Authors: Simon Conway
There was a pause.
‘Something happened to your mother didn’t it?’ she asked.
‘You’ve been listening to local gossip.’
‘People talk,’ she said. ‘Information comes to me.’
‘She’s dead,’ he told her.
‘I gathered that.’
‘She committed suicide.’
Typically once the basic facts were laid bare people couldn’t get away fast enough, they made some expression of sympathy that made him feel embarrassed and uncomfortable but also excused him from explaining any further. But not Leyla, she was different. She wanted to understand. ‘Why?’
‘It was some kind of death pact,’ he explained. ‘She had a lover, a teacher at a local school. It had been going on for years, apparently. Things came to a head when my brother and I left for college. I guess she thought there was no further reason to stay. She asked my father for a divorce but he refused. So they killed themselves in a hotel room in Tunbridge Wells. They were found in each other’s arms.’
‘Did it make you angry?’
‘It made me sad. I thought I knew my mother but it turned out I didn’t know her at all.’
She finished her whisky and announced that it was time to leave. She packed up her things and popped an extra strong mint in her mouth. He walked her to the door. He regretted that he had not changed the subject or said something to lighten the mood.
#
The next night she told him a joke. It was a commentary on the state of criminal investigation in the Punjab. The joke as told to her by a labour activist who’d been fitted up by the police.
‘Once upon a time, a king lost a prized and extremely valuable deer,’ Leyla told him. ‘All sorts of investigation teams were called in from all over the world but none was successful in tracing the deer. Eventually a wise man suggested that the Punjab Police might be called in to assist with the seemingly impossible task. The king took the wise man’s advice. Within twenty-four hours a crack squad of extremely efficient police investigators appeared with a wailing elephant between them. “What is this?” The king demanded. One of the policemen struck the elephant with a
chittar
, or leather shoe, and the elephant screamed, “I’m the king’s lost deer! I’m the king’s lost deer!”’
Ed despised torture as much as she did.
He didn’t tell her that he’d once spent four days at a black site in Damascus listening to a cowering man in a cell repeating, ‘I’m the Sheikh’s Engineer! I’m the Sheikh’s Engineer!’
#
They settled into a kind of routine. He read and she worked and then over dinner they bartered parcels of information. He told her about his childhood and his job at the bank. He described his anger at the fate of non-Arab Muslims in Saudi Arabia. He explained away his years in the Navy as a series of cold and uneventful tours in the North Atlantic. He told her about his brother, who was a dentist and part-owned a dental practise in Henley-on-Thames. They were not close. He told her about his short-lived engagement. He did not mention the List. He explained how his father had failed as a restaurateur and ended up as a waiter in the restaurant that he had once owned. He laid the facts out where he could, lied where he had to and hardly embellished at all.
She in turn described a ping-pong childhood, shuttling back and forth between London and Lahore, never quite feeling that she belonged in either. She shared her feelings of antipathy towards her mother for what she saw as her exploitation of elderly fellow Muslims, who used up their savings on her overpriced Hajj tours. She regarded money changing with distaste that seemed to originate more from a general anti-capitalist urge than from any argument that it contravened the prohibition rules of Islamic law.
She explained how she had come to activism via a dynamic aunt in Lahore who had inspired her and encouraged her. She told him that she was in the second year of a two-year Masters programme at SOAS, that she wrote a blog that was gaining followers and that she earned money by conducting research for campaigning organisations. Their priorities inevitably became hers.
The interviews with on-street and off-street prostitutes in the boroughs of East London were commissioned as part of a joint charitable/police project operating out of Toynbee Hall. Her focus was on trafficking. It was the most depressing and least fulfilling of her disparate tasks.
Home, by which she meant Pakistan, was by far the most exasperating. She threw her arms up at its incompetent police whose methods could best be described as “brutality tempered by torpor”, its corrupted courts that conducted their glacial business in incomprehensible English, its kleptocratic politicians, its death-trap factories and its mendacious anti-Hindu press. She railed against the state’s failure to provide modern services.
