by Jason Elliot
‘It will pass,’ she says. ‘We should go inside.’
We leave the roof and return inside, and close the doors and windows of the apartment in turn. The sky darkens even more. We can smell the sand as the haboob advances into everything, suffocating even the daylight and robbing the world outside the windows of colour like an eclipse of the sun. We retreat to the bedroom and make love once more as if to take shelter in one another, celebrating our intimacy in defiance of the affliction visited on the city beyond us.
Later, lying against each other in the muted light, feeling as though we’ve survived a natural disaster, Jameela speaks, prompting me to wonder whether she can read my thoughts. She faces away from me and asks quietly if I am awake.
‘I know you are a spy,’ she says. ‘I don’t care.’
‘I’m not a spy,’ I tell her.
There’s a long silence. She’s not happy with my answer.
‘But I do know people who are.’
‘They sent you here?’
‘Yes.’
‘To spy on me?’
‘No.’ Lie. ‘My meeting you has nothing to do with that.’
‘What do they want?’
‘To find out about bin Laden and his people.’
‘From me?’
‘No. From anybody.’ Lie.
Another long silence.
‘I knew sooner or later somebody would come,’ she says.
She rolls over, looks into my face without speaking and runs her finger across my eyebrows, my nose, my lips.
‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ she says.
I omit no detail of what she tells me, writing for reasons of security at a glass table from which the imprint of my pen can’t be lifted, and with a single sheet of paper at a time. She begins with the story of her husband, one of bin Laden’s many half-brothers, and describes her marriage in Khartoum six years before and her early meetings with his family members at parties and gatherings. She names the dozen other bin Laden brothers she has met, and describes their prosperous lifestyles, their homes in California and London, their love of business, racehorses, boats and cars. These are not the profiles I’m really expecting. Bin Laden himself, she says, is one of the few brothers who lacked the family’s love of wealth, perhaps because he’s the only child of his father’s tenth wife and lost his father when he was a teenager. Much of this, she says, she knows from her husband, who worked on the periphery of bin Laden’s circle, helping to raise money for his projects in Sudan. Her husband is a good man, she says, but fell under the spell of the extremists who formed bin Laden’s closest associates. I’m guessing that this is one of the reasons for their separation but I don’t ask.
Bin Laden has been in Sudan for several years when she meets him, not long after what is said to have been an attempt on his life by the Sudanese authorities, acting on instructions from powerful Saudis who are hoping to silence bin Laden’s criticisms of the Kingdom. It’s in Sudan, says Jameela, that he acquires a penchant for black women, and has a string of Sudanese girlfriends. Can’t really blame him for that, I’m thinking. His other great fondnesses are for earth-moving machinery and hunting with falcons. He also has an incongruous love of growing sunflowers.
The bin Laden I know from the cables and reports I’ve read over the previous year bears no resemblance to the man Jameela describes. The impression of a bloodthirsty mastermind simply doesn’t tally with the diffident, almost shy man she knows from family meetings and parties. He’s known to his admirers as a quiet philanthropist, sponsoring construction projects in Sudan and encouraging wealthy Saudi friends to invest in farming and real estate there. But those who knew him better, says Jameela, observed a man going through changes.
The unworldly teenager she’s described is marked by a single overwhelming experience: his involvement with Afghanistan. It’s there, after living and fighting among Afghan mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation, that his life is given a different direction. He becomes passionate about supporting the Afghans in their struggle against their invaders, and puts his personal fortune to work sponsoring camps, hospitals and a support network for Afghan fighters and their relatives. Like so many others, he simply falls in love with the place.
The simplicity and austerity of life in Afghanistan leaves a deep mark on him. When he returns to Saudi, he sees his own country through different eyes: a place run by corrupt and worldly men who care little for the true face of Islam. It is this true face that he has encountered in Afghanistan. He works against the Saudi regime, and when American troops arrive on Saudi soil for the Gulf War he calls for the overthrow of the royal family. He wins friends in low places and is forced to leave his homeland.
He’s hounded from country to country, and settles in Khartoum. A puritanical hardness has entered him. He bans music in his household and puts his teenage sons through hard physical tests. Two years after his arrival in Sudan the Saudis strip him of his citizenship and freeze his assets. Around him circulates a loyal entourage of ‘Arab Afghans’ from the days of the jihad in Afghanistan, and their agenda becomes increasingly political. A few of them take an interest in steering bin Laden in a new and more violent direction, simultaneously nurturing his grievances and idealism in accordance with their own more cynical agendas. By the time bin Laden is expelled from Sudan and returns to Afghanistan in 1996, he has fallen entirely under their spell, espousing a new kind of global jihad which makes no distinction between its targets and their civilian subjects. Jameela lists the names of his radical associates with contempt, calling them cold-hearted hypocrites who have brought shame on Islam, men who exploit the legitimate grievances of ordinary people for their own violent ends. She tells me the names of the organisations they use and of the places in Khartoum where she thinks they sometimes meet. With other men, she says, suffering leads to goodness. But not with these ones.
