by Henry Porter
Naji started shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said. He turned to Al-munajil, trembling violently, and raised his eyes. ‘No,’ he screamed, now confronting Al-munajil’s limitless, dull savagery with all his being.
Al-munajil’s mouth opened but no words came out.
‘You want to know what I took and where I hid it,’ continued Naji. ‘If anything more happens to my friends, you will never learn.’ Then he added, ‘Do you know what a timed release function is?’ Before Al-munajil could respond, he answered his own question. ‘It means I have to log into the place where I’ve hidden all your information before a certain time. If I don’t, the data I took from you and the phones and computers of your headquarters will be released onto the web.’ He was aware of his own voice, high and thin in the echoing barn.
‘You’re lying to save your life,’ said Al-munajil, his voice, by contrast, now a strangulated whisper. He cleared his throat violently and projected a gob of phlegm onto the ground.
‘All that data will be released the moment I don’t log in. You will have no more time – everything will be out there. They will know all about you.’
Al-munajil got up, took hold of Naji by the throat and squeezed his windpipe. Naji began to choke. Al-munajil watched and squeezed harder, then he seemed to think better of this, drew back and smashed the gun into the side of Naji’s head several times. Naji did his best to duck and several of the blows missed, though the gun caught his ear and he felt blood trickle down his neck. ‘You think you can save yourself with these lies?’
‘No! I know you’re going to kill me,’ Naji shouted as the gun smashed into his head. ‘I’m trying to save their lives, not mine.’ He fell to the ground to escape the blows.
Al-munajil stopped, his arm still raised, and looked at Ibrahim.
‘Maybe the data isn’t valuable to you,’ said Naji into the floor. ‘Maybe your masters don’t care about it.’
‘Pick him up,’ Al-munajil ordered Rafi, and returned to sit on the feed box. ‘What did you steal that we don’t know about?’
‘Everything on your three phones, everything on your laptop, and I hacked the headquarters using your passwords. That was a big dump. I didn’t look at it much, but there was data about sales of crude oil, money, bank accounts, foreign actions, military operations and social network communications – those kinds of things. Anything I could get. And I got all of it because your security is shit. I got so much I couldn’t read it all.’
Al-munajil couldn’t hide his reaction. ‘You did this all the time you were with me?’
‘Since the first time you gave me your phone to mend I have been copying all your communications data. But it’s all on a site I’ve built to store it. It’s like a hard drive, but I need time to access it, and that’s the truth. You can choose to believe it or not but you won’t have my help unless you release my friends.’
And now came the self-pity that Al-munajil always used to justify his worst actions. In his mind he and the fighters who butchered their way across Naji’s homeland and beyond were always the victims. ‘We were like brothers to you. We helped you. We gave you food and money for your family. I am to marry your sister, and you repay me like this!’
Ibrahim strode over to Naji and seized him by the neck. ‘Let me finish him off now.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Al-munajil. ‘Let him go.’
Naji shook himself and reached up to inspect the cut high on the top of his head.
‘Why?’ said Al-munajil, still acting the aggrieved party.
‘I saw what you and your people did. You made me watch and you even wanted me to kill for you. Ibrahim was going to force me to murder with his gun until I ran away. You were no better than the men who tortured my father. In fact, you were worse. I saw what you did to the women at that place.’
Al-munajil glowered at him for a moment, then asked where the data was hidden.
‘I told you – it’s on a website, but only I can access it and because I don’t have my phone that will take a lot of time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have to work out the encryption I put in place and the key is on my phone.’
‘Do it now on my phone,’ said Al-munajil. ‘Do it now.’
‘I need the Internet. There is no coverage here. That’s why the old people only have a landline. Look for yourself.’
Al-munajil got out his phone and beckoned the others to do the same.
