It was not lost on her, his use of the pronoun ‘we’. As if they were co-conspirators.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
He ignored the question. ‘Let’s have a drink. That’s what Jonah would have wanted. Come home with me’
‘Cobra’s job is to ensure that everything that can be done is being done,’ a government minister was saying on the radio. News of the terrorist attack averted that morning had been swiftly replaced by that of the coming storm. The minister informed the listeners that Police and Environment Agency staff were patrolling in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent, offering advice. ‘If you are advised to evacuate please follow those instructions, there are rest centres that are being set up for you. And it’s really important to keep away from the sea because, as well as the storm surge, there will also be very large waves, and this is dangerous – people need to keep away from it.’
‘A long way away,’ Nor commented.
She turned her back to the sink and watched him as he paced back and forth. The kitchen seemed too small to contain him. From the freezer compartment he withdrew a bottle of Absolut.
‘We are doing all that we can but we are just going to have to wait and see what happens as the surge makes its way down,’ the minister said.
There was a gun on the table between them, a compact black pistol. He caught her looking at it and smiled.
‘Have a drink,’ he said.
‘OK.’
He rinsed two glasses and poured vodka in them.
‘Nothing to mix it with here,’ he said.
She downed the shot. Her head reeled.
‘And if there was it doesn’t look like you’d need it …’
‘Why did you go for this?’ she asked.
‘Why did I go for what?’ he asked.
‘Blowing up the
Montgomery
?’
‘You understand,’ Nor told her, ‘that it’s not personal. It’s just what I do. It’s a vocation.’
‘Was it your idea?’
He found the notion amusing. ‘No. It was Fisher-King’s idea for a propaganda coup. MI6 and the police swoop in on conspirators manufacturing the biggest ever IED in the Thames Estuary. All they wanted me to do was recruit the dive team and manufacture the plastic explosives and detonating cord. They’d handle access to the wreck as part of a routine MoD survey and provide the detonators, duds of course. They then sweep in at the eleventh hour. Simple really.’ He brought the bottle over to the table and poured them both another shot. They were side by side, leaning against the table. ‘It was the Americans, Those Who Seek The End, who had the idea of really doing it.’
Those Who Seek The End – it was Mikulski, the FBI agent, who she had heard first use that name. She’d been wrong when she had watched the divers being arrested and she had thought that it was all over. She’d suspected that since she had looked up from the bench on the sea wall and seen him standing there. Now it was confirmed.
‘Yesterday morning they connected the ring mains that link the ammunition stacked in the forward holds and that in the aft holds,’ he explained, ‘and after lunch, while you were watching them from the beach, they attached real detonators and activated the ignition assembly, which is fixed to one of the warning buoys. It’s simple really – a regular phone connected to an electrical circuit in a waterproof box. It’s set to blow on receipt of a phone message. All we have to do is wait for the tide.’
‘You’ll do it?’
He shrugged. ‘You can’t have a war on terror without spectacular acts of terror.’ He put on an American accent and rolled his
r
’s: ‘We have to terrify them to make them agree to what is necessary for the protection of their freedoms.’ He poured them both another shot. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked.
‘To tell the truth,’ she said, shocked to hear herself saying it. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard all week,’ he said, laughing a little. He stared into her eyes. She thought that his eyes were the eyes of someone who would never be tamed. ‘You should run.’
It was ridiculous. She laughed and at the same moment so did he. An instant when they were as one. Bound one to the other. She caught her breath.
‘You’re shaking,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, with a laugh. She could hear the rising hysteria in her voice.
He held the back of his hand to the side of her jaw and she closed her eyes and exhaled softly, the tumult rising like a tide within her. He gently squeezed her shoulder and she felt as if she were sinking towards him, as if his outstretched arm was all that was preventing her from falling. She felt his lips brush hers and she let her mouth open. And then she was hungrily kissing him, devouring him.
