by Simon Conway
#
They settled into a kind of routine. He read and she worked and then over dinner they bartered parcels of information. He told her about his childhood and his job at the bank. He described his anger at the fate of non-Arab Muslims in Saudi Arabia. He explained away his years in the Navy as a series of cold and uneventful tours in the North Atlantic. He told her about his brother, who was a dentist and part-owned a dental practise in Henley-on-Thames. They were not close. He told her about his short-lived engagement. He did not mention the List. He explained how his father had failed as a restaurateur and ended up as a waiter in the restaurant that he had once owned. He laid the facts out where he could, lied where he had to and hardly embellished at all.
She in turn described a ping-pong childhood, shuttling back and forth between London and Lahore, never quite feeling that she belonged in either. She shared her feelings of antipathy towards her mother for what she saw as her exploitation of elderly fellow Muslims, who used up their savings on her overpriced Hajj tours. She regarded money changing with distaste that seemed to originate more from a general anti-capitalist urge than from any argument that it contravened the prohibition rules of Islamic law.
She explained how she had come to activism via a dynamic aunt in Lahore who had inspired her and encouraged her. She told him that she was in the second year of a two-year Masters programme at SOAS, that she wrote a blog that was gaining followers and that she earned money by conducting research for campaigning organisations. Their priorities inevitably became hers.
The interviews with on-street and off-street prostitutes in the boroughs of East London were commissioned as part of a joint charitable/police project operating out of Toynbee Hall. Her focus was on trafficking. It was the most depressing and least fulfilling of her disparate tasks.
Home, by which she meant Pakistan, was by far the most exasperating. She threw her arms up at its incompetent police whose methods could best be described as “brutality tempered by torpor”, its corrupted courts that conducted their glacial business in incomprehensible English, its kleptocratic politicians, its death-trap factories and its mendacious anti-Hindu press. She railed against the state’s failure to provide modern services.
‘Why can’t you drink the water out of the tap? Where are the medicines and the buses? Why can’t we educate our daughters? The problem is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats. So the democrats have not developed democracy and the dictators have not developed the country.’ But she was not without Nationalist urge. She insisted that it was not a failed state. ‘It works,’ she said, ‘just on its own twisted terms. It will still be here in a hundred years, with its nuclear weapons and its bloated army, its runaway population and its massive diaspora.’
The passion came off her in waves.
22. Combustible City
Noman dreamt of a wall of water twenty storeys high bulldozing the length of the Indus Valley and when he awoke he was lying on the beach by the ocean.
He got out from under a thorn bush into the blazing sunlight, and stumbled cursing over the sand, like someone walking on hot coals, to the cool, wet strip at the water’s edge. Sparkly junk littered the shore: condom wrappers, empty cans, broken glass. He waded into the surf and plunged his head into the water.
He was standing in the shallows, squinting at the shifting horizon while smoking a Flake, when his iPhone rang. It was Raja Mahfouz.
‘Good morning, boss.’
There was nothing good about it. His mouth felt like a monkey had taken a shit in it.
‘Where are you, boss?’
He grunted. ‘Clifton beach.’
‘On my way.’
Noman flung away his cigarette and struggled back to the road. He was sitting on the curb amongst the usual gaggle of rickshaw drivers when Raja Mahfouz pulled alongside him in the Range Rover about half-an-hour later. He climbed in the passenger seat, rooted around in the glove compartment until he found a strip of Paracetamol and dry-swallowed four.
Noman blamed the entire bloody Pashtun race for his hangover, for their overabundance of pride and their pigheaded refusal to see sense. You couldn’t spend a day listening to their endless complaining without wanting to spend the night smeared in lube, rolling around in bed with a couple of Napier Road’s finest. He couldn’t anyway. How he’d got from the city’s red light district to its beach was the usual mystery but he still had all his stuff: gun, money, phone, drugs, watch and sunglasses.
Now they were driving up University Road, heading for the Karachi Institute of Nuclear Medicine.
‘Whose idea was this?’
‘Yours,’ Raja Mahfouz replied, cheerily.
The big man was right. This had been his idea for trying to salvage something from a wasted trip. The ostensible reason they had come down to Karachi was to mediate in a territorial dispute between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. For some time the Afghans had been using the seaside metropolis as a kind of rear base, to lie low or seek medical treatment for injured fighters. Mullah Omar, their reclusive one-eyed leader, spent several months a year down here and in the past Noman had sat in on a couple of meetings of the Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban’s leadership council, as an observer for the ISI. It was an arrangement that all sides were happy with. Thus far the Afghan Taliban had limited their armed activities to kidnapping and bank robbery, which was considered an acceptable price to pay. But now there was a new gang in town. The Pakistani Taliban, namely the Mehsud clan from Waziristan, had arrived and launched a series of attacks on police stations that had left scores of police officers dead. They were in danger of upsetting the city’s delicate balance of competing criminal, ethnic and political groups that fought over money, turf and votes. The Afghan Taliban, which could do without the bad publicity, was particularly incensed.
Noman had spent yesterday with a succession of grizzled Afghan fighters who aired their grievances, from the poor quality of weapons available on the market and the rising cost of ammunition to the venality of border guards and the difficulty of making a reasonable living from smuggling, but always returning to the subject of the Mehsud clan and their heavy-handed tactics in the city. By nightfall he was sloshing with tea. The problem was he had nothing to offer. The ISI had no leverage. The Mehsud clan was refusing point-blank to talk to him or any representative of government. They’d even issued a death threat against him, which was ironic given that he was on their side. It was the usual bloody fuck-up.
So he’d decided to go looking for the ingredients of a dirty bomb. He wasn’t getting anywhere fast trying to locate the one-legged mullah and it seemed the only remaining approach was to identify the sources of medical and industrial waste that might constitute the radioactive elements of a dirty bomb. If the House of War really had built an itami, or atomic device, then they must have got the waste somewhere. Raja Mahfouz had produced a list of Atomic Energy Commission registered labs and facilities across Pakistan.
Karachi seemed like a good enough place to start.
#
They arrived unannounced at the Institute and demanded to speak to the Radioactive Safety Officer. He turned out to be a thin nervous-looking man with a prominent Adam’s apple. He talked them through the protocols for the delivery and safe custody of received isotopes, their application on the isolation wards and disposal of the radioactive waste generated. He showed them the storage procedures for unused capsules and the sealed sharps boxes for used syringes. Raja Mahfouz had a go with a Geiger counter while Noman flicked through the written records submitted to the Ministry of Health.
‘Let me get this straight, you inject people with radioactive isotopes?’
The Safety Officer nodded, enthusiastically. ‘Exactly so, it is extremely effective in the treatment of cancer.’
‘It’s not dangerous?’
‘Ha ha! Only to the area of tissue that is affected by the cancer, you see we use very small quantities.’
Noman frowned. ‘What happens to it after you’ve injected it?’
‘Over a typical patient five-day-stay eighty-five percent of the administered isotope has left the body.’
‘Left the body?’
‘In the natural manner.’
‘They shit it out?’
‘Yes. Indeed, the outlets for the toilets of patients undergoing diagnostic procedures are connected to a delay tank designed for the collection of radioactive isotopes. The tanks are emptied by certified members of the National Union of Sanitary Workers, they transfer the excrement into lockable waste storage trolleys that are secured on site.’
Noman and Raja Mahfouz exchanged glances.
‘Show us,’ Noman said.
#
‘Shit!’ Noman lifted his sunglasses and peered through crusty eyelashes at the rows of locked metal trolleys stretching away into the shadows.
‘Shit,’ Raja Mahfouz agreed.
They were standing in a cavernous hangar hidden away at the back of the institute. Noman’s head was pounding and he was experiencing a scatological epiphany.
‘Holy fucking shit…’
It was mind-boggling, enough to make your brain boil, a whole hangar full of radioactive shit.
‘We keep it here until radioactive decay renders it safe,’ the Safety Officer explained. ‘It might only be a matter of days. Then the waste is buried. The isotopes with the shortest half-life, like Iodine 131, are here at the front and the isotopes with a longer half-life, including Caesium 137, are located at the back of the facility.’
‘What’s the half-life of Caesium 137?’ Noman growled.
‘Thirty years,’ the safety officer replied. He led them about halfway into the hangar. ‘From here on in it is all Caesium.’
‘Open them up,’ Noman said, kicking the nearest trolley.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Open every damn one of them,’ Noman growled.
An hour later they were standing at the back of the hangar surrounded by empty trolleys.
‘They stole the shit,’ Noman said.
‘They stole the shit,’ Raja Mahfouz agreed.
It took Noman only a few minutes of delving about in the data and factoids on the web to come up with a theory. They must have shovelled the shit into a smelter with molten iron for the bomb casing.
#
When Noman found him later that day, Gul Rassoul was standing at the edge of a pond with a bucket beside him and every few minutes he flung a lump of raw meat from the bucket over the railing to the crocodiles in the pond.
‘Pilgrims used to feed them,’ Gul Rassoul explained, ‘but not so much now. The Taliban have banned it. If it wasn’t for my members they might starve.’
The pond was located next to a Sufi shrine in Manghopir, an impoverished neighbourhood of cinderblock houses clustered around marble quarries on the northern edge of the city. As General Secretary of the Sanitary Workers Union, Gul Rassoul controlled a huge workforce spread across the city, many of whom lived in the illegal housing settlements that spilled into the surrounding desert.
‘I’m looking for some missing shit,’ Noman told him.
Gul Rassoul nodded as if the question was not unexpected. ‘The men responsible are no longer employed by the union.’
One of Rassoul’s bodyguards brought a fresh bucket of meat and set it down beside him. There must have been at least a hundred crocodiles writhing and snapping in the pond.
‘Who were these men?’ Noman asked.
‘Nomadic people from the mountains in the north, hard-working resilient fellows who came here five years ago, I think. They stayed on, giving me no complaint. And then one day, eighteen months or so ago, they left.’
‘Three-and-a-half years! They were systematically stealing radioactive waste for three-and-a-half years?’
