Olives (10 page)

Startled, I
could only grin stupidly and mumble back at him. His smile died and
he turned back to the children in front of him. As I shambled away,
the man pulled the cage open for one of the children handing over a
coin.

I walked into
the kitchen. Lynch called on my mobile.

‘
You got any
plans for the weekend, Paul?’

For some
reason the sound of his Northern Irish voice made the hairs stand
up on my neck. ‘No.’

‘
Good. Let’s
meet up for a chat. Tomorrow morning, say eleven at the Citadel?
You know the Citadel, right?’

‘
Why should I
meet you?’

‘
That bomb in
Jericho. Very nasty. They traced the explosives back across to
Jordan, you know. Smuggled over the border, so an’ they were. The
Israelis are making quite the fuss about it, in a diplomatic sort
of way you understand. You might find you need a friend or two in
the weeks ahead. You know, what with court cases, bombings and all
that. You seem to enjoy a, how should I put it, a colourful
life.’

I brought my
racing mind under enough control to speak without stammering.
‘What’s Jericho got to do with me?’ But I was speaking to a dial
tone.

Jericho, the
biblical city across the River Jordan. I’d stood on the banks of
the river with beautiful Aisha, the daddy’s girl who had lost
her
baba
to the Israelis and whose brother had blown
himself up on a bus full of children.

The girl
unworried by her bag disappearing from a locked car in a remote
place near Jericho, separated from Israel by a few feet of brackish
water.

EIGHT

I took a
shower, made myself a large orange juice and soda then sat in the
living room watching the news. Jericho was yesterday’s bomb and
there was only a small piece on Jordan TV confirming one of the
wounded Israelis had died in hospital.

I opened my
laptop, shifting the empty whisky bottle and glass out of the way.
I didn’t have a great deal of time before my impending encounter
with Lynch and the nausea rolled over me in slow waves, making it
hard to focus. I searched for the Dajanis, Daoud, Ibrahim and the
names of the people I knew of at the Ministry. I sketched out
likely connections on some sheets of paper, searched for those and
connected some more. I looked up whois records for the owners of
websites, scanned the scant news reports on the Dajani scandal and
the extensive news coverage of the Jericho bomb. I searched blogs,
forums and business databases. Close to three o’clock, I’d sketched
a patchy map of the relationships I’d encountered, trying to tie
them together into what I knew of the family into some sort of
tree.

Aisha’s
brother, Daoud, was a powerful man but his Uncle Ibrahim was more
powerful by far. I understood why Aisha had brought him along to
spring me out of chokey. Ibrahim Dajani had clout. I could only
find hints of the whole: Arabs are strangers to the word
transparency. Whatever I could dig up on the Dajani family’s
business interests on the Web would only be the tip of the iceberg.
Still, I found a string of companies across the Arab World, a
network of relationships stretching back decades.

A complicated
web of ownerships and investments span out from a central holding
company, Jerusalem Holdings. Aisha’s father, Emad, had founded the
whole empire and his name came up in connection with Arafat’s
people, from Kuwait through to mentions of him in Lebanon during
the seventies. His death brought a stop to the thread, killed in an
Israeli rocket attack on a house in Gaza five years back. The
target of the attack, according to the Israeli press, had been a
big Hamas man called Mohammed Eftekhari. Nobody in the little house
in Gaza had survived the rockets, which had killed twelve people in
all, three of them children.

I sat back,
trying not to think of the nagging question.

Who is
Aisha?

Lynch picked
me up when I walked into the Citadel, Amman’s central hill topped
with the ruins of ancient civilisations and one of its big tourist
attractions. The guide hassling me to take a tour melted away when
Lynch appeared. The Irishman strolled casually beside me as if he’d
been there all along.

We walked up
the hill until it flattened out onto the top of the Citadel,
stopping by the Roman columns that overlook East Amman in its blue,
hilly haze. The Roman amphitheatre was below us, the colourful
shops and tenements of the Eastern city spread out crazily around
it, stretching up into the hills beyond.

