Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  ‘That should give us a bit of time.’ Rifat knew that the numbers would remain on the provider’s system, together with a back-up all the digital files of texts and e-mails. ‘Bram, there is no way they can connect Tiwana to the EgyptAir bomb. We were too careful. They would have had you first, if so. This must be something else. The preacher of hate stuff, maybe.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. But what now, Rifat?’

  ‘We’ve got to stay away from each other. Has there been anything on the news about the arrest?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen anything. I only heard because Tiwana’s wife rang Dr Khan shortly after 5am. The house is sealed off, apparently, and she had to go to stay with her sister.’

  ‘Then my guess is that the police and MI5 are waiting to see amongst those it is monitoring who will bolt for cover,’ Rifat said. ‘Sure, there will be lots of angry complaints by rank and file Muslim brothers from the mosques, but we should beware of informers and agents provocateurs. We don’t know anything about the arrest.’

  ‘I’ve got duties at the musallah, so I’ll be there with Dr Khan,’ Bram said. ‘But the cell is already dissipated. Without Zainab or Cantara, MI5 won’t have anything to go on. It’s just you and me. Everyone else was just a normal devout Muslim. Only Tiwana himself knew the members of the other cell, and I’m certain they didn’t know about us. The candidates being groomed for Operation Scorpion won’t know anything either. None of them had yet had pacemakers installed, so there is nothing to implicate our friendly Hammersmith surgeon.’

  ‘He’ll stay quiet if he knows what’s good for him.’

  ‘What about Tiwana? They are bound to ask him about the bomb. He could implicate us. He could implicate everybody,’ Bram said.

  ‘He won’t. He knows how to deal with interrogation. He went to training camps in Kashmir, he told me about it. They prepare you for water-boarding, but much worse than the CIA. You really believe these bastards would drown you for a rupee. But the lesson gets learnt. Tell them only what you know they already know, at least for the first forty-eight hours. After that give them the decoy names, the dummy cells. That will keep them busy for a while longer. They’ll get everything out of you in the end, but not for months.’

  ‘I’m still nervous, Rifat.’

  ‘I know.’ Rifat guessed that Bram would be out as soon as the coast was clear. He had a secret girlfriend, an older white divorcée with a holiday home in Portugal. They’d been seen together one day when Bram was supposed to be fundraising. Zainab knew about them, and had confided in Rifat. Bram was a fair-weather Muslim. Quite happy to send Zainab or Cantara on their way to Heaven, but not himself. Rifat had told Tiwana, who seemed quite relaxed about it. If Rifat had his way, Bram would have been dealt with long ago.

  ‘What about you, brother,’ Bram said. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll be out of here within a few weeks, back to Sharm. I think I can still use Cantara for part of Operation Scorpion.’

  ‘Hard luck about failing to get Wyrecliffe, my friend. Time to give up,’ Bram laughed.

  Rifat caught a howl of frustration before it left his throat. Never. Never. Never.

  ‘I don’t quit like you do, Bram. There are still possibilities. They need careful organising. But I’ve been lucky enough to find a new resource, one that I never expected.’ That resource was a young woman that he had met by chance at York University.

  * * *

  Kat Quinlan had always wanted to be an archaeologist, ever since watching Raiders of the Lost Ark as a child. Having studied it for a year at York University, she decided that real archaeology was dull. What she really wanted to be now was a journalist. That is what Indiana Jones would have been in the modern world. Since dropping out of the archaeology course and falling out with Michaela, she had found a course in media studies at the University of Aberystwyth. Things weren’t going well, though. She really wanted to be out there in the real world, writing, blazing a trail through world events, not sitting through boring lectures in a rainy, provincial Welsh university where the only bonus was the good local supply of magic mushrooms. But her only experience with the narcotic fungus had been bewildering and unpleasant. Instead, she now needed to organise herself for the world of journalism.

