by Henry Porter
He hung up and waited a full ten minutes as Simcek continued to brief his men. Then the phone rang again. This time it was Anastasia. ‘Naji’s here,’ she said breathlessly. ‘We were talking then he saw someone and ran off.’
‘Where are you?’
‘In the streets beyond the marketplace – it’s really hard to describe. It all looks the same. I’m looking for him now.’
‘I can’t move. Try to get hold of the boy and wait somewhere until I can come. Have you told Vuk?’
‘No, you were both on the phone – I couldn’t get through. I’ll call him.’
‘I’ll tell him to come to you.’
Samson hung up and dialled Vuk, but before the call could connect the battery died. He swore and dropped the phone in his lap. Another two or three minutes passed before the briefing ended and Simcek returned to his car. Samson eased the driver’s door open, rolled out of the seat and moved with his head down to behind the cattle truck, where he turned to see if the police had spotted him. They hadn’t – in fact, they were now dispersing in every direction except his. He waited a couple of beats before choosing the best line between the stalls and jogging through the crowds to the other side of the market.
*
Naji’s methodical search ended suddenly in the last line of market stalls when his eyes fell on Dr Anastasia, the woman who had been so good to him in the camp in Greece. She was wearing a white bobble hat and a dark olive puffer jacket and was facing away from him, talking to the woman from the mobile medical centre. He circled them to make sure it really was the doctor, wondering what she was doing talking to the aid worker. It looked like they knew each other, which he guessed wasn’t impossible. For one crazy moment he thought that she might have come all the way from Greece to take him back to the camp. But then she happened to look in his direction and their eyes met and her face lit up, and he sort of knew that wasn’t the reason she was there. She left the woman from the medical centre and hurried towards him. There was a part of him that still wanted to run, but her smile held him to the spot and he became aware of a sudden desire to tell her everything that had happened to him and about his little sister’s death.
‘Naji,’ she said, as she reached him and took his hands in hers. ‘Oh Naji, we’ve been searching for you everywhere. I’m so pleased to find you.’ She held him at arms’ length with a worried expression. ‘You’ve lost so much weight!’
He looked down self-consciously. It wasn’t what she’d said, it was the warmth in her face. And she was so very beautiful. All the kids in the camp thought so.
‘What a journey you’ve been on,’ she said, cupping his face with the palm of her hand. ‘I’m truly amazed by you, dear Naji. You are so brave.’ He might well have collapsed into her arms then and there, but he noticed that when she mentioned his name for a third time a head whipped round in a group of men to his left. The face was mostly hidden by a hood and was turned to Naji for only a fraction of a second, but that was enough for him to recognise Ibrahim. He froze. Anastasia gripped his arms and asked what was the matter. He looked down and muttered, ‘They’re here.’
‘Who?’ she demanded, looking around. ‘Who’s here?
He wrenched himself free, and flinging her a look of anguish, he sprinted away. But he did not go straight to the café. Instead, he ran in the opposite direction and then for about ten minutes darted back and forth through Pudnik’s murky streets, occasionally pausing to see if he had been followed. Eventually, he went to the street where Darko’s tractor was parked and slipped into the café. Darko was sitting alone, counting out notes on the table. He was smoking a sweet-smelling cheroot and in front of him were three empty shot glasses. A fourth was filled to the brim with a dark orange liquid, which he jokingly proffered to Naji as he approached. Naij couldn’t believe he had drunk so much – he’d only been away for forty-five minutes.
He tugged at Darko’s sleeve and frantically gestured that they must leave, trying to communicate his terror. But Darko was not to be hurried. He chucked back the contents of the last glass on the table, returned the cheroot to his lips, patted his pockets, stood, straightened his cap in the mirror, waved to the bartender then, wrapping an arm round Naji’s shoulders, aimed himself at the door and set off unsteadily.
