Fatal Ally

by Tim Sebastian

  Harry picked up the cup, drained it and sat back in his chair. ‘You do many of these?’

  Perhaps everyone talked to their executioner. He didn’t know the etiquette.

  In any case there was no reply and the easy smile had gone. Business was almost complete.

  Harry shut his eyes. It took only a few seconds for him to know that the man had lied. As the acid coursed down his throat he thought he could taste his own death in slow motion, as if a long, sharp blade was gouging out his life from deep inside him, silencing the scream that no one could hear.

  ‘You buried her where?’

  ‘You want a postcode?’

  Manson turned his chair and stared at the river below. ‘Somehow, I don’t think anybody’s going to ask for it.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Fucking hellhole the Middle East, isn’t it?’

  She said nothing.

  He clasped his hands under his chin and watched her carefully. ‘You know that Harry Jones died last night?’

  She raised a single eyebrow. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Why would I be surprised? People die all the time. I wasn’t expecting it today.’

  ‘His wife died overnight – he committed suicide shortly afterwards.’

  ‘And you know this from …?’

  ‘Something as secret as a White House press statement.’ Manson made a face. ‘Implication being that he died of a broken heart.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘Except for him …’ Manson got up. ‘Anyway, we’re told the president is devastated to have lost such a close and trusted member of his team …’

  ‘But you know better …’

  ‘I do.’ He held open the door but stood, blocking her path. ‘By the way …’ He allowed a few seconds of silence to tick past, opened his mouth to speak but seemed to change his mind.

  ‘You have something to say?’

  ‘It can wait.’

  She closed the gap between them. ‘Let me help you on this one. You want to ask if I’d have carried out your order to kill the American woman – but you don’t even have the guts to say it out loud. Typical, isn’t it? You give illegal orders but you hesitate to spell them out in plain English.’

  He turned away.

  ‘So would I have put a bullet in her head? If she’d been standing in front of me, fit and healthy and wishing me a nice day … would I have pulled that trigger?’

  ‘Get out of here, Lane.’ He wouldn’t look at her; had nothing to say; knew he’d been played.

  ‘We’ve been piecing together a few unfortunate events here, Alec.’

  The president’s deep baritone was slower, more measured than normal.

  Or was it the split-second delay on the transatlantic line? The prime minister hunched low over his desk.

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘We had an operation in Syria. Went badly wrong. Some collateral …’ He hesitated. ‘The fact is some of our folks crossed red lines. And some of those lines were yours.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Won’t happen again, Alec …’

  ‘It would be extremely damaging if it did. In all sorts of ways.’

  ‘My understanding is that you were taking certain counter-measures of your own. Is that right?’

  ‘I have no knowledge of that, Mr President. I can’t conceive of a situation where I would order what you call “counter-measures”. Our countries have a strong and vital alliance. It’s in both our interests to keep it that way.’

  There was a loud, insistent silence on the transatlantic line.

  Much to be said, thought the prime minister. No wish to say it.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr President.’

  ‘Goodbye, Alec.’

  Sears came in from the outer office where he’d been listening but he didn’t sit down.

  ‘You sent your signal, Alec. Clear and unequivocal. Just as you wanted. He got it.’

  ‘Did he?’ The prime minister bit hard into his lower lip. Always dangerous to revisit decisions when it’s too late to change them. ‘Think they’ll do it again?’

  Sears stood for a moment in the open doorway. ‘Course they will. You know that as well as I do. It’s who they are.’

  The overnight guest in the White House replaced the handset and turned to face the president.

  ‘The man lied to your face.’

  The president shook his head. ‘Not exactly. He was 3,500 miles away at the time. Besides …’ He paused for a moment. ‘If allies ever told each other the truth, they wouldn’t be allies for very long.’

