by Lee Stone
“There is a telephone in the kitchen” said the journalist, and so Daud walked blindly through the narrow hallway into the heart of the house. He felt like he needed more space to get the job done anyway. The journalist left the back door ajar, hoping that his guest wouldn’t stay long.
The kitchen had an earthen tiled floor, which was as old as the house. There was an old oak table in the middle of the room which had documents and photographs spread across it. There was a small laptop in the middle of the mess, and a solitary chair in front of it.
Daud turned and looked at the man who had followed him into the kitchen. The man who had betrayed his brother and sent him into the arms of the Americans.
“Your name is Charlie Lockhart?”
The journalist kept the knife gripped in the hand behind his back. The Iranians and the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia were not looking for Charlie Lockhart, so the guy in his house wasn’t a threat to him. But still it made no sense why he had arrived here, caked in snow.
“I’m Lockhart,” said the journalist cautiously, trying to disguise his Spanish accent and waiting to see what the man wanted.
It didn’t take long to find out. Daud pulled something from his pocket and thrust it hard into the center of the Spaniard’s chest. He kept pushing until the journalist toppled backwards and fell against the wall, winded.
The journalist looked down and saw that Daud was twisting a photograph into his chest. A photograph of a man who he had never seen before. The whole thing was as bizarre as it was alarming. He took the picture from Daud with his free hand and studied it carefully.
Daud was breathing hard, angry, waiting for a response.
“You might as well have killed him,” he spat.
Daud was past doubts or questions now. The man in front of him had sold his brother to the Americans. He was responsible for his brother’s torture, and he didn’t even seem to recognize him.
The journalist’s mind was racing. He had no idea what this guy wanted, what the photograph was, or what to say to calm him down.
Daud snatched at his hood, and pulled it down. The kitchen felt hot after the hike through the snow. His blood was pumping hard and his brow was furrowed. He had always been the elder brother, the sensible one. He was always measured, and fair, and reasonable.
Not today.
*
Outside, Tyler had reached the back gate and was moving stealthily through the garden of the Lodge. His eyes swept across the windows of the other houses nearby. It was getting dusky and warm lights were glowing from inside. No silhouettes. No prying eyes. The back door was still off the latch.
Tyler thought it was unfortunate that the snow would give away his tracks, but his boots were new today and he could burn them once the job was done. Plus, the snow was still falling so the imprints might be erased within an hour. The synthetic material of his jacket was making a lot of noise, so he slipped out of it, and moved silently through the back door.
In the kitchen, Daud’s usual control had slipped. He wasn’t thinking straight; he was just building himself up to finish the job. To avenge Ajmal by killing the man who had sent him to Guantanamo.
“You know what you did,” he spat menacingly. “You know exactly what you did.”
The journalist had absolutely no idea what he had done, or more to the point what Lockhart must have done. Stealing Lockhart’s identity was supposed to have protected him, but now it had bought trouble to his door.
“Listen, I’m not Charlie Lockhart,” he said, contradicting what he said before.
This only made Daud angrier. The very least the man could do was to admit what he had done. The guy had showed no interest in the picture of Ajmal, and now he was changing his mind about who he was. Daud stepped forward and punched the man hard in the stomach.
This was enough for the journalist. He had been calm and diplomatic until now, but this guy wasn’t Iranian or Spanish Intelligence. He was a scrawny, angry Englishman.
His face hardened, and he pulled out the kitchen knife from behind his back. His brow furrowed, and generations of animalistic darkness welled in his eyes. Coldness ran through his veins. He convinced himself that he could ram the knife into the stranger’s stomach. He hoped that the stranger would be convinced too, so he wouldn’t have to prove it.
Daud took a step back, reached into his rucksack, and pulled out his revolver.
Scissors, paper, stone.
Daud won.
The journalist was at a loss. He didn’t know Daud, or Ajmal his brother, and he had no idea why the guy was so pissed off with Lockhart. It made it hard to argue his case.
