A Loyal Spy (2 page)

Jonah was asleep before the chopper took off.

He opened his eyes on a different world. An impenetrable forest-green canopy lay below, dotted with cloud shadows. The engine shuddered and his ears pulsed.

They passed over a circle of open space, a village clearing. In it he could see naked black children staring up, each one pegged to a shadow, and the chopper’s shadow blurring on thatched roofs and then flickering over the forest again. He watched the Zambian soldiers bunched around the porthole windows, their ivory eyes staring down. The forest stretched to the horizon.

Jonah walked up Kenema’s Hangha Road, shouldering through the melee of hawkers standing outside Lebanese stores selling racks of boom boxes, shortwave radios and Sony Walkmans, past the bullet-riddled police station, plastered with Red Cross posters of missing children, and a café playing Nigerian rap:

You be the mugu, I be the master

Oyinbo man I go chop your dollar

I go take your money and disappear.

He stopped in front of a shop displaying a dilapidated wooden sign with a cut diamond painted on it. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The Lebanese had arrived in Sierra Leone over a hundred years earlier, and unlike the Europeans, who lacked the enthusiasm to penetrate the bush, they made straight for the interior. Before long they could be found on every street corner peddling mirrors, pots and pans, jewellery and cheap imported textiles. By the late 1950s they dominated the two most lucrative sectors of the economy: agriculture and diamond dealing; and by the late nineties they had it all sewn up, diamonds and gold, finance, construction and real estate. It was said that it was Lebanese money that Liberian president Charles Taylor had used to bankroll the RUF, when they seized control of the diamond fields.

Farouz was a large man sitting behind a small desk in a threadbare office at the back of the shop. There was a black velvet pad in the centre of the desk with a couple of magnifiers and a jeweller’s loupe on it, and a folded camp bed in the corner of the room. Farouz had a black carpet of chest hair and a heavy gold chain. He sipped at a tiny cup of Lebanese coffee while he examined Jonah’s letters of introduction from an Antwerp cutting house and periodically attempted, without much success, to light a fat Havana cigar. When he was finished reading he jabbed the cigar at Jonah.

‘So you want me to teach you about diamonds? We used to see a lot of delinquent kids offloaded down here to cut their teeth. It’s been happening for as long as anyone can remember. They’d fuck the local whores and beat their chauffeurs and when they were done they’d run back home to Beirut to take over the family business. You think you’re here to play?’

I’m here to play because of your delinquent nephew’s weakness for blackjack, Jonah was tempted to say, but he wouldn’t. It was an elaborate charade. A dance conducted, Jonah assumed, for the benefit of eavesdroppers. ‘Do I look like a delinquent?’

Farouz leant back in his chair, which squealed in protest. ‘You look like you’ve been in a car crash.’

‘I’ve been in several,’ Jonah acknowledged. It was true: the scars were there to see. Front- and rear-end impacts, rolls, pile-ups, the whole shebang. It was a hazard of the job. And explosions too; in 1994 in Bosnia he’d driven over an anti-tank mine in a Land Rover and had been catapulted into the sky. That one had cost him an eye.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to learn the trade,’ Jonah told him, going through the motions.

‘I’m sure you do,’ said Farouz, leaning forward again and leafing through Jonah’s papers with a sceptical look on his face. ‘Your references are impeccable. Best I’ve ever seen.’

Jonah silently cursed General Support Branch, which ­consist­ently failed to heed its own dictum –
keep it ordinary
. Farouz jabbed the cigar at him again. ‘What I don’t know is whether you have the stomach for this business.’

‘I’ve been around the block.’

Farouz snorted. ‘You have some scars. That’s nothing to boast about. Tell me, have you ever seen a diamond mine?’

‘No.’

‘You see a polished rock on a pretty young woman’s finger, white, no inclusions – flawless. You have a naive belief in the idea of the purity of marriage. But this is nothing. It’s just a sentimental idea. Here in the jungle, diamond mining is a kind of robbery with violence. You grab what you can get. To do it, you need only brute force, which is nothing but an accident caused by the weakness of others. It is not a pretty thing to see.’

‘I’m not a pretty thing to see,’ Jonah retorted.

