Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

Queller smiled thinly, as if he enjoyed seeing Altenburg get a run for his money.

  ‘I took a long weekend –’ Miranda explained, in a more reasonable tone, ‘– went over to the island for a few days and met up with him there. When I came back, I decided it wasn’t going anywhere. So what? I got clearance. The trip’s logged in the day files. Did they survive?’

  ‘Rather to my surprise,’ said Altenburg, ‘they did.’

  ‘The MSG put them in a fireproof safe, right?’

  Altenburg nodded. The agent came back in and passed him a printout. He took off his glasses and read it.

  ‘Well?’ enquired Queller.

  ‘I guess he’s legit,’ replied Altenburg. He sounded vaguely disappointed. ‘Now, there’s another tape I would like you to look at.’

  Miranda tossed her hair.

  ‘I’m just doing my job,’ Altenburg responded primly, as he cued up the new tape.

  He pressed the ‘PLAY’ icon, and they waited for another image to appear as the computer counted up the bytes. When it did, what the screen showed was a man with light-brown hair standing opposite one of the gateways to the embassy: the one where the water tanker and the bomb truck had come in. Juma’s post. The man was wearing a baseball cap with the words ‘SPORT TEAM OSNABRÜCK’ on it. Most of his face, which was brown-skinned, was obscured by the video camera he was holding up. The image only lasted a few seconds, before a bus passed and he was gone.

  ‘Do you know anything about this guy?’ asked Altenburg, rewinding and playing the stream again.

  ‘I remember the incident. One of the security guards alerted me to it and I came down. But the man had gone. I made an incident report in the day book.’

  Altenburg removed a piece of paper from her file. ‘Yes, I’ve dug that out, as I said. Your report in the day book. In which you recommend no action be taken. Why was that?’

  ‘There was not much we could do. He was gone. He told the guard he was a tourist.’

  ‘Indeed. That is what it says. Now, of course, it looks different. It looks like he was conducting surveillance of a target.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘But am I not right in thinking that DS regulations state that in all cases of surveillance of a diplomatic institution, Washington should immediately be notified?’

  Miranda hesitated. ‘I … believe that is correct – but I didn’t think it was surveillance!’

  She looked at Queller. His face betrayed not the slightest emotion.

  ‘I’m telling the truth,’ she said.

  Altenburg put his hands together and stared at her across the desk. She could see, in his hard blue eyes, the scepticism invited by her assertion.

  Eventually he spoke. ‘I’ll be frank with you. This does not leave you in a good place. I will be putting in my report that you were possibly negligent in your duties in not checking the truck. I have already recommended to DS your suspension from post until the matter has been gone into further.’

  ‘You’re shitting me,’ said Miranda, feeling something waste inside her.

  ‘I most certainly am not,’ said Altenburg.

  It was then he dropped his bombshell. ‘In fact, my recommendation has been accepted. The suspension comes into effect immediately.’

  Miranda could hardly draw breath. It was all so sudden. She felt a hot rush of blood to her face, and tears come to her eyes.

  ‘This is very precipitate,’ said Queller, shaking his head. ‘Surely any disciplinary matter should wait till after the investigation?’

  ‘Let me remind you who is chief investigating officer here,’ Altenburg said, standing up. ‘Your role is only advisory.’

  He picked up his jacket off the back of the chair and folded it fastidiously over his arm.

  ‘I suggest you return home, Miss Powers, and wait to hear from us. And now, if you will excuse me, I have to go.’

  As Altenburg closed the door, Queller went over to comfort her, lightly placing his hand on her heaving shoulder.

  ‘Look, I swear I had no idea he was going to spring that on you.’

  She shook her head several times from side to side.

  ‘Come on,’ said Queller. ‘It’ll sort itself out.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything?’ she said, chokily.

  ‘Do you want me to drive you home?’

  ‘I can drive myself.’

  ‘I’ll drive,’ Queller insisted. ‘You’re too upset. Leave your vehicle here.’

  Acquiescing, she went out down to the lobby with him, passing other embassy staff waiting for interview. Some of them, recently released from hospital, were bandaged. Miranda avoided their eyes, feeling the stain of guilt that Altenburg had laid upon her.

  It was dusk. They found the jeep Queller had been supplied with on arrival. He drove out of the city and, following Miranda’s muttered instructions, east along the coast road to Oyster Bay. The vehicle was an automatic, and he had already attached the stainless-steel bulb to the steering wheel, which allowed him to drive more easily with one hand.

  The flame trees that grew around Miranda’s bungalow were glowing a deep orange in the dying sun.

  ‘Beep the horn,’ she muttered, when they pulled up outside the gates.

  He did so, and the old nightwatchman, dressed in ragged khaki and carrying a staff, emerged from his booth and let them in. Hands shaking, Miranda found her keys and opened the door. She went straight over to the sofa and lay down on it, clutching a cushion to her chest like a child.

  ‘Got anything to drink?’ asked Queller.

  She nodded at a corner cupboard. He took out a bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses.

  ‘Don’t worry about this,’ he said, handing her a glass. ‘I’ll fix it. Where’s your phone?’

  ‘Bedroom. Bedside table.’

  He went through and sat on the unmade bed. There were bits and pieces of feminine underwear and other clothing strewn about. He felt like a voyeur. The room smelt sweet, and as he dialled – holding the handset under his stump – his eyes scanned the dressing table under the window. The usual crowd of perfume phials and make-up stuff. Also – by the bed – a little shell of some kind, rather beautiful. He could hear the muzz and gap of the long-distance line, then a beep: ‘Department of State. How can I help you?’

  *

  In the lounge, staring numbly at the wall, Miranda listened to Queller’s half of the conversation.

  ‘Put me through to the Secretary. Clearance 78034 JQ.’

  ‘Maddy? Jack Queller here.’

  ‘Dar. Pretty grim, but not so rough as the other place. It’s a big job, as you know. We’ll get them though, eventually … I’m just hearing statements. Listen, you know that FBI guy I mentioned to you when I agreed to come out on this? Well, I’ve run into a problem with him already …’

  Miranda listened as he explained what had happened. Her ears were still hurting from the blast.

  ‘He’s gone way overboard on this, and had the poor girl suspended. I’m convinced she’s clean.’

  ‘You can take my word for it.’

  She felt a rush of gratitude, but wondered how, as an intelligence pro, he could be so adamant. Why should they believe him, anyway?

  ‘I know you won’t want to intervene in an ongoing operation, but can you do me a favour? Her name’s Miranda Powers, she’s a junior in Diplomatic Security.’

  ‘That’s right. P-O-W-E-R-S.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to overrule Altenburg directly. The disciplinary aspect will run its own course. There is no case for her to answer. In the meantime, I want her reassigned to me as a local adviser. I know it’s non-procedural but –’

  There was a long pause during which Miranda imagined the distinguished other party speaking from her Washington office, raising objections and qualifications.

  Finally Queller spoke again.

  ‘Thanks, Maddy. I won’t let you down on this.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  After telling Mirand
a his plans for her, Queller insisted she ate some sandwiches, going to the refrigerator and making them himself. They drank more bourbon, it got late, and then she didn’t want him to leave, so he agreed to sleep on the couch, making her laugh through her tears when he said it wouldn’t be so cramped for him as he only had one arm. She went through to her bedroom, got undressed, and into the sheets. As she sank into sleep, she wondered what it would mean, exactly, to be his local adviser. She would ask him in the morning.

  *

  When she woke up, hung-over, he was gone. Wandering into the kitchen in her white towelling robe, a thousand thoughts rushed through her head, varying and shifting like a mist. Unsteady, she made herself some coffee and went through to run a bath.

  Usually she took brisk showers, but that was in the time before: the time when her integrity and professionalism were intact and she believed herself worthy. The bath was a refuge, and right now that was what she needed.

  Her face in the mirror had a sickly, greenish hue, and was still covered in numerous small scabs from the glass. The marks were like tiny zippers, the crust breaking at regular intervals as the skin underneath healed. She shuddered. Some people had suffered terrible scorching burns that would mark them for life. How could it be her fault?

  Lying in the tub, head pounding, her thoughts continued to turn. The interview session replayed itself, flashes of memory veering, backing, cannoning into each other. Then Queller’s fixing that she work for him directly. At least this was some kind of solution; at least it meant she wouldn’t be mooching around until the hearing.

