Authors: Alan Judd
Pretty soon it was less his memory than his heart and lungs that preoccupied him. He reckoned himself fit for his age, still ran regularly, still enjoyed long walks, but didn’t remember
these hills as so steep. Nor did he remember the route once he reached the final crest. The sky was grey, a damp wind buffeted the grass and there was snow on the Welsh mountains to the west. In
the deep valley to his right a red Dinky-toy tractor was carrying hay to sheep, white blobs on a green handkerchief. A hawthorn hedge marked a gentler slope to his left but there was no sign of the
gap he sought, only a sheep’s skull and rabbit holes in the bank. He followed the hedge down the other side of the hill until eventually he saw a rusty metal gate and in the grass beside it a
broken and faded footpath sign.
From there he followed a thinner and more neglected hedge across two fields. Eaten out by sheep and worn through by their tracks, it was decades since it had served any purpose. Probably not
since the days when farms had workers whose winter jobs were hedging and ditching. Those might also have been the days when the single-roomed ruin they called Templewood had functioned as –
as what? A shepherd’s hut during the lambing? Too substantial for that and, anyway, they would have lambed lower down or in the barns. Something to do with the water supply? He recalled an
iron relic in the stone floor. Or someone’s folly, a summerhouse for picnicking and enjoying the views, built during a burst of prosperity and romantic naturalism. Whatever its origin, the
overgrown ruin had provided a good hide from which to log the comings and goings of the unsuspecting Valley Farm below. That it was also cold, wet and hospitable to vermin was so much the better.
Train hard, fight easy, the army used to say. He wondered when MI6 had last used the place. The new SIA would find it incompatible with health and safety.
But he had yet to find it at all. From the end of the hedge he could see the farm, a scattering of grey stone buildings in varying states of disrepair, roofed with slate and corrugated iron and
surrounded by the scruffy detritus of old working farms – tyres, rusty implements, bits of tractor, discarded axles, fence posts, wire netting, the skeleton of a van, dilapidated hen-houses
and a moss-grown caravan with an incongruous blue roof and dirty net curtains. A few chickens were scratching about and a collie was sniffing a pile of logs. The only change was that they had
started to convert one of the barns to accommodation, and then abandoned it.
The ruin must be nearby, since it offered virtually the same view, but the wind-warped undergrowth looked too sparse to conceal it. Charles began circling the rim of the valley from the field
side, peering down into twisted thorn and stunted scrub oak. Thinking it must be lower than he remembered, he made his way down through the trees. As he slithered and caught himself on a branch he
heard a man’s distant voice, a single gruff shouted word. The dog turned and trotted back to the house. He froze: they wouldn’t spot him among the trees but they might notice
movement.
It was as he stood holding the branch that he became aware of the hide above and behind him, to his right. He must have moved below and across it after entering the trees. Dug into the hillside
and facing across the dell, it was concealed from above and on both sides by undergrowth, concealed also from the dell by tree growth. There was an entrance with no door, a rotting door frame with
the lintel missing, the stonework around it cracked and sagging. The windows were dark misshapen rectangles, sprouting weeds, and the tiled roof was holed and uneven, its timbers exposed.
If Martin was there he would have seen Charles arrive, but there was no sound. Charles remained still, neither frightened nor uneasy, but wondering if he should be. Martin was an unknown
quantity now; what he was doing, what he thought, what he wanted was a mystery. It was possible he had returned to kill his former case officers; Charles had once run an agent who had done just
that to the officer of a liaison service. Perhaps he really had become an extremist as Nigel Measures wanted everyone to believe, or perhaps he wanted to revenge himself on anyone from the service
that had sent him back to Afghanistan. Well, he could do it here and now easily enough. The only sound was the cawing of rooks.
Treading carefully on the loose earth, Charles climbed the few yards to the hut, stepped in and paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. It felt damp, there were leaves on the broken stone
floor and weeds coming up through the cracks. In the middle, about knee-height, was the iron relic he remembered. It looked like the remains of a water pump. He had forgotten there was a boarded
ceiling, sagging and holed in places. Some of the boards had rotted and fallen to the floor.
‘Welcome back to Templewood. Glad you came alone.’
