Fatal Ally

by Tim Sebastian

  ‘Is that all you have?’Mai asked.

  Lubna stood staring into the semi-darkness. It seemed to Mai that her mind and body were in very different places.

  ‘It’s enough,’ she replied. ‘We’re not going far, are we?’

  LONDON

  They were there when she walked in. Tribal chiefs and fawners, an expensive suit with a tie pin and a couple of overweight farm animals from the Foreign Office, glancing at their watches, because it was way past bedtime and they’d promised they wouldn’t be ‘too late’ home.

  And yet Margo thought she could see something close to excitement in their eyes, because blood always focussed the mind. That and the ritual hunt for a scapegoat.

  As she sat down, Manson leaned back in his chair and stared at her across the wide conference table. ‘You read the reports?’

  ‘Thank you – they were thoughtfully provided by the driver at the airport.’

  ‘Impressions?’

  ‘Obvious ones so far.’ She kept her eyes on Manson. ‘A leak from our end or Mazurin blew it himself. We don’t know yet.’

  ‘And the Americans?’

  ‘Not saying anything – as if they’re afraid they’re going to get the blame.’

  ‘Should they?’

  She could feel the irritation start to rise inside her. This was turning into a public interrogation. You put a person up against a wall, ask them a sheaf of questions they can’t answer – and make them look an idiot to anyone who’s watching. Golden rule if you want to succeed – tell people what you know, not what you don’t know. And right now nothing was certain.

  Margo’s eyes tracked around the table. ‘I see very little point in a meeting where we discuss our own ignorance. We need facts not supposition. Give me forty-eight hours and there’ll be something meaningful to talk about.’

  ‘That’s fine – but questions are being asked now. Not tomorrow or next Thursday. A man and his wife died in very violent circumstances in an operation that we ran.’ Manson raised an eyebrow. ‘You ran, to be precise. People want to know what this means and where it’s all heading.’ He locked his hands behind his head.

  ‘Which people?’

  Manson threw her an unpleasant look. ‘All of us.’

  ‘All right.’ She got to her feet. The eyes followed her. ‘The investigation starts now …’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Manson smiled. ‘Forbes here will be heading that one up. We thought it better to have it handled by someone outside the immediate loop.’

  Along the table, Forbes’s bright red ears hoved into view.

  Margo shook her head. ‘The hell he will. My operation. My agent down …’

  ‘Upstairs has already agreed.’

  ‘Then you can tell upstairs that I haven’t.’

  There was silence for a moment. The assembled faces, she thought, had no idea that the evening’s entertainment would be so absorbing. Mummy and Daddy didn’t usually argue like this in front of the children.

  Wasn’t like the old Service, she thought – not the one she had joined so many years earlier, where the fights were quick and dirty and out of sight. And the only sign was an empty desk the day after, and a brown box on its way to someone who wasn’t coming back.

  Didn’t happen that often these days. She was damned if it would happen to her. Damned if she’d take the blame.

  But it had all been agreed in advance. She could see that now. She was the end of the meeting – not the beginning. All the decisions had been taken before she arrived. Blame defined and apportioned even as her plane touched down. There’d be no appeal. Not tonight.

  Manson unlocked his hands and put his elbows on the table. ‘Please wait outside, Lane.’

  Margo gathered up her file. She didn’t look at the faces. Didn’t care to see the smug satisfaction that would be written on them. None of them had the first idea about what had happened but, hallelujah, they had taken a decision. Yes, they’d done something. Ticked a box. Put a stroppy officer in her place.

  One of the farm animals cleared his throat noisily. Otherwise there was silence.

  ‘I’ll be in my office,’ she said.

  She stood on the Embankment in the cold drizzle, waiting for the bus home.

  I should have known what was coming.

  Should have seen it in their eyes.

  Manson had entered her office without knocking. Hadn’t wanted to sit down, so it wasn’t to be a discussion. He’d come with an order.

  ‘You’re suspended for a couple of weeks. Go home, get some rest. We’re going to put the pieces back on the board and try to work out who moved them. We’ll call you when we need your input …’

  ‘Fuck you.’ She couldn’t remember ever saying that in the Service, but tonight it came easily enough.

  Manson feigned surprise. ‘No need to get touchy about this. It’s for your own good. Stops it all becoming too personal. New procedures.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since now.’

  ‘I’ll take it higher. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘You can try.’ Manson looked at his watch. ‘Getting late and I have a busy day tomorrow.’ He turned to go.

  ‘You’re scared I’m going to upset the Americans. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?’

  He turned back to face her but didn’t answer.

  ‘Scared that your little Agency friends’ll cut up rough, huh? Much easier to take me out of the equation. Bury it all – just as you did three years ago. Not in the national interest to find out what happened, is it?’ Margo smiled without warmth. ‘After all it’s only a Russian and his ex-wife who died. The man wasn’t any use to us anymore – so it’s not as if we’ve lost anyone of value, is it?’

  ‘You’re becoming ridiculous – it may have escaped your notice but this Service doesn’t exist to satisfy your personal agenda. Or your emotional needs. We all know how you’d handle this investigation. Fact is you’re totally blinded by your hatred of the Americans – so you’re off the grid. Now and until it’s done. I’m not about to risk compromising our US operations by letting you jump up and down on their heads. Got it?’

