In the bone-crushing, muscle-numbing exhaustion, he felt freedom.
Caleb had dug through the last of the sunlight, through the dusk, through the time the desert was bathed in silver. He had cleared the wheels. From the time she had given him the short-handled shovel he had not spoken a word, as if talking would further waste his energy, and she had seemed to realize the silence's value. He had used the roof boxes from the Land Rover to make a wall beside the wheels so that when he threw aside a shovel's load, the sanci did not slip back into the cavity he dug. Each wheel was harder to clear; with each wheel his strength seeped and his tiredness grew. She could not help him. When each wheel was freed, he let her ram down the next box into place for the next wall, and she brought him the water that sustained him. She had watched him through the dusk and the night, only darting forward to drag the boxes into position and to bring him the water.
The boy had come back in the night, had sat apart from them and had minded his own camel and Caleb's.
For those hours, digging and gasping down the water given him, Caleb had known a new freedom. Links were broken, burdens offloaded. He was no longer a recruit in the training camp, no more a member of the 055 Brigade, was away from the trenches and the bombing, was distanced from Camps X-Ray and Delta, did not live the lie, was not travelling to rejoin his family. The sense of freedom burgeoned.
She had had a torch, and in its light Caleb had stepped over that chasm of his memory. He had raised the bonnet over the Land Rover's engine then fastened it upright. With his fingers and then using his headcloth – the ghutrah – as a whisk, he had cleared the surplus sand that covered the parts. Since the wedding and his recruitment, he had never taken that step into his past, never shown his knowledge of the working parts of a vehicle's engine. She had rummaged in a bag for a clean blouse, ripped the soft cotton material into strips and passed them to him. A strip for the filters, two strips for the carburettor, a strip for the pump, strips for each part of the engine that sand grains had infiltrated. When the torchlight had guttered, the moon had fallen, he had worked by touch, from memory.
The freedom would not last. With the coming morning he would resume his march to return to his family.
At the end he had used the short-handled shovel and, with what little remained of his strength, he had battered the blade against the wood of one of the boxes until it had fallen apart, then he had placed the wood lengths, four of them, hard against the revealed tyres, for a valuable yard of traction. He had sat in the driver's seat, had turned the key and pumped the pedal. The engine had caught, then he had switched it off.
He had climbed up to the crest of a shallow dune, had collapsed on to the sand, and begun to erase the memories. Without the memories, Caleb was an Arab, he was returning to his family, was a man who hated, was a chosen man. Behind him he could hear the quiet sounds of the restless camels and the soothing voice of the boy.
She was beside him and he knew he must guard himself or the memories would swamp him, and with them came weakness.
Her questions were a torrent.
'Who are you?'
'Where are you from?'
'Where are you going?'
The questions were asked in Arabic. He stared up at stars losing lustre, at a moon losing brilliance. He felt the cold of the night, the pain in his legs, arms and shoulders, the emptiness in his mind. She crouched over him. It must have been the last strip from her ripped blouse, and the last of the water, that she used to damp his forehead and his mouth. He could smell her, not perfume from a spray but her sweat. Her fingers moved over his skin and his lips. He had been frightened to talk for fear that his language would slip and betray him.
'You are not a Bedu – too tall, too strong. Where have you travelled from? You knew the engine of the Land Rover – where did you learn it?'
He had the last of her blouse strips, the last drops from the water container, and the last of her sandwiches – hot, curled and dried out in the past day's heat – and he had thought he was going to vomit but he had swallowed hard instead.
She was closer to him, lying back. She lapsed into silence but her fingers played patterns with the hairs on his right arm. Old senses stirred in Caleb, pulses beat. The fingers worked over his forearm, then came to rest on the material that covered the plastic bracelet.
They stopped there, as if it were a barrier. The bracelet was exposed, then the torch snapped on and its failing beam was on his wrist.
Caleb writhed away from her, but she had hold of his wrist and tried to work it into the beam. She was strong-muscled, not dainty. They wrestled, but he had his arm under his body. She loosed him, knelt beside him. The beam moved on. It caught the soles of his feet. He heard the shocked gasp, then it veered on again and shone full into his face. He hit her arm, suddenly, surprised her and the torch fell away.
She sat back, reached out and switched off the torch. 'Time to talk.'
He looked away.
'Who are you?'
'You don't look into my face. You don't read what is on my wrist.
You don't know me, please, and you forget me.'
