by Mark Dawson
The man ignored him and descended the steps.
“Don’t turn your back on me. Don’t you know who I am?”
The man stopped. He turned back, an amused smile playing at the edges of his mouth. “Do I know who you are?” He stepped back toward Salim again. “Yes, I do. I know that you are the man the Americans and the British are saying funded the bombing at Westminster. The man who, they say, paid for the missile that downed the British Airways flight this morning.”
Salim’s jaw dropped open. “What?”
“They have broadcast evidence that says you are connected with us.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“Which part?”
“None of it. I had nothing to do with the bombs or the plane, and I have nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, Salim, we know you have nothing to do with the caliphate. We know of you, of course. We have researched you. Your involvement with the sheik, for example. We know about that. And you say that you had nothing to do with the bombs. That may be so. But the Imperialists have evidence that suggests you did fund the operation. Emails. Bank transfers. And they have emails from you to representatives of the caliphate that talk of a common cause. We know that these emails are false. We have never communicated with you. The question we have—the question you are going to have to help me understand—is why those emails exist and how they came to be in the possession of our enemies.”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’ve been set up.”
“Perhaps. But perhaps you are an agent provocateur. Perhaps you have worked with them and running to Beirut was part of the deception, what they would expect you to do. Or perhaps you are a stooge, as you say. It is impossible for us to say without discussing it with you. The details will become clear.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You would say that, though, wouldn’t you? We will need rather more certainty than just taking your word for it. Everything will become clear when you are interrogated. Now—please go inside. I will see you all tomorrow.”
They were met by four armed guards as they disembarked from the bus. These men were dressed in black robes over jeans and trainers, and they each sported AK-47s. The men led them inside, two at the back and two in front. Isabella paid close attention. They looked young, one of them particularly so; he was trying and failing to grow a beard like the ones sported by the three other men. The two in front were talking in a guttural language that she didn’t recognise: Russian, perhaps. The guards’ weapons did not look to be well cared for. The AK was impossibly rugged and reliable and would fire regardless, but that wasn’t what she focussed upon. If they did not maintain their weapons, it suggested that they were either lazy or badly trained, or both. It was possible that their laxity would extend to their guard duties.
One of the guards behind Isabella jabbed her in the back with the muzzle of his rifle, and she made a show of her compliance, obediently scurrying ahead. But she still observed. There was a narrow corridor with two doors to the left and right and a set of double doors straight ahead. One of the guards parted the doors and ushered them through into the factory’s main space. Isabella looked around. There were exposed girders in the roof, rows of pillars, windows in which every single pane of glass had been shattered and, overhead, a metallic hook for an indoor crane that would once have moved on runners. The factory must have once been dedicated to some sort of manufacturing; there were the hulks of lathes and milling machines and other machine tools that had been left to rust, their purpose impossible to discern.
They were shepherded to the back of the space. This was where the cells had been constructed. A row of small cubicles had been built out of bricks and breeze blocks, each cell fitted with a thick metal door. The row had been finished with a concrete slab that provided a ceiling; the warehouse space continued for another ten metres overhead. There was a single light that had been attached to the wall, its glow necessary to illuminate the dim space, although it was barely bright enough to do that properly. It did cast a faint glow over a wooden chair that had been fitted with belts that were intended, no doubt, to restrain prisoners during interrogations.
They were marched up to the cells. Salim and Khalil were taken away first. Jasmin reacted badly, becoming almost hysterical as she realised what was happening. She clutched Salim’s arm, but they were forced apart before her husband and son were marched to the cells on the far left of the row.
Jasmin slumped down to her knees and started to sob.
Isabella watched it all dispassionately. She needed to be aware of everything that was happening. The reactions of the people around her, the surroundings she found herself in—everything. There would be a moment when another chance to escape would be presented, and she knew that she would need to be ready to take it. And, too, she knew that she needed to maintain the pretence that she had worked so hard to maintain. She didn’t know how much the guards would know of what had happened before: how she had disabled the driver on the mountain road, or how she had almost escaped before they were transferred to the helicopter. Perhaps they wouldn’t be told, and perhaps they would form an impression based on the evidence before them: she was a young girl, still wearing the pretty dress that she had sported to a party a thousand miles and a different world away. She was frightened, confused and fearful of what the future might hold for her. The fact that her training was at the forefront of her mind, and that she was a coiled spring ready to seize the smallest chance, she buried deep. It served her nothing to reveal anything beyond her disguise.
One of the guards opened a third cell and returned for Jasmin. She wouldn’t stand when he told her to get up, so he dragged her across the room, deposited her in the cell and shut the door.
Isabella was next. Her cell was to be next to Jasmin’s. The guard opened it and gestured that she should go inside. She walked forward. The cell was tiny, no more than the span of her arms from side to side and seven or eight feet deep. There was a thin mattress that was spotted with brown stains and an empty plastic bottle. Nothing else.
Isabella was shoved the rest of the way inside. She pretended to trip over the edge of the mattress and sprawled over it, turning back just as the door was slammed closed. She heard the key turn in the lock.
