by Henry Porter
After a desultory exchange The Doctor got up. Gibbons did not rise or offer a hand. Herrick thought she saw a fleeting look of distaste sweep across his expression. ‘We’ll speak soon.’
Herrick decided to leave, but just as she stood up, her phone began to vibrate. The momentary distraction meant that she did not pay attention to the wind, as the Arab women on the street do, and a gust took hold of the hijab, revealing her hair, neck and some of her face. She pulled it down swiftly and made for the car. As she opened the door she saw Gibbons rise, sling some money onto the table and start purposefully towards her. In a matter of seconds he had reached the car and shouted through the window. ‘I’ll be damned if that isn’t Isis Herrick.’ He bent down to her level. ‘Shit! That is you, isn’t it?’
She looked ahead of her without moving, realising that she couldn’t just sit there – one call from Gibbons and the whole operation would be blown. She got out, pushed him away and shouted in Arabic to the passers-by that the American was bothering her.
‘Well, what do you know,’ he said, leering down at her. ‘The cold-assed British spook has followed me all the way to Cairo for a little loving.’ He felt in one of the pockets of his photographer’s vest and pulled out a phone. She knocked it from his hands and spun round, cursing him in Arabic. The filthy American was making indecent suggestions – wouldn’t someone help a virtuous woman?
Gibbons seemed to find this funny. ‘Oh, you’re good,’ he said, unhurriedly bending down to retrieve his phone. ‘You’re very good, Isis. But I just gotta tell my people you’ve gate-crashed the donkey roast.’ He stood up and placed a hand on her shoulder, dialling a number with the thumb of his other hand. Suddenly Foyzi appeared from nowhere and pulled Herrick away from him.
‘Who’s this? Omar Sharif?’
Foyzi smiled up at him. ‘I have gun aimed at your heart, sir. Get into the car.’
‘Yeah, and I’m King Farouk,’ said Gibbons. ‘Step aside, buster. This lady and I have business.’
Foyzi manoeuvred so he could show Gibbons the gun without displaying it to the rest of the street. ‘I will kill you unless you get in the car, sir.’
‘Okay,’ said Gibbons, trying to maintain his dignity. ‘So you’re going to kidnap an American citizen. You can’t get away with this, Isis – you and your little towel-head friend.’
‘Such company we have to keep,’ said Foyzi despairingly. He opened the back door and prodded Gibbons. ‘Get in.’
Gibbons obeyed, but with a thunderous look that said he would soon have the upper hand. ‘I’ll see you on the fucking rack for this.’
She climbed behind the wheel. ‘What now?’
‘No problem,’ said Foyzi, pointing ahead of them. ‘No problem at all. Drive!’
She edged the Fiat into the traffic.
‘Oh, I get it. You’re going to try to spring Khan!’ said Gibbons, laughing. ‘Jesus, I’m gonna be ringside on fucking amateur night.’
‘Last thing I heard, you said he was Faisal, not Khan,’ said Isis over her shoulder.
‘Right,’ said Gibbons sourly.
They passed the police HQ and courts, then turned left to travel in the opposite direction. Foyzi wrested Gibbons’ phone from him and crushed it underfoot on the floor of the car. Then he called someone on his own phone and spoke rapidly.
Gibbons talked over him, affecting not to mind the silencer lodged in his armpit. ‘You understand what you’re doing, Isis? You’re interfering with the legitimate investigation of a terrorist suspect by the United States. If an attack should result from your actions you and your friend will be named as accessories. They’ll come after you, wherever the fuck you are.’
‘I understand just one thing about your activities,’ she said calmly. ‘You’ve instigated the torture of a man who hasn’t been found guilty of a crime and-’
‘That’s the trouble with you fucking Europeans,’ interrupted Gibbons. ‘You want all the benefits of American power but you don’t want to get your hands dirty.’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you, this is the big new game, and it’s played with a whole new set of rules. Frankly, you don’t cut it. You don’t even come near. ’
‘There’s nothing new about your big new game,’ she said. ‘You told me that yourself. You were right. Torture was used by the regimes in South America, all of them endorsed by the US government. Torture is actually a very old, very desperate game and it doesn’t work. You don’t get results by tearing a person’s body apart.’