She was laughing. 'He speaks, has a voice. The mystery grows. A voice that is not Saudi, not Bedu, feet that are raw. Who are you? I am Beth Jenkins, teacher and geologist. I work at the Shaybah oil-extraction plant. I am twenty-seven years old. I was in the desert because I had been told of a meteorite site never studied before. I have no satphone and I am out of range of any mobile link. I have left no note of where I am, it would be days before a search was started and then they would not know where to look. There – you know all about me. Now, what about you? You saved me from dehydration and death, or from a rifle and death. At Shaybah there are Arabs of all nationalities, but you I cannot place. Your feet tell me that for the first time in your life you are walking without shoes or sandals.
Why? Because of my debt to you, I have the right to know who you are.'
'You never saw me. The storm missed you. In the morning you go on and you never remember me.'
Sitting close to him and cross-legged, she said, 'Those men with you, because I saw their faces, wanted to kill me, would have. I heard you. Know that I thank you.'
'And you never remember me – I am forgotten.'
No reply.
Her warmth was near to him. He felt the pain loose its hold on his muscles. A great calm came to him. Her breathing was slowed, regular. She slept. Had he moved clumsily he would have woken her.
She knew everything of him. She knew that he wore a plastic bracelet on his wrist as if it were a convict's tag, that he crossed the Sands in secrecy, that his identity was hidden, that his business was worth killing to protect, that his accent separated him from the region, that the scars, blisters and welts on his feet meant he was a stranger and an Outsider. He heard, from the base of the dune, the boy's hacking cough, the sounds of the camels stirring and their grunts as they spat.
If he moved he would break the spell of her sleep. She shifted, without waking, and her head was on his chest, her throat on his shoulder. His hand moved. His fingers touched her throat. They rail on her throat from the windpipe to the back of her neck until they tangled with her hair. She could drive back where she had come from and she could go to a police post or an army post. She could betray him. His fingers were on her throat. She slept and was without defence. He moved his fingers from her throat. She slept because she trusted him.
The first shaft of the sun hit him.
He heard the boy whistle for him.
With great care, with gentleness, Caleb lifted her head and drew his arm clear, then lowered her head back to the sand. Her eyes did not open. He edged back from her, scratched at his face, shivered, then pushed himself up. The boy, expressionless, watched him. He left her and slid away down the dune.
Caleb took the camel's rein. They walked briskly, leaving behind him the woman and the Land Rover. The boy led him. He had gone fifty paces, sixty, and the slight warmth of the sun nestled on his back.
The shout was clear behind him, burst over the sand: 'Thank you.
You saved my life and I thank you. If it is ever possible I will repay you.'
He did not turn but he cupped his hands and yelled, at the plateau of sand around him, 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.'
They walked on.
The boy said, 'The Iraqi would have cut her throat. My father would have shot her.'
'But he did not.'
'You made a softness in my father. I think it is because you are different from us – my father cannot explain it. None of us knows you.'
'What have you been doing? Lifting too many ammunition boxes?'
Bart stepped back from the couch and peeled off the rubber gloves.
'Not ammunition boxes, no.'
The patient was mid-forties and overweight, a former Logistics Corps man, had risen to warrant officer and had looked for better remuneration than an Army pension would offer. They talked across each other.
'What I'm thinking is a hernia.' Bart's face cracked with his general practitioner's smile, comforting.
'You don't get those SANG guys to lift anything, not if they can wriggle away and get someone else, some other idiot, to do it. It's been CS-gas cartridges mostly, and plastic bullets, more than live stuff.'
'I'm going to pass you on to a consultant specialist, but I'm pretty sure that the pain and the lump mean an inguinal hernia.'
'Most of what we're doing with SANG, these days, is riot control and crowd control.'
'I expect you were worried about prostate cancer, with the swelling and the symptoms. That I can most definitely rule out – so it's not been a bad day for you.'
At the basin, gloves off and binned, Bart scrubbed his hands while the former warrant officer, now on the training programme for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, spilled out the detail of his daily work.
Only when he'd finished saying anything useful, when he'd come off the couch, zipped up and belted his trousers, put his sneakers back on, did Bart start to hurry him.
'Convalescence isn't bad, two weeks till you can drive after the operation. No heavy lifting during that time. Actually, it's the anaesthetic – if you have a full one – that governs recovery time. I'll make all the arrangements, fix an appointment and, please, leave my receptionist with the details of your cover policy… It's been a real pleasure to meet you.'