When they reached the tractor, Darko handed Naji the key and gestured that he should put it in the ignition then perch to the right of the driver’s seat, which he had seen Irina do the day before. After a couple of attempts, Darko managed to haul himself through the door and plant his bottom on the seat, but this seemed to take it out of him and he had to rest his head on the wheel for a few seconds. Finally he started the engine, which he did by pulling out a choke button and pumping the accelerator, then with a great effort of concentration he reversed the tractor and trailer so he could clear the car in front of them.
Now they were moving slowly towards the outskirts of Pudnik, the tractor’s two tiny headlights making a double prong ahead of them in the fog. As well as watching out for anyone who might be following, Naji kept his eyes on the road, and twice in the first few hundred metres of their journey he had to move the wheel to stop them scraping a line of parked cars on their right. Darko didn’t seem to mind his intervention, and puffed away at the cheroot with a tipsy grin on his face. At a set of traffic lights, where they were turning left, they became stuck behind a truck that had broken down and Darko had to put his mind to reversing once more to steer round it. As they turned into the much smaller road and began to climb, Naji became aware of a voice screaming his name. He glanced down. Anastasia was running alongside the tractor and waving wildly at them. He tapped Darko’s shoulder and pointed to her, but it seemed that now he had set course for home nothing was going to deter him, and he accelerated. Naji made a helpless gesture. At first Anastasia quickened her pace, then she dropped behind the trailer, grabbed hold of the tailgate, jumped up and scrambled over it. Naji was amazed. He couldn’t believe that the beautiful doctor could vault into a moving trailer, and he waved excitedly to her. Then, as Darko accelerated more, he saw panic sweep her face. She clutched the pockets of her jacket, stood up and felt her jeans, then stared back down the road, aghast. Naji understood exactly what had happened – she had lost her phone when she was running or jumping into the trailer. He tried to get Darko to stop but the old man refused to take any notice. By then he had his hands full keeping the tractor on the road.
*
Samson circled back to Hisami’s car, having searched the market and streets around it. He found Vuk lounging against the side of the car, smoking and talking to Hisami. He got in the back seat and opened the window so Vuk could hear him. ‘That phone you gave me is dead,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to switch mine on, which I didn’t bloody well need. Did you hear from Anastasia? I can’t get her.’
‘She called,’ said Vuk, bridling at Samson’s tone.
‘And?’
‘She say she found Naji. She talk to him. Then he run away because he saw man. Then she see boy again on tractor and she follow him.’
‘What man?’
‘She did not say what man.’
‘Jesus wept. Didn’t you ask her?’
‘No. She go to follow tractor.’
‘A tractor – she’s following a bloody tractor? Where to?’
Vuk shrugged and stamped his cigarette into the tarmac.
‘Why isn’t she answering then? I’ve called her half a dozen times in the last five minutes – it’s ringing out.’
‘Can I help?’ asked Hisami calmly.
‘We need to find Anastasia and the boy. I’m certain that while every intelligence agency in Europe has apparently been conducting a surveillance operation on an old people’s home in Bosnia, the Macedonian intelligence service had reason to believe that Al-munajil and his team never left their country. I just saw Simcek handing out mugshots to his officers. It suggests they’ve got
hard information about their presence in Pudnik. Maybe Simcek knocked the information out of the two men I helped them arrest the day before yesterday.’ He stopped to think. ‘Simcek didn’t want me here, because I was competition in the hunt for Al-munajil. He wants the kudos of arresting the lot by himself.’
Hisami turned to him and said, ‘With your phone on, they’ll know you’re here.’
‘Yes, but that’s the least of our worries. If Naji fled because he recognised someone then there’s every chance he and Anastasia have been followed. So let’s think about where they might have gone. From the direction he ran yesterday, we know that Naji is somewhere to the south of Pudnik. So if we take the tractor story at face value and Vuk has got the right word, it means Naji has found help, probably at a farm in the mountains not very far from where his friend was shot. Does that make sense?’
Hisami nodded. Vuk looked annoyed and said, ‘Tractor is tractor.’
