The scream pierced the morning air.
Startled, Caleb looked around. He saw the guide, Rashid, loading the boxes on to the pack camels, with his son, Ghaffur. Fahd was clumsily folding the tents. Hosni kicked sand over what was left of the night's fire that the signs of it might be hidden.
The scream was terror, from the depths of a man.
He saw the Iraqi, Tommy. Tommy had never, not since they had set out into the desert, helped with the loading of the boxes or with folding the tents, as if that were beneath the dignity once belonging to him. Tommy had walked away after they had eaten the last of the bread baked the evening before. Once the work to move off had started, he had walked fifty paces, or sixty, from the camp and had squatted to defecate. That completed, he had sat apart from them and watched them as if he were not a part of them.
The scream shrieked for help.
As Caleb saw it, the Iraqi sat with his hands out behind him to support his weight, his legs stretched in front of him. He was rigid, as if not daring to move, staring down at the skin between his boots and the hem of his trousers.
The guide was the first to react. Rashid ran with a short, scurrying stride towards Tommy, and Ghaffur followed. Hosni looked into the distance, at the direction of the scream, but seemed unable to identify its source. Fahd scrambled to catch the guide but when he was at the Bedouin's shoulder, he was abruptly pushed away. Caleb went slowly after them, but hung back.
He looked past Rashid, gazed at the Iraqi. He stared at the eyes, which were distended, he raked over the chest and the open jacket and on to the trousers, still unfastened, and around the groin, then on down to the trembling ankles. Caleb saw the scorpion.
The sun, not yet high, fell on the scorpion's back, identified each marking on it. It was small, would have fitted into the palm of his hand. Its head was hidden in a fold of the trouser leg, but the tail was clear. It was arched over its back, and below it was an angry reddening swell with a puncture hole at its centre.
Tears rolled on Tommy's cheeks, his lips quivered. The scorpion was still, but the tail was up, poised for a second strike, and Caleb could see the needle at its tip. Rashid allowed only his son, Ghaffur, to come forward.
The man and the boy were at either side of Tommy's legs. Each knelt, then each edged slowly towards the legs, until they were within a hand's reach of the ankles and the scorpion. Caleb heard Rashid murmur to the Iraqi, but could not hear what he said. Then he spoke, with great gentleness, to his child. Caleb saw Ghaffur, so slowly, rock backwards and forwards, as if he prepared to strike with the speed of the scorpion. Father and son kept their bodies and heads low, almost to the sand, so that their shadows did not pass over the legs and the scorpion.
The father did not tell the son when or how, had trust in him, as though he knew his son's reactions and movements would be faster than his own, he would make a better strike than himself. The trembling spread from Tommy's head to his chest and hips; if he could not control it, if the creature were further disturbed, more venom would be injected into him.
Ghaffur's hand flashed forward.
Caleb gasped.
The finger and thumb, delicate, slight and unprotected, caught the tail half an inch from the poison tip… and then the boy was grinning and holding up the writhing little creature. The Iraqi seemed to have fainted. Ghaffur marched with the scorpion first to Fahd, who flinched away, then held it in front of Hosni's dulled eyes, then brought it to Caleb. The scorpion thrashed and its pincers, limbs, body and head crawled against Ghaffur's hand; small spurts of venom came from the needle tip. Caleb saw, momentarily, the pride on the father's face before the mask slipped back. The boy took the knife from his belt and, with a slash as fast as his strike had been, he cut the tail from the body. The scorpion fell at his feet, writhing, then the boy threw the tail and its tip carelessly over his shoulder.
Rashid used his fingernail to stroke the bitten wound.
The yellowish body and legs and the darker pincers of the scorpion were still, dead in the sand.
Rashid's fingernail stroked towards the centre of the swollen place, where the pinprick was, pushing the venom back from the extremities and towards the hole.
Rashid barked an instruction at his son.
Caleb followed Ghaffur. The boy returned to the camels, bent close to them and started to refasten the hobble ropes.
'What does your father say?'
'My father says the man is not fit to travel, that we will lose half a day before he is well enough to move. My father says we have to wait until he is stronger.. It is bad.'
'You did well with it.'
'Where you come from, are there no scorpions?'
Caleb grimaced, was guarded against the question. There had been scorpions at X-Ray and Delta, only once had a guard been bitten, many scorpions in the corridors and cages and the guards had stamped their heavy boots on them or the prisoners had flattened them with their sandals. He lied: 'I have never seen a scorpion before.'
The boy shrugged. 'It is easy to kill them… but we may lose half a day and that angers my father.'
