Mark had this very week made his first trades. The City was going through an anxious phase, with rumours of all sorts of nasties emerging from the US derivatives market, but Mark had always believed that it was during bad weather that you found out how good a sailor you were. He had bought some derivatives taking a long – optimistic – position on the Argentine peso, measured against the yen. Within seventy-two hours, there had been a 6 per cent movement in the currency in the right direction. Thanks to the magnifying effect of derivatives and leveraging, Mark had come close to doubling this bet, which meant doubling the bank’s money. He had closed the position and hidden the profit in the no-longer-dormant account. Then he had gone on to make a big bet on the dollar, the highly out-of-fashion dollar, against a basket of other currencies, and that was going so well that he was still running an open position, and was well on his way to doubling his money again. This was not mere evidence that he might have a talent for this kind of thing: it was not an indication: it was the thing itself. This was what genius looked like.
It had been difficult getting to the position where he was able to do what he wanted. That was fine with Mark, the difficulty was part of the point. This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing most people were capable of thinking of, or capable of doing. His face, his mask, his Thomas Pink shirt and Gieves & Hawkes suit and Prada shoes might not be exceptional (though to the person who studied them, there were signs that this City uniform was more carefully put together, more thought through, than most), but the person inside them was a once-in-a-generation talent. Given that, it had to be admitted that Roger was a grievous disappointment. Mark deserved a better figure to outwit, surpass and overtake. He had once seen Roger as a worthwhile antagonist, someone who merited his efforts to outdo. But it was increasingly clear that his boss wasn’t that person. He just wasn’t up to the role of Mark’s enemy; he wouldn’t even be a footnote in his biography.
‘Bring the paperwork, would you?’ said Roger, proving the point, as he drifted in his airy, athletic way towards his own office door. For such a tall man he had an indecisive, soft manner of movement, as if his determination to get where he was going might fail him at any moment. He had a folder under his arm, which for Roger, clearly, was good enough reason to let his junior colleague carry everything else. He was just so oblivious, that was the thing about Roger which really irritated Mark – which properly got under his skin. What would it take for Roger to notice what was going on around him? A bomb under his chair? Mark wouldn’t put it past him to not-notice. Well, he’d certainly notice when his deputy turned around and told his bosses – Roger’s bosses – that he had just made fifty million quid while Roger was looking out of the window thinking about how to pay for his wife’s Botox, or whatever it was he thought about. Maybe the inside of Roger’s head was like one of those Simpsons cartoons depicting what Homer was thinking about: tumbleweed drifting past, a mechanical monkey doing somersaults, a hamburger. Yeah, that’s probably what it was like to be Roger. Like being Homer Simpson, except taller and richer and working in a bank. For now, anyway.
Roger, with his thin folder, and Mark, with his armfuls of paperwork, arrived at the meeting room. Lothar was sitting there already at the head of the table, red-faced and fit-looking, his own single folder on the table in front of him, beside a large plastic glass with a bright green liquid inside, presumably one of his nasty-smelling health drinks. Lothar said what he always said at the start of meetings, one of the few words which made his German accent fully apparent:
‘Chentlemen.’ He made it sound halfway between a statement and a question.
80
Shahid had taken to sitting on the floor in the corner of his cell. He wasn’t sure why, and it wasn’t part of a conscious plan; it wasn’t as if it offered him a more interesting view of his bed and his toilet. But since he had found out that the police thought he and Iqbal were part of a plot to use stolen Czech Semtex to blow up a train in the Channel Tunnel, he had lost his earlier confidence that things were somehow going to turn out all right of their own accord. Up until now, although what was happening to him was ridiculous, he had never lost a basic trust that there was a larger justice working in his favour. Now, however, that belief was fading. The plain fact was that the police did not believe him. They thought Iqbal was a bad guy, which as far as Shahid knew might well be true – ‘You know a lot more about him than I do,’ as he kept telling all four of his interrogators, over and over again – but they also thought that he and Shahid were closely involved with each other. Instead of Iqbal, Belgian semi-nutter from more than a decade ago who self-invited, it was Iqbal-and-Shahid, co-conspirators, peas in the pod, two halves of the same naan. It turned out that his internet use was being monitored and that Iqbal had visited jihadi websites, corresponding in encrypted emails, and reading and downloading all sorts of terrorist how-to information – which was nowhere to be found on Shahid’s computer. What that meant was that Iqbal had been doing things on his own laptop. But none of that had anything to do with Shahid. It had nothing to do with him! Nothing! To do! With him! NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM!
‘OK, he’s been using my wireless broadband,’ said Shahid. ‘You know when he came to stay with me. Look at the dates. You can obviously do that. You won’t find a single jihadi site anywhere on the records before Iqbal came to stay. It’s not that hard to work out, is it? Two and two, meet four.’
