Strangled Silence (28 page)

'You're sure nobody at MI5 has a hint of this?'
asked. 'And you said MI6 had
some of your people under surveillance in
Sinnostan—'

'The deal was done in the utmost secrecy. My
people are the best,'
-
told her,
glaring at her with his arrogant, sleepy-looking
eyes. 'There are a few in each agency who know
because they have to, but they also know that what
we are doing is in the nation's interest. Nobody will
interfere.'

'And we won't be hung out to dry if it goes
wrong?'
pressed him.

'It has gone too far for that, my dear,'
told her. 'The stakes are too high. If this operation
goes wrong, we'll all be found dead in our beds.'

John Donghu didn't want to be taken to lunch.
He wanted four orders of sandwiches and he
wanted them delivered. Amina was happy to oblige
and after taking his order over the phone, she had
the sandwiches made up at a local deli and put
them on the
Chronicle
's account. Donghu gave
her an address, which she found with difficulty. It
was a garage in a lane behind a row of houses
in Chadwell Heath. The rhythmic sounds of
machinery carried from inside. When she knocked
on the peeling navy paint of the wooden door, she
was greeted with a yell over the noise. Pushing
open the door, she stepped inside.

The place was warm and heavy with the scent
of lithograph printing: oil-based ink, thinners, cut
paper and the hot, greased joints of the printing
press. It was similar to the atmosphere Amina had
grown to love after her visits to the
Chronicle
's
printing floor. Seeing the giant web presses in
action gave her a sublime thrill. The printing press
here was a fraction of the size, but still took up
nearly half the space in the small garage, along with
a guillotine in one corner, a light desk with its long
daylight bulb suspended inside a metal hood and
several workbenches and sinks lining the walls.
Every horizontal surface was covered in some form
of paper or film or discarded metal printing plates.
Stacks of printed material, some wrapped in plastic,
others simply bound with twine, sat under the
worktables.

There were four men. Three of them were
white, with two in their fifties and another in his
twenties. They were all dressed in old clothes and
aprons. The fourth man was small, barely over five
feet tall, and had the oriental eyes and broad flat
face of a Sinnostani. His skin was weathered a
ruddy brown and he smiled with teeth the colour
of beeswax. Amina's first thought was that he
looked like a stereotypical Eastern bloc Communist,
dressed in shapeless slacks, a heavy grey
woollen jumper, cheap shoes and a large flat cap.
There was something about his face that was
immediately likeable and he strode straight over to
her to shake her hand with his right one and take
the bag of sandwiches with his left.

'You're a star,' he said to her over the whirring,
stamping press. 'Lunch is up, lads!'

The men didn't stop working to eat their food,
merely grabbing their sandwiches, nodding their
thanks to Amina and going back to whatever they
were doing. Amina sat up on a stool and tucked
into her cheese salad wrap as she watched the oldest
man using the guillotine to trim the latest stack of
leaflets to come out of the machine. She looked at
what was printed on them.

YOUR TAX MONEY
IS THEIR BLOOD MONEY

Below, it listed the arms dealers who were
making huge profits from the war in Sinnostan.
Amina was not impressed. She knew that these
leaflets would be handed out at protests or pasted
onto lamp-posts and walls, but most would be
thrown away or simply become litter. They did no
good and just showed these operations up for what
they were: amateurish, badly funded and smalltime.
Her mother had no time for them and Amina
was inclined to agree.

'So you want to know about Sinnostan?'
Donghu asked over the sound of the machinery.

'Yes, please. Is there any chance we could go
somewhere quieter?'

'I like the noise,' he replied. 'Quiet makes me
nervous. Too many years hiding from the secret
police in the old Sinnostan, see? Lots of ears around
back then. Getting like that here now.'

'I don't think we're that bad yet,' Amina chided
him with a coy smile. 'We're a long way from
having the Gestapo knocking on the front door in
the middle of the night.'

But she was already thinking of the Scalps. Had
they followed her here? Were they listening? And
even if they were, what harm could she do talking
to a man who published all his thoughts on a
weblog anyway?

'Used to be that way in Sinnostan,' Donghu
told her. 'Now it's different. Now you get a knock
on the door in the middle of the night and you
don't know
who
it could be. Could be soldiers looking
for insurgents, or insurgents looking for
"traitors", or kidnappers just looking for someone
to ransom. Or it could be some old dear tryin' to
find her son who's been out on the town all night.
The old women scare me most. Some of 'em have
tongues that could cut you in half.'

Amina had already decided to tell Donghu
about parts of her investigation. There seemed
to be no way around it; he would want to know
why she was so curious. She explained that she
was working on a story about the mental health
of British soldiers coming back from the war.

'This war, is it drivin' people mad? Good
question!' Donghu said with a humourless grin.
'Most wars are insane, but this one is making less
sense than any of 'em.'

'What do you mean?'

Donghu took a big bite out of his roast beef
sandwich and kept talking.

'Gah! It's like a war from some goddamned
kid's comic book: good-guy soldiers and bad-guy
terrorists. All these heroic-soldier stories and hardly
any innocent bystanders with bits blown off them.
Up until lately, hardly any civilians killed – only
soldiers and "terrorists"! What kind of a war is that?
Even Sinnostani reporters say the whole thing is
short on dead bodies – and they're really
looking
! We
want to show what your news doesn't – which is
plenty. It's too weird. War is a nasty, complicated
thing. But we watch it on your news and it's like a
Hollywood production – all neat and tidy and
exciting.'

'But the aerial bombing and the smart missiles
are supposed to be really accurate,' Amina put in.
'They go on about it all the time. That's why
there've been so few civilians killed.'

'Gah! How do you avoid killing wrong people
when you blow up whole
towns
! No, it's weird.

