I found him in a gay bar in Sydney. It’s usually the best place for what I had in mind, whatever country you’re in. Nicholas, I soon learned, had been living and working in Australia for six years; he had a good job behind the bar and a partner with whom he shared a house; most important of all, he had no intention of going back to the UK. Pointing out of the window, he said, ‘Look at the weather. Look at the people. Look at the lifestyle. What do I want to go back for?’ I got to know him over two or three weeks; I’d pop in there a couple of times a week, when I knew it was his shift, and we’d have a chat. I met other gay men there, but they didn’t have what Nicholas had. He was the one for me.
When I got back to the UK, I opened up an accommodation address in his name. Then I went to the town hall and got Nicholas registered on the electoral roll for the area of the address and applied for a duplicate of his driver’s licence. It arrived from the DVLC three weeks later.
During that time I also went to the Registry of Births and Deaths at St Catherine’s House in London and obtained a copy of his birth certificate. He hadn’t liked to talk to me about his past, and I could never get anything more out of him than his birthday and where he was born, and trying to dig any deeper would have aroused suspicion. Besides, his partner, Brian, was getting pissed off with me sniffing around. It took a couple of hours of scouring the registers between 1960 and 1961 before I found him.
I went to the police and reported that my passport had been stolen. They gave me a crime number, which I put on my application form for a replacement. Added to a copy of the birth certificate, it worked: Nick Davidson the Second was soon the proud owner of a brand-new ten-year passport.
I needed to go further. To have an authentic ID you have to have credit cards. Over the next few months I signed up with several book and record clubs; I even bought a hideous-looking Worcester porcelain figurine out of a Sunday supplement, paying with a postal order. In return, I got bills and receipts, all issued to the accommodation address.
Next I wrote to two or three of the high-street banks and asked them a string of questions that made it sound as if I was a big-time investor. I received very grovelling letters in reply, on the bank’s letterhead, and written to my address. Then all I did was walk into a building society, play very stupid and say I would like to open a bank account, please. As long as you have documentation with your address on, they don’t seem to care. I put a few quid in the new account and let it tick over. After a few weeks I got some standing orders up and running with the book clubs, and at last I was ready to apply for a credit card. As long as you’re on the electoral register, have a bank account and no bad credit history, the card is yours. And once you have one card, all the other banks and finance houses will fall over themselves to make sure you take theirs as well. Fortunately, it appeared that Nick One had left no unpaid bills behind when he’d left. If he had it would have been back to the drawing board.
I was thinking about going one step further and getting myself a National Insurance number, but really there was no point. I had money and I had a way out, and anyway, you can just go down to the local DSS and say you’re starting work the next Monday. They’ll give you an emergency number on the spot, which will last you for years. If that doesn’t work, you can always just make one up; the system’s so inefficient it takes for ever for them to find out what’s going on.
As soon as I had my passport and cards up and running, I used them for a trip to confirm they worked. After that, I carried on using them to keep the cards active and to get the passport stamped with a few entries and exits.
Just as I would do if I needed to disappear, Sarah would be leaving behind everything she knew. She wouldn’t be contacting family or friends, she would completely bin all the little day-to-day experiences that made up her life, all the little eccentricities that would give her away.
I started to think back over what she’d told me of her past because, without any outside help, that was the only place I had to go. I really knew very little, apart from the fact that she’d had a boyfriend a while ago, but binned him after finding out he was also seeing another woman. The story went that he lost a finger during the row with her; and that was the sum total in that department. Maybe metal-headed Mickey Warner could help, if I made it sound like a PV question. In fact, there would be plenty of questions for him to answer.
As for the family and her upbringing, she’d never told me much. All I knew was that, though we might have come from different ends of the social spectrum, we seemed to share the same emotional background. Neither set of parents had given a monkey’s. She was fucked off to school when she was just nine, and me, well, I was just fucked off. Her family life was a desert, and it would hold no clues. The more I thought about it, the smaller the needle became and the larger the haystack.
What it boiled down to was that if she wanted to disappear she could – nobody was going to find her. I could be on her trail for months and still not be getting any warmer. I racked my brains, trying to remember something, anything, that might help, some little clue she might have revealed at some point which would give me a lead.
I pressed the ‘call’ button and ordered a couple of beers, partly to help me sleep, partly because, once I got to DC, there would be no more alcohol. For me, work and drink never mixed.
Maybe Josh could help. I could get hold of him when he returned from the UK, and maybe he could access some databases and run some covert checks. I wondered whether I should tell him the truth, but decided against. It could land both of us in the shit.
The thought suddenly struck me that part of me was hoping I wouldn’t find her. I felt depressed, but resolved to crack on and get it over and done with. I would go straight to her flat, meet my new mate Metal Mickey, and take it from there.
The beer turned up and I decided to veg out for the rest of the flight. As I watched a film my mind drifted to Kelly. She was probably sitting at the table with her grandad, drawing pictures and drinking tea and trying to pull her jumper out from her jeans every time her grandmother tucked it back in. I made a mental note to call her.
I took another swig of beer and tried my hardest to think of something else, but I couldn’t get Sarah out of my mind.
In 1987, two years before the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the UK and US were sending teams in-country to train Afghani rebels, the mujahedin.
The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan eight years earlier. Peasant villagers got their first experience of modern technology when they were pounded by Moscow’s jets, tanks and helicopters. Three million were killed or maimed; six million others fled west into Iran or east into Pakistan. Those that were left standing took on the Russians, living on stale bread and tea, sleeping on rocky mountainsides.