‘Tell us again about the last time you saw Iqbal,’ replied the heavy, sagging policeman, who was the very worst of them for never seeming to have heard what Shahid said. And they began, all over again, again and again, the same true stories, the same interruptions. It was a small comfort that even his interrogators were beginning to look bored and tired, though not nearly as bored and tired as Shahid himself felt. On and on and round and round and now Shahid was back in his cell, sitting on the floor, which he had come to like doing as he found he lost his belief that things were going to be all right; the contact with the floor and the wall, the fact that to sit like that he had to be curled in on himself, was comforting. Everything else might not make sense, but at least gravity was still gravity.
There was a knock on the door of the cell. This in itself was not routine. When they came to take him for interrogations, they just opened the door; when they brought their terrible bland food, they just shoved a tray through the hatch. Nobody ever knocked. Shahid sat there for a moment, then said, he hoped sounding ironic,
‘Come in.’
The door opened and a policeman came in, followed by a middle-aged woman in a trouser suit, carrying a slim briefcase in brown leather. The policeman nodded at her and then went back out. The woman was smiling in a way which did not indicate any particular emotion other than a desire to indicate that she was well-meaning. She held out her hand to point at the floor beside Shahid and said,
‘May I?’
He nodded. She sat down, cross-legged, in the same position as him.
‘Fiona Strauss. Your family have hired me to be your lawyer.’
Shahid felt his eyes fill with tears. For a moment he could not speak.
‘I’m surprised we can afford you,’ he eventually said. Without knowing it, Shahid had said the perfect thing, because the remark gestured gently in the direction of the lawyer’s importance; and at the same time Fiona Strauss, who was a sincere fighter against the things she thought were wrong, felt that this young man sitting on the floor of his cell needed her. She was a complicated person who took a simple view of things. He was the victim of an injustice, and he needed her.
‘I’m working pro bono,’ said Fiona Strauss, with a faint smile. She took a spiral-bound notebook out of her briefcase, opened it, and held it up in front of Shahid. On the page was written:
‘Assume we are being listened to.’
‘Right,’ said Shahid.
‘I’m told you signed a waiver of your rights.’
‘Excuse my bad language, but that’s crap.’
‘They have th
e piece of paper, I’ve seen it.’
‘Well, then it’s a forgery. They faked my signature.’
‘OK. I believe you. But for now we must assume it doesn’t matter. Have you been ill-treated? Are you being adequately fed, are you being allowed to sleep, are you being physically abused, are your religious beliefs being respected, are you being threatened, physically or in other respects?’
As she was talking, she turned the notebook over to another page which said:
‘Don’t tell me anything they can use.’
It was a lot for Shahid to take in. What he mainly felt was a sudden sense of connection with his family outside: chubby Ahmed, irritating Usman, sexy Rohinka, and Mrs Kamal, driving everybody nuts and – Shahid had always felt this, even when he had heard nothing, knew nothing about what was happening – doing more than anybody else to try and help him. His eyes teared up again. The lawyer, feeling him struggle, put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t worry, we don’t have to do everything in one go. I’ll be coming back.’
His voice choked, Shahid said, ‘They brought me a bacon sandwich. The first morning. Then they realised.’ And he broke down and began to cry, deeply and fully, the sensation close to one of physical pain, and it came accompanied, even as he cried, by the sense that things inside him were breaking up, like an iceberg cracking or a huge sheet of glass shattering into fragments. It’s all got to me, Shahid told himself, as he cried, it’s all got to me much more than I realised.
Fiona Strauss stayed for an hour and when she left, she took something out of her handbag and handed it to Shahid, wrapped in a piece of silk: his copy of the Qur’an.
81
From that moment on, Shahid’s time in custody divided into two. The first part of it was formless and blurred and, afterwards, he couldn’t remember how it was partitioned into days, or the sequence of what happened before what, or anything to give it shape or order. He had specific memories – the diarrhoea, the time he spilled tea on himself, the inedible fish fingers which were so hard he could have used them to drum on the table, the time all four interrogators had had a go at him – but the overall way in which the time had passed now seemed vague and dreamlike. Then Fiona Strauss had come, and time had shape again. He waited for contact with her, looked forward to it, and his days were now oriented around specific events. It was the weirdest thing.
Now, too, he had his Qur’an. It was wrapped in the gold and green silk shawl that his father had given him over twenty years ago, unannounced, for no reason, just coming home from work and pressing it into his hands. Shahid was not, and never would claim to have been, devout – even when he had been off on his adventures it had been more out of a feeling of solidarity, of brotherhood in the umma, than of pure religious feeling in and of itself. He was an OK Muslim in a B-minus kind of way. He wasn’t going to claim that he had suddenly turned into a devout believer, but the day after Fiona Strauss came he prayed five times, after asking the guard who brought him his breakfast the direction to Mecca – and the policeman had instantly told him, as if he had known all along and been expecting to be asked. Shahid learned something: it turned out that there was a huge difference between washing your hands in the nasty metal sink because there was nowhere else to do it, and washing them in the sink because you chose to do so as part of the ablutions before prayer. The space in the cell, as demarcated in Shahid’s head, changed. It was now his space and he chose to use it to pray in. He had for the first time since his arrest a feeling that he was not just someone who was acted on, passive, done-unto; he could decide what to make of what was happening to him. In his own head, he was free.
