by Nick Louth
‘Hello. How soon are you going back to the hotel?’
He looked at his watch. It was almost nine. ‘About now.’ He looked at her quizzically. Perhaps it was the remains of the bruise, or her worn-out clothing.
‘I’m Noor. I’m the guide for a group arriving at the Ramada from Lebanon tomorrow,’ Cantara said.
The driver smiled at her, but his eyes showed doubts. Nevertheless, he showed her into the front passenger seat. He then started rounding up the tourists, taking ten agonising minutes to guide them all back in. Cantara resisted the temptation to help shepherd them on, and speed them up. Instead she helped herself to a pair of cheap sunglasses she found on the dashboard and a man’s jacket, which she draped around her shoulders.
‘Oh, who are you, Honey?’ asked one American woman. ‘Are you Rafiq’s girlfriend?’ she said, indicating the driver.
‘No. I am just a guide, for another group.’
She dealt with the questions and small talk as best she could as the minibus slid out into a main road. While they were waiting at traffic lights, she saw Omar’s truck cross in front of her. He was looking the other way, phone still clamped to his ear, then did a dangerous U-turn in the middle of traffic, bumping up and across the low concrete median which separated the two carriageways. She looked down and shivered as he crossed back the way he had come. The lights changed and the bus headed off. It took only five minutes to reach the hotel. As she reluctantly returned the jacket, the driver said in Arabic: ‘Keep the sunglasses. Inshallah, the men in the pick-up truck will never find you.’ As she turned to him in surprise and gratitude, he added. ‘I saw the fear in your face. Whether it is husband, brother, father; no one should strike a woman. It makes me angry.’
She thanked the driver, staring wistfully after him as he drove away. The tourists were making their way up the hotel steps and she mingled with them. A security guard outside looked at her dirty clothes suspiciously, until she greeted him in English, when he lifted a hand in apology.
Jabr and Omar would be looking for her. She couldn’t rely on them being barred entry to the hotel. They might pass as maintenance men. They might even shoot their way in. The dilemma which she had tried to suppress just could not be delayed much longer. But first she needed a good disguise.
As soon as she was inside the large marble-lined entrance hall she saw two trolleys being loaded with luggage by a porter. She waited by a newspaper stand until he pushed one trolley away towards the lift. From the remaining trolley she picked up a small pink wheeled suitcase and strode off to the ladies room. The bathroom was luxurious and well-lit, and reminded her of her time at the Royal Opera House. There she had drunk alcohol, with Chris, and had felt like Cinderella at the ball. This time there was no one around. That was as well because she resembled an ugly sister. The huge mirror showed the true awfulness of her bruised face and threadbare trousers and stained blouse. The low heel of one of her shoes was literally hanging off. She had no money, not even a cent. Her only possessions, in a tatty plastic bag, were the niqab and abaya, which were wrapped around the Stanley knife, a tube of glue, and a few small bottles of complimentary soaps, eau de toilette and aftershave.
She had high hopes for the suitcase. She took it into a cubicle, closed the toilet lid, placed the case on it and got to work. It was padlocked, but not secure. The Stanley knife made short work of it. She cut across the zip just below the padlocked tag, then forced the teeth apart. It opened effortlessly.
A woman’s heels clicked into the bathroom. She stayed just a minute, talking on a phone about being on reception for the peace conference. She complained about her hair. Then she left.
