by Holly Watt
There was a long pause, then he turned away. He gestured to the Tuareg: it’s OK. Casey felt her limbs go limp with relief.
He walked towards his car, and every step was a gift.
‘I had to check,’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Sure.’
27
Selby glanced back at them, as Josh climbed into the car, and gave the smallest of shrugs. She smiled at him, grateful in her anger. The Tuareg were walking to their cars. Casey tried to stop her hands shaking.
‘Do you think he’s a sociopath,’ Ed asked conversationally, as the cars pulled away, ‘or a psychopath, the person behind all this?’
She could hear the struggle to keep his voice even.
‘I never know the difference,’ said Casey, as he accelerated.
‘As far as they know, psychopaths are born, and sociopaths are made. Psychopathy is nature, sociopathy is nurture. Sociopaths have hints of a conscience, but not much. Neither of them cares for much for ethics and morality and all that. Psychopaths are manipulative, and good at gaining people’s trust.’
‘You learned a lot from your books, in Helmand.’ Casey strangled the fear.
‘Psychopaths can’t form emotional attachments, and they would plan out every step of this in advance,’ he paused. ‘So which one do you think he is, the man who organised this?’
‘I don’t know.’ Casey watched the desert fly past. ‘I’m just trying to work out which one Ross is.’
It was almost a joke.
But she felt her nerves jolt back, as they approached the crossing at Tinkarine.
It was always the same in these places. Fight or flight. And then, for a certain type of person, the adrenalin drains away. The body identifies the new normal, and starts to make do. Any jolt after is an aftershock, raising more dust, but not a new terror. The key lay in surviving that first surge of terror.
Casey could file in a war zone, tapping out the words as she listened for the scream of the mortar. She could do this.
This was Tinkarine, where the Gaddafi family had crossed, terrified, into Algeria. Fleeing as their country collapsed behind them. The convoy of expensive cars held for hours at the border, with the rage of millions screaming at their heels. This was the only road, across the desert, the only way to a strange sort of safety. But even they were allowed through, grudgingly, in the end.
Josh was waved through with an ease that spoke of familiarity. He gestured to their car. Cash was passed over, casual as a greeting. The border guard wandered over, chewing khat, skinny, a man’s uniform hanging off boy shoulders.
‘Passaporte.’ He was proud of his English.
The guard’s AK was swinging over his arm. The safety was off, out of laziness, or arrogance. Casey had looked and then wished she hadn’t. She handed over their passports, praying that Josh would stay in his car, wouldn’t come over for one last check, and glance at their passports. Because if he did, it was inevitable.
How come your name’s Cassandra? I thought you said Carrie. Then would come more suspicion. And the checking.
But Josh stayed in his car, and Casey managed to breathe. He’d decided. The guard stamped the passports, barely looking at their names. The Tuareg rolled through, too.
As the car pulled forward, Casey looked at the page. The Tinkarine stamp, so familiar from Milo’s passport. Less than a year since he has passed through here. Following in a dead man’s footsteps. And was it this guard who’d stamped his passport, with the same lazy indifference?
‘It’s only a couple more hours,’ Josh shouted across. ‘Stay close. And don’t drive off the road. No one ever got round to marking the minefields.’
Now they were in Libya, lawless, beautiful Libya. This world was half sand, half sky, and they never got closer to the horizon.
They passed a scatter of shacks by a small oasis. There were car skeletons here and there, with the occasional twisted oil drum. Because that’s what it’s all about, really: the oil.
Casey and Ed smiled at each other, united by relief, and rolled down the windows, and roared across the desert.
Casey had travelled to Libya, before. Back in that summer, as the Gaddafis fled or died. That brief moment when the Arab Spring felt like the future. People firing tracer bullets in the air in celebration. In the night sky, they looked almost like fireworks.
And the cars screaming along the seafront. Racing. Because that turns out to be the thing that people do when the rule of law collapses: they go out and drive very fast.
