by Henry Porter
The Lotus glided silently towards a cleft on the island and the boatmen punted the last few yards to the bank with the oar. The shapes of several men appeared and moved down to the river’s edge to catch the boat and lead it into a berth of ancient wooden piles. One man waded through the water holding up a white robe. It was Sammi Loz. He bent down, touched Khan’s shoulder and said something. There was no response.
‘How bad is he?’ he asked Harland.
‘Not good.’
The stretcher was borne up the bank by four men to a group of single-storey buildings arranged loosely around a courtyard and hidden from the river by a screen of vegetation. At the corner of the courtyard, light came from an open door, revealing a room with a faded mural of flowers and exotic birds, a low wooden bed, some chairs and a couple of oil lamps. They lifted Khan from the stretcher and laid him on the bed. He stirred and seemed to recognise Loz, then Herrick, but he plainly doubted what he was seeing and tried to reach out to touch Loz’s face.
Loz told him to stay still, lifting Khan’s head to give him some water and a sleeping pill. When Khan’s eyes closed a few minutes later, Loz set about removing the rags from his friend’s emaciated body with a pair of surgical scissors he’d found in the medical bag. He took each strip of cloth and dropped it neatly into a pile. Then he asked Foyzi to run a light over Khan very slowly so he could see the extent of his injuries. He stopped to look at the burns on his genitals where the electrodes had been applied. He sponged away the grime and blood and dabbed the livid red and black weals with anti-bacterial ointment. With Herrick’s help he rolled Khan onto his side so that he could treat similar injuries on his back, buttocks and the inside of his thighs. Then he cleaned and dressed the chafe marks on his hands and ankles.
Khan’s feet presented a greater problem. They were so swollen and bruised that it was hard to distinguish the toes from the rest of the foot. Loz suspected there might be one or two broken bones but said he wouldn’t be able to tell until Khan had had an X-ray. There was little he could do, apart from giving him painkillers and arnica to help the bruising. He said that many weeks of physiotherapy lay ahead.
Throughout the hour he spent tending his friend, Loz paid as much attention to the general trauma as to the particular injuries, judging the position of his spine and shoulder blades now that he was in repose. He touched the back of his head, neck and pelvis lightly, gazing up to the flickering light on the ceiling to concentrate better on the distortions and misalignments that his fingers found. Occasionally he shook his head but said nothing. At length he asked Foyzi for a pen and paper, and made some notes on his lap.
Harland signalled to Herrick that he was going outside. She followed. They had agreed during the journey that one of them should always be with Khan and Loz to hear anything that passed between them, but Khan was obviously going to be out for some time and Foyzi was keeping a close eye on both of them.
They sat down on an open terrace a little distance away. For several minutes Harland stared down at the insects that had gathered round a light, then shook himself from his reverie and looked at her vacantly. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘What we need is a drink and a smoke. I’ve got some whisky in my bag. Have you got any cigarettes?’
She shook her head.
‘Damn.’
Foyzi came through the door and tossed him a packet of Camel Light. ‘Compliments of the establishment,’ he said, turning back to Loz.
‘Who the hell is Foyzi?’ asked Herrick quietly.
‘He’s in your business, actually – a freelance, as fly as you get. But he’s reliable and loyal.’
‘And all this?’
‘He must have done a deal with the local Islamist nutters for the island. This area is crawling with them. They hide out in mountain caves either side of the Nile.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘He’s Jordanian, based in Turkey. He had something to do with the Iraqi opposition but now works all over the Middle East. I came across him about a year ago when the UN needed a line to Hamas. Foyzi fixed a meeting in Lebanon.’
‘And you trust him?’
‘Yes, so does the Chief.’
They drank for a further fifteen minutes, then Harland looked at his watch and said they should call Teckman. He set up the satellite phone in a clear patch of ground nearby and plugged it into a laptop equipped with powerful encryption software. He dialled three times before getting through to one of the duty officers at Vauxhall Cross. There was a further delay while the office patched through the unscrambled call to the Chief. Harland passed the handset to Herrick. ‘You’re the secret servant round here,’ he said. ‘I’m just the help.’
The Chief came on. ‘Your father is going to be fine – a suspected fracture in his wrist, that’s all. They’ll be back with us by midday today. What about our friends?’
‘He’s sedated, and the osteopath is doing a good job, as far as one can tell.’
‘Well, we’ll send reinforcements to you later. Two of your colleagues are nearby.’ He paused. ‘You’ve all done very well, but now comes the hard part. I need you to get as much as you can, as soon as possible. I know the fellow is in a bad way but you should make a start tomorrow. You can use the computer to send your reports. I’d prefer you do that than spend any time speaking on the phone. If you log on now, Harland will find a message.’
Harland was signalling that he wanted to talk to Teckman, but before she could tell the Chief, he had gone.
‘What’s the bloody hell’s he playing at?’
Herrick told him about the message. For the next ten minutes Harland struggled with the decryption program. Eventually she took over and retrieved the email.
‘Good news, I hope?’ she said.
He shook his head.
‘Well?’
‘It’s nothing important.’
‘Anything that comes through that computer is important. I need to know what it says.’
