Kingdom Read Free Page A

new International Herald Tribune South Asia Bureau Chief. She was thirty years old, which was young for the post, but she had been very fortunate with the timing. It was a new stage in her career and equally a new stage in her life. She hoped that it would allow her to put the recent past behind her and that the exoticism and excitements of India would help her forget her last few months in New York, months that had seemed at times to pass as slowly as whole years.
    The knocking continued, but Nancy was still too groggy and confused to get out of bed. The message icon was flashing on her phone. Shouting weakly at the noise – ‘Coming, just a minute’ – she opened the message. It was a mail from her ex-boyfriend, James Long, the Tribune ’s Buenos Aires correspondent. That made her heart sink; she could not help thinking that it was an inauspicious sign that the first message she should receive in India was from him. She had met him five years ago when they had been working together in the New York office; they had dated for three. She had been, unquestionably, in love – but their desires were so different. He wanted to settle down with a wife who stayed at home and looked after his children: that was never going to be her. Finally, he announced he had found someone else, someone he had met whilst she had been on one of her frequent trips abroad – a motherly stay-at-home type. She was from Argentina and James, it seemed, was very lucky: the Buenos Aires job came up the next day and James applied for the post and got it. Either that or he’d been seeing the woman for much longer than either he or Nancy wanted to admit. That was three months ago – she should have seen it coming but she took it very badly. She knew that they weren’t suited but that didn’t stop her being in love.
    ‘My dearest Nancy, I am so sorry that I did not return your calls. As I explained to you when we last spoke, I felt it was better if . . .’
    She stopped reading and then she weighed the phone in the palm of her hand before pressing Delete. She exhaled with relief, as if she had just made the right decision about which wire to cut and had successfully defused a bomb. A few months ago, she observed with the fragility and hollowness that comes after grief, she would have been desperate to hear from him, but now that at last she had almost regained her equilibrium the very last thing she wanted to do was to re-establish contact.
    ‘My dearest James,’ she said out loud as the diaphanous white curtains stirred gently in the sultry Delhi breeze, ‘I now understand that there will come a day, perhaps not too far in the future, when I will actually get over you . . .’
    She managed a forced smile and then looked around the bedroom, almost hoping for encouragement from her new surroundings. Goddamn this knocking, she thought. ‘OK OK,’ she said, and really tried to move herself. She shifted her legs off the bed, rubbed her eyes. She was in one of the most fascinating countries in the world, with a challenging career break ahead of her, and the past was behind her.
    Things had slipped into place, almost uncannily. The vacancy in India was announced the same morning that she made up her mind to go abroad. Or more accurately, Dan Fischer, the editor, who was over from Paris, had tapped her on the shoulder and invited her into his office. Anton Herzog, her hero, everybody’s hero at the Trib and the longest-ever-serving Delhi Bureau Chief, had gone missing three months earlier. After twenty years in the job, he had vanished without a trace into the mountains of Tibet. Dan Fischer had waited and waited but finally the board had put pressure on him: someone had to be found to fill the post; India was the biggest story in Asia and the paper couldn’t wait indefinitely for Herzog to return. Nancy was offered the job on the spot. Dan didn’t even bother to advertise it on the paper’s internal vacancies board – a fact Nancy would have