One day, Casey was driving back to her hotel, with her fixer, after a long day. The car was held up by a crowd of people.
Let’s get on, she almost snapped. Come on.
They had banners, home-made ones. They were chanting. The fixer stopped the car, almost in tears.
‘This is the first demonstration in Libya. The first demonstration in almost forty years.’
He talked through the window to one of the women. A long stream of Arabic, and then turned to Casey.
‘They want to know if they are doing it right, the demonstration. They are not sure how it is done.’
They all wanted to tell their stories, the Libyans. One man, blank eyes, told her how his son had beaten one of Gaddafi’s sons at football. Just once.
‘They fed him to their dogs. Alive. My son. They tore him apart. I loved him so much, and they fed him to their dogs. My son. My only son.’
But, even then, there were signs that the future might not be their dream. As Casey moved around the city, she came across different militias. One group would smile at her, chat to her, thrill over this new world. Another would mutter disapprovingly at a woman wandering so freely. The divide was there, even then. Soon the fast cars were in long queues, as the petrol ran out. Lines of people pushing their cars to the pumps, remembering what they had, once.
They ripped Gaddafi to pieces, out in the desert. His convoy bombed by a Predator from Vegas. And he was left to the mob – the death that haunts every dictator – and an unmarked grave. Not for Libya, forgiveness.
Once again, it was a war that the West had started, without thinking about the end. As if this were a fire that could ever burn out. The tribes resurrected, along those ancient fault lines. The Arabs and the Berbers. The Tuareg and the Toubou. Dozens of fiefdoms, and the Islamists moved fast, to fill the void left.
And now, Casey was here again, rolling through the desert and thinking about death.
Her eyes tangled with Ed’s for a second.
‘Burning our bridges as we go,’ she said.
‘We’ll be OK, Casey.’ He looked at her for a second. ‘But if we’re not, promise me you’ll run. You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to make it back.’
‘I’ll try.’
She put her hand out, into the air between them. Carefully, without taking his eyes off the road, he took her hand and squeezed it.
28
Back in London, Dash couldn’t sit down. He strode around the office, unable to concentrate.
Hessa had reported the conversation to him, faithfully, as soon as she put the phone down.
‘Message me next time they call in,’ he had snapped, knowing he wasn’t being fair. ‘I need to talk to them direct.’
Now Dash tried to concentrate on the news list chucked to him by Ross. That junior minister, Alexander Kingsley, was making some announcement about new investment in border guards. Ross was right. That man would be the next prime minister. Dash tried to focus on the minister’s careful words; gave up.
He tuned into the news desk babble for a second. Ross was shouting down the phone at a photographer. ‘I want you to shoot him outside his house, but from right down the street. I don’t want him to even know you were fucking there.’
Dash walked away from the news desk in an odd swirl of emotions. He wanted them to get this story, more than almost anything. It would win awards, this one. But half of him felt protective. They had no brakes, those two. They wound each other up.
And they manipulated him, he knew, like they manipulated everyone else. Casey, wild little Casey, would lie through her teeth now she was out of his sight. Cool as a cucumber, every time. Beautiful, ruthless, his little street fighter. But she was vulnerable, underneath it all. Where Miranda’s pouts concealed steel, he worried about Casey.
Dash had never asked Casey about her background. People never asked much, in a newsroom. But he’d seen her flinch, once, at a gesture from the education correspondent. Flinched in a way she shouldn’t have, really. She’d looked around afterwards, found his eyes on her and glowered instinctively.
Casey had survived by manipulating, Dash realised, early on. And he’d harnessed that damaged behaviour, again and again. Give her a moving target, and make sure it wasn’t him. Watch the moment of loss when the story was finished. A greyhound catching the mechanical hare.
She broke it down: the pain, the agony, the despair; and sent it back in neat black and white. For Casey, even more than the rest of them, he knew, the Post was her home; the only place where people had her back and it all made a strange sort of sense.
