by Tim Lees
“We have a bodyguard lined up, former Royal Marine. Scots chap, top man, handles our security. Very reliable. He’ll be assigned to you directly.”
“My very own Scotsman. Is it my birthday?”
He laughed now, as if I’d actually said something funny. It ended quickly.
“The interpreter’s a local man. Again, we’ve worked with him before. He’s sound. You couldn’t be in safer hands.” He put his own hands on the tabletop and spread his fingers. “Really, Chris. Would I steer you wrong? Try the stew. Go on. Just try it.”
So I tried the stew.
“Good?” he said.
I nodded.
I looked at his hands, the knobby wrists protruding from his sleeves, so tanned they looked like they’d been dipped in paint. And I remembered, years ago, a girl saying, “But have you seen his arms?”
I hadn’t at the time, and it was quite a while before I did.
“The thing is, Chris, see—thing is this. It’s all a bit hush-hush, and I’m sort of . . . restricted in what I can tell you. But the fact is, you were recommended for this job. More than that. Requested, as it happens.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve made enemies.”
“How’s the bamia? Good, I hope? I’d suggest the kibbeh or kofta to follow. You can eat well here if you know the right places.”
“And you don’t get killed.”
“Quite.” He put the spoon up to his mouth again. A line of red clung to his upper lip, looking unpleasantly like blood. “We’ve got a big, big presence here. The Registry, I mean. You won’t read about it in the press, but it’s true. Still,” he said, “this one site, we’ve held off on. Till now.”
He let me eat a little more. Then he asked me, “Interested?”
“Why should I be?”
“Well—it’s a job, for one. And you’re professional.”
“Not good enough.”
“You’re Field Ops.”
“That’s on my card.”
“What’s more—” He leaned back, one hand stroking his wrist. I wondered if he could still feel the scars, even after all this time. “What’s more,” he said, “you’re proud of what you do. No, Chris, you are, I’ve seen you. You take a real pride in it. I know this because it’s—well, it’s one reason I’m not in Field Ops anymore.”
He gave a small, self-deprecating smile.
I held off asking for as long as I could. Then I said, “Go on.”
“Simple. I saw it mattered to you, that’s all. But to me, it wasn’t like that. It was a job. To you—it was important. Getting it right. Doing it well.” He shrugged. “I had some bad experiences, and . . .”
“Well. We’ve all had that.”
“You got out for a time yourself, I heard.”
“Few years, yes.”
“But you got back in! That’s what I mean! With you—it’s in the blood, Chris. It’s what you do. And—well. This job’s special, like I say. You’re going to want this job.”
“Try me.”
“This is—this is probably the oldest entity so far identified. It goes back, I don’t know, thousands of years, at least. Hm?”
“OK. Risk of death aside, I’ll say that I’m intrigued.”
“I’m giving you the chance to be alone with it. Take a day, a night, however long you want. Talk to it. Commune with it, if that’s what you do. Because you know that once you get it back, you’re never going to see the thing again, don’t you? It’ll disappear into some workshop or research facility, or get left in one of those big bloody storerooms for about ten years till someone works out what to do with it.” He made a gesture with his hands, placing an unseen bundle on the table. “What I’m offering you—what I’m offering is a chance. To know what it knows. I can’t promise, but I can give you the chance. And I think you’ll take it, won’t you? Yes?”
I didn’t answer him.
“You’ll take it, because—well. Because somewhere in the world, there’s a god walking around with your face, and that bothers you. I’ll tell you, frankly,” he pursed his brow, “it would bother me.”
He raised his water glass, watching me over the rim of it.
“Half right,” I said. I raised my own glass, made to clink with his, but then pulled back. “It hasn’t got my face,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“No?”
“Update your intelligence.” I put the glass down carefully in front of him. “One of us got older. I don’t suppose it looks much like me now at all.”
