There’s a scream of fright from Jameela, and then an immense shrieking fills the air as a cloud of birds erupts in a single swarm from the trees behind us. Jameela and her attacker are momentarily frozen in surprise. She breaks free from him, and in an impressive move whacks him squarely on the jaw. He’s about to retaliate, but seeing his friend cringing on the sand has a different idea and sprints for the trees. I fire two rounds by his feet and he gets the message.
We need to leave. Jameela gathers up the bags as I cover the two men, make them take off their shoes just in case anyone feels like running anywhere, and direct them on their knees back to their own boat. I’d rather they didn’t go and fetch any of their friends, so I break off the top of the spark plug of their outboard with the butt of the AK. Having to paddle with their hands will slow them down and have the added advantage of keeping their minds off robbery and kidnap.
Jameela finishes loading the boat and throws a look of contempt at the men.
‘They would have killed us,’ she says in a frightened voice. Then she shouts something at them in what I suppose is Amharic and probably a curse.
‘Want to shoot them? The sharks will be happy if you do.’ I offer Jameela the AK, guide her hand to the grip and the trigger, and point out the foresight for her to line up on her cowering targets.
‘They would have killed us,’ she repeats.
‘Women with guns.’ I shrug my shoulders at them as if the decision is out of my hands. ‘Scary, isn’t it?’
They’re not laughing.
We move out of the shallows and throttle up the engines. The two stranded men are stooping over their boat as we gain distance. Jameela sits next to me, gripping me in silence and looking back from time to time as we race across the water. At the halfway point I pass the AK to Jameela. I’d love to keep the weapon, but it would be hard to explain. She flings it into our foaming wake and returns to my side.
The first moments of intimacy are never really equalled. She hasn’t tidied up the rose petals, and their perfume wraps itself over us as we fall onto the bed and submit to the momentum that feels as though it was set in motion the instant we first saw each other. A frontier rushes beneath us as if we are entering territory new to us both, and where before there has always been restraint, there is now abandon.
Her skin is still salty and smells of the sea, like a mermaid who has miraculously survived the journey ashore. She laughs, weeps and laughs again, grips me repeatedly with unexpected force, then gives way again as if her body has returned to liquid and been reclaimed by the sea. I have never given myself so fully before, nor received so generously.
I wake in the night with a shock, as if roused by a gunshot. The shots I fired on the beach have been carried into my dream. Somewhere a dog is barking. Jameela is asleep next to me like a baby, half-wrapped in a sheet. I go to the bathroom to drink from the tap and notice the pattern made by all the sand washed off our bodies in the shower. Then I retrieve the satellite phone and step onto the balcony, where the air smells of dust and jasmine. I prepare a coded sitrep for Seethrough and thank him for his part in the arrangements of the previous day. I’m not really expecting an immediate reply and I’m just sitting in the silence thinking of Jameela when I see the blinking light in the phone display that signals his reply:
your reference ‘pirates’ not understood please confirm.
And it’s only after about a minute of thinking this over that it really hits me.
I see Jameela every day, and return to her home with her after she’s finished work. The hours of daylight are spent in anticipation of the hours of darkness, when we can travel ever deeper into the territory of intimacy that has opened itself to us. I planned nothing of this when we first met. But now it has us in its grasp and we are powerless against it, and care nothing about where it will take us.
The elements themselves seem to be conspiring in our favour. One afternoon Jameela calls to say she’s returning home early. I drive to her apartment to meet her, and we sit on her balcony, where the air smells so strongly of jasmine, and drink cold white wine. I notice that the sky seems darker than it usually is and wonder if a storm is coming in.
‘Not a storm,’ says Jameela, as if she knows something I don’t. ‘Come.’
We climb to the roof by some narrow brick stairs and she points over the rooftops. Beyond the river to the west, rising out of the desert beyond Omdurman, is a sight I’ve never even imagined. A billowing wall of sand, a thousand feet high I’m guessing, is rolling towards the city. It stretches for what must be miles, an opaque, boiling, blood-orange wave, creeping visibly towards us. The scale of it is stupendous, like a biblical plague. The outline of the city seems puny against the advancing bulk of sand, and the sky grows darker as it nears as if under the command of an irritated god. I have no idea what will happen when it reaches us.