When the patient had gone, having grinned and pumped Bart's hand in gratitude, he sat at his chair and made his notes. Nothing about an inguinal hernia. Everything about the National Guard's current training schedule, yes: all classified as top secret, all closely guarded by the leaders of the Kingdom. Good stuff, the best he'd had for at least two months. He was a kept man, Wroughton's toy-boy.
He had been a kept man since he had answered the advertisement, had been accepted for employment on the basis of his severely edited curriculum vitae, had flown to Cyprus, paying his own fare, and had taken a taxi that had cost a small fortune to Nicosia. Ann behind him, and the kids, all of them the responsibility of the bastard with the Saab franchise, and the divorce papers signed. Anew start and a new beginning in the sunshine. He hadn't crawled into the water, he had jumped. In the last month before he flew out of the UK, with no forwarding address for the sour-faced detective sergeant in Torquay or the pompous creep of a solicitor from the British Medical Association, he had begun a crash course in the Russian language.
What he'd read, there were more Russian banks on the island of Cyprus than anywhere other than Moscow. There would be Russians with heart problems, liver problems, kidney problems, and there would be British tourists with sunstroke and alcohol poisoning. Piece of cake, on his feet at last.
After a good dinner and an excellent sleep, having shaved carefully, then dressed in his best suit and a sombre tie, he had walked from his hotel to the block where the practice he would join worked from. Kept waiting twenty-five minutes, no coffee and no biscuits. Left to cool his heels before a harassed man, with a face that said death was visiting, had called him in. 'I regret, Dr Bartholomew, that the offer made in writing to you no longer stands. We have a considerable reputation on the island that my colleagues and I will not sacrifice.' A moment of leaden silence while the man looked at the floor and Bart had gaped. A letter was passed to him, headed
'British Medical Association'. It gave close detail of a police investigation into the illegal sale of class A drugs, as yet incomplete, and a BMA inquiry, as yet not concluded. The man shrugged, then almost ran to the door to open it. 'You understand, Dr Bartholomew, that no alternative is open to us.'
He had gone out, dazed, into the sunshine. His head had been bowed, so he had seen the cigarette tossed down on the pavement, then crushed under a polished shoe. A voice had said, in flawless pedigree English, 'What I always say, those days you wake up and the sun shines are those when you go out without an umbrella and the rain starts pissing down. Know what I mean? Raining now, isn't it? Let's go and have a drink and see if we can roll the clouds back. Come on.' He had been led and he had followed, as any kept man would.
When the notes were complete, Bart rang Wroughton to fix a lunchtime meeting, then buzzed for the next patient.
Beth stood where no man or woman had stood before. She should have felt a thrill of exhilaration, should have wanted to jump and cheer and punch the air.
The memories of the night trapped her. She stared around her, then began to walk forward. The crater was in front of her. What she had been told to find was a high wall of sand, the highest in that part of the desert, and four hundred paces from the right side of the wall was the perfect circle of the crater. It should have amazed her that her Bedouin informant could be so exact in his description of the place and, without a GPS, so certain of the route she should follow. She had driven only eleven point three miles from where the storm had caught her, and after four – when doubt was settling – she had seen the wall that towered higher than any others. The crater was a dozen strides across, its rim clear to see, and there were other, smaller, circle shapes near to it, and a scattering of dark grey stones.
The crater had a raised lip. Five hundred years before, or five thousand, or five million, a mass of rock had hurtled down from the heavens. Having burst the atmosphere it had detonated on impact.
The entry heat would have melted the external parts of the rock, leaving them as blackened slag, fusing the iron ore that was its signature, and creating intense heat sufficient to turn sand to glass.
There would have been, in that part of the Sands years before, the equivalent of an explosion by five kilotonnes of TNT. Perhaps there had been people close by, perhaps the desert had been as empty as now, but anything living within hundreds of metres of the ejecta field would have been killed. Her mind, mechanically, made calculations and estimates of the size of the meteorite, while her thoughts were on the young man who had saved her, who had told her, with steel authority, 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.'
Beth had been eight times to the Wabar site, the ninth largest in the world, with a principal crater four hundred metres across where an iron core mass of three thousand tonnes had impacted. The largest known was in Arizona, fourteen hundred metres in diameter, but to Beth that was a tourist site, boring, and she had not visited it. Nor had she gone to the site at Chicxulub, on Mexico's Yucatan coast, which dated back sixty-five million years: there, a rock said to have been the size of Everest had hit the earth's surface at perhaps six thousand miles an hour and had caused such seismic shocks as to destroy the dinosaur population and shift fractionally the earth's orbit – coachloads went there, utterly boring.