Chapter 2
Night Moves
At 3 a.m. Baghdad is almost quiet. The restaurants and cafés are in use, but nobody goes in or out. The doors stay shut. Diners who dropped in for an evening meal stay on till 5 a.m., when curfew lifts and everyone goes home. It’s like the world’s biggest lock-in. Equipped with papers and an escort, you can stand there in the dark and listen to the music drifting from a window twenty yards away. It’s dream-like, spooky . . . laughter on an empty street. Nighttime in the land of ghosts.
And then the trucks start up. Big engines grumble, big tires grinding in the dirt. Another US convoy setting out. They move at night, each night—but this time would be different. This time, we were going with them. Out of town, and then a few miles more. After which, the plan was, they’d head one way, and we—well. We’d be on our own.
It was just as Dayling had described it. One truck, retrieval gear stowed in the back. A local guide named Nouri, chain-smoking his PX Marlboros, occasionally remembering to blow the smoke out of the window. Carl was the driver. Heavy forearms mottled with tattoos, accent probably Glaswegian; the most I’d had from Carl so far had been a quick, obligatory, “All right?” when we’d shaken hands. After that, it was all business. He seemed sharp, confident, experienced. Somehow that didn’t altogether calm my nerves.
We drove with windows down. I could smell petrol fumes. A dog barked somewhere. Then, astonishingly, children’s cries. It was the middle of the night, but on a half-cleared bomb site in the ruins of the city, kids were playing soccer. They paused to watch us pass, ready to run if need be. Instead we waved to them, and someone in the Humvee up in front yelled, “Go Colts!” and the kids called back, “Beck-haaaam!” and the game went on.
Nouri clapped his hands.
“You see? Only the children now are brave.”
“How’s that then, Nour?” asked Carl.
“Because the rest of us,” said Nouri, “we lock ourselves away. We say, yes sir, no sir. But the children, they don’t care for stupid rules. They do as they please!”
“They’ll care if they get shot,” said Carl.
“No one likes getting shot, I can be damn sure. Especially by interfering foreign squaddies like yourself, eh? No offense,” he added, amiably.
“Ah, none taken, pal. None taken.”
Nouri was watching me.
“You are worried, friend.”
“I’m fine.”
“He’s worried,” said Carl.
“I’m cool.”
“Worried.”
I stared into the night, my head filling with visions, daydreams, near hallucinations: some crazed gunman charging at us from the dark, some nutter with a grudge and a Kalashnikov, or else some mad old woman strapped with gelignite—
“No,” I said. “It’s going to be an easy job, I think. Once we’re there I’ll do a survey, and then we’ll know—”
“The job. Aye. Right.”
“OK.” I looked from one of them to the other. “I’m worried. That suit you? Shit scared, if you want to know. How’s that?”
“Only a fool,” said Nouri, “isn’t worried.”
“I don’t do this. Places like this. Jesus—”
“Aye. And you can tell your boss, your Mr. Dayling, we don’t bloody do it, either. Not without some preparation and the full security, no way. Still,” Carl said, “here we are. So I guess we do do it, after all. And so do you.” He sucked air between his teeth. T
hen he said, “Want lessons?”
“Lessons?”
“Aye. Iraq 101. War for dummies. You want ’em?”
The whole time he’d been talking, he’d been looking at the road, the darkness either side, the country slipping near enough invisibly along beside us. He hadn’t once looked at me.
Maybe that was my first lesson.
Chapter 3
The Car Wreck
There was a strange effect, almost an optical illusion, which I noticed once we’d left the other vehicles and moved out into open country. The lights from the truck lit up a little of the roadside, giving the impression, not of flat land, but of two low walls running on either side of us. We seemed to be passing through some quiet residential suburb—the weird illusion I was still in England. For some reason, this soothed me, and in spite of my anxiety, I found myself starting to doze, drifting off into this dreamy little fiction.
Darkness peeled back slowly over palm trees, telegraph poles, little houses squat as pill boxes.