Away across the sand, near the dune wall, Rashid had torn a strip of cloth to a bandage width and was binding it round the Iraqi's shin, just below the knee. He began again to stroke his fingernail across the swelling.
Caleb went to the Egyptian. 'We will lose half a day's march.
We cannot move until he has recovered. It was a revolting creature.'
'Any snake is revolting/ Hosni said, with bitterness.
'Yes, any snake.' Caleb stared at the dulled eyes, and knew.
'I did not see it well, I stayed back. I saw the boy take the head off.
Was it a viper?'
'I don't know snakes,' Caleb said. 'Last night I asked you – why do you travel with me? Why am I important?'
'Important? Because of where you come from. Think on it, where you have come from. They tell me you are not a believer – to us you are the Outsider. That is what you have to consider when you ask of your importance. Can you admit it, where you come from?'
'From the 055 Brigade – from Guantanamo.'
'And before you were recruited?'
Caleb took sand in his hands and let the grains fall between his fingers. Before the wedding and his recruitment was the darkness he had imposed. He remembered arriving in his suit, with Farooq and Amin, at the celebration after the wedding, and remembered the way that the Chechen had watched him, then set tests for him; everything before was in blackness. The next morning he had left – and he could remember it clearly – Landi Khotal before dawn; he had been told by the Chechen that he should forget his friends, Farooq and Amin. A pickup had taken him through the border and through the last of the narrow passes, and he had been brought to Jalalabad, and then straight on to the camp. At the camp, two days later, two postcards had been given him. The reverse pictures on the postcards had not been shown him, but he had read the words 'Opera House' and
'Ayers Rock', and he had written two bland messages that he was well – and on each he had written a name and an address, but the name and the address were now erased from his mind. A small, tired smile played on the Egyptian's face.
'You are the Outsider, you are separated from us – I am not offended. To us, the Outsider is the most valuable. He can go where we cannot. He has access where we do not. He can walk unseen where we are noticed. Who are we? Lesser creatures. What use do we have? Small, nothing that is strategic. We will watch you go, and we will pray for you, after you have disappeared into darkness, but we will listen to the radio and will hope to learn that the trust given you was not wrongly placed.'
Once the Iraqi cried out, the only sound against the whisper of the Egyptian's voice and the restless grunting of the hobbled camels.
Hosni's fingers, stubbed and wrinkled, came and touched Caleb's face and they moved across his features, as if discovering them, ran over his nose and his chin, through the hairs round his mouth, and it was a long time before they dropped away.
'Don't go all shy on me – what did your Miss Jenkins have to say for herself?'
Eddie Wroughton always varied the meeting-places with Samuel Bartholomew: a bookshop, a museum, a hotel lobby… The hotel was sumptuous, fitted to the highest specifications of carpets on marble flooring, lighting and furnishing. He'd ordered the orange juice, which was garnished with lemon slices, but Bartholomew hadn't touched his.
'She paid for the consultation, didn't she? Strong as a good bay mare, I'd have said. So, what did she say?'
Opposite him, Bartholomew sat hunched, pudgy head in pudgy hands. There was a cool, comfortable temperature in the lobby, but Bartholomew sweated.
'Come on, come on… all right, I'll remind you. She is friendly with the deputy governor of the province, friendly enough to be allowed to live down there – what's his pillow talk? Didn't she gossip just a little? Such a wonderful consultation-room manner you have…' Wroughton leached sarcasm. 'Surely a few minor confidences were exchanged as you poked round her. While she had your disgusting fingers crawling over her, surely there was some gossip. Be a good chap, cough it up.'
He knew he frightened the man, that he was supine. At the age of forty-one, Wroughton was young to be station chief at so prestigious a posting as Riyadh. His last two overseas bases had been in Sarajevo and Riga, but now he was top league. There was one overriding catastrophe in his life, a cloud that darkened the sun's glory: he had no money. He lived off his salary, spent cash only on what could be seen, was a pauper behind the privacy of his front door. There was no investment portfolio ticking over in London, only a rabbit hutch of an apartment on the wrong side of Pimlico. His poverty was kept as hidden as his sharpness and intelligence: playing a wealthy dandy, a buffoon, did him well… But the irritation at the lack of personal money was only battened down by his workload. He lived for work.
'I don't push business your way out of the goodness of my soul. I expect payback. Miss Jenkins is down there in the sand, a place where a saint wouldn't survive. Didn't you pedal a bit faster, just a little? She's unique where she is, might just be the most interesting corner of this whole hideous place – she goes out into the desert. Got eyes in her head, hasn't she? What did you talk about? Her menstrual cycle?'
