‘Hurry,’ snapped Madame Ko. ‘You will lose me.’
‘In your dreams, Madame,’ replied Juliet, unperturbed. Madame Ko was simply trying to distract her with conversation. And there were already enough distractions in the local environment. Gold hung in shimmering ropes from a dozen stalls; Tunisian rugs flapped from wooden frames, the perfect cover for an assassin. Locals pressed uncomfortably close, eager for a look at this attractive female, and the terrain was treacherous – one false step could lead to a twisted ankle and failure.
Juliet processed all this information automatically, factoring it into every move. She placed a firm hand on the chest of a teenager grinning at her, skipped over an oily puddle reflecting rainbow patterns and followed Madame Ko down yet another alley in the medina’s endless maze.
Suddenly there was a man in her face. One of the market traders.
‘I have good carpets,’ he said in broken French. ‘You come with me. I show you!’
Madame Ko kept going. Juliet attempted to follow her, but the man blocked her path.
‘No, thank you. I am so not interested. I live outdoors.’
‘Very funny, mademoiselle. You make good joke. Now come and see Ahmed’s carpets.’
The crowd began to take notice, swirling to face her, like the tendrils of a giant organism. Madame Ko was moving further away. She was losing the principal.
‘I said no. Now back off, Mister Carpet Man. Don’t make me break a nail.’
The Tunisian was unaccustomed to taking orders from a female, and now his friends were watching.
‘I give good bargain,’ he persisted, pointing at his stall. ‘Best rugs in Sfax.’
Juliet dodged to one side, but the crowd moved to cut her off.
It was at this point that Ahmed lost any sympathy that Juliet might have had for him. Up to now, he had simply been an innocent local in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now…
‘Let’s go,’ said the Tunisian, wrapping an arm around the blonde girl’s waist. Not an idea that would make it on to his top ten of good ideas.
‘Oh, bad move, Carpet Man!’
Faster than the eye could blink, Ahmed was wrapped in the folds of a nearby carpet and Juliet was gone. Nobody had a clue what had happened until they replayed the incident on the screen of Kamal the chicken man’s camcorder. In slo-mo, the traders saw the Eurasian girl hoist Ahmed by the throat and belt, and lob him bodily into a carpet stall. It was a move that one of the gold merchants recognized as a Slingshot, a manoeuvre made popular by the American wrestler Papa Hog. The traders laughed so much that several of them became dehydrated. It was the funniest thing to happen all year. The clip even won a prize on Tunisia’s version of the World’s Funniest Videos. Three weeks later, Ahmed moved to Egypt.
Back to Juliet. The bodyguard-in-training ran like a sprinter out of the blocks, dodging around stunned merchants and hanging a hard right down an alley. Madame Ko couldn’t have gone far. She could still complete her assignment.
Juliet was furious with herself. This was exactly the kind of stunt her brother had warned her about.
‘Watch out for Madame Ko,’ Butler had advised. ‘You never know what she’ll cook up for a field assignment. I heard that she once stampeded a herd of elephants in Calcutta, just to distract an acolyte.’
The trouble was that you couldn’t be sure. That carpet merchant might have been in Madame Ko’s employ, or he might have been an innocent civilian, who happened to stick his nose in where it didn’t belong.
The alley narrowed so that the human traffic ran single file. Makeshift clothes lines zigzagged at head height; gutras and abayas hung limp and steaming in the heat. Juliet ducked below the laundry, dodging around dawdling shoppers. Startled turkeys hopped as far out of the way as their string leads would allow.
And suddenly she was in a clearing. A dim square surrounded by three-storey houses. Men lounged on the upper balconies, puffing on fruit-flavoured water pipes. Underfoot was a priceless chipped mosaic, depicting a Roman bath scene.
In the centre of the square, lying with her knees hugged to her chest, was Madame Ko. She was being assaulted by three men. These were no local traders. All three wore special-forces black, and attacked with the assurance and accuracy of trained professionals. This was no test. These men were actually trying to kill her sensei.
Juliet was unarmed; this was one of the rules. To smuggle arms into the African country would automatically mean life imprisonment. Luckily, it seemed as though her adversaries were also without weapons, though hands and feet would certainly be sufficient for the job they had in mind.