White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  From the crunch of her footsteps, they could tell she was walking on the road now. ‘She’s still got the phone,’ said Tulliver.

  There was a hurried exchange, Anastasia said something, then her voice faded and vanished. There was a sound of rapid movement, three muffled shots and a series of thuds, then absolute silence.

  The two men looked at each other. ‘What happened?’ whispered Tulliver.

  Hisami just shook his head. ‘She’s either dead, or she’s been kidnapped.’ He gripped his forehead with his right hand and breathed very deeply for a few seconds then called his wife’s number and listened. It went straight to voicemail and he heard Anastasia’s voice telling him to leave a short message or text her. He hung up. ‘Okay,’ he said to Tulliver, ‘we need to get hold of the Italian police and give them that plate number. Let them have Anastasia’s phone number so they can get a fix on those calls. Have the office call the State Department and find out who we talk to at the US Embassy in Rome about liaising with the Italian police. I’ll need the plane ready for this afternoon – tell Mike Daniels we’re going to southern Italy.’

  Tulliver’s phone pinged with an incoming text message. ‘It’s Zillah – she’s in the lobby. She was in her car outside because she thought you’d need her at the meeting.’

  ‘Bring her up here, please,’ Hisami said.

  Tulliver went to find Zillah, while Hisami listened again to the two voicemails. A couple of minutes passed before Sam Castell knocked and opened the glass door with an awkward look. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Denis, but there are people here to see you.’ He caught sight of Hisami’s expression. ‘What’s going on? You look terrible.’

  ‘Something very urgent has come up. Can you thank them and make my excuses?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the meeting. Officers from ICE are here – Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They want to see you.’

  Hisami’s head snapped up. ‘What the hell do they want? How did they know I was here?’

  ‘I guess they’re the government,’ said Castell. ‘You may want me to stay for this.’

  He hadn’t finished before two men appeared at the door.

  ‘Mr Hisami?’ said the first, through the open door. ‘We are here at the instruction of the Secretary of Homeland Security to inform you that they have suspended your passport. Written notice has been sent to your home, but we wanted to advise you personally, sir, in case you had any plans to travel out of the United States in the near future.’ He was straight out of an old police precinct, with oiled, bristly, short hair, folds of skin over a button-down collar and a mean little mouth. The younger man, soft face with hair that flopped over his right brow, wore an open-necked shirt and a grey jacket. He looked West Coast, whereas the older man was from the East. They both held folders.

  ‘We have a copy of the revocation order here,’ said the younger one, withdrawing a sheet of paper from his folder. ‘It’s straightforward – it requires you to submit your passport to us at the earliest opportunity.’

  ‘As Mr Hisami’s lawyer, I’ll take that,’ said Castell, intercepting the paper. ‘What’s the reason given by the Secretary of Homeland Security?

  ‘It’s all there, sir.’

  Castell scanned the document. ‘They’re claiming you made false statements on your passport application twenty years ago. That’s obviously crazy.’ He read on. ‘It says – “The Secretary has determined that the passport holder’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” This is bullshit. I’ll have our team get on to it right away.’ Castell looked at the older guy. ‘What’s going on here? Have you any idea of Mr Hisami’s standing?’

  ‘We know who Mr Hisami is, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re just delivering the notice, sir.’

  Hisami shook his head. ‘This is no coincidence, is it? My wife’s been abducted and now you’re suspending my passport so I can’t travel.’

  Castell swivelled to face him with an appalled look. ‘What are you saying, Denis?’

  ‘Exactly that. Anastasia has been abducted. I’ve just listened to her messages. Now, my only priority is to get her back. Can you deal with this, Sam? If you’ll excuse me now …’ He made to pass the two men.

  The younger one moved to block his way. ‘I don’t know anything about your wife, sir, but we will need your passport. You can appeal the decision with State, sir.’

  Hisami walked to the window, dialled a number and murmured into the phone. He turned to the two men. ‘It will be at my home, just show your ID.’

  ‘We would prefer you to come with us, sir.’

  Hisami moved towards them. ‘You only have the power to seize my passport – nothing else. You know that, and so does my lawyer.’

