She remained oblivious as the man descended the steps and peered into the gloom, overcome almost immediately by the stench of death, and unable to control his nausea.
He had run outside and thrown up, cursing the girl and the country and been laughed at by his fellow fighters.
‘It was disgusting,’ he told them all. ‘A corpse wrapped in a blanket, stinking to hell and back. Let’s get out of here.’
But Mai knew nothing of this as she slept away the day, watched over by the little girl.
SYRIA/JORDAN BORDER
They met at the same place – a dip in the the rolling farmland that straddled the border area. The night had come suddenly. From daylight to darkness in less than an hour.
Ahmed sensed immediately that the contact’s mood had changed. The hang-dog expression, the exaggerated politeness and fawning had gone. Something had clearly gone right for him. For once he had not come to beg.
He led him back to his car on the Jordanian side and turned on the engine. The night was freezing.
The contact rubbed his hands and held them against the heating vent.
‘An old colleague of mine, we had worked together in the police force. I never trusted him, but …’
‘Get to the point.’ Ahmed slammed the steering wheel.
The contact smiled winningly. For the first time in a long time, there was a success to report. And he had done it with his own knowledge and ingenuity.
Where pressure had been needed, he had applied it.
Ahmed took the piece of paper with the Beard’s scribblings and scanned the coordinates. Perhaps the contact was more useful than he had thought. Perhaps he had earned a reprieve – for now.
He leaned across the man and opened his door. ‘Get out. Go home … I have messages to send.’
‘I trust you’re satisfied with my work.’
To Ahmed the contact sounded pathetic. ‘You did your job. When I return you will account for the money I gave you, which you have omitted to mention.’
‘But is this not the news that you wanted? The woman is alive!’
‘It would appear so, from what you have said.’ Ahmed fired up the engine. ‘The question is how long she will stay that way.’
Five minutes later, he stopped the car and reached for a miniature computer, with direct satellite connection. From a tiny, matt-black keyboard, he sent a three-line snap message to Moscow, promising more when he reached Amman. He had no idea why the news about an American woman was so important to them; no idea if it would arrive in time to be of use.
THIRTY KILOMETRES FROM THE JORDAN/SYRIA BORDER
For hours on end the little girl had sat watching Mai – but she didn’t wake up.
On the other side of her kitchen lay the body of her father, too heavy to move, too sad, too difficult.
One is asleep, the other is dead. The girl added the components of her life together but the equation had no result.
There was nowhere else to go and no help to be sought.
If the woman they had tortured didn’t wake up, she had no idea what she would do.
She caught sight of the kitchen clock and noticed that it was close to midnight. Without choices, though, time was meaningless.
It would move forward when it felt like it and stop when it stopped.
She pulled herself onto the table and swung her legs backwards and forwards, wishing away her life, hoping the night would pass more quickly and that dawn would bring answers.
JORDAN/SYRIA BORDER
The contact had not been at all happy about the meeting with Ahmed. The man had not even acknowledged his skill or his loyalty. He’d been treated like a third rate office boy, caught robbing the boss’s safe and promised a beating when the man returned.
For a moment, he considered how he might get even with him – but rejected the idea immediately. Ahmed was poison. Best left alone and kept as far away as possible.
He wasn’t happy either about the policeman. It had been a messy affair. No sooner had the creature told him to ‘get on with it’, than he’d rushed him with all the speed he could muster. The contact had shot at the head but missed, hitting the shoulder instead and finding himself on the ground with the furious, groaning animal on top of him. He’d been forced to fire another three rounds, before the man fell off him. Winded and shocked, he had staggered gingerly to his feet only to discover the policeman was still twitching. So he had fired again into the neck. W’allah’ee … My God, the man was unstoppable.
The contact arrived home and sank down on a chair in the kitchen. Thankfully his wife had gone to bed, so there’d be no need for any stupid questions or explanations.
He swallowed two cans of beer and reflected some more on the policeman.
He hadn’t disliked the man. In the past they had even shared a joke or two at work. Sure, he had stunk and been greedy. But that hadn’t been enough to kill him. No, no. He had killed the man because of what he knew. And because the fellow, by his own admission, would have done the same to him.
Nonetheless, he couldn’t help reflecting how casual, how mundane, killing had become. Hardly more than a brush-off; the removal of an irritant, the termination of an awkward encounter. Almost, the local pastime of choice.
The fact was that bodies were piling up right across the country – some days the dead seemed to outnumber the living. Whole families and neighbourhoods, the men he had known and smoked with at the shisha café – half at least were dead or missing.
To kill, he told himself, was no longer special. Now that everyone was doing it.
AMMAN/JORDAN
Ahmed took out the coordinates which the contact had given him and married them to his map of the region. Within about ten kilometres, he could gauge the spot from where that one hysterical call had been made.
‘The woman is missing, the woman is missing – kill her on sight.’
