by Mark Dawson
Aqil?
Isabella had already decided she would attack him if he opened the door.
She hopped to her feet and closed her eyes a little so that she wouldn’t be blinded by the light from outside.
The door opened, and she saw Aqil standing there.
She grabbed a double fistful of his jacket, pivoted on her right foot and hauled him into the cell. She tripped him, drove him onto the mattress, planted him there with her right knee in the middle of his sternum and drew back her fist to pummel him.
“No!” he said, raising his hands and holding them above his face. “I want to help.”
Her fist was bunched so tightly that she could feel her nails pressing into her palms, and her bicep throbbed with adrenaline, but something told her to pause. Aqil’s face was dimly lit in the light from the bulb outside, and enough of the glow was cast onto his face that she could see how terrified he was.
He wasn’t here because he had been told to get her. This was something else.
She didn’t strike him.
“Quickly,” she said. “And keep your voice down.”
“What you said last time—you asked why I was here.”
“To fight. That’s what you said.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked as if he was about to go on, but his face dissolved and he looked away.
“What is it?” she said.
He was crying. “I don’t want to be here. It was a mistake. I should never have come.”
“What are you saying, Aqil?”
“You asked me to help. I will. Let’s go. I’ll get you out of here. We can leave together.”
Isabella thought as quickly as she could. Thoughts scampered through her head, difficult to pin down and weigh up. The dominant one was that this was her chance. She knew what her mother would have done: Beatrix would have knocked him out, locked him in the cell, taken his AK and gone. It was dark now. She would be able to hide in the shadows, use them to help her to get out of the city.
But she thought around it a little more. What was the alternative? She could go with him. There were all sorts of problems that he might be able to help her surmount. How would she get by the guards? How many were there? At least one, but maybe more. He could give her the information that she needed, and help her deal with the problem. There were other advantages of having him around, too. Women were not supposed to be on the street without a chaperone. If anyone saw her, out on her own after dark, she would be arrested. He could help her to avoid that, too.
And then doubts. He was frightened. What would he be like if they came under fire? Could she trust him?
“Please,” he said. “I want to do the right thing. I’m going. Tonight. I can’t leave you here. You’re just a girl. How are you going to get away without me?”
It was so pitiful she almost chuckled at it. Here he was, pinned to her dirty mattress, half a second from being hit in the head, and with no idea at all who she was and what she was capable of doing. Perhaps he really did want to do the right thing. That was in his favour. But he thought she was helpless, a poor little lost girl whose only chance was if he helped her. But he had it the wrong way around: if he did want to get out of the city and the country, his only chance of making it was if she helped him.
“They’re going to kill you,” he added redundantly.
Isabella leaned back, removing her weight from his chest, reached down for his fatigues again and pulled him back to a sitting position.
“Get up,” she said.
“What? I—”
“Quickly.”
Her decisiveness—and the fact that she had thrown him to the ground so easily—now seemed to register on Aqil. He stood.
“Where is your AK?”
“Outside,” he said.
“How many guards are there?”
“One. In the guardhouse outside. We take shifts.”
Two guards? Okay. That seemed reasonable when the prisoners were so securely locked up.
She went outside and he came behind her.
“The guard,” she said. “He’s in the guardhouse? The hut at the front of the building.”
“Yes,” Aqil said.
“What’s the guard like?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Is he thorough? Lazy? Is he likely to be asleep? What weapon does he have?”
“He’s young,” he said, stumbling over his words. “I think he’s Syrian. He’s scared of them, too. He won’t be asleep.”
“Weapon?”
He nodded at the AK that was standing against the wall. “The same as that.”
“My niqab is in the cell,” she said. “Get it for me.”
He did as she asked. She turned, looking out into the gloom of the wide space and the shadowed hulks of its machinery, and started to work out what they would do.
But then she paused.
The al-Khawaris were still here.
She couldn’t just leave them to be killed.
“Does your key open all the cells?” she asked him.
“Yes. The same one works on all of them. Why?”
“I can’t leave them.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’re not here. They didn’t come back today.”
“They’re still at the hotel?”
“I don’t know. No one tells me anything. I’m just a guard.”
That changed things.
Bad luck for them, but there was no time to waste thinking about the al-Khawaris now. She would have let them out, once she was certain that they could not impede her, but she certainly wasn’t going to go looking for them. Whatever was going to happen to them was going to happen.
“This is what we’re going to do,” Isabella said. “You’re going to go and get the guard. Say that there’s a problem. Tell him I’m ill. I’m having a fit. Bring him back here. I’ll hide there”—she pointed to one of the larger pieces of machinery that they would have to pass to reach the cell block—“and I’ll take him out. And then we’ll run.”
“How?”
“We steal a car.”
He shook his head, his doubt suddenly overflowing. “This is stupid. We haven’t got a chance.”
