by Simon Conway
40. Intimacy
He lay in the darkness of his cell, imagining Leyla somewhere nearby, willing them not to hurt her.
The bolt was drawn back. Raja Mahfouz stood blocking the doorway with his meaty arms crossed on his chest. 'Get up.'
Ed climbed up off the mattress. ‘Where are we going?’
‘That would spoil the surprise.’
As he emerged from the basement, he heard the steady drumbeat of rain on the roof, the noise growing louder as they climbed two more flights to the servants’ quarters at the top of the house. Raja Mahfouz led him along a corridor with a rough concrete floor and doors on either side. He unlocked one and stepped back for Ed to enter.
‘In you go.’
‘Ed!’
The last time he had seen Leyla was at security at Heathrow, she had been wearing a dress, a rare event. Now she was dressed in the same grubby orange overalls as he was. Her eyes were darkened by fatigue or bruising, possibly both and she looked thinner than he remembered. He was unable to think of a time when she had looked more fragile or more beautiful.
She jumped up from the bed and rushed into his arms.
‘They kept telling me you were alive, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe them.’
Behind them the door slammed shut. She drew him down onto the bed. In a few moments they had stripped off their clothes. They snatched back intimacy from their captors.
#
Ed stood at he window and stared through the bars at the narrow cul-de-sac with its high-walled compounds. Below him a guard in a poncho ran from the house to the sandbagged position at the gate. He glanced back at Leyla sleeping on the narrow bed. The look of exhaustion was now out of her face.
They had been confined together for several hours now and during that time there had been no let-up in the rain. Tariq’s widow had brought them dinner on a tray and come again half-an-hour or so later to collect the dirty plates and plastic cutlery.
Ed had tried to engage the woman in conversation. ‘Can you help us?’ But she had hurried back to the door and knocked on it to be let out. After that, Leyla had gone to sleep.
She hadn’t been physically harmed. Apart from the loss of liberty the worst she’d suffered was when Noman had escorted her down to the cellar and shown her the rack. She’d told him what the woman had said to her at Heathrow.
‘That’s what she wanted, isn’t it?’ Leyla said, clinging to him on the bed.
‘Yes, that was what she meant you to do.’
‘You used me.’
‘Sleep,’ he’d urged her, and she had.
He’d prowled the room, opening the cupboards and peering under the bed. He’d stood watching from the window. Now he walked across the rough concrete floor to the bed and lay down beside her.
#
They were face-to-face on the narrow bed with the tips of their noses inches apart. She had just woken.
‘Are they listening?’ she whispered in his ear.
‘It doesn’t matter if they are. I’ve told them everything I know.’
‘What is this about?’
‘I was sent here to betray one of our own.’
It was still difficult to believe that Khan, who he had regarded as his enemy for so long, was in fact a British asset.
‘Why?’
‘I think they grew tired of him.’
‘What’s going to happen to us?’
‘If this works out they’ll swap us.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
There was no avoiding what had gone before.
She frowned. ‘Nothing’s real about you,’ she said. ‘You never stopped being a spy.’
He wanted to tell her to stop and not pursue this any further. But he knew her well enough to know she would not be stopped.
‘You came out of the blue didn’t you,’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘The saviour of J&K Cargo and Travel. Mum lost her license, Nasir was hit by a van and Mohammed Akram ran off, and suddenly we needed a driver, and then, as if by chance, you were there. It wasn’t chance though, was it? All the time you were working for my mother you were preparing to come here, weren’t you?’
He nodded.
‘My mother loved you. You were my rescuer. Damn!’ He saw that she had worked out what he had most hoped to prevent her from discovering. ‘The attack on me in London, it was a sham, wasn’t it? It was all a bloody sham.’
He nodded.
There were tears in her eyes. ‘Everything about you is a lie. You stole my heart.’
‘I love you,’ he told her.
41. Sodom-Sur-Mer
A six-foot blonde slid on to a bar stool next to Noman, the split in her skin-tight, low-cut evening dress running all the way up her tanned leg to the top of her unblemished thigh.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked, not even looking at him. Her voice was startlingly beautiful, bell-sweet. ‘How long are you here? Where are you staying?’
Every woman in the place was a prostitute, the Eastern European hookers gathered at one end of the bar and the Chinese at the other with an invisible line that might as well have been an international border running between them. Selling sex was forbidden in Dubai but the Emirate’s ruler Sheikh Mo took a laissez faire attitude and the authorities rarely did anything about it. Occasionally, an establishment would break some unwritten rule. Cyclone, a notorious whorehouse near the airport, had been closed down after it went too far – a special area of the vast sex supermarket had been dedicated to in-house oral sex. It was said that it had offered the best blowjobs west of Bangkok.
Noman had come straight from the airport and he hadn’t figured out yet where he was staying. Looking at the woman and her swollen silicon cleavage, it was easy to see how the night might pan out.
‘Tell me about yourself?’ he asked.
‘I’m a Nobel laureate of sex,’ she replied, turning her eyes on him, widening them. ‘I’ll show you things you have only ever dreamed of.’