  She smiled without warmth. ‘Hit a nerve, did I? Going to give me some of your best cliches about moving on, drawing a line, taking a view. Fact is, you’re going to investigate fuck all – you and I both know that. Forbes, can barely find his way to the Gents. This whole thing stinks.’

  But Manson was halfway through the door and he wasn’t looking back.

  The bus was almost empty when she boarded. At the front, a group of teenagers were arguing about who had drunk most that evening. Margo thought they were equally wasted. The girls had no coats, just thin dresses and high heels and plenty of eye makeup. They looked frozen, exhausted, but tomorrow, she reckoned, they’d be back at school.

  And I’ll be at home, wondering if I still have a job.

  As the group got out, one of the boys stopped beside her seat. He was probably no more than eighteen, just as drunk as all the others, but the alcohol seemed to have fuelled his aggression.

  For a few seconds Margo stared straight ahead and then glanced up at him.

  ‘What you looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Especially not you.’

  He took a step closer, his knee against her hip. She could see his hand moving to grasp her shoulder. But there was something so defiant in the look she threw him, so confident, that it made him stop, and slink past instead.

  She didn’t watch him go. On the street one of his friends yelled out ‘scaredy-cat’ and a few other voices joined in.

  But it was just as well he had gone. For a few seconds, no more than that, she had been ready to hurt the boy – really hurt him – just to make herself feel better.

  Not a good move, she reflected. Neither clever nor controlled.

  Of course, she was ready for a fight. After the last forty-eight hours, there wasn’t the slightest doubt about that. But a serious fight. Not something
stupid with a kid.

  AMMAN, JORDAN

  Ahmed cursed the traffic in the narrow streets around Shmeisani. Everywhere he looked cars were blocked by trucks, old ladies hobbled into the middle of the road, children chased balls. A hundred distractions on every corner.

  We Arabs, he thought, we consider no one but ourselves. We need to cross the road – we cross. A thousand cars and elephants may be in the way, but we just don’t care. We want something, we do it, we take it.

  And they were his rules too. He drove without flinching. Other drivers saw the silver Nissan bearing down on them and realized instinctively that he wouldn’t stop. Some could hold out longer than others – till the crash was a few seconds away – but they got the idea in the end. Ahmed wouldn’t brake and he wouldn’t back down. And if he smashed another car and smashed his own he wouldn’t care about either.

  He turned off a roundabout and headed east. Behind him were the lights of the seven hills that surround the scorched, stone city of Amman. Blocks of flats, hammered half-finished into the rocks. A single shepherd on a donkey.

  But Ahmed never looked back. He drove the way he lived.

  As if in a hurry to die.

  ZARQA, JORDAN

  The three men came from different parts of the city. One from a villa near the stinking Zarqa river, another from the suburb of Russeifa, the third from the Hateen refugee camp, where the police never visited, and the gangs decided among themselves on matters of law and disorder.

  Like Ahmed’s best teams, they were united only in mutual hatred and a desire for money.

  Their loyalty was therefore assured until the job was done and payment had been made.

  They had left their cars outside the camp, skirted the market and the rain-soaked highway, past the UN school where the girls were flooding out in white headscarves – lone symbols of innocence, oblivious to the filth in the narrow, broken streets around them.

  And then sharp left, down an almost sheer drop to the blackened, concrete sprawl below, the streets barely wide enough for a single car, the sky criss-crossed by telephone wires that hung loose from crooked poles. Close by, thick black smoke from the oil refinery gushed out unceasingly over the city.

  Ahmed’s directions led them to a house with the words ‘For Sale’ spray-painted in red on the brick. An unwanted, stubby little shack, that leaned against a small warehouse, as if unable to stand on its own.

  ‘Push the door,’ Ahmed had said. ‘There’s no lock. But no one will come in. Wait for me. I’ll come when I can.’

  The two younger men rested at the table in silence. The third sat apart on a step. A week earlier he had killed fighters from both the groups that the younger men represented. And it gave him quiet satisfaction.

  The two victims had thought they were so righteous, so disciplined, but he knew better, knew them for the cowards they were – one a paedophile, the other a thief. Both had deserved to die and his own faction had sent him to do the job.

  Not an easy task. But necessary. Like catching rats. And he had pledged – as he did each day – to do his duty. The same way he cared for his mother, blinded by diabetes and sharing a tent with a corrugated plastic roof and five other sisters from Syria.

  Every Friday he would massage her red, raw hands and feet and rub in the special cream that someone had brought him from Amman. And it made him feel good because it was the only time she ever smiled and called him a good boy and made him recall, once again, the times when everyone used to smile and sing and dance – long before all the killing had begun.

  The younger men were chain-smoking, chucking the butts on the floor. Around them the air was stinking and stale. Every few seconds they checked their mobile phones, but the signal was weak and no messages came in.

  The older one watched them through the smoke and enjoyed their insecurity.