“It isn’t. We can do it, Aqil. Trust me.”
“No, we can’t. I’m too scared. And trust you? Come on, Daisy. You’re, what, fifteen? Be real. What chance do we have?”
He had already forgotten how easily she had put him to the ground. Isabella decided he would benefit from another demonstration of what she could do. “Watch,” she said.
Isabella knew all about AKs. It was important to be familiar with them, her mother had said, since the weapons were so ubiquitous. They had fired hundreds of rounds in the desert outside Marrakech, and Isabella had fired more in the months when she had continued her training alone. She reached down for the rifle, ejected the magazine and checked that it was unloaded. It was. She had performed the function check so many times that it was almost a muscle memory for her now, and she flew through it. She pulled the charging handle fully aft and released it, letting it fly forward, checking that it was fully in battery. It was. She moved the selector to safe and pulled the trigger to check that nothing happened. Nothing did. She moved the selector to fire and pulled the trigger to check that the hammer dropped. It did. She slapped the magazine back into the well and took the weapon in both hands, her finger through the guard and against the trigger.
Aqil watched her, his mouth agape.
She gave him a small smile.
“I’m not who they think I am,” she said.
“So who are you?”
“It’s better that you don’t know. But I can get us both out of here. You just have to trust me.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Isabella heard Aqil speaking as he led the second guard into the factory hall.
“She’s ill,” he said loudly. “Sick.”
“What do you mean?” The second voice, that of the other guard, wa
s uncertain and halting. It was obvious that English was not a language with which the man had much facility.
“I think she’s epileptic or diabetic or something. She’s fitting.”
She heard the sound of footsteps. The light next to the cell block was illuminated, but the brightness was quickly swallowed up into the blackness that filled the big space.
The darkened shapes of two men went by. Isabella detached herself from the deeper blacks that clung to the machine and took two quick steps to close the distance between her and them. It was too dark to identify Aqil. She hoped that he had remembered to put himself on the other side of the guard and not on her side.
His fault if he hadn’t.
She had turned the AK around so that the wooden buttstock was facing away from her. She raised the rifle so that it was level with her head, let out a low whistle and, as the man turned in her direction, drove the butt into his face.
The man folded in the middle and collapsed to the floor.
“Jesus.”
“Aqil?”
“You nearly took his head off!”
Isabella turned the rifle around and aimed down at the man on the floor. She heard the sound of his breath whistling in and out through a mouthful of broken teeth, but he did not stir. He would be out for a while. There was no need to shoot him.
“Give me a hand,” she said.
They took an arm each and dragged the man deeper into the shadows until there was no way he would be noticed until he awoke.
“Let’s go,” she said, leading the way.
Isabella opened the door and looked outside. She remembered it from before, but it looked different after dark. The skeletons of buildings that had been razed to the ground were on either side, and across the small parking area, a larger building had been torn apart by a bomb, leaving a large crater surrounded with blackened and charred struts scattered across it like matchsticks. There were huge chunks of rubble on the ground. The factory was bounded by a chain-link fence, and beyond that, Isabella could see the darkened shape of the skyline in the distance.
“Where are we?” she asked him.
“I’m not sure.”
“Think, Aqil.”
“The northern part of town.”
“Do you have a map?”
He shook his head.
She was losing her patience with him already. “Fine. Which way did you come in?”
“We went across the border at Reyhanli.” He paused, saw the irritation on Isabella’s face and added, “It’s to the southwest. It took us six hours to drive here. You want to go that way? It’s miles. And we’d have to go around Aleppo.”
“We’re not going anywhere near Aleppo.” She tried to remember her geography. Aleppo was in the north of the country, and they were north of that.
She pointed away from the city. “Turkey is that way. It can’t be far to the border. We’ll try to find a car. But until we do, we’ll walk.” She looked up at the sky. The moon was directly overhead. “What time is it?”
“Late.”
“We need to move.”
The factory was part of a wider complex of buildings. The streets were quiet, with no traffic. There were no lights visible; Aqil explained that it was because the electricity supply was intermittent and usually rationed for the daytime. They passed buildings that had been blown apart by explosions and others that had been allowed to burn to the ground. The road was littered with debris, and they frequently changed course to avoid large chunks of masonry that had been tossed into their way, or craters that had been gouged out of the asphalt.
Isabella was alert, pausing regularly so that she could reacclimatise herself to their changing surroundings. The guard she had knocked out would wake up eventually—assuming that she hadn’t scrambled his brains—or if he did not, both his and Aqil’s absence would be noticed when the shift changed. It was remotely possible that their absence would not be noticed until morning. If that was the case, maybe they had a chance. There were five or six hours until dawn, and they would be able to put several miles between them and the factory by then. She knew that she walked at between three and four miles an hour; fifteen miles did not seem unreasonable. That was a good head start.
Aqil walked silently alongside her.