M
artin spoke quietly, from somewhere very close. Charles felt a slight spasm in his throat.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll come to you,’ said Martin.
There was slithering and creaking overhead. Charles remembered now that the actual hide was between the roof and a reinforced section of ceiling, entered from the bank behind via an enlarged
hole in the tiles, hidden by bushes. Martin would have slid in on his belly from the field and could be heard now, pushing his way back out through the thicket.
Charles stepped outside the door to await him, shielded by branches from the farm below. After a minute or so Martin appeared without a sound from the other side of the hide, a tall man with
reddish-brown stubble. He wore camouflage kit and the kind of green woollen hat the army used to call a cap comforter. He carried a green rucksack in one hand and held up his other like a policeman
stopping traffic.
‘Come no closer. I probably smell worse than the last time you picked me up from this place.’
Charles stepped forward. ‘We can chance a handshake.’ Martin’s grip was strong and his hand hard. His face was dirty and his green eyes looked tired. ‘How long have you
been here?’ asked Charles.
‘Long enough. Sarah passed the message, then? She assured me she could. Mrs Measures, I should say.’ He laid heavy emphasis on her married name. ‘How is she?’
‘Well, I believe. I saw her a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Still married?’
Charles nodded. ‘Where shall we talk?’
‘Here. Nowhere’s safe.’
‘From what?’
‘From your friends. Your employer, if you’re still employed. From the organisation you got me into many years ago and which right now is trying to kill me.’
They squatted on the earth, leaning against tree trunks. Martin’s speech was quiet and controlled, as if long thought about, or even rehearsed. He would have had time to rehearse, thought
Charles, lying day and night in that damp hide.
‘You sent me to Afghanistan to target the Taliban. Or al-Qaeda. It wasn’t clear which, but that didn’t matter. No longer the PIRA, anyway. I’d done that crusade. I was
keen and d’you know what? – I loved it, every frozen, boiling, tedious, gruelling, exciting, awful, wonderful, boring minute of it. Away from my own country, I found I loved war. It
surprised me, I thought I’d be appalled by the suffering and want to help but instead I found the struggle of man against man the most exhilarating thing I knew. Better than sex, religion,
climbing Everest, better than anything. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I never felt more fully alive than when killing. I did a lot more of that than I ever let on to you or your
successors.’
He paused, looking for a response. This was a more expressive Martin than Charles remembered. He’s been saving it for a long time, he thought. He nodded. ‘I always suspected you
did.’
‘That wasn’t why you sent me, I knew that. But they were so appealing, those Afghans, it was impossible not to get involved. Their fierce simplicity, their courtesy, their manners,
their pitilessness, their fantastic loyalty and treachery, their bravery. I love them for it. I know it’s said that you don’t buy an Afghan, you rent him, but that doesn’t make
him any less brave or even less loyal, provided you know the rules he lives by. For him, life is fighting and striving; for us it’s security and comfort. Colours are vivid for him, for us
they’re blurred. Life for him is crueller, and clearer. I couldn’t be with them and not be one of them. I was young, I guess. That’s why I stayed on after 9/11.’
‘You found a cause.’
‘I found a mission. I stayed to help. Schools, medicine, roads, whatever I could. Mainly schools, because without education you can’t do anything; but if they’ve got that they
can do the rest themselves. For a while it was fine; so much to do, and no-one seriously trying to stop you. But when the security situation worsened and the warlords fell out with one another
everything changed. I became a Muslim, as perhaps you know. That kept my head on my body, at least. It also helped my education mission. It was never a question of belief – I no more believe
in the Prophet than in the Pope or the Reverend Ian Paisley, for Christ’s sake. Not that there aren’t some fine things in Islam. Like most religions, it’s a good enough way to
live if you don’t believe very much, or take it literally. It’s just that accepting faith means giving up on questioning, which is how we learn, how we move on. So I
pretended.’
‘You had a lot of time for thinking,’ said Charles.
‘A lot of time sitting cross-legged and talking. Conversion was not only a way of showing where my sympathies lay, it was also a way of getting beneath the skins of a people and culture
that intrigued me. Not that the Afghans are very religious, most of them. Unlike AQ – which I could’ve joined, by the way, if I’d sworn allegiance to UBL and all that.’