Daud aimed the gun straight at the Journalist’s forehead.
“I’m not Charlie Lockhart,” the journalist repeated, his voice cracking slightly. He had been trained for this kind of situation; his kind of work usually meant being held captive at some point. His job had often been dangerous, and he had prepared for the worst.
He had learned how to keep his hotel room secure and he had agreed standard protocols for checking in with his editor while he was on assignment. He had left alarm words with his family, which he would embed in any message he was forced to make. He had been taught to identify different weapons, and to spot whether the safety catches were on or not. He had been shown how to avoid being hijacked, and he had been told how to negotiate and behave if he was taken hostage.
Now he was at gunpoint, none of the training seemed helpful. He should keep eye contact, he remembered that. Refuse to kneel down. Be a pain in the ass. Talk lots.
Despite all the things the journalist had learned, a strange resignation washed over him. The man with the gun didn’t look like he wanted to reason, or chat.
Daud was ready. Ready to kill the man who had sent Ajmal to the Americans. Deep in his soul Daud knew that there was no simple explanation for what had happened, other than the obvious one. The fact that Ajmal was guilty. There was no story which would be comforting to hear, so instead Daud had blamed the man he read about in the official reports. The man who had wrestled his brother to the ground and sent him into captivity. Fearless, the man who had disappeared from Kandahar soon after his brother’s arrest.
It was much easier for Daud to imagine killing Fearless than to imagine his brother in distress. And much easier than considering that Ajmal might be guilty. Daud aimed the revolver at the journalist’s forehead and squeezed on the trigger.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Woodridge Lodge, England.
“Crazy skies all wild above me now, winter howling at my face,
And everything I held so dear disappears without a trace.”
– David Grey, Sail Away with Me.
As Daud pulled the trigger, the journalist had instinctively closed his eyes, realizing that death was coming. But it didn’t arrive. There was a faint whistle and Daud released the gun which clattered to the floor. The next thing the journalist felt was a sharp stabbing pain in his shoulder.
As he opened his eyes, he realized he was toppling backwards as the weight of Daud slumped forward onto him. The heavy oak table in the middle of the kitchen stopped the journalist from falling further, but Daud’s body twisted around him and continued to fall to the hard stone floor.
As Daud twisted, the pain in the journalist’s shoulder increased, and as he looked down, he saw that his shirt was torn and blood was pouring from it. A movement in the corner of his eye made him look up from his wound, and he saw with horror a giant of a man wearing black clothes blocking the doorway. Why hadn’t he bolted the back door?
It was the guy he had seen back in Mary, trying to claw his way onto Lockhart’s bus. He had a small crossbow hanging nonchalantly by his side, and his broad shoulders filled most of the doorframe. For a moment the journalist thought he must have been hit by the crossbow, but then he looked down at Daud. He was lying on the floor on his back, his eyes bulging open, and a steel tip emerging from his forehead.
Evidently Tyler’s crossbow bolt had sma
shed through his temple and exited through the front of his forehead, giving him a steel horn, which had pierced the journalist’s shoulder as Daud had slumped forward onto him.
Having expected to die a few seconds ago, the unexpected turn of events gave the journalist a lease of life. Daud had released the revolver as he fell, and it was lying on the wooden table in front of him. Almost within reach.
Tyler saw the journalist’s eyes move towards the gun, and years of training kicked his body into action before any conscious thought caught up. He sprang forward, his first step landing heavily on top of a frail wooden chair. The chair skidded on the tiled floor and started to splinter apart under his bulk, but it gave him enough leverage for his second step to land on top of the oak table.
One foot kicked away the weapon while the other landed with all of his weight on top of the Journalist’s arm. There was a dull crack, and the journalist cried out as his arm snapped.
Tyler acted on impulse, standing on top of the table with his back crammed against the low ceiling above him. He looked down at the arm which he had pinned to the table with his boot and fired the crossbow again. The bolt pierced straight through the journalist’s outstretched hand and lodged into the wooden table. The journalist screamed as his hand was pinned to the oak.