'And very goddamned hard to
find
sometimes
too. It's like they're trying to
hide
the real war. I
been out looking for it and it's always somewhere
else. I seen fire-fights and stuff, but not much, you
know? There been times that I been out there asking
the locals about some battle that's supposed to
have happened and people just shrug and shake
their heads. They haven't seen nothing. But it's on
film . . . on the news. I watch reports on Western
news about fighting in places I never heard of. And
I know my country. There been reports of terrorist
attacks in villages I can't even find on a map.

'Like I said, it's a comic-book war. I'm still
waiting for them to bring out a range of toys.'

Amina nodded. After reading so much about it,
she'd been wondering about all these little, out-of-the-way
locations.

'It's a big place though, isn't it?' she said. 'And
everyone says it's hard to get into those mountains.'

'Gah! There are people living in those
mountains!' Donghu waved his hand dismissively.
'Getting pushed about by soldiers who are leading
the reporters around. These soldiers, they're
controlling everything the reporters see. Don't want
bad press. But even the locals not seeing much
terrorists. At least not until lately. Now we got all
these foreigners coming in to fight the soldiers for
us. Not like we
asked
them, mind you. They just
showed up and joined in. Ha! Between them and
your soldiers, we got a war of the immigrants! And
now it's starting to creep into the towns. Now it's
starting to worry us. We goin' to be one of those
countries where the big boys come from outside
and use our land as a battleground.

'But this happens all the time, I just don't
understand why Sinnostan. We got nothing the
heavyweights are interested in. Just big mountains
and thin soil and people tough enough to live off
them. We got a little natural gas, no oil, no minerals
worth mining. There's no diamonds or gold in our
hills, no tantalum or—'

'You've got terrorists,' Amina pointed out.

'Gah!' Donghu shrugged. 'Like I said, they're
not a natural resource – they had to be imported. A
lot of those guys don't even speak the language.
Even heard rumours that they got something else
going on up there – something no one's talking
about. Mind you, we know there are Special Forces
units working out there – SAS and the like – hunting
for the insurgents. But that doesn't explain
some of the stories.'

'What stories?'

'Stories about lights in the night sky,' he said,
looking at her. 'I mentioned it in my blog a few
times, but it hardly gets noticed. You're out in the
hills and suddenly you see these lights and a few
hours later, you wake up lying on the ground. And
some of the people who tell these stories swear that
they've been searched, or they've lost time, or even
been moved to a different location. A few
even claim they been the subjects of some kind of
experiment. Weird, huh?'

His eyes were on her, watching for her
response. Amina remembered the piece of film
taken by the camera in Stefan Gierek's helmet; the
flashing light just before he blacked out.

'Not as weird as you'd think,' she replied, as she
decided to tell Donghu what she and the others
had discovered so far.

The alert at the airport resulted in increased traffic
on the Underground. It was starting to look like
another false alarm, but that was little comfort to
the people whose flights had been cancelled and
were forced to make their way home again as rush
hour began. A number of bodies had brushed
against Ivor's as he travelled home and in his distracted
state, he had taken little notice. So it was
impossible to tell who had slipped the note into his
jacket pocket.

He discovered it as he tucked his hands into his
pockets on exiting the station, walking down the
road towards his flat. Pulling out the folded piece of
paper, he read the words written in a looping,
perfectionist handwriting:

I hear you are willing to pay for
information on your injury. I can supply
a full explanation, with documentary
proof and the names of the people
responsible. This will cost you £1 million.
If you are willing to pay this amount,
contact me at the number below at 9 p. M.
tonight. Call from a phone box you have
never used before. If you say a word to
anybody else, or if I think you are going
to cheat me out of my money, you will
never hear from me again.

Ivor read the number, his heart thudding against
his ribs. Was it a trick? Were they playing with him?
Were they setting him up? He felt overcome with a
sickening fear. It couldn't be this easy. The price
meant nothing to him if it could provide him with
the answers he was after. He already knew he was
going to make the call. But if this person wanted
payment, there would be some kind of trade
involved and that could mean exposing himself.

Wasn't he already exposing himself ? Just
returning home after he had been attacked was a
risk in itself. He should be avoiding his flat, staying
where there were crowds . . .

He shook his head. Whatever this was, he
would go along with it. It was too good a chance
to turn down. He would worry about the risks
when they came up. In the meantime, he had a
phone call to make.

Chi had already started rooting through Nexus's
back-ups, but had not come up with anything really
new. He emailed the others in the network to see if
there was any news on Nexus. Then he continued
his trawl through the back-ups. One disk was
labelled 'The Triumvirate' and was full of surveillance
photos. They were badly composed
enough to have been taken by Nexus himself. Nex
was not a great one for fieldwork. He could
disassemble a digital camera and put it back
together with his eyes closed, but even with them
open, he still couldn't take a decent picture.

Chi checked the dates on the files. The most
recent ones were of a nondescript office building
on what looked like a London street. He clicked
them to enlarge each one in turn. There were a
number of people on the street, but the photos
were centred on three figures leaving the building,
one after the other. There was a lean, sallow-faced
man with a grey military-style haircut, dressed in a
khaki trench coat. The second figure was a shorthaired
woman dressed in a brown woollen sweater
and slacks who resembled a university lecturer.
The third person was a tall, stocky man with the
appearance of a politician but the eyes of a wary
animal.

The three subjects had left the building
separately, but the way Nexus had photographed
them linked them together. He had definitely been
interested in these people. Flicking back to the
woman, Chi thought he recognized her, but he
couldn't remember where he had seen her before.
'The Triumvirate'. Nex had mentioned that term a
few times; supposedly it was a group of three
conspirators who were running some operation he
was interested in. Something to do with smuggling
weapons. Was this them?