by John Sweeney
‘Is this true, boy?’ The Caliph’s full power concentrated on Abdul, his voice soft, almost caring.
Abdul mumbled something, but nothing comprehensible. He towered over Haroun. Hard to believe that the little one could bully an oaf like Abdul. What the smaller, younger boy was saying had the force of physical truth behind it.
‘Is this true, boy?’ repeated the Caliph, angry at Abdul’s mulish incoherence.
Wide-eyed but stupid, Abdul’s mouth fell agape but nothing came out.
‘It’s true, sir, everything I’ve said is true, sir.’ Again the purest, clearest note from Haroun, his thick black eyelashes and liquid eyes the very picture of innocence.
‘Boy? What have you to say, boy?’ the Caliph demanded of Abdul.
Saying nothing, he sank to his knees, his neck lolling forward, head touching the ground in submission – a plea for mercy, not a denial of guilt. The Caliph nodded to Khalil, who let Haroun go and seized Abdul and yanked him up to the makeshift stage. Khalil ripped Abdul’s shirt open, exposing his neck. Haroun, in the meantime, quietly walked down the steps to the factory floor and took his place amongst the boys below.
‘This is God’s justice,’ cried the Caliph, and signalled that the execution be carried out. The woman in black turned her head towards Abdul and the powerful central light speared through her two veils, revealing her eyes to be of the brightest blue. She cried out something, incomprehensible to everyone present apart from Timur, who understood English.
‘No, no, no, for Christ’s sake, don’t kill the boy!’
Hadeed punched her hidden face hard, twice. She took the full force of the blows, appeared to shrink physically, falling to the ground and curling up in the foetal position. But she had not finished.
‘He’s sick. Your Caliph, he’s ill, mentally ill. There is nothing good about this place. It—’
‘Shut the bitch up!’ barked the Caliph.
Khalil raised the scimitar above her prone neck, but Timur, stepping out of his stupor, managed to place himself between the executioner’s sword and the woman in black. None too gently, he picked her up in his arms and dragged her to his strongroom – the steel door was open – where he stored his explosives. He shoved her inside a cage, clanged it shut, locked it with a padlock and twisted around to exit the strongroom. She cried out once more, ‘Don’t kill him!’ and then the great steel door closed behind him and her voice was silenced.
The Caliph spat out in Arabic that the sentence of death be carried out. Khalil raised the scimitar high above Abdul’s neck. Understanding that speed was a kind of mercy, with a suddenness that startled everyone present, even the Caliph, he brought it down, slicing off Abdul’s head. The blood from Abdul’s severed carotid artery pumped so powerfully it hit the roof of the cave, then as the headless torso twitched this way and that, the jet of blood whiplashed around like a garden hose out of control. The Caliph, Khalil, Hadeed, Timur and all the boys by the front were covered with heavy splotches of blood. Abdul’s head bounced once, twice, then fell off the pedestal to land at Haroun’s feet. He kicked the head away as if it were a football.
‘Behold, my lion cubs – the management of savagery. To be pious is to be cruel; to be cruel is to be pious. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ – God is great – shouted the Caliph, and the lion cubs echoed him, their high-pitched voices fluting the phrase again and again, the intensity of it painful to the ear, the sound amplified in the close confines of the rock vault.
The Caliph raised one finger to heaven and then he and Hadeed were gone. Khalil, holding his bloodied scimitar aloft, studied Timur with an unpleasant stare, then he and the guard followed their master without a word. The lion cubs, many blood-spattered but curiously elated by the elimination of the traitor in their midst, returned to their work, chattering excitedly as they weighed the correct quantities of ball bearings and poured them into pockets in the vests and checked the wiring. When they grew just a couple of years older, they would become shaheed and enjoy the sweet glory of Paradise themselves, all one hundred and three of them.
