by Mark Dawson
“More than you might think. But I’d be here even if it didn’t. Some of the kids here, they’re just boys. They don’t speak the language. They’re frightened. If we can help them improve things just a little, it’s worth it.”
Milton nodded and slid the leaflet back into a holder.
The woman smiled at him. “What’s your story?”
“Similar,” he said. “Just trying to help.”
“We could always do with an extra pair of hands.”
Milton smiled back at her. “I’m not qualified to give that kind of help.”
He turned before she could try to continue the conversation, just as the doors were opened and the detainees were allowed inside.
Samir was at the back of the group. Milton caught his eye and pointed to the same table that they had used before. He went to the table at the back of the room and made two coffees. He turned and saw that Samir was watching him.
Milton went to the table and put the paper cups down.
“I did not think you would come back,” Samir said.
“I said that I would.”
Samir took the paper cup and put it to his lips. He looked at Milton the whole time, the whites of his eyes standing bright against his black skin.
“I spoke to the lawyer.”
“And?”
“She said she will take my case. She says I have a chance. Asylum—she says it is not impossible.”
“That’s great,” Milton said.
“But it might take weeks. There is bureaucracy. I need to be out of here, John. My sister needs me.”
“I found the place,” Milton said.
“The place?”
“The address you gave me. I visited it.”
Samir’s expression changed to one that mixed fear and anticipation. “Was she there?”
“No. They moved her. I’m sorry, Samir.”
The young man closed his eyes, and Milton saw his larynx bobbing up and down in his throat as he swallowed. “When was this?”
“The day before yesterday.”
Samir looked down at the table.
“Has she been in touch again?” Milton asked him.
“No,” Samir said. “Nothing. What happened when you were there?”
“I went inside,” he said. “I spoke to someone who was there. Another girl. She told me about Nadia. She was there. I was a day too late.”
Samir drank again. His hand was shaking.
“I’ve got a picture I want to show you,” Milton said.
He took out his phone and navigated to the still from the security camera that showed the woman and the man as they exited the brothel. He slid the phone across the table. “That’s Nadia, isn’t it?”
Samir picked up the phone and stared at it. Tears welled in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. His voice was husky and he blinked hard, trying to prevent the tears from falling.
“The man she’s with—do you recognise him?”
Samir cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen him before. Do you know who he is?”
“I don’t.”
“What do you know? Do you know anything?”
There was anger in his voice; Milton disregarded it. It was reasonable, and he knew that it wasn’t directed at him.
“How will we find her now?” Samir asked when Milton didn’t respond.
Milton put the telephone back into his pocket. “I’ll find her.”
Samir stared hard at him. “But you have no idea, do you? They have taken her somewhere else, and there is no way we will be able to find her.”
“Not necessarily. I’ve been thinking about it. About everything that happened to you. There might be a way we can get to them.”
Samir clenched his fists on the table, his knuckles bulging. “How?”
“Tell me about the smugglers.”
“Why—”
“Tell me what happened. How you found them. How they operated. Everything.”
Samir looked dubious. “We travelled from Eritrea,” he began. “I told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“We travelled for a week to get to Tripoli. We travelled at night, in cages, with no food and no drink. Through the desert. We were near Tripoli when we were captured by Libya Dawn. They are a militia. They fight against the other militias and the government. They buy and sell refugees like us for use as slaves or fighters in their gangs. I did not care about what they did to me. I was worried about Nadia. My sister is pretty.” He pointed down to Milton’s pocket, where he had put the phone. “You have seen. Very pretty, yes?”
Milton inclined his head.
“And I see how the guards look at her. I know what they are thinking. You understand?”
“Yes,” Milton said. “Go on.”
“The militia were offered money for us. There were thirty of us. They sold us to a smuggler for one thousand dinars each. The smugglers say that they will get us across the sea, but we must pay them back the one thousand dinars as well as the price of the boat trip, our food, life jackets, and everything else that they say that we need. It was two and a half thousand dinars each. We had been saving our money for months and I paid them. The next morning, they told us we would go. They drove us to Sabratah, where they had their boats. They kept us in houses near the beach and then drove us to the boats in trucks. There were five hundred of us. I thought that they would have many boats, but they did not. Two boats. Two boats for all of us. They told us not to worry, that the ships were new and had a captain and two assistants, but they lied. They guarded us with Kalashnikovs and told us that no one could leave. Then we go, and they followed us in dinghies until we were out at sea. We were lucky, but the other boat broke down. We left it behind. When we arrived on the island, people asked what happened to it. They said we don’t know, but then someone on our boat heard that the other boat sank and everyone drowned.”
Samir finished and Milton was quiet for a moment.
“I meant what I said,” Milton said. “I want to help you, and I want to help your sister, but I don’t think I will be able to find her in London now. So I need to work backwards.”
“What do you mean?”
“The smugglers. How do they operate?”