Money, promotion, status in the Service, had never mattered to Wroughton's father, or to his grandfather. He was from a dynasty – not a financial dynasty, but a dynasty based on the precept that a grateful population must be allowed to sleep safe in bed. His father had done time in Moscow and Prague during the Cold War; his mother had been in Library, sifting, filing and annotating, until his birth. His grandfather had been seconded to MI5 after the Dunkirk evacuation, and then had had a good war turning the agents the Abwehr parachuted in and having them broadcast back misinformation; his great-uncle had hunted down war criminals after VE Day, and enough to have filled a small bus had gone on the dawn walk to the gallows. All through his childhood, at Sunday lunches, the glories of intelligence and counter-intelligence had been preached. No chance he could have gone elsewhere. He had been groomed as a youth for the Secret Intelligence Service. To Wroughton, Bartholomew was more pathetic than the agents his father had run behind the Iron Curtain, more pitiful than the turned Germans who saved their skins, more disgusting than the hanged butchers.
'I sometimes think you forget your situation – do you? If we cut you adrift, then slip the word round, you're a gone man. Those nice little accounts, earning a low rate of interest but safe – the nest-egg for the future – can each have funds withdrawn at the pressing of a button. We have any number of people who specialize in that. Didn't you know? With your history, a quiet word from me, and your future is sleeping under cardboard beside Waterloo station. Just that I sometimes think it's necessary to remind you… If she ever comes back to you from that trackless wilderness, make sure she's pumped dry – there's a good chap.'
To reinforce it, emphasize his argument, Wroughton manoeuvred his right foot's brogue, then kicked hard against Bartholomew's left ankle. Wroughton had never believed his mother had liked him, let alone loved him, or that his father had respected him. On the day of his first induction interview at the Service, his grandfather had offered him the stern advice that he should look in the City for employment, but Eddie Wroughton had never flinched from meting out punishment to this repellent man. Most of his work was in the sifting of publications, less of it was in mixing with the Saudi elite, as they liked to be regarded, a little of it was cohabiting in the gutter with scum. Bartholomew was scum. The best of it was with Juan Gonsalves, his friend. The best brought the praise from London, the certainty of advancement and the probability of an augmented salary.
'If she comes and sees you again with as much as a pimple on her sweet little shin, then you gut her and fillet her, and you damn well learn something of what goes on down in that bloody place. Don't snivel. Plenty goes on there, and she'll know it. I don't think you're big on scruples, so it shouldn't be too hard.'
He kicked again, then stood. He looked down on Bartholomew.
From his pocket, Wroughton took a slip of paper. A name was written on it, and an address. 'Go and see her, take the time. Give her a bit of tender and loving care, what you're so good at. And learn something – what she saw, what, if anything, was shouted out, any warning or any denunciation. Then report back – course you will.'
'Where'll you be?' The voice squeaked from between the hands.
'Away for a couple of days, then I'll hear from you… All that perspiration, it makes you look old and revolting. Do something about it… You haven't finished your juice. It's thirty riyals a glass, don't waste it.'
Wroughton smiled sweetly at the concierge who held open the outer door for him. He had no conscience as to dealing out a bully's Mows at Samuel Bartholomew. From his childhood days at the Sunday lunch table he had learned that the relationship between handler and agent should be master and servant: no emotion, no affection, no relationship. Like dogs, they should be at heel and obedient.
*
Lack of engine thrust had grounded First Lady. The four-cylinder Rotax 912 push engine was playing delicate. George wanted time on it, half a day.
They'd already had Carnival Girl up once, but she was back-up – so, George would have his half a day, and Lizzy-Jo could kick her heels.
She had her problem.
It was not a problem to be discussed with Marty, most certainly not with any of the rest of the team. Marty was in the tent beside the Ground Control Station, was by the fan that circulated stinking hot air, had his feet up and was reading back numbers of Flight International.
'I'm going to go find a shop,' she told him, but he was too absorbed with the magazine and last year's articles to respond with anything more than a grunt.
'I need to look for a shop,' she called to George, and he looked up from the engine pieces and nodded.
'I need to do some shopping, won't be long,' she said to the armourer, who sat facing the space left in the barbed wire coiled round their perimeter. He wore a multi-pocket khaki waistcoat that concealed his shoulder holster and the Colt. He had a baseball cap low over his face, and he shrugged.
There must be a shop.
The encampment was at the extreme end of the runway. Beyond their own wire was a single strand fence, then the desert, and set in the sands in the near distance were the landing lights of the strip.
Half-way up the strip, on the far side, was the cluster of buildings that she presumed were the accommodation blocks for the workers: there would be a club, a gym, a clinic – and a shop.
