THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (21 page)

He went through what had been asked of the man in previous interrogations. Why had he gone to Pakistan? Whom had he met in Pakistan? What had he been taught in Pakistan? Who had funded his studies in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? Had he gone into Afghanistan at any time? The answers were the same, word for word, as they had been at every interrogation. He had the transcripts in front of him, and the pages were signed by the interrogators. Sometimes Jed let the answers run; sometimes he interrupted and his tone was savage; sometimes he smiled and softened his voice as he put the question; sometimes he doubled back. As the boy was denying ever having been in Afghanistan, he returned to the funding of the studies. Jed never caught him out, no discrepancies in the story, but far down in his mind a thought was developing.

He couldn't place where it came from. Whom had he met in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? He felt the stab of recognition.

Jed paused. He collected his thoughts. They had been chaff, a jumble. Most of his concentration had been on the questions he'd asked, a little of it had been on his family and on the week gone by.

He cut away the chaff.

He sat for a full minute in silence. He watched the fingers writhing, and the breath come in little pants, and let his instinct rule.

Jed's voice was gentle, in English. 'Friend, do you speak Pashto?'

The faces of the two guards were impassive. He had used the word

'friend'. The guards would talk about that afterwards. Guards hated the prisoners. Guards knew that any fraternization with prisoners was forbidden, would lead to a flight out without their boots touching the Tarmac. Guards knew that a brigadier general, Camp Delta's commander, had been summarily fired and that 'defense sources'

had claimed he was too 'soft' with the regime he'd ordered. In Delta, signs - printed by the ICRC - told detainees their rights, and had been posted with the authorization of the brigadier general. When the brigadier general had visited prisoners' cages he had greeted them in Arabic, 'Peace be with you.' He'd been sacked . . . but an interrogator had the freedom to call a prisoner 'friend'.

The man across the table, the 'friend', nodded.

In English, because Jed didn't speak that language: 'Would that be good Pashto, or only a little Pashto?'

'I can speak in Urdu . ..'

'No, no.' Jed leaned forward. 'Do you have Pashto?'

'Some, a bit, there were Afghan people in the college. I. ..'

Jed used his hand to gesture that the answer was sufficient. He used his desk telephone to call the central office. He requested the immediate presence of a Pashto interpreter. There was doubt as to whether one was available. He did not raise his voice, but it carried enough menace to the clerk. He dropped the 'request', replaced it with 'requirement': a Pashto interpreter to his room immediately -

not tomorrow, not in half an hour. In a drawer on his side of the table the tape-recorder turned, and microphones were built into the table, on his side and on the prisoner's. He opened the drawer and stopped the tape. He waited. The quiet clung in the room. The man opposite sat bolt upright and still, except for the motion of his hands.

Jed wrote, in a fast long-hand scrawl, answers he remembered. The answers were not verbatim, but as he recalled them. Ten minutes later, when the interpreter came into the room, he passed him the two pages, now thickly covered with his handwriting. He asked the interpreter to translate them, on paper, into Pashto. Again there was silence as the interpreter crouched at the table and wrote down the translation.

He could not be sure where this would lead him. When the translation was complete, the pages in Pashto were laid in front of the prisoner ard Jed switched on the tape-recorder. The prisoner was asked to read aloud.

His host had put Bart at the end of the line.

They had been down to the paddock to inspect the first race's runners, then had climbed back to the stand. They made a party of eight and they waited for the start of the five thirty-five at Riyadh. The banker did the book. No Tote or William Hill or on-course bookmaker, the banker wrote down their little bets. Ten
riyals
or twenty
riyals
were the flutters. No money would change hands in the stand, no winnings or losses would be paid over in public, but rewards and debts would be settled at dinner at the defence-procurement man's villa.

Most of the row of seats in front of Bart was empty, and the row behind him only sparsely filled. Not like the old days, before the war in Iraq: then the whole stand would have heaved with expatriates.

'Terrorism threat' and 'personal security' were the catchphrases of the day. Only the diehards remained. He did not own binoculars and struggled, when he looked down the course to the start, to see the quartered shirt and cap that he was backing, and he listened to the talk in the row stretching away from him. Here, at least, indiscretion was possible.

