Fatal Ally

by Tim Sebastian

  The commander turned away, then pivoted like a dancer on the balls of his feet and slammed his fist into Youssef’s mouth. ‘I believe you, brother. If you tell me it’s true, I believe you. I just have to be sure. You understand. And the more pain that you bear with such bravery and determination, the more I will believe you.’

  Question, punch. Question, punch. The commander continued the rhythm until he got tired and hungry and Youssef was on his knees.

  He went into the kitchen and returned with cheese and water. Sprawling in a chair, he swallowed a wedge of cheese and gave Youssef a friendly smile.

  ‘How are you, my brother? You hungry? You wanna eat?’

  Youssef’s eyes had closed and his lips moved soundlessly as if he were praying.

  ‘You see where your lies and your treachery have brought you.’ The commander drank greedily from a bottle. ‘This is the room you will die in, my brother. In a few minutes, when I’ve had some more food and said my prayers, I will get up and come over to you and cut your head off. You understand?’

  Youssef’s eyes remained closed.

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. Confess your guilt and I will make it very quick. A single bullet. Fast and straight. There will be no reprisals on your family, I swear to you. We will bury you tonight and prayers will be said for your soul. You will feel no pain … if not, my brother, your death will be very different. I will cut very slowly around your neck and it will take a long time to make you die, and you will scream and scream and beg me to finish the job.’ He stuck another hunk of cheese in his mouth. ‘Is this what you want, Youssef? Think very carefully …’

  Youssef opened his eyes. His body drooped, his face was white and covered in sweat.

  ‘I have told you the truth, brother. I would not lie. As God is my witness.’

  WASHINGTON DC

  ‘Harry.’

  The voice was so faint that he barely heard it.

  ‘Harry.’

  And he was on the stairs, taking them as fast as he could, because the voice was no longer hers. Her breath barely strong enough to exhale his name. It was, he thought, like a farewell cry from a traveller passing through this world, heading to the next.

  He could see she was lost, disoriented. Awoken, somehow, from drug-induced sleep, eyes blinking, wet with tears.

  Perhaps she had cried herself awake.

  She tried again to speak but her throat was dry. He gave her water.

  ‘I was afraid you’d gone, Harry.’

  ‘I’m here, my dear. I haven’t gone anywhere.’

  ‘But you did go, didn’t you?’ The voice an urgent whisper. ‘You haven’t been with me these last few days. Not in your heart.’

  She never missed anything. He should have remembered that, at least. Forty years, living in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, she could have read him his pulse rate without even counting the seconds.

  In a wild moment of fantasy, he told himself it wasn’t too late to stop. All he had to do was to meet Yanayev and tell him to order the unthinkable – end the whole saga with Mai, stop it dead where it stood.

  ‘I was worried …’ He looked down at Rosalind’s face and saw that her eyes had closed and she was once again asleep.

  Harry got up and tiptoed out of the room. He’d had no idea what he’d been going to say to her.

  Perhaps he could have confessed to a minor sin or two, used a meaningless admission to mask the much larger deceit. A born liar, toying as all liars do, with scraps of truth.

  And yet, however he dissembled, she already knew what that truth looked like.

  LONDON

  Margo lay in bed for hours, but there was no question of sleeping. A single message had been left on the answerphone and the shock wouldn’t go away.

  The shock and the memories. Half-closed and put away. But never forgotten.

  Sam.

  At dawn she showered and dressed. But fatigue pressed down on her; the day still-born, half-hidden in mist.

  He had chosen eight a.m. at London’s Paddington Station – the time of bustling bodies and bags when all eyes focussed on the day ahead, seeing nothing else around them.

  On his back a long, brown coat with a faded, velvet collar that smelt of cafés in Central Europe and the thick, curly hair struggling between grey and white.

  But, even with a time-gap of twenty years, her eyes plucked him straight from the early-morning faces.

  The self-deprecating smile, the half-suggestion from the eyebrows that he knew more about you than you wanted. A man in the middle of a crowd, but so totally alone.

  Sam, you haven’t changed.

  Sam, from a once-locked cell in Moscow.

  They left the station and sat in a small café in a cluttered, side street.

  ‘You chose a good day to come,’ she told him.

  ‘The cold?’

  ‘That and everything else. There’s an equal chance of rain or snow. We won’t know which till it happens.’

  ‘You Brits never seem able to make up your mind.’ He stirred his coffee thoughtfully.

  She put her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her hands. ‘So did you come all this way just to see me?’

  ‘I was in the neighbourhood … hell.’ He shook his head. ‘Why should I deny it? Yes, I came all this way to see you.’

  ‘After twenty years?’

  ‘Doesn’t feel like it, somehow …’

  ‘I hope you’ve got something more important to tell me than that. This is not a day when I feel like playing games.’

  Sam smiled.

  It had been around five a.m. that morning when her mind had spewed up all the memories.

  She could still see the Israeli intelligence barracks, the low, squat building, encased in barbed wire, pre-fabbed and dumped off a desert road, miles from anywhere; see herself sliding from the front seat of the dusty car, with the white-hot sun, glaring down on the whole ghastly enterprise.

