‘I have serious commitments now: a business, real estate, a Thames view, a child on the way. My wife has expensive tastes.’
‘I guess it’s lucky for you that 9/11 revived the security business.’
‘You make your own luck, Jonah. You know that. When I left the Department, I spotted an opening and I’m making the most of it. I have an opportunity to build a future for my family. That’s the most important thing to me. I’m not risking that for some Department fuck-up.’ There was a pause. The preamble was over and they had arrived at the meat of the conversation: ‘Do you think that anyone in authority here is going to lift a finger to defend us if it comes out that we murdered a CIA agent in an unsanctioned operation? Christ, I wouldn’t even be saying it out loud if we weren’t up here.’
Alex had committed sacrilege. It was the Department’s one unbending rule:
never ever mention Kiernan’s death out loud.
‘They’ll throw us to the fucking wolves,’ Alex growled. ‘I’m not having it. I’m not going to prison for anyone.’
‘It’s not a situation that any of us likes,’ Jonah told him.
‘But you’re the one who’s in a position to do something about it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t play stupid with me. Do you think he’ll talk?’
Jonah shrugged – it was not an easy question to answer. There was no science in the running of agents, any more than there was an understanding of the intricacies of childhood friendships, and Alex knew that as well as Jonah did.
‘You understand Nor better than anyone,’ Alex insisted.
‘As you may recall, we abandoned him in Kandahar back in ’96. He thinks we betrayed him.’
‘Was he ever ours?’ Alex responded.
‘I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘You’re not sure about much, are you?’
‘Less and less by the day,’ Jonah retorted.
‘Let’s concentrate on what we do know,’ Alex said. ‘The Americans, who seem to have difficulty distinguishing their friends from their foes in the War on Terror, allowed the Pakistanis to fly every terrorist of value out of Kunduz before the Northern Alliance could capture them. I’m talking about Chechens, Uzbeks, Afghans and Arabs – Pakistani military personnel, ISI, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Why didn’t the Pakistanis take Nor? He’s a fucking Sith Lord, Jonah. Why did they leave him behind?’
‘He says because the Pakistanis knew about the diamonds.’
‘Do you believe that?’
Jonah shrugged. ‘He says he was a mule for al-Qaeda. One of several that broke out of Kunduz carrying the diamonds. They were supposed to scatter and meet in northern Iraq, near the Iranian border, at a camp run by an al-Qaeda-linked Kurdish group.’
‘These days all roads lead to Iraq,’ Alex said.
‘And that’s exactly what the Americans want to hear,’ Jonah said. ‘They’re intent on creating a link between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They’ll use it as a pretext to invade.’
Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where are the diamonds now?’
‘The Americans have them.’
‘Have they valued them?’
‘A million dollars, apparently.’
Alex whistled. ‘You know that’s twice what it cost al-Qaeda to finance 9/11? The total estimated cost to the US of the 9/11 attacks, including direct costs as a result of systems sabotage and indirect costs as a result of security, insurance and policy changes, was five hundred billion dollars. That’s a million to one return. Do you really think he’s just a mule?’
‘I don’t see that there is anything I can do about it.’
‘The Americans want you to handle him. They recognise that you’re the best man to do it and that gives you an opportunity to get to him before there are damaging revelations.’
‘What do you mean by
get
to him?’
‘You want me to spell it out for you?’
‘Yes, I think I do.’
‘I mean kill him.’
There was a pause.
‘You want me to kill Nor?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. Go down there to the Sahara and kill him. We can’t afford messy revelations.’
‘Who do you mean by we?’
‘Obviously, Monteith can’t tell you himself. There has to be denial.’
Jonah watched a gull lift and wheel in a spiral of air. He reflected that Monteith had always preferred to conduct his dirty work at arm’s length. He heard himself speak from some middle distance. ‘Of course.’
‘Don’t be fucking childish. You know how this works.’
‘I’ve known Nor since I was a child.’
Alex looked closely at Jonah. ‘People are asking why Nor didn’t kill you in Sierra Leone when he had the chance.’
Jonah returned his gaze. ‘Which people?’
Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe you’re too close.’
Jonah frowned. People hurried past on the pavement below.
