26
Two hours was all it took. The sand turned to dry fields where nothing seemed to be growing and in the haze of the horizon Abraham could begin to see minarets and a pinkish line of buildings.
‘Raqqa,’ said Murat, and grinned again. ‘City of the Damned.’
Two hundred yards short of the city walls was another checkpoint, more permanent: a concrete shelter on one side, draped in black flags, and on the other an armoured jeep, its mounted gun trained on the road. A fighter in a khaki flak jacket with a chain of bullets across his chest and carrying a machine gun leaned against it. Two fighters stood by the shelter, and a fourth was checking the papers of the car in front. With a nod he signalled to the others to check its boot.
Abraham stiffened, wiped his sweating palms on his trousers. None of these men were wearing sunglasses. He wasn’t sure about the sunglasses – he should get rid of them.
‘It’s okay, my friend,’ said Murat, quietly and calmly. ‘This is all normal.’
He took off his own and Abraham did the same, hoping that his eyes wouldn’t betray the fear in them. Wasn’t that what these people looked for? Couldn’t they smell it, like dogs?
‘New guys,’ said Murat.
Ahead of them the fighters had put a suitcase on the floor and were roughly going through it; Abraham could see shirts, pants, T-shirts. One of the fighters lifted up a can of something, showed it to the other, then took off its cap and sprayed it in the air.
‘Perfume,’ said Murat. ‘Stupid.’
Abraham kept watching, though part of him felt he should look away. Don’t catch anyone’s eye. The man checking the papers took the can from his colleague, held it up to the driver’s face and asked him something. Abraham saw the driver shrug; in response the fighter half turned, threw the can hard off into the wasteland by the side of the road, and stood for a moment with one hand on his hip, one hand on his gun, staring at the driver in the car. Abraham didn’t breathe, and even Murat stiffened a little. But all the fighter did was shout at the man, loud enough for Abraham to hear some words – banned, unIslamic, an insult to Allah, the most high, the most glorified – and then with a parting command not to be caught with rubbish like that again he waved the car through.
‘You see? Not so bad.’
Murat eased the car forward and wound his window right down. Abraham kept his eyes straight ahead but sensed the man well enough, the usual: black beard, the top lip shaved, the air of violence imminent.
‘As-salamu alaykum,’ said Murat, relaxed but respectful.
The fighter said nothing. Abraham could feel him looking at him.
‘Here,’ said Murat, and handed him his papers and Abraham’s new passport.
The fighter took his time leafing through them.
‘You live Raqqa?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Murat. ‘I do business. Trade. Food, clothing. I’m known here.’
‘Who is this?’
‘My partner. He has a clothing mill in Egypt. They make niqabs, veils.’
As stories went it wasn’t bad. Until now Abraham had been nervous of Murat’s confidence, his casualness, but maybe he’d picked a good one. He was alert now, on his mettle.
The fighter took two steps back.
‘Open back of car.’
‘Abu Waheed knows me. I source things for him. He can vouch for me.’
‘Open car.’
Murat said nothing, and his silence told Abraham that the mood had changed. Murat was a talker, and if he wasn’t talking that was bad.
He nodded, as if deciding something for himself, opened the car door and got out onto the road.
‘I come this way the whole time. Where’s Abu Nazir?’
He had put the smile back in his voice.
‘At Kobani, fighting. Open car.’
‘Okay, no problem. It’s open.’
Murat walked to the back of the car and in the mirror Abraham saw the boot lid pop open. His own case was in there, and two of Murat’s, regular-looking suitcases.
For a minute all Abraham heard was the wind and the car that had driven up behind them idling. In his side mirror he could see Murat, one hand on his hip, the other in his hair, watching the fighter go through the bags.
‘You see? Just some samples, some clothes, that’s it.’
Now Abraham felt the car rock a little, and listened to the sounds of rummaging coming from the boot, and then of something heavy dropping on the ground.