She walked briskly. As a New Yorker, she walked everywhere briskly. The temperature on the thermometer hanging from the support pole of her tent had shown 98° Fahrenheit, in shade. For decorum, local sensibilities and that crap, she had a blouse over her T-shirt and she'd slipped on long loose trousers and had a headscarf over her hair. She skirted the end of the runway, looking up to check there wasn't an incoming flight that might, if the wheels were down, have taken her head off.
Selfishness had brought Lizzy-Jo to Shaybah. The electronics expert was a selfish woman; she had made a career out of selfishness ever since the Air Force had sent her on the sensor operator's course.
She had been with Predator from the start.
At the far side of the strip, she turned and started out on the long tramp to the buildings – she could have taken wheels, but the restrictions on their movements away from the encampment would have meant the fullest of explanations about her problem to the armourer and to George and Marty… Her problem was not theirs.
She'd done Air Force time, then seen the recruitment notice posted by the Agency for UAV personnel. She'd left the Air Force and been taken on by the Agency, and then the selfishness had ruled. Rick had been with her at the Air Force camps, and Clara, but the Agency didn't do married accompanied. Rick sold insurance now in North Carolina, and last year had been his company's Salesman of the Year in the state; his parents looked after Clara. They'd divorced while she was at Taszar, Hungary, doing sensor operator for flying over Kosovo, a long-range divorce that spared her meetings in lawyers' offices. And she was not, it was her justification for selfishness, a natural mother. What Rick wanted out of life was to sell death benefits to customers; what she wanted was to find pictures on First Lady's cameras.
The heat shimmered on the dun-painted buildings ahead, and the sunlight burst back from the buildings' windows, and behind them was the city of pipes and containers, cranes and stacks.
She had seen that Marty had his old Afghan war picture propped against the metal cupboard beside his cot; Lizzy-Jo had a small tent to herself, woman's privilege, and beside her bed a collapsible side table with the picture of Rick and Clara – she assumed that Rick had a picture of her beside his bed. Not that it mattered to her. She wrote to them, not more than a page, every three or four months, birthdays and Christmas, and once a year she wrote to her own people in New York; her own people, she knew, didn't hold with divorce, were fervent Christians, and disapproved of her abandonment of Clara. It was tough shit, for all of them. She wanted to be with the Predator team, and reckoned the eighteen months of Operation Enduring freedom, out of Bagram, had been the best time of her life. She d idn't regard herself as selfish, just as professional. It mattered to her.
She was closer. Lizzy-Jo could make out what she thought was a recreational building, fronted by a veranda. She hit her stride.
There was a sign for a shop, and she followed its arrow.
She walked inside and the air-conditioned cool punched her.
She followed the shelves, wove among men – some in robes, some in slacks and shirts – who carried wire baskets or pushed trolleys.
There was food, frozen trays, vegetables and fruit. Confectionery chocolates and boiled sweets. Clothes, for men. Toiletries, for men, and cosmetics, for men. Juices of every shade and taste. Stationery and software. Music DVDs and compacts… Then she found the chemist's section. Headache pills, sunstroke creams, insect repellents. Eyes were on her. When she met them, they dropped or turned away, but she felt that as soon as the eyes were behind her again they fastened back on to her, clung to her.
But the problem had to be answered.
It was part her own fault, and part the Agency's. The instruction to travel and the take-off from Bagram had given her too little time. Too many of the few hours available between the order and the flight out had been taken up with downloading the computers and checking the loading of the gear; they were her computers, her gear, and she had fussed over them, not permitting the technicians free range over what was hers – and she had not been to the base shop.
She joined the queue to the cash desk. The man in front of her, robed, edged away from her, pushed against the man in front so that a distance might be between her and him. Oh, sweet Jesus… At the cash desk an older man, a dish-towel over his head, a moustache and fat jowls, repeated in a strident voice everything asked of him by his customers.
She was next to the head of the queue. The customer in front of her paid for a bag of fruit and a tube of shaving soap. She said it again, to herself, and she could feel the sweat on her back. The cash-desk man looked up at her, then averted his eyes.
Lizzy-Jo said it out loud, like she would have done in a New York drug store. 'Do you have tampons?'
'Tampons?'
'That's what I said. Tampons. If you have them, I can't see them.'
'Tampons?'
'It's a pretty simple question – what your wife…'
The cash-desk man shook his head, a great rolling movement.
The voice behind Lizzy-Jo was crisp, clear English. 'No, they don't.'
Lizzy-Jo spun. Eyes dropped, swivelled, fell from her. Six back in the queue was a woman, younger than herself, and she caught the grin like it was contagious. 'They don't have tampons?'
'No – not a great call for them here. Look, why don't you wait outside, or by the door? I'll sort you out.'
