‘First they want to save me, then they want to kill me.’ He lets out a heavy sigh. ‘But God knows best. There are details?’
I tell him what I know. Then I give him a phone number and instruct him to notify me, using a code, if our intelligence proves to be correct. He agrees again, knowing that we also need to verify the reliability of our own source.
‘Remember, our friendship is outside all of this,’ he says, and stands up. ‘We have work to do.’ His guards come to their feet as we cross the open space, and then he pauses, as if he’s remembered something.
‘You will go to Khartoum?’ he asks. ‘Perhaps there is a better way to search for such knowledge while you are there. There is a woman who has been in contact with the people in my office, to speak about our charitable work. She works with the
mellal al-mottahed
– the United Nations.’
I’m puzzled, because a woman with the UN isn’t much of a lead. Then Gemayel speaks again, and it’s as if he’s put gold dust in my hand.
‘She belongs to the family of the Sheikh, and she knows many things that will interest you. Her name is Jameela. I believe she is very beautiful, as her name suggests. If you become her friend …’ A vague wave of his hand suggests both uncertainty and promise. ‘You are young and handsome. You know how these things are done.’
I don’t. But it occurs to me I’ll be interested to find out.
‘Not exactly house style,’ says Seethrough, tapping the nail of his index finger against a pink file which I’m guessing is the contact report I’ve written up for my meeting with Gemayel, ‘but you get the message across. Have a seat.’
I’ve been escorted to another anonymous-looking room at Vauxhall Cross to talk things over with Seethrough, who’s there to meet me with another man who epitomises the description grey man. He’s about sixty, wears glasses and a shabby grey suit, mumbles a greeting, avoids eye contact and says nothing else while Seethrough turns the pages in the file.
‘This isn’t bad for your first approach,’ he says. ‘Now we have to make it fly. At least she exists.’
‘Who exists?’
‘Your Sudanese floozy exists,’ he says, opening the file towards me. I haven’t forgotten about the woman Gemayel mentioned, but haven’t expected a file to be put together on her so quickly. She’s even been assigned a code name: Hibiscus.
‘She wasn’t in the CCI,’ he says, referring to the giant database that the Firm maintains on every operational contact. ‘So we asked Santa’s little helpers for some details. Titbits from CX KHARTOUM and our friends at the Mokhabarat. Good-looking girl.’
He’s used this phrase before, and he’s right. There’s a photograph of her, taken only two days earlier by the Sudanese security service, whose members Seethrough is pleased to call the elves. She’s standing outside a shop talking to a passer-by or friend. One arm is half-raised as if in the process of giving directions. I can’t tell if she’s tall or not, but her face is slender and intelligent-looking, and her features suggest seriousness. Her eyes are large and expressive. Over her head she wears a long and loose white scarf, which accentuates the smooth dark brow it encloses, and the impression of youthfulness is at odds with the intensity of the gaze that the photograph has captured.
‘Clever too,’ he says. ‘Parents moved to Paris when she was a teenager and she ended up with a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Married into the bin Laden family six years ago after she moved back to Sudan, but we don’t have any details. She’s worked for UNICEF for the past two years. We think she’s worth cultivating.’
‘Cultivating?’ Spy-speak, I now remember, for winning a target’s trust.
‘All you have to do,’ says Seethrough, ‘is be there when she drops her shopping. Play the game. Get to know her. And find out everything she knows about bin Laden and his best friends in the Sudan.’
‘What if she doesn’t know anything?’
‘If she doesn’t know anything, you can take lots of pictures of Khartoum for us instead. Enjoy the local food. Spread goodwill, that sort of thing.’ Then the other side of him surfaces. ‘But she does know. And as long as she knows more than we do, she’s an asset and a potential source.’
‘How close,’ I ask, ‘are you expecting me to get to her?’
‘As close as the situation on the ground permits,’ he says with a leer. ‘If you think she’ll have you, I don’t care if you sleep with her and all her sisters. But do be careful about her brothers.’ He gives a signature bounce of his eyebrows. ‘We don’t want to unleash the Mahdi’s revenge. Just judge the situation as it develops. I need gradable CX that we can’t get anywhere else.’
‘When?’
‘Saturday alright for you? We’ll put you in a nice guest house in a quiet part of town. Shouldn’t be too many cruise missiles this time of year.’
It’s over two years since the retaliatory American strike reduced Sudan’s showcase pharmaceutical factory in north Khartoum to a pile of rubble, and it seems unlikely there’ll be any more. The US needs all the help it can get from the Sudanese intelligence services, and cruise missiles have proven a poor way to win friends.
There’s a satellite picture of the city on which a number of key points are marked, to which now Seethrough points.
‘On Mondays our target drives on her own to a refugee camp called El Salam in Jabal Awliya, about forty klicks south of the city. Your best place for a first meet will be on the road, out of the city and where nobody’ll be watching.’
‘So what do we do, give her a puncture?’ I’m half-joking, but he’s already considered the scenario and his seriousness comes to the surface again.
‘No. She parks in a gated compound at home and at work. A puncture’s too unpredictable in any case. If she’s clever she’ll suspect something. Better to be in charge of the moment ourselves, and make it quick and unexpected.’ He doesn’t elaborate. ‘You’ll get help with it when you’re there.’
His eye falls back to the photograph of Hibiscus, and lingers there.
‘Ant,’ he says. ‘CX is like an investment account. You have to have some capital to put in to start with. That’s you. It has to outperform anything else in the same field. If the CX reaches the threshold, you put some more money in. But if you’re putting in money and nothing’s happening, you close the account. I’m giving this a couple of weeks. Three at the outside. That’s what you’ve got to work with. George here will run you through the SOPs and help you sort out your legend.’
Then he leaves.