‘Why can’t you drink the water out of the tap? Where are the medicines and the buses? Why can’t we educate our daughters? The problem is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats. So the democrats have not developed democracy and the dictators have not developed the country.’ But she was not without Nationalist urge. She insisted that it was not a failed state. ‘It works,’ she said, ‘just on its own twisted terms. It will still be here in a hundred years, with its nuclear weapons and its bloated army, its runaway population and its massive diaspora.’
The passion came off her in waves.
22. Combustible City
Noman dreamt of a wall of water twenty storeys high bulldozing the length of the Indus Valley and when he awoke he was lying on the beach by the ocean.
He got out from under a thorn bush into the blazing sunlight, and stumbled cursing over the sand, like someone walking on hot coals, to the cool, wet strip at the water’s edge. Sparkly junk littered the shore: condom wrappers, empty cans, broken glass. He waded into the surf and plunged his head into the water.
He was standing in the shallows, squinting at the shifting horizon while smoking a Flake, when his iPhone rang. It was Raja Mahfouz.
‘Good morning, boss.’
There was nothing good about it. His mouth felt like a monkey had taken a shit in it.
‘Where are you, boss?’
He grunted. ‘Clifton beach.’
‘On my way.’
Noman flung away his cigarette and struggled back to the road. He was sitting on the curb amongst the usual gaggle of rickshaw drivers when Raja Mahfouz pulled alongside him in the Range Rover about half-an-hour later. He climbed in the passenger seat, rooted around in the glove compartment until he found a strip of Paracetamol and dry-swallowed four.
Noman blamed the entire bloody Pashtun race for his hangover, for their overabundance of pride and their pigheaded refusal to see sense. You couldn’t spend a day listening to their endless complaining without wanting to spend the night smeared in lube, rolling around in bed with a couple of Napier Road’s finest. He couldn’t anyway. How he’d got from the city’s red light district to its beach was the usual mystery but he still had all his stuff: gun, money, phone, drugs, watch and sunglasses.
Now they were driving up University Road, heading for the Karachi Institute of Nuclear Medicine.
‘Whose idea was this?’
‘Yours,’ Raja Mahfouz replied, cheerily.
The big man was right. This had been his idea for trying to salvage something from a wasted trip. The ostensible reason they had come down to Karachi was to mediate in a territorial dispute between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. For some time the Afghans had been using the seaside metropolis as a kind of rear base, to lie low or seek medical treatment for injured fighters. Mullah Omar, their reclusive one-eyed leader, spent several months a year down here and in the past Noman had sat in on a couple of meetings of the
Quetta Shura
, the Afghan Taliban’s leadership council, as an observer for the ISI. It was an arrangement that all sides were happy with. Thus far the Afghan Taliban had limited their armed activities to kidnapping and bank robbery, which was considered an acceptable price to pay. But now there was a new gang in town. The Pakistani Taliban, namely the Mehsud clan from Waziristan, had arrived and launched a series of attacks on police stations that had left scores of police officers dead. They were in danger of upsetting the city’s delicate balance of competing criminal, ethnic and political groups that fought over money, turf
and votes. The Afghan Taliban, which could do without the bad publicity, was particularly incensed.
Noman had spent yesterday with a succession of grizzled Afghan fighters who aired their grievances, from the poor quality of weapons available on the market and the rising cost of ammunition to the venality of border guards and the difficulty of making a reasonable living from smuggling, but always returning to the subject of the Mehsud clan and their heavy-handed tactics in the city. By nightfall he was sloshing with tea. The problem was he had nothing to offer. The ISI had no leverage. The Mehsud clan was refusing point-blank to talk to him or any representative of government. They’d even issued a death threat against him, which was ironic given that he was on their side. It was the usual bloody fuck-up.
So he’d decided to go looking for the ingredients of a dirty bomb. He wasn’t getting anywhere fast trying to locate the one-legged mullah and it seemed the only remaining approach was to identify the sources of medical and industrial waste that might constitute the radioactive elements of a dirty bomb. If the House of War really had built an
itami
, or atomic device, then they must have got the waste somewhere. Raja Mahfouz had produced a list of Atomic Energy Commission registered labs and facilities across Pakistan.