‘He’s playing for time,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Yes, I am, because I want you to stop hurting my friends and let them go.’ He looked down, aware that something was happening inside him that he’d never experienced before. He couldn’t speak, and he waited a moment before saying, ‘But you need this more than I do.’ Suddenly Naji felt an overwhelming need to close his eyes, for everything to just stop. The tensions from the last three years, the violence he had seen – close at hand and the bombs from the air – all but drowning in the ocean, the trials of his journey, the constant fear, the loss of his little sister and on top of that the much, much greater loss that Anastasia had tried to make him confront now all swarmed in his mind. He began to sway. He was aware of Al-munajil telling Ibrahim to get water and Anastasia shouting in English that they should leave him alone because he was just a kid. Before collapsing he thought, ‘Yes, I’m a kid, and I’m finished.’
Eighteen
Samson and Hisami spotted a faint glow in the trees a few hundred metres ahead and drove to the top of a rubble track that curved sharply to their left, down to a farmhouse and several outbuildings that were all entirely hidden in a hollow.
‘This is it,’ said Samson, drifting to a stop and switching off the headlights. ‘There’s nothing else around. Best to leave the car here. We may not get it back up that slope.’
Hisami agreed. Samson turned off the engine and they got out. ‘I’ll go on ahead and see what’s happening,’ he said, moving off. He took a few paces but, having got no response, glanced back into the dark. ‘You okay, Denis?’
‘Yes.’ The voice was muffled, as if Hisami was distracted, or perhaps bending down.
Samson assumed he was relieving himself and continued on down to the bottom. He noticed the tractor and trailer, and several stables with the top halves of their Dutch doors open. The lights were on in the house and cracks of light were coming from between the panels of a building further down the gradient. A caged lamp illuminated the yard. He got the impression of an orderly, well-maintained establishment where money was tight. Many running repairs had been made to the stables and the steps and the wooden rail that led up to the farmhouse. He paused and listened. Apart from the periodic lowing of a cow, he heard no sound. He started up the steps and was exactly halfway up when the farmhouse door banged. The shadow of a man hurried across the veranda and started moving down towards him. Too late, Samson saw that as well as the large water bottle under his arm, he was carrying a gun. Now he saw Samson. He stopped and raised the weapon. He already had a grin on his face as he said in Arabic, ‘Welcome, British spy – we expected you.’
He knew this bastard: Al-munajil’s right-hand man, Ibrahim Anzawi, thirty-five years of age, a native of the Sunni town of Latifya in Iraq and a man whose crimes were so extensive that he would certainly merit a drone strike on his own. And this bastard had him cold – there was absolutely nothing he could do.
Ibrahim whooped and yelled over his shoulder. Another man rushed from the house and joined him on the steps. Samson knew this one too – Usaim Abdel Zahra; twenty-eight, a petty criminal and black marketeer turned war criminal. He was brandishing a handgun. They kicked him down the steps and marched him to the barn with a gun at the nape of his neck. As they went, Samson noticed Usaim was limping.
He had an idea what to expect inside the barn, but nothing prepared him for the tableau of pain and despair that was illuminated by a single naked light. H
e took in Anastasia’s appalled expression, though he didn’t let his eyes meet hers, the young man on the post next to her, slumped and unconscious, with blood dripping from his arm, and Naji sitting on the floor with his arms clamped around his knees, rocking gently. Al-munajil rose from a box and moved towards him. As the draught from the door caught the bulb and made it swing, light and shadow swept across his face. He approached Samson and said, ‘So we didn’t lose them all. One of them stuck to us.’
‘This one was in the market,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I saw him with my own eyes. He is the one who is speaking to Munira.’
‘I know that, you fool,’ Al-munajil said, spitting out the words. ‘Did you check the vehicle?’ Ibrahim shook his head and looked at Usaim, as though this had been his oversight.
When Usaim turned and took a few steps towards the door, Al-munajil looked as though he was going to have a seizure. ‘Keys!’ Usaim turned back. ‘Didn’t you search him before?’
‘We thought it best to bring him in here first,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Do it now!’