  CHAPTER 3

  On a calm but bitingly cold day three years before, Paul Samson and Anastasia Christakos chartered a boat in the port of Pula in Istria, Croatia, and sailed across the Adriatic to Venice.

  Two weeks had passed since the events in the farmhouse in northern Macedonia, where four terrorists had held them, together with a Syrian boy, Naji Touma, his friend Ifkar and the old couple who ran the farm. They had been saved from torture and certain death by the intervention of Denis Hisami, who dispatched three of the terrorists and was aided in the killing of the man named Machete – Almunjil – by the boy Naji, who stabbed him in the heart at the very moment that Denis Hisami fired with the deadly skill of his days with Peshmerga. Hisami vanished immediately, satisfied that the man who had raped his sister, Aysel, and was responsible for her death was himself now dead. Nothing of what had happened could be allowed to get out, if Hisami’s position as a pillar of Bay Area society was to remain intact. Credit for the rescue was given to the Macedonian security forces, a story that Samson, Anastasia and Naji had no trouble in maintaining during the debriefing by European intelligence services, who were glad enough to receive the vital information brought to them by Naji. Only the British spies Peter Nyman and Sonia Fell had pressed them on the exact sequence of events at the farmhouse, but this had earned them the scorn of their European colleagues and they’d stopped their questioning.

  It took a few days to extract Naji’s family from the refugee camp in Turkey and transfer them to the new home provided by the German authorities, which had also guaranteed places for Naji and his equally bright elder sister in a school for the gifted. To Naji’s extraordinary joy, a helicopter had arrived in Pudnik, in northern Macedonia, to take him to Skopje airport to catch a German government plane to Berlin. The expense of this was covered in recognition of the extraordinary intelligence on ISIS that Naji had brought to the West on his battered phone, which had survived a dunking in the Aegean and every sort of hazard on his journey through the Balkans.

  While Samson was treated at the Skopje hospital for the beating he had received from one of the gang – there was concern that he might lose the sight in one eye – Anastasia flew back to Lesbos to arrange cover for a period of leave that was well overdue. By the time she returned to the Balkans to meet him at Zagreb in Croatia, he had been told that his eyesight was not going to be damaged and had more or less recovered, though the swelling and stitches around his eye were still visible.

  The trip to Venice was her idea. Neither of them had been there and it was Anastasia who insisted that they arrive by boat rather than plane. So, they travelled west from Zagreb in a rented car, cheerful but saying little, and dropped it off at the ancient city of Pula, where Samson began to search the port for a boat and skipper, not an easy task, as winter had set in and the charter yachts were being serviced or were laid up on the quays. At length he found the owner of a large, snubbed-nosed trawler who said he was willing to do the journey, but for an exorbitant €3,500 due to the price of fuel. But after his win on the thoroughbred Dark Narcissus at Ascot racecourse two weeks earlier, Samson had no difficulty paying.

  They boarded the Maria Redan, freshly pain
ted in a dark blue and red livery, at 6.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning with a couple of holdalls and backpacks. The skipper, a man named Filip, turned out to be more obliging than his manner on the quay had suggested. He prepared a breakfast of rolls with cured ham and coffee, which they consumed as the Maria Redan left port and set course to the north-west of the Adriatic. Filip seemed to understand that the voyage held a special significance for them and that they were making a journey towards each other, as well as to Venice.

  ‘You still smoking?’ she asked Samson when the land had disappeared in the mist that blurred the border between sky and sea.

  ‘Not much, but I have cigarettes somewhere.’ He fished in his backpack.

  They went out on deck, perched on the winding gear in front of the wheelhouse and lit up, but the fine spray coming from the bow soon made it impossible to smoke and they flung their sodden cigarettes overboard. ‘You okay?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I wonder about this. You know – what the hell we’re doing.’

  ‘You think this isn’t going to work, that it’s not meant to be?’ she shouted as they crashed into a wave.

  He shook his head and wiped the spray from her face. She smiled and licked her lips.

