by Henry Porter
He shook his head. ‘No, but I fail to see why Islam hasn’t produced proper democracies. If people can begin to participate in democracies in South America there seems no reason why they shouldn’t in the Arab countries.’
He noticed she was energised by the prospect of argument. She leaned forward, eyes suddenly glistening. ‘And yet a democracy might produce a regime like the Taleban. The fact that people have the vote doesn’t guarantee a social democratic system. So you could argue that it is the religion which is at fault, that it is inherently expansionist and intolerant. You could even say that the precepts of Islam are incompatible with democracy and therefore human rights, because only democracy can guarantee human rights.’
Harland hadn’t seen this side of Isis Herrick before. He liked it, but felt that he was being sluggish. ‘Then you make the fact of religious belief the belligerent act and that’s very hard for a true democrat to accept.’
She smiled, her mind moving faster than she knew. ‘But surely there’s no difference between a person who holds doctrinaire political views, like the old style communist, and an Islamic fundamentalist. Their basic positions, whether involving a political creed or a religious one, are anti-democratic and so present a threat which all true democrats must oppose with equal force.’
‘That’s quite a right-wing stance, Isis. I assumed you were an out-and-out liberal.’
Suddenly the exhilaration in her eyes was tempered. She drank some wine and her gaze swivelled to the dark. ‘I am a liberal, but when I was watching Sammi Loz the other night, I saw pure, visceral hatred in his face. He pays a lot of lipservice to Bosnia and the Palestinians, but I somehow didn’t think that was his priority. There was an element of savagery which I simply can’t contend with.’
He moved to touch her face again.
‘In other circumstances, I would say this was rather romantic,’ she said.
‘Why, what’s wrong with the circumstances?’ His fingers splayed backwards into her hair.
‘I’m sorry, it is romantic. Yes it is. To my amazement I find myself very happy to be with you here in my manky little garden. It’s taken me by surprise, that’s all.’
‘Good,’ said Harland, not really knowing what he intended. ‘Your garden isn’t manky, and you are exceptionally attractive – uniquely attractive, in my view – although it’s clear you don’t feel it.’
She stiffened in his hands. ‘Don’t say that. That’s what Loz said to me.’
‘I know… I know about what happened to you. Philip Sarre told the Chief.’
‘How odd that he should tell you.’
‘He was concerned.’ He stopped. ‘Anyway, you haven’t said what’s wrong with the circumstances.’
‘It’s just that I feel we ought to be doing something to work this thing out. Get Rahe. Find Loz. Look at Dolph’s photographs… you know.’
‘But you need rest.’
She put her lips to the palm of his hand for a second, then lifted her head. ‘Why are you in London? Aren’t you meant to be with Jaidi in the Middle East?’
‘He’s gone back to New York. Things didn’t work out in Syria.’
‘But that wasn’t really my question. Why are you still working on this?’
Harland withdrew his hand, mild exasperation spreading across his face. ‘I’m here partly because Teckman asked me to come. He thought he might need help persuading the powers that be that Norquist was in a tangle with Mossad and Loz.’ He paused and picked up his glass. ‘But the actual reason is that Jaidi and Teckman overlapped at Cambridge, something I only recently discovered. Teckman took pity on the little man from Zanzibar and introduced him to people, made his life bearable in the cold, damp fens. They have been friends on and off for thirty-five years and were especially close when Teckman was with the British mission to the UN and Jaidi was a minor official. At some stage in the last few months, Jaidi told Teckman about a character named Sammi Loz in New York. Teckman had probably already had him investigated or knew at least that he had shown up on their radar. So, in the wake of Norquist’s death, Jaidi gets me an appointment. Then Teckman approaches me the day afterwards. They fixed it between them. Now that we know Loz was working for Hizbollah and has most likely set up a group with Youssef Rahe, clearly Jaidi wants to protect himself and the other well-known patients on Loz’s books. You see, Jaidi has been recommending Loz to all manner of folk. Who knows, he may have been responsible for introducing Norquist to Loz and now suffers some kind of remorse. At any rate, you can see that with the Israelis sniffing around, everyone needs to be extremely careful. Information is power when it comes to Israeli foreign policy.’ He stopped. ‘That’s why I’m here to see this thing through. And by the way, that was the reduced version of the story and I don’t want to be cross-examined on it.’
