by Mark Burnell
‘Do you like music?’ Serra asked.
She knew he was toying with her. ‘Sure. Some types.’
‘Well, now you can listen to whatever you want.’ He let the sentence hang in the air before making a casual addition. ‘One thing, though. Don’t push fast-forward and reverse at the same time. At least, not when you’re on an aircraft.’
Petra’s skin tingled. ‘Why not?’
‘You never know what might go off in the cargo hold.’
Despite herself, her eyes widened. ‘Are you serious?’
Serra looked it. ‘You wanted to know what your role as sleeper will be. Well, now you do.’
Petra played it coolly. ‘I’m not blowing myself to pieces for half a million dollars.’
‘I’ve already told you, you and most of the passengers and crew will be released in Malta.’
‘Most?’
‘There may be some who stay on board.’ He pointed at the Walkman. ‘This trigger has a range of one thousand metres but, to be sure, you should use it at no more than eight hundred metres from the aircraft.’
‘What about Khalil’s men?’
‘They have all volunteered to be martyrs, to die for the glory of Allah the Avenger. Your job is to make sure that they do.’
25
The electric iron hissed, steam rising from the scalding plate. Petra spread a crumpled grey T-shirt across the ironing board. She felt clumsy with the iron in her hand. The drone of the washing machine competed with the banality of daytime TV; cookery shows, make-over programmes and those game shows too feeble to make prime time. Earlier, she had wrestled with the vacuum cleaner while trying to change the bag and had only succeeded in splitting it, spilling dust and dirt across the sitting room carpet. Domestic chores were new to her; when she was a child, her mother had done them all, hardly ever asking her to help, whilst as a student, domesticity had been an optional extra that she and most others had chosen to bypass. And as a prostitute, it was never even an issue. The places she worked in were beyond redemption, although Joan, one of her maids, had occasionally run a vacuum cleaner across a carpet. Stephanie had never cared about the filth or about clean clothes because she hadn’t cared that she was dirty herself. What was the point of cleaning the outside when everything on the inside was so sordid?
Now, she found these trivial acts of domesticity were strangely cathartic. In collaboration with the TV, they numbed the mind, which was a partial freedom. The tedious routines allowed her to pretend that her life was tediously routine, which was what she now craved. Frank had eroded her cutting edge, blunting her instinct for revenge and justice.
There was a knock on the door and he walked out of her thoughts and into her presence. He’d been naked in his bed when she’d last seen him at seven-thirty in the morning. Now he was wearing a black suit, a very dark blue shirt with no tie, and black brogues. Petra didn’t think she had ever seen him look so good.
‘I was walking past your door and I heard the TV,’ he explained. ‘So I knocked.’
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘No, I’ve got a couple of urgent calls I need to make.’
‘Okay.’
‘I thought maybe you’d left it on when you’d gone out.’
‘Gone out?’
‘To work.’ Petra felt winded. He’d caught her off-guard. Not deliberately, of course, but that hardly mattered. He tilted his head to one side. ‘That was where you were going when you got up this morning, wasn’t it?’
‘Of course,’ she replied, almost bristling at the suggestion that it might not be true.
In the early days as Marina, Petra had made more of an effort. During working hours, she had gone out to libraries, museums, cinemas, shops. Sometimes, she had even gone to Magenta House. But recently, her discipline had slackened. She no longer possessed the determination to maintain the most tedious aspects of Marina’s life. Instead of going out to ‘work’, she frequently hid in her flat. Instead of dressing in suits and applying the make-up that made her look so severe, she resorted to worn jeans and faded sweatshirts. The façade of Marina was cracking and Petra didn’t care.
Frank looked around. ‘So … how come you’re not there?’
Her initial instinct was to employ aggression as defence. That was what was natural to her and had it been anyone else, she would have resorted to it. But not with Frank. She saw the look in his eyes. He didn’t just want an explanation, he wanted to believe it too.
