A Loyal Spy (22 page)

‘I bet he is. And I expect he’s not the only one. How’s Alex?’

‘Alex has made a new life for himself in risk consultancy and he’s feeling very protective of it.’

‘Protective enough to have me silenced?’

There was a pause. Jonah chose his words carefully. ‘What do you think?’

Nor hung his head and nodded as if to acknowledge the direction in which they were heading. ‘And the others? What about Lennard?’

‘He’s in a monastery in Burma. He has a new and unpronounceable name. I don’t suppose he cares.’

‘And Beech?’

‘Beech is a policeman on a small Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland. He married Flora a couple of years ago.’

Nor looked up sharply. ‘Beech married Flora Monteith?

‘Yes.’

‘You should have married Flora.’

Jonah shrugged. ‘It didn’t work out that way. She’s pregnant, I think.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not,’ he lied.

Jonah had gone in search of Flora right after his marriage broke up. Of course he had. It was the summer of ’99 and she was living in a flat near the tube station in Ladbroke Grove. He’d buzzed the entryphone of her flat at 2 a.m. after spending several sleepless hours pounding the streets rehearsing what he wanted to say. ‘What are you doing here?’ she’d asked, standing in the doorway, once he’d made his way up the stairs.

‘You know why I’m here,’ he’d said.

‘Stop right there,’ she’d told him, and then after a pause, in a soft voice, she’d dropped her bombshell. ‘I’m getting married.’

He remembered being stunned. It had seemed so unfair. He’d married the wrong person and now he’d meant to put it right. How it always should have been. How could he be thwarted now? It was finally possible. Where was the justice in that?

‘I didn’t know,’ he’d said.

‘You will soon. You’re the best man. I’m marrying Beech.’

And he hadn’t known what to say.

‘He’s here if you want to speak to him,’ she’d told him.

He’d staggered back down the stairs.

A couple of months later, he had stood beside Beech at the altar, in a morning suit that was bursting at the seams, with the ring tightly clenched in his oversized hands. And when the time had come for the priest to ask whether there were any objectors present, he had not said a word. What right did he have? He’d screwed up one marriage already. He had wanted to punch his hand through a wall.

Jonah and Nor sat side by side on the rock and the desert stretched away in all directions.

‘And you?’ Nor asked, staring at his feet. ‘Do you care?’

‘You were my joe and you betrayed me,’ Jonah said, the fury there in the knot of his shoulders and in the grip of his hand on the knife.

‘Did I?’

‘You lied to me. As a result, we executed a CIA agent. For Christ’s sake, the guy had a wife and two kids.’

‘Are you going to kill me, then?’ Nor asked.

There was a pause.

‘I haven’t decided,’ Jonah replied, carefully.

Nor stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I don’t know whether you remember this, but you once offered me a definition of friendship, of true friendship. It was at Chicksands, at the intelligence school, when you were turning me into a spy. You told me that a true friend is someone who you could rely on to help you bury a body with no questions asked.’

‘I remember.’

‘Well. Kiernan had to die.’

‘Why did he have to die?’

Nor looked across at him. ‘He was poking his nose in where it wasn’t welcome.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s best if you don’t know.’

‘Best?’

‘Safer for you.’

‘You’re going to have to do better than that,’ Jonah told him.

‘Besides, you should be glad it’s turned out so well. Killing Kiernan was an easy way to prove that my oath, my
bayyat
, meant something. It gave me instant credibility. It infiltrated me inside the upper echelons of al-Qaeda.’

Jonah was incredulous. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Nobody has got as close to Bin Laden as I have.’

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You must be fucking crazy. We sacked you in ’96.’

‘And all this time I’ve been working for you, inching myself closer every day.’

‘Why should I believe that?’ Jonah asked softly.

‘Because you want to,’ Nor replied, ‘because I’m your oldest friend and because I make you feel guilty.’

‘I don’t know who you are any more.’

‘Come off it, Jonah. You never had a clue who I was or what I believed and you never bothered to find out. You were too busy playing the elder brother and protector and then, of course, your best role, the one you were meant for, agent and handler.’

‘You were a willing volunteer.’

‘Sure I was. I fell for it. All that patriotic duty shit. Playing the secret agent. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. You made me a traitor to my own race.’