Tyler climbed down and picked up the gun from the floor. He placed it carefully back on the table and caught his breath. The man stuck to the table stopped screaming, but had broken into gentle sobs. Beneath the table, the Asian guy was dying noisily, coughing and drowning on blood.
Tyler pulled the splintering chair back towards the table and sat down close to where the journalist had sunk to his knees. He rested his black boot on Daud’s throat and applied some pressure. The noise stopped, and Tyler turned his attention to the journalist. The man who he had chased right around the world. The man who had stolen three hundred million dollars. The man who was about to pay it back, with interest.
“Hello, Charlie,” Tyler said, and he grabbed the sobbing man by the throat.
Beneath Tyler’s boot, the edges of Daud’s world were turning black. He was aware of a third person in the room, and he knew that something had gone badly wrong. He was pretty sure that he was injured, but nothing seemed to hurt.
The Journalist denied being Charlie Lockhart at third time. Despite the overwhelming pain in his hand, the irony of his situation didn’t escape him. He had taken Lockhart’s identity to keep himself safe from people who wanted him dead, but hadn’t thought that Lockhart’s pursuers might be worse than his own.
“I’m not him. I can take you to him, but I’m not him. He lives next door.”
It sounded like a desperate lie. Tyler grabbed at the documents on the table. Many of them were in Arabic, but there was a small pile of official-looking English letters; they were bills. They all had Lockhart’s name on them.
Under the table, Daud knew that bad things were happening. Thoughts were slipping from him, breaking up in his mind as he tried to grasp onto his last precious moments of consciousness. He remembered that it had something to do with Ajmal. He was in trouble. He had to save his brother.
Beneath Tyler’s boot, Daud had started to shake violently. The last gasps of air exploded from his lungs as his chest contracted, and the blood which had begun to congeal in his mouth was thrown into the air. Then suddenly, Daud stopped and went limp and silent. The journalist looked down at Daud, knowing that he would be next to die.
Tyler had not looked down at Daud during his final spluttering. He was inconsequential compared to the other man in front of him.
“Have you banked it?”
The journalist understood at once. It was about the money. The blue bale which he had seen under the driver’s seat of the yellow bus in Ashgabat.
“I have some of your money. Maybe nearly half.”
Tyler demanded to know where the money was. The journalist was smart enough to know that he was in no position to bargain. If the giant was going to kill him, then it was better to get the ordeal over with quickly.
“This house is worth nearly a million and there’s another two hundred thousand in the bank” he said. That was about the truth of it. He was as honest as he could be because this would be the worst time to be caught in a lie.
Tyler held his throat tighter.
“You drove out of Kandahar with three hundred million dollars, and that’s what I want back.”
Suddenly the journalist understood. That’s why Lockhart had been driving a bus. There must have been more than one blue bale. A lot more.
Tyler had considered shooting the man’s knees to convince him to talk, but the snowscape outside was so quiet that he didn’t want to risk the noise. He stood up and towered over the journalist who remained pinned to the table. Then he stooped down to the floor and grabbed Daud’s corpse by the hair. His blank eyes were still open, and the bolt was still protruding from his forehead as Tyler lifted him from the floor.
“Where is the money?” Tyler asked the journalist gently.
The Journalist remained mute, partly because he couldn’t think of an answer which wouldn’t get him killed, and partly because he was mesmerized by the sickening way that the giant man had lifted the dead guy from the floor by his hair like a marionette. Daud’s slack jaw had dropped, and he was drooling blood. His unfocussed eyes were staring at the journalist without seeing anything.
There was silence while Tyler waited for the journalist to reply. Then suddenly, without warning, he rammed the dead guy’s head straight into the journalist’s face, horn first. Before the journalist could react, the bolt protruding from Daud’s head ripped through his cheek. Instinctively he tried to pull away, and pain instantly shot up his arm as he ripped at the hand which was pinned to the kitchen table.