He pulled his T-shirt over his head and she unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged it off. She undid her bra and let it fall to the floor. She reached for his smooth, hairless chest and ran her nails down his sternum, across the plain of his stomach. She unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his jeans and reached in to hold his engorged penis, feeling it thickening in her palm. She pushed him back on to the table and bent to his penis in an act of deliberate surrender. She plunged her mouth on to him, again and again, feeling him tense from his knees to his shoulders. Her nose was filled with the smell of him, and above her he was groaning, and his hands were making fists. He did not offer any warning before he came. He suddenly shuddered and groaned and she tasted the briny wash of his discharge in her mouth.
He lay back on the tabletop with his mouth open and his eyeballs rolled back into his skull. She felt a shudder of elation. For the first time since she had left the island of Jura she felt truly fearless and bold.
She took him by the hand and led him up the stairs to the bedroom. They removed their remaining clothes and she pressed herself against him. He held her away for a moment to look at her and she felt triumph as she recognised the need rising in him again. He turned her around, bent her over the bed and lifted her hair from the nape of her neck, wrapping it around his fist and pulling her up so that she was pressed against him, his breath on her neck, his other hand cupping a breast, the arm rising across her collarbone and encircling her neck. She was trapped with his penis pressing against her. He went in, pushing into her, and she felt as if she were falling. She felt so full. He made a roaring sound, and spent himself again.
They lay together in the bed, with the sheets and blankets tangled between their legs, sleepy and hot, with his sperm trickling out of her, and it felt as if some part of her was melting.
She felt at peace. She remembered Saira once describing Stockholm syndrome to her, the fondness and loyalty one could come to feel for a captor.
‘What happens at high tide?’ she asked.
‘I press speed dial.’ He put his mobile phone against a nipple and moved it downward across her belly until it pressed against her labia. He whispered in her ear, ‘And everybody’s dead.’
JONAH
‘… of three days’ journey’
The Bible, Jonah 3
9–11 September 2005
Jonah fell. It was no more than fifty feet from the bridge to the surface of the Euphrates, no more than a second of weightlessness before he plunged into the water. But in that second after he was shot, and while he was falling through the air, he stared wide-eyed into the approaching depths and saw death there waiting. Its howling maw.
You have betrayed everyone that ever loved you.
Then he struck. He was dragged down. Panicking, he tried to scramble for the surface but he was tricked by the current, and instead funnelled down into the murky depths, among dark and menacing shapes. Voices whispered to him:
Traitor! Adulterer!
Thief!
Close to passing out, he gave up the last of his breath, watching the air bubbles rising around his face, urgently seeking the surface. Then a moment’s clarity, a life-saving spark – sheer bloody-mindedness – caused him to strike out with one arm and chase the path of his ascending breath. His head broke the surface, his mouth open and gasping, filling his lungs with the humid night air. Above him were cars and buildings, a moving field of light. And he was spinning, powerful currents swirling and eddying around him, sweeping him towards the centre of the river. There was no strength in him to fight it and so he let himself be carried forward.
He had been shot in the front of his upper body, he was sure of that, in his neck, shoulder or chest. There was no pain as such, just a dull throbbing. His left arm was paralysed but his right arm was working, and soon he discovered that by using the blade of his good hand as a rudder, he could edge across the face of the current. He must get ashore and soon if he was to survive. He steered towards the bank.
Soon, his fingers slid through soft mud and he grabbed a fistful of reeds, and, using the current’s momentum, allowed himself to be washed on to the rubbish-strewn bank. He could not afford to rest. He knew that he must keep going if he were not to be sucked back into the water. He crawled forward one-armed through the ooze, grabbing debris and other organic matter, anything he could get a purchase on to haul himself forward.
Creatures scuttled across him. A nauseating stench filled his nostrils. He could no longer see and he had no idea how far he had to go. His left arm felt massive, like an anchor dragging alongside him. His legs were useless. He was cold and getting colder. He must keep going. Death would not have him yet.
It felt like crab claws tickling his sides, then a wet sponge on his face and a snuffling sound. A dog licking his face. Jonah smiled. It was Esme’s nameless dog to the rescue. Then two hands, rough and calloused, travelled up and down his body, exploring his pockets and unbuckling his belt.
‘I can give you money,’ he said.