‘Okay, okay!’ She held her hands up in surrender. ‘But you have to admit it’s interesting that there are so many parallels. These pairings across the Atlantic for instance – Jaidi and Teckman; Loz and Rahe…’
‘You and me,’ said Harland, grinning.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
He touched her lightly on her forearm and let his hand rest there.
‘The question now is am I going to allow myself to be seduced by you?’ She looked at him with an open expression that made him think she was considering it with the same fierce logic that she applied to everything else.
‘I’m not necessarily seducing you,’ he said. ‘I’m more one for synchronised desire.’
‘Really? That strikes me as an unworkable strategy. How do you know when you’re synchronised?’
Now he was embarrassed. ‘Believe me, I’m rather out of practice.’
‘Why don’t I make some coffee and you can try to remember what to do next.’
She divided the rest of the wine between them, then scooped up the dishes and went inside. He heard a clattering as everything was chucked into the dishwasher, then some music that was very familiar to him. ‘What’s that?’ he called through the window. ‘Where have I heard it before?’
Her head appeared in the window. ‘It’s Sufi music. You heard it on the island. When I was in Sudan I bought this in the market. It’s wonderful, but I was worried it would seem silly and out of place in England.’
She reappeared a few minutes later with coffee. ‘You know there’s one thing I slightly resent about you and the Chief. Leaving me on that island with Khan and Loz. I was very exposed.’
Harland nodded. ‘The Chief told me you had backup. By the time I left, Sarre and Lapping were within a few minutes’ boat ride.’
‘But I didn’t know they were there and they couldn’t know what was going on. What kind of backup is that?’
‘I suppose he felt he had no option, because there were so few people at his disposal. But he was right in one way. You drew them out and got the crucial information about Yahya and the time frame we’re working in.’
‘Still, it was bloody irresponsible of him, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, but I’m afraid I was partly to blame. I insisted on leaving. I had to go.’
‘Alpha shit,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Still, you pulled a rabbit out of your own hat, though it turns out to be a much smaller one than mine.’ She smiled mischievously at him.
They were both aware that they were marking time, but Harland reckoned he had made one move and that it was now her turn. The music slipped into the night to entice the uncomprehending world of a London suburb, and they watched each other. Without warning, she moved from her chair to stand over him, then put her hands down to his jaw, cupped his face and bent down to kiss him.
‘We don’t have to go to bed,’ she said. ‘But I thought I’d let you know that we are synchronised.’
‘Good,’ he murmured as she kissed him again.
‘But on the whole, I think I’d like to go to bed very soon – with you.’
‘Yes,’ said Harland. ‘That seems a good idea.’
They left
the table and went to her bedroom, which struck him as a remarkably private, perhaps even lonely, place. It was bare but comfortable, and on one side of the bed there was a stack of books and a picture of a small girl and a woman standing in the shade of a tamarisk tree. The woman looked remarkably like Isis, but he knew it must be her dead mother, and that the girl with her face creased with laughter was Isis. He suddenly felt the scale of her loss all those years ago and turned to her and held her, partly because of this flash of understanding, but also because he was desperate now to end his own long, morose isolation, and prove to himself that he could love and listen as well as the next man. She wriggled free to undress, which she did with little fuss, then stood before him without the slightest embarrassment. Harland was aware of his inability to grasp the whole of her in his mind – to resolve the neat white figure in front of him with the turbulent, driven person he’d seen working in the field. She came to him, hung her arms round his neck and told him to take off his clothes. At length they fell to the bed and became lovers. Finally Isis grew silent and went to sleep in his arms. His eyes closed too, but less happily. In his mind were three words – victim, survivor, person; the three stages he had been told the torture victim must go through. Was he yet the person he had once been? Was this thing that had happened to him fourteen years ago in the cellar of the house in Prague still distorting him? He was now certain that was what his bad back had been all about; not Eva’s disappearance, or the air crash.