  Her first attempt was to ask Michaela for her father’s e-mail address. Maybe he could fix up for her to get into the BBC, like the papers said he had for that Arab girl who turned out to be a terrorist. Michaela’s reply was furious. Of course she wasn’t going to give her his e-mail address. Who did she think she was? Though they hadn’t spoken for several months, Kat was baffled that they had fallen out so sharply over Rifat, the dishy and wealthy Saudi. Michaela just thought him creepy, and had become increasingly obsessed with the idea that they had been drugged by him. Kat had laughed at the notion. It was patently obvious that it was once again drink that had been their undoing. If Rifat had drugged them, the question was why?

  While Michaela had ‘unfriended’ Rifat on Facebook, she had refused to. It was one of the issues between them. All his details were still there, on her page. There was no photo of him, but Kat didn’t need one. She remembered. Shy, but good-looking, with big brown eyes and such long lashes. OK, he might be a bit straight-laced, a young fogey if such a thing exists in Saudi, but he was well-off, and well-connected. That was why it now made such sense to e-mail him now. If the BBC couldn’t get her out into the world of news, perhaps he could? A good journalist, she decided, should use all contacts to the max. She put together an e-mail which cheekily asked if he had any journalistic contacts in the Middle East, because she would like to set up her own blogging site. She looked at the text for half a minute. Crossed her fingers, and clicked send.

  * * *

  Being friends with an Islamic terrorist hadn’t been great for Chris Wyrecliffe’s career. Since the EgyptAir bombing, all his high-profile broadcasting work had evaporated. Still formally under police investigation, he was too toxic for anything but Have I Got News for You and a few of the late-night chat shows. At best, putting him on air distracted from the story. That was how one senior colleague described it to him. Wyrecliffe and the BBC had quietly agreed a termination of his contract and a decent but not outlandish payoff with effect from the end of the year.

  But the arrival of the Arab Spring in December 2010 changed everything. On December 17, a poverty-stricken Tunisian vegetable seller called Mohamed Bouazizi, who was twenty-six and sole breadwinner to a family of eight, had his cart confiscated by a policewoman. Wyrecliffe knew it was the kind of thing that happens every day in a hundred towns and villages across Africa and the Middle East. Unless the man can pay a fine or afford a bribe, a family goes hungry. Bouazizi was different. Later that day, he poured lighter fuel on himself and set it ablaze. His death set off a chain of riots. It was already a decent sized story for a country that, in international terms, produces very few.

  The BBC, short of experienced reporters who could be called on over Christmas, asked Wyrecliffe to cover the story as a freelance. While the terms were meagre, foreign assignments editor Hector Munro said Wyrecliffe would be foolish to turn it down. ‘Isn’t it just what you wanted? Frontline Middle East reporting.’

  Wyrecliffe had no intention of turning it down. He relished an obscurity which also kept him away from the British tabloid press. That worked fine until January when the riots became so bad that the Tunisian government resigned. It was an unlikely turn of events. President Zine Ben Abdine Ben Ali was, after twenty-three years in power, one of the Arab world’s most stable autocrats. After his resignation, there was revolution. Then riots spread to Egypt.

  Now, less than a month after all that, Wyrecliffe was in front of a camera again, in the middle of huge demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

  * * *

  Cairo

  Sunday January 23 2011

  Tahrir is Arabic for liberation, and Tahrir Square is the stage on which the liberation of Egypt is played out by an increasingly broa
d array of Egyptian society. Nothing like this has been seen in Egypt for more than thirty years, since Hosni Mubarak came to power in this impoverished country of eighty million. Today among these thousands of demonstrators we have already seen bravery and brutality. Whether this turns into revolution, as was seen in Tunisia, or fizzles out, we do not yet know. But what we do know is that this is already the biggest challenge to the government here in a generation. Chris Wyrecliffe, BBC News, Tahrir Square.

  Wyrecliffe pursed his lips, and re-edited the text. The read-through was forty seconds. It probably needed to come back to thirty. Finally satisfied, he closed the document and answered the insistent ringing of his phone. It was Nimr Mustafa, Wyrecliffe’s local fixer-cum-producer and he was excited.

  It had taken more than four hours’ gentle persuasion for Nimr to get the woman’s agreement to have the BBC speak to her. It was tough. She didn’t want her name used. She didn’t want her imprisoned husband’s name used, as he had been a known activist in the Muslim Brotherhood. She didn’t want to travel from her home in the Cairo suburbs to the Cleopatra Tower Hotel, nor indeed to any other hotel.

