A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (22 page)

Mowbray had hired the Peugeot in his wife’s name and left it overnight in Westfield. He had posted the keys and the parking ticket through Kell’s front door just after nine o’clock the previous evening, with a note telling him where to find the vehicle. As soon as he had left Marks and Spencer, Kell took a lift to Level Two of the underground car park, paid for twenty-four hours of parking and found the Peugeot. He sat behind the wheel and looked at his watch. Four and a half minutes had passed since he had seen Minasian. He knew that it would take less than thirty seconds to drive the short distance to Aisle 45.

He could picture Minasian every step of the way. Down to the Food Hall, past the soups and the rows of checkout staff, the grandmothers buying chutneys and the teenagers stacking shelves. The chill of the air conditioning, the shrill robotic voice of the automated warning on the walkways –
Please hold the handrail while travelling … Please hold the handrail while travelling –
then the stale, uncirculated air of the subterranean car park. The lengths to which both men had gone to protect themselves from scrutiny, to seal off any possibility of suspicion or arrest, struck Kell with the full force of their absurdity. Sitting in Mowbray’s rented car in the basement of that vast, soulless shopping mall, Kell wondered what had gone so wrong between their two countries that the SVR would not simply pass over, as a matter of courtesy and respect, the file on a brainwashed
jihadi
bent on causing mayhem in the United Kingdom. Why had it required blackmail to obtain that information? Why had it required Kell to devise an intricate system of signals and meetings with a compromised Russian spy in order to secure the safety of his fellow citizens? Was the blood feud between their two countries, the clash of systems and personalities, so toxic that it would allow for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people? Kell was under no illusions about the extent to which people wanted – even
needed
– to cause each other harm, but he felt cleaned out by the political classes, exhausted by the effort of trying to make a difference in a world where no difference could be made.

He looked again at the watch. Eight minutes since he had left GAGARIN. He started the engine and pulled out. The wheels of the Peugeot squealed on the smooth concrete. Kell flicked on the headlights and looked for Minasian. He turned into Aisle 45 and saw him immediately – the newly grown beard, the cheap denim jeans, the man on whom he had come to rely so heavily. Kell pulled up alongside him and Minasian opened the door. Within a minute they had left the car park, emerging into the clear, bright sunlight of a London afternoon.

The more time Shahid spent with Rosie, the more he opened up to her. He wanted somebody to know what he had been through in his life, the pain he had suffered, the sense of isolation he had known. It had taken sacrifices for Azhar Ahmed Iqbal to become Shahid Khan. It had been necessary for him to prove his worth on the battlefield and then to separate himself from his old life, even from his family. Shahid wanted Rosie to know at least some of this, so that when the time came she would look back and understand why he had been prepared to sacrifice his life for a cause much greater than himself.

There were obviously things that he could not tell her. It was too much of a risk. Though he knew that Rosie hated the police because of what they had done to her family, Shahid could not trust her with the full knowledge of what he had seen and done in the Caliphate. She would never understand, for example, why homosexuality was a sin in the eyes of God and therefore why it had been right for Shahid to take the life of the man in Raqqa. He and two other fighters had led the blindfolded man to the top of an apartment block, close to where Shahid had been living, and Shahid had pushed him to his death. Rosie could never be told this. If he began to explain his actions, to describe to her both the revulsion and the intoxicating sense of power that he had felt as he reacted to the baying crowd and pushed the man; if he told her that he had looked down at the dead body – the man’s leg twisted and jack-knifed at the knee, his smashed skull spilling blood onto the ground – and had felt liberated in that moment from all ordinary moral constraints; well, she would never be able to see sense and would inevitably betray him.

One night in July, Shahid had gone around to Rosie’s flat and they had watched a DVD. When Rosie went out to buy pizzas, he had looked for her diary and read parts of it. He knew then how much she wanted him and felt confident when he undressed her later that night and took pleasure in her body. He knew that she had dreamed about him that way and so he let her touch him and suck him and give him the pleasure that he had wanted for so long. Afterwards, though, Shahid had felt that they had gone too far and he left the flat. Rosie had been upset and had texted him. She asked if he was all right and if she had ‘done something wrong’. Shahid had not responded.

Two days later, he invited her for a meal at an Italian restaurant in Brighton. He wanted her again. He wanted to be inside her this time. He used some of the money that Farouq had given him, because he thought he should take her somewhere nice, somewhere impressive.