We stood
together in the warm breeze. Lynch lit a cigarette. ‘You been here
before?’

‘
No. Never
got around to it.’

He puffed out
smoke. ‘They’ve done a good job here. They excavated it in layers,
preserving the best of each age. Roman, Byzantine, Muslim. It’s all
here. Thousands of years of history on a single
hilltop.’

‘
Can we get
down to brass tacks?’

Lynch turned
to me, his eyebrow raised. ‘Sure, Paul. I’m just after some
information in return for helping you out with this court case
you’ve landed for yourself. Simple as that.’

‘
Bollocks,
Gerry. You’re beyond information. You’re playing War Against Terror
with all the other little spies and I really don’t want to get
involved with any of you, if that’s all the same to you, thank
you.’

I wanted him
to react, to try to defend himself, but Lynch wasn’t going to give
me the pleasure. His accent seemed stronger, an image of the murals
on the Falls Road popping incongruously into my mind as he faced
me. ‘That’s Gerald, if you don’t mind, Paul. I’ve been twenty years
getting away from Gerry Lynch.’

I scanned his
angry countenance, surprised by his violence. ‘Um, okay. But it
doesn’t change the fact. I don’t want to play your
games.’

Lynch talked
to the Citadel. ‘You know, I had a hunch that you’d meet up with
Daoud Dajani. You’ve been spending a lot of time with his sister.
He’d want to meet you. Have you met him?’

‘
Yes. Why do
you ask?’

‘
He likes to
be in control, does Daoud. He’s not a very nice young man, you
know.’

‘
No, I don’t.
I’ve only met him once.’

‘
Did he ask
you to do anything for him? Carry anything, talk to
anyone?’

‘
No. Why
would he?’

‘
Oh, no
reason, just wondering.’

Carry
anything
? Like a bag to the
border area near Jericho? No, officer. I packed it
myself.

Lynch’s face
was screwed up against the sunlight, his shabby jeans and brown
corduroy jacket seemed designed to let him blend in with the crowds
in the city’s streets. He strode off again and I followed
him.

‘
Look, I know
Daoud Dajani’s got form, that he was in trouble last year because
of his brother,’ I said, my hands in my pockets. ‘I know his father
was involved with Arafat and even Fatah, and he was helping to fund
Arafat in Kuwait, okay? But so are a lot of business people in the
Middle East, particularly Palestinian ones. You going somewhere
with this or are you just fishing around?’

Lynch stopped
walking and looked at me, blinking. A palpable hit. Oh, thank God
for the Internet. ‘How did you know about all that?’

‘
Aisha told
me.’ Which wasn’t true, but I certainly planned on giving her the
chance. ‘So what’s your interest, MrLynch from the commercial
section?’

‘
Like I said,
just interest.’

‘
Gerry, don’t
fuck around. Can you help me or not? And if you can, what do you
want from me?’

Lynch smiled
at me. ‘I told you before, it’s Gerald. I won’t tell you again. You
could use a rethink about your attitude towards authority. You’re
due in court to answer a serious charge against you of assaulting a
police officer and pissing me off will just make things a great
deal worse. I’m not going to argue with you about what I do or
don’t do. Take it or leave it. Just don’t dress me up as something
fancier than I am. I know you hacks, you’ve got overactive
imaginations. But I thought we could share information, you and I.
You’ve got access to the Jordanian government, you’re working
within the infrastructure. We’d like to share some of the inside
track. Particularly on the water privatisations. There’s hundreds
of millions of pounds at stake, some key British companies are
involved and it’s a strategic play for us. You’ve met Clive
Saunders, you know Anglo-Jordanian are going for the water. It’s in
our interest to help them out in any way we can.’ Lynch turned and
looked at me, his eyes glittering in the sunlight. ‘Legally, of
course. Always legally. So there are my cards, Paul. There they
are, right there on the table.’

I sulked.
‘I’m flattered by your interest in me.’

Lynch paused
by a huge stone-lined hole in the ground, a hundred feet across.
Steps curled around the inside wall of it down to a layer of green
water in the bottom. A pillar of cylindrically cut stones rose in
the middle.

