Free Open Sesame by Tom Holt Page B

dripped. Something electric hummed. Noises like these are the authentic sound of a building snoring. He relaxed and groped for the door.
    It took him an hour of painstaking, heart-in-mouth work to reach the gallery where the glass case was. Naturally, he’d memorised the floor-plan and counted the number of paces from the door to the case, so the complete darkness was no handicap to him. He’d had the benefit of a year’s apprenticeship with Foggy Mushtaq, the legendary blind burglar of Joppa, who had taught him that all in all, sight is the most expendable of a thief s five senses, and as he felt with the tip of a goose quill for the wires he had to cut, his eyes were in fact tightly shut. Snip. Job done.
    ‘Psst.’
    Once, for a joke, Daft Harit had woken his chief from a fitful doze by putting a handful of ice cubes, stolen five minutes earlier from the Emir’s own ice-house, down the back of his neck. The fact that for the rest of his short life Daft Harit was known instead as One-Eared Harit is a tribute more to Akram’s lightning reflexes than his ability to take a joke; but there had been a split second, a period of time so brief that there is no recognised unit of measurement small enough to quantify it, when he’d been completely at a loss and hadn’t known whether he was coming or going. Thus, when the voice said ‘Psst’ a millimetre or so from his ear, a small voice in the outback of his brain groaned and muttered, Shit, not again.
    Managing in the nick of time to countermand his instinctive reaction, Akram kept perfectly still and said, ‘Hello?’
    ‘Hello yourself.’
    Go on then, be enigmatic, see if I care. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, as quietly and calmly as he could.
    ‘Me.’
    Maybe, Akram suggested to himself, I’ve actually fallen asleep on the job and this is a nightmare. ‘Who’s me?’ he asked.
    ‘Don’t you know?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Give you three guesses.’
    ‘Look
    ‘Go on. Three guesses.’
    ‘All right. The Prophet Mohammed?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Stanley Baldwin.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Kenneth Branagh.’
    ‘No. When I tell you, you’ll kick yourself.’
    Any minute now, said Akram to himself, a certain amount of kicking may well take place, but I doubt very much whether I shall be the recipient. ‘Stop pratting about,’ he hissed ferociously. ‘Who are you?’
    ‘I’m the djinn,’ the voice replied. ‘From inside the lamp inside this glass case. My name’s Ibrahim Ali Khan, but my friends call me Curly.’
    Akram’s eyes were still shut so he couldn’t close them as a symptom of frustrated disappointment. It was a bit of a blow, nevertheless; to go to all this trouble and then have your supposedly invincible magic djinn turn out to sound just like the ghost of Kenneth Williams. ‘Curly,’ he repeated.
    “Cos I wear curly-toed shoes,’ explained the djinn. ‘Who’re you?’
    ‘My name is Akram the Terrible.’
    ‘That’s an unusual surname. And what’s the V stand for?’
    ‘Shut up.’
    ‘No it doesn’t, otherwise it’d be Akram S. Terrible.’
    I could, of course, just leave, quietly and without fuss. There’s nothing in the rules says I’ve got to take this pillock with me. On the other hand… ‘Be quiet,’ Akram whispered. ‘And watch out, I’m going to break the glass.’
    ‘Need any help?’
    ‘No, thank you, I’m perfectly capable.’
    Crackl
    WHAAWHAAWHAAWHAAWHAAWHAA!
    Bugger, snarled Akram under his breath, must have missed one. The noise was so loud that the shock of it paralysed him for a moment; it was like being in the same room as a forty-foot-high two-year-old who doesn’t want to go to bed. Just a minute…
    ‘What do you mean,’ he demanded, shouting as loud as he could, ‘need any help? How can you help me, you were inside the bloody glass case.’
    ‘No I wasn’t’
    Give me strength, Akram prayed, I shall need all the strength I can get if I’m going to kick this bugger’s arse from here to Khorsabad. ‘Then why,’ he