'What I say is, the place is cracking up. I think it's terminal.'

'Take the servants, there's a new impertinence. I'd call it dumb insolence.'

'More to the point is Saudization - is that a real word? You know what I mean. They're stuffing lazy incompetents into jobs they can't handle.'

'I never go out at night, not now, not even with a driver. This used to be the safest city on earth, not any more.'

'Dreadful what happened to young Garnett - such a sweet girl that Melanie, beautiful children.'

'It's all become so dishonest, corrupt. The ethos is almost criminal here now. I . . . '

They were off, away in the distance the small shapes of the horses, and the smaller ones of the jockeys. Bart could not make out his horse and he didn't bloody care. He had not been invited because his host particularly liked him: one day he might be useful for a late-night emergency call-out.

It all came back to Ann. He wondered where she was, whether she was still shagging the owner of the Saab franchise showroom, how the kids were . . . Ann demanded private schools, two holidays a year that weren't package. The debts had mounted: unopened envelopes carrying final demands had littered the Torquay house, and the mortgage payments were in arrears. By 1995 - yes, he could remember the date, clear as bloody crystal - she'd started the taunting that he hadn't the balls to stand up to the practice partners and demand they offloaded private patients on to him. He'd faced ruin, and he'd faced her goading . . . Then Bart had responded.

In April that year he had come to the solution to the ills. Josh, a right little weasel, had been in the consulting room and had sown the seed. Josh was an NHS patient, there to have his face patched up after a beating. Josh was a dealer. Josh left an address in the bed-sit land at the wrong end of the town. Josh had a roll of banknotes in his hip pocket, a fat wad. Josh paid up on the nail, cash on delivery . .. and Bart had delivered. Morphine alkaloid tablets were the currency for which Josh paid cash, and heroin and cocaine.

Any patient on Bart's books who was terminally ill, or any patient with chronic pain from a back injury, could be prescribed the morphine tablets - and always, from the spring of 1995, he prescribed big. The bathroom cabinets of his patients bulged with the bottles of morphine tablets . . . And when there was a death, or when a back's pain was relieved, he collected what was left and took it away. Josh had the left-over tablets, and the cash from the roll of notes in Josh's hip pocket began, by the late summer of 1995, to dent the piles of unpaid bills. So simple . . . Heroin and cocaine were used to help, quietly, those on their way when life had little more than a fortnight to run. Relatives were grateful for the release of their loved one from suffering. Bart called it the Brompton's Mixture: a gin or sherry cocktail with the addition of liquid heroin or powdered cocaine; when he signed the death certificate, and before the undertakers called, Bart cleared the unused excess. The partnership with the little weasel, the bastard, Josh, might have lasted for ever - not for a mere eighteen months, until the catastrophe.

There was no betting slip to tear up at the races in Riyadh. His prediction had been correct: his horse was last over the line. Again, the conversation down the line of seats clamoured, as if the race had been a minor diversion from the main business of gossip and complaint.

'I really don't know whether we should all get out, cut and run.

but what I reckon - back home - no one wants to employ a banker of my age.'

'That Al Qaeda, it's a cancer, and Iraq's taken the eye off the main hall. We're all targets now, that's what I feel.'

'If the Kingdom collapses we're in deep trouble, about as deep as you can get. We keep bags packed, we're all ready to go, but if it happened suddenly, without warning, how would we get to the airport? Who'd protect us? And can you imagine pitching up at Heathrow with just a suitcase each? That's assuming we got to the airport.'

'It's all so unfair. What do you think, Bart? . . . Bart, I'm speaking to you.' The banker's wife tugged his arm, peered into his face.

He jerked his mind away from Josh, the tablets, the cocktail and Ann. 'Isn't it more dangerous crossing the road in Riyadh?'

'Is that all you've to say about the security situation?'

He was emboldened. 'If you want my opinion, A1 Qaeda's power is overstated.'

'Have you plans for a quick bolt, Bart?'