  Lydia stood for a moment and took in the magnificent stone courtyard, the sprawling creeper, the candle-lit tables along the thick, rough walls. At each of them she could make out the lined, worn faces of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian elite – the talkers, always outnumbering the doers, the caring and the plotting, the dark, silent figures who came just to watch all the others or to tell their fortune from upturned cups of coffee.

  Once, long ago, the American Colony Hotel had been in Jordan, only Israel had expanded its borders, the way you did in the Middle East, and the proud building with its metre-thick walls, had woken up in 1967 to find itself in a different country.

  She remembered the last time she had seen him – could still smell the airless, summer afternoon in Moscow’s Park Dubki, the fumes from the filthy buses, wafting over the trees, the sweat on his face and the enormity of the fear etched in his eyes.

  And even with thirty years gone by, his back to the doorway, she recognized the tight curly hair and the elbows on the little table, the way he had sat when he had introduced himself at the university.

  Or had it happened to someone else?

  Sam, Sam, Sam …

  As he turned, she stumbled, glimpsing the hesitant, knowing smile, grabbing at the nearest table, steadying herself, seeing him open his arms wide in greeting.

  And they both said it at the same time. ‘A glass of tea in Jerusalem.’

  A promise, undiluted by time and distance, now kept in full.

  As so often when there is much to say, they said nothing; held hands, playing and replaying the silent memories between them.

  The baker and his wife never spoke about that evening.

  He never told her of his meeting with the commander – or the fear and the cold and the long walk home that had almost killed him.

  And she, in turn, never spoke about the American woman, although she thought about her every day and wondered if she had gone home to Missouri or California, or somewhere else with a strange name.

  She was glad of Lubna’s company.

  The girl had driven back with her and, as the days passed, never shown the slightest desire to leave.

  She worked hard in the shop, learned quickly about making bread. She was clean and efficient but she seldom spoke. And the baker’s wife had never seen her smile.

  When they did talk, it was only about matters of the day. After all, both the past and the future lay in impenetrable darkness, best undisturbed.

  To those of the townspeople who asked, Lubna was the orphaned daughter of distant relatives – two committed fighters, killed in a Russian airstrike. The daily reality of Syria. No need for explanation.

  And the baker? He too had become silent, afraid to look in the wrong direction, say the wrong thing, speak – God forbid – to the wrong person.

  He knew – because his wife had told him just once and so very quietly – that if he ever talked about Lubna to anyone, ever told or even so much as hinted at the real story, she would slit his throat.

  Mum and Dad had gone to bed by the time she climbed the stairs.

  Their door was open. Light from the streetlamps flooded onto the landing.

  Margo sat on a chair in her old bedroom and tried to recall some happy moments.

  But they wouldn’t come.

  Instead she saw the dark, winter fields on the border between Jordan and Syria and heard the shots that had echoed across the frozen
landscape.

  For all her misgivings, she had, when it came to it, been quite ready to kill.

  She would have done it quickly and in silence, without emotion, crossing into the new world she had dreaded, closing the doors behind her.

  It’s who I’ve become.

  And one day the situation would come again. On a desert road or a back-street in a European city. It didn’t matter. Somewhere, sometime she would be required to pull the trigger.

  As an officer in the intelligence service she was paid to catch rats in traps, deter them or despatch them back to their maker. The motive was paramount. So was the result. Everything else was secondary.

  Margo shivered. Dangerous ground; her mind already finessing the moral dilemma, collecting excuses and justifications.

  She replayed a far-off conversation with the Service’s legal adviser.

  In the darkness of the tunnel, he’d said, the rules are different; no one can see you or tell you to stop. You can live there for years, unencumbered by belief or principle. But when you return to the light, you should know that the world will no longer want you. Your place is with the rats you hunted. Out of sight and in the gutter.

  People will know that.

  In the distance she heard a bus draw up at the stop on the Finchley Road, caught the sound of a police siren, a car racing down the Hendon Way.

  She closed her eyes and lay flat on the bed where she had slept away her childhood.

  Perhaps I think too much.