Eventually the mujahedin put out an international plea for help. The West responded with $6-billion worth of arms. Congress, however, would not give permission for the rebels to be armed with American Stinger ground-to-air missiles to take down the Russian gunships and ground-attack aircraft, so our job was to train them in how to operate the Brit Blowpipe missiles instead. The CIA reasoned that if Congress was shown that the Afghans had a piss-poor ground-to-air missile capability – which they certainly did with Blowpipe: you needed to be a brain surgeon or have two right hands to use the thing – then they would eventually be allowed to have Stingers instead. They were right. We stayed and generally trained them how to fuck the Russians over.
Not that I knew it at the time – I was more concerned about not losing a leg on the hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel mines the Russians had dropped – but in Saudi Arabia, a few years before, a young civil-engineering graduate called Osama Bin Laden had also responded to the rebels’ plea for help, packing himself and several of his family’s bulldozers off to central Asia. An Islamic radical from an influential and enormously wealthy family, whose construction company had been involved in rebuilding the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, Bin Laden was inspired by what he saw as the plight of Muslims in a medieval society besieged by a twentieth-century superpower.
At first his work was political. He was one of the Saudi benefactors who spent millions supporting the Afghan guerrillas. He recruited thousands of Arab fighters in the Gulf, paid for their passage to Afghanistan and set up the main guerrilla camp to train them. Then he must have gone a bit loopy. With all that money he decided to take part in the fighting himself. I never saw him, but every other word from the mujahedin would be on the subject of how great he was. They loved him, and so did the West at that time. He sounded like a good lad, taking care of widows and orphans by creating charities to support them and their families, all that sort of stuff.
Our team had just finished a six-month tour in the mountains north of Kabul and was cleaning up back in the UK before a two-week holiday when we got called to London for orders. It looked as if we were going back to visit our new best mates a bit quicker than we thought. Aboard the helicopter, the rumour going round was that we were needed to protect a civil servant during meets with the mujahedin. We groaned at the thought of having to nanny a sixty-year-old Foreign Office pen-pusher while he did an on-site audit of arms expenditure. Colin had been picked to be with the principal at all times when on the ground, while the rest of us would provide protection from a distance. ‘Fuck that,’ said Colin. ‘It’ll be like getting stuck in an episode of
Yes, Minister
.’ He promptly wriggled out of it and handed the job over to me.
Colin, Finbar, Simon and I were part of the team. We were sitting in a briefing room in a 1960s office block on the Borough High Street, just south of London Bridge, drinking tea from a machine and gobbing off as we waited for others to arrive. A woman we didn’t recognize entered the room, and all four of us, as well as a few of the advisers and briefing personnel, did a double take. She was stunning, her body hardly disguised by a short black skirt and jacket. She nodded to people she knew and sat down, seemingly oblivious to the many pairs of male eyes burning into her back.
Colin would fuck the crack of dawn if he had the chance. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She took off her jacket, and the sleeveless top beneath showed off her shoulders. They had definition: she trained. I could sense Colin getting even more excited.
He leaned over and whispered to Finbar, ‘I need a lawyer.’
‘Why’s that, wee mon?’ Finbar always called him that, which was strange, as the Irishman was about a foot smaller than Colin.
‘I’m getting a divorce.’
We were all intrigued to know what she was bringing to the party; it came as a bit of a shock when she was introduced as the civil servant we were going to protect. I had to smile. I knew what was coming next and, right on cue, Colin leaned towards me. ‘Nick…’
I ignored him, making him suffer a bit more. ‘Nick…’
I turned and gave him a big smile.
‘I’ll take my job back now, mate.’
I slowly shook my head.
Listening intently to the briefing officer, she crossed her legs, and the rustle of the material was just about the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. I was sure we were all paying more attention to that than to the briefing. She was now comfortable in her seat and her skirt had ridden up enough to show the darker tops of her tights. It was impossible to tell if she was doing it on purpose. She didn’t turn her head or glance around to check for effect.
When she stood up to speak, her voice was low and very confident. If the Intelligence Service didn’t work out for her, she could always find a job on an 0898 number.
Sarah explained that what she wanted to do was lay her hands on – and get back to the West – an airworthy, Russian-built Hind ground-attack helicopter, the true capabilities of which, she said, were still not understood. Better still, she added, she’d like a pair. She was the one who was going to strike the deal with the Afghans, and it was a simple case of, ‘we’ll scratch your back by carrying on showing you how to fuck the Russians, you scratch ours with a helicopter or two.’
From day one of the two months that we were moving in and out of Pakistan to the rebels’ mountain hides, she was a consummate professional to work with. She made life so much easier for us – sometimes on jobs like this we could spend just as much time massaging the fear factor out of the poor fucker who had to make the meet as we would preparing for it ourselves. But she was different. Maybe she wasn’t scared because she had just as much of a fiery temper as the truculent rebels. That often led to delays in negotiations – more so than the fact that she was a woman. But it was obvious to me that she had the knowledge, language and background to hold her own with these people, for whom we all had the greatest respect; after all, they were fighting a superpower, and winning.
I saw that Sarah had a love and understanding of this part of the world that she couldn’t have hidden, even if she’d tried. On top of that, she was switched on and didn’t flap when the meets got heated. She knew I was there, and that the other three were around somewhere, watching. If the shit had hit the fan, the Afghans wouldn’t have known what had hit them – unless the shit was Russian, in which case our orders were to bail out and leave the rebels to it.