Empire State rh-2

by Henry Porter

  Loz’s eyes were utterly expressionless. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s pretty simple really. The picture you had of Khan wasn’t given to you by a homeless man in New York. You brought it back with you from Afghanistan. For some reason I recall that in 1998 all photography was banned by the Taleban except for official purposes. The portrait of Khan looks very much like the ones from the Taleban’s records recently handed over by the Northern Alliance. So my guess is that you were in Afghanistan in 1998 or 1999 for a period of training and planning. And you managed to get a copy of one of those pictures. You were there. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re forgetting that I’m a Shi’ite.’ He said evenly. ‘The people in Afghanistan were all Sunni Muslims, like Karim.’

  ‘That’s a detail. The point about your war is that it’s not really about religious practice, despite all that bullshit about jihad; it’s about the inequalities between the West and Islam. That’s what you’re fighting against, although the foot soldiers like Khan really have no notion of this. You don’t believe it’s a religious war any more than I do. It’s about economics.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said.

  ‘But look at your life in New York – the material wealth, the women, the fornication. What does the Koran say? “Approach not fornication; surely it is an indecency and evil as a way.” But that is your way. Or is this just the sacrifice you’ve made to create a convincing cover? I think not. I think you genuinely bought all that stuff and you’re such a fucking freak that you manage somehow to reconcile it with your other lives.’

  He shrugged good-naturedly. ‘You think I am a split personality, Isis.’

  ‘Nothing so simple. You have compartments with communicating doors. Each side is conscious of the other and fully aware of what it is doing, but you can close the doors.’

  ‘Maybe you see into me a little.’

  ‘And The Poet?’ she said rhetorically. ‘The Poet doesn’t exist, not in any relevant way today. But I do believe there’s another man you have been protecting, an individual whom Khan knows but doesn’t, or didn’t, see the importance of. He gets it now because you have been schooling the answers he gives me.’

  He shook his head. ‘You won’t be asking Karim any questions now.’ He looked down. ‘But since you have chosen to press the issue, which is certainly an unwise course for you, I can tell you that The Poet exists – it was the name we used in Bosnia when this individual, as you call him, refused to tell us his real name. This lasted a matter of days and when we learnt his real name we stopped calling him The Poet.’

  ‘And this man is running your organisation – another Shi’ite perhaps?’

  ‘I cannot answer you.’

  ‘From Lebanon?’

  He grinned. ‘I can’t tell you these things, Isis.’

  ‘But you can. What good is it to me now? I know what you intend here. What is his name?’

  He thought for a moment and smiled to himself. ‘His name is John.’

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes, John.’ He laughed. ‘Now, we do have some unfinished…’ He looked down. A small green frog had hopped into a pool of light on the floor and remained there, blinking. This was the moment she had been readying herself for. She launched herself from the edge of the bath towards his stomach, but he had anticipated the move. He stepped out of the way, caught one of her arms and pulled her round like a rock’n’roll dancer into his chest. Then he lifted her with a strength that took her by surprise and placed her on the side of the bath, forcing her legs apart.

  ‘No! Not like this,’ she shouted out.

  He stopped and held her by the shoulders. The gun was pointed at her right temple. ‘Then you will behave.’

  She shook her head, thinking only of how she could wrest the gun from him.

  Then he did something odd. He stroked her face, brushing his hand across her lips and eyebrows. He considered her once more. ‘You are a real beauty, Isis. You have a secret beauty. That’s it – a secret beauty.’ He pressed his mouth to hers hungrily and moved between her legs. ‘You understand,’ he said under his breath. ‘I didn’t want it this way. I wanted us to make love like equals.’

  The gun had slipped down and now she was sure it must be pointing at the wall behind her. She put her arms around his neck. As she did so a triumphant smile flickered at the corners of his mouth and he kissed her neck.

  ‘Tell me you want me,’ he said.

  ‘I want you,’ she replied.

  He was touching her breasts. She now felt such loathing for him that she was prepared to risk anything to stop him. The only way that presented itself to her was to use the purchase she now had on his shoulders to headbutt him. But she was slightly above him, and any blow would only connect with the top of his head. She had to get him to look up to her. ‘I want you,’ she said, smiling with as much acquiescence as she could muster and drawing back as though to see him clearly.

  ‘I knew you desired me all along,’ he said.

  Then she hit him, not with her head, but with a chop of her hand at the carotid artery. He fell back but still managed to hold onto her with his left arm. And then she felt the incredible, athletic energy of him as he spun her round so that she was facing the bath, and forced her head down to within a few inches of the water. He was cursing, pulling her robe up and working her legs apart.

  It was then that the first explosion occurred.

  Herrick was thrown upwards and flipped over like a leaf so that she landed half in the bath, her body bent backwards. The blast seemed to have caused the room first to depressurise and then fill with a second deafening thunderclap. She knew nothing for several seconds, but then recovered enough to tell herself that she was still alive. She rolled into the bath and covered her head with her hands, concerning herself only with the masonry and timber falling from the roof. She had heard a cry from Loz at the moment of the explosion, but that was all.