His fingers had been at her throat, and she had felt no fear. Over the years men had tried to impress her, had put on peacock feathers
… He had not. The men she had known, at university and in her social life in London, and on the field trips, had sought to create an indebtedness, had bought her dinner, taken her to the theatre, carried her bags ostentatiously, tried to insinuate themselves… He had not.
There were men who had made her laugh, and men who had demonstrated their cleverness with intense and earnest talk… He had refused to answer her questions. Men told her their life stories
… She knew nothing of him.
There was not one person in the world, no one she knew, to whom she would have talked about the encounter in the dunes, not even her mother. He had wanted nothing of her. There had been a serenity about him, a strength, and a gentleness when he had moved her arms to stand and slip away while she pretended to sleep.
What confused her most – at Shaybah she met Arabs from every country in the Middle East, Yemenis, Egyptians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians, and there were labourers from Pakistan, but she could not place or match his accent.
Every aspect of her life was based on certainty, except him. No name, no start point and no destination. She cursed out loud.
Her voice, yelling the obscenity, rolled back at her from the sand wall. Angry, as if he watched her, she flounced back to the Land Rover, snatched up her camera, her samples bag and clipboard. She started to work where no other human had stood before, but she could not escape him.
For the first time, Caleb rode. He would not have done but Ghaffur insisted. Ghaffur made him ride, shouted at him in his high-pitched voice, and showed him. Ghaffur said that if they were to catch the caravan then Caleb must learn, and that if he fell off he should mount again. He had to ride because they must rejoin the caravan by nightfall.
The boy called the camel the Beautiful One.
Caleb rolled, rocked on the hump. The Beautiful One went her own way at her own speed. Caleb had no control over her. He sat on a saddle of sacking and clung to the reins or to her neck and clamped his thighs to her flanks, but he survived, did not fall… Again he crossed the chasm. The memory was from far back, rain on his face, darkness and bright lights around him, and the quiet of the Sands was replaced with raucous noise: it was a fairground and he rode a roller-coaster. Boys screamed and girls shrieked… but the desert was around him, and the quiet. It had been something from the past, breaking into his memory, and he rode the hump and obliterated it.
The Beautiful One crossed the sand with long, weary strides. He had seen the way Rashid treated his camels; foul-tempered to the men he escorted, but sweet with the animals – almost love. The boy turned often, as if expecting to see that he had been pitched off, but there was not the usual mischief on the young face. They made time. Caleb realized that the boy had caught from his father a new suspicion of his resolve, and had caught it, too, from Hosni and Fahd and Tommy: all of them – without his intervention – would have killed Beth Jenkins and would have left her body for the wind and sand to strip, for the sun to rot.
Twice they found the tracks of the caravan, each time close to a gully between the dunes where the sand was sheltered from a brisk wind. Each time they had gone through the gully, the tracks were lost. The surface of the sand seemed to float and it filled the hoofprints. Caleb marvelled that the boy could go with certainty after the caravan when he, himself, saw no tracks.
They did not stop to rest, eat or drink. He perched on the hump, bounced on it, would not fall. He had forgotten her, she was no part of him, the long night was behind him, and the wind blew the smell of her from his robe.
'I've got a target.' Gonsalves was flushed with excitement at the Ground Control's door. They needed the excitement he peddled: the door hadn't been more than half open, and he'd only had a glimpse of the back of the pilot's head and the profile of the sensor operator's, but the shoulders and back postures told him excitement was in short supply. 'I've got a real target for you.'
He had been strapped into the Cessna for the flight down, had never loosened his belt. Now he paced the tiny space behind their workbench. He thought that the pilot desperately wanted to believe him, that the sensor operator was suspicious of gifts that might be snatched away.
'What I'm telling you is for real. Doesn't come often, but this is HumInt, it is eyewitness. What I told you stands. They are hunted, they are regrouping, they are trying so damned hard to get their shape again. What we have is a camel caravan, and it has crossed the Oman-Saudi border and it has gone into the Rub' al Khali. By going the hard way, they tell us they have with them at least one man of exceptional value, but they are also carrying sophisticated weapons that we consider to be of lesser but still considerable importance.'
He took from his briefcase a photocopied sheet. He reached forward and slapped it on to the bench between the console the sensor operator used and the joystick that the pilot's fingers were on.