Then sunrise. The heat came almost instantly, like switching on an electric fire. Nouri blew cigarette smoke through a half-inch crack in the window. We passed a small boy leaning on a staff with goats all round him, like something from the Bible.
Mirages of lakes, water on the tarmac up ahead, folding into nothingness as we approached . . .
I nodded off awhile, dreaming of home. Then Carl shook me awake.
“Huh? What?”
He jerked his head to indicate.
There was something in the road. Dark shapes, what seemed to be the roofs of vehicles, then a movement, detaching itself. A man walking around as if wading in water, ripples shifting all about him . . . but no water. Obviously. The light moving instead.
“On the floor.”
“What?”
“Floor. Now.” Carl wasn’t offering debate. “Our mission is to protect you. Down.”
I sank into the footwell, but kept myself propped partway on the seat, peeping out.
“Might be nothing. Might be legit. Safest to assume not.”
I heard a click, realized Carl had his pistol ready.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
Two old Toyota flatbeds had been pulled across the road. There were four or five men in the uniform of the Iraqi army; a bunch more sitting or standing at the roadside. Carl pulled up a way before them, waiting for them to come over. They beckoned him, but he wouldn’t move. “Down,” he said to me. I was on my hands and knees now. Nouri’s tennis shoes were right next to my face. He wore no socks, and I could make out every detail of his ankles, every curl of hair, the red blotch of an insect bite on one leg, the scabby graze above his ankle.
I heard him wind the window down, call out in Arabic.
Someone threw a sheet across me.
And I waited. I heard talking. Nothing I could understand. I tried to analyze the harsh, guttural syllables, desperate to work out what was happening. Desperate and scared. It seemed to take a long time. Then I caught the salaam of good-bye. I heard an engine start; one of the flatbeds moving out the way. “Stay down,” said Carl. We crept forwards. We were well away before he let me up.
“What’s that about?” I said.
Nouri reached a hand down, helped me back into my seat.
“Nothing, my friend. Just a check. They say there is a car smash up ahead. A mile, maybe two. Is all.”
I looked at the pair of them. “You knew we were going to be OK, right?”
Nouri showed his palms. “If we are good, we are good. If not . . .”
Carl said nothing.
“You knew it was legit? The roadblock?”
“Aye, well.” Carl lit up a new cigarette. “Truth is, the other kind can look legit as well, sometimes. You never know until it happens. Aye?”
“True, my friend. Very true. You never know until it happens.”
We came across the car wreck not long afterwards. There was only one vehicle still there, a farmer’s truck. It hadn’t been moved because it was lying on its roof in the middle of the road. There was fruit or something cooking on the tarmac. Several wicker baskets had been lined up at the roadside. No one about. It was a sad sight. Carl said, “Down,” again, but while I hunkered low, I still kept looking.
“Is anyone hurt? I don’t see anyone. We ought to help—”
Another quarter mile on, we passed a house, a little one-story shack. Sheltering beside a broken wall, an oldish man, wrapped in robes, looked out at us. He had a dazed expression.
A companion lay upon the ground beside him. They were obviously the crash’s victims. Nouri pulled the window down and called a blessing as we passed.
“Could have stopped,” I said.
“Could not,” said Carl.
“Those guys—”
“Aye. Very bad for ’em, no doubt. And likely they’re as innocent as newborn lambs, the pair of ’em. Likely they are. Or else they’re not. And either way, still doesnae stop somebody else coming along, hiding the other side o’ yon brick wall. Dinnae talk or we kill you. Or putting a bomb in that wrecked-up truck, just for the moment we glide by. Eh now?”
“OK,” I said. Then, a little later, “I’m not used to war.”
“No. You told us that.”
Chapter 4
Everywhere Is Somewhere
The dust got in. The dust got into everything.
Fine, fine sand. The finest sand you could imagine.
