Free The Alamut Ambush by Anthony Price Page A

Hassan’s men are here, I think they could well have come in through it. And frankly, I think they are here.’

V
    ROSKILL WAS TIRED and uncomfortable and thirsty and bored.
    He couldn’t quite decide which sensation led the others; as he thought of each one in turn it took over the lead, but they were all jostling one another for a dead-heat.
    On the whole the discomfort was probably the most acceptable. The chairs in the lecture hall were plastic and form-fitting, but the form they had been designed to fit was not his, no matter how he tried to rearrange himself. But at least he was accustomed to such a state of affairs and even expected it.
    The thirst would have been bearable but for one daunting possibility which had occurred to him three seconds after he had realised he was thirsty: since this was primarily an Arab occasion the drinks promised after the lectures might be aggressively non-alcoholic, in strict deference to the Prophet’s ordinance. True, it was an Anglo-Arab evening, but the nature of the refreshment would depend on which half dominated the organising committee – the Arabs would want to cater for the boozy British, and the British would want to defer to nonexistent Arab sensibilities. He could only pray that the Arab faction had come out on top.
    At the moment boredom was ahead. The speaker droned on and Roskill looked again helplessly at his watch. Theoretically the fellow should have finished ten minutes earlier, but somewhere along what he had disingenuously called his ‘lightning journey through Arab literature’ he had taken a wrong turning and had become lost in medieval Persia. It had taken a good – or bad – quarter of an hour to talk his way back to the main road and he was still two centuries behind schedule.
    The organisers had unwisely kept their dullest speaker at the end. Or perhaps they hadn’t expected him to be so goddamn awful; on paper the opening session on the problems of aid and education had sounded even drearier and in practice only the obvious competence and intelligence of the young American-trained Arab who conducted it had saved it.
    But then the young Arab had been a Ryle man, and the Foundation always paid for the best. Judging by the lightning traveller they needed the best, too: he was an educational stumbling block in himself.
    Roskill tried to stretch his legs into another position. His tiredness was not so much the product of his early morning expedition along Maitland’s telephone line as the result of the afternoon’s Middle Eastern cramming lesson which had followed hard on the morning’s head-shrinking conference. The idea had been that he should not betray himself too fatuously at this evening’s bun-fight by confusing the National Liberation Movement with the Popular Democratic Front or the Palestine Liberation Movement with the Palestine Armed Struggle Command, should those mutually hostile bodies crop up casually in the conversation.
    But the Foreign Office crammer had waxed something too eloquent for a good teacher. Names and initials had flowed from him: Ashbal, Mapam, Group 62, Friends of Jerusalem, Friends of Arabia, Saiqa, P.L.O., P.L.A., P.L.M., P.O.L.P., A.N.S.A.R. and A.L.F. – as an incantation, repeated quickly enough, it would probably summon djinns from the desert, but it had gone in one of Roskill’s ears and out the other.
    Unfortunately it had stayed between the ears just long enough to answer the crammer’s quiz with deceptive competence.
    ‘Bravo, Squadron Leader,’ the crammer had beamed at him. ‘Another two or three afternoons and we’ll make an Arabist of you! And a Zionist too if you can spare a morning. The right jargon’s half the battle — just string it together with a few slogans and you can pass anywhere…
    ‘In action this evening? Is that the C.A.A.B.U. gathering at the Dorchester? No – the Ryle Foundation one, isn’t it? Well, not to worry, Squadron Leader – the Ryle people are as near non-partisan as