This gave Gibbons some pause. ‘We’re against the clock. There’s no other way now.’
‘There is,’ said Isis. ‘There always is.’
They were alongside the museum and Foyzi told her to drive two hundred yards further and take the first turning right. She negotiated a hand-cart loaded with crates of vegetables and swerved right into a shaded street where huge pieces of awning and cloth hung vertically from wires overhead. Foyzi was on the phone. They turned right again into a yard where there was a white Nissan van. Four men in jellabas rushed towards them. One opened the door on Gibbons’ side and rammed a needle into his arm. Almost immediately the American’s eyes closed and his body went slack. He was dragged from the car, carried off to the van and lifted into the back. Two of the men jumped in with him and the van moved off in a cloud of dust. Foyzi got out, ran round to take the wheel from Herrick and reversed out of the yard at a furious speed, span 180 degrees and rushed to rejoin Bur Said.
‘Who were they?’ shouted Herrick, thinking it was certainly fitting that Gibbons had now himself been drugged and driven off unconscious.
‘My backup, my people,’ he said.
‘Who’re your people?’
‘Another time,’ he replied, straining left and right to look for an opening in the traffic. ‘The transport is about to leave the police building. We must get into position.’
‘What will they do with Gibbons?’
‘Take him somewhere and dump him. He’ll be fine, but he won’t remember who he is or where he is for a day or two.’
They found a way through the jam that brought them near to the cafe, and stopped alongside a line of minibuses disgorging passengers and admitting others with equal numbers of cumbersome packages. For a few minutes they waited in the sweltering heat. Foyzi’s eyes darted between the screen of his mobile and the throng of people around the car. Then the phone beeped twice with a text message.
‘It’s coming,’ he said. ‘He’s on the next truck.’
He nosed forward through the crowd and within a very short time they saw the truck moving out of the side street. It was accompanied by a car that had edged round the truck and was forging through the traffic with occasional blasts on its siren. Herrick relayed all this information to Guthrie. There were four policemen in the car, and two guards carrying automatics could be seen through the open back of the truck. She caught sight of The Doctor in the passenger seat of the truck. Khan had to be inside. Guthrie told her to use the radio from now on so that everyone could hear.
Foyzi worked the little Fiat into position, about three vehicles behind the truck, which was moving at about 15 mph. There was much competition among the other cars around them to fall into the truck’s slipstream, but Foyzi held their place effortlessly.
They reached the Kahn al Khalili souk where the traffic became less responsive to the police siren, and they stopped for minutes at a time. Herrick used the fan fixed to the Fiat’s dashboard to cool her face and glanced idly down the warren of passages into the souk. A further ten minutes passed. Then the traffic seemed suddenly to ease and the truck moved away at a speed of 40 mph. Foyzi dodged to keep in touch, but was forced to stop at some traffic lights where they knew the first lookout man was positioned. They heard his terse commentary over the radio and then shot off in pursuit of the truck, which to their relief followed the predicted route, turning left on a road called Salah Salem and then right into the cemetery. Herrick called out, ‘Three minutes to landing. Repeat. ETA – three minutes.�
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Harland had moved very little in the heat, but when he heard Herrick’s voice he got out of the Isuzu and lifted his binoculars to the cemetery road. From his vantage point 150 yards away, he had seen the blue and white Peugeot stop some ten minutes before and Munroe Herrick leave the car with Selvey. Despite Munroe’s reputation, Harland was extremely doubtful about allowing a man in his eighties to take part in the operation. However, he observed him now, moving without the slightest sign of age or heat fatigue. He was dressed in a light summer jacket and a broad-brimmed straw hat. Selvey was in a long floral skirt and a hat tied with a scarf under her chin. Together they looked as though they were about to attend the Chelsea Flower Show or a vicarage garden party.