‘Have you seen this before?’
‘It’s a
haboob
.’ She smiles. ‘The desert’s way to clean itself. It’s beautiful.’
It’s a magnificent reminder of the scale on which nature prefers to do things. We watch its course for a few minutes. Its beauty is inescapable. But as I look at it I feel more than anything a sense of foreboding, as if a kind of reckoning is about to unfold. It signifies only danger to me. Then I turn to Jameela and see her beauty and am reminded how often beauty and danger can be found close together, and the symmetry of the moment seems complete.
‘It will pass,’ she says. ‘We should go inside.’
We leave the roof and return inside, and close the doors and windows of the apartment in turn. The sky darkens even more. We can smell the sand as the
haboob
advances into everything, suffocating even the daylight and robbing the world outside the windows of colour like an eclipse of the sun. We retreat to the bedroom and make love once more as if to take shelter in one another, celebrating our intimacy in defiance of the affliction visited on the city beyond us.
Later, lying against each other in the muted light, feeling as though we’ve survived a natural disaster, Jameela speaks, prompting me to wonder whether she can read my thoughts. She faces away from me and asks quietly if I am awake.
‘I know you are a spy,’ she says. ‘I don’t care.’
‘I’m not a spy,’ I tell her.
There’s a long silence. She’s not happy with my answer.
‘But I do know people who are.’
‘They sent you here?’
‘Yes.’
‘To spy on me?’
‘No.’ Lie. ‘My meeting you has nothing to do with that.’
‘What do they want?’
‘To find out about bin Laden and his people.’
‘From me?’
‘No. From anybody.’ Lie.
Another long silence.
‘I knew sooner or later somebody would come,’ she says.
She rolls over, looks into my face without speaking and runs her finger across my eyebrows, my nose, my lips.
‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ she says.
I omit no detail of what she tells me, writing for reasons of security at a glass table from which the imprint of my pen can’t be lifted, and with a single sheet of paper at a time. She begins with the story of her husband, one of bin Laden’s many half-brothers, and describes her marriage in Khartoum six years before and her early meetings with his family members at parties and gatherings. She names the dozen other bin Laden brothers she has met, and describes their prosperous lifestyles, their homes in California and London, their love of business, racehorses, boats and cars. These are not the profiles I’m really expecting. Bin Laden himself, she says, is one of the few brothers who lacked the family’s love of wealth, perhaps because he’s the only child of his father’s tenth wife and lost his father when he was a teenager. Much of this, she says, she knows from her husband, who worked on the periphery of bin Laden’s circle, helping to raise money for his projects in Sudan. Her husband is a good man, she says, but fell under the spell of the extremists who formed bin Laden’s closest associates. I’m guessing that this is one of the reasons for their separation but I don’t ask.
Bin Laden has been in Sudan for several years when she meets him, not long after what is said to have been an attempt on his life by the Sudanese authorities, acting on instructions from powerful Saudis who are hoping to silence bin Laden’s criticisms of the Kingdom. It’s in Sudan, says Jameela, that he acquires a penchant for black women, and has a string of Sudanese girlfriends. Can’t really blame him for that, I’m thinking. His other great fondnesses are for earth-moving machinery and hunting with falcons. He also has an incongruous love of growing sunflowers.
The bin Laden I know from the cables and reports I’ve read over the previous year bears no resemblance to the man Jameela describes. The impression of a bloodthirsty mastermind simply doesn’t tally with the diffident, almost shy man she knows from family meetings and parties. He’s known to his admirers as a quiet philanthropist, sponsoring construction projects in Sudan and encouraging wealthy Saudi friends to invest in farming and real estate there. But those who knew him better, says Jameela, observed a man going through changes.