  Now Chris Wyrecliffe sat patiently on the sofa in the woman’s modest but comfortable home while Mustafa, sunglasses perched on his head, tried his very best to reassure the woman that the BBC only wanted the world to know what she and others had endured. The woman was clearly devout. Her hijab was worn so tight that her forehead bulged beneath it. She could have been any age between twenty-five and forty. The woman’s teenage daughter, a pretty creature with intense dark eyes, sat holding her mother’s hand as she relayed to Nimr the details of her abuse in the Interior Ministry building. Wyrecliffe didn’t want to interrupt the flow by asking Nimr to translate, but he nodded his own head in encouragement and reassurance as she told her story, and found her making eye contact with him too, to reassure him that she was truthful and to assess the effect on him of her tale. In some ways the words were superfluous. The woman’s welling eyes and rapid hand movements were eloquent testimony to the horrors she had endured.

  After she had fallen silent, Mustafa rapidly summarised to him the details of her arrest at a demonstration by mothers and wives of prisoners. Her hours packed in a police van with twenty others, where the temperature was so high she and others had fainted. The refusal of the Mukhabarat to give her water. Then the arrival at the ministry. The interrogation, which resulted in her being put in a solitary cell when her husband’s name was discovered. And then her repeated violation by at least three officers over the course of thirty-six hours. Finally, a beating before she was released without charge.

  ‘It’s a chilling tale,’ Wyrecliffe said at last. ‘Can we corroborate any part of it?’

  ‘Probably not. She’s too ashamed to go to a doctor. But I believe her. You saw the tears.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt it’s true, but we have to ask these questions. So is she prepared to go on camera?’

  ‘No. She’s absolutely terrified of being identified,’ Mustafa said.

  If she refused all filming, which Wyrecliffe knew was still possible, her experience would still make powerful radio, stripped of the gimmicks and trickery of TV. Either way, after the first five seconds, her words in Arabic would be faded out for the translation, which would carry the power of her experience through the voice of someone else. At least if she did refuse he wouldn’t have to do any cutaways, awful falsified shots which editors insisted on. A concerned-looking reporter nodding in apparent reaction to an interviewee’s remarks, or even worse actually asking questions. Cutaways were in Wyrecliffe’s view the biggest lie in television, because they are always filmed afterwards. The reason for that was technical. With only one camera you can’t see both the interviewee’s and interviewer’s faces simultaneously.

  ‘Tell her what we can do,” Wyrecliffe said. ‘We can film her from behind, wearing the hijab. Or we can film her in shadow profile, which would work best without the headscarf, frankly. We’d like to film her hands, in full light. If we did that she should remove any rings that could be used to identify her. If we can’t get her to come to a hotel or studio, we’d need to anonymise her home. We can set up some curtains, but obviously any pictures or family photos need to be off camera.’

  ‘Okay. Do we have a sample we could show her?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘Preferably not some unintelligible Ulster supergrass from the 1980s. Tell her that she has my personal assurance that we will protect her anonymity.’

  The woman, whose name was Amina, had come through to the BBC via a local freelance reporter who had already written up a report for Al Ahram, the only independent Egyptian newspaper. Even then, the details of the rapes were covered euphemistically, and her attackers were only mentioned as security force members. The newspaper knew where the limits were, and the reporter clearly felt the BBC could do more. He was right. Wyrecliffe knew that viewers and listeners across the world needed to feel the crimes of dictatorship. Totals of dead, injured or arrested would never carry the impact of a single woman, in tears, on camera or the personalised description of a humiliation of womanhood. Dictatorship, after all, is the rape of civilised society and this woman gave it a form that anyone could feel.

  * * *

  Cairo

  January 28, 2010

  The morning after arrival in Cairo, and the stifling heat of room 416 of the Hostel Budi Aswan was already gathering. Kat Quinlan, wearing only bra and pants, lay back on a greasy chair and fanned her face with a brochure offering felucca tours down the Nile. She was in a fix, one familiar to any journalist stuck in an unfamiliar place. Having written your story, how do you get it quickly to the editor who needs it when there are communication difficulties? Difficulties, in this case, meant the Internet connection was down.