It was his fault, really, this Libyan madness. He’d let the investigations team get away with plausible deniability for so long that they’d become the paramilitary wing of the newsroom. Out of control, really.
‘They’ve done what?’ He would pacify the incensed cabinet minister. ‘I must apologise. I’ll have a word. I’m shocked. Talk me through it, so I’ve got my head round the whole thing.’
And then he would walk over to their office, where they were sitting waiting, knowing the call would come.
‘He’s admitted the conflict of interest, shouldn’t have asked that question in Parliament about the road link. So keep pushing on that. But row back on the fraud point. He sounded convincing there.’
If anything happened to Miranda and Casey, out in the desert, he would be fired on the spot, of course. He would expect that, despite what he’d told them. But knowing that he had let them go, for his ambition – he would have to live with that, for ever.
By that sin fell the angels, he thought.
Dash had dealt with kidnap before. The long hours of negotiation, and the sweating terror of the handover. When all you could do was listen in, as the ex-SAS boys went about their business. And hope that they managed, with cool heads and cold hearts, to swap the reporter for a few hundred thousand dollars. Because if the money was enough, he could breathe.
But of course, now, it wasn’t.
Journalists used to get a free pass. Back when everyone wanted to tell their story, and everyone needed a messenger. Then, one day, it was possible to get their message out, everywhere, in seconds. Exactly as they wanted, carefully packaged and perfectly scripted. They could cut out the middleman, and so that is what they did, quite literally.
Now the journalist is the story. So they shoot the messenger, in beautifully edited films. And if it was Casey screaming into the camera . . .
Dash paused by the picture desk. The picture editor was scrolling crossly through a set of photographs from one of the agencies.
‘Don’t know why Cromwells have even sent these through. I mean, fucking look at them. Totally unusable,’ Stan moaned.
Dash peered closer. An explosion in a hospital, probably an air strike. Syrian children, blown to tatters. A horrifically burned baby. A doctor, still in his shredded white coat, looking, hazily, at where his arm had been.
‘We’d have to pixelate everything,’ grumbled the picture editor. ‘Useless idiots. They should know what we need, by now.’
Their public didn’t like war to look too real; they would complain. But the editors had to examine it all, in close-up, bowdlerising where others glorified, so who knew what was real?
Dash had found Stan’s deputy crying in the stationery cupboard once. She’d spent hours on the aftermath of a bomb in Jakarta: dozens of immaculate shots of screaming and death. Later that afternoon, Isis had dropped a new video, a pilot in a cage, and a stream of petrol, and a flame. And she’d had to watch the whole thing, to be sure they weren’t missing anything.
So she’d cried, very quietly, in a cupboard. Stan, poker-faced, had gone the other way.
Dash wanted to put the whole lot on the front page. This is what a three-year-old looks like after she’s been hit with the payload of a Sukhoi fighter-bomber. This is her face when she realises that her whole family is dead, and nothing will ever be the same ever again. Look at it. Don’t tell me you don’t want to see it. Don’t tell me it’s a little bit upsetting. Look at it.
‘You can use that one,’ said Dash. ‘Pixel out that leg, the one on the ground there. It’ll do.’
Dash wandered on.
The editor was over by the designers, watching impassively as they laid out a page. Dash veered to the left. He was avoiding Salcombe now. Impossible to pretend you’d just forgotten that a couple of reporters were running around north Africa.
I counted them all out and I counted them all back . . .
Dash went into his tiny office and closed the door, and waited.
The message came through. I see him. He is moving. To the restaurant.
She lifted her head, lioness. This pack hunts together.
They’d worked well together, from the beginning. By now, they read minds and finished sentences. Flicked hand gestures as he glanced away.
Two was better, and braver. And if one said barely a word, she would be watching and listening and ready to jump in.
‘I think what Carrie means is . . .’
‘Anna, do you remember when . . .’