Usaim moved to Samson’s front and slapped him hard across the face. This is the one who is bullied by the others, Samson thought – he may be the cruellest of the four. Usaim wrenched the car fob from his jacket pocket and then pulled the three phones from two inside pockets, plus a money clip of euros, some change, a few loose cigarettes, a pocketknife and a flashlight key ring.
‘Any ID?’ said Al-munajil.
Usaim shook his head.
‘Sometimes it adds to the pleasure to know who you’re killing,’ said Al-munajil.
‘Paul Samson’s the name,’ said Samson coolly.
Al-munajil studied him. ‘You are Arab.’
‘British, and proud of it,’ said Samson.
‘No, you are Arab. You speak Arabic and you look Arab.’
‘Lebanese-British. Proud of the first part, too. And you are Al-munajil, the butcher of men and tormentor of defenceless women and children – the man who has failed in just about everything in life except cutting people’s heads off, which isn’t so hard when you’re called Machete.’ This earned him a blow to the back of his head from Ibrahim, but Samson was expecting that. His purpose was to draw the fire from the others and to gain time, in the hope that Hisami had the sense to walk back to where there was a good signal and raise the alarm, but right now he wasn’t holding out much hope for any of them.
‘You will soon be dead,’ said Al-munajil.
‘That makes two of us,’ replied Samson. ‘Actually, your chances of leaving here alive are less than mine.’ Another blow followed and this time Ibrahim drew blood. Al-munajil walked over and put his face so close to Samson’s that he was aware of a bacterial stench, which told of the man’s tooth decay and rotten gums. Everything that came from Al-munajil’s mouth – the words, the voice and the breath – was nauseating.
‘You will watch the others die and then you will die,’ he said, and his voice cracked to a whisper. Samson just managed to turn away as Al-munajil cleared his throat and spat at him. ‘We have business to complete,’ he said, stepping back to cover Samson with his gun. ‘Ibrahim, bring the boy to his senses. Usaim, check the car, dispose of the old people and come back. Then you will your have fun with the whore.’
Ibrahim marched over to Naji and emptied the water bottle over the boy, but it was Usaim banging the door as he left that shook Naji back to reality. He gave Anastasia a stricken, helpless look, which she acknowledged with a taut smile, though her eyes quickly fastened on his feet, or just a little above one of them. Naji rose slowly, dripping wet, and looked at Samson for the first time.
‘You will show us how to find all the data you stole,’ said Al-munajil.
‘Let my friends go,’ he said hopelessly. Al-munajil ignored him. Naji understood that everything had changed with the capture of the British spy. Samson somehow had made things worse. Then his eyes came to rest on the feed box where Samson’s things had been piled. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. There were three phones, and one was the phone that had been stolen from his backpack a few days ago. The scratched red cover, the shattered corner of the screen, the tape holding everything together, the peeled-back corner of the Super Mario sticker – this was his phone. It was his phone! How had Al-munajil conjured it out of nowhere? If they had his phone, they could get everything they needed. It would take only a minute to find the encryption to operate the online computer he had built. He looked again. Yes, it was his.
The only person at that moment to realise the import of Naji’s discovery was Samson, who also understood that Al-munajil didn’t yet know what he had in his possession. Ibrahim’s eyes had followed Naji’s gaze and settled with mild interest on the three phones. Samson was sure he was on the point of working it out: once he had, they were all as good as dead. It would take no time to torture the boy into revealing what those screenshots in his camera roll meant and how they could be used to access his online computer. Or, worse still, they’d torture Anastasia in front of the boy. Al-munajil’s men already knew she was theirs to do with what they wanted.
Samson stepped sideways and backwards, whirled round to Rafi behind him and dived for his weapon. It was a clumsy move and the distance between them meant that it was bound to end in failure – and pain. Before Al-munajil or Ibrahim had time to shout a warning, Rafi had clubbed Samson to the ground and straddled him, ready to set about his face with his gun.