  ‘But that’s what you said before we found Naji. Remember? Commitment wasn’t your thing. That’s what people always say when they’re not sure. I’ve said it myself.’

  ‘How can anyone be sure? What I know is that I love being with you and I think you’re a smart, decent human being and I’m attracted to you.’ She ran a finger along his lips. ‘This is the happiest I’ve been for years. That’s because I’m with you and I can forget the stuff I do every day back in the camp. And forget what happened in the mountains.’

  ‘So I’m a distraction? I guess that’s okay.’ He looked at her with mock-hurt.

  ‘That’s right – you are. But a distraction that I might love for all time. Who knows, Paul? I have no idea about the future. Nothing really makes any sense. We’re in a new time and no one can be sure what happens, or where we’ll be in a few years. So, I live in this moment with you, on this stinky old boat in the middle of the sea, and I rejoice in it and I’m not going to spoil that moment by worrying about the future or obsessing about the past. You understand that, don’t you?’

  He shrugged agreement, but she wasn’t about to stop. She shifted her bottom on the winch to face him, laid her hands on top of his and looked at him so earnestly it made him smile. ‘Paul, we saw each other in a moment when we both thought we were going to die. After that, you really know a side of a person that no one else is going to see. There’s a fucked-up intimacy in that, as well as a kind of shame. It’s like the ultimate nakedness.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s a good way of putting it.’ Samson had seen the worst of Syria on his trips to find Aysel Hisami, but the drawn-out terror in the barn had shaken him more profoundly than anything he’d witnessed in that war.

  ‘When you see people like those men and what they do, it destroys some part of you. That’s a problem I deal with every day in the camp – the psychological effect on people who have lost their faith in humanity and humaneness. We both suffered that, and so now we find it hard to be casual and treat this for what it is – fun and companionship. It doesn’t have to be meaningful, Paul. My life is too damned serious!’

  ‘You are, obviously, right,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘That’s cowardice. Argue with me!’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Anyway, Mr Spy, you’re the guy who lives in the moment – hundreds of racehorses and women.’

  ‘Just a few of both, actually.’

  She ducked as the Maria Redan thumped into a big wave and squealed as the water trickled down her neck. When she stopped writhing, he gently took hold of her face. ‘Stop talking and kiss me.’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘I will jump overboard and you will have to rescue me.’

  She frowned and thought for a second. ‘I can’t make up my mind which is worse.’ Then she offered her mouth, parted with a mischievous grin.

  ‘You taste of the sea,’ he said, smiling at the pleasure he found glistening in her eyes.

  ‘So, that’s settled,’ she said, jumping up. ‘We’re going to have a mad, irresponsible affair. And we will live for the moment! Come on, I’m freezing. Let’s go inside.’

  A couple of hours passed. Samson dozed and Anastasia insisted on steering the Maria Redan, having assured the skipper that seamanship was in the blood of every true Greek. They spied Venice from about five miles out and Filip slowed the boat so that they could go out and watch as the Campanile, Doge’s Palace and the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore gradually came into focus against the smudged backdrop of the Dolomites.

  ‘God, it’s so beautiful!’ she gasped. ‘Wasn’t I right about coming by sea? You want to hear something?” She closed her eyes to rifle her memory.

  “‘The soft waves, once all musical to song,

  That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng,

  Of gondolas – and to the busy hum,

  Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds

  Were but the overbeating of the heart.”’

  ‘You surprise me. Where’s that come from?’

  ‘Your English poet Lord Byron. He lived here when he was in disgrace, having had sex with far too many women!’ She gave him a reproving look. ‘Byron liked the Greeks, and we like him.’

  ‘You know it by heart?’

  ‘Yes, by my overbeating heart.’ She winked at him. ‘It’s the poem that made me want to come here. I did a course at university on the English Romantics.’

  ‘You astonish me.’

