Aggressor

by Nick Cook

  Lazan cracked a seed between his front teeth and spat the shell on the ground. ‘Did you work all this out for yourself?’

  ‘A colleague of mine saw Stansell mark a street map shortly before he left to see you. That map is in my possession now. It marks your house very clearly.’

  ‘Quite the detective, aren’t you, Tom Girling?’

  ‘I want to save Stansell’s life, Lazan.’

  ‘Like so many journalists, I’m afraid you manage to tell only part of the truth.’

  ‘This is no matter for professional pride, Lazan. I’m happy to admit I’m wrong if it means saving Stansell.’

  ‘And you think you are the one who will find him, is that it?’

  ‘He hasn’t got anyone else,’ Girling said simply.

  Lazan pulled a slim, ornate case from his waistcoat. He offered a cigarette to Girling, who declined, before lighting one up himself. ‘Go home, Tom Girling. If these Angels of Judgement have him, then Stansell is past help.’

  ‘If?’ Girling asked. ‘You said ‘if the Angels of Judgement have him?’

  ‘There are many groups here who would gladly act in their name.’

  ‘That’s certainly a theory I’m working on,’ Girling said.

  Lazan nodded, the light of the fire dancing on the right side of his face. ‘Overnight, the Angels of Judgement have become heroes for every disaffected hard-line Islamic group in the Middle East. Only a very special band of Muslim brothers could hold a super-power to ransom, after all. The Angels of Judgement have instilled a new generation of Arabs with inspiration.’

  ‘So that’s why you decided to show yourself,’ Girling whispered. He said the words to himself, but Lazan couldn’t help hearing them.

  Girling met the Israeli’s eyes. ‘You’ve no more idea who they are than the rest of us. The Angels of Judgement scare the living shit out of you, don’t they?’

  ‘You don’t mince words, do you, Tom Girling?’

  Girling studied the battered face for a moment. ‘Then if you weren’t Stansell’s primary source, who was?’

  Lazan remained impassive. ‘I’d put my money on the Russians.’

  ‘The Russians?’ Girling remembered the reception at the Soviet Embassy. ‘Why them?’

  ‘Because the Soviets expelled one of their diplomats the day after the hijacking. Maybe he’d been telling tales out of school.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe. Stansell had good links with the fundamentalist community here. His primary source might well have been inside the Brotherhood. As you know, the Brotherhood here is well connected internationally...’

  Girling looked Lazan in the eye. ‘Tell me what happened the night Stansell came to see you.’

  Lazan pulled hard on his cigarette. ‘As you said, he already had the terrorists’ name when he came to see me that night. He was after confirmation, but how could I confirm a name I had never even heard of? When he mentioned these Angels of Judgement, I actually laughed. I told him that we would definitely have heard of a group with those kinds of resources.’

  ‘But you haven’t.’

  ‘Personally, no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Tel Aviv is conducting a high-level inquiry right now into the revelations published by your magazine. If the Angels of Judgement exist, as Stansell said they did, then we will find them, be sure of that.’

  ‘Is there any chance you could let me in on their findings?’

  Lazan let out a choked, gravelly laugh. ‘Are you mad?’

  Girling held his hand up. ‘There is a connection between Beirut and Stansell’s disappearance. I’m prepared to share whatever I turn up, if you’ll do the same for me. I’m not talking about high-level secrets, just a steer in the right direction from time to time.’

  Lazan leant forward till his face was a bare few inches away. ‘Then let me give you a steer, right now, Tom Girling. Get on a plane, leave Cairo, leave the Middle East and don’t come back. You are pitting yourself against a monster, a many-headed beast. And to this monster you will become an irritant - if you haven’t already become so - something for it to annihilate without so much as a second thought. It will show you no more mercy than it has done to Stansell. You can’t reason with it, for it knows none. It kills because it is conditioned to kill. It spares life only when it wants something in return -’

  ‘Maybe they wanted something from Stansell. Maybe they want to keep him alive.’