There was another shout from the farm below. He glanced down the hill towards it. ‘Going deaf, that dog. But love dies, doesn’t it? That’s the trouble. Dwindles, fades, anyway. I
fell out of love with the office and in love with the Afghans, the non-Taliban ones. But when the stability they were promised after 9/11 never happened, it became more and more difficult for me to
do my work. Down in the south where the Taliban were regaining control the only way for me to survive would have been to join them, and I didn’t want to kill my own. At least not
then.’
‘You do now?’
‘Don’t worry, not you. So far as I know.’ Martin’s smile showed a broken tooth and made him look younger than his thirty-five years. ‘So, I moved back here full
time and built up my practice, my legal practice, largely in the Pakistani community where my languages help. I travelled out there quite a lot. I kept my hand in with Afghan work, when I could,
though there wasn’t much scope for legal process there.’
‘But you were still an agent, weren’t you, still working for the office?’
Martin picked a strip of bark from the ground and turned it over the fingers of both hands, his arms around his raised knees. ‘Off and on, gradually more off than on. We sort of drifted
apart. It was mutual, I guess. They used to be pretty good at keeping in touch in your day, didn’t they? Just that – keeping in touch, we’re here if you want us, we haven’t
forgotten you. They’d never forget; and if you were ever lost they’d always, always find you. That’s what you felt. But not nowadays. It’s changed since your time. Now
everything’s immediate, current; either a quick win or forget it, waste of time. I did get in touch a couple of times because I came across people in my charity work. People who might have
been useful in future, with a little cultivation, gentle and early. But no-one’s got time for that now, it’s all wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. You miss a lot of good agents that
way.’
Martin broke off a small piece of bark and flicked it away. ‘And then one day the phone rings again. What about getting back into harness for a while, scouting things out, re-visiting some
old contacts who might help us win the great War on Terror without their knowing it? Only this time I had two case officers, younger than me, which was a first, a man and a woman. Nice couple,
good, keen; didn’t know much about Afghanistan but that’s not their fault, they’ll learn. So I did a couple of trips to Pakistan for them, which I could combine with genuine
business, and I made contact with one or two people. Came back each time with a few snippets which they raved over – and which suggests to me the SIA doesn’t have much coverage out
there these days. Does it?’
Charles shrugged. ‘I don’t see current stuff. They asked me back to find you.’
‘Tell me about it. In a minute. So, after the last trip I get this summons to go back in a great hurry. It came by an unusual route, suggesting there was something urgent they wanted my
help with. Looked fishy to me, not the normal way of my friends over there. They like to play things long – if it doesn’t happen this time, then next if Allah wills, and if he
doesn’t it still doesn’t matter, because their timelines are millennial. No performance indicators for them. The office took its time to decide, of course, but my young minders were
wary and in the end I sent a holding reply. Can’t go now, court commitments, that sort of thing.
‘Then, out of the blue, our old friend Mr Measures comes knocking on my door. We hadn’t met since dinner at his house years before, he kept telling me. So pleased I was back in
harness, wanted to thank me himself. Of course, I didn’t let on I’d seen him in Paris after that dinner, playing away from home, doing what he shouldn’t. His little indiscretions
there didn’t harm his career, obviously. Desperate for me to go back immediately, he says; the service needs me, the country needs me, world peace and Christians and Muslims everywhere need
me. Information urgently required on someone called al-Samit, who’s apparently over here coordinating the troops. But no-one knows who or where he is: could I go back there and find
out?’
Charles held up his hand. ‘Nigel called on you? Alone? Unannounced? In your office?’
‘At home.’
‘And he said al-Samit was already here? He definitely said that?’
‘Yes. Why – isn’t he?’ He smiled, slightly.
‘Go on.’
‘Seemed pretty dodgy to me, going back, not only for the obvious reasons but because of our mutual friend’s unexpected visit. Last thing you want to do with that bunch of conspiracy
theorists out there is to go round asking questions. But that’s what he wanted. He gave me a name, someone I’d never heard of but whom I should meet. Also a few titbits, so I had
something to talk about. If I didn’t go, the streets of our cities would run with blood, all that sort of crap. He’s persistent, I’ll say that for him. Anyway, it was good to feel
wanted again, to be useful. I agreed.’