Lizzy-Jo went past the younger woman and saw that her basket contained an insect repellent spray, an anti-inflammatory cream and sunblock.
So, Lizzy-Jo met Beth, who took her to the club. They sat out on the veranda and were shaded by a table parasol. They drank iced lemon juice, and she learned that Beth Jenkins was the only woman resident with the run of the Shaybah oil-production works.
'And I'm assuming you're with those little aircraft. I saw one take off, a pretty little thing. Why here?'
Lizzy-Jo said quickly, too quickly, 'Just test flights, performance evaluation in heat over desert – mapping.'
A little frown puckered the young woman's forehead: she would have thought there were about a million and ten places that were easier for that evaluation, and a hundred thousand and ten places that were more of a priority for mapping. The explanation was not queried.
'Anyway, can't stay. I've an English literature class, my top group.
We're doing Dickens, Oliver Twist. They like that, bestial English society, makes them feel good. Got to go. How long have I got? You desperate?'
'Not now. I will be by the end of the week.'
'I'll drop some by… Don't worry, my tongue doesn't flap, I won't see anything.'
As she walked back along the side of the runway strip, Lizzy-Jo reflected that she'd made a poor job of the security of the mission, but maybe just once security took second place. Tampons counted.
She reflected, also, as she turned at the strip's end, that a young woman who took a stranger for a drink when she was short of time and late on a class commitment was lonely – not alone but lonely.
Lizzy-Jo didn't do loneliness, but the thought of it frightened her.
George and his technicians had the casing back on the engine, and were standing back from First Lady. The light caught the forward fuselage, clean and virgin. She remembered the words loud in her headphones. 'Shoot on sight.'
They had lost half a day. Worse than the hours lost was the water used. Caleb watched the pot brought to the boil. And more of the withered dry roots that Ghaffur had kept the fire alive with. Rashid took the sodden plants from the pot, clasped them in his hand and seemed not to feel any pain as the scalding water seeped between his fingers. The plants were slapped on Tommy's inflamed ankle, the Iraqi cried out, then rags were bound over them. Tommy writhed.
There was no sympathy from the guide. Caleb sensed Rashid's concern: what to do with the water? Wait for it to cool? More time gone. Throw it on to the sand?
'What is that?' Caleb asked.
The reply was curt. 'It is ram-ram.'
'Is it an old cure?'
'What my father would have used, and my grandfather.'
'Tell me.'
'We learn from the Sands. There are lizards. They are not bitten by the snakes, not bitten by the scorpions. We watch and we learn, and we hand down what we know. The lizards eat the ram-ram plant, and they roll in it, wherever they find it. It is a protection against the poison.'
It was said matter-of-factly, without feeling. First the majority of the venom had been drawn out by the stroking fingernails, now the poultice would extract what remained. Old practices and old times.
At Camp Delta, when the guard had been stung by the scorpion alarms had rung, medics had charged to the scene, an ambulance had come with the siren wailing, panic had been alive, and within two days the guard had been returned to the block. That was the new way, but the old way of Rashid had been quiet, calm and competent.
Rashid swung his foot, kicked over the pot and the water momentarily stained the sand. Then he shouted for Ghaffur to pick up the pot and stow it. The guide lifted Tommy on to his shoulder, carried him to the kneeling camel and heaved him on to the saddle on the hump.
Again Tommy cried out, again his pain was ignored. The caravan moved on. The wisp of smoke from the fire was left behind them.
Caleb walked beside Hosni, who rolled on his saddle. Twice Caleb reached up to steady the Egyptian; it was not a journey for a man of his age. The question welled in him. 'What is the first thing that I should know?'
The voice wheezed, 'You should know your only loyalty is to your family, us and those who wait for you.'
'And the second thing?'
'Your duty is to your brothers, us and those who wait for you.'
Again he put the question. What should he know?
'You have no nationality, it is behind you. None of us has a country. We are the rejected. Tommy would be taken by the Americans, or their puppets, and would be put before a military court or a sham court of their stooges, and he would be executed…
Fahd, if he were arrested here, would be tortured by the police, then taken to the square in Riyadh in front of the Central Mosque and beheaded. I, if I were held, would be flown to Cairo and if I survived the interrogation I would be hanged in a prison. And you, you would be
…' Hosni's voice died.
'What would happen to me?'
No answer. The question was ignored. A new fervour came to the Egyptian. 'You are a jewel to us. Men will give their lives that you should live… Is that not enough? At a chosen time you will go back where you came from, or to America. You will be the servant of your family and your brothers, and you will resurrect your memory. You will strike the blow that only you are capable of… Enough.'