It was almost completely dark inside the cell. She reached out with both hands to touch the walls so that she could orient herself, and then stood. There was a tiny sliver of light around the top of the cell, where the concrete slab had been lowered onto the bricks. It was eight feet to the ceiling, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been lower; it would have been impossibly heavy for Isabella to move.
She heard the sound of laughter and retreating footsteps as the guards walked away.
Isabella stayed awake for two hours to get an idea of the functioning of the prison. She listened for the guards and tried to gauge the pattern of their patrols. She concluded, in the end, that there was no pattern. They were disorganised and haphazard and not particularly well trained. That all being said, the cells had been well constructed, and Isabella concluded that it would be difficult to break out of them without help.
She was tired, and she needed sleep. There would be a chance to escape, and she didn’t want to waste it because she had no energy. She lay down on the thin mattress, ignoring the stains that she had seen while the door had been open, and closed her eyes. She could hear gentle sobs from the cell to her right. She thought that it was Jasmin, but Jasmin was next to her and this sounded farther away.
It must have been Salim.
Chapter Nineteen
The motorbike lost power suddenly and without warning. Pope heard the sound of a sharp snap and felt a painful sting as something whipped against his left leg. He applied the brakes and came to a stop at the side of the road.
Pope was not a mechanic, but it was simple enough to diagnose the fault. The chain had snapped in half, part of it draping down onto the sandy road. He had been fortunate. It would have been ea
sy enough for the snapped chain to have bound and locked the drivetrain, or the broken end to have whipped back into his leg with enough force to sever a tendon. As it was, the only damage to his calf was a painful welt that was already beginning to discolour with a fresh bruise. He prodded and poked at the chain, but he knew that there was nothing he could do. There was no repair that he could make out here, with no spare parts and no tools. The bike was a write-off.
He cursed his misfortune. He was going to need to find alternative transport.
He took his binoculars out of his backpack and scanned the surroundings. The desert stretched away in all directions, a bland and generally featureless expanse composed of blacks and greys, gradually disappearing into the encroaching darkness. There was a large butte perhaps twenty miles to the east, the road swerving around it and continuing through the wide basin over which the mountain presided. The road continued, marked by vivid yellow stripes that warned against straying onto the verge and the dotted white central line. Electricity pylons accompanied the road in both directions, the fizz and pop that Pope could hear suggesting that they were still functional.
Pope looked back to the west. He had crossed the border twenty minutes earlier, and he had been travelling at around fifty miles an hour. That meant that he was around sixteen miles inside the border.
There was no sign of traffic in either direction.
He had two options.
He could retrace his steps and cross back into Turkey. It would be safer, it would be easier there to secure more suitable transport, and it would give him the opportunity to plan for a second incursion with the benefit of greater preparedness. Pope dismissed it at once. It would take time to do that, perhaps a day or even two days before he would be ready to return. Isabella might not have the time to permit him that luxury.
The only other option was to continue onward. He had no interest in trekking through the desert during the heat of the day, but it would be cool now, and he had the benefit of the darkness to help him avoid detection. There was no sign of habitation on the road ahead, but he knew that there were towns within reach.
He went back to the bike and rolled it off the road, pushing it into a ditch and arranging it so that it was lying flat and impossible to see from a passing car. He put the binoculars back into his backpack, replaced it on his back and scrambled back up to the road. He would travel across the smooth surface rather than the more rugged terrain for as long as he had enough time to hide if he saw a vehicle.
Pope checked left and right again. He was alone, with just the calling of a nightjar high overhead to keep him company.
He set off to the east.
Chapter Twenty
They were woken at dawn.
There was a slat at the bottom of the cell door that Isabella had not noticed. One of the guards opened it and pushed in a bowl of rice and beans, a spoon and a cup of water.
“Eat,” he said through the door. “We go soon.”
The man left the slat open so that she had a little light. Isabella looked down at the bowl. It looked barely edible, but she hadn’t eaten since lunch on the day that she had been abducted. She tried to remember how long ago that was. Thirty-six hours? She would have to eat to try to maintain her strength; she intended to escape, and, if she could carry that off, there was no way of knowing how long it would be before she was able to find food again. She took the spoon and shovelled the rice into her mouth, washing it down with glugs of the tepid water that she hoped might disguise its foulness, but in reality just substituted one unpleasant taste for another.
Isabella heard the guards return half an hour later, and as she listened, trying to anticipate what might happen next, she heard the sound of cell doors to her right being opened. She counted three doors, and then her own was unlocked. Shafts of sunlight filtered down from the holes in the ceiling and through the broken windows, casting their light over the idle machinery, the debris that littered the spaces between them, and the coating of sand and grit that had fallen over everything.
Salim and Khalil were already halfway across the factory floor, two guards behind urging them toward the corridor and the exit. Jasmin was outside her cell, a woman standing next to her with her hand on Jasmin’s arm. One of the guards had stayed with them, his AK trained on them with lazy technique.