  A few seconds later there was another, equally demonic explosion, but this time another part of the area was hit and she was able to better comprehend what was happening. There were three distinct stages after the initial impact: a huge reverberation that must have been heard twenty miles away, a whoosh of air, and a short time afterwards, sounds of collapse and pulverisation.

  She waited for a third blast, now convinced that the island was under bombardment from the bank of the river. But nothing came, and the only noise she could hear was a fire taking hold somewhere across the courtyard. She began to push upwards against a mass of debris that was trapping her in the bath. It was no good. For minutes on end she grappled with a beam and what seemed to be a large chunk of plaster attached to some stone, which lay across the top of the bath and gave her room to manoeuvre. All the time she could smell the fire taking hold. She lay back in the water, deciding that her best chance was to work at an opening she had found with her foot near the tap. This required her to bunch her legs to her chest and force herself forward in a somersault. It took many contortions and compressions of her frame before she managed it and then she was so out of breath that it was several minutes before she began working to enlarge the hole. At length she thrust her head and right shoulder through it and was able to start shifting larger pieces of stone and wood. A few minutes more and she was free, scrambling through the roof of the bath-house to see the damage in the light of two fires.

  The first explosion had occurred in the rotunda and completely obliterated the structure, together with the stairway and the rooms either side. The second had hit the buildings on the far side of the courtyard. Where Harland and she had sat talking the first night, there was now a crater measuring thirty feet across. The wooden terrace and building had been atomised. She clambered down, cutting her foot on a piece of metal, and reached the ground. Two figures were running towards her from the north end of the island shouting her name. She sank to the ground, and before she knew what had happened, she was looking up into the anxious faces of Philip Sarre and Joe L
apping.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Sarre.

  ‘Yes… I think so. Where the fuck… did you?’ she stopped, spat the dust from her mouth and wiped the blood and sweat from her face. Her eyes and hair were caked in a kind of clay. ‘Where did you two come from?’

  ‘We were over there,’ said Lapping pointing to the east bank.

  ‘Since yesterday. We were told to keep our heads down while you were getting so much from Sammi Loz.’

  ‘But what the hell happened?’

  Sarre shook his head. ‘Joe’ll explain – where are Loz and Khan?’

  She pointed to the bath-house. ‘Loz was in there with me. He must be dead. Khan might be alive. He’s over there in the part that wasn’t hit. I don’t understand,’ she stammered. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We think it was friendly fire,’ said Lapping. ‘It looks very much as though you were hit by a couple of Hellfire missiles delivered by a Predator. We heard it earlier and were halfway across the river when we saw the first strike.’

  They heard Sarre shouting.

  ‘Right, you stay here, old girl,’ said Lapping. ‘I’m just going to see what he wants. Be back in a tick.’

  She looked up. Between the gaps in the smoke the cloud was beginning to clear, and one or two stars were showing again.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As Harland moved towards Immigration at Beirut, acutely conscious that he would benefit from a shave, haircut and a new set of clothes, he noticed a group of three men standing a little way off from the visa counter. One nudged the other two to look in his direction.

  Instead of making for the counter, he arrived in front of them and dropped his bag. ‘Hello there,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Tell me, are you Syrian or Lebanese intelligence?’

  The men shifted and pretended not to understand.

  ‘I was hoping one of you could give me a ride into town.’ He searched their faces expectantly. ‘No takers? Oh well. Just in case you’re wondering, I’m with the United Nations. Robert Harland, Special Adviser to Secretary-General Benjamin Jaidi.’ He opened his passport and offered it to them. They looked the other way and began to walk off, one flicking worry beads, the other two finding the need to consult their cell phones.

  He moved to the kiosk to pay his twenty-five dollars for the visa, then to the counter where his passport received a little stamp showing a sailing barque. Finally he passed through Immigration and Customs and made for the taxi rank, where a shabby Mercedes waited in the warm summer night.

  Both Benjamin Jaidi and Sir Robin Teckman had told him to go to Beirut and, most importantly, it was the only place Eva Rath would agree to meet him when he phoned the number Teckman had given him. The reaction of his vanished partner had been surprising: she offered neither an expression of astonishment about his finding her, nor remorse for her disappearance, but simply forbade him to visit the apartment block in Shabazi Street, Tel Aviv, where she now lived with her mother. She had told him that Hanna Rath was now in her last weeks and she would not stand for Harland disturbing her peaceful end.