‘Brother, I don’t know what you’re doing, but there’s nothing there.’
Maybe another ten seconds passed. Murat ran his hand through his hair, shifted on his feet. Abraham closed his eyes and prayed he was wrong about what was happening.
‘What is this?’
At first Abraham hardly heard the fighter’s voice, but then he repeated himself, coming up to Murat and shouting, pressing something into his face.
‘You. Get the other one.’
Abraham’s door opened and a gun appeared, pointing at his chest. Raising his hands, conscious of the sweat now pouring from him, he swung his legs slowly out of the car and pulled himself upright. Another fighter, another dark, blank face. With the gun he motioned to Abraham to move to the back of the car.
Murat was standing there, a different man, hands up, jacket hanging off him, his face red, flushed with fear and impotence. The fighter was rummaging in the boot again, and now he came up with three clear plastic bags, each the size of a grapefruit, full of small brown pills.
‘They’re not mine. They’re for Abu Waheed. He knows me.’
‘On ground. You. Knees. Both of you.’
As he knelt by Murat, Abraham instinctively put his hands on his head, and realized that he had seen this scene before, online, in the videos he had stopped watching before the inevitable end. Now he looked up into the fighter’s face: it was animated, on fire with righteousness, strength, almost lust.
Murat was still playing his one card.
‘I do this for Abu Waheed. Understand? He places an order, I fill it. You know him, yes?’
‘I know him.’
‘He’s a big fucking deal, brother. Really. You don’t want to be messing with this arrangement.’
The fighter had opened one of the bags and was smelling the contents. His face was narrow, angular, the nose fine, and his eyes seemed to swim with a strange poison. The Arabic he spoke was bad.
‘These illegal. How much you sell for?’
Abraham hated him with a hatred he had never felt for anyone. Here was the lie that had fooled Sofia: where she had seen virtue and energy there was only this angry little man lusting after money and death.
‘They’re not mine to sell, brother. They belong to Abu Waheed.’
The fighter sealed the bag, put it with the others on the ground. His eyes went from Murat to Abraham and back to Murat, where they stayed.
‘They’re not yours either, brother.’ One last try.
‘Abu Waheed dead. Two days.’
Abraham kept his hands on his head and began to say a new prayer.
Forgive me, Lord. This has not been the best use of a life.
Murat sniffed, loudly, took his hands from his head, and when he spoke his voice was quicker, shriller.
‘Brother, I’m sorry to hear that. He was a brave man.’
‘Dead man now.’
‘I hear you. The pills are yours, destroy them, sell them, do what you want. It’s not my business but he asked me, you know, he wasn’t a man you could refuse. Take them, I have some cash, take anything, whatever you want . . .’
With no warning the fighter swivelled on his heel and brought his boot up hard into Murat’s face. Abraham heard the bone crack and Murat sprawl against him, sending them both over onto the hot tarmac.
Murat groaned, brought his hand up to his jaw, with slow eyes saw the blood on his hand as it came away, and for a mere instant he and Abraham shared a look of terror and understanding.
‘Dead man now.’
Four flat cracks. No echo, no fanfare. No glory. Abraham felt Murat’s body twitch and shock against his, put his hands to his shoulders to support him, saw two dark holes in the back of his jacket. Felt his body go slack as the last signals left the brain and the blood from his exploded heart slowed to a stop.
‘Wait!’ He looked up at the fighter, who without hurry had turned the gun on him. ‘Wait!’
The body’s full weight was on him now and he tried to scrabble out from under it, adrenaline pulsing through him, making his own heart race, lighting every cell with energy. Standing over him the fighter turned to his friends and laughed.
‘He wants me wait.’
He lifted the gun up an inch until it was pointing at Abraham’s head.
‘Listen. Please. I’m not with him.’
He laid Murat’s head down on the road and pushed himself away. So quickly gone.
‘Stop. I’m a doctor.’