‘Wait!’ shouted Ibrahim above Anastasia’s screams. ‘Wait! He’s trying to distract us.’ He shot forward and grabbed the phone. ‘Look – this is the boy’s phone!’ He turned to Al-munajil, his face jutting and fanatical under the light. ‘What spy goes around with a phone like this?’ He pointed to the sticker. ‘This is what we came for! This is the phone! Look at the boy’s face – he knows this is his phone! And the British spy knows it’s his phone, too.’
A silence fell in the barn. Al-munajil had been watching Naji. He put a hand on his shoulder in an almost avuncular manner and handed him the phone. There was no point in pretending any longer. He took the phone and turned it on. He was praying that the battery was down, but no, the phone was fully charged. He went to the phone’s calculator, which he had rigged as a portal to a programme that generated his code. It would have taken several hours to recreate this on another phone, and that other device would have had to be the same model and age as his, but it would now be just a minute or two before the set was ready to access yondaworld.com, the virtual world where a good part of Naji’s life had been spent building fantastic machines and chatting to obsessed engineering types during the months he was with Al-munajil’s crew in Iraq and Syria. He worked hard, remembering 168 prime numbers between one and 1,000, tapping them into the screen in reverse order, except for the numbers that appeared halfway in the sequence, 431, 433 and 439, which he did not reverse.
Al-munajil looked over his shoulder, fascinated but uncomprehending. ‘What are you doing? Show me.’
‘I can’t,’ said Naji, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’
It was indeed complex: even if a person had known that the calculator was the place to gain access, there were several stages beyond typing in the prime numbers and not all of them were mathematical. The function buttons on the calculator – MR, memory recall; M+, add to memory; and M-, subtract from memory – all played a part, and they had to be pressed in the right order and the correct number of times for the next stage to begin. This generated a random code that Naji did not even know, but the way he had set things up in yondaworld.com meant that the virtual computer – the one that existed only on the web and in his mind – would recognise a code that flew from the calculator in the shape of a fluttering cartoon chicken. The trick was then to land the chicken by dragging it to the right positions, for which reason he had taken screen grabs of the four places the chicken had to land in the architecture of the online computer, otherwise it was ve
ry easy to get lost in the maze of strata and geometric shapes.
A string of digits appeared in the calculator’s display: 1.111111E20. This had no meaning other than to indicate the code was ready. Naji closed the calculator and saw the chicken on the display. He handed the phone to Al-munajil, even now prepared to take some pleasure in this numbskull’s reaction to the chicken bobbing up and down at the bottom of the screen.
‘What is this? Are you playing a joke?’
‘No,’ said Naji. ‘That is the code. You have to place the bird at different locations in a computer I constructed in yondaworld.com, but you need the Internet and a reliable signal.’
This was all plainly beyond Al-munajil. He didn’t even know what to ask about the code. ‘How do I know you are not tricking me like you always do?’
Naji shrugged. ‘You can try it up on the hill, where you’ll get a signal. I have to be with you to put the bird in the right place, otherwise you won’t be able to access the material.’
Al-munajil stood dumbly looking down at the phone. The wind had got up and was blowing through the cracks in the barn’s timber walls, causing the light from the bulb to trace a perfect circle on the floor of the barn.
At that moment they heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.
Al-munajil looked up and said, ‘Old man!’ After the second shot he said, ‘Old woman.’ And when they heard a third, he grinned and said, ‘Dog!’
It was at this point that Samson came to, though he had never been fully unconscious. His head and face hurt like hell, and his left eye socket was already so swollen he could not see out of it. His assailant had stopped beating him the moment Ibrahim made the discovery of the phone and, assuming Samson was unconscious, he’d got up and rushed over to watch Naji work the phone, over the shoulders of Al-munajil and Ibrahim. Samson had heard the gunfire and knew that now the end must be close. Although he’d missed most of Naji’s explanation, he appreciated that Al-munajill had got what he wanted and had no further use for his three captives. And Naji would be disposed of, too, once Al-munajil had secured the database. Any help that Hisami might have managed to raise would certainly be too late for them.