Harland lit another cigarette. ‘This is personal. A deal which I don’t propose to discuss with you.’
‘If it has a bearing on this situation, I insist you do,’ she snapped.
‘It doesn’t, except that I may have to leave the island over the next day and a half. This is your business now. I don’t work for HMG. I’ve got another job to go to. And I do have to go – the Secretary-General is leaving for Syria and Jordan tomorrow. I must find a way of joining him.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘You’ve got Foyzi. You won’t have any problems. ’
‘Oh yeah, stuck on some bloody island in the middle of the Nile with a known Afghan veteran and a man who has direct links with Hizbollah. That’s to say nothing of the minor interest the Egyptian government and the Americans have in finding Khan and apprehending those who freed him. And when you throw in the Islamic jihad skulking in the mountains, the whole thing is a mere picnic. You bloody well can’t leave me here. I need you. Tell me why you’re really going. It’s not your job.’
Harland shook his head. ‘Look, you knew I had a deal with the Chief. In return for helping to get Sammi Loz out of Albania and bringing him here, the Chief said he would find a friend of mine. And he has now given me the information. This is something I have to do.’
‘Well, which is it? This friend or the job?’
‘Both.’
She sighed heavily and swallowed the remainder of her whisky. ‘I need sleep. I can’t think about this any longer.’
They got up and went to Khan’s room. Loz was sitting on a three-legged stool watching him sleep. He looked up.
‘Thank you for rescuing my friend,’ he said. ‘You have undoubtedly saved his life.’
‘We weren’t doing it as a favour for you,’ said Herrick.
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but you risked much. I am grateful to you both and so will Karim be when he’s able to speak.’
‘Which will be tomorrow. We need to talk to him as soon as he wakes in the morning.’
‘That will be too soon,’ said Loz
evenly.
‘Too bad,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you need some rest, Isis. You look tired.’
‘Don’t tell me what I need. Just make sure he’s ready to speak to us by morning.’
Loz was taken aback. Even Harland was surprised by the sudden flare of temper.
She woke six hours later, and for a few minutes stared through an open door, astonished by the intense, green lush-ness that surrounded her. Apart from a few bird-calls there was a strikingly profound stillness, and she felt that only now had Cairo stopped ringing in her ears. She swung her legs from the bed and glimpsed a reed bank through the trees.
A few minutes later Harland called out from the courtyard and announced he was bringing her coffee. She drew over her the blue cloth that had served as a blanket during the night and said he could come in.
‘Feeling better?’ he said, as his head came round the door. He handed her a bowl of thick, black coffee, and held up a dark blue robe with a hood. ‘It’s been suggested by Foyzi that you might be prepared to wear this while you’re here. He says you won’t be so conspicuous to people passing in boats. If it makes you feel any better, they’ve found me one as well.’
‘That’s fine. Leave it over here,’ she said.
He dropped it on the bed.
‘What about Khan?’
‘He’s still asleep.’
‘Something came to me in the night,’ she said. ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it – a sense that we’re looking at the wrong thing.’
‘Maybe.’ Harland’s shrewd eyes narrowed. ‘Let me know when you think of it. I’ll go back to them now. One of us should be there when he wakes. Why don’t you get something to eat from Foyzi and then relieve me in an hour or so?’
She put on the robe and trainers and walked around the building until she found Foyzi standing by a clay oven. With him was an old man in a brown skull cap and dirty shift who, on seeing her, whisked a roundel of unleavened bread from the fire. Foyzi cooled it by flipping it between his hands, then spun it through the air to her. He walked a little distance to a patch of bare earth and looked up at the smoke from the oven curling to the top of the trees.
‘You should look around,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a place. A piece of paradise.’
‘You’re moving better,’ she said. ‘You’ve lost your limp.’
‘Oh yes, the doctor took a look at me last night and pressed a few buttons,’ said Foyzi. ‘He’s got quite a touch.’
She nodded. ‘“Big lorry jump all over little car,” I liked that. Were you actually hurt in an accident?’
‘Yes, a long time ago in Manchester, England. I worked there for eighteen months. Four of those were spent in hospital with a broken hip bone.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘This and that,’ he replied.
She smiled at the evasion.
‘Okay, I have a question for you,’ he said suddenly in the manner of an eager college student. ‘How did you learn to lip-read?’
She told him about catching meningitis when she was young, the deafness that followed and the operation to cure it a few years later.
‘Only in English, not other languages?’
‘Maybe I can lip-read as many languages as you can do accents, Foyzi,’ she replied.
‘Never,’ he said.
A little later she took Foyzi’s advice and began to look around. From the buildings clustered on the rock plateau in the south to the northern end, the island measured about three-quarters of a mile. At its widest point it was about five hundred yards. The banks were covered in dense shrubbery, but at the centre there were citrus groves, palms and several large dark green trees which bore fruit Herrick didn’t recognise. There were also a few square fields cultivated with strips of lucerne, bananas, maize and flower crops, mostly roses and marigolds. Between these grazed tethered water buffalo, goats and a lone donkey.