‘And what are you now?’

‘I’m just the same as I always was. A loyal spy.’

‘But who’s loyal spy? Tell me why Kiernan had to die.’

Nor shook his head, and smiled wryly. ‘You’re not going to kill me, are you?’

‘I couldn’t,’ replied Jonah. It was true. The anger had abated. He had decided that whatever happened would happen. He’d take the consequences. He thought:
You remind me too much of myself to kill you.
But of course there was a time, in Afghanistan back in 1999, when he thought he had.

The moon had risen but the sun had not yet fully set. They seemed to have fallen between times – an interstice, a truce. Below them Justine emerged from a thorn-bush-filled wadi wearing a sarong. Her hair hung in wet ringlets on her shoulders. She headed back to the fire that Zalik had built beside the Land Cruiser. Jonah would have liked to go back down to her but he guessed that the intimacy of the night before was unlikely to be repeated.

‘Do you see much of your daughter?’ Nor asked, matter-of-factly.

‘When I can,’ he replied. Despite his ex-wife’s antagonism towards him she had continued to allow him to spend time with Esme when he was given leave. He supposed that he should be thankful for that.

‘What are you going to tell Monteith?’

‘The truth, that when it came down to it, we’re too alike, you and I. I don’t have it in me to kill you.’

‘Will that satisfy him?’

‘I doubt it. But there’s not much he can do about it. After tomorrow you’ll be an American asset, beyond his reach.’

‘I won’t tell them about Kiernan,’ Nor said. ‘Why should I? I don’t want to end up back in the Dark Prison, any more than you do. Tell Monteith that your secret is safe with me.’

At first it appeared to be a trick of the dissolving horizon. They had been driving for what seemed like hours across the remnants of a vast and ancient lake, their tyres leaving tracks in the salt crust behind them. On Jonah’s GPS the Land Cruiser’s progress drew a line across an empty screen.

Then it crystallised out of the haze: a burnished Land Rover, bright as molten glass, driving towards them. Zalik stopped the engine and squinted over the steering wheel at the approaching vehicle as they freewheeled to a halt.

The Land Rover stopped alongside them.

A man got out. It was Pakravan, the Persian-American with the boxer’s flattened nose. He was wearing the beard and shaven upper lip of a true believer. He walked over to the Land Cruiser and leant in the window, resting on his beefy forearms.

‘Welcome to Eschatos,’ he said.

February–June 2002

They knew in London that he’d failed to kill Nor as instructed long before he landed at Heathrow. There was a text message from Alex waiting for him when he switched on his phone at baggage reclaim, a command –
Footbridge at Vauxhall Bus Station. Now.

It was time to face the consequences. He took the underground, travelling on the Piccadilly Line to Green Park and then on the Victoria line south to Vauxhall. He emerged from the underground and spotted the metal footbridge that spanned the roundabout. Alex was standing at the centre of it, leaning on the railings.

‘Smile,’ Alex greeted him, mirthlessly. ‘You’re on
Candid Camera
.’ He nodded in the direction of the MI6 building. ‘You’ve got to hand it to Terry Farrell. I mean, the man was not just an architect, he was a comic genius. Who would have thought of hiding our most secretive government offices inside a massive Inca pyramid on the banks of the most famous river in England? They were a bloodthirsty lot, the ancient Incas. And Terry Farrell was Maggie Thatcher’s favourite architect. Can you believe that they’ve written me a cheque and asked me to evaluate the threat? I was like, are you serious? Between you and me, I’d have done it for Smarties.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Of course, the IRA had a pop. They fired an RPG from Vauxhall Park. There, just the other side of the railway line. It didn’t do any damage to speak of. Bollocks, really …’ Something caught his eye and he pointed down the line of railway arches. ‘Look down towards Albert Embankment, our side of the road, beyond the gay spa and the Portuguese deli. What do you see?’

The bonnet of a police Range Rover was just visible poking out from under one of the arches.

‘The Director of Special Forces arrives in an unmarked forest-green Land Rover every Thursday morning with an armed police escort who wait outside for him. He leaves a couple of hours later. I’ve had a rotation of my people, collecting make, model and registration numbers of vehicles going in and out. We’re building a map. You’re probably wondering why we haven’t been spotted. I’ll tell you why. There’s a large transient population around here. Winos and junkies. So despite all the surveillance cameras – and as you’ve no doubt already clocked, there are plenty of them – it’s still difficult to keep track of individuals over an extended period.’