TIRANA, ALBANIA
As Zeke stepped inside the pyramid he was yanked off his feet and then pushed down into a hole in the floor to the right. He fell for a split second, only to be caught by a very fat man who stank of garlic. Zeke couldn’t see clearly because his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the gloom, but he could feel the girth of his saviour’s belly. The fat man bounced him out of the way with his belly, only to catch the man who had pushed Zeke down. The fat man held on to the second man so that he could close the hatch above them. With the last of the natural light from above, Zeke realised that the second man was the Albanian detective, Agim Neza. The slight thud made by the closing of the hatch was masked by the racket created above on street level, as Zeke’s American protection team karate-chopped the board at the entrance.
Zeke found himself in a thin tunnel, enormously long; at its end, some two, three hundred yards away, a single naked bulb. He mentally scolded himself, having not anticipated the tunnel. Tyrannies like secret tunnels, the same way that democracies like chat shows.
The party of three hurried towards the light without running, and, as it grew stronger, he could better make out his companions. Agim was wearing a leather jacket, his face wreathed with anxiety yet also sardonic, displaying a slight tinge of amusement that they might just be getting away with it; behind Zeke was the round tub of fat, wearing the cheapest suit he’d ever seen, face smothered by an enormous walrus moustache. Zeke became aware of a great snorting noise, only to realise that it was Mr Walrus, breathing hard, at the pace that Agim was forcing.
When they reached the light, the corridor hit a T-junction. To the left was a set of stairs, to the right more corridor. Agim fiddled with his smartphone and it let out a thin, piercing beam. As soon as that was done, Mr Walrus reached for a switch on the wall and killed the light from the bulb. The two men shook hands and Mr Walrus started leaving, to the right. Zeke had enough time to whisper faleminderit – thank you – and then the fat man was gone.
Agim led the way up the stairs, his phone punching out a narrow beam of light. A door at the top opened onto the basement car park of a shopping mall. The policeman led the way to a Fiat Punto with a crevice in the front bumper. Zeke studied it circumspectly. As Agim unlocked the car, he said, ‘I am from Tropojë. We drive badly, but with courage.’
Zeke smiled to himself, then started to regret the chain of events he had started as Agim shot the Fiat out of the underground car park like Thunderbird Two taking off from its ramp on Tracy Island. No palm trees swung out of the way, however, for which Zeke gave thanks.
Agim didn’t appear to like roads. He took a right down an alleyway, squeezed the Fiat up a kind of footpath, and turned left through someone’s vegetable patch, only to emerge onto a main street, choked with traffic, from which there seemed to be no shortcut.
Agim examined the rear-view mirror, breathed an expansive sigh and announced, ‘No one is following us.’
‘They don’t have to,’ said Zeke.
‘What?’
‘You will be top of their list of suspects, as to which Albanian might have helped me do my Houdini act. We, er, they can track your phone.’
‘It’s switched off.’
‘They can track your phone even though it’s switched off. It makes it a little harder, that’s all. In Washington, DC, they can hunt you down in ten minutes. Here, maybe we’ve got an hour before they lock on to it. Maybe less. Take this turn.’
Agim turned onto a side road and parked opposite a grim rectangle of concrete, subdivided into flats, the ground-floor apartments barred with rough wire to prevent burglars. Ahead was a café, twinkling neon, and outside it four or five cars and a few motorbikes. The Albanian picked up his phone, looked at it with disgust and rolled down his window.
‘Should I throw it away?’ he asked.
‘Where are we heading?’
‘Tropojë.’
‘Why?
�
�You want to know about the CIA facility, don’t you?’
‘The facility that has nothing to do with the deaths of the seven fried ISIS men?’
‘In the meeting you said five of the fried men had been in ISIS.’
‘I was being conservative. Yes. I want to know about the CIA facility that no one at my level in the CIA knows about. What do you know?’
‘Nothing. Only, whenever I hear rumours about it, people shut up. When I ask my bosses about it, they change the subject. Bejtullah’ – and he switched to English here – ‘Bejtullah, as you say, let the bag out of the cat.’
Zeke smiled to himself.
‘My English is wrong?’
‘Charmingly so. The correct expression is “let the cat out of the bag”. But you’ve found something . . . ?’