By the time she’s finished I’ve filled a dozen pages. When she leaves in the morning I rewrite them using the pen supplied to me by Seethrough and the pad of water-soluble paper that he’s shown me how to use with it. Double spaced and in capital letters. Then I press the blank sides of a twenty-page United Nations de-mining report against each page in turn, and press them together for several minutes as the invisible dye contained in the ink of my report transfers to the blank sheets. Even under a microscope, there is no physical disturbance to the fibres of the paper, and the ink is virtually undetectable using chemicals. Then I re-staple the pages, and the result is what looks like an ordinary printed document, together with a scribbled covering note, sealed into an envelope addressed to a Mr Halliday of the British embassy. I burn my original notes in the kitchen sink, then run the tap over the sheets of my finished report. They dissolve within seconds into a translucent sludge. Then I throw a single unused sheet which I didn’t need into Jameela’s waste-paper bin. It misses by a tiny fraction, and bounces from the rim onto the floor.
I wonder, now, about such things.
A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball and propelled by the force transferred by the muscles of my hand and arm, tumbles through the air. Its direction and speed is in turn influenced by the immeasurably smaller forces that act on it from the air through which it passes. The resulting momentum, partially dissipated by the metal lip of the waste-paper bin, determines its final position, a few inches from the edge of the wall under Jameela’s dresser. And this tiny deviation from its intended goal, of which the paper itself cannot possibly be conscious, prompts me to stand up and retrieve it from the floor with the intention of putting it into the bin where I had hoped it would land. But as I lean down to pick it up, something catches my eye.
On the floor tile at the base of the wall under the dresser where the paper has ended its flight is a tiny mound of white powder. It must be recent, otherwise it would have blown away or been swept away by now, and I can’t help but wonder where it comes from. It’s the kind of mound generated by making a small hole in a wall with an electric drill. I smell it. It’s
plaster dust. I look up to see where such a hole has been made, bemused at the same time by the habit of my own curiosity. An oil painting hangs directly above the dresser. It’s a sample of raw but striking art from a local painter, depicting half a dozen women in brightly coloured tobes carrying pots of water on their heads. The dust, I reason, must come from the hole made to hang the painting. But this would have been made months or even years before, and no trace would be left today.
The dust, I decide, comes from a hole in the wall which is actually above the frame of the painting. I haven’t noticed it before because it’s just a few millimetres across and just above the frame. But this is the puzzling thing: the dust made by the drilling of the hole hasn’t fallen onto the frame of the painting but onto the floor instead, which suggests that the painting was removed when the hole was made. None of which would have the slightest significance, had I not, out of curiosity, run my finger over the hole, which turns out not to be a hole at all but a slightly convex bump. It’s the wide-angle lens of a covert fibre-optic surveillance camera.
It’s not exactly a three-pipe problem, but it does raise questions. If the hole was made from the side I’m on, there’s the question of who made it. I can’t really picture Jameela with a covert entry and surveillance kit, so it’s probably been made by someone who’s got access to the other side of the wall. Whoever it is has a strong reason for wanting a camera that looks into Jameela’s bedroom, and provides a panoramic view of the bed on which I’ve spent a good part of the preceding week with her.
It strikes me, the following morning at 5 a.m. as I’m about to break into the neighbouring apartment, that I’m here because of the irregularity in the flight of a ball of paper. Which suggests to me that large events are determined, at least in part, by smaller events, and those in turn by even smaller ones. Following this idea to its extreme is problematic, because you end up with the vibration of atoms determining every measurable event; and if everything really is determined, no action has any significance other than its own unfolding, and one may as well stay in bed. Thinking of the flare of Jameela’s hips beneath the slimness of her waist, staying in bed does indeed seem like the most sensible thing. But I know intuitively that the apparently random position where my sheet of paper came to rest and the sense of foreboding I felt on seeing the giant haboob are somehow connected. Not by scale, but by their significance.
My lock picks live in a panel of my wallet that only the most diligent search would uncover. They are made from a high-tensile ceramic coated with tungsten carbide and are much stronger than steel but have no detectable metal content. The six picks are black, and moulded, like the pieces of an Airfix model, into a panel the size of a credit card with a thin plastic cover, which I now slide off and twist out the tension wrench. I put the short end into the keyway, using my third finger to apply pressure and resting the other two gently on its length. With the other hand I use the snake pick to lift all the pins in one go, listening as they snap down when the pressure from the tensioner is released. Five tiny clicks tell me it’s a five-pin right-handed lock.
To judge from the slightly gritty feedback I’m getting from the pins, it’s either a fairly new lock or there’s dust on them. Probably both. It doesn’t matter which. I push the diamond rake to the back of the lock and work it a few times to get the feel of things, then work the pins one by one, feeling the tiny variations of pressure in the tensioner as the cylinder struggles to turn. There are few tasks more satisfying that can be accomplished with the fingers of the human hand than picking a lock. One minute you’re locked out, blocked from your goal by a device that seems so inflexible and defiant. Then comes the magical moment as the tensioner gives way, the cylinder turns, and the door swings magically open.