Harland saw Munroe set up an easel in the shade of one of the monuments that bordered the road. Very soon he was sitting on a collapsible fishing stool, sketching the view that Harland had been staring at these past few hours – the parched sandstone necropolis and, beyond it, Cairo and the flood plain of the Nile in a dusty blue haze. It was a pity he’d never finish the picture.
In almost every respect the place was perfect for an ambush. The traffic was very light indeed. Just four cars had passed in the previous five minutes. The walls either side of the road were never less than ten feet high, so no one would be able to see what was going on when the police convoy was intercepted. And there would be very little danger from stray bullets. There were many open doorways into the cemetery either side of the road and the numerous smaller byways which criss-crossed the area. At two different points these held the vehicles that the snatch squad would use in their escape.
For a moment Harland’s attention was caught by three or four black kites wheeling in the sky high above the cemetery. His concentration snapped back to earth and he moved the binoculars down the incline to settle on a group of barefoot children playing in the stretch about 200 yards from Munroe. He hoped they wouldn’t get wind of the old man. If they were drawn to him for baksheesh it would badly complicate things. He swept the cemetery on the far side of the road, pausing to examine the figures moving between the memorials. One or two people were sleeping in the shade of the more elaborate tombs. He wasn’t sure which of these belonged to Colonel B’s squad of SAS veterans, but he knew they were there because of the radio checks every ten minutes.
He saw the police vehicles leave the main road and begin the steady climb towards Munroe. The car in front moved a little too quickly for the truck and twice had to slow down to wait.
Harland got back behind the wheel, started the engine and, leaving it in neutral, let the handbrake off so that the Isuzu began to creep down the narrow stony track to the cemetery road. If all went well, he would arrive behind the police truck, ready to receive Khan, Herrick and Foyzi. But the timing had to be just right.
The radio sprang to life. ‘Final positions, please. Runway clear.’ Then Sarre’s voice could be heard counting away the distance – ‘Five hundred yards and closing. Four hundred. Three-fifty.’ When he reached two hundred, Munroe got up, felt in his pocket and handed something to Selvey. They were replacing their radio earpieces with earplugs.
Not far from them, a bundle of rags moved slightly – a beggar dozing in the dappled shade of a eucalyptus tree shifting something hidden in the sackcloth. Across the road a cart loaded with sugar cane seemed to move of its own accord. Harland could just make out two pairs of boots beneath it.
The police car showed round the first part of the Z bend and climbed the rutted stretch towards Munroe. Then came the truck, heeling as it took the potholes. Some way off, the little Fiat driven by Foyzi tore through the dust kicked up by the two bigger vehicles.
As Harland inched forward, his view of the road remained unimpaired. The whole plan began to unfold in front of him. Munroe was the first to move. He got up from his seat and managed to dislodge his hat, which rolled off across the road. This seemed to cause the old man some distress and he went in pursuit of it, holding his back and moving with great difficulty. He added further to the impression of frailty by waving a stick in the air and knocking over his easel. At this moment the police vehicle came round the bend and, without slowing down, drove between him and the hat. Munroe seemed to become disorientated in the cloud of dust, fell forwards and rolled onto his side. Harland prayed the driver of the truck would see him. He did brake, but only just in time, at which point several things happened. Smoke grenades went off in the road behind and in front of the two vehicles. The load of sugar cane erupted and three men wearing gas masks jumped into the road, shooting out the police car’s tyres and radiator. The vehicle juddered to a halt with its blue light still flashing in vain. At this, another man sprang from an opening in the wall and propelled a small canister of knockout gas through the window. None of the four men had any time to react.
A second or two before, Munroe rolled over in the road and aimed a machine pistol with one hand at the truck’s front tyres and engine. He was joined by Selvey, who raised her sidearm in a textbook two-handed aim. The rear tyres were cut to ribbons by two other men who had leapt from behind a wall, and for good measure they threw a stun-grenade in the general direction of the truck. The driver had been on the point of jumping down when it exploded and he fell to earth like a dead bird.