‘Of course, I’m too close.’
Abruptly, Alex changed tack. He grinned and slapped Jonah on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s go over to Bangla town and grab a curry.’
February 2002
The Moroccans called them black locusts, the thousands of illegal immigrants that gathered on the North African coast in the hope of reaching Europe by scaling the fences surrounding the tiny Spanish enclave of Melilla.
Scores had died on the fences, shot by border guards, and hundreds more had been captured. For several weeks the Moroccans had been cramming them into the back of trucks and driving them a thousand miles south across the desert to the ‘Berm’, the 2,400-kilometre-long earthwork fortification that divided the disputed territory of Western Sahara. At the Berm they were stripped of their belongings and ejected through the minefields into open desert.
The route was proven, the venality of the guards well established. It was simply a question of waiting. Nor would come. And when he did Jonah would face an impossible choice: kill his oldest friend or risk exposure of himself and his colleagues in the Department as the murderers of the CIA agent James Kiernan.
The plane’s wheels extended with a dull thud that jerked him awake. Jonah was always awake for landing. He rubbed his face and, looking around, found the woman in the next seat staring at him. She was wearing a ribbed, white shawl that covered her hair and her hands were smeared with henna. He wondered whether he had called out in his sleep. Glancing out of the window, he saw only darkness, and then suddenly the lights of the city beneath him.
They landed and the engines screamed as they decelerated on the tarmac.
He went down the metal gangway and walked across the tarmac in the searing cold of the desert night. He had landed at the airport on the outskirts of the closed military city of Tindhouf, in the far south-west of Algeria. His name was Jonah and he was a British passport holder. He was a journalist, of sorts. He wrote half-hearted cant for a socialist Internet site. He had lost his eye to a welding spark as a child.
His contact was waiting in the terminal beyond, standing a head taller than the Saharawis around her, clutching a tatty Gladstone bag beneath her arm. She was wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops despite the cold and there were goose bumps on her tanned forearms. She had dirty blonde hair, unnerving blue eyes and almost no upper lip. She was wearing lipstick but it did not follow the contours of her mouth; for a moment, Jonah experienced a bizarre urge to reach out and wipe it away.
Her name was Justine. She was a former Sky News reporter, now reduced to acting as a freelance stringer for anyone unlikely enough to show interest in the plight of the dispossessed population of Western Sahara. The route that had led her to this remote outpost, as described in her file, was a painful one – a spectacular fall from grace, precipitated by mobile phone footage of her shouting at a rape victim in a field hospital in Sudan: ‘
Nobody gives a shit if there was only one of them. It’s nothing. You have to say it was a gang rape. Look at the camera. Do it again, but four or five of them this time, you understand?
’ The footage was posted by an outraged MSF doctor on the Internet and almost immediately went viral. The self-righteous fury that followed had caused the network to ditch her and made her a virtual pariah.
‘My God, look at you,’ she said, and he could tell immediately from the shrewdness of her stare that she was unlikely to be satisfied until she understood the nature of his mission. She tucked her arm in his. ‘Come on, there’s a car outside.’
She led him to the far side of the car park, to a battered white Land Cruiser with a small group of men squatting beside it, drinking tea around a fire. As they approached a man in a faded army jacket and a black turban got up. He climbed in the car, turned the key in the ignition and it rattled into life.
‘We had a pack of Spanish journalists fly in a couple of days back,’ Justine explained, once he had squeezed on to the bench seat beside her. ‘They have already crossed into the liberated zone. I presume that’s where you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘We’ll overnight tonight in the one of the camps and set off tomorrow at first light.’
‘Fine,’ he said.
They skirted the city on a bypass lit up with sodium lamps that gave it a hallucinogenic orange glare. There were no other cars. There was no one to be seen. They circled a roundabout and turned off into the desert. There were no more street lamps and the only illumination came from their headlights on the road ahead. After a few miles they approached an Algerian military checkpoint. The driver slowed the car and flicked on the overhead lamp. A soldier emerged from his hut. Justine gave him a friendly grin and the soldier waved them through.
‘Welcome to the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic,’ Justine said.