Karachi seemed like a good enough place to start.
#
They arrived unannounced at the Institute and demanded to speak to the Radioactive Safety Officer. He turned out to be a thin nervous-looking man with a prominent Adam’s apple. He talked them through the protocols for the delivery and safe custody of received isotopes, their application on the isolation wards and disposal of the radioactive waste generated. He showed them the storage procedures for unused capsules and the sealed sharps boxes for used syringes. Raja Mahfouz had a go with a Geiger counter while Noman flicked through the written records submitted to the Ministry of Health.
‘Let me get this straight, you inject people with radioactive isotopes?’
The Safety Officer nodded, enthusiastically. ‘Exactly so, it is extremely effective in the treatment of cancer.’
‘It’s not dangerous?’
‘Ha ha! Only to the area of tissue that is affected by the cancer, you see we use very small quantities.’
Noman frowned. ‘What happens to it after you’ve injected it?’
‘Over a typical patient five-day-stay eighty-five percent of the administered isotope has left the body.’
‘Left the body?’
‘In the natural manner.’
‘They shit it out?’
‘Yes. Indeed, the outlets for the toilets of patients undergoing diagnostic procedures are connected to a delay tank designed for the collection of radioactive isotopes. The tanks are emptied by certified members of the National Union of Sanitary Workers, they transfer the excrement into lockable waste storage trolleys that are secured on site.’
Noman and Raja Mahfouz exchanged glances.
‘Show us,’ Noman said.
#
‘Shit!’ Noman lifted his sunglasses and peered through crusty eyelashes at the rows of locked metal trolleys stretching away into the shadows.
‘Shit,’ Raja Mahfouz agreed.
They were standing in a cavernous hangar hidden away at the back of the institute. Noman’s head was pounding and he was experiencing a scatological epiphany.
‘Holy fucking shit…’
It was mind-boggling, enough to make your brain boil, a whole hangar full of radioactive shit.
‘We keep it here until radioactive decay renders it safe,’ the Safety Officer explained. ‘It might only be a matter of days. Then the waste is buried. The isotopes with the shortest half-life, like Iodine 131, are here at the front and the isotopes with a longer half-life, including Caesium 137, are located at the back of the facility.’
‘What’s the half-life of Caesium 137?’ Noman growled.
‘Thirty years,’ the safety officer replied. He led them about halfway into the hangar. ‘From here on in it is all Caesium.’
‘Open them up,’ Noman said, kicking the nearest trolley.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Open every damn one of them,’ Noman growled.
An hour later they were standing at the back of the hangar surrounded by empty trolleys.
‘They stole the shit,’ Noman said.
‘They stole the shit,’ Raja Mahfouz agreed.
It took Noman only a few minutes of delving about in the data and factoids on the web to come up with a theory. They must have shovelled the shit into a smelter with molten iron for the bomb casing.
#
When Noman found him later that day, Gul Rassoul was standing at the edge of a pond with a bucket beside him and every few minutes he flung a lump of raw meat from the bucket over the railing to the crocodiles in the pond.
‘Pilgrims used to feed them,’ Gul Rassoul explained, ‘but not so much now. The Taliban have banned it. If it wasn’t for my members they might starve.’
The pond was located next to a Sufi shrine in Manghopir, an impoverished neighbourhood of cinderblock houses clustered around marble quarries on the northern edge of the city. As General Secretary of the Sanitary Workers Union, Gul Rassoul controlled a huge workforce spread across the city, many of whom lived in the illegal housing settlements that spilled into the surrounding desert.
‘I’m looking for some missing shit,’ Noman told him.
Gul Rassoul nodded as if the question was not unexpected. ‘The men responsible are no longer employed by the union.’
One of Rassoul’s bodyguards brought a fresh bucket of meat and set it down beside him. There must have been at least a hundred crocodiles writhing and snapping in the pond.
‘Who were these men?’ Noman asked.
‘Nomadic people from the mountains in the north, hard-working resilient fellows who came here five years ago, I think. They stayed on, giving me no complaint. And then one day, eighteen months or so ago, they left.’