Hosni's eyes, as if they hurt or disappointed him, were closed.
Caleb dropped back.
'If only he'd come with me,' she sobbed. 'If the silly bugger had come with me, he'd have been all right – but he didn't. He wasn't interested.'
Her behaviour, the anger in it, was predictable to Bart. He knew the pattern from road accidents back in Torquay, and from his time as house physician in London. Melanie Garnett's outburst was what he would have expected. If he'd been called out earlier, just after it had happened, he would have heard a horrified description of the bomb detonating under the Land Rover Discovery.'
'No, he wasn't interested in that necklace. He said we were saving money, were supposed to be. We're only here for the mortgage -
God, what other reason would anyone be here? He didn't have the guts to tell me I couldn't have it so he stayed in the Discovery.'
Clearest in Bart's mind was the image of the man at the driving-wheel, elbow out through the open window, and the puff of his cigarette smoke. She was a fainter image, blurred behind the glass of the jeweller's shop. He wondered where the children were now – oh, yes, they'd be round at a neighbour's, with the Lego out on the tiled floor. Yesterday there would have been the horror, today would be the anger, tomorrow the guilt. The anger was easier to deal with…
Even if he had stopped, done his duty as a man of medicine, he would not have been able to save the man.
'He wanted to save for a mortgage so's we could live somewhere posh when this three years of hell was over – somewhere like Beaconsfield or the Chalfonts. And it killed him. Damn him! I mean, what's a three-bedroomed semi in Beaconsfield worth? Worth getting killed for?'
An older woman shared the sofa with Melanie Garnett, widow.
She would have been a long-term matriarch of the expatriate society, and knew her stuff. She was doing well, made a soothing listening post with her shoulder, and didn't interrupt… Ann would have interrupted. Ann never could keep her mouth shut. Bart examined her. He murmured little questions, not to calm her but to pump information from her. What had she seen? What had she heard? Had there been any threats? Nothing, nothing, and no – nothing seen, nothing heard, no threats. It would be a negative report to Wroughton but he had asked the questions. While he took her pulse and heartbeat, he looked around him. The furnishings were sparse, the decorations minimal; the sense of a home was missing, except for the heap of toys in a corner and children's books on the table. He looked for signs of the familiar expatriates' scam, alcohol boot-legging. Then there would have been flash opulence, but there wasn't any… Ann would just have bought the bloody necklace, charged it to his card, and the first he would have known of it was when she wore it. He could blame everything on Ann. The size of the mortgage, the scale of the overdraft, the fees for the private school that the kids had to go to, the two foreign holidays a year, and the remedies he'd sunk to were all down to Ann… His mother had come to the wedding, been barely civil, but his father had not. His mother had told him, in a stage-whispered aside, well into the reception, that Ann was common and unsuitable and that her relatives were plainly vulgar – and, thank the good Lord, Hermione Bartholomew had not lived long enough to crow at him that she had been right. In the Kingdom, all the deaths of expatriates by bomb or bullet were put down to alcohol turf wars; this one would be too, but Bart knew better.
He prescribed diazepam, a maximum of ten milligrams a day, two tablets. From his open bag, he took the bottle and counted out sufficient to last three days. He should have felt, beneath the professional exterior, serious sympathy for Melanie Garnett. What had she done to deserve an encounter with a bomber? She was without blame. He was almost shocked at his reaction, as near to being shamed as was possible for him. He put the tablets into an envelope and scrawled the dosage on the label.
'I really wanted that necklace – wasn't a crime to want it. If he'd come with me… if he'd come with me just to look after the kids. He didn't come with me, the kids were arguing, and he's dead. What I hate about him, the last I saw of him, properly saw of him, he was all stone-faced and getting his fags out. Not a kiss, not a "love you", not a cuddle, but looking sour. That's the last I saw of him, damn him.'
To his mind, rebellion was alive in the Kingdom and soon, pray God, the whole stinking edifice would come down. Bart had always been good at learning lines but, then, his talent was to play a part – the part of a liar. Against the weeping anger of the widow he was able to recite in his mind, perfect recall: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' The towers of glass and concrete, airports and luxury hotels, wide highways and people of such mind-numbing arrogance were floating on oil, and the edifice was crumbling. A bomb here and a shooting there, work for the executioner in Chop Chop Square, a frisson of fear eddying into the palaces. Each time he read of, or heard of, an atrocity a little raw excitement coursed in Bart. 'Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.' He hoped, damn it, that he would still be there to see the decay come to fruition, be able to scent it.
'His mother's on the flight tonight. What am I going to tell her? If her precious son hadn't been so bloody mean to me, his wife, he'd still be alive. Do I tell her that?'