'That is a Stinger box. As it's reported to me, second hand, it is at least similar to the ones the HumInt saw loaded on the camels.
Stinger is a shoulder-launched ground-to-air missile, it-'
The woman said, 'I think we know what a Stinger is, Mr Gonsalves.'
Deflated, Gonsalves said, 'There are six of them, loaded in pairs on three camels.'
On the workbench, covered for protection with Cellophane sheeting, was a large-scale map of the Rub' al Khali. Over the sheeting were the squares they had drawn, and a pitiful few had crosses on them with dates and times.
The woman did the talking for herself and the pilot. 'Where did the caravan cross the border?'
Gonsalves checked his own map, then stabbed with his pencil at theirs. The point rested on the broken line of the international frontier.
'Very good,' she said quietly. 'And when does the Humlnt say the caravan crossed?'
'These people are vague. They don't do days of the month like we do.'
'When?' Her question was icy calm.
'More than a week, could be ten days, up to two weeks. We were lucky to get this much.'
Disappointment clouded the pilot's face, his eyes losing hope.
Gonsalves could see them through the thick lenses of the spectacles.
She talked for him.
'We would have to estimate, Mr Gonsalves, that a camel train can move at twenty-five land miles on a bad day, thirty-five miles on a good day – something between there on an average day.'
She used a black Chinagraph and drew three half-circles on the Cellophane, each covering more of the box squares than the last. He understood. A great segment of the desert was enclosed by the outer half-circle, and its radius from the pencil mark on the border was just short of five hundred land miles.
He said emptily, 'It's the best HumInt I've got. What are you trying to tell me?'
'About needles and haystacks. Take a look, Mr Gonsalves.'
She pointed up to the bank of monitors. He saw the sand, miles of it. Sand that was without an horizon. Flat sand, humped sand, ridged sand and dune sand. He saw true emptiness. Then her finger was on the map, inside the widest of the half-circles.
'We are flying Carnival Girl today. Out behind you there's a piss-bucket. We don't leave here when a bird is flying. Marty and I, we're like a fist and glove, we are together. He wants to piss, he stands over the bucket. I want to piss, I squat over the bucket. Why? Because if one of us went out to piss and the other's head was rocking we would miss, on the wide angle, any sort of caravan, let alone a few camels. We get brought sandwiches and we get brought water. We are here as long as the bird is up. We should have at least one more relief shift, but we don't. We should have a stand-by sensor operator, but we don't. Why am I telling you this, Mr Gonsalves? So you appreciate this is a big haystack, and the needle you're giving us – the "best Humlnt I've got" – is tiny. Don't take offence. You are trying and we are trying. You are giving it your best shot, and so are we.
I hope you have a good flight back.'
He stared at the sand on the screens, stared till the picture distorted his vision. He thought that the pilot and the sensor operator should have relief every two hours if their concentration was to hold, and he thought they were prisoners in the Ground Control for twelve or fifteen hours at a time. The nightmare gathering in his mind: they would fly the UAV, Carnival Girl, right over a camel caravan that carried six boxes of importance and at least one man of significance, and they would not see either a trail of beasts or that man.
'Do what you can,' Gonsalves said weakly. For a moment, on his arrival, he had lifted them. Now their shoulders had flopped again.
He went out.
The heat hit him, seemed to stifle his breath.
He walked towards the jeep that would drive him back to the Cessna. It was the life he knew… A counter-intelligence officer encountered rare highs and frequent troughs. He fought in what was now dubbed in the smart current-affairs magazines back home the War without End. The customers expected goddamn miracles. He remembered what had been said after the Riyadh attacks last year:
'They're saying, "We can get you any time, anywhere."' It had been good information, but quietly trashed as they had shown him the desert pictures and the half-circles on the map, and all the time his enemy was regrouping… Savagely, he kicked a stone from his path to the jeep.
His name was called. He turned, went back, climbed the steps into the Ground Control.
She pointed to a screen.
He saw two tiny shapes. A vehicle roof was at the screen's side and a minuscule figure was in the centre. She played her tricks, the zoom started. He identified the Land Rover, then a woman. The zoom lost the Land Rover as it closed on the woman. She was bending. He could see a clipboard on the sand beside her and bright stones reflected up, then she crouched. Her hair was fair – damn it, he could see the colour of her hair, and of her blouse.
'I just wanted you to know, Mr Gonsalves, what the gear did, if we can find a target.'
