over but bowed his cloaked head and listened as Brad briskly murmured his name, credentials and purpose. The man nodded and returned to his post, then picked up the telephone. At the next aisle, the first immigration officer answered, flicking his eyes up to his colleague and then over to where Brad now stood before returning his gaze to the woman in front of him. The official barely acknowledged him, but barely was all he needed.
Whatever happened from now he’d just insinuated himself within the process.
And he could do a much better job from within than from without.
The official requested her bags and a customs officer set about a professional but laborious inspection more designed to buy them time to run a series of immigration checks than to fulfil any particular fascination with the contents of her designer luggage. When the computer had spat back everything they needed, the men stepped out from behind their barrier and gestured for her to follow them. Her feet remained fixed to the spot and she glanced around for someone—anyone—to come to her aid. No one did. After a moment, the larger of the two men returned the few paces to her side and gestured, not unkindly, towards the interview room.
Perhaps it was the ‘please’ that Brad saw on his lips in English that got her feet moving. Or perhaps it was the intractable hand at her back that stopped short of actually touching her. Either way the official achieved his aim, and Seraphina Blaise took the first careful steps behind one official while the second flanked her from behind. Just before they left the arrivals area, the man to the rear glanced his way and jerked his head just once in permission.
Brad moved immediately.
* * *
Two was bad enough, now there were three. As dark and neutral as the other officials but this one wasn’t in the traditional robe and headdress of his people. He looked more like a dark-suited chauffeur. Or a CIA agent. Or a chauffeur for the CIA.
All three men stood on the other side of the soundproof glass of her containment room talking about her but not to her. The immaculately dressed officials listened attentively—one of them even smiled, which had to be a good sign except that he followed it up with a firm and distinctly suspicious glare in her direction. The chauffeur talked some more, his hands gesticulating wildly.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked aloud, with more confidence than she felt, counting on the soundproofing being one-way. Only the chauffeur bothered to look up for the briefest glance before his attention returned to the airport officials and their intense conversation.
This wasn’t her first run-in with authorities, but it was her first in such a conservative country where everything was done so differently from Britain. Still, the basic rule applied here as it did everywhere in life...
Show no fear.
But do it politely.
‘Perhaps we could please begin?’ she called out carefully, as though the only part of this bothering her were the delay. ‘I have a service waiting to collect me.’
She threw in a winning smile for good measure. Hopefully, it would temper the thump-thump of her heart clearly audible in her voice. But the smile was wasted as the rapid, under-their-breath discussion continued without her. Then the largest of the officials shook the chauffeur’s hand and crossed to the table where her documents lay spread out. He flipped her passport open and stamped it with the visa, then initialled it and passed it to him.
She jumped as the glass between the spaces suddenly snapped to opaque, then again a moment later, when the door to her half of the room was flung open and the chauffeur stood there, her bag in one fist and her documentation clenched in the other.
‘Welcome to Umm Khoreem,’ he said, with no other explanation or apology, wedging the door open.
He might have shared the same tan skin and dark hair as the other officials, but his accent wasn’t Arabic. She stared at him, her feet still nailed to the floor as he spelled it out in clearer terms.
‘You are free to leave.’
‘That’s it?’ Her passion for natural justice started to bubble. ‘Why was I detained in the first place?’
She had a fairly good idea—those few hours in a disguised medical research lab north of London were going to shadow her forever—but she just wanted to hear him say it. Plus, she wanted to narrow down his accent. But he wasn’t in the chatty mood, it seemed; he slid his sunglasses on, turned and walked away from her with her suitcase. And her passport.
She hurried after him. ‘Can I please have my—?’
‘Keep walking, Ms Blaise,’ he gritted, nodding towards the distant glass exit. ‘You’re not legally in the country until we get past that door up ahead.’
His tortured vowels gave her an answer—Australian—and the way he practically barked at her made her reassess him as airport security or some kind of translator. The other officials might have been obstructing her entrance but they were nothing but painfully and professionally courteous. He might have facilitated her release but he was curt and grumpy.
So, if he wasn’t airport staff then who was he? Why should she follow a random stranger down some long dark corridor?
Though she had little choice as he marched off with all her worldly goods.
‘Sorry, what just happened?’ she puffed, hurrying up beside him as he strode along the passageway. Other than, clearly, she was almost refused an entry visa. ‘Why did they let me go, just like that?’
He didn’t deign to do more than angle his head slightly back as he answered. He certainly didn’t stop or even slow. ‘They had little option when the ruling Sheikh vouched for you.’
Her feet stumbled to a halt. ‘You’re a sheikh?’
His laugh ricocheted off the polished walls of the corridor. ‘Do I look like a sheikh?’
How would she know? Maybe they were all neat-bearded, square-jawed types. ‘Then how—?’
‘Sheikh Bakhsh Shakoor is my employer. I therefore spoke on his behalf.’
Oh, everything was starting to make more sense now. ‘And why exactly does Sheikh Whatsit care what happens to me?’
Or even know about it, come to think of it? It all happened so quickly. One minute she was happily arriving, the next she was unhappily interned.
‘You are a long-stay guest in his most prestigious resort. He would not be pleased to hear you had been detained on a technicality.’
A criminal charge wasn’t exactly nothing. That was why she’d declared it on her immigration form. Transparency and accountability and all that. But she was spending a fortune on her month at the Sheikh’s desert resort and being booted out of his country bound in red tape would obviously be an expensive outcome for the resort. And since he probably also owned the airport...
‘He has no idea what you just did, does he?’ she guessed.
‘The Sheikh does not have time for trivialities.’
Way to make a girl feel special... ‘So, you just got creative?’
His lips pressed closer together as he lifted her suitcase as though it were empty of designer contents and pushed it ahead of them through the official exit into the Umm Khoreem side of the airport.
To freedom.
Kind of.
‘I gave them a few assurances,’ he went on. ‘Nothing that should put a crimp in your sunbaking plans.’
Yep, he probably did think she’d come to bask under Umm Khoreem’s toasty winter sun. Rather than for the sanctuary—from life and from her least favourite time of year.
‘What kind of assurances?’
The pace he set across the polished stone of the airport terminal was almost hard to match, though it was