“Back there,” Isabella said. “You said ‘we crossed the border.’ Was that with your brother?”
He didn’t answer at once, and when he did speak, his voice was low. “Yes. We were going to get away from here. And now . . .”
And now he was dead.
Isabella had never felt comfortable with expressing emotion. It was a hang-up from her unhappy childhood that had never been given a chance to heal. She knew that she should say something, so she managed a simple “Sorry.”
They walked on, crossing the road to skirt the wreck of a car that had been left to burn down to blackened steel and ash.
Isabella glanced over at him. He was glum, his eyes downcast. “Why did you come out here?”
“It was the worst mistake I ever made.”
“But why?”
He paused for a moment and just walked on silently. Isabella waited. She could see that he was trying to find the right way to answer the question. “I have—I had—a twin brother. Aamir. He was involved in the Westminster bombing. I don’t know how, but he was there, in the station, when they blew up their bombs. But he didn’t do it. He changed his mind, and he ran. But then he was shot and killed, and his body was dumped into the Thames. My older brother, Yasin, the one who came over the border with me, he thought the police murdered him. I let him persuade me.”
Isabella could have mentioned that she had been there, at the station, when the bombs were detonated, but she did not. She didn’t want to put an end to the conversation with her anger, so she walked on, quietly, while Aqil considered what to say next.
“My family were victimised. Racism. It never stopped. They’d done nothing wrong. My brother was dead. My mother is ill and my father has never done a thing wrong in his life. They love our country.”
She repeated the question. “So why are you here?”
“Because I was angry. And because I didn’t think. I let myself be persuaded to come when I should have told Yasin he was crazy. I don’t want to be here. He didn’t, not since we arrived. We both wanted to go home.”
Isabella had other questions for him, but she put them aside for now. The boy was hopeless. Isabella could see that if they were going to get out alive, it was going to be because of her and despite him. But he seemed genuine. And he had taken a big risk to free her from the cell. He could have left without her, but he had not. It was fortunate for him that he had a conscience, because he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on his own. She had already given thought to leaving him and making for the border alone, but she decided that she wouldn’t do that.
They were close to the desert now, and she could see the dunes and foothills in the gaps between the buildings. As they turned the corner, they saw that the road petered out and became a rough track. It ascended a gentle slope, crested the hill and disappeared to the north. There was a shack ahead, to the right of the road, and there was a car parked next to it.
Isabella put out a hand to stop Aqil. She waited, listening, and then, when she was confident they were alone, she crossed the road. The car had been parked next to the building. It was a Hyundai Lantra, an older model, and it was bearing its age gracelessly. It was dented, the front wing had been replaced with one in a different colour, and the window in the passenger-side door was missing its glass, the opening covered with a plastic sheet that had been taped to the frame.
Isabella tried the door of the car. It was open. It was open. She looked for the keys, running her hand beneath the seat and then pulling down the sun visor.
Aqil watched her. “Anything?”
“No.”
“So how are we going to start it?”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said.
Beatrix had tau
ght her many things in the year that they had spent together, and hot-wiring a car was one of them. The Lantra was old and lacked the security features of newer models. She found a sharp stone on the ground next to the car and used it to pry off the plastic cover on the steering column. She pulled out the three bundles of wires inside and picked out the wires that led straight up the column to the starter, battery and ignition. She found the red wires for the battery, stripped away the insulation and twisted them together. She stripped the starter wire, too, and sparked it against the battery wires.
The engine turned over and started.
Isabella couldn’t help a smile.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Aqil asked, staring at her dumbfoundedly.
“Get in,” she said. “We need to be as far away from here as we can.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Isabella turned to Aqil. “Can you drive?”
“I passed my test in the summer,” he said.
“So?”
“I’m all right.”
His answer didn’t fill her with confidence, and she wondered whether she should drive. She decided against it. Women were not supposed to drive, and even though it was dark and the streets in this part of town were deserted, it wasn’t impossible that they would come across a patrol, and it made sense to avoid creating obvious problems for themselves. And, she reminded herself, she had the assault rifle. That was certainly going to remain her responsibility.
She opened the rear door and slipped into the cabin behind the driver’s seat. Aqil settled down, rehearsing the procedure for pulling away with a deliberateness that suggested that he had overestimated his confidence behind the wheel.
“You’ll be fine,” Isabella said. “You’ve just got to drive carefully. We don’t want to stand out.”
“What if I stall it?”
“You won’t.”
“They have patrols. What if they see us?”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens. Just relax. Let’s go.”
He put the Hyundai into gear and almost stalled the engine, depressing the clutch just in time. Stalling would be a problem, Isabella saw. She wondered afresh whether she should drive. Aqil cursed under his breath, released the handbrake and pressed down on the accelerator. The car started forward, the suspension creaking ominously as it bounced down from the raised kerb.
