The Power of Five 5 - Oblivion by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781406346961
Published: 2012-10-04T06:00:00+00:00

THIRTY

By midnight, Jaheda still hadn’t come.

Richard and Scarlett had been given adjoining rooms in the palace. They were certainly comfortable enough. The beds were enormous, covered with Egyptian cotton sheets and silk duvets, buried underneath an avalanche of pillows. Anything that could be made of gold turned out to be just that – from the mirror frames to the light fittings to the bathroom taps. They had hot and cold water too. The baths were deep and surrounded by oils and shampoos. It was like staying in the most luxurious hotel in the world, apart from two small details: the windows were barred and the doors were locked.

They were both still awake. After everything that had happened during the course of the evening, sleep would have been impossible. Scarlett could still feel the clasp of the sheikh’s fingers on her wrist. She saw his black eyes and the food caught in his beard. She remembered what he had said. The one thing she hadn’t done was to tell Richard the threats that he had made. He would kill Richard to make her change her mind. Maybe that was why he had allowed them to stay near each other tonight, to remind her what her refusal would cost. But she had already decided that she wouldn’t let it happen. She would marry Sheikh Rasheed if she had to – but she would deal with him in her own way before she allowed him to touch her again.

For his part, Richard was angry with himself.

It had been his idea to come to the palace. What had he been thinking of? Martins had warned them that the sheikh was unstable. Had there really been any chance that they could persuade him to hand over the pilot and let them fly out of here to Antarctica? Richard had allowed them to walk in here without any plan at all and now they were both prisoners. His position was bad enough but from what he had seen at the dinner table, Scarlett’s was worse. He had brought her to this. It was his fault.

It seemed so long now since he had been a writer, working on a local newspaper in the north of England. The Greater Malling Gazette … he could see it so clearly, the drab offices set behind the High Street, filled with cheap furniture and computers that were forever crashing. It had been his first job after leaving university. Not The Times, not the Telegraph, not even the Yorkshire Post but his next step towards a career that he had wanted since he was a boy. Richard had always been fascinated by the news, by the way people’s lives all over the world could be changed and moulded by events over which they had no control. Why should a flood in Bangladesh mean anything to a housewife in Yorkshire? It was the journalist’s job to make the connection, to make people care.

Not, of course, that he ever covered such stories in Greater Malling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.