I clear the lock and close the door gently behind me. Jameela has told me that the apartment is empty and that nobody lives there, and she’s right, almost. Nobody lives there, but the place isn’t entirely empty. There’s just enough light to make out the shapes of things, and I feel my way from room to room and then up the stairs. The layout of the rooms is the mirror of Jameela’s apartment. In the bedroom that lies next to Jameela’s there are two folding tables against the wall and two empty chairs. A black fibre-optic video cable comes out of the wall above them, more or less where I expected it. What I didn’t expect is the sophistication of the equipment. The cable feeds to a digital video recorder, next to which there’s a control console, flat-screen monitor and a keyboard. It’s all switched off, which suggests that the watching is done selectively. I squat by the edge of the table and study the equipment without touching anything, and I can hear my heartbeat pulsing in my ears. A strong smell of stale cigarettes comes from an unemptied ashtray, and there’s a crumpled empty packet of Marlboros on the floor. Then a muffled thump sends a shock wave through me and I leap to the door.
Someone has come in downstairs. I can just make out an exchange of male voices. There’s no time to leave by the window. A light goes on at the foot of the stairs. I close the door silently and go to the adjoining bathroom and feel my way into the shower, leaving the curtain open and pressing myself against the tiled wall. A yellow band of light spreads under the bathroom door as the light goes on in the room, and I hear voices and footsteps.
My heart’s thumping now and feels like it’ll jump out of my throat. I close my eyes and try to regulate my breathing. The bathroom door opens and the light, which seems blindingly bright, comes on for a few seconds and then, to my inexpressible relief, goes off again. They are checking the place but not searching it, and not really expecting to find anyone. They have perhaps seen me follow the path to the entrance of the building, and wonder why I haven’t reappeared. Perhaps I should, to appease their curiosity. Perhaps they have decided I have gone into another apartment. Perhaps they have seen nothing at all, and one of the men who works the equipment has simply come back for something he’s forgotten. But I doubt it.
I leave the apartment via the roof, cross it noiselessly, and climb down by the steps that lead to Jameela’s balcony. A few moments later I am lying at her side. For another hour I can’t sleep.
I half-expected them to come for me, though I’m not sure why, and I’m not anticipating being detained for long. I wonder if Jameela is still officially married, and whether the technicality of adultery will see me expelled from the country. We are lying naked next to each other when the buzzer sounds. I have never heard it before and wonder what it is at first, but the loud simultaneous pounding on the door confirms the unfriendly nature of the visit.
Jameela and I dress hastily and are buttoning our clothes when two black men wearing suits and open shirts enter the room and announce abruptly in Arabic that they are members of the Mokhabarat, the intelligence and security service.
‘I am a British citizen,’ I say in English, holding my passport in front of me. ‘I have the right to contact my embassy.’
The man nearest to me looks me up and down with a scowl, takes my passport and flicks through it. Then he hands it back, and his reply stuns me.
‘You are British. She is not.’ He points to Jameela on the far side of the room and snaps his finger. The other man grabs her arm and leads her to the door.
‘I’m sorry, Antoine,’ she says. She looks utterly demoralised and bites her lips as her eyes fill with tears.
‘Jameela, what is happening? Tell me what is happening.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says again.
The man pushes her though the bedroom door and guides her down the stairs without looking back. The sight of her disappearing has a strange effect on me. I cannot bear the thought of her being harmed. I see the sudden image of the haboob and the boiling wall of sand drawing towards me, and feel myself being swallowed in its immensity. I try to follow her down the stairs, but the other man blocks my way by putting his arm across the doorway.
His eyes have a fierce coldness to them. He looks straight at me and says something slowly in Arabic which I don’t under
stand, but the language of threat is universal and the cruelty in his eyes tells me the warning is a serious one. Something in me is snapping. It’s as if I can hear it, taking up the final moments of strain before it reaches its limit and shatters into fragments. I don’t want it to, because there’ll be no return when it does. I meet his gaze.
‘Let me go, now,’ I say very slowly.
‘Mister,’ he says, ‘you should not fuck Sudan woman. She make too much noise.’
People will always tell you about the horrors of conflict, but seldom about the exhilaration that so often accompanies it. War is one of the rare performances on the human stage where every taboo is lifted, every restraint lifted, and the limits removed from behaviour that’s unthinkable in peacetime. The result is that people do extraordinary things, sometimes performing acts of selfless courage that defy belief, and at others carrying out acts of depravity that make the world shudder. The lack of limits brings out strange things in people. It’s as if, when war is declared, something else takes over where reason leaves off, a promise of freedom that will always be denied in ordinary life, the taste of which is incomparably sweet. Perhaps that’s why war is likened to a fog, a mist, a haboob even. I know there is no return from this. I have declared war.
I push his arm sharply in the crook of his elbow, and as it gives way I walk out of the room. He doesn’t like that idea. Almost instantly I feel his arms on me, grabbing me from behind and pulling me violently back inside. But I’m not in the mood to be thwarted now. I draw my mind and breath towards my centre of gravity and keep my balance, turning as he pulls me so that I move around him, then drop suddenly to one knee as I sense his momentum beginning to follow mine. As his body begins to fall onto me, I reach back with both hands to get a grip on his wrist and upper arm, and pull as hard as I can.