Ahmed wondered what kind of jerk would scream out like that. He despised emotion and lack of self-control and considered it the worst of the Arabs’ failings. They reminded him far too much of his Jordanian mother, sentimental and capricious as she’d been. He preferred to think only of his father, Russian to the core.
The man had been an unkempt giant, with his shirttails always hanging in the wind, sometimes funny and sweet, but more often brutal and drunk. ‘A moody, fat, fucking bastard,’ his mother had called him. But she had only said it once. And after she came out of hospital and the bruises and broken wrist had healed, she had never said it again.
Happy days.
From the sweet, silly mother and the tyrannical dad, he had learned how one animal gets to dominate another. The key was always violence.
Ahmed sifted through his computer records and began putting together a team.
If the American woman were still alive, he would need all his cunning – and a great deal of force – to get her out.
The hours passed and he worked on, honing the details.
TEL AVIV
Sam was about to leave the office on Ben Yehuda when he saw the message from Washington.
It had been given the wrong coding and taken more than two hours to reach him through the system.
‘What the fuck’s the matter with you people?’ he yelled out to no one in particular in the corridor outside. A few of the junior staff smirked, one or two pretended they hadn’t heard. Sam was just being Sam, they thought. Even after thirty years in Israel, a Russian bear was still a Russian bear.
‘Fucking people,’ he muttered again, lower this time, as he read through the printed report, underlining words and phrases, circling, querying. It was his way. He scrawled on everything.
Decades earlier when he had first joined the Mossad, his supervisor had asked him, ‘What’s with the graffiti, Sam? You scribble and doodle and write on everything … didn’t they have paper in Russia?’
Sam had thought of an obscene reply, but changed his mind. He was a junior. The supervisor was an idiot. Why bother to tell him that there’d
been a shortage of everything in Russia – including brains? If he didn’t know that by then, there was no point trying to enlighten him.
He finished reading the report and put his feet up on the table. Often, when he heard from Lydia, his mind went back to their last meeting – the hurried farewell in Moscow’s Park Dubki, his request that she denounce him, the terrible fear that they had seen in each other’s eyes.
What was it that had endured so many decades?
He had known her star would ascend in the Soviet establishment, but she had reached higher than he had ever thought possible. And she had surmounted all the contradictions and pressures that their ‘relationship’ had created.
To be able to love her husband, as she clearly did, and to rob his secrets at the same time, made her a very special asset.
On the face of it, her two lives lay in sharp contradiction but somehow she had made them complementary. In her own mind, there was no betrayal – she was simply satisfying two distinct and separate demands, instead of just one.
And yet there remained an essential, unanswered question.
To this day, he had no idea why she had proved such a faithful friend. They had never been lovers, not even the closest of friends. Perhaps he had simply provided her with a cause that she could believe in – not the Party thing where she had so excelled – but a proper cause, embraced by people like her, afraid of their true identity, trying to survive in a hostile land.
As he read the report again, one of the junior officers stuck his head around the door.
‘Yes, Ari?’
‘You’ve seen the signal from Washington?’
Sam lifted the piece of paper, waved it in the air and put it back on the table.
The young man was bright but often said stupid things. Perhaps if he spent more time reading and less in front of the mirror, he might learn something.
‘What’s on your mind?’ He gestured to Ari to sit down on the other side of the desk.
‘So the US is screwing the Brits once again. Nothing in it for us, I assume.’
Sam leaned back and put his hands behind his head. ‘I don’t agree.’
‘Why not? Why should we care? We don’t have a dog in this fight.’
Sam let his chair fall forward and leaned across the desk. ‘Wrong, my little friend, we have dogs in all sorts of fights, but sometimes they just sit and watch for a while.’
Ari shook his head. ‘As long as the Yanks aren’t screwing us, they can screw anyone they like. That’s my view anyway. And as for the Brits …’ He raised his middle finger to finish the sentence.
Sam sighed and took off his glasses. They no longer seemed to teach the bigger picture at the intelligence schools. Instead they hired kids with their certainties pre-loaded and no requirement to question them.
Life, thought Sam, was all about questions. Only Ari didn’t seem to know that. It was what had first attracted him to the Jewish faith into which he had been born in the city of Moscow.
He had been just thirteen when the rabbi had told him, ‘Judaism is the start of a question. It’s not an answer. Get that into your head before anything else. You go through life asking your questions and if you ask them in the right way and the right order, God may show you what you need to know.’
Or not.
He shook his head and fixed Ari with an unpleasant stare. ‘Listen, my stupid friend. Try to open up your mind and put some new ideas into it. What makes you think we have the Americans where we want them?’
‘Money.’
He nodded. ‘Money is a big part of it, but not everything. When you look back at the last 100 years, why did America betray so many of its friends?’
‘You tell me, Sam.’
‘Because they got bored with them. To them new is better than old. New friends are better than old ones. Old ones become complacent, difficult, hard to manage, demanding. New ones are keener to please, easier to manipulate.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘We are old friends, Ari, we and America. Which means that for them we have a sell-by date. Like everyone else. We don’t know when it will be. But it will come.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides we have other areas we need to work on.’
