the absurd sense of excitement which was bubbling up through the fear.
‘Talib,’ a voice said from outside, causing the clean-shaven man to prick up his ears. Words in a foreign language followed.
Talib gestured with his left hand for the men to follow him, and retreated down the steps. Docherty stood up quickly, intending to position himself at the head of the procession, but then thought better of the idea. A time might come for him to assume some sort of command responsibility, but it hadn’t arrived yet.
They filed off the bus, stepping down on to a gravel surface. Ahead of them was a long, one-storey building with dim lights showing in two of the windows. Two men with automatic rifles stood on either side of the twenty-metre path which led to the front door, channelling their passage. Another two waited by the door. Since Nasruddin was not among them, this raised the number of the hijackers to at least seven.
While making this simple calculation, Docherty was also taking in the panoramic sweep of countryside to either side. Though moonless, the clear sky offered enough illumination to make out the jumble of slopes which receded into the distance. The lodge had been built at the back of a wide shelf, at the upper end of a deep valley. Behind the building a bare rock-face rose almost sheer, while from its front the folds of the valley stretched away into the darkness. In the few seconds he had left before reaching the door Docherty searched for and found the North Star, low in the sky away to his left. The building faced west.
Not that it mattered. They seemed to be a long way from civilization. In more ways than one.
The interior of the building, though, exceeded all his expectations. It seemed to have been decorated and furnished to a higher standard than most of the Central Asian hotels they had stayed in, which perhaps wasn’t saying much. Docherty had a glimpse of a large living-room with bear rug and open hearth, before passing down a long corridor full of closed doors. At the end they were ushered into a dormitory room. It was reasonably large, about four metres by six, with two-tier bunks on three of its four walls. Otherwise the room was empty, save for the cheap rug which covered most of the floor. Docherty was still wondering what the place was when he heard a bolt slam shut on the outside of the door. And then another.
He looked round at his fellow-captives. The two elder Zahids had begun talking animatedly in Urdu, with their sons looking on anxiously. They suddenly looked no older than adolescents, Docherty thought.
Ogley was sitting on one of the bunks with his head in his hands, Copley pacing up and down. ‘Where do you think the women have been taken?’ the builder asked nobody in particular.
‘A room like this one,’ Docherty said.
Copley looked at him with worried eyes. ‘You don’t think they’ll…’
‘No I don’t,’ Docherty said shortly. A year ago there would have been more inner certainty behind the denial, but the mission to Bosnia had shaken his sense of how much evil was loose in the world. ‘If they’re Islamic fundamentalists then we can expect some sort of moral code,’ he added, with more conviction than he felt. But one of the worst things that could happen here would be for the men to sit around imagining what was being done to their wives. If they were to get out of this alive then they all had to remain rational and reasonably focused. Fear and anger led in the opposite direction.
‘How do you know they are Islamic fundamentalists?’ Ogley asked.
Docherty shrugged. ‘The Trumpet of God doesn’t sound like a bunch of communists. What else could they be?’ He turned to the Pakistani contingent. ‘Mr Zahid,’ he said, addressing the elder brother, ‘have you heard of these people?’
The mullah shook his head dismissively. ‘They must be Shiites,’ he said angrily. ‘Lunatics from Iran. That is all I can think.’
‘Hey, look,’ Copley said from behind Docherty.
There was another door in the fourth wall. Copley tried the handle and it opened to reveal a bathroom and toilet. Admittedly the former comprised just a tap and the latter just a hole in the floor, but a full bucket of water was standing by one wall.
‘I think we must be on a Magical Mystery Tour,’ Copley said. He at least seemed to be recovering his composure.
‘I wonder which of us is the Walrus,’ Docherty murmured.
‘Will you two stop gibbering,’ Ogley snapped behind them. ‘We’ve been kidnapped, for God’s sake.’
‘Tell us something we don’t know, Professor,’ Copley said drily. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it, but I actually feel hungry.’
‘So do I,’ Sam Jennings agreed. ‘Do you guys mind if I take one of the bottom bunks?’ The Zahid fathers had already laid claim to two of the four.
‘Go ahead,’ Docherty said, wondering what the place was normally used for. Maybe it was a youth hostel. Or a barracks for border guards.
He noticed Ogley sitting with his head between his hands, sighed, and went over to him. ‘Are you OK, Professor?’ he asked.
‘I am not a professor,’ Ogley said. ‘And what do you care anyway?’
Docherty chose his words carefully. ‘I care because experience has taught me that in a hole like this people need to pull together. I want to be alive a month from now, not a name in an obituary column.’
Ogley looked at him sideways, rather like a schoolboy who wasn’t sure if he was being kidded. ‘So do I,’ he agreed slowly.
‘Good. Now is that the bunk you want?’
The women’s room was a mirror image of the men’s, situated at the opposite end of the lodge. Once the bolts had clanged shut behind them, Isabel went round checking all the more obvious hiding-places for listening devices. She wasn’t expecting to find any, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Once she was reasonably certain there weren’t any, she asked her five companions for a conference. Both Elizabeth Ogley and Sharon Copley seemed close to hysteria, and Isabel thought developing a sense of solidarity could only help.
She also had something vital to ask. ‘Sarah,’ she began quietly, ‘no one’s mentioned it, but I think we all know who you are – or maybe I should say we all know who your father is…’
‘I don’t,’ Alice Jennings said, surprise on her face.
‘He’s the British Foreign Minister,’ Sarah Holcroft said.
‘Oh boy,’ Alice said softly.
‘The point is, do they know?’ Isabel asked, jerking her head in the direction of the door.
Sarah looked surprised. ‘I…I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Did Nasruddin ever say anything to indicate he knew?’
‘No. At least, I can’t remember…But he must have known, mustn’t he?’ A hint of a wry smile crossed her lips. ‘He did live in England.’
Alice Jennings snorted. ‘They’re always doing polls in America that show eighty per cent of Americans don’t know who the President is.’
‘Nasruddin seems