And Farouz laughed – a belly-shaking rumble that caused further protest from the springs in his chair. ‘If you want to see the mines you have to get up early.’

‘I don’t sleep much.’ Which was also true: he’d been a raging insomniac since his wife had left him two years before.

‘Nobody sleeps here,’ Farouz told him. ‘There’s too much money to be made.’

‘So when can I see the mines?’ Jonah asked.

‘Tomorrow. Why not …?’

July 2001

The following morning it was as if they were at the bottom of a deep oceanic trench, moving along a footpath through shafts of dusty sunlight that filtered through the forest canopy far above. The air in the forest was cool and dark, and the path ahead of them stretched out without visible end. They hurdled columns of venomous black ants, and stepped between the husks of mangoes discarded by diamond diggers on their way to the mines. Farouz proved to be nimbler than he looked.

Twice they passed through collections of mud huts with thatched roofs in clearings of hard-packed red dirt. Old people and ­children lounged sleepy-eyed in front of their huts and stared impassively at them from porches and stools while chickens pecked at the earth around them.

‘In the dry season I take a backpack filled with diamonds and ride a motorbike through the jungle trails to Guinea and from there to the capital, Conakry,’ Farouz explained. ‘That way the customer avoids paying licence fees and export tax. In Conakry, I go to a bank and deposit the parcel in a safe deposit box. Soon after, we meet somewhere, a hotel lobby or a café, then I take you to the bank and you get to inspect the goods. Once the sale is agreed, you transfer the money from your end and it is converted to cash at the bank. Next the diamonds are inspected by Guinean customs and they issue a certificate of authenticity confirming that they originated in Guinea. After that they are legitimate. You send a small plane down and pick them up and you have the diamonds in Antwerp by nightfall.’

‘And in the wet season …?’

‘We do it via Freetown. The overheads are higher because the customs officials are greedier, but it is just as straightforward.’

‘Can you bring them out via Liberia instead of Guinea?’

Farouz glanced at Jonah suspiciously. ‘It’s costly but feasible. It requires more security, but the basic process is the same.’

One moment they were in the jungle and then the next they had stepped on to the banks of a giant hole, awesome and volcanic, that had been gouged in the jungle.

Men with guns swarmed on the banks and earthen ledges and around the pumps and wooden troughs that led to the water, and the pools were filled with gangs of skinny men stripped to their shorts and covered with mud and slime. They slung rocks and gravel around in circular shake-shakes, washing the red clay and silt away from the stones, watching for the grey and white ones among the quartz chips, their helot faces dripping with sweat.

Diamonds are born of heat and pressure. Millions of years ago, deposits of compressed carbon crystallised under extreme heat and pressure miles beneath the earth. Then subterranean volcanoes erupted, punching through the layers of earth, shooting the diamonds to the surface in geysers. Today you can find them sprinkled in the sand and gravel of Sierra Leone’s alluvial plains.

Farouz greeted a gang leader who was standing beside a conical mound of drying gravel high above the pits. ‘How’da body?’ he called. Their handshake ended with a flourish, a snap of the fingers.

Jonah crouched at the edge of the pit. Beneath them a man in the water stopped and lifted his shake-shake and immediately the guards were on him, a foreman reaching in and plucking out the stone. He washed it in the water to remove the last of the clay and held it up between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Boss,’ he called.

Beside them the gang leader nodded and the stone was passed from hand to hand up the earthen ledges. It was placed in the palm of Farouz’s hand. He held it up to the sun and squinted at it.

‘Two carat,’ he said.

Then he passed it to Jonah, who mimicked him – holding it up to his remaining eye for scrutiny. It looked like an impossibly large grain of salt. Jonah had read that once upon a time diamonds were said to reveal the guilt or innocence of accused criminals and adulterers by the colours they reflected. By rights, in Sierra Leone, Jonah thought, the diamonds should be blood red.

There was the sound of a throat being cleared close behind him and the cold O-ring of a muzzle was placed against the back of Jonah’s neck. The sound of insects thickened around him.