A man grunted in surprise. Jonah wondered what language he had spoken and tried again, careful to use Arabic. The man shooed the dog away from Jonah’s face and leant down to look at him. He was a large man in a grubby djellaba. His breath was if anything worse than the dog’s.
‘You’re alive,’ the man said. He grinned toothlessly and shook his head in wonderment.
‘I’m glad,’ Jonah told him, ‘because this would make a shitty paradise.’
‘You’re a gift,’ the man said.
‘Get me to a phone,’ Jonah said.
The man took hold of him by the ankles and started to drag him through the debris and waste.
He heard the first note of the dawn call to prayer. He opened his eyes. Two donkeys were staring down at him. They were attached to a wooden cart that was stacked high with rubbish.
He looked to one side. He was lying outstretched on a concrete apron beside the river. At the back of the cart he could hear the dog yelping at what it thought was a game and the man muttering as he shifted bundles of trash to make a bed.
Rag-pickers, charcoal burners … Jonah wondered what it would take to get found by actual Search and Rescue. A different line of work perhaps? He shut his eyes against the throbbing in his head and waited for the sun to come.
‘You are lucky the bullet did not break up in your body. Your clavicle is fractured but not splintered,’ a voice said. He opened his eyes. An elderly man in a white coat was holding the bullet up to the light with forceps. He had a hooked nose and prominent chin and resembled a geriatric Mr Punch. Behind him on the wall there was a poster with all the different breeds of dogs on it. Somewhere close by, several dogs were barking. ‘Frankly, I am more concerned about your swim in the Euphrates. You are very lucky that old Hassan found you. I am giving you intravenous antibiotics. When did you last have a tetanus shot?’
He realised that the man was speaking to him in English. ‘I need a telephone. I need to speak to Yakoob Beg,’ he said, struggling to hold a thought.
‘Yes, yes, it is being taken care of,’ said the man in the white coat. He held a needle up to the light and with one eye closed threaded suture material through it. ‘We have heard all of your speeches. We have spoken to Mr Yakoob Beg in Kabul. A very nice man. Now hold still. I’m going to stitch you up, first the deeper layers and then the surface skin.’
Jonah wondered whether he’d heard right. ‘You’ve spoken to Yakoob Beg?’
‘Yes. As soon as I have finished here you are leaving. You are going home.’
Home?
Out of the corner of his eye, Jonah watched as several times the man pulled the thread tight, tied a knot and snipped the ends of the thread with scissors.
‘I’m not feeling any pain,’ Jonah told him.
‘That’s because you are receiving five-star service, no expense spared, orders of Mr Yakoob Beg and courtesy of the swiftest international cash delivery I have ever encountered. I gave you enough ketamine to knock out a bear. I worked at Baghdad zoo for a while, before the current difficulties. You are like a bear, I think?’
‘I’m hallucinating,’ Jonah said.
‘No doubt. You know I must tell you, I’m not used to patients who can speak.’
‘Where am I going?’ Jonah asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘I don’t want to know. And frankly it’s better for me and for old Hassan if you don’t remember us. If we are asked we will say that we were coerced.’
There was the sound of vehicles growling to a halt and several cars doors slamming. Then shouting. Someone banging on a nearby door.
‘You will need to have the sutures taken out in about seven days.’ The man smiled. ‘If you are still alive, of course.’ He paused. ‘I hope they don’t break down the door.’
They broke down the door. There were four of them and more outside, and drifts of blue smoke followed them in as they came barrelling down the corridor. They were carrying M4 carbines with under-slung grenade launchers and wearing body armour and helmets. The man in the white coat backed against the wall with his hands in the air.
‘I’m Sergeant Stone,’ the nearest one yelled in Jonah’s face. ‘Third Squad, First Platoon, Charlie Company. I’m your escort out of here. This way please, sir.’
He grabbed Jonah by his good arm and together they ran out into the smokescreen, towards four Humvees that were rolling back and forth so that snipers couldn’t get a fix on a door. Jonah was bundled into the back of the nearest one. He wedged himself against a storage rack, with his sling braced against his chest, and the top gunner’s legs in front of him. The vehicle’s sound system was cranking out the Eminem and Obie Trice track ‘Go to Sleep’: