Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  At the prospect of taking orders from his Colonel, the wariness and confusion cleared from Salif’s face.

  ‘OK, I take you,’ he said. ‘You crazy man. Get killed.’

  They ate in silence for several minutes, then Anton and Mikhail entered the dining room. James stood up and made a show of welcoming them, clearing space at their table while Salif went to the doorway and shouted for more food. Mikhail took a chair opposite James and immediately started chewing on a flatbread. Anton looked around disdainfully and at length, flexing his shoulders inside his cream jacket and muttering some imprecation at Mikhail before eventually deigning to sit down.

  Salif beckoned to James from the door. ‘I hide now. Not safe for me.’

  ‘Meet me at six,’ said James. ‘One kilometre outside Smara, on the road north.’

  Salif nodded and James went back to the others. Anton was scowling at a basket of dates in the middle of the table.

  ‘You know what? Where I come from, something that looks like shit and tastes like shit, we generally don’t eat.’

  ‘You sleep OK?’ said James. ‘Planning a day at the beach, I guess.’

  He grinned at Mikhail, feeling that there must be more to these two than met the eye and wondering how they could be useful to him. Mikhail gave a polite nod in acknowledgement of James’s poor attempt to resurrect his joke. Anton pulled out a cellphone and started to fiddle with it.

  ‘I guess Vodafone won’t have seamless integration with Smara Telecom,’ said James. Anton looked at him sourly and tucked the phone back into his pocket.

  ‘Let me explain how I got here,’ said James, thinking that his own story might loosen their tongues. ‘I was tricked into going to Oran, then abducted and taken to a compound out there in the desert. . . ’ Already his audience looked sceptical. ‘They got hold of a computer intercept device I built—’

  ‘This is bullshit,’ said Anton.

  ‘I escaped, obviously.’

  ‘And here you are having breakfast with us in sunny Smara. Amen.’

  ‘I still don’t know who’s behind it,’ James ploughed on, ‘but Salif told me that an arms dealer called Claude Zender is involved.’

  Anton’s eyes steadied. Mikhail stopped eating.

  ‘You know him?’ James said.

  ‘No,’ said Anton. But the lie was sabotaged by Mikhail’s eager face.

  ‘You came down here to find Zender?’

  Mikhail addressed Anton in Russian. James didn’t speak the language, but there was a throaty roll to his voice that sounded exactly like the man who’d been locked up in the cell opposite him at the compound.

  ‘There’s another man being held at the compound. Heavily built – like you, only bigger,’ James said, nodding at Mikhail. ‘I heard him shouting in Russian. Someone’s given him a beating.’

  ‘You see Nikolai?’ said Mikhail.

  Anton hissed at him.

  ‘He’s there all right. Salif said he’d been caught spying on Zender.’

  The two men conversed in Russian again.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Anton eventually.

  ‘Salif and I are going back to the compound. You should come, get your friend out of there. The longer he stays. . . Well, having spent a week there myself, I don’t fancy his chances.’

  ‘He know where is Nikolai. We don’t,’ Mikhail observed.

  ‘So he claims,’ said Anton. ‘And if he’s lying? We follow him into the big sandy desert and what, have a frigging picnic?’

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know? First you hijack my taxi. Then you claim to be mixed up with spies. Now you say you know where Nikolai is. I’ve heard better lines from a pissed-up beggar in a cardboard box.’

  ‘He’s not drunk,’ said Mikhail.

  ‘I’m going to the café in the square,’ James said. ‘You can find me there. You got a few dirhams I could borrow?’

  ‘What did I tell you, Micky,’ said Anton. ‘The guy’s a shyster.’

  Mikhail pulled a note from his wallet and handed it over.

  They’re in, thought James.

  The café in Smara’s main square smelled of coffee and sweetened tobacco, and was full of old men in spotless white shirts and black trousers, or bishts the colour of oatmeal with embroidered collars. They fell silent as James entered through the bead curtain over the door and picked his way through the thicket of chairs that filled every square inch of the brown-painted concrete floor. There was a computer set up on a rickety steel table in the corner. James paid for half an hour’s internet access and bought a cup of sweet, grainy coffee to drink while he browsed.

  The connection was slow, and every image download choked it. In any case, nothing he needed to find out was going to be readily available on the web. How about a Google search: British computer scientist abducted by al Bidayat in cahoots with arms dealer Claude Zender while MI6 watches. . . He looked for al Bidayat: their site had been taken down – within the last twenty-four hours, it seemed, because there was a link to it in a blog posted the day before – but there were plenty of news reports. The organisation had been started by an elderly Professor of Islamic Jurisprudence who had disappeared from his post at Cairo University in early 2005. Its goal was predictable enough – ‘to overthrow the tyrannical hegemony of the western imperialists’ – but its modus operandi was unique: al Bidayat would not commit acts of terrorism itself, but supply backup and support services – funding, training, equipment and logistics – to anyone who could ‘demonstrate a commitment to driving the imperialist crusaders from the cradles of Islam in Africa and the Middle East’. Its record in this endeavour was opaque – there didn’t seem to be firm evidence that it had done anything at all – but the intelligence community clearly believed it was successfully plying its trade behind the scenes. They’d even given it a nickname: the Terror Consultancy.

  If Ibrahim al Haqim was al Bidayat’s elder statesman, then Mansour Anzarane – a former student of his – was its poster boy. He paraded his terrorist credentials like an obnoxious ten-year-old with a row of gold stars, and majored in long, repetitive calls to arms, bloody and righteous in equal measure. But it all seemed a little flimsy. His calling card was that he claimed to be the executioner in a video depicting the beheading of a Saudi intelligence agent. James found a copy and watched. Unless his swordsmanship had since deserted him entirely, the man who whisked the Saudi agent’s head from his body in the video was not the same man who had butchered Hamed at the compound. A cruel and dangerous narcissist, yes, but the right-hand man to a terrorist mastermind? Etienne was the more likely candidate, but there was no record of anyone by that name being associated with al Bidayat.

  What else? Anemone. . . Not much point searching for that. He created a webmail account and keyed Clive Silk’s home email into the address box. He remembered the message he’d found in the Centuries Deep log on the compound network, the one with the header that had led him to the gates of MI6, and wrote:

  REF ANEMONE, NO SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITY TO REPORT.

  As he pressed send, there was a chinking sound from the door. The bead curtain was being held open by a small, chubby man of about thirty in a light brown suit with a wine-red shirt. An old white Mercedes thrummed in the square behind him. The man looked quickly round the room. The café’s customers lowered their heads to avoid meeting his eyes. They were nasty eyes: pale and unblinking in his round, childish face. He saw James and grinned. It was a nasty grin, too, mirthless and triumphant. He approached James’s table.

  ‘Come with me, mister,’ he said in rough French. He had a high pitched, expressionless voice, and you could imagine that he only used a dozen phrases, all of them much like this one.

  ‘You want to talk, sit down,’ said James equably. ‘Otherwise, go and tell Monsieur Zender that I’m looking for him.’

  The other men in the café were leaving, quietly and fast. He didn’t have much time. The man in front of him had his right hand up by the lapel of his j
acket, ready to pull the gun lodged in his left armpit. He was keeping his other hand out of view.

  James stood up.

  ‘OK, let’s go.’

  He threw a rabbit punch at the man’s throat. The man swayed neatly to his right and James’s fist glanced harmlessly off his neck. There was a snarl on the man’s face and excitement in his eyes. He’d done this before, he enjoyed it. He feinted for his gun. A stiletto blade arced towards James’s groin. He was really quick, frighteningly quick. James threw himself backwards, came down on his right shoulder, and grabbed for a chair. The gleeful, child’s face loomed over him. James kicked hard and caught him in the gut, but the man rolled back easily, almost disdainfully, and with keen precision drove the point of his knife into James’s calf. He gasped with the shock of the intruding steel, jerked back his leg as the cut nerves shrieked. Pleasure flared in the man’s pale eyes. James swung the chair up at the babyish face, using the momentum to roll him back to his feet. Again the man was quick enough to dodge the blow, again the blade darted forward. But the legs of the chair hampered him and the point of the blade stopped six inches short of James’s face. With James on his feet, the chair was the better weapon and the man knew it. He stepped back, ducked and reached for his gun. James followed through with the chair. The blunt wooden legs snared his neck and the little man’s neat evasion turned into a fall. He flipped sideways and the side of his head banged against the edge of a bench. James pressed on, concentrating all his weight into the foremost leg of the chair and spearing it into the man’s unprotected chest as he hit the floor. He felt springy resistance, then the give as his ribcage cracked. The man wheezed noisily, coughed. A shard of rib must have punctured his lung. Should keep him quiet.

  There was a click behind him. A man in the doorway, gun levelled, waiting to get a clear shot. James dived through the maze of chairs and a bullet smacked into the wall above his head. He scrambled for the narrow corridor that led out back, flinging chairs aside. Another shot and the top of a chair to his left disintegrated into a bouquet of splinters.

  James drove on, gained the mouth of the corridor. It was dark and harboured the harsh, salty stench of old urine. There was a door at the far end and he made for it, keeping low. He was three feet away when the door swung open. A big man stood silhouetted in the doorway, peering in, fist clamped round the butt of a handgun. There was a stairway to James’s right. He took it.

  He ran up four flights of stairs, then a set of steep, narrow steps that led to the roof. Shots cracked and spat in the stairwell behind him. The door to the roof was unlocked and he stepped out. Adjoining roofs led all the way to a taller building at the corner of the square. He ducked under a line of washing and jumped a low wall on to the next roof, then hid behind a chicken coop and some old paint tubs planted with red peppers. He heard his pursuer kicking open the door. The alley to his left was about eight feet across, but the building on the other side was just a two-storey concrete shell – leaving him with a ten-foot vertical drop as well. He judged the run-up to the parapet, then set off with short, vigorous strides. Just as he was about to jump, two things happened.

  He heard a shout from his left. And he realised that because of the stab wound to his right calf he was about to launch off his left foot. The one connected to the buggered knee he’d so successfully forgotten about.

  In mid-air he stretched his arms out and got ready to land belly-first against the opposite edge. He took it as best as he could, but that wasn’t well. The ridge of concrete ripped into the muscle of his stomach and slammed every last pocket of air from his lungs. Then he was slipping down the wall, fingers scratching across the gritty surface. His chin crunched down onto the edge, halting his slide for a second. But there was nothing to grip, nothing to dig his fingers into. . . Then his feet weren’t bumping against the wall but kicking into the empty space that would one day be a window. Just before his fingernails ran out of concrete to scrape, his toes found the ledge below and he stopped.

  Precarious, but not lying in a bloody heap in the alley. He worked his toes to the very outside of the ledge, bent his knees inward and slid down as quickly as he dared, conscious that if he lost his balance he’d dive backwards onto the baked dirt twenty feet below. He got one arm under the top of the window opening, reached for the inside face of the wall and pulled his head inside the building. Stepped gratefully off the ledge, and fell.

  REF ANEMONE, NO SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITY TO REPORT.

  Clive Silk re-read the email and a bubble of panic swelled inside him. He looked reflexively over his shoulder, even though he was in his office at home and no one could be standing there watching – or at least, no one who was at all interested in anything he did. The return address was friendoftheplaypen@hotmail.com. Fucking Palatine. What did it mean? That he did know about Anemone. That he hadn’t been abducted. That he was poking around where he didn’t belong, sniffing out things that would allow him to keep the expression of contempt on his face for another few years.

  Super-saintly, super-heroic Dr Palatine. And Strang really believed I might be colluding with him over the IPD400. Me, help Palatine, who treats me like something that crawled out from beneath a filing cabinet? Clive wondered if, having deleted the email, he could shut down his webmail account and pretend it had never existed. He searched through pages of settings and discovered that you couldn’t – there was simply no option to close it. The message would sit there on the webmail servers like a telltale stain, and they’d send smug little Julian Twomey-Smith in to find it.

  He had to report this to Strang and de la Mere. The thought of their gleeful expressions, incompletely hidden behind a mask of inquisitorial gravity, made him feel weak with anxiety. They’d find a way of making it his fault that Palatine was goading him over the email. Can you explain, Clive, why Dr Palatine chose to contact you? He’d called Claude Zender, too, the night before last. Can you explain, Clive. . .

  He couldn’t explain, no. He’d done nothing wrong, but they were going to bully him. Sir Iain Strang, Nigel de la Mere, Zender, Palatine. All of them, taking it in turns to have a good kick, because he was a nonentity and they would drive him away like a dog that’s farted under the dining room table.

  Mikhail heard gunshots. He leaned out of the window of his hotel room and saw a man run onto the roof of the row of buildings to the north of the square. Now he was looking round for a place to jump across the alley below. It was James, Mikhail saw, running from a man who was just now emerging onto the roof, gun in hand. He heard a door banging in the alley and looked down to see another man, also armed, run out and turn his head up to look at the rooftops above. The man on the roof couldn’t see James, but the man in the alley would, when he jumped.

  Mikhail watched carefully, and as soon as he saw James start his run-up, he yelled:

  ‘Hey!’

  The man in the alley turned. James jumped. Mikhail ducked back into the room.

  ‘Someone is shooting at James.’

  ‘Good luck to them.’

  ‘We gotta help him.’

  ‘We do not have to help him, Micky. If he wants to travel to the arse end of the universe and start a fight, that’s his business. Anyway, he can handle himself.’

  ‘You coming or do I go on my own?’

  ‘Fuck you, why?’

  ‘This stuff is what we do,’ said Mikhail.

  ‘In Kiev. This is someone else’s patch.’

  ‘Yeah, and someone else got Nikolai.’

  ‘I get shot, I’m blaming you.’

  Mikhail grinned. ‘I’m blaming God.’

  ‘Yeah, but God is not going to say, Sorry Anton, and bring me beer and cake every day until I’m better. But you are, right?’

  They left by the back entrance to the hotel. The man Mikhail had shouted at was patrolling the street behind the café, so they circled round and entered an alley that seemed to run parallel. The air was making a thin humming noise, like a trapped insect. The alley took them left, then meandered b
ack on itself, narrowing all the while. A harsh banging up ahead. . . They turned a corner and found a man of about thirty, naked other than a torn T-shirt, squatting in the dust and hammering on a wooden door with a lump of rock. He was shouting some words over and over again. A dismembered chicken lay by his side. He saw them and swivelled on his heels, rock in hand. His face was filthy and heavily bearded, his elongated scrotum trailed in the dust.

  ‘Where to, tour guide?’ Anton whispered.

  Mikhail moved forwards purposefully. The man turned and stared, then dropped his rock and pinned himself back against the wall. Mikhail walked by, Anton at his heels. They ran along the alley for twenty yards before taking a right turn into a tiny yard occupied by a plastic hopper shedding mangled bags full of refuse. They crouched in a patch of shade and heard footsteps behind them. There was an angry shout, then the man yelled out his repetitive phrase and smashed the door with his rock. Then they heard a cry and a thud. It sounded like he’d been hit. Then another thud. Silence.

  ‘Why we hiding?’ Mikhail asked.

  ‘I thought we were being followed.’ Anton suddenly felt how ridiculous it was to be crouching among the filth and flies in a Smara alley. ‘Why the fuck did I follow you into this shithole,’ he hissed.

  ‘James must be round here,’ said Mikhail.

  ‘We’re lost. Let’s go back.’

  Round the bend, they found the crazy, half-naked man urinating over the figure of a man lying face down in the dirt. The hot fluid splashed over a purplish lump that was forming on the back of the prone man’s neck. It looked like the one who’d fired at James from the roof. The triumphant stream of urine was improbably copious. There was something about this grotesque ritual that seemed to demand of Anton and Mikhail that they watch until it was complete.

  The half-naked man leaned back against the wall. Blood from a cut on his cheekbone was dripping into his T-shirt. The man on the ground was still breathing. Anton’s eye was drawn to the gun in his hand. The half-naked man was now stroking his penis, not in search of arousal but as one might a household pet that has done something useful. Anton bent down and disengaged the unconscious man’s fingers from the revolver, then patted the pockets of his jacket and extracted a couple of spare clips.