‘I was on the Underground going in and I began to feel ill. I was hot and had a splitting headache. I thought I was going to throw up. So I got off at Holborn and waited on the platform for about ten minutes, hoping it would pass. But it didn’t. So I went up to the street to catch some air and then took a cab home.’
Frank picked up the Sony Walkman that Serra had given Petra and began to turn it over in his hands. Petra wanted to shout at him to put it down but knew that she couldn’t. He wasn’t really examining it. He was just fiddling with it. The drum began to spin inside the washing machine.
‘You okay now?’ he asked.
‘I feel a little better. I went to bed for an hour.’
‘You should’ve called me,’ he said, before pressing the ‘open’ button.
‘Where?’
‘What?’
‘Where should I have called you? I thought you were going out too.’
For a moment, Frank looked as stranded as she had been, which she found strange. Certainly, he was dressed for a meeting of some kind.
‘Yes, I … er … you could have left a message on my machine.’
‘I suppose I could have, yes.’
He looked inside the Walkman, which was empty. ‘No Radiohead, no suicide. What a relief.’
* * *
Petra entered the Hilton on Park Lane, walked through the lobby and ground floor, and exited out of a staff entrance. The Ford Transit van was waiting for her in Pitt’s Head Mews. She climbed into the back, hauled the door shut and the driver pulled away. As far as she was concerned, Alexander’s insistence on such measures was excessive and childish but he had been adamant that if she wanted to come to Magenta House this was the way it had to be. It took half an hour to reach Lower Robert Street, Petra being required to use the lower and more concealed of the two entrances.
Margaret was drinking tea at her desk. ‘How are you, Stephanie?’
‘Surviving. Just. You?’
‘I’m well, as usual.’
Petra nodded towards Alexander’s closed office door. ‘And our man Beria?’
‘I think “agitated” is the word.’
‘A first, surely.’
Petra found Alexander peeling the wrapper off a pack of Rothmans. ‘I’ve arranged for Rosie to help you with your computer enquiry.’
‘So that she can report back to you all the stuff I’m interested in?’
‘There’s no need to be facetious.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’
‘How was your visit to Paris?’
‘I went through some of his personal files but I didn’t find much hard stuff.’ She placed a manila folder on Alexander’s desk. ‘This is other material that you or somebody else might find useful or interesting.’
Alexander’s nod of appreciation was grudging. ‘What about this hijack? Any development there?’
‘No.’
‘You still don’t know what he requires of you as a sleeper?’
‘No,’ lied Petra. ‘He hasn’t said a thing yet.’
Petra had elected to keep Alexander in the dark for her own protection. After Rio and New York, what little trust she had ever had in him had evaporated. She knew that she would have to feed him occasional scraps of information to prevent arousing his suspicion but that could be managed.
Rosie met Petra in the basement. An Indian, she was the only non-white person Petra had ever seen inside Magenta House. They were the only two inside the sealed computer room. Petra made coffee for both of them before they sat
side by side in front of the screen. Rosie operated the keyboard.
‘Okay, what’s first?’
‘I’m looking for a military training camp.’
‘Where?’
‘In Libya. It’s new.’
‘Does it have a name?’
‘LV241 is all I know.’
Rosie scanned files but came up empty-handed. So then she tried Algeria, Tunisia and Sudan. Again, nothing. She broadened the search to include Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. Still there was no match for LV241.
‘I could try some foreign agency records,’ Rosie suggested. ‘The CIA, perhaps?’
‘How about cross-referencing with Kamal Ibrahim Karim? He paid for it.’
This approach was also unproductive. Next, Petra asked Rosie to run the Khalil file. He was rumoured to have been trained at Niaravan, the first revolutionary camp to be established in the Islamic Republic, where the Party of Allah’s Volunteers for Martyrdom were trained to kill and die in the name of the Imam and in the service of the Party of Allah. Established in 1980, Niaravan was set in beautiful parkland in the suburbs of Tehran. Khalil was supposed to have gone to the camp in 1988. The most promising students were selected for special combat training to transform them into lethal instruments for Allah the Avenger. These special units were known as goruh zarbat—literally, strike unit—and were specifically intended to operate abroad. Khalil had been part of such a group, operating under Sheikh Abdul Kamal Qassam, until Khalil had decided that he could operate more effectively by himself.