They turned off the road and bounced along a rutted track between low hills, and then they were on the camp’s unpaved streets. The low, crude brick huts and rectangular tents were arranged in loose blocks.
‘There are a hundred and something thousand Saharawi refugees spread across five camps,’ Justine explained, staring at him. ‘They have been here for thirty years, a whole generation stranded out here in the middle of nowhere, forgotten about by the international community while the Moroccans occupy their homes and plunder their phosphates and fishing banks. But I guess you knew that?’
They turned into an alley. He attempted to count off the shacks as they bounced past but it was no good. He had no idea where he was. The driver stopped and cut the engine and lights.
‘They’ve maintained a ceasefire for fourteen years,’ she said as they got out of the car. ‘They’ve resisted the temptation to draw attention to themselves with spectacular acts of violence. These are the best-run refugee camps in the world.’
The driver led them to a large tent. He ducked under the guy ropes and through the flap at the entrance and Jonah and Justine followed. A short, round woman in a shawl got up to greet them. Justine put an arm around the woman’s shoulder.
‘This is Fatima,’ she said. ‘She is my auntie.’
Jonah shook hands with the woman. The driver closed the flap behind them. The large, windowless tent was bare except for a low table, a charcoal burner, a pile of blankets and a few cushions spread across the carpet. They sat and Fatima resumed making tea. Two teenage girls wearing thick woollen mittens entered the tent and sat opposite them, watching but saying nothing.
Jonah asked for details about the migrants.
‘They’ve found ninety-five so far. Most of them have spent two or three days wandering in the desert before being picked up. They’ve been given shelter in a schoolhouse in Birlehlu, one of the settlements in the liberated zone. It’s about six hours’ drive west of here.’
‘What nationality are the ones they’ve found?’
‘West African mostly, Guineans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Gambians … you name it. They’ve found a couple of Bangladeshis, also.’
‘Any Arabs?’
‘No Arabs,’ she said, holding his gaze, no expression on her face.
He was passed a small glass filled with sweet black tea. He drank it and handed back the glass.
A man pushed aside the tent flap. He was tall, thin and bespectacled with a neat goatee beard. Jonah got up to shake his hand but the man motioned for him to remain seated.
‘This is Ahmed,’ Justine said. ‘He is an official from Polisario.’
Polisario was the Saharawi independence movement, they controlled the refugee camps and the ‘liberated zone’, the stretch of mostly empty desert to the east of the Moroccan ‘Berm’.
‘You are welcome,’ Ahmed said, solemnly, when he had sat down. He spoke very good English without a discernible accent. Jonah got the feeling that although he was polite, he did not welcome Jonah’s presence. A second round of tea was served. Jonah checked his watch. It was after two.
‘Are you tired?’ Ahmed asked.
‘I’m OK,’ he replied.
‘Why have you come?’ Ahmed asked, in Arabic.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ Jonah replied, also in Arabic.
‘You’ll find no jihadis here,’ Ahmed said, ‘if that’s what you’ve come for. There are no fundamentalists or suicide bombers.’
‘I’m looking for a friend, that’s all.’
‘Our people on the other side of the Berm tell us that there has been a prison break in Layoune, from the Dark Prison. That is unprecedented. The identity of the escaped prisoners is unknown.’
‘I just need to find my friend,’ Jonah told him, ‘and then we will leave. I don’t mean to cause any difficulty.’
Ahmed said to Jonah in English, ‘I have something to discuss with Justine. Please excuse us.’
They disappeared out of the tent.
Jonah sat back against a cushion and accepted a third glass of tea. After he had drunk it he checked his watch again. He closed his eyes. He became aware of someone standing at his shoulder. He opened his eyes again. Justine smiled sympathetically.
‘You speak Arabic,’ she observed.
Fatima and the girls had left the tent. The driver was asleep beneath a pile of blankets.
‘You’re not a spy, are you?’ Justine asked.
‘No.’
‘OK.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not concerned.’
‘No need to be.’
‘My father was a spy,’ she said.
‘OK.’
‘I don’t know whether he was any good at it. He didn’t like it much when the cold war ended. He said the Soviets were worthy adversaries. I think he’d have been happy if the Soviet Union never collapsed. What about you? What about your father?’