'Who the hell do you think she is?'
The sensor operator grinned as she took the picture fractionally closer. 'She's two people. She's a meteorite expert, a scholar. She is also my supplier of tampons. And she's also the only living person, thing, we've seen all day.'
'Won't she wave?'
The pilot said, 'She doesn't know we're up above. We're on loiter at twenty-four thousand feet altitude, that's four point five four five miles. She can't hear us, and if she looked up she couldn't see us.
Why we wanted to show her to you, Mr Gonsalves, if there's camels with military crates we can identify them.'
'You got Hellfire on?'
She said they had not.
'Don't ever fly another day without Hellfire on, don't ever.'
'It's riot control they're doing, Mr Wroughton. Five days a week of riot-control training and preparation to counter a breakdown of law and order, that's the truth.'
Wroughton never took a note in the presence of an informer. To have taken a shorthand precis would have made the informer believe his information was interesting, important. His face was a study of disinterest. They were in the lobby of a small hotel that was rarely used by expatriates, and the chairs they used and the table with their juice were shielded by potted plants from the swing door and the reception desk. In any case, his cufflink was a microphone, and the recorder was under his jacket in the small of his back. God, the wretch came cheap.
'Every man and officer in the National Guard who is not on essential priority duties is now being sent on riot-control training.
They are crapping in their pants – if you'll excuse me – Mr Wroughton. It's gas and plastic bullets at the moment, but SANG units now have access to live ammunition. I know it's only a little detail, but all the armoured personnel carriers in the National Guard barracks must have full fuel tanks at all times. It's like they know the place is crumbling.'
Some handlers became fond of informants, treated them like way-ward children, pretended they were almost a valued part of the intelligence-gathering process. Eddie Wroughton would never make that mistake. Samuel Bartholomew was a creature he despised. Kind words, encouragement, unless laced with a tone of sarcasm, had no place in the relationship.
' I gather it's coming out of the mosques. Not the big ones, the party line rules there, but the small ones whose customers are hard hit by the new austerity. The Americans are gone, their troops have left, but my patient says the poison out of the lesser mosques is now directed at the royals. It's the fall in the standard of living that's doing it, my patient says – oh, yes, the armoured personnel carriers are full-time loaded up with gas and plastics, but they also have heavy machine-guns mounted. They're running scared. I hope this is valuable to you, Mr Wroughton. I've been very dedicated for you, Mr Wroughton, haven't I?'
Wroughton's lip curled. He thought he knew what was coming and he pushed away his near-empty glass with fruit in the bottom.
He smiled limply, then stood.
'Please, please, just hear me out.' Then the blurt. 'What I'm thinking, Mr Wroughton, your people can get access to buildings, can't they? And files, can't they?'
They did. 'I'm not following you, Bart.'
'There's files on me. I-'
'Files on all of us, Bart,' Wroughton teased.
'My files at the Devon and Cornwall police and at the BMA, I'm wondering…'
Wroughton played the idiot. 'What are you wondering?'
'After all I've done, you know, all the help – well, couldn't they just get lost?'
'Lost,' Wroughton mimicked. 'Lost? Are you suggesting that we might burgle police premises, and the offices of the British Medical Association, and remove files concerning criminal investigations? Is that what you're suggesting?'
The wretch cringed. 'I think I've done my time. I want out. I want a new start without those bloody files blocking me. That's reasonable, surely that's-'
Always dominate an informant, keep him under a steel-shod shoe. Wroughton said, 'You leave when I say so. Files go walkabout when I decide it – and that's not now. You are going, Bart, nowhere.'
A little dribble of spittle appeared at Bart's mouth.
Anger, Wroughton could have respected. Fight, he could have warmed to.
The doctor caved in. 'Yes, Mr Wroughton.'
There was no spine in the man. He waved him away, watched him cross the lobby and go through the doors. Then he saw her. If he hadn't watched Bartholomew going out of the hotel he would not have seen the woman. Quite elegant – a little plump – well dressed.
Silk blouse and skirt. Not young but well cared-for. She turned the pages of a magazine, but her attention was not on the pages. He caught her eye… Eddie Wroughton was expert at reading the boredom factor in middle-aged women. She had a wedding ring on her finger. Married women were always the better targets – they were always more bored. She'd caught his eye, and had held it. He thought she matched his own interest. He stood, paused for a decent moment, then eased across the lobby towards her.