‘Put your hands up,’ said a voice that was calm but authoritative, and suddenly familiar from a long-ago children’s game. Silwood Park in the endless summer of 1976: a skinny boy pointing a stick at him. Jonah glanced at Farouz, who shrugged and mopped his brow. So much for a deal cut on behalf of his delinquent nephew.

The muzzle was removed. The man with the voice that had sent him spinning back through time stepped back, safely out of reach. ‘Turn around.’

It couldn’t be.

Jonah took a deep breath and obeyed.

There were three of them and he recognised them immediately. One of them he knew from grainy mugshots in ‘most wanted’ posters, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Ghailani had bought the truck that carried the bomb that destroyed the US embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. The second was Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese diamond broker on the UN watch list, and the third, the one who was pointing a pistol at him – a black moulded-polymer sub-compact – was the custodian of a deep, dark secret. Jonah would say that Nor ed-Din had been his best student and his oldest and dearest friend, but the last time he had seen him he was lying face down in a pool of icy water in the Khyber Pass, and for many years Jonah had been under the impression that he had killed him there.

Nor held out his hand for the diamond and Jonah dropped it into his upturned palm. He wanted to say, ‘Hey, Nor, welcome back from the dead.’ But Nor was a professional secret-keeper –
trained by the best
– and it seemed from the expression on his face that they had never met.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Nor in Arabic.

‘Buying diamonds,’ Jonah replied, also in Arabic.

‘The diamonds here are no longer available for sale.’

‘Then I guess I’d better go back the way I came,’ Jonah told him, but he could see from the expression on their faces that this was not an option. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

‘Nevertheless, trouble has come,’ said Nor, and gestured to the guards with a flick of his narrow, tapered fingers. ‘Take him.’

They dragged Jonah down a jungle trail to a clearing with a single breeze-block hut and threw him inside. For several hours he listened to the steady footfall of the guards circling the hut and occasionally the sound of Nigerian Alpha jet fighters buzzing the jungle to the west.

Afternoon sun poured through the gaps in the thatch roof and created pools of light on the dirt floor. Jonah squatted on his haunches and watched as a fly writhed on its back in its death throes. Soon afterwards an ant emerged from a crack in the breeze-block wall. It darted this way and that with its antennae writhing. It found the fly carcass, circled it, and then went back to a second scout. They met antenna to antenna as if talking and then the second scout returned to the crack. Almost immediately a column of ants marched out and smothered the fly. They dismembered it and carried the pieces back to the nest.

The next time he saw it happen, he waited for the second scout to return to the crack and then reached down and removed the fly. Sure enough, a column emerged but when they found no fly they turned on the scout and tore it limb from limb. It occurred to him that the impulse to kill the bearer of bad news is hard-wired into all creatures.

He couldn’t help wondering whether he had been dealt a similar fate.

September–October 1996

It was 27 September. On an elevated traffic island outside Kabul’s presidential palace the corpse of former president Mohammed Najibullah was strung up by his neck. His clothes were drenched in blood and the pockets of his coat and his mouth were stuffed with afghanis, the country’s almost worthless currency. Kabul had fallen to the Taliban and the motley collection of British soldiers and spooks known as the Afghan Guides were now officially surplus to requirements.

Jonah was called to a meeting with Fisher-King to be given the news in his carpeted rooms at 85 Vauxhall Cross, the headquarters of MI6. He left the Department and walked down Whitehall and along the Embankment, past Parliament and MI5, and crossed Vauxhall Bridge. Approaching the building with the sun rising behind it, you could see why it was known as the ‘inca jukebox’. It was surprisingly brash for a building that housed a secret arm of the government.

Fisher-King met him by the lift in shirtsleeves and socks and guided him by the elbow past Immaculate Margo, his formidable secretary, and on into his inner sanctum with its privileged view of the Thames.

‘Looking back on it, who’d have thought a band of bloodthirsty tribesmen would bring the Soviet Union to its knees,’ he drawled in his effortlessly patrician voice. ‘Darjeeling?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Have a seat.’ He waved in the direction of a chesterfield.

Jonah sat carefully. The first time he had been called to Fisher-King’s office a chair had collapsed beneath him, and although he had suspected that the incident had been manufactured, it had nonetheless had the desired effect; ever since he had felt ill at ease in Fisher-King’s presence.