It was over dinner that he started to tell Rosie more about his past. First, he told her about Vicky. He said that he had had a girlfriend in Leeds who had cheated on him. She had gone to live with another man in London. She had betrayed him and broken his heart. Then he told her that he had a secret, that if the police or anyone else knew about it, he would get into a lot of trouble. Rosie understood that he was telling her to keep her mouth shut. Shahid said that he was a good Muslim who had been horrified by what was happening in Syria and had gone there, secretly, to fight against Assad.

Far from being shocked, Rosie said that she admired his courage.

‘I think that’s amazing of you.’ She held his hand across the table. ‘Fuck, that’s so brave.’

‘I believed in what I was fighting for,’ he told her. ‘I believed I made the right choice in going there. I never doubted myself. I never doubted my brothers and sisters who fought alongside me, against the regime.’

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘You know, fellow soldiers. The women out there living alongside them.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Assad was killing innocent people, slaughtering them. Women and children. Women like yourself, Rosie, Muslim girls like Marwa and Hind at work. Butchered by Assad’s cowards. I just felt like it had been going on too long. Their sisters in Pakistan, Afghanistan, murdered by Americans, killed by drone attacks. Women and children. Old men and babies. I felt like I had a responsibility as a Muslim to go out and fight for them. To protect them, avenge them.’

‘Of course you did.’

In her diary Rosie had written that Shahid often seemed ‘unhappy about something, sad inside’, so he knew that what he had told her might help her to piece him together. He knew her well enough to know that she would respect him for his honesty and admire him for what he had done.

He poured more water into her glass – he didn’t like her to drink alcohol when they were together – and told her more about his reasons for going to Syria.

‘Many times, back in Leeds, I’d be watching films, you know, on YouTube, wherever we could find it, wherever my friends could find the footage online, and I still remember the blood, the pregnant bodies carved open, the screaming on those films.’ He saw Rosie flinch. ‘I’m sorry to speak like this to you, but that’s what drove me out there. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel anything. I cried again and again, you know? I wept for the fear those people lived under, of the attacks by Assad and the Americans. Their lives without hope, futures destroyed before they had started. Somebody had to do something to help them. It was the will of Allah, peace be upon him.’

Rosie hesitated. It looked as though she was trying to work out how she felt about what Shahid had told her. Eventually she admitted that she did not understand the complexity of the politics in Syria and didn’t feel that she knew enough about Muslims or what Shahid believed in.

‘What about ISIS?’ she said.

Shahid knew that he could tell her nothing about ISIS and the Caliphate. It was enough that she knew he had fought on behalf of oppressed Muslims. She would admire him if he told her this. Girls, Muslim or infidel, loved soldiers. They liked their men to be strong and brave.

‘What about them?’ he said.

‘Did you come across them? They’re fucking maniacs.’

Shahid was silent. Rosie saw that he was annoyed.

‘I don’t mean to upset you,’ she said

‘You’re not upsetting me.’ He spoke quietly. ‘There’s lots of lies and propaganda about ISIS put out by the West. They’re not just about violence or whatever. Suicides. Bombings. That’s all propaganda and lies.’

‘But it’s on the news. Online.’

‘Yeah but those guys, the guys that do that stuff, they’re the radical ones. You always get men like that in war. They go too far. They’re not thinking about the future and what’s best for Islam. Some of them don’t know their religion. They have no education.’

Rosie was watching him very carefully.

‘So you think what ISIS is doing might be right?’ It looked as though she cared about his answer. ‘I’m not judging you, Shahid. We’re just chatting. You’re my boyfriend, you can tell me anything. I trust you.’

‘And I trust you,’ he said, and stroked her wrist. It was the first time she had called him her ‘boyfriend’ and he felt trapped by the word, even though he knew then that he could have all of her. ‘It’s just that things were very complicated in my head for a long time. I was so angry, you know?’

‘Sure.’

‘I just felt like I didn’t belong, and my faith gave me that. I just felt like I wasn’t worth anything. I’d grown up not feeling that I was like other lads, that I didn’t have their opportunities on account of my skin, my background. You’re a white girl. You don’t know what that’s like. I was brown. They called me “nigger”. They called me “Paki” and “coon”. Me and my friends, we were third-class citizens. You grow up around that, you get stopped by the police because you’re brown, because you’re not wearing the right clothes, because your mum and dad are from a different country …’

‘So you got confidence, you got strength from fighting?’ she said, interrupting him. ‘I bet you did. I think it was brave of you to go out there. I wouldn’t go out there! I wouldn’t know what to do or where to start.’