  The Maria Redan made for the port of Venice via the broad Giudecca Canal, the tradesmen’s entrance to Venice, used by the riff-raff of refuse barges, muck clearers, builders’ launches, delivery boats and, on this occasion, two empty hearses. They disembarked on the first free quay and Filip was made to sign papers because the authorities suspected they had come from outside the EU, and Samson and Anastasia were marched away to immigration, where they were delayed because of their unusual and, therefore, suspect arrival in Italy. They took a water taxi to a small hotel five minutes’ walk from the Rialto Bridge. Anastasia had arranged it all – a top-floor apartment with a tiny kitchen and a small balcony that overlooked a chaotic roofscape and from which you could just see the Campanile. There were flowers, a bottle of white wine from the Veneto and a guidebook on the table, along with a note from the manager thanking the signora for her choice.

  This scene Samson would later recall with formidable pain – the sight of her dropping the bags, twirling with pleasure on the tiled floor and throwing herself backwards on to the bed with her arms out. To the sound of church bells from a nearby bell tower, they made love, at first with shyness and some amusement, but then, as they moved with each other, never losing the other’s gaze, they finally expelled the memory of the mountain barn that smelled of shit and old hay and celebrated life and the absence of terror. The image of her below him, smiling and urging him on and taking her own pleasure, would never leave him. He was enthralled, and afterwards he mused how very different she seemed to when he saw her unblushingly shower in front of him in Macedonia. He kissed her stomach and traced a line with his fingertips from her pelvis to a breast and then to jaw and chin, and was in awe. His grave expression made her giggle and tweak his nose. Whether he fell in love at that moment, or this was simply the summation of all he’d felt since they’d lain together on her bed in the rackety seaside villa in Lesbos when they first met, was moot. It would churn in his mind long after she had left him and he was inconsolable without her. He would try to pinpoint exactly when he fell for her with the bitter hope that, if he identified that moment, he would somehow be able to reverse it and move on with his life. But this was the first real love of a man who’d coolly run his life as he wanted – his first complete acquiescence. As he approached his forties, he told himself that it was pointless to den
y it.

  Afterwards, as it grew dark, they talked in the light from the illuminated bell tower that permeated the room, casting fantastical shadows on the ceiling, and they drank the wine that was left for them and teased each other, which was how their relationship would be conducted over the next year or so. In Venice, they spoke seriously about their lives, but rarely afterwards. He was her light relief and he was to discover that he was unable ever to broach the subject of their future together or suggest a change in her rigid terms and conditions because she would cut him off and withdrew into herself.

  It was that evening in bed that she began to call him by his second name, because her father had been called Pavlos – the Greek version of Paul – and she admitted that she disliked the name almost as much as she did her two-timing, hypocritical bully of a dad. So, Samson it was. And in his mind, Delilah she became.

  They walked out and dined in an old-fashioned restaurant with sparkling glass lamps, starched white table clothes and solemn waiters. It was filled with a noisy local crowd that Anastasia criticised – a little piously, he thought – for their wealth and ignorance of how life was for the people she saw every day. The place had been recommended by her friend Gianni, who, the next day, was to take them on a tour to visit locked churches and monasteries that held seldom-seen masterpieces, and she wanted to be able to say that they’d been. She conceded that the food was for the gods. They drank more wine and stared at each other across the table with pride and disbelief. They told funny stories of their past, taking delight in everything about each other, and at some stage she leaned forward and said she would never find anyone she wanted to fuck more than him. ‘You are the lover of my life,’ she whispered gleefully. He knew that she was unquestionably something more to him – the love of his life.

  Much later, he’d remember that she dropped Hisami into the conversation that evening, not about the intervention that saved them both – they kept off that subject. She told him he had been in touch with her and had offered money – a lot of money – to extend her work on Lesbos, with a proper clinic and more therapists, and she was taken with the way he had acted on their chat in the hotel before the rescue in the mountain farmstead. The money was great, but what really impressed her were his follow-through and his grasp of detail after such a brief conversation. She went on about that, saying it was the mark of a really successful individual. Samson should have seen the threat, but he was no more aware of Hisami’s intentions than of his ability with a gun. As they had climbed the mountain to the farmhouse looking for her two weeks before, Hisami had asked him about his interest in Anastasia and, though Samson had thought nothing of it at the time, the man couldn’t have been plainer about his own ambition and he was, in fact, already plotting to win her.