He figured that business must be slow if she was making a move on a Desi guy like him this early in the evening. She glanced over his shoulder and he watched her face change, a mask of wariness descending, like the shutters going down.
‘Later,’ she said, and slipped off the bar stool and walked away without looking back. He was almost sad. Her place on the stool was taken by a diminutive man in a long white Indian shirt with the sleeves rolled up over thick veiny forearms, baggy white trousers and a small white cotton hat perched on a cannonball of a head. He gestured for the barman and ordered a whisky.
‘Little Man,’ Noman said.
Little Man was an “independent trader”, a Kokani Muslim who’d grown up as a sadistic street-hood in the chawls (tenements) of the dirt-poor Dongri district of Bombay, hiring himself out as muscle before graduating into the role of assassin. He’d made a name for himself for his proficiency with the notoriously tricky kutta – a pistol manufactured in Uttar Pradesh whose barrel had a tendency to blow up. You had to admire the balls of a man who used a weapon that was good for one shot only. Little Man had cleared out of Bombay in the mid-nineties and set himself up in Dubai as a narco-trafficker, smuggling Afghan heroin into the ports and bays around Bombay. And in this part of the world, if you wanted to guarantee the success of a narcotics business there was one organisation that you needed to keep sweet – the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence. In return for the ISI’s good favour he had, on several occasions, made his routes available for the transport of explosives to rebel groups in India. But that was not the full extent of his links to the organisation.
‘How is my brother?’ Little Man asked, calmly, once his drink had been set in front of him.
‘Safe,’ Noman grunted. Little Man’s brother was in Karachi, living in the opulent hill district of Clifton under the protection of the ISI. That was the problem with Dubai: you were always a guest and Sheikh Mo could kick you out at any time. It was prudent to have a bolthole ready. For Little Man and his family that meant Pa
kistan. And the Pakistanis didn’t offer asylum without conditions attached.
‘I’ve got the information you requested,’ Little Man said. ‘You understand how the visa system works here? If you’re an Emirati you get an allocation of visas, so it’s common to offer them to a broker who sells them on. There is a broker who specialises in selling visas to Somalis. He says that the man you are looking for operates out of this address.’
He put a folded piece of paper on the bar-top.
‘Thank you,’ Noman said.
Little Man nodded, drained his glass and hopped down off the barstool. Noman ordered another drink. A couple of minutes later the tall blonde rejoined him at the bar.
‘Where were we?’ she asked.
‘We were talking about my dreams.’
#
Early the following morning, Noman sat in the back of a white Mercedes taxi with the meter running and the radio turned down low, fading between local stations.
A blue glass eye, a ward against devils, swung above the dashboard and in the rear-view mirror Noman could see the driver’s eyes. He was an off-duty cop from the Department of Punitive Establishment. A prison warden, really. He was singing along to the radio absent-mindedly. They hadn’t talked since the initial exchange outside the hotel when he’d picked Noman up.
Now they were parked across the road from a shuttered shop front in the Deira district of downtown Dubai, the address given to him by Little Man the night before. Behind them there was a “borrowed” surveillance van with four more off-duty cops in civilian clothes.
Noman was nursing a brutal hangover and trying to decide which of the various drugs in his arsenal to deploy against it; something powerful enough to wipe away the pain but not so powerful that it reduced him to a quivering jelly. This was no time for dosing errors. He kept getting flashbacks of the night before: the whore licking cocaine off his Viagra-stiff cock in the bathroom of his hotel suite, the two of them jumping up and down on the bed like it was a trampoline, her endless legs crossed behind her ears while he rammed into her like some kind of assembly-line automaton. He hadn’t been able to come, of course, but he’d gone on banging away for ages. Finally she’d had to beg him to stop. He’d kicked her out and spent the rest of the night with dreams of fiery infernos flickering like strobe lights behind his eyes.
Now he was exhausted. He decided that he would have to forego further drugs and bear the pain.
He really needed the Somali to make an appearance, without him he was scuppered, open to counter-attack. But if Noman could prove that Khan was taking money for the information provided he could go to the Joint Chiefs and demand his arrest. It wouldn’t matter how flawed or self-serving the information was the fact of accepting money for it would seal Khan’s fate. He’d be court-martialled as a traitor.
#
At 5.45 pm the Somali emerged from the shop and got in the back of a cab. They followed him to the Al Manzil on Sheikh Mo Boulevard, where he checked into a room on the top floor with a view of the Burj Khalifa.
Noman took a seat in the corner of the lobby and surveyed the entrance while his friends from Punitive Establishment made themselves known to the hotel staff. Half-an-hour later a pink ladies taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and a woman in a voluminous black hijab and stilettos got out. As she crossed the foyer he caught a glimpse of the distinctive red-lacquered soles of Christian Louboutins.
She spoke to one of the receptionists, who accompanied her to the bank of elevators. She took one to the top floor. Fifteen minutes later Noman received a call telling him that the Somali had made a call from his room to another room on the second floor. Its occupant was an Englishman named Totty who had arrived with only a briefcase.
Totty rode the elevator to the top floor and entered the Somali’s suite. Another ten minutes passed. The elevator in the lobby pinged open. The fully covered woman strode out holding a briefcase and the doorman summoned her a pink taxi.