‘That’s fascinating,’ Jonah droned, attempting to convey his wish for Alex to get to the point.

‘It’s not funny, mate. Well, it is, actually. There are a couple of grocer’s shops not five minutes from here in Oval that will sell you Tamil Tiger training videos under the counter. I’ve been watching them. The assault on Jaffna is particularly instructive: swarms of suicide bombers – men, women and children – all of them sprinting like fuck straight at enemy lines. They completely overwhelmed the Sri Lankan army and took the peninsula. You know the Tigers invented the suicide bomber?’

‘Is that how you’d do it?’ Jonah asked, caving in, as he usually did.

‘They’re certainly vulnerable,’ Alex said, thoughtfully. ‘Crisps and soda pops would be their downfall. Twice a week, regular as clockwork, you’ve got loaded vans delivering pallets of soft drinks and confectionery for the vending machines. You hijack one of those, pack it with explosives and drive it in. You kidnap the driver’s family, threaten his wife and kids with electric drills, sure enough he’ll get the gate opened. You wouldn’t need to get as far as the underground car park, the chicane at the entrance would do. Detonate it and then swarm the place with jihadis with shaped charges. You make your own access. You could send a bulldozer in after the truck to mount the ramps and get access to the foundations in the car park, that’s if you wanted to bring the whole building down. But basically you’re looking for the server. Knock that out and England’s flying blind. All the secrets up in smoke. Of course, to spread the confusion, you could set off secondary devices at the police station two doors down opposite the Esso garage, Fire Brigade HQ up by Lambeth Bridge and behind us at Cobalt Square.’

‘You know, you have every teenage boy’s fantasy job?’

Alex grinned expansively. ‘Of course I do.’ The grin disappeared just as suddenly. ‘Which is why I take personal fucking affront when I learn that somebody, who clearly hasn’t been listening, fails to perform a simple task as instructed and as a result puts all of this in jeopardy. What happened?’

There wasn’t much point in a lengthy explanation. ‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘That doesn’t cut much ice with Fisher-King.’

‘Is that who you are answering to now?’ Jonah asked.

‘Fisher-King is who we are all answerable to: you, me, Monteith.’

‘What do you want?’ Jonah demanded.

‘Hear me and believe what I say. I have been given ­unequivo­cal direction. If Nor fucks up, this country will no longer be safe for you. Witnesses will come forward and be offered immunity from prosecution in return for testimony that you conspired to kidnap your wife’s lover. Do you understand?’

Jonah thought of his one-bedroom flat in London and his bolthole in Edinburgh that the Department might or might not know about – the meagre threads of his life. Ever since the Department had conspired to organise the kidnap of his wife’s lover and frame him for it, he had been aware that, one day, he might be forced to leave the country or face the prospect of disgrace and a lengthy prison sentence.

‘I understand,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ Alex said. ‘Fisher-King wants to speak to you.’ He strode off along the footbridge.

They fell into step with Fisher-King, heading north on Albert Embankment towards Lambeth Bridge.

‘He doesn’t want you in the building,’ Alex had explained as they hurried to catch up with him. ‘He’ll brief you on the way to his weekly meet with Five.’

Fisher-King glanced at Jonah briefly and returned his attention to the pavement ahead. He wore a pinstriped suit, knee-length cashmere coat, silk scarf, gleaming handmade shoes. As ever he looked immaculate.

‘You have jeopardised us all.’

Jonah waited. This wasn’t going to be a dressing-down; that wasn’t the way Fisher-King operated. That was what Alex was for.

‘Winthrop has asked for you again,’ Fisher-King informed him. ‘Nor’s your joe. Winthrop wants you to run him again.’

‘Why?’

‘I think his idea is to put Nor back inside al-Qaeda.’

‘That’s insane,’ Jonah protested. ‘How could we ever rely on anything that Nor told us? How would we know he was on our side?’

‘Winthrop has Vice President Cheney’s ear. That has allowed him to bypass the usual channels. He’s a force unto himself.’

‘You can’t agree to this,’ Jonah told him.