The fighter cocked his head, turned again to his friends, a big grin fixed on his face.
‘You are doctor? Heal friend.’
‘I’m a doctor. My name is Abu Ibrahim. I have come to join Islamic State.’
PART THREE
1
‘You are Egyptian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I have come to make jihad.’
‘What made you come?’
‘Islam in Egypt is not Islam. My country had its chance. Now they kill the Muslim Brothers in return for money from America. I must live where there is sharia. Then I can return and build the khilafa there.’
The words that streamed from him had the right sound but no substance; like bricks he piled one on top of another and hoped they wouldn’t fall. The shots still rang in his head, and even with his eyes open he saw Murat’s empty face nestling on the ground. Yet the more scared he was the more easily the words seemed to tumble out.
‘There is no mention of you on the internet.’
This he hadn’t prepared for. Of course they would look for him.
‘I don’t go online.’
‘One Ibrahim Mounir in England. One in Texas. No doctors in Egypt.’
‘I don’t like computers. I read books.’
‘Spies have no background.’
Christ. Think of an answer to that.
‘Yes, they do. Someone makes a background for them. I’m just an ordinary man.’
His questioner looked at him for a long time, as if that might force him to confess that everything he was saying was nonsense.
‘Can you fight?’
‘If you require me. But I know you need doctors.’
That was a mistake. He knew it was true, but he shouldn’t have said it. How did he know, apart from reading the infidel press? The man across the desk stopped and drilled a look into him.
‘Our health facilities are excellent.’
Such pride in the rat pit. And such thin skin.
This man looked like all the rest, in his sand-coloured shirt and thick beard with the bare top lip, and he had the eye of a fighter – calm, deliberate, vicious. But his job was in this office, in this hot little room with its tiny barred window and its peeling lemon walls – an administrator for this new state, or some part of it, and proud of his work. Two fighters in fatigues stood to each side of him cradling machine guns.
‘Everyone says so. But I read that kafir doctors have left. They have betrayed you.’
The man leaned back in his chair and eyed Abraham for a moment, mollified, turning over the blue Egyptian passport with the fingers of one hand. He was older than the others Abraham had seen, and his eyes held a wariness that suggested experience: the violence there was of a practical kind, the bloodlust dulled to a calculation.
He opened the passport.
‘Ibrahim Mounir.’
Abraham nodded.
‘You are Sunni?’
He said it with a faint jerk of his chin, and his look seemed to harden.
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t sound sure about that, brother.’
‘Of course. All Egyptians are Sunni.’
‘So, Egyptian. How many times a day do you pray?’
Abraham tried to find his balance. He had reached a state of pure fear, and his mind had emptied of everything else. How many times? How many times had he heard the call to prayer over how many years? His whole childhood. It was five. Or four. One at dawn, one at noon, one in the afternoon, and two at night. Definitely two at night.
‘Five times. Five.’
‘And what is the name of your mosque, in Cairo?’
Muhammad Ali was the famous one, but if this man knew Cairo he would know it was the most obvious. There was one, near where he had trained, it was where his friends had gone to pray.
‘Khekia Mosque. In Shubra.’
‘Khekia. I don’t know Khekia.’
Now he locked his eyes on Abraham’s and held them there.
‘Your favourite hadith. The one that means the most to you. Recite it.’
Hadith. The only ones he had ever read had been sent by Sofia to her followers, in amongst all that chaff. Desperately he cast back for one.
‘You shouldn’t have to think.’
‘I . . . I am ashamed by this.’
‘You’ll be worse than ashamed. Are you serious? One hadith.’
Without turning he held up a finger and the fighters brought their guns up to point at Abraham, who looked at the black barrels and raised his hands.
‘I have a memory disorder. Lacunar amnesia. Please. There’s a hole in my memory. I can remember everything except words. For years, I have suffered the deepest shame from this. Every day I have to learn my prayers and by the next they are gone.’