The unworldly teenager she’s described is marked by a single overwhelming experience: his involvement with Afghanistan. It’s there, after living and fighting among Afghan mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation, that his life is given a different direction. He becomes passionate about supporting the Afghans in their struggle against their invaders, and puts his personal fortune to work sponsoring camps, hospitals and a support network for Afghan fighters and their relatives. Like so many others, he simply falls in love with the place.
The simplicity and austerity of life in Afghanistan leaves a deep mark on him. When he returns to Saudi, he sees his own country through different eyes: a place run by corrupt and worldly men who care little for the true face of Islam. It is this true face that he has encountered in Afghanistan. He works against the Saudi regime, and when American troops arrive on Saudi soil for the Gulf War he calls for the overthrow of the royal family. He wins friends in low places and is forced to leave his homeland.
He’s hounded from country to country, and settles in Khartoum. A puritanical hardness has entered him. He bans music in his household and puts his teenage sons through hard physical tests. Two years after his arrival in Sudan the Saudis strip him of his citizenship and freeze his assets. Around him circulates a loyal entourage of ‘Arab Afghans’ from the days of the jihad in Afghanistan, and their agenda becomes increasingly political. A few of them take an interest in steering bin Laden in a new and more violent direction, simultaneously nurturing his grievances and idealism in accordance with their own more cynical agendas. By the time bin Laden is expelled from Sudan and returns to Afghanistan in 1996, he has fallen entirely under their spell, espousing a new kind of global jihad which makes no distinction between its targets and their civilian subjects. Jameela lists the names of his radical associates with contempt, calling them cold-hearted hypocrites who have brought shame on Islam, men who exploit the legitimate grievances of ordinary people for their own violent ends. She tells me the names of the organisations they use and of the places in Khartoum where she thinks they sometimes meet. With other men, she says, suffering leads to goodness. But not with these ones.
By the time she’s finished I’ve filled a dozen pages. When she leaves in the morning I rewrite them using the pen supplied to me by Seethrough and the pad of water-soluble paper that he’s shown me how to use with it. Double spaced and in capital letters. Then I press the blank sides of a twenty-page United Nations de-mining report against each page in turn, and press them together for several minutes as the invisible dye contained in the ink of my report transfers to the blank sheets. Even under a microscope, there is no physical disturbance to the fibres of the paper, and the ink is virtually undetectable using chemicals. Then I re-staple the pages, and the result is what looks like an ordinary printed document, together with a scribbled covering note, sealed into an envelope addressed to a Mr Halliday of the British embassy. I burn my original notes in the kitchen sink, then run the tap over the sheets of my finished report. They dissolve within seconds into a translucent sludge. Then I throw a single unused sheet which I didn’t need into Jameela’s waste-paper bin. It misses by a tiny fraction, and bounces from the rim onto the floor.
I wonder, now, about such things.
A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball and propelled by the force transferred by the muscles of my hand and arm, tumbles through the air. Its direction and speed is in turn influenced by the immeasurably smaller forces that act on it from the air through which it passes. The resulting momentum, partially dissipated by the metal lip of the waste-paper bin, determines its final position, a few inches from the edge of the wall under Jameela’s dresser. And this tiny deviation from its intended goal, of which the paper itself cannot possibly be conscious, prompts me to stand up and retrieve it from the floor with the intention of putting it into the bin where I had hoped it would land. But as I lean down to pick it up, something catches my eye.
On the floor tile at the base of the wall under the dresser where the paper has ended its flight is a tiny mound of white powder. It must be recent, otherwise it would have blown away or been swept away by now, and I can’t help but wonder where it comes from. It’s the kind of mound generated by making a small hole in a wall with an electric drill. I smell it. It’s plaster dust. I look up to see where such a hole has been made, bemused at the same time by the habit of my own curiosity. An oil painting hangs directly above the dresser. It’s a sample of raw but striking art from a local painter, depicting half a dozen women in brightly coloured
tobes
carrying pots of water on their heads. The dust, I reason, must come from the hole made to hang the painting. But this would have been made months or even years before, and no trace would be left today.