‘And we know from the number of bandages Naji stole that his friend is probably quite badly hurt and cannot travel,’ continued Samson. ‘I’d guess they are pretty close to where they were attacked.’
‘That all seems logical,’ said Hisami.
‘So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll take your car up the mountain, and Vuk, you will drive Mr Hisami back to the hotel in your car.’
‘I am coming with you,’ said Hisami.
‘That’s not possible,’ said Samson, in an equally matter-of-fact tone.
‘Well, this happens to be my vehicle and you are also working for me, Paul.’
‘You have shareholders, investors – people that rely on you. And someone should be in Pudnik in case Anastasia returns.’
Hisami shook his head slowly. ‘We all know that Anastasia will stay with that tractor if she’s seen Naji on it,’ he said. ‘I’m coming with you and that’s all there is to it. Vuk will stay here.’
‘There’s a lot of ground to cover. It’s probably going to be a fruitless search.’
‘All the more reason for you to have company. Shall we go?’
Samson’s phone rang. He answered, noting that it wasn’t Anastasia calling.
‘Hi,’ said the caller. ‘It’s Jamie O’Neill.’ Samson grimaced. ‘I was just hoping you might give us a bit of help.’
‘How?’ asked Samson, surprised that O’Neill had not immediately mentioned that he knew he was still in Macedonia and not Austria.
‘Can you turn on your encrypted phone? Then we can talk.’
Samson hung up, switched on the satellite phone, waited it for to fire up then called O’Neill’s number.
‘The thing is, we’ve become very interested in Firefly’s phone in the last few hours. Of course, we copied everything from it a few days ago when you took it from Al Kufra, but there are things we don’t understand, in particular some screen grabs that he stored in his photos several months ago. Do you have the phone with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Samson, delving inside his leather jacket. He turned Naji’s battered phone on and went to the camera roll. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘It’s an album called “Sikinsabbi”, which I think translates roughly from the Arabic as “knife boy”, though you would know better than me.’
‘Kind of,’ said Samson.
‘Right, go to the first photos at the top.’
Samson scrolled to the top and saw a series of geometric structures that resembled buildings and were made out of layers of vivid colours. ‘Yes, I’ve seen them before. He did a drawing along the same lines in the camp. What are they?’
‘We think they’re a computer constructed by Firefly in an online game. It looks like a fully functioning computer to the people at Cheltenham. There are quite a few of them out there, mostly made by kids showing off to each other.’
‘I don’t quite . . .’
‘They construct computers in the virtual world of online games, and they use them like any other computer to store information, but naturally only the person who builds the computer knows how to access and use it. If Naji has information, that’s almost certainly where he’s stored it. Cheltenham is trying to locate this structure on the web but have had no success so far. They think it likely that he hid the access codes somewhere on the phone, but they haven’t found them either. So, all we need to know from the boy is where this computer is and how to get into it. This has become a very urgent matter, Paul.’
‘What about the others in the north? The action there?’ Samson asked, knowing that O’Neill would understand he was talking about the joint operation in Bosnia.
‘Can’t tell – things are still unclear. But this request I am making about the phone comes from the very top.’
‘You do know that our arrangement was terminated this week,’ said Samson. ‘They said they didn’t need my help.’
‘I’ll find out about that, but would you mind helping out?’
‘As long as you keep that particular party off my back and get word to the locals to leave me alone.’
‘Consider it done. Thanks a lot. Hear from you soon.’
Samson said goodbye and opened the rear door. ‘If you’re coming,’ he said to Hisami, ‘you’d better get in the passenger seat, because I’m driving.’ Hisami nodded and got out, while Samson took some cigarettes from Vuk. ‘Don’t do one of your vanishing acts,’ he told him. ‘Stay on the phone! If Anastasia calls, she’s likely to try your number because she doesn’t know I’m using my own phone.’
‘I not vanish,’ said Vuk solemnly.