A quarter of an hour later, when he had learned she was Belgian, that her husband worked up-country, and her home telephone number, he left her with her magazine.
*
Jed staggered like a drunk. He came off the ferry that linked the accommodation area with Marine Corps administration from the Delta Camp and thought he might fall. He knew that the eyes of every civilian, officer and enlisted man who had sailed on the ferry were locked on him.
A headcold had gone feverish and forced him to his bed. Two whole days, two nights, and part of a third day he had been tossing under the sweat-damp sheet, dosed with pills, twisting, cursing.
Then frustration had forced him up and into his work clothes. He was unshaven, unsure whether he could manage a razor with his shaking hand. A lumbering shadow of himself, Jed made his way off the ferry and towards the shuttle bus.
The mission he had set out 011 hooked him. He had gulped down more pills, dressed haphazardly; the stubble on his face and the unbrushed hair gave him the appearance of a vagrant. He heard titters of laughter. He said nothing, but hauled himself heavily up the bus steps, then flopped on to the nearest seat.
He was dropped off at Camp Delta. He showed his card at the gate. 'You all right, sir?'
'Just fine, thank you, Corporal.' He wasn't 'just fine', he felt goddamn foul. Swaying, he made his way to a store shed, far in the wrong direction from the block where his office was. It was the territory of a giant-built Afro-American sergeant, a man to be treated with respect or steel shutters would block any chance of co-operation.
He gave the name of Fawzi al-Ateh. 'What's the classification, Mr Dietrich?'
He said that the classification was Not to be Continued With, and that the subject had been released. 'You're asking a lot of me, Mr Dietrich – for me to find an NCW who's not even here.'
He asked whether the NCW files had been pulped or shredded and his voice was deferential. He was told where they were, an annexe. He thanked the sergeant. He did not suggest the man put aside his magazine or his two-litre Pepsi bottle, or pull himself up and get himself into the annexe. He said he would be happy to go look himself for what he wanted.
'Don't mind me telling you, Mr Dietrich, but you're not looking your best.'
He went through the door behind the sergeant's desk, and closed it.
Jed passed the racks that held the current files of transcripts, floppy disks and audiotapes. Ahead of him was a wooden door that squealed as he opened it. After more than two years of Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, the annexe was still under-used. He flicked the switch and a dull ceiling light came on. The Not to be Continued With files and tapes were in sacks on the floor, not separated in any alphabetical system. He shared the annexe with a cockroach, more spiders than he could count and travelling caravans of ants. He had opened fifteen sacks before he found a date on a file that corres-ponded with that on which Fawzi al-Ateh had been bussed from Camp Delta to the airfield. He had checked nine envelopes, the thin brown pouches used for government service, before he unearthed the transcripts and audiotapes of the taxi-driver. He shoved the envelope under his arm, and left the annexe a little more of a mess than he had found it. It was an effort to walk between the store shed and the office block, and once he had to stop and lean against a fencing post.
He passed an FBI office. Through the open door a voice sang out,
'Hi, Jed, thought you were supposed to be down sick…' He smiled at the face behind the shoes on the desk and thanked the agent for his concern. He would shaft them.
In his room, he loaded an audiotape from Fawzi al-Ateh into his cassette-player and slipped on the earphones. He listened, then snapped down on the button. From his desk drawer he took the cassette that carried the voice of the Brit prisoner who claimed to have been nothing more than a religious student in Peshawar, and who had read a translated text in Pashto. Again and again, Jed played snatches of the two voices, till they rang and merged in his mind. His head was supported by his hands, which were clamped over the earphones… He was feeling weaker… The weight of his head grew… He sagged.
He opened his eyes. He knew he had fainted because the tape was finished.
But he had what he wanted.
Caleb and Ghaffur had ridden hard through the heat and caught the caravan in the late afternoon.
When they reached it, Ghaffur left him, urged his camel faster and went past the travellers to join his father at the head. The atmosphere for the last hour of the day, before they halted, was heavy with suspicion and dispute; Caleb was the cause of it. He saw Ghaffur chatter to his father, but Rashid seemed to ignore the boy. When the guide looked round, raked his eyes over those riding behind him, Caleb saw that the malevolence of the glance was not directed at him but fell on the Iraqi. It had been hotter that day than on any other; the heat, Caleb decided, and the lost water were the reasons for Rashid's temper. Because his camel had gone fast, Caleb was stiff, aching, and the sore blisters were growing where his thighs joined his buttocks.