Cantara picked through the case. There was underwear, but much too big. No blouses or trousers, but a navy blue niqab and abaya. A Muslim woman’s case. Make-up, lots of it; scissors; a hand mirror; a sewing kit; a roll of sticking plaster and a tube of antiseptic cream. Best of all, a pair of practical sandals which fitted her perfectly. She risked taking the case out of the cubicle, and lifted it onto the counter by a washbasin. She rapidly applied the make-up, heavy eye-liner, thick red lipstick, and some brown eyeshadow. Then put the niqab and abaya on, but with the veil thrown back so her face could be seen. An inflatable neck pillow, wrapped in a blouse and stuffed up the front of the abaya gave her a quite unflattering belly. A garish sequinned shoulder bag made a good place to keep her knife and other small items. Finally, she opened a spectacle case and found a pair of unfashionable pink-tinted reading glasses. She toyed with these against the sunglasses, but decided the sunglasses covered the bruise much better. Either way, she realised she looked quite a lot like Muysaneh Abbas, the woman whose passport she had been given in the musallah in London. She certainly looked nothing like Cantara al-Mansoor. Satisfied, but dreading the next step, she emerged from the bathroom as a portly middle-aged matron. She left the suitcase next to a new pile of luggage which was being stacked by the main door. Then, heading to the lift, she set off to a higher floor, to look for a room. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere she could cut herself open.
* * *
Rifat was furious. While he was relaying Cantara’s movements at the Red Sea Emerald over the phone to Omar, it soon became clear that she had got into a vehicle. She suddenly switched from moving at three or four kilometres an hour up to thirty or forty. But it was only half an hour later, when he overheard an angry exchange between Omar and Jabr in downtown Sharm that he realised that she had been travelling in the back of their own pick-up. How stupid they were, not to check. Hiding in the truck was, he had to admit it, an act of genius. High-risk genius, but genius all the same. In fact it was so clever that it almost made him suspect that she knew she was being tracked. It had got her out of the hills and into the city, where there was at least some chance of someone helping her.
That was a big worry. But tracking her down now should be easier. The Google map of Sharm el-Sheikh was finely detailed compared to the rough sketch provided for the hills and mountains. Here he had every side street, every large building, and detailed satellite photos too. Yet even here, Omar and Jabr had difficulty, and not just because of the police patrols, which were everywhere. When he had told them that she was right at the crossroads of El-Salam and Hussein Salam, they didn’t even seem to be able to find her. ‘She’s in a vehicle,’ he had yelled.
‘Not ours!’ was Omar’s reply.
‘Well, maybe she’s running in the middle of the road! She’s registering twelve kph.’
‘I don’t see her.’
‘But she’s right there. At your junction. Look around!’
‘We are looking. There are lots of cars and taxis. And police. Police everywhere!’
At one point Omar had been stopped by traffic police for the suspicious manoeuvres he was undertaking. The place was crawling with cops. And soldiers. Paratroops. Armoured cars. There were others. Not just Egyptian, but private security men. American Secret Service agents with their dark suits, sunglasses and coiled wires leading to earpieces. Rifat knew that, and he was as nervous as hell. But the one demand that came up, again and again from Omar was: ‘Why don’t you just blow here to pieces now? We are sick of this whirling Dervish dance.’
They were right. He should have detonated Cantara weeks ago. In the mountains, when the human remains, like those of the incompetent Tofi, could have been hidden. Certainly, it had been obvious for a long time that she could never have been used the way he had intended. Having made her a prisoner made it impossible. Rifat should have predicted that she was bound to become mistrustful. If she had to be bodily transported to the target area, she was no better than a car bomb. Worse, even, because the charge inside her was small, it was suited to little more than blowing out the skin of an airliner.
But the time for regrets was past. The one thing he certainly could not do was to detonate her this evening in the middle of Sharm el-Sheikh. It was quite possible that the whole conference might be called off in such circumstances, or at least many of the VIPs stay
away. Wyrecliffe was the crucial weapon. He just had to be there in that conference. With all those VIPs. With four hundred grams, nearly a pound, of PETP. The most audacious bomb in human history, there would be no other way to describe it. Rifat was looking forward to bringing the house down on the so-called peace process. He was looking forward to the notoriety that it would bring him.
Rifat looked back to the tracker axes. Cantara’s dot was now pulsing in the car park of a hotel. ‘Omar, are you there?’
‘I’m always here. A hand maiden to the devil that you are.’ Omar hawked and spat.
‘She’s walking in to the Ramada Royal Pharaoh Hotel.’
‘Where is that?’
‘On El-Salam, the south side. Just before Happy Time restaurant. You should be able to see it.’