Gul Rassoul shrugged and flung another lump of meat. ‘Perhaps. Who can say?’
‘Where did they take it?’
‘Back to wherever they came from, a land of stones.’
‘What tribe? What clan?’ Noman demanded.
‘It is said of nomads with no livestock that they have no right to a name let alone a clan or tribe. But I can tell you what I told your colleague, that they lived under a bamiyat – an oath of allegiance – to one known only as the father of smoke.’
‘My colleague?’
‘I think Khan was his name.’
Noman swore under his breath. So Khan knew. Khan, who maintained that the House of War was a tall tale, a bugbear to frighten the Americans, knew that, in reality, the House of War had in its possession enough radioactive waste to manufacture the dirtiest kind of bomb imaginable. Why had he kept it secret? Why was he so adamant that Noman should stay away?
It was as he was striding back to the Range Rover that Noman first caught sight of the boy, a skinny rat-faced beggar in a ragged black overcoat that made him resemble a bat. He was staring at Noman with an impudent expression on his face. Noman might have dismissed him as wholly unremarkable, but there was something about him that made Noman think of himself at that age, the same barely-suppressed orphan anger.
Noman scowled in return and slammed the door behind him as he climbed in the car beside Raja Mahfouz.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
23. Nadifa’s story
The doorbell woke him. Ed looked groggily around. He’d dozed off in front of the television with his father in the chair beside him. The old man was still snoring. He looked at his watch. Two am.
When he opened the door Leyla was standing there with her mother’s X5 blocking the street behind her. She was wearing a black woollen hat and the tip of her nose was pink with cold.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.
‘Can you do me a favour?’
He nodded without thinking. ‘Sure.’
‘I need to go to Newham. Do you think you could come along?’
‘Sure.’
She seemed surprised. ‘Just because you work for my mother doesn’t mean you have to jump to it. You can make your own mind up.’
‘I’ll get my coat.’
He got in the car and she turned the music down. It was Asian Dub Foundation: Where’s All the Money Gone?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m kind of a dick sometimes.’
‘That’s alright.’
She accelerated down the street and turned onto New Road. ‘You’re a boxer, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How come?’
‘It’s a family tradition. My father boxed in the Navy. I boxed at college.’
‘Did you win much?’
‘I won more than I lost, put it that way. Now tell me what’s going on.’
‘It’s something I’ve been working on for a while. A woman has agreed to be interviewed. She works in Forest Gate, off the Romford Road.’
‘She’s working at this hour? What does she do?’
‘She runs a brothel.’
He laughed. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Absolutely.’ She was an impatient driver but wary too, short bursts of rapid acceleration with her eyes roaming the road ahead. ‘The police have launched a crackdown. They’re closing down brothels across the East End and putting ASBOs on the women barring them from the area. They’re putting their pictures up in shops and pushing them through letterboxes. It makes it dangerous for the prostitutes because they can't phone the police to protect themselves. It’s pushing them further underground. If I don’t do this interview now I’m worried I won’t get the chance again.’
‘Does your mother know you’ve got her car?’
‘No. Are you going to tell her?’
He was enjoying himself now. ‘No.’
‘Look, I just need you to be there with me as a precaution. Don’t say anything and don’t start any fights. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal.’
She parked underneath a railway bridge beside an ominous sign encouraging anyone witnessing a collision wit
h the bridge to call an emergency hotline. They walked along the side of the railway arches and cut down an alleyway between two brick walls, emerging onto an expanse of waste ground and a long, low-rise sixties housing block. They stood at the entrance to the block and she pressed a buzzer. Soon after the intercom crackled into life.
‘Name?’
‘It’s Leyla for Nadifa.’
The door clicked and they were in. They climbed two flights of concrete stairs and walked along a corridor past a man zipping his fly. Leyla knocked on a door. A large man with bloodshot eyes opened the door.
‘I’m here to see Nadifa,’ Leyla said.
The large man stepped back and allowed her to enter, but when Ed made to follow he stopped him with one hand. ‘Not you.’
Ed locked eyes with him and, stifling the urge to break the man’s arm, he carefully removed the hand from his chest.
‘She doesn’t go in there without me.’
‘It’s ok,’ Leyla said. ‘You can wait out there. I’ll be fine.’
‘It’s not ok,’ he said, continuing to stare at the man. ‘You don’t go in there without me.’
From inside the flat a woman’s voice called out. ‘Let him in if he’s so keen.’
The man stepped aside. Ed brushed past him and followed Leyla down a carpeted hallway past two closed doors and into a room lit by candles on a low table.
Sprawling on a long sofa was a young black woman with a moon face, long braided hair and painted-on eyebrows that gave her a startled, mask-like expression. She was wearing a white robe with the hood thrown back and the longest nail extensions Ed had ever seen. They were crimson and sharp as blades.
She pointed one of them at Ed. ‘I know you.’
‘No,’ he said, emphatically.
The woman chuckled, ‘Of course not. It was your father.’
‘We’re not that alike.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘You have a pretty face,’ the woman said, switching her attention to Leyla, flashing a sly grin, ‘but you’re too skinny. My clients prefer their bones with flesh on.’