And now the Sons of Sabah existed, which forced Petra to wonder whether they were Khalil’s own goruh zarbat?
* * *
There was a sign in the window of RJN Travel on Hogarth Road. It listed air-fares to over twenty destinations around the world. The amounts had been written in red felt-tip pen but sunlight had faded the ink to pink. Petra stepped inside. Behind three desks sat three operators in front of three computers. Each terminal was a museum piece; an abacus to the modern calculator. One of the operators was dozing, one was busy smoking a cigarette, one was on the phone. They ignored Petra, who sat down opposite the one who was smoking. ‘I’d like to buy a ticket.’
He looked at her through filthy tinted glasses. ‘To where?’
‘Tokyo and Bremen.’
His spine stiffened. ‘Wait a moment.’
He picked up a phone and muttered something into it. A few seconds later, the door behind him opened and Serra appeared. Dressed in jeans, a red and black check shirt and a charcoal grey jacket, he looked American to Petra, which was a style she would never have associated with him.
From Earls Court, they took the Underground to Westbourne Park, from where they walked. The building was dilapidated, the plaster and paint crumbling from the façade, the steps to the front door cracked and uneven. The plastic intercom panel had a dozen buttons. To the right of it, there were twelve mail-boxes, four of which had been prised apart. Serra pressed one of the buttons. There was a clunk as the lock released. The hall had been partitioned lengthwise so that it was absurdly narrow. Climbing the stairs, they moved through different zones; the smell of onions frying, a small dog yapping, black damp patches on the wall, Pulp on a sound-system, a man and woman arguing in a language that sounded like Russian.
The flat was on the third floor. Suspicious eyes peered at them through the partially opened door. Once Serra was recognized, the door opened fully and they entered. There was graffiti on the walls—some of it in pen, some of it sprayed, some of it English, some of it Arabic. They passed a small bedroom on the right. The door had been replaced by a thin purple curtain that was partly open. A woman sat on a mattress breast-feeding a baby. In a tiny kitchen, three old men argued in Arabic while a kettle whistled on a Sixties stove.
They moved into the cramped sitting room, which overlooked the street. There were more drapes suspended from the curtain rails above the windows. Some had been tied to one side, others hung limply, filtering the daylight in orange and green. Petra counted eight men and two women in the airless room. The man who had let them into the flat retreated and shut the door.
Serra turned to Petra. ‘These are the ten who will perform the hijack. For reasons of security, they know each other only by the names they used during their training. The reason you are here is so that they can see your face and recognize you. You will not have a name. Okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Then let me tell you who they are.’ Starting on the left, Serra went through them one by one. ‘Yousef, Ali, Mouna, Markoa, Mirqas, Zyed, Khan, Fatima, Basit, Obaid.’ They were young and conservatively dressed. Generally, they wore dark trousers, plain shirts—mostly buttoned to the throat—and six of them wore jackets. Their clothes were tatty but they were neat, hair cut short and beards—five of the eight men had them—tidily trimmed. Both women were dressed in black trousers and black jerseys. The one called Mouna had her hair drawn back from the face, the other, Fatima, wore her hair as short as the men. Petra felt excluded by the suspicion coming from the eyes of all ten. Serra said, ‘Basit will lead the team.’
At the mention of his name, Basit rose from a chair, his face emerging from the gloom.