Then the Beautiful One speeded up, lengthened her stride, without command. She passed Fahd, who looked away and would not catch Caleb's eye, and two of the bulls, who had the crates, and came level with Hosni's camel.
The Egyptian seemed hardly to see Caleb. His eyes were watery, without brightness and stared down only at the rein and the neck of the camel. The clothes on him hung looser than when they had started out, but even then they had flopped over the spare body.
Without shade, exposed to the ferocity of the sun, without sufficient water, Caleb realized how quickly the strength of the elderly Egyptian was waning. His own pains were severe and the blister sores were growing, but Caleb hid them because Hosni's pains and sores would be worse. It must have been his breathing, a little sucked intake as the Beautiful One lurched and the rough saddle sacking expanded the biggest of the sores, that raised the Egyptian's head a fraction.
'Thank you, Fahd, for riding with me. I will not fall, I…'
Caleb looked into the dull wet eyes. 'It is me, Hosni, I am back with you.'
'Ah, the noble one. The one with the conscience. What did you achieve?'
'I dug out the wheels, I cleaned the engine.'
'Did she thank you?'
'She thanked me.'
'How did she thank you?' Hosni's voice was mocking.
Caleb said firmly, quietly, 'She told me she was grateful for what I had done.'
The Egyptian, as if it were a great effort, threw his head back and snorted derision, 'She said she was grateful. Are we all now at risk because you dug out her wheels and cleaned her engine?'
'I did not put you at risk, I promise it.'
'Promise? It is a fine word, "promise". I would have killed her, we all would.' From the exhausted weakness of his face his voice came clear and strong. 'You will be asked to stand in a place where great crowds move. A thousand men, women and children will walk in front of you, will jostle behind you, will ignore you or will smile at you. Old men, pretty women and sweet, laughing children will pass by you – and if you carry out your order all are doomed… Can we now trust you? I am not sure, Fahd is uncertain, Tommy is certain we should not…'
'I will do what is asked of me. I made a judgement, 1 live by it.'
'If it had been a man, as gross as Tommy, as ugly as Fahd, as old and weak as me, would you have stopped to dig him out and clean his engine, or would he now be dead?'
'I live by my judgement,' Caleb said.
'But it was a pretty woman…' Hosni spat into the sand, and the hoofs erased his spittle. The coughing racked his throat. 'Because you ride with me, because you are from outside of us, of great value but new to us, I will tell you of the mistakes made by men of A1 Qaeda.
Listen well… Many mistakes, and all made by men who had faith and commitment but were careless or stupid… Ramzi Yousef will die in prison because a colleague left his laptop computer on a table in an apartment in Manila, and the whole of Ramzi's strategy was on the hard drive. Careless and stupid, and a mistake… Arab fighters posed for celebration photographs on the armour of destroyed Soviet tanks in Afghanistan, and ten years later one fighter has kept a copy of the photograph and is captured by the CIA. All his closest comrades are identified. Careless and a mistake… In Nairobi, approaching the American embassy, needing to get through a guarded barrier to be close to the building, the one chosen to shoot the guard realizes as the lorry bomb brakes that he has forgotten his pistol, has left it in the safe-house. Stupid and a mistake… An organizer plans an attack to the last detail, takes months to prepare for the strike, and an hour before the bomb is moved he boards a plane home to Pakistan. By the time he lands the bomb has exploded, security at Karachi is alert. The organizer shows his forged passport at the desk. He is bearded, the photograph in the passport shows a man who is clean-shaven. A mistake… A man carries sixty kilos of explosives in the trunk of his car to the Canadian side of the border with America and it is the middle of winter and there is snow on the ground and ice on the road, and he is sweating. A mistake that is stupid and careless… A van is driven under the World Trade Center in 1991, the first attack, which did not bring down the towers. In six thousand tonnes of debris, the Americans find the VIN number of the van's engine and trace it to a hire company, and the man who has hired it has given his own name for their records and his own address. A mistake that is careless and stupid… Each mistake, the use of the Internet, of a satellite phone, of a mobile phone, costs the freedom of many, and the lives of many. Do you listen to me?'
'I am listening.'
'A week before you came to us I read in an Omani newspaper that, on the Pakistan and Afghan border, the bodies of two men had been found; both dead. Their throats had been cut, and their mouths were filled with dollar notes. They had lost the trust… You demanded of us that the woman should live. Was that a mistake?'
Caleb said, 'I did not make a mistake.'