I spend an hour with ‘George’, a retired Security Branch officer who’s previously served in Khartoum and now offers his services to the Firm in the manner of a consultant. It’s a challenging hour, which begins with a geography lesson.
‘The Sudan is the largest country in Africa,’ he begins in a dreary monotone, ‘and the tenth-largest country in the world, with a population of approximately thirty million.’
I haven’t been this bored since Sandhurst.
‘The capital Khartoum is centred around the confluence of the two major tributaries of the Nile, the White Nile and Blue Nile, the latter being the source of most of the Nile’s water and fertile soil, but the former being the longer of the two.’
George uses a pencil to point to the features on the map, but is careful not to let its tip make contact with the paper. ‘The White Nile rises in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, and flows north from there through Tanzania, Lake Victoria, Uganda and southern Sudan, while the Blue Nile starts at Lake Tana in Ethiopia, flowing into Sudan from the south-east. The two rivers meet at Khartoum.’
He moves on to history, racing me through the Mahdist revolt against the British that leads to General Gordon’s untimely demise at the siege of Khartoum in 1885, the British withdrawal and subsequent reoccupation after Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman, where Churchill rode with the 21st Lancers. He mentions the long British efforts to resist the unification of Egypt and Sudan until the country’s independence in 1956, when a seventeen-year-long civil war began. He points out that the ongoing civil war has been rekindled after a hiatus of ten years, and is now being fought between the government of the north based in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army based in the south. The SPLA, he points out, is a non-Arab secular movement with an interesting history, having been supported in turn by the Soviets and the Americans.
Consulting nothing but his own memory, he moves on to average temperatures and rainfall. Land use and natural resources. Different types of law enforcement. Different types of electrical outlets, traffic hazards and places to visit. He points out that the city is divided into three parts: Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North or Bahri. Alcohol can be legally served only in the small Pickwick Club, which forms part of the British embassy.
My initial bemusement has turned into a kind of awe. He identifies the location of the UNICEF headquarters in Street 47, the whereabouts of the British embassy, the embassies of several other countries that can serve as a refuge in an emergency, and the location of other emergency RVs, as well as the main routes in and out of the capital. The CIA station, he tells me, closed down five years earlier, although the American and Sudanese spooks have been talking again since the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
He shows me the target’s home address and her route to work. He shares with me a frighteningly long list of organisations considered to be terrorist outfits, all headquartered in the city. And he ignores my joke that, with so many terrorist organisations, it’s probably the safest city in the world to be.
My legend should remain as close to the truth in every detail. He asks if there’s a particular one that I’ll feel comfortable with. I suggest that I be working on a mine awareness project, since mine awareness is all the rage nowadays. He likes that, and notes it down in spidery handwriting. It will give me a reliable pretext to be in the UN building and to mix with its staff, because the UN has its own mine programme in the country, he says. We invent a mine awareness organisation based in London that sounds like the real thing but doesn’t really exist. He’ll have Central Facilities, whoever they are, check the name and print business cards with phone numbers that work in the UK. Then other details. The car reserved in my name at the airport is a four-wheel-drive Isuzu. My visa, he tells me, has already been applied for.
George gathers up the maps and papers and returns them to their files. I realise it’s the only trip I’ve ever planned where all the relevant documents are deliberately left behind in the office.
‘Khartoum?’ says H, when I call to tell him the op is on. ‘Well, say hello from me.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘Can’t remember now.’ I picture a wry smile spreading across his face, the way it does when he’s not telling the whole story.
10
No one who’s been to Khartoum can forget the place. You fly for hours over weird and lifeless corrugations of rock and desert until the land turns to the colour of mud. Then, descending towards the city, the sun flashes from a broad snake of water, and in the centre of a sprawling grid of roads and houses streaked with green lines of trees you see what looks like a crescent-shaped samosa, wrapped in the dirty braid of the Nile. This is Tuti island, where the Niles converge.
On the ground, the heat hits you like a wall, and suddenly your white face feels like a lonely beacon as you move among crowds of ebony-coloured faces. You feel the vastness of Africa, like a vibration that stretches back to the beginning of time. A reddish dust moves in snakish wisps above the surface of the tarmac and quickly settles into everything.
The entry stamp in my passport is a swirl of Arabic script, delivered with a flourish by an immigration officer who welcomes me to Sudan with a gleaming smile. I return the smile, and when his pen runs out of ink, I offer him mine.
‘Thank you, my
friend
.’ He beams and looks like he means it.
Changing money and collecting the car that’s waiting for me involves an hour of form-filling and official stamps. Then I pay a taxi driver to drive ahead of me to the district called Riyadh, and I follow him along a broad highway with chequered kerbstones, overlooked by giant advertisements which I try to decipher from the Arabic as I drive past. The taxi pulls over as we reach a grid of sand-covered streets lined with charmless modern villas, and the driver waves goodbye to me from his window.
I’m greeted by a housekeeper called Kamal, who guides my car into a small compound, carries my things indoors and prepares hot sweet tea, over which he alerts me gently to the danger of scorpions in my shoes in the mornings.
I shower and lie under the ceiling fan for a solid hour. Then out of curiosity I go by taxi to the centre of the city, a term the driver doesn’t understand, but suggests instead the presidential palace, which I remember lies near the water. He drops me near the palace, around which the city’s more interesting buildings lie, and for a couple of hours I walk along roads parallel to the banks of the Nile lined with fat palm trees. I’m adjusting to the heat, and savouring the scent of datura and frangipani blossom and others I can’t identify. And I’m taking pleasure in the innocent charm of strangers who say hello as they pass, then look back and ask my name and wave. Their friendliness reminds me of Kabul, where the visitor quickly gets used to the spontaneous smiles of passers-by, whose sincerity renders irrelevant all the bad things you hear about the place back home.