Harland plunged through the narrow opening, scraping the underside of his vehicle on a boulder, and landed in the road just behind the truck. He saw the Fiat parked with both its front doors open and Isis Herrick running up the road into the smoke. This was the very last thing she should have been doing because three policemen, who had been protected from the worst effects of the stun-grenade, had spilled from the open door at the back of the truck with their rifles. Harland had no choice but to steer the Isuzu into one and then slammed a second by opening his door while the vehicle was still moving. The third man had scuttled round the truck and was taking aim. Harland got out and sprinted to tackle him. The gun went off at the moment he collided with his upper thighs and sent him into the dirt. Harland was aware that his back wouldn’t take the jolt but pushed the thought to the back of his mind. While Colonel B’s men disarmed the three policemen, Harland picked himself up painfully and went to the front to find Isis bent over her father. He appeared to have sprained his right wrist but that was all. The Peugeot getaway car had already been summoned, and before long Munroe and Selvey were being rushed towards it through the smoke. Isis stood looking utterly stricken, but then her father bent down to pick up his hat and waved a cheery goodbye over his shoulder.
It was a bizarre sight, and no one was more astonished than The Doctor, who remained in the passenger seat of the truck as if he had suffered a seizure. Foyzi opened the door and pulled him down into the road at gunpoint uttering many imprecations under his breath, then took him by the scruff of the neck and marched him to the rear of the truck. Harland and Herrick followed.
They went through all the cells. Two men were released but neither bore the slightest resemblance to Khan and were told to make a run for it while they could.
‘Maybe they’ve got him on another truck,’ suggested Colonel B, wiping his face. ‘Inform this cunt that you will shoot him if he doesn’t tell us where Karim Khan is.’
Foyzi placed the silencer of his pistol against The Doctor’s temple. After a moment of deliberation, The Doctor lifted his head and pointed inside the truck.
‘There’s a compartment in the floor,’ shouted Isis. ‘Look, there are two hinges.’
They wrenched the door up with crowbars. Beneath the steel plate Khan was lying bound, gagged and blindfolded in a space not much larger than a coffin. His feet were a blackened mess and his groin was stained with blood and urine. The rest of his clothes were sodden. They lifted him from this hold with infinite care and moved him to the light. Herrick took off the blindfold and gag and told him he was in safe hands, but he seemed not to understand and moved his head rhythmically from side to side like a blind singer.
‘For the love of God…’ said one of Co
lonel B’s men.
‘No,’ said Harland, remembering with an almost physical pain his own time at the hands of a torturer. He shook his head and turned to The Doctor ready to kill him.
The Colonel put up his arm. ‘We’d better be about our business,’ he said. ‘Get Khan into Harland’s vehicle and give him a shot of morphine.’
‘What about this man?’ Harland asked, pointing to The Doctor. ‘He knows Isis. We can’t leave him here.’
The Colonel nodded. ‘I rather thought we’d take him with us.’
‘And?’ said Harland.
‘Well, obviously we can’t take him all the way home to Syria or Iraq, or wherever the devil he comes from, but we can certainly give him a ride to, say, the middle of the Sinai desert.’
Harland, Isis and Foyzi got in with Khan and made their way through the remainder of the smoke. Colonel B’s men melted into the cemetery, two of them running The Doctor towards a container lorry waiting with its engine ticking over a little way off.
The radio came to life again. It was Guthrie. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to join me in thanking the Captain for a perfect landing. Local time is 4.25 p.m. The temperature is ninety-two degrees. Welcome to Cairo. Please remain seated until the aircraft has stopped moving.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The island where they took Khan lay some two hundred miles south of Cairo, below a great bend in the Nile. Thirteen hours after leaving the cemetery they made a rendezvous with a boat named Lotus, hidden at the edge of a sugar plantation. Khan’s stretcher was loaded across the bow and secured with ropes. The boatman pushed off into the current and, using only a long oar at the stern, steered them downstream towards the island. There was no man-made light to be seen for miles around and the moonless night had an infinite clarity. When the boat found a breeze in the centre of the river, Herrick peered down at Khan to see if he was cold. She watched his eyes open and then his entire face spread and relax. A curtain was being drawn back.