‘Okay. We’re not far.’
A few minutes later Omar confirmed he was there. Cantara’s dot had been static for some time. The altitude readout had showed her on the ground floor. But now she was moving again. And she was now thirteen metres up.
‘Are you in there yet? She on the second or third floor. How many floors are there?’
‘Maybe three or four. And there’s armed security at the door. I don’t think they’ll let us in.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t look so much like a murderous jihadi,’ Rifat said. The thought came to him, again, of Irfan Tiwana’s remarks about the flexibility of women as tools on their path to the Caliphate. Tiwana, now being held in Belmarsh Prison, London. He had been the prime mover in selecting Cantara as their human bomb. Perhaps he might regret it now, if he’d seen how much trouble she had caused.
‘I am what I am,’ Omar said. ‘Jabr, pass me my trusty AK47, would you? We have God’s work to do.’ He turned off the phone.
Chapter Forty
Cantara had found an open room on the third floor of the Ramada Royal. The bed was unmade, the room service cart outside the door. The chambermaid was in her storeroom chatting to someone, unaware that the room that she was half-way through cleaning had been taken over. Cantara hung the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door, went in and locked it. When the chambermaid knocked, Cantara replied in English that she had forgotten something and would be gone again in ten minutes. The maid went away.
Cantara spread a spare blanket over the bed, and then a towel. She stripped down to her underwear. With her fingers, she felt the scar. It was just above the line of her pants. She positioned the mirror on a chair, so she could see exactly what she was doing. Her whole body was trembling. The hand-width horizontal incision was fully-healed after eight months, but at least she knew exactly where to cut. If only the tremors of fear that were pulsing in her abdomen would cease. She looked at her resources. A darning needle, which she had threaded with cotton, a miniature bottle of eau du toilette, some cotton wadding, a roll of sticking plaster, antiseptic cream and a leather belt.
She pressed the button and slid the triangular blade out, wiped it in perfume to sterilise it, then retracted it smoothly into the metal shaft. Slid it out, then retracted. She didn’t know how long she had sat there with the carpet-cutter, trying to pluck up the courage to do what she had to do. If there was any other way, any alternative, she would have taken it. But there was not. It had to be done. There was no one to help her. No one to take the responsibility. No one to do the job that had to be done. She just had to do it herself. She had prayed for strength and, inshallah, she would find it. She didn’t know whether she could bear the pain, but she knew she must try. It wasn’t just her own life at stake. The lives of others, perhaps many others, would depend on her having the courage to cut her own flesh.
And to remove the evil within her.
She folded the belt and gripped it between her teeth. Then she brought the blade to the edge of her quivering coffee-coloured flesh. And began to cut.
* * *
Two miles further north, Wyrecliffe’s taxi was stopped at the security barrier half a mile from the Tutankhamun hotel. He joined hundreds of other journalists, producers and photographers who were milling about under floodlights. They were waiting to pass all their equipment through a mobile x-ray scanner, and be patted down in pre-fabricated wooden kiosks. They would then be allowed to board one of half a dozen buses which would take them the short distance to the hotel lobby. The conference did not begin until tomorrow, but this evening’s introductory press briefing showed how seriously security was being taken. On the bus a PR woman handed out bulky press packs which included some advertising for the hotel with all its facilities, some frequently-asked questions about Egypt’s attitude to Middle East peace and some file pictures of the attendees, from Tony Blair to Hillary Clinton. While the bus crawled at walking pace, the PR woman picked up a microphone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press, welcome to Sharm el-Sheikh, and the most important Middle East peace conference in fifty years. You may think that today’s security is tight, but tomorrow’s will be unprecedented. Fifteen hundred military personnel, nine surveillance and attack helicopters, and state-of-the-art anti-aircraft defence systems are being deployed. We also have three new millimetre wave Advanced Imaging Technology body scanners. They don’t even have these at JFK in New York yet! I can safely say that the heads of state and other dignitaries who are coming will be safer here than they are at home…’
In the distance there was a series of pops. Immediately, half a dozen reporters at the back of Wyrecliffe’s bus bobbed up, looking through the back window of the. ‘That was gunfire! Definitely,’ one said.