I’d stop to pee and bring it back, tucked in my boots or folded in my shirt and then, once it was in the truck, it seemed to spread. I’d crunch it in my teeth, dig it out my ears. It gathered in my hair and in my nostrils. It wasn’t as if we were driving into dunes or anything like that; the countryside was rocky, barren, but at times there were patches of scrub, even trees. But the dust and the sand were the biggest thing. Months later, I’d still be finding it among my clothes, or trampled into odd parts of my flat.
The journey was hypnotic. I drifted off, even while I jolted this way and that.
Carl said, “Look sharp.”
I sat up, scared.
“What? What now?”
We were passing by a few low, square-built houses, electric cables strung on poles between them. Dry, dun-colored hills rose in the background. People looked up from the roadside as we passed. There was no question of blending in, no question of Dayling’s “stealth” plan.
“See?” said Nouri. “Up ahead?”
“I thought this place was in the desert somewhere. Like, miles from anywhere.”
“This is the oldest country in the world,” he said. “Here, everywhere is somewhere.”
“Aye,” said Carl. “And we’re nearly there.”
Chapter 5
Thirty-four Potential Sites
“You must watch for scorpions, my friend.” Nouri had a long stick and was happily flipping over stones with it, inspecting the dimpled bits of earth they left. “Also snakes. There are snakes to be very afraid of: the saw-scale viper, the horned viper” (he pronounced it “hornèd” like some old English poem), “also the cobra. And the giant centipede. And . . . ah.” He gazed around. “Wolves. Hyenas. In rare cases, lions, tigers. We have both, you see. Then too there are bears, which must be very much avoided . . .”
“Are you winding me up?”
“Not at all, my friend. These are great dangers. You must be aware.”
“And isn’t it better not to stir them up, if they’re there?”
He flicked the stick, raising a plume of dirt. “Let us know our enemies, know their positions. A snake bite or a scorpion sting—”
“You’re wearing tennis shoes.”
“Ah yes. I will admit. Not the best choice.” He leaned upon his stick. “The city of Assur is more than four thousand years old, a great historic monument. It has outlasted the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Persians. With luck it will outlast us, as well. The Americans placed troops here to defend it from destruction in the war. It would be a bad place
to die, I think . . .”
“No doubt.” Dust blew, scouring my face in a hot blast. The low, eroded mounds seemed not so much ruinous as still under construction, as if the builders had just gone for a siesta. I didn’t blame them, either. My back was soaked in sweat; the heat and dust brought tears to my eyes, and I could hardly see.
I took a handkerchief and mopped my face. I pulled the reader from my pocket, switched it on, set the levels. Almost immediately the lights began to dance.
“So, my friend. Where to?”
“Away from the scorpions.”
I left Carl at the truck with the bulk of the gear. Nouri followed me, but after a short time, sat down on a block of masonry and watched as I roamed about the site. It must have all looked pretty aimless, I suppose, and yet it wasn’t. I had the site map in my hand. Each time I took a reading, I’d jot it down, near as I could place to the location. But that seemed to be throwing up more questions than solutions. A census in the seventh century bc had listed three palaces and no less than thirty-four temples in Assur, not all of which have been uncovered yet. Thirty-four potential sites of worship. Thirty-four charged spots. But it had been a thousand years or so since anybody’d actually bothered with them, and things had grown a little sloppy in the meantime. There was power here for sure, but I couldn’t get a clear location. It just seemed to have leeched away into the rocks, diffused across the site and probably beyond. I didn’t have the cable length to stretch that far. Assur might be a small city by modern standards, but it’s still a good couple of miles across. And that was more than I could handle.
I watched a heron strutting through the shallows of the river, the curve of its neck as graceful as the Arabic calligraphy I’d seen since my arrival, its movements delicate, almost hesitant. Then suddenly its head shot forward. It scrabbled in the water, shaking like a dog. The neck swung up, its beak raised to the sky, and it gulped, greedily, too fast for me to catch a glimpse of what it had.
I checked the reader once again.
Flick, flick, flick.