* * *
I am speechless. My breath has been stolen. Serra is saying something to me but I don’t hear him. Instead, I stare at Basit because Basit is Reza Mohammed. I cannot tear my eyes from him. The last time we were this close I had a gun in my hand and I was pointing it at him through a pane of glass. His hair is a little shorter now, his beard a little fuller, but there’s no mistaking those hooded eyes or that aquiline nose, which is a similar shape to Frank’s but not quite so large. A cold energy surges through me. If we were alone, I would … to be honest, I don’t know what I would do. I’d like to think I might tear him to pieces but I doubt that I would. I force myself to look away before my stare attracts attention. Now I turn to look at Mirqas, who is a sinewy man, about the same height as Reza Mohammed. He has a lazy eye. He’s sitting on the arm of a sofa and I am wondering if he’s the one who killed Keith Proctor. Mirqas was the name scribbled by Ismail Qadiq next to Proctor’s address.
* * *
Serra said to Petra, ‘You will have no contact with any of the people in this room unless there is some kind of problem and, in such a circumstance, they will come to get you. If they do, there is a procedure in order to protect your true identity.’ He turned to Reza Mohammed. ‘Basit?’
Mohammed said, ‘If we need to speak to you, we will come into your section of the aircraft cabin and ask if there is a doctor who speaks French. All you have to do is raise your hand.’
‘And if there’s more than one, you’ll just pick me anyway?’
‘Yes.’
Serra told Mohammed to tell the others to memorize Petra’s face because this was the only chance they would get. Serra then explained to her that only four of them spoke English. Two of the others spoke French, but there were four who spoke only Arabic.
Mohammed offered Petra a piece of paper with a foreign phone number on it. ‘Call me tomorrow and I will tell you where and when to pick up your ticket.’
Petra took the scrap of paper from Reza Mohammed and brushed his fingertips with hers.
* * *
They walked, after leaving the building, and had reached Notting Hill Gate when the first drops of rain began to fall. Daylight was fading fast. Serra turned up the collar of his coat and looked at his watch.
‘In about an hour, they will have dispersed,’ he told her.
‘To where?’
‘Anywhere and everywhere. By train, by aircraft, by ferry, they will spread out across Europe until it is time for them to come together again.’
‘And where will you be in an hour?’
‘On the Eurostar.’
‘So this is it, then?’
‘Until afterwards, yes.’
‘Where will we meet?’
Ser
ra shrugged. ‘I don’t know where you and Khalil will go. Or how long you will be there. But you know where you can find me.’
They kissed by the entrance to the Underground station. Serra said, ‘You and I are different, Petra. We are not shaped by the world, we are the ones who shape it. Our future can be anything we choose.’
Petra wore a small smile for him. ‘Or anything Khalil chooses.’
‘No. Not even Khalil can control us. Nobody can.’
* * *
Some perverse nostalgic instinct persuaded Petra to take a cab to the Edgware Road. From there, she walked to Bell Street, pausing outside the building in which Keith Proctor had lived. She looked up at the windows. There were no lights on. By the entrance to the building, an estate agent’s placard announced a flat for sale. She crossed the street and entered Bell’s Café and bought a cup of milky tea. She sat at the table nearest the entrance, the one she had always preferred. Her view of the street was still obscured by the net curtain that hung over the lower half of the window.
She had somehow hoped that in the run-up to the hijack, she would learn enough about Khalil to track him down independently of the atrocity but all she had learned was that he would be in Malta. That wasn’t enough. Serra had been cautious and now there was no way to proceed. When the time was right, she would ensure that the targeted flight never left the ground and that would be the end of it. Khalil would be as out of reach as ever. The prospect of being back where she started was more than bleak. It was impossible.
* * *
Frank kisses the cosmetic scar on my left shoulder and I flinch. We are on the floor of my sitting room. Our clothes are all around us—but not on us—and we are trying to catch our breath. I close my eyes and imagine us together in a house somewhere far away. The Isle of Skye, perhaps, or even Islay. We went on a family holiday there once and the beauty of it has stayed with me ever since. I imagine Frank and me leading a life of spartan simplicity. I think it would suit us both. We would take pleasure in the daily routines, in the gorgeous inconvenience of living in such a place.