‘
This is a
Roman cistern,’ he said. ‘One of their reservoirs. Clever chaps,
really.’

I looked down
into the hole, my eyes following the steps down, a little thrill of
vertigo ran through me, reminding me of the day I had looked out
over Amman from the hotel window. It seemed like months
ago.

Lynch kicked
a stone over the edge. ‘You want to be careful of Dajani, you know.
We don’t know for sure he was behind Jericho, but we do know he was
involved, and both his father and brother were involved with people
we would rather not see wandering around the streets of Tel Aviv,
let alone London or New York. We’ve got a hunch he might be funding
more of the same. The family likes to fund things. Daddy used to
fund things, like you said. But Daoud’s bigger. He’s got enough
money and enough legitimate business interests to stay moving
around between places that we’d rather he wasn’t mixed up with, to
be honest. And now they’ve lost another one of the family, a cousin
of Daoud and Aisha’s. He died at Jericho, but not in the
blast.’

Aisha’s
hesitant voice on the telephone came back to me. The boy who had
screamed through the night from his injuries before finally
welcoming the cool, dark relief of death. Aisha taking huge gulps
of air as she talked through her grief.

Lynch stared
at me, his face expressionless. ‘The Israelis shot the kid. That’s
been kept out of the news. They don’t seem to be able to
remember
quite
why or how they shot him, so we
can’t
quite
link him to the bomb. It just
happened in the confusion. We’re keeping an eye out, though. I’m
not a great believer in coincidence. You could help us to keep an
eye out, too. I’m not asking you to do anything more than have the
occasional chat over a drink, to keep your eyes open. It’ll be kept
confidential. Like you journalists, we’re always looking for a
second source, for corroboration. And I’m not asking you to carry a
micro-camera or a Walther PPK around with you, it’s just low level
fill-in stuff. Really. Local colour, call it.’

‘
So you want
me to spy on Daoud Dajani for you. This isn’t about the Ministry at
all.’

‘
Daoud
Dajani’s a worry. He’s seen as something of a visionary here, you
know. Moneyed Arab visionaries are trouble. Look at Osama Bin
Ladin. God rest the poor bastard.’ Lynch bent down and picked up a
stone before flinging it into the cistern where it clicked and
skittered off the downward leading stone staircase into the empty
depths. ‘We’ve had research requests from the Israelis about Daoud.
They’ve got something on him, but they’re not sharing. It’d be nice
to know quite what he’s up to, Paul. That’s all. Is he just
commercial or is he playing a bigger, nastier game? We’d love to
find out but we can’t get close enough. Now if you could let me
know you’d be up for helping us out, just by keeping on your toes,
so to say, it would be very much in my interest to keep you out of
the slammer, wouldn’t it?’

Lynch raised
his finger as he faced me, the violence in him making me step back.
He may well have been too fond of the sauce, but I didn’t want to
get into a tussle with Gerald Lynch. ‘The water and Daoud. You’re
close to two things sitting in my little file of unfinished
business, Paul. It’s in my interest to help you. If you’ll help
me.’

My mouth was
open to reply, but Lynch was on the move again, his hands in his
jacket pockets as he struck out ill-naturedly through the ruins. He
stopped by an excavated area, a low wall around a foot high, the
size of my living room at the house. There were bits and pieces of
mosaic tiling poking through the hard, dry earth.

‘
So. You
going to play, Paul?’

‘
If you can
help me with the court case, I don’t see I have much
choice.’

Lynch smiled.
‘Right. Sensible. Good man.’

He nodded
towards the mosaic, his hands in his pockets.

‘
This is
Byzantine, by the way. Dates back to the dawn of Christianity.
There’s an older one at Madaba and another at Nebo. The Madaba
church contains the oldest surviving mosaic map of the Holy Land.
It points to the place where Lot escaped to and holed up with his
daughters, a cave above the Dead Sea. The girls conceived their
father’s incestuous children there.’