Noman hurried out after her and got in the waiting Mercedes.
‘Follow that car,’ Noman said, his hangover forgotten.
From the hotel they followed the pink taxi to a bank and watched and waited as the woman in the hijab went inside and emerged again ten minutes later without the briefcase. The taxi dropped the woman outside one of the entrances to the Dubai Mall. Noman abandoned the Mercedes and followed her inside. He was immediately confronted by a massive indoor waterfall four storeys high, like a plunging curtain of molten silver, with fibreglass castings of plummeting human divers suspended above it. It made his head reel. He almost lost the woman in the milling crowds. Suddenly, it seemed there were women in hijab all around him, but then he caught another glimpse of her red soles and set off again in pursuit, following the signs for Fashion Island.
He watched her enter the Versace shop.
Twenty minutes later he observed his wife, Mumayyaz Khan, emerge from the shop and saunter casually across the polished marble floor in a sumptuous black cat suit with pantaloon legs and a plunging neckline that was adorned with gold necklaces as thick as rope.
‘Howzat!’
42. Noman’s choice
Noman waited for the maid’s trolley to turn the corner at the end of the corridor and then rapped his knuckles on the door in front of him.
‘Room service.’
He stepped back a pace and waited. He was in the Palace Hotel, on the lake. He hadn’t realised that Mumayyaz had such expensive tastes.
The door cracked opened a couple of inches. An Arab with a towel clutched around his waist stared indignantly out at him through the gap. According to Noman’s contacts in the local police the man was a Kuwaiti property dealer, a conjuror of skyscrapers out of barren sand.
‘We didn’t order anything.’
Noman kicked the door open, sending the man sprawling. He stepped over him into the room. There were clothes scattered across the floor and his wife was tied to the bed, lying face down with her ample buttocks raised by a stack of crisp white pillows. He paused long enough to reflect that she really did have a magnificent ass before scooping up the man’s trousers and shoes and throwing them out into the corridor.
‘Get out,’ he snarled, helping him on his way with another well-aimed kick.
He slammed the door and stood for a moment with his back to it. This was no time to let his actions be ruled by emotions. He crossed the room and threw himself down into an armchair facing the bed. He lit a Flake.
‘How long has this been going on for?’
‘I should have known you’d come busting in,’ she said, her head turned to one side so it appeared as if she was speaking into her armpit. ‘This is a non-smoking room.’
‘How long?’
‘This one? He’s new. A couple of months.’
‘I mean the money.’ She’d been making the monthly visit to Dubai for as long as they had been married, and burning his salary on clothes she never wore. ‘How long have you been collecting the money?’
‘Six years. There is about three million dollars left in the account. I’ve spent some of it, obviously.’
‘Shit!’ He didn’t know what was more shocking, the act of betrayal or the fact that she’d been able to pull it off for so long without him realising it.
‘Are you going to untie me?’
Seeing no reason not to, Noman undid the straps and Mumayyaz rolled over onto her back and kicked the pillows away. She swept her hair out of her face.
‘You’re in a lot of trouble,’ he said, sitting down again. ’You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang you alongside your father.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Tell that to the Joint Chiefs.’
‘You really think this is going to see the light of day?’
‘Your testimony alongside that of an MI6 officer named Edward Malik will leave the Joint Chiefs with no alternative but to court-martial your father.’
‘Don’t be so bloody naïve. This will never go to court. No senior officer has be
en convicted of treason in the entire bloody history of Pakistan. You think they’re going to shame themselves in public like that? You, of all people, should know them better than that.’
‘They’ll hold a closed session. They’ll do it in the cantonment.’
She rolled over onto her stomach and rose up on her elbows, cupping her face in her hands. As usual he found himself distracted by her cleavage, its dark inviting crevice. ‘Darling, they’ll hush it up. You know they will. I’m not saying there won’t be consequences. Most probably Papa would have to retire. Frankly speaking, it’s about time he did. But more than that? Really? I’m sorry to say this but you’re the one that’s most likely to suffer.’
‘How do you figure that?’
‘No one is going to believe you weren’t in on it. They’ve been waiting all their lives for a reason to discredit you. In their eyes you’re a filthy outcast and you always will be. They’d seize on it as a means of discrediting you. No I really don’t think it’s in your best interests to make a fuss. I have a much better plan.’
‘You do?’
‘We keep the money. I’m tired of sharing it with Papa.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The British have agreed. All you have to do is release some smelly old Taliban for talks and cancel next year’s fighting season in Afghanistan. Let them get out without any fuss. They’ll be so grateful, and the Americans too. They’ve offered to double the money.’
‘They have?’
‘They’re furious with Papa right now because of not telling them about bin Laden, and lying about this and that, and not giving them any proper secrets, but they’re prepared to put that to one side. They’re realists. You give them the promise of a smooth exit from Afghanistan and I guarantee they’ll make it worth our while. We only need another year or so and then we could retire. We could settle here.’ She wagged a finger at him and her eyes lit up. ‘You love it here. You know you do. And you could have it all – girls, boys, drugs – anything your heart desires.’
He shook his head. ‘You really are a piece of work.’