  For two days, she had watched the interrogation, veering from the subtle to the almost agricultural, a slow and visibly excruciating process, as a young Palestinian fighter was broken – first the body, then the mind, then both together.

  After the first day, she had called Manson in London. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s against everything we stand for.’

  ‘Then tell them to go easy on the fellow.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Manson had cleared his throat noisily on the clearest of phone lines. ‘We need this, Lane. There’s credible intelligence that this man has information, vital to our security.’

  ‘You mean he knows of an attack against the UK?’

  ‘That’s my understanding.’

  Coy bastard, she recalled thinking. Back to the clinical office speak, the moment you’re on shaky ground.

  ‘It’s still illegal. What they’re doing is illegal. We both know that.’

  She had waited for an answer, but the line had gone silent.

  The third morning they had kept her in the outer lobby, refusing to let her through to the interrogation. Thirty minutes, an hour. She had become irritated, then downright angry.

  She tried her mobile phone, but there was no signal.

  And then the man who had led the team the day before had appeared in front of her in khaki fatigues and asked her to follow him.

  Sam, with the same self-deprecating smile and the tight curly hair.

  He had sat her down in his office and told her in heavily-accented English that the Palestinian had died. They had miscalculated. He had obviously been weaker than they had imagined.

  She remembered the sudden numbness, the shortness of breath. ‘You tortured him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Such a simple, unadorned admission, she had thought; in a desert outpost where life and laws counted for nothing, where humanity was left God alone knew where, and only the information had value.

  Sam pushed a piece of pape
r across the table. ‘The names of his associates, the address in south London where they are headquartered, the plan and the rough timetable for its execution.’ Sam had lingered over the final word for effect. ‘I suggest you pass this to your superiors without delay.’

  She had got up to leave, but he had blocked her way to the door.

  ‘You could say thank you.’

  ‘I could,’ she had replied, ‘but I’m damned if I’m going to.’

  Keep it normal, she thought. Order tea and a croissant. Don’t show any sign that you’re ill at ease.

  Sam was staring at her, expressionless.

  She knew the technique: arrange a meeting, say nothing, hope that your interlocutor will give something useful away, just to fill the silence. But she wasn’t going to play that game.

  ‘We could sit here all day, like this …’ He glanced out of the window.

  ‘And then you’d have wasted your time coming. As far as I remember you’re not a man who likes wasting time.’

  In that moment, he seemed to make a decision, pushing away the coffee cup, wiping a few drops from the table top with his napkin.

  ‘I’ve been here a few times since we last met. I often thought of getting in contact with you – but I never did.’

  He paused as if expecting her to say something – but she didn’t.

  ‘I never did, because in the first few years, I thought you were stuck-up and judgmental – a typically hypocritical Brit, going round the world, condemning other people who, for whatever reasons, didn’t seem to meet your exalted standards.’ He closed his mouth and sniffed loudly. ‘Your so-called standards.’

  ‘And you stayed at home, torturing and killing people in the name of self-defence and convincing yourself that in each and every situation you were the ultimate victims.’

  Sam smiled. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘Nor have you.’

  ‘But that’s where you’re wrong, Margo Lane.’ The smile stayed where it was. ‘I’ve changed a great deal. And that’s why I came here to see you.’

  She sat back in her chair and stared at him. The kind of expression, he thought, that people seem to reserve for second-hand car dealers when they make their initial offer.

  ‘So you’ve seen the light. That’s it? New Sam? New Israel? You’re turning the page.’

  The smile tapered off. ‘It’s not that simple, Margo Lane …’

  ‘Oh I get it …’

  ‘No, I don’t think you do. Hear me out. Please. I came a long way to say this to you.’

  She nodded.

  ‘What happened twenty years ago … we can argue about it. The Palestinian shouldn’t have died and I’m sorry he did. But a great many lives were saved as a result of the information we extracted. British lives. On British streets.’

  She opened her mouth to speak but he held up his hand. ‘Wait a minute. Please. I’m not saying that torture is always justified. To be perfectly honest with you, the excuses are always produced that we had no other way … the man had information that could save lives, the bomb was ticking …’ The hand went up again. ‘This is very rarely true – sometimes our people exaggerate – we both know this. But it was true when we met twenty years ago.’

  She had stopped trying to interrupt. He could see that her temper had calmed.

  ‘When I said to you that I’ve changed, this is absolutely true. I have changed fundamentally and in ways you could not even imagine. So have many people in the Israeli intelligence service. Why do you think that all the former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet are in the peace movement? Mm? Why did six of them go public in a film and declare that we – Israelis – are making life intolerable for millions of Palestinians on a daily basis? That’s change, Margo Lane, real change – by my standards and by yours.’

  ‘Just words, Sam,’ she said quietly. ‘Just words.’