  ‘As I said, there is only the very merest chance.’

  ‘As long as there is that chance, I will continue to search for him.’

  ‘Then you should prepare yourself for death also, Tom Girling.’

  ‘I almost died once at the hands of these people, Lazan. They killed my wife. They can’t do any worse to me now.’

  Lazan took a deep breath. ‘Stansell told me about you and Asyut. Believe me, I am sorry for what happened. But look at me, Tom Girling. In 1982, I got shot down over the Beka’a Valley after a Syrian MiG driver put a heat-seeking missile up the jetpipe of my F-4. It was a bad ejection, you know. The cockpit coaming removed most of my right knee on the way out and I’d broken three vertebrae, although I didn’t know that at the time. When I came to, they had me tied to a bed-frame in a blackened room, in the basement of some house in a village, God knows where. I could hear my navigator close by, crying. I think he was in a next-door room, or maybe it was upstairs, I don’t know. He was a young kid of twenty-one, a good kid, a brave kid, with seven Syrian MiGs and Sukhois to his credit. I thought he was crying for his mother, or that like me, he was scared out of his wits. We had every right to be scared. You see, we had fallen into the hands of Hizbollah...

  ‘When they eventually threw him into my cell, there was just enough light to see him. He was slumped unconscious in the corner of the room, his head hanging on his chest. I called to him, but he didn’t answer. I knew he wasn’t dead, because he was still whimpering. Somehow, I managed to untie myself and crawl over. I touched him on the shoulder and he fell forward, his head in my lap. There was a lot of blood, mostly on his face. From the ejection, I thought. I tore a sleeve off my shirt and tried to wipe his cheek, but - ’

  He paused to take one last drag of the cigarette. ‘But it just came away in my hand. The whole right side of his face. They’d used acid on him. A whole bottle of acid. Drip, drip, drip, until there was almost nothing left. He died in my arms a few hours later, but it felt like days. Like you, Tom Girling, I was so angry that I forgot my pain. I wanted them to come for me. I wanted to kill them with my bare hands. But that night, when they did come, I saw the thick rubber gloves on their hands, and I saw the smoke-brown bottle one of them carried, and I wasn’t brave, I wasn’t the lion I convinced myself I had become. I wept like a baby and I screamed when they tied me again to that bed-frame. And I carried on screaming many hours after they had finished. Drip, drip - ‘

  ‘Jesus Christ, Lazan, that’s enough,’ Girling blurted. He kept his eyes on the floor, unable now to turn them to the Israeli. The face of the young navigator had become Mona’s face.

  Lazan tapped Girling gently on the leg with his cane. ‘I was lucky. I had a combat rescue team come for me in a CH-53. You, on the other hand, are quite alone. Are you sure you are ready to face the beast, Tom Girling? For it is here, you can count on that. Though you cannot see it, it is everywhere. All you have to do is provoke it...’

  Girling decided to pour himself a whisky before he turned in. He sat in one of the big armchairs and willed the alcohol to work on the tautness that had made his muscles and sinews ache and his head hurt. He tried to tell himself that the symptoms were a product of the day’s exertions, but it was an unconvincing argument. His mind drifted time and again to Lazan’s words. They had raked up such feelings of bitterness in him that his mind teemed with images from the past. He could feel his white side, his positive side, struggling against the black, but try as he might, his thoughts always ended on
that stretch of dust-track. He could feel his arms pinioned behind his back. He felt the panic and despair, too, as the life slipped from her with every new blow to her body; and there was nothing he could do about it. Finally, he saw the wild face of the man who gave the orders swing round, his eyes latching onto him. Like a bird of prey, seeing its quarry scurrying for shelter, and knowing there is no escape for it. In the darkness of his apartment, Girling saw that face with a disturbing new clarity. For today, somebody had given it a name.

  He snapped on the light and fumbled for the bound volume of Dispatches beside him. He began skimming over its pages, trying to distract himself. His fingers flipped the pages mechanically and week after week of that distant year passed before his eyes.