  As the Mercedes bumped through the vast new developments in the central district that had risen on the ruins of Beirut’s civil war, Harland found he was curiously at ease with the situation. The pain of her rejection of him had in the last week or so miraculously ebbed away. He was now concerned only with getting answers about her behaviour. Of course he now understood she must have left to look after her mother, who as one of the few Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Czech Republic, had presumably gone to Israel to die. But there were other aspects of Eva’s departure which Teckman had told him about. SIS was certain that she was working for Mossad in a capacity requiring her to move between London, New York and Tel Aviv, possibly as a courier. Having been trained by StB, the security services in communist Czechoslovakia, then by the KGB spy school, Eva would have interested Mossad high command. Harland imagined she must have done a deal that allowed her mother to live the remainder of her days in Tel Aviv with medical assistance, in exchange for Eva’s talents as a spy. It was unsurprising to him. If he’d been asked to describe the unseen parts of his lover, the first would be her need to deceive, the second was her habit of placing herself beyond control by vanishing, and the third was the unbreakable bond with her mother, Hanna. These were to a very large degree the drives of Eva Rath, although the things that had attracted him when he was barely twenty were her nimble intelligence and startling, intimate beauty.

  Why hadn’t she told him? Why not explain? She could never reasonably have doubted his devotion to her. It had spanned nearly three decades and, even in the long period when their son Tomas was growing up and he had no idea of his existence or where she was, he had still nursed his love for her.

  But now, as he thought of her, he felt strangely unburdened. He was amused by things, which quite apart from anything else accounted for his twitting the graveyard shift of intelligence officers at the airport, usually an unwise move.

  He arrived at the Playlands Hotel – specified by Eva and suggested by Teckman – and checked in. There were no messages for him and he tramped off to his bedroom in the southern wing of the hotel where he poured two miniatures from the fridge into a glass and took it into the shower. Fifteen minutes later he was standing on the balcony letting his hair dry in the sea breeze, when there was a knock at the door. He opened it to Eva, who stood in the corridor with a tight, drained smile. He instinctively bent down, took her by the shoulders and let his lips skate across each of her cheeks.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

  She circled a finger in the air, which he took to mean that the room was probably bugged, and they walked through to the balcony.

  ‘Where the hell did you go?’ he said, unable to hide the anger of fifteen months. This was not how he’d planned it.

  ‘Bobby, don’t start…’

  ‘Don’t start! I thought you were dead. I searched everywhere. You just walked out with no explanation, no idea of the hurt you caused me or the effort I would put into finding you.’

  ‘I knew you would eventually.’

  ‘I didn’t – Teckman did. You remember him?’

  ‘Of course. I worked for them, like you, Bobby.’

  He shook his head, wondering at his own earlier nonchalance about seeing her.

  ‘Then why not tell me in the first place? You only had to explain about your mother. I’d have understood.’ He examined her in the light from the illuminated swimming pool beneath them. Her hair was much shorter and as yet unflecked with grey. She was using less make-up than before and had put on a pound or two that showed in her cheeks. If anything, it made her look younger. ‘You look good,’ he said quietly. ‘Really, a lot better than you did in New York.’ He stopped, studied her, then exploded. ‘Jesus… are you incapable of understanding what I felt for you?’

  ‘And you?’ she asked, calmly turning towards the sea. ‘Did it occur to you to ask what I was going through in New York?’

  ‘But I did. I tried to talk about Tomas with you. You said so little that I thought you… Look, I tried. You know that.’

  ‘I knew no one. Only you. You were the one person who knew what I had been through. I had no other witness to my life in New York. Do you understand what I mean? No one who knew that I’d lost Tomas and what that meant to me.’ She stopped. ‘It was never going to work, Bobby. Never. We… our love…’

  ‘Was overwhelmed by circumstances,’ he said.

  She grimaced. ‘Yes, if you want to put it that way. But it was also destroyed by you, Bobby. You didn’t know how to talk to me. Maybe that’s because there was an inequality between us. I lost my son; you hardly knew yours. He was an acquaintance for a few weeks. That’s all.’ Her jaw clamped shut and her eyes welled with tears.

  He touched her on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

  ‘No it isn’t!’ she hissed, recoiling from him. ‘That’s the point. It’s not okay. I’m not E
nglish. I have to be able to talk about this and be with someone who understands what his death means to me now – today. It doesn’t go, you know. It doesn’t just end like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, moved by the pain flaring in her eyes. ‘I admit this is a failing of mine, but I wasn’t responsible for his death. I did everything to try to save him.’ He paused. ‘And you know if you and your mother had not been so close to Viktor Lipnik, Tomas would never have seen the things he did in Bosnia. He wouldn’t have been a danger to Lipnik. It was Viktor Lipnik – your lover – not I, who killed Tomas…’

  ‘Don’t!’ she said. A passionate hatred passed across her face. Without looking down, she felt for the arm of the metal chair and sat at the table.

  ‘I’d like some vodka if you have some.’ This was unlike her. He had only ever seen her drink wine. He went to the minibar, resolving to be calm.

  When he returned with the drinks, he laid his hand on the table near hers. ‘Eva, I’d have done anything to keep you with me. Anything. You knew how much I loved you. You should have helped me, shown me how to talk and listen to you.’

  ‘You can’t tell a man this. Either he knows or he doesn’t know. You don’t, Bobby. That’s why I stopped loving you.’ She paused to consider this. ‘No, that’s not true. I didn’t stop loving you. There are many parts of you that are wonderful; it was just that my love for you was not deep enough to tolerate the way you were ignoring me.’