‘There is nothing to worry about,’ the woman said. ‘It is probably just…’
The next fusillade of gunfire was unmistakeable, and there were flashes in the night sky coming from the southern end of town behind them. Almost as one, the journalists got out their phones and started making calls. ‘What? What?’ bellowed an enormous shaven-headed journalist from CNN, phone to one ear, and his hand clamped over the other. ‘Guys with AK47s storming the Ramada Royal Pharaoh? Fuck!’
Another reporter yelled out ‘Listen up, everyone. We got a feed from the centre of the city.’ He brandished his iPad. ‘Look at this. It’s a terrorist attack.’ Everyone tried to squash around to look at the footage, or access it on their own smartphones.
‘We’ll be at the reception in just one minute,’ the PR woman said. ‘Please sit down.’
‘We’ve been sold a dummy. Turn this goddamn bus around, now!’ yelled an American voice. ‘For fuck’s sake. We’ve got to get back into town.’ Everyone was standing up, trying to see, shouting to the driver. Several were climbing down the steps to the front door, but were blocked by an armed security guard. ‘Please sit down! It’s too dangerous to exit here,’ the PR woman said.
The sound of helicopters clattering low overhead drowned out the arguments. In the distance sirens wailed. Wyrecliffe, trapped in his window seat by an over-fed Polish radio reporter, could go precisely nowhere. His phone calls were faring no better. Arab Satellite Broadcasting’s fixer had his phone set to voicemail, while the line to the cameraman just rang and rang. All he could do was try again and again, as a bus full of frustrated newsmen rumbled at ten miles an hour directly away from the biggest story in months.
* * *
Cantara had tried not to scream, she really had. The TV was on loud, heavy metal music videos, but she was louder. The pain of cutting her own flesh was unendurable. Tears misted her vision. She had cut less than a finger nail-width, and there was blood. A lot of it. She didn’t think she could do more. Five minutes went by as she tried to pluck up the courage to try again.
Then outside, a single gunshot. A scream, followed by a deafening burst of gunfire. It sounded identical to the AK47 Omar had used. It was right outside. Glass exploding, there were more screams. They are coming for me, Oh God. They know where I am. The next noise came up from the stair well, echoing into the corridor. More shooting, more shouting and screaming. The sound of a door being kicked. Then there were noises outside. Sirens. A throbbi
ng orange light flashed through the curtains, a flickering light show on the ceiling of her room.
She had intended to be slow and deliberate, but there was no time for that. After wiping her eyes, she took in a very deep breath, and made a single deliberate but agonising stroke along the whole scar which brought a mewling cry through her clamped teeth. Wiping up the first gush of blood, she tentatively felt at the cut, poking a finger inside her abdomen. More blood, and a strange whitish fatty substance oozed out, spilling onto her thighs and the towel beneath. With two probing fingers she moved upwards and to the left, where her stomach’s bulge revealed the hard outline of the device now pressed against her skin. She found a cable leading into it, and tugged gently. The spattered mirror revealed a mass of dried black blood on a webbing of inflamed scar tissue, an alien object coated by her body’s defences. As she tugged, the device moved, slowly. But the scar tissue made it too large to come out of the incision. The sharp pain as the cut was strained further made her cry out, and she was forced to add an agonizing extra nick in her own flesh.
Another burst of gunfire came from the stairwell, echoing up to her floor. There was panic in the corridor outside. Guests trying to gather their families, knocking frantically on doors. Running, shouting, ragged voices. A man’s shout in English: ‘They’re shooting everyone.’
With shaking hands, she edged the device out, a stretching, tearing pain she imagined to be like giving birth. Five excruciating seconds and it was out. She cut the cable which led back through the incision, wrapping the exposed wire end in sticking plaster. The other end of the cable presumably led up to the pacemaker higher in her chest. She feared to disturb that.