  And then he stopped. Girling stared down at the open pages. At first, he didn’t know what it was that had made him halt here, then he understood. A page had been ripped from the volume, leaving jagged stubs protruding from the spine of the binder. He prised back the other pages to see if any words were discernible on the remaining scraps of paper, but he could make out no more than a few letters. He was reaching for his pen to jot down the details of the missing page, when he heard the noise outside the door. His ears pricked at the sound. One of his neighbours returning after a late dinner? But a minute later there was a faint shuffling sound in the corridor. He put the whisky and the binder on the floor by his feet. He stood up and found the hairs lifting on his forearms, the skin at the back of his neck prickling against his collar. He moved quietly to the door.

  He stopped and listened. Over the sound of his own breathing and the blood rushing in his ears, he heard clearly the light movement of feet on the other side. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a gun. He looked around for something to take to the enemy, knowing as he did so that he had nothing to protect himself just as Stansell had had nothing...

  The rap on the door sounded like a burst of machine-gun fire. Long after Girling had recoiled from the jamb, he stood there trying to fight the pervasive numbness that gripped him. He considered shouting for help, but realized that they could have the door down in a moment and history would repeat itself.

  And then he heard his name. He reached for the latch and drew it back, his heart hammering so hard against his chest he felt light-headed.

  The voice reached him a fraction before the dim light of the distant lamp illuminated the face of the man that spoke it.

  ‘So now you, too, have found fear, Tom.’ It was said without mockery.

  Mohammed Hamdi stepped forward a little way, until the glow of the lamp-shade reflected off the thick glass of his spectacles. ‘I would have stopped you on your way in just now, but I did not want the Mukhabarat to see us together. Did you know there are two of them watching you?’

  Girling nodded. He ushered his father-in-law inside and shut the door.

  ‘If the Mukhabarat had seen me speak to you, they would arrive at my door wanting to know why,’ Mohammed Hamdi continued. ‘Um Mona has suffered enough without the attentions of the Mukhabarat.’

  From the way he used this term of respect for his wife, it was as if Um Mona - the Mother of Mona - had never been given any other name. While Girling caught his breath, the ex-policeman reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘There is a place near here. I meet with some of my old colleagues from work. It does me good to talk, to relive the old days. She’s not a bad woman, you understand. But she does not see with the clarity with which I see things now. I do not have much time.’ He paused. ‘I cannot stay long, and I do not want to stay long. You and I have never seen eye to eye and I doubt if things would have changed had my daughter lived. You are an ‘agnabi. Our ways are different. But until today, I never took you for a man of integrity. I saw the look in your eyes when you told me what you had come here to do. I saw the hatred, and just now I saw fear, too. I never confronted those who took Mona from our midst, for I thought to have done so would have been to question my faith, my very reason for existence. But I know now how wrong I have been. These people need to be hunted down, all of them. I could not do it, because they act in the name of the God in whom I believe, but you, Tom Girling, are an ‘agnabi...’

  ‘Just tell me where I must go to find Abu Tarek,’ Girling whispered. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you found him, would you avenge Mona, or would you use him to find your friend?’

  ‘Both, Mohammed Hamdi.’

  ‘You cannot have it both ways, Tom Girling.’ The ex-policeman rested against the wall. Girling offered him a seat, but he refused. ‘Yes, Abu Tarek killed Mona, but even if you were lucky enough to find him in this vast city, it would not do you any good. You told me you wanted to find this man Stansell and that the only way you knew how was to penetrate the Brotherhood. Abu Tarek is a small fish, a common criminal who obeys orders. He will not know who holds Stansell, but his protector might.’

  ‘What protector?’

  ‘They call him the Guide.’

  ‘The name makes him sound important, yet I have never heard of him.’

  ‘He is one of the most powerful men in Egypt, yet scarcely anyone knows of him,’ Mohammed Hamdi wheezed.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘To understand, you have to go back to Asyut, on the day Mona died. Are you strong enough to do that?’