  He shook his head. ‘The fact is that successive governments in Israel are leading the country to isolation and ruin. Politics are dominated by settlers who are nutcases and won’t listen to reason of any kind. I love my country and that’s why I’m speaking to you. After all these years we have no peace, no friends, growing boycotts and sanctions and a human rights reputation that’s sinking fast …’

  ‘You still have America …’

  ‘For the moment that’s true. But our perception is that this will not last forever. Patience with our policies is wearing thin, especially among Democrats. We also have a prime minister who seems to enjoy sticking his finger up their arse whenever he has the opportunity. So there’s no guarantee the relationship will be the same in five years’ time. We have to think ahead …’

  ‘And you’ve come looking for friends in Europe …’ It was only half a question.

  ‘Of course I have. I’ve also come with a little token of good faith.’ His eyes locked onto hers and held steady. ‘From what I hear, maybe I arrived at the right time.’

  And then he had said his piece. The story of an American operation in Syria that had gone badly wrong, the US national security adviser who had needed an urgent favour from the Russians – the Russians who had insisted he pay in kind – and the cold, unvarnished fact that he had done exactly that.

  The price, paid in full by Arkady Mazurin.

  She wrote furiously as he spoke. Half shorthand, half longhand, with scrawls and arrows and numbered pages in her notebook.

  And when he had finished, he could see the lines of disbelief forming across her forehead. He watched her stop writing and run a hand through her hair. The emotions were colliding inside her. Anger and amazement, of course – and yet her self-control, her steel were impressive. He reckoned she was a formidable enemy.

  ‘Allow me to imagine your thoughts.’ He leaned across the table. ‘Sam has taken leave of his senses. Sam is a fantasist, or just a liar, like so many of us in this business. Your superiors will say it, even if you don’t. It’s for that reason, that I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: reveal the identity of our source, who is personally very precious to me and who I have known and respected for many years. I would never do such a thing, unless it was vitally important, but I know you’ll treat the information with the utmost care.’

  ‘How do you know that, Sam?’

  ‘I’m not a bad judge of character.’

  A few moments later he stood up and the self-deprecating, little smile had returned.

  ‘I’ll remain here in London for a few days. I’ll pass on whatever I can. Seems to me you’ll need some up-to-date information …’ He paused for a second. ‘If you do what I think you’ll do.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘In your position you don’t have many choices.’ He held out his hand. ‘I don’t expect any thanks, this time.’

  She tilted her head, acknowledging the shared memory.

  ‘Just as well.’

  ZARQA, JORDAN

  Ahmed surveyed the three men with evident distaste.

  What he most disliked about them was their hypocrisy, the veils of piety in which they wrapped their violence and greed – the endemic self-delusion that they were somehow God’s appointed judges on earth, licenced to determine who should live and die.

  Ahmed had never objected to violence – but he didn’t cloak it in righteousness.

  He used it because it was essential to the job, designated by his masters. An alternative tool for the time when warnings went unheeded and bribes were inadequate.

  So he knew what he was – a fixer, a facilitator, who was simply too violent and ruthless to cross. And most people – including the scum in front of him – knew that too.

  For now, though, he would humour them, treat them with the kind of respect they didn’t deserve, but make sure they knew the penalties for disobedience.

  He dragged his chair closer to the table. ‘Thank you for coming and I apologize for making you wait. All three of you have worked with me in the past as individuals – this is the first time you have come tog
ether as a group.’ His eyes moved across each of the faces. ‘You represent, shall we say, very different interests. If that’s a problem for any of you, then you should say so now. You can walk out of the door and forget you were ever here. Should you decide to walk later, after hearing about our project, this would not be tolerated. Do I make myself clear?’

  The men glanced at each other, then back to Ahmed.

  ‘We’re going into Syria to bring out a woman that my associates wish to interrogate. They will pay good money for your services – what’s more they will pay you in cash, once she has been delivered safely across the border.’

  ‘How much?’ The older man leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Thirty thousand dollars each. All three of you have worked with me before. You know that I keep my word.’

  ‘Who’s this woman and where is she?’ It was one of the younger men from the Al-Qaeda affiliate.

  ‘She’s American. Her last-known position was some thirty kilometres from the border. But there are people after her – so I have only a vague idea where she is now. You three are going to help me get to her. You all have groups in the area – some of them will be hunting her as we speak. You need to use your contacts …’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ The older one shook his head. ‘You want us to betray our own brothers, so you can take an American bitch to safety? I don’t go round helping Western whores to escape. She’s a spy, isn’t she? Uh? … Fuck you!’

  Ahmed studied the man’s face. It was just possible that he had underestimated his stupidity. He ignored the outburst. ‘As I said, the fee for each of you is thirty thousand dollars in cash.’

  ‘Fifty!’ The older man’s index finger jabbed the air with excitement. ‘Fifty thousand to get the bitch out and across the border.’

  Ahmed’s eyes swivelled towards him. It was clear his objection had been purely tactical – a simple attempt to extract more money. But now he would be the one to pay.

  ‘You can leave,’ he told him, abruptly. ‘You’re no longer required. Get out of here.’