‘There is an old construction engineer who, under Hoxha, built many, many tunnels and bases in the mountains. He taught everyone in his line of business. He stays in touch with the young ones who do his old job these days, hears their gossip. He is my third cousin. If anyone knows the location of your secret facility, he will.’
‘Agim, you married?’
‘No.’
‘Got kids anyway?’
‘No.’
‘OK. Tropojë’s to the north-east, correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Got any elderly relatives down south?’
‘Yes, an aunt in Gjirokastër, not so far from the border with Greece.’
‘How old is the aunt?’
‘Eighty-nine.’
‘Perfect. They won’t give her a hard time. Go to that café, find a guy with a big powerful motorbike, and give him seriously good money to deliver your phone to your aunt, fast. Do that now.’
‘So when they track my phone it will b—’
‘Going at a hundred miles an hour in the wrong direction.’
Agim started to smile.
‘We’re fighting a trillion-dollar hunting machine with what’s locally available. So hurry,’ said Zeke.
Agim didn’t hurry at all, but walked, a little half-heartedly, towards the café. Zeke liked that, liked the way he handled himself under pressure. The Albanian policeman reminded him of a much younger version of himself.
On his return, Agim fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a lump of rock, knotted, gnarled, light in weight, like volcanic lava but somehow not like it.
‘I forgot to give you this, a present. The shepherd who found the dead men on the mountain,’ said Agim, ‘he gave me this.’
‘Fulgurite,’ said Zeke in English. And then, in Albanian: ‘My grasp on your language isn’t good enough to say what this is, but in English we call it fulgurite. Rock that’s been forged by lightning. Another name for it is “petrified lightning”.’
‘Mr Ezekie—’
‘Call me Zeke, Agi—’
‘Zeke, the way you speak Albanian is beautiful. The best.’
‘Thank you. And thank you for arranging this. I’m worried that it might get you into trouble with your superiors.’
Agim started to laugh, his eyes closed. ‘I am in so much trouble already, helping you is just the caking on the ice.’
Zeke grinned, but this time inwardly, only to himself, knowing that although the expression was new to the English language, he understood exactly what Agim meant.
‘OK, so next, we’ve got to deal with the car.’
‘It’s an old car. Not mine.’
‘It belongs to a cousin?’
‘A second cousin.’
‘They can dig that out in no time. They’ll make a spider’s web of your family, friends, colleagues, people you’ve slept with, loved, lost, met, helped, harmed, arrested – you’re a policeman, after all – let go, prosecuted, freed. They’re making that web right now, tracking all previous phone calls you’ve ever made, emails you’ve ever sent, websites you’ve ever watched. They don’t do it in real time. They’ve had some clever folks from MIT, from Stanford, build a programme. They put your name in and out the data pops, billions of cunning searches in the time it takes to boil an egg. Less. Your second cousin ain’t no secret anymore, Agim, and nor is his car. The registration number, they already know. If this was New York or London or Paris or Beijing or Tokyo, we would already be in grave trouble. But there aren’t so many CCTV cameras in Tirana, so we have some time. We’re going to have to walk away from the car, to lose it. The safest way to go to Tropojë . . .’
‘Is how?’
‘By bus.’
Agim’s eyes widened in revolt.
‘That will take seven hours.’
‘Longer. We take local buses, we change, we go slow-slow.’
‘That will take maybe two days.’
‘Agim . . . I love my Agency. I love it what it stands for and I love who it defends – my people, the people of America, and beyond that the idea of democracy and the people of the world. Defends, more or less. Too often, right now, more less than more. We’re in trouble, it’s buckling out of shape, under pressure from ISIS, or more from our public’s fear of ISIS, from us needing to be seen to do something, however batshit crazy that something might be. So you and I are on the track of something the Agency has gotten into, something secret and dark. We don’t know exactly what the facility does, but we do know the results: folks, bad folks to be honest with you, but still human beings, end up electrocuting themselves in thunderstorms. The moment I got a whiff of this dark facility, I was ordered to head back to the States.