Samir shrugged. “It is easy to do. You need a boat and the contacts to find people like me and my sister. A place like Sabratah or Zuwara is like a market. Dozens of smugglers. The passengers are just cargo. If boats leave early, the smugglers with cargo to move will sell them to the smugglers who are ready to go. Say one smuggler has one hundred people. He sells them to another smuggler for one thousand dollars each. He makes a lot of money. The other smuggler, the one who has a boat and is ready to go, he charges the passengers two thousand dollars each. He makes a lot of money, too. I think they are all very rich.”
“Which smuggler was responsible for you?”
“He is called Ali. He is in charge of the market at Sabratah. He is the biggest.”
“And he arranged your trip?”
Samir nodded. “His boats were ready to leave. He bought us from the militia.”
“And how would I find him?”
Samir looked at Milton with wide eyes. “He is in Libya, Mr. Smith.”
“I know,” Milton said. “You said. How would I find him?”
“You would go to Tripoli.”
Part 3
Libya
Chapter Twenty-One
MILTON LOOKED DOWN from the porthole window of the EgyptAir Embraer 170. They were over the coast, the ocean a vivid blue beneath them and the beaches of northern Egypt thin yellow ribbons lapped by the white spume of the incoming waves.
It had been a long day. Milton had driven from Dover to Heathrow and left his car in the long-stay car park. He had gone into the departures lounge, stopped at an ATM to draw out the money that he thought he might need and then changed it into an assortment of currencies: dollars, euros, Egyptian pounds and Lybian dinars. He had given careful thought to the best way to reach Liby
a. The political instability meant that there was an extremely limited selection of flights into the country, and it wasn’t possible to fly direct from the UK.
He had three options.
He could have flown on Air Berlin from Heathrow to Orly and then transferred there to a Tunisair flight to Monastir Habib Bourguiba International Airport. Afriqiyah Airways had just announced a new flight into Tripoli, and Milton could have taken that. But he decided against it. He was travelling under one of his false passports, but his documents were English and he did not want to attract unnecessary attention by being one of the few Europeans with the bravery or stupidity to fly directly into Tripoli.
The second option was to fly Tunisair to Tunis, as before, and then drive the eight hundred kilometres east to Tripoli so that he could avoid drawing unnecessary attention to himself upon his arrival at the airport. It was a ten-hour drive, but still quicker than driving west from Egypt, and it would have been his preference had it not been for the recent gains by ISIS along the northern coast road. He would have to pass through contested territory, and, after careful assessment, he decided that the risks inherent in that route were too severe.
That left him with one other option. He had purchased a flight from Heathrow to Alexandria, flying Aegean to Athens and then EgyptAir to Alexandria. He would make his way across country and cross the border at El Salloum.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the chief steward said over the intercom, “the captain has put on the fasten seat belts sign. Please return to your seats, fasten your seat belts, and put your tray tables in the upright position. We will be commencing our descent into Alexandria shortly.”
Milton finished the bottle of sparkling water that he had purchased at Heathrow and dropped it into the black bin liner that was held open by a passing steward. He clipped his belt around him and watched out of the window as they started to descend.
#
MILTON WAITED PATIENTLY before the kiosk while the immigration officer checked his passport. The man looked down at the splayed-open document and then up at Milton. He was travelling under the name of John Smith and was using the false passport that he had used the last time he had travelled into north Africa. He had had no trouble before, and the delay was a little concerning. He had chosen Alexandria rather than Cairo to shave a little time from his onward journey to Tripoli, but he second-guessed himself now. He wondered whether it might have been more prudent to fly into the busier Cairo International than this quieter airport. Alexandria was busy, but it would have been easier to hide within the greater multitudes that would have passed through Egypt’s main hub.
Too late for that now, though.
“What’s your business in Egypt, Mr. Smith?”
“Pleasure.”
“On your own?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just want some sun and some peace and quiet.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Here—Alexandria.”
“Which hotel?”
“The Sheraton Montazah.”
Milton had taken the precaution of booking a room. He had no intention of using it, but, since it would be unusual for a tourist to arrive with no accommodation arranged, he knew that his usual thoroughness was important.
The officer considered the information and turned to the computer screen on his desk. Milton wondered whether the Mukhabarat had a record of his reservation. Milton knew that the Egyptian intelligence service was still extant even after the overthrow of the regime that had spawned it.
He had travelled to the country on several occasions before this. The last time was the assignment to Cairo for the joint MI6-Mossad-CIA operation that had sabotaged Iran’s nuclear and long-range missile program. He and another Group Fifteen agent had been the British contingent. Milton remembered the meet-up with Avi Bachman, and the thought of the Mossad agent—put out of his mind since the events in Croatia—gave him a moment’s pause. He remembered the expedition from Egypt to Iran’s Zagros Mountains and the bombs that had degraded the likelihood of there ever being an Islamist nuke.