Facing his interrogators that day, going over the yet-again questions, Shahid felt different. He felt that it was his questioners who were trapped, who were bound within the narrow circuits of their own suspicions. All they could do was repeat themselves; he was more at liberty than they were. It was almost funny. They had a script that they had to stick to. He was alone – alone in front of Allah – but free. They were all in it together, and they had no choices of their own to make.
Brotherhood in religion had always been an easy emotion for Shahid to locate. This was more elusive, but it had always been this more difficult feeling that Shahid had liked best about Islam: the aloneness before God. Not the imam, not the rest of the umma, but you standing on your own before Allah. No one to mediate the contact. Shahid felt that more purely than he ever had before: the contrast between the human world of institutions and the awful singleness of Allah. On the one hand, Formica table tops, policemen and their questions, plastic cutlery on a shatter-proof plastic tray, rules and human smallness all around; on the other, nothing but you, on your own before the infinite. The religion Shahid had grown up in never reached more deeply into him than when he caught this feeling, the exhilarating bleakness of the desert faith. I am here for a maximum of twenty-eight days, he told himself; after that they have to charge me, and there’s nothing they can possibly charge me with. OK, so Iqbal was up to something. Maybe he wasn’t organised enough to be up to the thing they were accusing him of. But he was up to something. And OK, Iqbal had been staying at his flat. But no British jury would send him to jail for that, so there was no prospect he would be charged with a crime. And even if he were, because he was innocent, and because he was alone before Allah, he didn’t care what happened. No, that wasn’t right: he did care, he cared deeply. But there was a part of him where the events, the what-happened-next, did not reach. A part of him apart.
82
If Shahid had known, there would have been another source of comfort close to hand. The policemen interrogating him did not agree about whether he should be there at all.
Iqbal Rashid had been a person of interest to the security services for some time. He was an associate of Brussels-based radicals who had trained in Afghanistan and who were known to have dealings with Al Qaeda groups in Pakistan. When he first came into Britain he was not subject to close monitoring by MI5 and Special Branch, but they had an eye kept on him, as part of the general penumbra of concern around Al Qaeda affiliates and wannabes. Then police in Belgium intercepted a plot to blow up a bomb and sink a cross-Channel ferry, and because the people involved in that were known associates of Iqbal Rashid, the level of attention given to him was raised. He was subjected first to a raised level of surveillance for two weeks, to see what, if anything, he was up to. During that two weeks he had contact with a number of persons of interest to MI5 and it was decided to make the watch on him permanent while he was in the UK. It was around this point that Iqbal got in touch with Shahid, who was at first completely unknown to the security services. When they looked into his case they found that he had been to Chechnya and had there met people who went on to train in Al Qaeda camps. They began monitoring both Shahid and Iqbal and it became clear that the Belgian was involved in something that was either a sinister and sophisticated plot, at a late stage, to blow up an important piece of infrastructure, thought to be the Channel Tunnel – or it was just a whole load of loose, blabbermouthy talk by angry young idiots showing off to each other. The normal procedure would be to wait until someone actually did something overtly terrorist in intention, and then to arrest all the conspirators; this was the historic preference of the British police, as opposed to the American bias, greatly intensified in the wake of 9/11, to thwart plots by arresting their members at an early stage. But British juries were showing a reluctance to convict people arrested on the basis of these early-stage, putative plots, so the police were strongly minded to stick with their method of arresting as late as possible. Then someone linked to the group had been seized trying to buy Semtex in the Czech Republic and the security services had been faced with the choice of waiting to see what the plotters did next, or stepping in and seeking convictions with the evidence they had. After debating the point, and reluctantly, they had decided to go ahead with the arrests after Iqbal Rashid had left Shahid’s flat and disappeared; and it was as a result o
f this that Shahid now found himself in a cell at Paddington Green Police Station.
Iqbal’s involvement in the plot, if there actually was one, was clear. Shahid’s wasn’t, at all, and the only evidence against him was the internet use at his flat during the period Iqbal had been staying with him. Jihadi websites had been visited, and encrypted emails exchanged – the encrypted emails being a fingerprint-clear proof of something amiss, since no one without a dark purpose would bother with the necessary weapons-strength secrecy. It seemed entirely obvious to some of the security services – Amir the Asian interrogator, and Clarke the tired heavy Special Branch man among them – that Shahid had nothing to do with whatever was being planned and that he was at worst a kind of useful idiot, willing to give shelter and accommodation to a man he knew was up to no good. To some others, including the MI5 officers who had been in charge of the initial surveillance, nobody could be that naive. His semi-jihadi past combined with his association with the terrorist Iqbal made it self-evident that he was a central member of the plot, and if there was little direct evidence that was nothing more than a sign that he was careful – in other words, the absence of evidence was an important and sinister piece of evidence.
‘Bullshit,’ said Amir. ‘Total bullshit. Catch-22. The fact that there’s nothing on him is proof that he’s a trained operative? Bullshit.’
‘He has the history,’ said the MI5 liaison.
Capital: A Novel Page 40