There was very little noise as she walked – the rustle of a lizard over dead leaves, a bird call or the cough of buffalo – and because she barely glimpsed the river, the only sense she had of it was the smell of heated mud banks and an occasional distant whoosh caused by the current tugging at an obstacle on the bank. In a glade at the northern end she came across the old bread maker, who had made his way there along a more direct path, and was contemplating a wall constructed of drainage pipes and mortar. From the openings spilled swarms of bees that hung in the sun like skin pelts drying. He lifted the swarms with a stick, talking to them in a falsetto.
She made her way back and found a spot where she could see all the buildings and realised they had been designed to look like the blunt prow of a ship forging up the river. They were almost completely hidden from both banks of the Nile by vegetation, and even from where she stood they appeared deserted, a ruin from a colonial past.
She continued walking, deep in thought. She had never been so impressed by the beauty and stillness of a place, yet was aware of its dangerous isolation. The Chief had planned it this way, she was sure. He expected something to happen, some revelation to occur. And when it did, he wanted Loz and Khan away from the world and unable to communicate.
She went to Khan’s room and saw that he was still asleep.
‘I think you had better wake him,’ she told Loz.
He shook his head. ‘We’ve tried.’
She looked at Harland who nodded to agree with Loz. ‘I want him conscious by midday,’ she said, ‘even if it means throwing water over him. Is that understood?’
‘We will do our best,’ said Loz.
‘Just get him to the point where he can answer my questions, ’ she said, and turned on her heel. Harland followed, leaving Foyzi to watch them.
They walked to the most shaded part of the island in the east where a tree grew out into the river. Herrick perched on a low branch.
‘So now you’re going to tell me about this woman?’
He looked at her for a while, then shrugged. ‘She left six weeks after nine-eleven,’ he said. ‘November first to be precise. Just vanished. No letter, message or phone call; no activity on her checking account; no record of her having left the United States or having bought a plane ticket in her own name. Nothing.’
‘Had you been together long?’
‘About a year. I fell for her nearly thirty years ago. That didn’t work out, then we got together a couple of years back. It was after the business in the Balkans. You probably heard about it.’
‘I know it did for Walter Vigo – at least temporarily. You had a son together?’
‘Yep. When he died it was a very deep shock to her. She moved to be with me in New York but never settled down. She didn’t know anyone there and turned in on herself. My job took me away. It was difficult.’
‘And you tried to trace her?’
Harland nodded. ‘She knew how to disappear. She did it once before when we were young.’
‘Where is she?’
‘In Tel Aviv.’
‘She’s Jewish?’
‘Yep, though it was never particularly important to her, apart from the fact that her mother’s family in Czechoslovakia was wiped out in the Holocaust. Her mother was the only one left.’
Herrick thought for a moment. ‘Maybe she was reclaiming her Jewish ancestry. Trying to put herself in some kind of context.’
Harland nodded. ‘Something like that.’
‘How did they find her?’
‘Spotted her at Heathrow, followed her and then traced her to Israel.’
She thought, he’s holding something back. Either that, or there’s something else he doesn’t understand.
‘So you’ll try to see her?’
‘Yes, I’ll go directly from here. I’ve got work in Damascus anyway.’
‘And you have to go now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve got a bloody job to do.’
By the early afternoon the mercury in an old enamel thermometer in her room rea
ched the 105-degree mark. Nothing moved. The leaves on the trees hung limp and the birds and insects had long ceased to make any sound. In search of some movement in the air, Herrick climbed to a covered turret and looked across the swathes of green either side of the river to the unforgiving mountains in the west and east. Harland spotted her and shouted up that Khan was awake. She rushed down the narrow stairway and went to the room with him.
‘How are you?’ she asked, approaching the bed.
‘He’s doing very well,’ said Loz.
‘That’s good,’ she said, smiling at Loz.
‘I was just telling him that he must have lost forty pounds since I saw him last,’ said Loz. ‘I can’t believe he’s still alive.’ There was certainly love in his eyes but also an expectant look.
‘Have you explained that we have to ask him some questions? ’ she asked.
‘It is too soon,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think he has the strength.’
She crouched down so that she was at eye level with Khan. ‘We know you’ve suffered terribly,’ she said softly, ‘but I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking to us for a little while?’
He glanced at Loz. ‘That will be all right,’ he said. Again the perfect English she’d heard in Albania surprised her. ‘I can try to help.’
She put the notepad and digital recorder down and touched his hand. ‘I’m really sorry about this, Karim. The moment you feel too tired you must tell us.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘But there are some things that are… not very clear at the moment.’
‘He’s on very strong painkillers,’ Loz interjected.
‘Can I ask you about The Poet?’
‘I’ve already told you about him,’ said Loz.
‘I know, but we really do need to find out more about him.’ She turned to Khan. ‘The Poet, who is he?’
‘The Poet was a man in Bosnia. But this was only our name for him.’
‘What was his real name?’
Khan shook his head helplessly.
‘You know that a man calling himself The Poet went to see Dr Loz in New York to ask him for money? He mentioned your name and after Dr Loz had given him the money he gave him a photograph of you. Mr Harland has it here.’ Harland delved into his shirt pocket and handed it to her. ‘Is that you?’