Tomorrow would be worse for the widow. She would have his mother there, organizing her, and she would have her guilt. Post-traumatic stress syndrome would crucify her with guilt. If she had not wanted the bloody necklace, her husband would be alive, her kids would have a father. The guilt would churn like a whirlwind in her mind – poor little cow. Ann had never felt guilt, even when she had brought him to his knees. He went into the kitchen, where a maid cowered, poured a glass of water and carried it back into the room. The matriarch slipped a tablet into Melanie Garnett's mouth, then gave her the glass.
Bart waited until she was quieter, then left. Out in the compound, spied on by the neighbours, the sliver of independence deserted him.
He walked to his car, preparing what he would say to Eddie Wroughton. He was in fear of Wroughton, and knew it. He flopped into the back of the car and the driver took him away. He was as pliant as putty, and he knew no route for escape, no track that could free him.
He fumed, but his experience of recent years had taught Eddie Wroughton to mask fury. Had he shouted abuse at the Omani policeman, he would have lost him.
He had been driven a hundred kilometres or so west of the capital to Ad Dari, a trading town en route to the interior. He should have been at the police station, in an interrogation room. Instead, he was shivering – with anger and from the cold – in the refrigeration room of the hospital mortuary. The British staffer in Muscat city was green, so lacking in experience with the Secret Intelligence Service that Wroughton – on hearing of the arrest – had caught the first available flight from Riyadh.
The man he should have been questioning, with relish and vigour, was now a corpse, frozen solid. Death had come in a spasm of pain that the refrigeration plant had preserved. The attendants hadn't even closed the man's eyes, which were wide and staring.
'Cardiac arrest, there was nothing we could do,' the Omani intoned.
Yes, there bloody well was. He could have been properly searched on arrest, had goons in his cell and his hands manacled behind his back.
T h e autopsy will be tomorrow,' the staffer intoned emptily, like he thought it was his failure. 'Don't know what they'll find.'
Wroughton could have reeled off a list of poisons, right for self-administration, that were quick but painful while they did their work.
He turned away. He had no more need to look down at the trolley and the body. The man was late fifties, or perhaps early sixties, but his age would be confirmed over coffee in the policeman's office. His name and occupation were paramount, particularly the occupation, which had brought Wroughton scurrying off the plane. His last sight of the man was his fat fingers and the width of the two gold rings, one on each hand, over which the flesh bulged.
They walked along the corridor towards an office.
'It was a rumour, Mr Wroughton, from information we received.
We acted on it immediately,' the police officer said, ingratiating and ashamed. 'We heard that this prominent hawaldar had travelled a few days ago up-country. He was a wealthy man, prominent in his trade, and he had gone to a place where there is only poverty. We said, and I discussed this with your young colleague, that he must be arrested immediately.'
The staffer flinched because now the blame was shared…
Wroughton understood. The western members of the Financial Action Task Force regularly and predictably targeted the Gulf states for the movement of money that benefited Al Qaeda. There had been a gesture of action, and the action had led to catastrophe. The hazval system was the nightmare, money moving without paper or electronic trace. And big sums were not needed – an investment of $350,000, wisely spent on flying lessons, simulators and cheap motels, would cost the Americans $200 billion, for the rebuilding of the Twin Towers and the economic losses post the hijackings. What was required was money to follow, to track. Breaking into the hawal networks was as big a priority as existed in Eddie Wroughton's life – and the man was dead, the bastard was a stiff. Guilt was proven. A man who took a pill after only cursory questioning was a man harbouring a big secret, a man who would die rather than face in-depth interrogation.
'I'm sure you did the right thing,' Wroughton said, without charity.
There would, of course, be mobile and landline telephone records to work on, but he doubted they would show up anything beyond inconsequential dealings.
They sat. The first coffee was poured into a thimble cup. He sensed a nervous energy building in the staffer. They talked of the hawaldar' s connections, his links, they hacked at his Special Branch file… It was nearly an hour before the staffer's energy burst out.
'There is something else you should know, Mr Wroughton. An American Navy helicopter came in here recently with a CasEvac. A crewman needed facilities they didn't have on board the carrier. I met the navigator off the helicopter. He just told a silly story – we were talking smuggling. You know, cigarettes going from here to Iranian fishing villages – fast speedboats. Maybe it wasn't much of a story.'
'Well, if it's "silly", keep it short, please.'
'Yes, of course. The navigator explained how they regularly track the speedboats, keep them on radar – because of suicide attacks.