And it always helped, on the other side of the world, to be together. Upside-down clock, and upside-down mind.
Not to be alone.
She carried cash, quite a lot. She could never pull out a credit card, embossed with her name.
She checked again, now, from superstition.
Yes, enough. Plenty.
Restaurants never minded cash. They assumed it was an affair.
She could hesitate on her address. She could hesitate on her phone number. ‘Silly of me. It’s new . . . You know how it is . . .’ She could even mishear her own name. But she could never hesitate on her date of birth. So she was one year younger, one month older.
It’s never a simple joy, either. She learns that, one day, on the way home. Crying on the Tube, which she thought she would never do.
Because her best day is always his worst.
Somewhere he is humiliated, and ruined, his world crashing around. Somewhere he is seeing his wife, and seeing her tears. And seeing himself through her eyes for the very first time.
And always the fear that he will walk under the train, or jump off the bridge, or swallow all of the little white pills. Because it can happen. It does happen.
And so it is never perfectly happy. The sadness is embedded, in every success. Baked in.
She wrote stories, not fairy tales.
At least, this time, he would disappear.
Injured, they were dangerous.
They didn’t always disappear. Once, afterwards, across a crowded room at a polite party, he froze. Wounded, but not destroyed.
She faded into the crowd, then. Hid behind a doleful waitress, handing out canapés like an upside down Oliver Twist. But finally, he’d cornered her. Brave, really.
You used me, he said. Like a puppet. Like your puppet.
But I’m a puppet too, she thought. There’s always someone pulling the strings.
We’re puppets, all of us.
And suddenly she saw everyone tied together, bound by long and delicate strings. An arm twitches and a shiver runs round the room.
I was his puppet, she thought, and he cut my strings.
And I fell, I fell, I am fallen.
29
They just hesitated in Ghat, the garrison town, with the Italian fortress on the hill. The old fortress, from the days when you could see the enemy coming, and all you needed were strong walls, decent supplie
s and the will to win.
Then the convoy drove on, through endless rocky plains. Miles floated past under the huge sky.
‘You OK?’ Ed said into a silence.
‘Just thinking about Isa.’ Casey twisted her face.
‘That,’ Ed said simply, ‘was shit.’
‘Yes,’ said Casey. ‘And Miranda won’t be able to explain. Not really. It would be a risk.’
She turned towards him. ‘I know you wouldn’t have done it. If I hadn’t been there. I am sorry.’
‘I wonder what they’re talking about, Josh and Selby,’ Ed changed the subject abruptly.
‘We’ve got to stop calling him Selby,’ said Casey, after a pause. ‘Josh doesn’t know that we know his surname. And it will seriously alarm him if we let slip that we do.’
‘You’re right. Sorry.’
When they pulled off the road, the cars barely slowed despite the corner. They hooked in a sharp right, towards a line of hills to the south. Casey felt her stomach knot.
‘Remember, you’ve got to butterfly,’ said Ed. ‘Giggle. We’re here for a laugh.’
‘But how can they? How can they do this?’
‘Later. Not now.’
They could see Josh’s car bouncing, as it hit potholes on the long track up to the red hills. The Hilux grumbled, struggling with the pace.
And then, quite suddenly, the white marble palace appeared. It was vast, with long rows of Moorish arches mocking the desert, and golden domes above. There had once been a long row of cypress trees leading up to its gates, but the trees had faded to bleached skeletons, or been hacked down. Serried colonnades held up a massive portico that glittered with Arabic words.
As they drew closer, they could see the huge bronze statue of a fist snatching a US fighter jet out of the air.
‘Dictator chic,’ said Casey. ‘You can get something very similar in Hampstead.’
The four cars pulled up, the Tuareg drawing away to the left. Josh, energised, jumped out of his car.
‘Welcome,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome to Euzma!’
‘It’s stunning,’ Casey enthused. ‘What a place.’