“Where is it?” Tyler asked quietly. His slow measured question was a contrast to his explosive physical violence.
After a few seconds, Tyler lost patience and thumped Daud’s head into the Journalist’s chest again and again, until the bolt ripped through his shirt and pierced his skin. The journalist couldn’t take any more, and in a moment of desperation he ripped his hand from the table and was instantly sent dizzy with pain. He was losing a lot of blood, but now that he was free, he stumbled towards the gun resting at the other end of the table.
He reached it at the same time as Tyler. He got his hand around it, but the barrel was pointing towards him. Tyler had dropped Daud to the floor and was trying to prize the journalist’s fingers from the weapon. The journalist didn’t have the strength to turn the gun back towards his adversary. Tyler was the stronger man, and he knew that he would win out. The journalist knew it too, and he knew that he was finished. The man in the black outfit would torture him until he gave him an answer, and he didn’t know the answer. So, the journalist took the best option he had left. He couldn’t turn the gun, but he could pull the trigger, so he leaned forward and put his head to the cold metal.
He squeezed before Tyler could disarm him, and a shot rang out through the kitchen. He died instantly, and fell to the floor next to Daud.
The cockerel in the yard crowed twice, and then Woodridge fell silent again.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“When I'm dead and hit the ground a love back home, it unfolds”
– Coldplay, Violet Hill
Ajmal was thinking about his school days. The spring of his life had gone well. His parents and grandparents had worked hard to ensure that he and his brother Daud grew up in a world of opportunity. As he grew up, he prayed hard at the Mosque every day, thankful for the luck that Allah had bestowed on his family. He was diligent at school, and always hungry to learn.
Ajmal’s grandfather reminded him every day how lucky he was. He told them how different life would be if they were still in Quetta. He told the boys that when he was as young as them he was out in the fields feeling hungry each day.
“Hungry for food, hungry for knowledge, and hungry
for adventure,” he told them. “My head and my heart rumbled almost as much as my stomach. You are lucky to have all of these chances around you, but you must work hard to grab them when they come your way.”
Then he would smile at them and his eyes would twinkle, and Daud and Ajmal were filled with the desire to impress their grandfather. After school, the brothers would play hockey opposite the Mosque. They were simple, happy times. He imagined where all the kids from the mosque might be now. He imagined how they would look now that they were grown up, with their wives and their children and their beards.
Ajmal grew up in the shadow of his brother Daud. Daud looked after him at school and in the street. Sometimes he would help him with this homework, other times Daud was the person he turned to when he needed advice. Early on, Daud had showed signs that one day he would be the head of the family. He was clever and reasonable and caring. He seemed wise beyond his years. And whenever there was trouble, somehow Daud was always there to save the day. With anger in his eyes and fists flying, mild-mannered Daud would stop at nothing to fulfill his role as the family’s protector.
Ajmal missed Daud. He missed having a big brother protecting him. When he was younger, he had wanted to step out of Daud’s shadow. He wanted to prove that he was a man too, and that it wasn’t always going to be Daud who made the family proud. That was why he set out to find his grandfather’s old house in Quetta. That was why he organized the convoys to trade with the Americans. That was why he tried to keep the townsfolk unscathed on the journey by making deals with the militia in Afghanistan.
He hadn’t stood on the roof of the canteen in Kandahar because of some ideological battle. Afghanistan was a huge desert, apart from a few cities. Not much had ever thrived there, but the bits that had flourished had since been decimated by war. Ajmal didn’t care who ran or raped the place.
He just wanted to go home a hero who had made things better in his grandfather’s old home. He wanted to be more than just Daud’s younger brother. His heart had led him to Quetta, to see the house that his grandfather had talked about. But once he had arrived and saw the NATO convoys driving down the Chaman Road, the smell of money and opportunity had drawn him in. The chance to make money had led to danger, and the chance to bargain a way through the danger had led to him standing on the roof guiding a missile into the camp.