‘Such as?’
‘We’re short of friends in Europe – desperately short, I would say – and the Europeans are not all as stupid as our political masters would like to maintain.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Or as stupid as you are. So just as the Americans have bought themselves a very questionable favour from Moscow, we will buy a favour from the Brits – or at least they will owe us one. Got it?’
Ari looked puzzled. ‘You mean you’re going to tell the Brits what Washington has done to them. Pretty dangerous if they ever found out, no?’
Sam put his glasses back on. ‘This may surprise you but I don’t propose to tell that to the Americans.’ The thick eyebrows lifted again in Ari’s direction. ‘Do you?’
It was after ten when he left the office, still irritated by the late arrival of the signal from Washington, still cursing them all under his breath.
He knew they mocked him as an angry old man – but he didn’t care, didn’t want office friendships and didn’t trust the ones outside.
Sam didn’t have a home either – he had a space to live in. He had books that enthralled him and a collection of Russian music – the only thing in the world that could still make him cry.
He also had a garage that no one knew about where he kept the most private possessions of his life. Among them, two passports in other names, bought from a Lebanese forger, who had lived in London and died, not altogether inconveniently, on a visit to Beirut; a stash of money, mainly dollars and Swiss francs, the keys to an apartment in London, acquired by elaborate deception through the good offices of a Pakistani bank – a discreet service, provided to its most discreet customers.
And a collection of telephone numbers that he had long ago believed might one day be useful.
The garage was a lock-up beneath a tatty block of flats in Central Tel Aviv and Sam walked for an hour before he was convinced that no one had followed him.
Once inside, he took a flashlight from the bare concrete wall and leafed through a notebook, encoded from the words of a poem he had written half a century earlier at school in Moscow.
The name he took away with him was Margo Lane.
WESTERN SYRIA
‘How long have I been asleep?’
The girl stood over her, the thin face seemed sharper and more angular, silhouetted against the ceiling light.
‘Two days, maybe longer. I thought you would die.’
Mai tried to sit up. ‘I have to get out of here. They might …’
The girl brought her water. ‘They already came. They thought you were my mother, dead just like my father. I covered you in the same way.’
Without warning the kitchen light went out. Mai could hear the girl fumbling, looking for matches. Her hands shook in the cold.
I will die here unless I move now.
The light flickered and came on again. The girl shrugged. ‘We don’t get much power anymore. The generators were damaged in the fighting. Someone tried to repair them – but it’s not much good. Just a few hours of electricity a day. No more than that.’
Mai sat up and looked around. The pain in her abdomen seemed to come awake at the same time, coursing outwards into the rest of her body. The girl began boiling water on the stove.
‘The car – the one I saw outside – could I use it?’
‘This was my father’s. He loved it.’ She smiled for the first time. ‘His mother gave it to him ten years ago and he took so much trouble—’
‘But does it work?’ Mai couldn’t help the angry snap in her voice. It was as if she had slapped the child. The girl’s smile disappeared.
‘Yes, take it. I’ll give you the key. Take whatever you want. It’s why you came.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound angry …’
The girl said nothing. She turned off the kettle, handed Ma
i a cup of boiling water and watched her drink. ‘You should go now. Who knows if the people who came here will return? They’ll get angry and desperate when they can’t find you.’
In the hallway, the girl located a can of fuel and a bunch of keys, thrusting them into Mai’s hand.
‘You’re shaking,’ she told her.
‘Just cold, tired.’ Mai pulled the blood-stained jacket tightly around her, relieved to feel the hardness of the gun against her hip.
‘I’ve no food to give you.’ The girl shrugged. ‘One of my cousins said he’d bring something today or tomorrow …’ The voice drifted away.
‘Thank you for helping me.’ Mai put out her hand but the girl seemed not to notice it. They both knew that the cousin would never come. ‘I’ll get help and I’ll come back.’
‘No, please don’t.’
‘Why not?’
The girl took a step back. ‘You can’t make promises, not in a war. They don’t come true. You may want to come back, but it’ll be impossible. I’m telling you. If you come that’s good, but it’s better for me to think that you won’t. Here …’ She opened a box and pulled out a thick red jacket. ‘This was my mother’s – you should take it. You can’t keep wearing the coat you’ve got.’
Mai leaned against the door. Time was running out. She knew she had to go. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked the girl.
‘Lubna.’
‘What will you do, Lubna, when I leave?’
‘The same as everyone else. Try to survive as long as I can.’
‘Then come with me. We’ll be safer together.’
‘I can’t leave my father.’
‘He’s dead – there’s nothing you can do for him. We’ll leave a note for your mother if she ever returns …’
The girl knelt down and rummaged through the piles of clothes and papers on the floor. She found a plastic bag and put a shirt inside it, along with a child’s toy. In the poor light, it looked like a rubber frog.
Fatal Ally Page 17