“This is Aabidah,” the man said, indicating the woman. “She is from the al-Khansaa brigade. You know who they are?”
“No,” Isabella said.
“They are our moral police. They raise awareness of our religion among women and punish those who do not abide by the law. You will do what she says.”
Jasmin shook her head. “No. I want to be with my husband and my son. Where are they taking them?”
“You will do what she says,” the man said, his voice becoming more forceful. “No argument. Okay?”
Jasmin looked as if she was going to resist, and Isabella could see from the attitude of the man that he would not stand for her disobedience. They would use force if they needed to, and Isabella was concerned that rough treatment could very easily be extended to her, too. She had no interest in taking a beating for no reason. She turned to Jasmin and took her gently by the elbow.
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll do what she says.”
Jasmin turned to look at her, the expression on her face suggesting that she didn’t know how to respond to Isabella’s intervention, but she did not demur. She gave a nod, her eyes rimmed red from crying.
The woman gestured down to the bag at her feet. “Your new clothes are inside,” she said.
Isabella crouched down and unzipped the bag. She took out two double-layered niqabs, two loose abayas and two pairs of gloves. Isabella had lived in Morocco long enough to have become familiar with Arabic dress, but Marrakech was a cosmopolitan city and attitudes were relaxed. The full-face niqab was not common, and certainly not as thick as this one. These items were more conservative than any she had ever seen before.
The woman turned and said something to the man that Isabella didn’t catch. He grunted a response, turned and walked to the other side of the room. They were left with Aabidah. Isabella felt her fists clench, an almost subconscious reaction, as she reassessed the situation. Was this the chance she had been waiting for? There was nothing in the room that she could use as a weapon, but she was confident that she could disable the woman with no difficulty. Aabidah was encumbered with her own abaya and veil and would not be able to react quickly enough to stop Isabella from disabling her. But what would she do after that? The man was on the other side of the room. He had an automatic rifle. She would have to get by him in order to get outside. The other guards had gone in that direction. Even if she was able to take the guard out and get outside, what would she do then? She didn’t know where she was.
No. This wasn’t the opportunity. She held up the abaya. Her dress would make her hopelessly conspicuous. The abaya and the niqab would offer her anonymity. She would stand a better chance of getting away if she was wearing the clothes that they wanted her to wear. It made better sense to be compliant, at least for now.
There would be another chance.
“That dress,” the woman said distastefully. “Remove it.”
Isabella pretended that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with the clothes, and Aabidah helped her. She removed the dirty party dress and accepted a pair of plain denim jeans, a white T-shirt and a pair of second-hand trainers. The abaya was loose, much more voluminous than any she had seen before and, she suspected, designed to eliminate the smallest possibility that it might reveal the outline of the wearer’s body. The double veil was stifling and uncomfortable, reflecting her breath back against her face. The gloves, too, were made from a fabric that was not best suited to the temperature inside the room. When she had finished dressing, she felt different. Isabella was not concerned with appearance. Vanity was a weakness that her mother had scoured out of her.
Aabidah adjusted the fall of the garme
nt and, satisfied, gave a nod. “You must wear this always. If you go outside without it, the hisbah will punish you. Always black. Always thick, always baggy. It must not attract attention. No decoration, no perfume. Everything must be covered.”
Jasmin dressed, too, and when they were both done, the woman called out to the guard and he returned to escort them out of the room and into the corridor beyond. The daylight was bright, and Isabella was glad of the shield across her eyes. She could see through the gauze strip that covered the eye slit, and outside she noticed the same yellow bus that had brought them here yesterday.
They were hustled outside. The guard went first, opening the door and admitting the noise of the bus’s engine and a waft of stifling, dry heat.
Salim and Khalil were at the front of the bus. Jasmin sat next to her husband, and Isabella, who was going to sit beyond Khalil, was pushed so that she fell down onto the bench next to him.
The guards boarded and the driver closed the doors and pulled away.
“You’re dead,” Khalil said to Isabella as they bounced across the road. “At least we are Muslim. You’re a keffir. They’ll kill you.”
A huge curtain of pitch-black smoke billowed into the air on the other side of town. It was wide, at least a mile across, and as it drifted up, it cowled the sun. One of the guards pointed to the smoke and told the man next to him that it was from a pipeline that had been destroyed by Russian jets.
The bus drew to a stop and the guards indicated that the four of them should disembark. Salim and Jasmin went first, then Khalil, then Isabella. They were outside a building that had obviously once been a hotel. It was set back from the road and surrounded by gardens that had not been tended for many months. Weeds had been allowed to grow tall and unkempt, and lawns that might once have been green had been flattened under the brutal hand of the sun. Late-model cars lined the roads, and two fighters in fatigues transported blankets and other belongings from the trunk of a Nissan. A sign above the door read “Karnak” and as they were hurried inside the reception, Isabella saw a wall that had been decorated in an array of crazy colours; parched potted plants; and a counter that was no longer used, relegated to holding stacks of paper and folders.