As Sammi Loz had said, the body remembers. Old pain – that’s what he had to ditch to become a person again. He looked down at Isis’s face and remembered why he had first been drawn to her. It wasn’t her looks, which in fact had taken him some time to get used to. It was her conviction that no matter what Khan had done or might be, his torture would be a crime.
Then he closed his eyes.
Some time later they were woken by the phone ringing. Harland heard her answer to the Chief. They were expected in the office at 6.30 a.m. the next day.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Early next morning a group of about thirty people assembled at Thames House. Herrick and the key members of the SIS team arrived shortly before Vigo entered the building. The Chief had evidently spoken with him overnight and agreed that the man Vigo had identified in the Bosnian photographs as Jamil Rahe was the only hope of tracing Youssef Rahe and Sammi Loz. Vigo was once again the architect of a plan, but now he had the support of the entire security establishment and, though looking drawn, somehow managed to present a picture of righteous self-possession.
Jamil Rahe had been traced to a maisonette in a quiet street in Bristol, and a surveillance team was already in place. At 8.15 a.m. a uniformed policeman and a member of the local Special Branch, posing as an immigration official from the Home Office, approached the building and rang the doorbell. The exchange with Jamil Rahe was relayed to Thames House from a microphone in the Special Branch officer’s briefcase, and it was agreed that their manner was striking precisely the right balance between suspicion and reassurance. They explained that a form had been overlooked in the processing of Jamil Rahe’s application for political asylum and that it must be completed that day to make everything legal. Across the street a cameraman, hidden in the back of a TV repair van, silently recorded the scene. The three men were still talking on the doorstep when the first images arrived through the secure internet server at Thames House. One glance showed that he was the man from the Bosnia photographs. These images were then forwarded by email to a laptop in the possession of Special Branch officers on the roof of Heathrow’s Terminal Two.
At length, the big Algerian offered the two officers coffee while he filled in the form. They went in, and within a very short time the plain-clothes policeman had secreted a tiny transmitter in Rahe’s home so that the sound coming to Thames House was of much better quality. Jamil said he was familiar with the form they’d brought and insisted that he had already filled in one like it. The officers apologised. While he sat at the table writing, they gently questioned him about the kind of welfare benefits he had been claiming, his prospects of work and his wife’s attendance at a language course. Once or twice Rahe’s replies seemed rather too considered, particularly when one of the officers mentioned that with his brother Youssef in London things would not be as difficult for him as it was for other new immigrants. The fifteen minutes of talk and coffee passed off very amicably, yet by the time they left, saying that this would certainly be the last he saw of them, Jamil was plainly on his guard.
Five minutes later, the police at Heathrow contacted Thames House. Three plane-spotters had identified the Algerian definitely as the man who stood with them on the observation platform on May 14 and on several occasions before that. Jamil Rahe was now confirmed as a very significant element in the story, and not for the first time the Chief looked towards Herrick and winked his thanks. Now all they had to do was wait for Jamil to make contact with someone.