The border guard looked down at the passport and back to him once again, and then pushed the document through the slot in the Plexiglas screen.
“Welcome to Egypt, Mr. Smith,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
MILTON TOOK a taxi from the airport to Misr railway station. Alexandria was teeming with life, its inhabitants going about their daily business under the cosh of a brutal noonday sun. He paid the driver, went into the station concourse and then joined the queue for the ticket office. There were four queues, in fact: three for men and women and one for women alone. It took thirty minutes to get to the head of the line but, as he was about to approach, the clerk pulled down the blind and went for lunch. Milton shook his head with wry recognition, remembering similar experiences of Egyptian customer service, and joined the end of one of the other queues. He waited another twenty minutes, was finally successful in purchasing a ticket, and then made his way to the platforms.
The Egyptian railway network was of variable standard. The line that ran down the spine of the country, connecting Alexandria in the north to Cairo and then Luxor and Aswan in the south, was a prestige line that was provided with lavish funding. Milton remembered it well: the carriages were plush, modern, and air conditioned, and the long journey could be enjoyed in some very decent accommodation.
The other main line, running east to west along the northern coast, was not so pleasant. It connected Alexandria and Sallum, on the border with Libya. Milton had never used it before but, as he boarded and found his way through the busy carriage to his seat, he decided that the accommodation could only be generously described as third class. The carriage was a French design and made from stainless steel, which promised to amplify the heat, and the air conditioning was not particularly impressive.
Milton sat down. The seats were arranged in twos, with pairs facing each other. He was sitting next to an elderly woman and opposite a younger woman with a young child on the seat next to her. The old woman looked at Milton, said something in Arabic that he took to be derogatory, and then looked away. The mother was too busy keeping her child in line to afford him more than a quick glance.
The journey was almost exactly five hundred kilometres and was timetabled to take six hours. The child promised to be distracting but, on the other hand, her small legs meant that Milton could stretch his out until they were beneath her seat. He took his phone from his pocket, plugged in his earphones, and scrolled through his music until he found the Happy Mondays compilation he wanted. He closed his eyes and waited for the train to leave.
#
MILTON STEPPED DOWN from the train and crossed the platform to the exit. The journey had been long and arduous. Instead of the advertised six hours, the train had been delayed outside El-Agamy and, by the time they reached the end of the line, they had been travelling for closer to nine. It was dusk, and the temperature, although still warm, was more pleasant now than it had been earlier.
The station was basic. A concrete platform was alongside the carriages, a curved wooden roof suspended overhead by a series of wooden pillars. Milton had his ticket ready, but there was no one to show it to. The exit was open and Milton followed the handful of other passengers who had travelled this far until he was outside.
The town of Sallum was a mainly Bedouin community that survived as a regional trading centre. It was rich with Roman history, with wells and the remains of villas nearby, but despite a pleasant beach, it had escaped the relentless tide of commercialism that had changed the rest of the country and did not see many visitors. That was unfortunate. Milton knew that he would be noticed and also that it was unlikely that he would be able to find anywhere to hire a car for his onward journey.
He would be as quick as possible.
The landscape around and about was dominated by the arid countryside. The town was situated on the slopes that led down from higher ground to the sea, with low-slung buildings and a collecti
on of taller hotels by the water. Milton walked away from the station toward the centre of the town and kept going until he reached the collection of cafés down on the dockside. There were a couple of cars parked up against the wall that guarded the drop to the water below. They were both old Ladas, painted black and white in the fashion that marked them out as taxis. The cafés had laid out a row of tables in haphazard fashion, some of them arranged in the road to create an unofficial patio area, and several men were sat around them, smoking from a shisha pipe and drinking qasab, the sugarcane drink that was served cold as refreshment against the heat.
Milton approached the men.
“Do any of you speak English?”
The men looked across at him with no attempt to conceal their scorn. One man, swarthy and grizzled, spat down at Milton’s feet.
Milton’s Arabic was basic, but he could make himself understood. “I’m looking for a taxi.”
The man who had spat at him waved a hand dismissively, pushed his chair away from the table and got up. Milton tensed, expecting trouble, but the man shook his head at him, crossed the road and got into one of the taxis. He started the engine and pulled away.
There were three men left around the table and one taxi. Milton turned and pointed to it. “Who drives that car?”
One of the men raised a finger and, to Milton’s mild surprise, he spoke in halting English. “What are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not tourist. We get no tourist here.”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Why would a journalist come here? There is nothing.”
Milton took the chair that the first driver had vacated and sat down in it. He looked more carefully at his interlocutor: he was middle-aged, with dark brown eyes and deeply tanned skin. The shisha pipe had four hoses; the man was holding his between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, the skin stained a dirty yellow from cigarettes.
“Do your friends speak English?”
The man drew on the pipe, inhaled the smoke, and then put the hose down on the table. “No,” the man said. “Only me.”