The administrator’s expression did not change.
‘My Koran, it has all gone. I . . . I didn’t say this before, but one of the reasons I am here is to reaffirm my faith. To make amends for this shameful deformity.’
‘One hadith.’
‘Please. If I was blind, if I was lame, you would see it. This is the same thing but inside my head. I cannot control it.’
The administrator sat back, crossed his arms and for ten seconds didn’t speak.
‘Doctors are useful. Traitors and spies are deadly. If I kill a doctor, it’s not good. But if I fail to kill a spy the whole khilafa may fall.’
‘I am no risk.’
Again he was silent, and then he stood.
‘Kill him. But not here. Outside.’
Abraham rose from his chair and instantly one of the fighters was by him, pushing him back.
‘I killed a man in Antep. In our name.’
The administrator stopped with his hand on the door.
‘I was held in jail for it. You can check.’
‘What man?’
‘Free Syrian Army. He knew I was coming here.’
‘How did you kill him?’
‘I slit his throat. In his hotel.’
‘But you are not a fighter.’
‘It was a great test of my faith.’
His decision was tipping back. Abraham could see it.
‘Please. Check. You must have ways of checking.’
‘How did it feel?’
‘Like I was closer to God, the most high, the most glorified. And to the khilafa. Please. I have come so far.’
That was a good answer; he knew it as it came out from wherever it had been waiting. The administrator scratched at his cheek and nodded at the guards.
‘Lock him up. I will make two calls. Your life hangs on them.’
Once an office block, the building was now part government department, part police station. The khilafa’s Ministry of Fear, or one of them. Outside it, motionless, stood a dozen armed men in camouflage, black masks across their faces and machine guns held at their chests. Machine guns mounted on two 4x4s watched the street. A pair of vast black flags hung from the second storey either side of the door they guarded, and a black banner ran bet
ween them to create a sort of arch, like an open mouth.
Now, marched down stairs and along anonymous corridors, Abraham had time to wonder how many people had been brought here in terror, never to leave. That man just now; the easy choice was execution. He would lose nothing by it. There was no risk to getting it wrong. Alive Abraham might be useful to them, dead he would certainly be, and that was the genius and special savagery of the whole place. There was no obvious benefit to letting any one man or woman live. Death became the safe state.
His cell was a storeroom, two floors below ground, lined with shelves that still held pots of paint and bottles of detergent. A thick alien smell in the hot air, and a single fluorescent bulb giving out a tired blue light. Abraham sat against the wall in a gap between the shelves and took inventory. Buckets, rags, a broom. Various chemicals, none useful, though they’d kill him quickly enough if he was minded.
He wasn’t minded. They could do it. Let it be on their souls, or whatever passed for them. Mingling with his fear was a simple repugnance, as if with every breath he was still able to make he was taking in a gallon of the stink and poison they exhaled. Heavy with the smell of the dead, there was only so long you could breathe it in. What was that line? From Revelations. That Death and Hell would be given dominion over men, to kill with swords and famine and the beasts of the earth. Well here they were, the beasts of the earth, pinning him down and waiting to tear him into pieces. Evil didn’t cover it. Evil was too good a word, too noble. In the eyes of his interrogator and the guards and the checkpoint patrols he saw nothing but an indiscriminate hunger, and no thought beyond the need to satisfy it. He had sensed this in his reading, and seeing them close up, he knew it: there was nothing captivating about ISIS. No dark charm that drew you in, no glimmer from the black flame. The blackness was simply the absence of light, and somehow that quietened his fear. In the end they had nothing, and would return to nothing, and as he had seen it so Sofia would see it, in time.
It could have been worse for me. I tried – at the end, I tried. Better this than a lifetime of slow regret. Better this death than that one.
Somehow, he slept, and when he woke his head was numb and his clothes were wet and standing over him was a soldier with a gun.
The Good Sister Page 18