  It was quite possible that he would get the order to despatch them – only not until the job was done. Then he could shoot them like the filthy dogs they were, steal their share of the contract and buy some things he wanted.

  Or maybe, as sometimes happened, no order would come and the three of them would simply walk away and never see each other again. He didn’t mind either way.

  Whatever took place, it was God’s will.

  THIRTY MILES FROM JORDAN/SYRIA BORDER

  For a moment it struck her as funny that she could think of food. But in her mind she was back in a Washington hotel, near Chevy Chase having breakfast with Harry. They had spent a night, rushed and guilty, arriving separately in the restaurant as if they were strangers, forced to share a table.

  Around them were groups of kids with their dragging, slapping flip-flops and eyes half-closed. She remembered thinking that the young always look younger in the morning – their skin unmarked by time or conscience – the old, much older in the new daylight, tired and slow, as if dragged unwilling from their deathbed.

  The way she felt now.

  At first, the car’s engine had faltered, whined and moaned as if it had hibernated for the winter and was unwilling to be disturbed. But after a few kilometres, it seemed to settle into a rhythm.

  Mai could feel the tyres were wildly uneven and the steering worn.

  So we’re both damaged, she thought. Both on our final journey, as far as we can go.

  She had wondered about whether to travel in darkness, deciding in the end that there would be more traffic by day and they would attract less attention. But she had told Lubna they would move only in short stretches.

  ‘We’re both tired. There’ll be lookouts all the way to the border. People will be searching for us. Lots of people. I’m sorry.’

  For a moment the girl said nothing, staring out at the flat, frozen fields and the scattered concrete hamlets. Then she turned to Mai. ‘Last night I just wanted to die like my father. Now we’re going somewhere and I want to get there.’

  ‘But it’s dangerous. You need to understand that …’

  ‘I understand better than you do. I’m not afraid to die. Tomorrow or next week, it’s OK. But just for now, we’re on a journey. Neither of us knows how it will end.’

  They stopped in a grey, half-shuttered village. There was bread, some olives and dried fruit and Lubna scooped money from her father’s old wallet and proudly handed it to Mai.

  The baker, nervous and over-friendly, tried to make conversation. Where had they come from? Where were they going? How clear were the roads? But Mai sidestepped the questions. They had come to see a relative, a very old and sick mother. Hard to help these days, wasn’t it? So much tension, so much pain and suffering.

  The baker nodded sympathetically and watched them leave.

  Outside in the busy street, they seemed unnoticed. To all the world, a mother buying food with her daughter.

  Or a widow and a fatherless child.

  Either way Mai reckoned they would fit in well with the violent reality around them. She wondered if that was the reason she had brought Lubna with her. Did she care about the little creature’s safety or just her own? She didn’t know.

  In any case, they would inch their way to the border, find refuge for the night and try to search for a crossing into Jordan. Just the two of them. Whatever happened from now on, they would live or die together.

  Watching from his counter, the baker told his wife that the two strangers looked sick as wild dogs and he didn’t believe they were visiting a relative.

  He saw them get into their car and noted how they fell instantly on the food they had bought. It seemed to him they ate like animals, starving and desperate.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ his wife asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied and continued to watch.

  She drew the black hijab tighter across her hair and shook her head in contempt. ‘Do something useful,’ she said. ‘Bring more bread from the cellar. Only a fool stares at nothing.’

  TELL SHIHAB, SYRIA

  Youssef had not known such fear since he’d been a child. He remembe
red his father screaming at him when he had played truant from school, remembered the beating with a horsewhip, and the bruises on his face that had lasted for weeks after. But this was far worse.

  After the last beating, he had thought himself in the clear, safe from further humiliation. But for nearly an hour, the commander had harangued him in the basement of a villa, cursing the ground he walked on and the mother who had given him life. ‘Why had the prisoner not been moved? Why was she so far west? She should have been smuggled further east to a safer area. Why had that not happened? Every ‘why’ came with a punch to the stomach and Youssef knew it would only get worse.

  ‘Our people have circled the area several times. They went house to house. Soon they will do it again. Someone must have lied, someone must be covering for the woman, or she has threatened them. You should know the answers, brother. You went inside her mind. You know her better than any of us.’

  The commander stuck his great, hooked nose, with the bloody veins at the side, right up close into Youssef’s face and smiled as a revelation seemed to come to him. ‘So we know why this filthy American spy was allowed to escape. We know this very well, Youssef, don’t we? Of course we do.’ He chuckled, showing Youssef a mouthful of yellow and gold. ‘No one but a lunatic would leave a highly trained American operative with a single guard in an empty house. No one, that is except an enemy who was working with her the whole time and just waiting for the chance to let her escape.’

  He punched Youssef twice. This time from the left side, straight into the kidneys. Youssef faltered but managed to stay upright. ‘You are wrong, my brother …’ The words came out in gasps. He struggled to breathe, to speak.

  ‘Speak louder,’ the commander shouted. ‘You make no sense. Louder.’

  ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. I was working on the woman for days, preparing for her grand execution and the television pictures that would have gone around the world. A few more hours and the whore would have confessed everything – and I personally would have cut off her lying head. This I promise you, my brother.’