An hour passed, during which the Chief and Barbara Markham, the Director General of the Security Services, discussed the raid on Youssef Rahe’s bookshop in Bayswater. The Security Services wanted to move on the premises immediately, but the Chief argued that they should wait for as long as possible, although plainly it had to be done by the time the arrests started across Europe the following morning. Eventually they compromised on 5.00 p.m. that afternoon, with the agreement that the staff of the Secret Intelligence Service would have the run of the place once it had been secured. The Chief returned to Vauxhall Cross, leaving Dolph and Herrick to watch as a stream of visitors looked over the shots from Bosnia. Journalists, diplomats, army officers and even the odd aid worker had been contacted the previous evening and asked as a matter of urgency to Thames House. They were all on time for the unusual invitation to coffee and croissants, but as each of them pored over the photographs laid out on a table and consulted a map where the photographs had been shot, it became clear that the remaining men would not be so easily identified. ‘Well,’ said Dolph as the last one left, ‘we’ve still got the Guignal gal. Maybe Lapping should fly out to Skiathos with a disk. He might even lose his virginity.’
‘It would be quicker to get her to an internet cafe and send them by email,’ she said.
‘You’re not worried about security?’ he asked.
‘Damn security, and anyway we do need to speak to her about Jamil Rahe. She may remember him. Why don’t you do that?’
Dolph’s eyes flared. ‘All of a sudden I’m your runner, Isis. Why the fuck don’t you do it?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ll both talk to her, okay? It will be better.’
Dolph still looked put out. ‘You’re tired. You need to rest.’
‘Yes,’ she said, managing a grin. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve had a rough few weeks and sooner or later it’s going to tell.’
‘Lecture over?’
‘I mean it,’ he said, looking down at the photographs.
She was tired, damned tired. She thought of Harland in her kitchen that morning, sitting as though drugged, over a cup of coffee. They said little, but she had tried to let him know that she didn’t regret sleeping with him. He was affectionate but also slightly remote, as though mentally drawing back to grasp the scale of something. Fine, she had thought, she’d wait, and if this turned out to be a one-night stand, all well and good. It had been very pleasant.
‘Don’t worry,’ she had said, brushing her knuckles across the top of his hand as the cab pulled up at Brown’s Hotel. ‘There’re no strings. I’m not like that.’
‘I’m not worried, just astonished that it happened. More than that, I’m moved and extraordinarily grateful that you would favour my old bones.’
‘Grateful is not a word that should ever be used in the context of sex.’
They smiled at each other and it was left at that, but as he reached for the handle of the cab door she noticed the haunted, puzzled look in his eyes. She clutched at his arm and immediately regretted it
because it made her seem needy, when in fact she was just concerned for him.
‘Are you okay?
He had replied with slight irritation, ‘Yes, of course I’m okay.’ Then he pulled free and got out of the cab.
It had been a very unsatisfactory parting and she wished she could put it right.
Dolph and Herrick had returned to Vauxhall Cross by 11.00 a.m. but it was not until 1.10 p.m. that they were told that Jamil Rahe had left his house with a sports bag over his shoulder and walked to the end of his road to catch a bus. A feed from Thames House was hooked up and they were able to hear Jamil’s progress. The bus took him to the centre of Bristol, where he moved unhurriedly from store to store buying odd items – a pair of socks, a packet of soap and a school exercise book. At length he came to an electronics shop where he browsed through the display and then, as though on impulse, bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone. The phone stayed in the box and the watchers were fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to use it straight away because it would require a period of charging. Rahe then whiled away time in a park, briefly visited a library and considered the programme of movies at a multiplex cinema. The consensus was that he had activated a pre-planned routine to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Several times he went through ‘dry cleaning’ channels – an escalator in a shopping mall, an underpass and an alley, each of which allowed him to observe at leisure the people in his wake. The police response was briefly to implement a procedure known as cascade surveillance, which involved filling his path with watchers, like water falling over a boulder. But Rahe moved so slowly through the city centre that it soon became necessary to revert to traditional methods and just hang a little further back.
Herrick realised time was getting on. Even though the raid on the Pan Arab Library had now been put back to 6.00 p.m. she would need to leave Vauxhall Cross by 5.15 and it was now 3.30. She went and found Dolph and they tried for a fifth time to raise Helene Guignal. She answered on the first ring, and in response to Herrick’s question, told them that she had her laptop with her and could pick up her email. The Bosnia photographs were sent to her.