They were following this formation when it broke. One speedboat detached from the main group and took a line that was going to bring it close to the carrier. The navigator's helicopter was put on immediate intervention alert. It was all armed up, missiles live for firing. They didn't have to take off. The single speedboat headed away, and they tracked it. It went right in to the Omani coast, then up the shoreline and rejoined the others. On the return trip there was the same number of them as with the original formation. Have I explained that? Well, it was the day before the rumour put the money-lender up-country, where there was nothing for him that we can identify. I thought you ought to know.'
Wroughton didn't thank him, did not praise him. He hid the increased pulse beat in his heart.
He asked for a map. It was spread across the table. He asked where the speedboat from Iran had hit the Omani coast, and he made a cross at that point with his pencil. Then he asked where rumour had put the hawaldar up-country, and he made a second mark. Could they, please, bring him a ruler? When the ruler was given him, Wroughton made a line that linked the coast and a road junction, took the line on and traced it right to the Saudi border.
He was in a good humour. The corpse and the frustrations were forgotten. He told the police officer and his staffer what he wanted from the morning, and at what time they should leave. In the privacy of his hotel room, Wroughton would manage a large drink, damn sure, he would study the map and dream of what the line told him.
The guide, Rashid, had set a forced pace. Caleb had thought, when they came to the dune wall, rising in front of them, an almost sheer slope, that they would rest there for the night. The sun was low, the half-light treacherous. Soft-spoken, but harshly, Rashid gave his orders. His son sulked, but obeyed. Only Tommy was the exception, but for this one evening only. The camels were unloaded. The waterskins and the crates were lifted down from them. Two at a time, Rashid led the camels up the near vertical slope with their hoofs kicking for, and failing to find, a grip, and Tommy scrambled after him on hands and knees.
Fahd carried waterskins. Hosni struggled with food pouches.
One at a time, Caleb and the boy took the boxes. With ropes, they dragged them to the dune's ridge line, gasped for air, were glowered at by Rashid and went back down for more. There was no encouragement from Rashid, only contempt at his thin and bloodless lips.
Three times, Caleb heaved a box to the ridge, then slid back down the slope. The last time he went there were no more boxes at the base of the dune, but Hosni was there with the last two of the food pouches.
He did not think Hosni saw him until he was beside him. Caleb lifted the last two pouches on to his shoulder and snatched at Hosni's hand, put it against the belt of his robe and felt the fingers tighten.
They went up together – it was family, they were brothers. He would not have done it for Fahd, or for Tommy, only for the Egyptian.
Twice, on the last climb, the dune's sand cascaded away from under his toes and he fell back, cannoned into Hosni and felled him. Twice he picked himself up, each time realizing that the fingers still gripped his belt, and they went back up. He took Hosni to the ridge.
He flopped, and Hosni collapsed beside him. Only a quarter of the sun was left and the desert, darkening, stretched away beneath them, below, at the base of the gentler slope of the dune, Tommy held a tangle of the camels' reins, and Rashid was loading the boxes on to their backs.
They started down.
Rashid, again, set the pace.
The boy, Ghaffur, was beside Caleb. Caleb walked, dead, saw nothing. He did not know from where the boy found the cheerful laughter.
'Look, look.'
The boy had hold of his sleeve, tugged it for attention, then pointed.
Thirty yards from where they walked, to his left Caleb saw the crazily formed white shapes. In the half-light, he could not identify them, but the boy dragged on his arm and led him from the path made by the camels' hoofs.
'You see them? Yes, you do.'
He could make out the backbones, skulls and ribcages, half buried in the sand. The leg bones were covered where the sand had drifted, but the four sets of bones were clear. Flattened empty skins lay on the ribcages, the same size as those holding water that Fahd had carried up the dune. The black leather of the skins lay on the bones' whiteness.
'Shall we find the bones of the men?'
'No.' Caleb pulled himself free of the boy's hand.
'If the camels died, the men died – don't you want to find them?'
'No,' Caleb grunted over his shoulder.
'After the camels died, the men would have finished their water.
At first they would have hoped another traveller would find them.
But when the water was finished, and no traveller came, the thirst would have destroyed them and they would have tried to walk away. Their bones will be near here.'
Against his instinct, Caleb turned. The darkness was coming fast, but the bones were highlighted.
He heard his own voice, breathy, anxious. 'Do we have enough water?'
'Only God knows.'
They hurried to catch up; the light of a small fire guided them when they could no longer see the camels' trail. Caleb felt the pain in every joint of his body. He sank down. Water was passed to him, his measured share. He drank it down, the last drop, then scraped his tongue round the mug's sides. He imagined travellers who had finished their water and on whom the sun had blazed. Every joint of his body was alive with pain.
He waited to be fed, huddled by the fire under which the bread cooked, and felt the cold settling on him.