For emphasis, Bart smacked a closed fist into the other palm. 'No, I have not.'

It was a lie - of course he had a permanently packed case. Whether he would ever use it was another matter. Would Eddie bloody Wroughton - the marionette tweaker - ever permit its use? He had nowhere to go without Eddie bloody Wroughton's sanction.

'I have no plans to run. Al Qaeda's threat is probably minimal. A few fanatics in the desert or up in the mountains, chewing dates, suffering from amoebic dysentery. I don't rate them, no.'

Shocked into silence, the other guests in the row shuffled their feet and examined their racecards. Bart thought of nobody but himself -

himself and Eddie Wroughton.

The host's wife chipped in, 'Well, that's enough of that. I think it's time we went back down to the paddock.'

The dung was dried, desiccated.

The line drawn on the map had served Eddie Wroughton well. At each village close to the pencil line they had stopped and Wroughton had stayed in the vehicle, forcing the police officer to go among the mud-brick homes. The routine had led them to the last village, then on to the single isolated building. There had been signs there of recent use, and the fire that had been lit. He'd photographed the interior, then the new bolt and the new lock on the inside of the door.

No shepherd or goatherd would have sealed a window so thoroughly, then lit a fire inside, or would have used a new lock and a new bolt on a shed door. They had gone on, following the pencil line on the map, using ever rougher tracks.

The toe of his brogue brushed the top of a dung stool, which fell away as powdery dust. But he worked with the toe until he had exposed the stool's underside, where there was still dampness. A week, a little more perhaps, but not a month. From the dung, he decided that more than half a dozen, fewer than a dozen camels had been there, had waited, had defecated. Near to the riverbed there were tyremarks but on the dirt track; Wroughton could not have said whether they were a week, a month, or half a year old. Away to the right there was a cluster of buildings from which cooking smoke spiralled, and there were irrigated fields. That community would be centred on a well. The police officer had been there and had come back with his head down, as if he felt ashamed to report back that his questions had met a wall of silence. If he was given time, if Wroughton had allowed the police officer the time to take two of the older men away from the village and drive them to the cells at the station back down the road, the questions would still have gone unanswered, so he did not permit it. The wall of silence denied that strangers had been there within the last several days. Tribesmen and farmers, his experience of the hardship of their lives told him, did not respond to inflicted pain.

Slowly, taking his time, Wroughton gazed around him. His eyes were shaded by his dark glasses and he could look out over the ground from which the sun reflected. When he was satisfied with what he had drunk in, seen nothing that interested him, he turned and began again. He looked for the mistakes that men made. A discarded wrapper, a ground-out cigarette filter tip: men who thought their precautions were total always made one mistake. Most of Wroughton's life was dictated by paper: paper accumulated on his desk, was spewed out by cypher machines and his computer. From the paper mountain came clues to the identity and relevance of the prey he hunted, but only rarely. He turned again, stared up at the high ground on the right side of the riverbed, and saw the movement.

Horns moved, then ears, a head and then the goat was gone from

.a ledge above the right side of the riverbed.

Wroughton looked hard at the ledge and saw that it reached precariously a patch of green and yellow grass, and that there were more goals. According to his father, grandfather and great-uncle, the best work of an intelligence officer was in close-quarters observation

- they might not have thought him suitable to follow them, not thought he could hack it as a career, but he had remembered. Where there were goats there would be a boy. He had left the villagers to the police officer, but this was for himself.

He scrambled up the loose stone. He clung to the branches of little sprouting bushes that grew from rock crannies. His best brogues were scraped, his linen suit was dust-smeared and his pure-white shirt was sweat-soaked, but he reached the ledge. Never looking down, he edged along the rock wall to where a small plateau opened out. On it, extraordinarily, there was grass. Perhaps a tiny spring dribbled water from the upper rocks. There were goats, and a boy was sitting on the grass among their excrement. He caught his breath. The occasions when excitement had gripped him were rare enough for him to count on the fingers of one hand. The boy watched him as he composed himself. He spoke in Arabic, with the gentleness he would have used to his friend Juan Gonsalves' children.