‘I smell a rat. And so, my Albanian friend, do you. The solution we’ve got is to go see an old construction engineer in Tropojë. Now, I know my Agency. They’re clever people, some of them the cleverest people on the whole planet. But they would never imagine that when one of their own executives goes rogue, he takes a slow bus. That ain’t natural. They’ll ask the Albanian interior ministry to put up roadblocks, but everyone will be looking for a deputy director gone rogue in a fancy car, not on a local bus. We want to do this right, we take the bus.’
And that is what they proceeded to do.
An encrypted cell call from Langley to Albania: ‘You want the bad news or the very bad news?’
‘Start with the bad.’
‘We’ve got four contractors, seriously good operators. They have one job, to make sure the Angel Moroni behaves himself and goes straight back to Langley.’
‘So?’
‘They lost him.’
‘Where?’
‘Hoxha’s mausoleum.’
‘How?’
‘He went down a bunny hole.’
‘Like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And the very bad news?’
‘They can’t find him.’
‘Tracked his phone?’
‘Are you serious? ’Course we tracked his phone. He uses a caveman phone, out of the Jurassic.’
‘So?’
‘He dumped it in the mausoleum.’
‘Any other leads?’
‘We think he may have run away with an Albanian cop.’
‘Can’t you buy the cop? Cops here are cheap.’
‘Word is he has moral objections. Anyways, he too has gone off the radar.’
‘What about the cop’s phone?’
‘We tracked it to an old lady down south, Gjirokastër. She was gaga. My guess, we were being played by the Angel Moroni.’
‘So?’
‘We suspect he’s heading your way. He’s going to stick his weird Mormon nose into your facility.’
‘He does that, he’s dog meat.’
‘We would not approve of that.’
‘Bow-wow.’
‘Not funny. We would not approve of that. Remember, soldier, we pay through the nose for your know-how. The bottom line? You do what you’re told.’
‘So Moroni sniffs the programme out, and there’s jack shit that you’re going to do about it, and I’m to do nothing?’
‘You misunderstand me. I’m going to
give you the telephone number of someone who, on occasion, can be useful. In our war against jihad, he is an ally. He has none of the Angel Moroni’s scruples, to put it mildly.’
‘Can’t you text me the number?’
‘No, that’s potentially traceable. Encrypted phone calls like this one are much tougher to crack. You’ve got a pen and paper?’
The other party said that yes, he had. The number was read out.
‘That’s a Moscow number.’
‘It is.’
‘You in bed with the Russians?’
‘The CIA is not now and never has been a soft-toy factory. You got trouble from the Angel Moroni, you call that number. You don’t harm a hair on Ezekiel Chandler’s head yourself, you understand me?’
‘Got it. What’s the name of the guy at the end of the line in Moscow?’
‘Grozhov.’
‘Can I call him now? Get him up to speed?’
‘He’s expecting your call.’
‘Does this Grozhov know about the Angel Moroni?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does Grozhov like him?’
‘On the contrary, Grozhov lost his favourite boy thanks to Zeke. Grozhov hates Moroni, hates him with a passion.’
‘What about blowback – what if it goes wrong?’
‘There won’t be any blowback. It won’t go wrong.’
‘And our programme as a whole? It’s black now, but if she wins the election, I’m hearing it’s never going to get official sanction.’
‘She won’t win the election. He will.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Grozhov.’
And then the line went dead.
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
An elderly white Mercedes 300D taxi drove Joe and Humfrey out of the Beirut burbs, to the Bekaa, the great rift valley that cleaves the eastern flank of the Lebanon. Joe was wearing a suit and tie, sensing that when crossing borders you get a dividend from dressing like a bank manager. Humfrey sported a Hawaiian shirt of volcanic-lava red with blotches of vomit yellow, and salmon-pink trousers, sensing that behind outrageous dress you can hide in plain sight. Either one or the other ruse might have worked, but together, in the same car, they looked crazy. But their paperwork was good and the Lebanese had other, more important things on their minds, such as not losing the peace.