  It was only 10am but the tiredness and dislocation of the last twenty-four hours were beginning to kick in. Next door, through the plywood walls, she could hear an argument in Arabic over the sound of a TV. She turned up the fan to maximum. The whump-whump-whump drowned out the neighbours, but had no real effect on the enervating air. The low-ceilinged room was heavy with the smell of scorched dust and old socks, barely masked by the cloying reek of the strawberry scented air freshener that the management had hung above the door. The windows seemed to be screwed shut to stop people getting in from the flat roof opposite, though one of the higher panes was cracked. The thin orange curtains kept out the full glare of the sun, but not the heat which seemed to seep up from some echoing shaft which adjoined the tired and grubby bathroom.

  The luck of the Irish had been good until now. Rifat had been a star. He transferred her enough cash for the air fare, and something towards the cost of hostel and food. He had even provided Chris Wyrecliffe’s personal e-mail address. ‘Use it sparingly, and don’t ever say you got it from me,’ Rifat had warned. When she asked where Rifat had got it he had replied: ‘From Michaela, on that day when you both got drunk. Don’t you remember? I said I wanted to comment on a story he had written on the BBC website.’

  She didn’t recall that, but that didn’t surprise her, given how incredibly inebriated she had been that day. Rifat had been sweet then to get them home, and he’d been sweet now too, giving her a mobile phone with heaps of credit which was already set-up for roaming in Egypt. But in the last e-mail before she left, he was quite clear about what he wanted. ‘Use your charm to get close to Wyrecliffe. Be near the big story, and you might get hired. Don’t go off on your own. It might be dangerous.’

  Her e-mails to Wyrecliffe, however, went unanswered. And now she was unable to send any at all. She didn’t know exactly where he was.

  She was still hoping to get a feature, based on her brief foray into Tahrir Square last night, into the Observer. Moira, a college friend, was working as an editorial assistant there. Moira had promised that once Kat e-mailed the piece, she would ask if the news editor could use it. She’d have to get that in today, by lunchtime London time, if she was to stand a chanc
e. Cursing her idleness, Kat threw on a T shirt and some shorts, and went out to check the wireless modem, a dusty device dangling by a cable over the open-plan staircase. Down in the lobby, a fat balding man was watching soccer on TV at the reception desk. She walked down to talk to him, appreciating the cool of the tiles under her bare feet. ‘Excuse me. No Internet?’ she asked.

  He barely looked up while shrugging. ‘Broken,’ he said, then pressed a thumb downwards. He had congealed egg yolk around his mouth.

  ‘I need to file a story to London. Is there an engineer coming? Do you know when it might be back up?’

  He turned to her, his bulbous eyes immediately flicking down to her breasts, until she folded her arms across them. ‘It’s quite important.’

  He glanced back up at her, drew a hairy arm across his mouth as if he’d just been caught eating a forbidden food, and then pointed across the street. ‘Internet café, round corner, go left,’ he barked. He’d already turned back to the TV.

  ‘Thanks a bunch, you old perv,’ Kat muttered. Two minutes later, she was out exploring. The bustling street, noisy and dusty was somehow much cooler than her room. Walking left from the hotel, she saw the Internet café, in an alleyway leading to a clothing market. The shutters were down, and it was covered in graffiti. Kat sighed and looked around. On this shady side of the street were a series of stalls selling colourful washing baskets, clothes pegs, metal food containers, plumbing supplies and a whole host of other household items. On the sun-baked far side of the road, beyond the stream of black and white taxis, was a mobile phone shop.

  The tinted glass doors of the shop opened into an air-conditioned coolness. A man in his late twenties with sleek hair, designer stubble and soft leather jacket looked up from a magazine.

  ‘Salaam,’ he said, unleashing a broad smile, and pushing his sunglasses up onto his head. ‘Deutsche… or English?’

  ‘Irish actually. I’m a journalist,’ she said, the phrase sweet and fulfilling on her tongue. ‘Look, can I ask a favour?’