  Girling felt his skin prickle. He had returned there every day since. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Mohammed Hamdi stubbed out his cigarette and promptly lit another. ‘Asyut is a big city. Its university has many students, the vast majority of them from poor families in Upper Egypt, where I was born. It has long been a trouble-spot, a breeding ground for fundamentalism. What happened there three years ago was more than just a riot. It was an uprising, a revolution, an attempt to overthrow the government of this country. And the Guide was the spark who made it happen. He began a campaign against the government through his mullahs, the local priests. Every day they preached to the students about the government’s corruption, how it had given itself to the West. The tension rose, until one day, there was an incident with the police, and the town exploded in violence. You and Mona arrived there when the trouble was at its height. Remember, the Guide’s mullahs had called for the death of the faithless, the eradication of all profanity; and so it was that his followers turned their hatred on you. Abu Tarek was one of the Guide’s right-hand men, like a military adviser, if you can believe such a thing. He was the instrument of Mona’s death, her murderer. But in many ways, the Guide is more guilty of her death.’

  Girling’s eyes widened. ‘What happened to him, this Guide?’

  ‘The troops who moved into the city, and rescued you, managed to capture him. He was brought here to Cairo in the strictest secrecy. But they did not dare try him for Asyut, for his punishment certainly would have been the death penalty. And the last thing the authorities wanted was a martyr and another uprising. So they pretended Asyut never happened and the Guide was sent into exile.’

  ‘It was a bad day for Egypt when the ‘Askary lost you as a detective, Mohammed Hamdi.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But if the Guide’s living abroad, how could he know about Stansell? Stansell is somewhere in this city still, I’m convinced of it.’

  Mohammed Hamdi gave a smile of satisfaction. ‘Whoever said anything about foreign exile, Tom Girling? This was the government’s - or should I say the Mukhabarat’s - master-stroke. In exchange for the Guide’s complicity, his promise to behave, they have let him live out his days here in Cairo. He is a prisoner, certainly, but it is a golden cage that holds him. The Brotherhood knows where he is and the Mukhabarat knows the Guide is in regular touch with them. But as long as there is no trouble, the Guide stays out of prison. He is, in effect, their puppet, but in a sense, they are his puppets, too. For, it is his word - or rather, his henchmen - that keeps order in the streets.’

  ‘Where do they hold this Guide?’

  ‘In the Al-Mu’ayy
ad Mosque. To get there you must go down Al-Mu’izz Street, almost to the point where the old quarter meets the City of the Dead.’

  ‘The City of the Dead?’

  ‘Yes, it is close. Is that significant?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. How do I get into this mosque?’

  ‘Anyone can get in. There are two guards on the door to ensure the Guide does not leave, but there is little danger of that. He does not want to leave. He has the government by the neck just where he is.’

  ‘How will I know him?’ Girling asked.

  ‘He holds prayers every day. In the morning. At nine o’clock. To the people, he is a great and skilful orator. Yet only a handful know of his true power.’

  Mohammed Hamdi turned for the door, then stopped. ‘I should warn you that if you go to this man, it would be most unwise to tell him who you are, or the secret you harbour. I cannot say I like you, Tom Girling, but-’

  ‘Say it, Mohammed Hamdi.’

  ‘If you mention Mona, or Abu Tarek, a man who enjoys this man’s protection... Little Alia is a beautiful child. She has already lost her mother. Stay alive long enough to kiss her goodbye from me, Tom Girling.’

  CHAPTER 13

  The Sikorsky thundered through the wadi at over a hundred and sixty miles per hour, barely thirty feet above the ground, a fearsome fusion of sight and sound; an enormous squat insect with seven thousand pounds of shaft horsepower propelling it through the air.

  The pilot’s gaze did not flicker from the TV dis-play’s green and black FLIR image just above his knees. At this height, glancing up from the screen was an invitation to fly the helicopter into the ground or the valley walls.