*
Naji was doing most of the steering by the time they cleared the forest, following a track marked with posts that were topped with orange paint and small plywood double arrows that pointed up and down the hill. He had noticed them on the way down, although Darko hadn’t used them to navigate because he knew the way so well. But they were helpful going back to the mountain farm in the fog. They also had their own tyre tracks to follow and those of the vet’s quad bike. When he could, Naji waved to Anastasia, who was clinging to one side of the trailer to stop being thrown about. He didn’t have a lot of time to think, but he certainly asked himself what she was doing in Pudnik and why she was so desperate to find him. But mostly his thoughts were haunted by the cruel gaze that had settled on him from beneath Ibrahim’s hood. And that was the main reason he glanced behind the trailer so often as they crossed the slope to the hanging valley where Darko’s farmhouse lay hidden behind a clump of pine trees.
At the sound of the tractor entering the yard below the house, Irina rushed down the steps and started scolding Darko, who waved to her good-naturedly before swinging his legs out of the cab and half-falling into her arms. Naji attempted to introduce Dr Anastasia, but Irina took little notice, and anyway, Naji was at a loss to know how to explain her presence in sign language. Instead, he shrugged.
‘So this is where you’ve been hiding,’ said Anastasia, looking around then peering hard into his face. ‘How are you, Naji, apart from losing all that weight?’
He had never told her his name, but he liked her using it. He shrugged again. ‘I saw Ibrahim,’ he said. ‘He is Al-munajil’s man. Ibrahim goes nowhere without Al-munajil, so that means Al-munajil is here, too, and he will kill me. In the camp I told you about these men who want to kill me and you did not believe me.’
‘I did believe you, but you ran away before I could help, Naji. However, now I am here and Paul Samson is in Pudnik and you will be safe.’ She stopped to admire the horse, cattle and pigs that had poked their heads out of various stalls and were watching them with interest. ‘This is a wonderful place you’ve found.’
‘Ifkar – that is my friend – wants to remain here with Moon, who is his dog. She was shot, too.’
‘Who was shooting at you?’
‘Two of Al-munajil’s men, but we beat them and they ran off. I threw their gun away. I wish I�
�d kept it. I was dumb.’
She smiled at him. ‘No, you weren’t. It was good you threw it away: it was symbolic.’
‘Symbolic? What does that mean?’
‘Ah! For once I have found a word you don’t understand! It means you weren’t just throwing the gun away – you were saying that you’ve had enough of all the violence you have witnessed. That action was a symbol of all your disgust.’
‘I understand – but violence to defend yourself is good, no?’
‘It’s never good, but it is excusable, yes.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s go in and I can meet your friends properly and then we can decide what to do.’
Inside the farmhouse, Darko had already been pushed into another room to sleep it off. Ifkar lay on the couch with his good arm crooked over his head. Beside him was Moon, who gave them a single tail wag. Ifkar was now much better, and it pleased Naji that Anastasia’s looks caused him to blush and become completely tongue-tied when she greeted him with her few words of Arabic.
Irina brought them a drink that Anastasia identified as mountain tea, made from the flowers of a particular herb and used to treat colds and chest infections, and a cake called kozinjak. She wondered about the best way of contacting Samson; she was without her phone and she didn’t know any of his or Vuk’s numbers by heart. They talked about using the landline to call Naji’s sister, who would be able to give them Samson’s number, but then Anastasia remembered Samson was using Vuk’s old phone, and of course Munira didn’t have that number.
Naji rang his sister on the landline several times and left messages, giving a good description of where the farm was in relation to Pudnik, which he doubted would be relayed to Samson with any accuracy should he call her.
Anastasia also spoke a little Macedonian, and as Irina knew some Greek, they were able to converse quite well as they watched Ifkar consume nearly all the cake. Anastasia explained she was a psychologist and told Irina some of what Naji had been through in the last few months, including his near drowning and Yasmin’s death. As the story unfolded, Irina looked more and more appalled and kept touching Naji’s head, which irritated him quite a bit, partly because he didn’t know what was being said.