‘It’s not your fight,’ Shahid replied, and saw that he had confused her.

‘I know it’s not my fight.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that I wouldn’t want you to see those things. To put yourself at risk. It’s no place for a girl.’

‘Isn’t that a bit sexist? You said there’s lots of women out there.’

Rosie started laughing. Shahid did not respond. He took a sip of the water and looked at the other couples in the restaurant.

‘What was I going to do here in England?’ he said. ‘Get a job in a corner shop? Drive a taxi? There were no opportunities for lads like me.’ Rosie nodded. Shahid often wondered what would happen to her, how she would remember him, after he was gone. ‘I’m glad I did it,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I did my duty as a Muslim.’

‘I’m glad too.’

They were silent for a while. The waitress came and spoke to Rosie. Did she want anything else? Dessert? Coffee? She didn’t look at Shahid. When she had gone, he told Rosie that the waitress was racist, that she hadn’t liked it that he was with a white girl.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Rosie said, laughing. ‘That’s silly. People aren’t like that round here.’ Her eyes were soft in the candlelight. ‘Tell me more about Syria,’ she said. ‘Did you feel like you really changed things?’

‘Changed things? Yeah. Definitely. But it will be slow. The fighting will go on for a long time.’

‘But how does fighting change anything? How does what ISIS or what these rebels are doing stop the bombings? I don’t understand. Aren’t they the ones
doing
the bombings?’ Rosie forgot the name of the Syrian president and Shahid had to remind her. ‘That’s right. Assad. If you want to stop his killings and his slaughter, then how does more fighting do that? An eye for an eye, yeah? If I attack you, you attack me.’

‘I would never hurt you,’ Shahid replied.

‘I don’t mean that. I mean the expression. The
idea
. They’re starting to attack ISIS now, yeah? I’ve seen it on the news. British and American planes. Their bombers.’

‘Yeah, that’s true. The Western governments fight them, but they can never win …’

‘But that’s what I’m saying to you! Nobody can win if you keep fighting. You get attacked in the street here in Brighton, you fight back, right, but you both end up in hospital.’

‘Not me,’ Shahid said proudly, and he could see the effect his words had on her. He remembered what she had written in her diary –
He makes me feel safe. I like the way he looks and smells. His arms turn me on. There’s something a bit scary about him but I’ve always liked that, a bad temper. He’s so gentle but he has these sudden outbursts and it’s a bit frightening
. Shahid knew that he could say or do almost anything and this girl would go along with it.

‘The attacks have been even worse under Obama than under Bush,’ he said. He liked teaching her. He liked the feeling of being able to educate those who were ignorant. ‘The Middle East – the whole region since the invasions, the illegal invasions and occupations of Muslim lands – has been unstable and corrupt. My Muslim brothers and sisters are at the mercy of politicians, Rosie. My government.
Your
government. The greed for oil and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people was for the sake of what? For power and money? The only solution is to fight back. The only solution is to go back to a time when things were pure. When people like you and me lived side by side in harmony and the Americans, the West, had not reached this state of corruption. They are murderers, Rosie, much more than ISIS are murderers. Obama drones. He kills without looking. He sits in his White House armchair and presses a button and whole families die. They don’t care about ordinary people. They never cared.’

‘Hey, let’s change the subject,’ Rosie said. She forced a smile. ‘This is all getting a bit sad. We’re meant to be having fun, no? I’ve had such a nice time. Food here’s so good.’

‘Really good,’ said Shahid. He was worried that he had revealed too much, that she might become suspicious of him. ‘I’m sorry to be so political,’ he said. ‘It’s just important to me. I don’t like seeing ordinary people suffer.’

‘Me neither,’ Rosie replied quickly. ‘But I feel like you’re so passionate about this stuff, that you believe in it so much, you should do politics or debates in public or something. That’s the way to change things, isn’t it? Not through wanting people to fight and get hurt. There are already so many wars, Shahid.’

He allowed her to say that without contradicting her. Shahid wanted to explain to Rosie why it was necessary for people to die in order to create a better future, but he did not want to lose her. She would never understand.

They asked for the bill. Rosie went to the toilet while Shahid paid. When she came back, he saw that she had applied lip gloss. He could smell a fresh burst of perfume. She bent down and kissed him on the lips in front of everyone in the restaurant.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘I’m not tired. Let’s go back to yours. Get a minicab.’