ALEXANDRA SELLERS - Sheikh's Ransom

“Oooh!” The anchorwoman shivered with affected greed. “Must be worth a king’s ransom!”

“Its worth is literally incalculable, because there is nothing else in the world to compare it to. The weight of the jewel alone puts it out of reach of most of us, but add to that the work of the sculpture—which is said, by those who have been privileged to study the ancient documents of this country, to be miraculously lifelike and artistic—and its value as a completely unique thousand-year-old artefact, and you’re looking at what they call ‘inestimable value.’ I asked three jewellers for a ballpark figure, and the closest I could get was—in open auction, the sky’s the limit.

“Now, there’s Prince Rafi, I believe, stepping forward. He will draw the sword over the document, and then lay the naked steel right across the parchment,” Paul murmured helpfully, as Prince Rafi did just that.

“The origins of that ritual are lost in the mists of time, and although it is now said to symbolize the monarch’s determination to defend a treaty with arms if necessary, it is thought by some that there was once another symbolism attached to it. Certainly it is true that if Prince Rafi were to draw the Sword of Rostam through the seal it would render the agreement instantly invalid. If he draws it against an enemy it signals a fight to the death.”

“How on earth do they keep track of all these customs?” Marta marvelled.

“Don’t forget they haven’t changed for a millennium. And now the Cup of Jalal is brought forward,” Paul spoke over her, “and now it’s Prince Omar’s turn. He will drink from the cup, sometimes called the Cup of the Soul, which is said by tradition to guarantee happiness to its owner, and then offer it to the signatories of the Four Nations, and lastly to his brothers. There’s the Grand Vizier Nizam al Mulk carrying the cup to the foreign leaders—the contents, by the way, are a dark secret. Only the signatories will ever know what they drank—that’s meant to be another form of protecting the treaty. And now Prince Rafi is drinking, and Prince Karim.

“And that is what is called ‘sealing in the Barakati tradition,’ so this historic agreement has now been formally signed and sealed, Marta, in one of the most impressive marriages of Eastern and Western tradition in modern times.”

Two

July 1998

“Will Mr. David Percy and Miss Caroline Langley please meet their driver at the Information Desk. Will Mr. Percy and Miss Langley—”

Caroline was hot. They had been left standing in the Royal Barakat Air plane for twenty minutes after something went wrong with the doors, but that hadn’t stopped the captain turning off the air conditioning. Then there had been an endless wait before the luggage from their flight made its appearance on the mile-long conveyor belt, and everyone had been pressing so close that Caroline—with a new appreciation of what it meant to say that people from the Middle East had a smaller “personal territory” than Westerners—had found it impossible to see her own bags till they were half the arrivals hall away. While she was wrestling them off the belt someone had filched her trolley, and rather than hunt down another one, she had simply carried her bags, a mistake she would not make again soon in an inadequately air-conditioned building.

Her neat white linen travel suit was smudged, damp and badly creased, her skin was beaded with sweat all over her body, her makeup was history, her short honey-gold hair now clustered in unruly curls around her head, her always volatile temper was in rags.

It didn’t help to know that if David had been with her, her arrival in this little-known country would have been very different. The smell of money generally ensured that for David things ran smoothly. But at the last minute David had called to say that he could not make the trip—and Caroline had come alone.

She had not really been surprised when David cancelled. She had almost been expecting it. There was something about this trip that David hadn’t liked right from the beginning. He had even tried to talk her out of buying the raffle ticket.

“I’ve never yet met anyone who won a raffle, Caroline,” he had said with raised eyebrows, as though the only reason for parting with money must be in the hope of getting a return.

“Well, it’s for a charity, David,” she had smiled pacifically, pulling out the few dollars that was the price of three tickets. They were being sold in aid of a hospital being built in the Barakat Emirates. “I don’t mind not winning.”

He picked up the ticket stub. “The Queen Halimah Hospital, Barakat al Barakat!” he read with derision. “Do you really believe that your money is actually going towards such a purpose?”

But she had already taken out the money, and the child selling the tickets—by the pool at the exclusive club where David was a member—had said indignantly, “Yes, it is! They’re building a new children’s wing!” And she had passed the money over and written her name and phone number on three pale green tickets.

When she won, it had been a small triumph of feeling over logic. She had been thrilled with her prize—a first class, all-expenses-paid visit to the new resort in West Barakat—but she had managed to damp down her excitement before telling anyone about it. David no more liked to see evidence of her volatile nature and easily touched feelings than did her parents. He had predicted a chaotic holiday where nothing ran on time, but he had agreed to come along.

When he had cancelled, only a few hours before their flight, he had made it clear he expected Caroline to give it up, too. It was too late for her to invite anyone else along in his place, and he was sure she would not want to go to a somewhat remote Islamic country on her own. He would take her “somewhere equally exotic” within a week or two.

But Caroline, unusually for her, had dug her heels in.

“Oh, darling, are you sure you should?” her mother had asked nervously, but Caroline had gone on packing.

“The condemned man ate a hearty meal, Mother,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of holidays paid for by someone else. I won this, it’s my holiday, and I’m going to take it,” she said. For years now they had been entirely dependent on someone else for everything, Caroline impatiently felt, and she hated it.

Caroline’s parents had been born into East Coast aristocracy. Both had generations of breeding, wealth and influence behind them. But Thomas Langley had not inherited the business brain of his forebears, nor, more fatally, the wit to recognize the fact. On the advice of his son, he had attempted to shore up his failing business with investment in the junk bond market during the eighties. When that bubble burst, his son had died late one night as his car hit a bridge. No one said the word except the insurance company, but even if the policy had paid the double indemnity due in cases of accident, the money would have been a drop in the sea of Thom Langley Senior’s mounting debts. And he had followed that catastrophe with a steady string of bad decisions that had finally wiped him out.

Those terrible years had naturally taken a disastrous toll on Caroline. She was a straight-A’s student, but her marks had gone into instant decline in the months after Thom Junior’s suicide. She had won no scholarships, and she certainly wouldn’t have been accepted to any of the top universities she had once confidently dreamed of attending.

But she wasn’t going to university anyway. It was one thing for her parents to live on family handouts, and her sister Dara was still in high school; it was another thing entirely for Caroline. In spite of protests from her long-suffering uncles that there was of course no objection to paying for Caroline’s education, she had declined to apply for university and had taken a job.