  Steam rose about her, clouding the window. Beyond the glass, in the thick bush they loved and sometimes descended upon in their hundreds, the quelea birds were singing. The flowers on the bush made her think of Zanzibar and the Macpherson gardens … Nick Karolides.

  She slipped under the water, closing her eyes against the enamelled brightness, her scratched skin stinging. Should she call him? He must have heard about the bombs. Was it fair to expect him to have tried to call her, considering how she’d effectively brushed him off on her return to Dar?

  She came up for air, then stood up and soaped her legs. She liked the idea, heard somewhere or other, of distributed memory: the body remembering, every piece of it thrilling with information deeper and more primitive than conscious thought. And what it said was this: Nick’s strong hands moving over her. She imagined him swimming through the water, or simply floating, the wave motion lapping him.

  And now she was down in the water again herself, filled with melancholy and longing. Her feet were up on the taps, her little toes curling. The sponge danced gently, an island on her stomach.

  24

  Over the course of the next two days, in a stuffy room at the Kilimanjaro Hotel, Miranda worked with Jack Queller. Computers and secure phone lines had been installed. Everything was on a direct satellite uplink to Washington. The job was to process. To sift and analyse. Data was beginning to come in from the bomb sites, as the FBI gathered fragments of physical evidence, analysed photographs, and interviewed witnesses. Traces of ammonium nitrate and TNT were found at Nairobi on analysis of cotton swabs taken at the blast site.

  ‘That is the primary blasting agent in many home-made bombs,’ Queller told her on their first morning together. ‘The next thing will be to find evidence of the detonators, which can range from anything like Casio watches with nine-volt batteries to mercury tilts and complex electronic timing devices. Usually blasting caps and detonation cord are used. It’s like a rope, det cord, made of another explosive that ignites easy. About ten centimetres of det cord is good to ignite five kilos of TNT. Or one blasting cap for the same amount.’

  In Dar, the men in the Tyvek suits had also found remnants of TNT. There had been some arrests. Fourteen foreigners had been picked up by the Tanzanian police and turned over to the FBI for interrogation: six Iraqis and the same number of Sudanese, plus one Turk and one Somali. Queller said he thought these men would turn out to be innocent.

  ‘There’s always a kind of panic after something like this. A need to pin down likely culprits.’

  ‘I had noticed that,’ she said, and Queller laughed.

  Miranda started going through massive caches of data under his instruction, applying various filters and keyword searches. It was all SIGINT, or signals intelligence, that had been sent over that morning. The National Security Agency had scoured its digital and other records of recent global communication, using satellites, ocean cable taps, electromagnetic listening devices and direct feeds from Internet servers. Expert cryptological linguists had been going over hundreds of hours of phone calls, radio transmissions and emails, in particular from the main terrorist ‘host nations’, including Libya, Lebanon, Sudan and Afghanistan.

  The room smelt of old fabrics, the traffickings of life. She imagined businessmen coming and going. Deals done, exchanges made. She stared at the screen. She felt disconnected. Not the same person as she had been before. There had been a loss of continuity. Everything seemed fragmented, speculative, unstable. There was a weird sort of incongruence about her: today’s and yesterday’s self asking each other, Who are you? Raw emotion was the only corrective to this feeling that nothing seemed to have any foundation any more. Now and then, waves of cold anger swept over her as she thought about her suspension. Then she would put herself straight and try to think rationally about what had happened. About victims. About perpetrators.

  At least two terrorists had been killed in the Nairobi blast, it was thought. Their bodies had been partially recovered. The rescue operation was still continuing, but hopes of finding anyone left alive under the rubble were fading fast. Rescuers had been pumping oxygen into collapsed areas. They had been working like maniacs, but were becoming despondent about the chances of anyone having survived. Sniffer dogs, heavy-duty balloons, pneumatic jacks, and cutters capable of slicing through cement and iron had all been employed. But again, it didn’t seem likely now that they could do any good.

  Queller was certain it was the group led by Osama bin Laden that was behind the bombs. But he still hadn’t been able to persuade Altenburg of this. Miranda remembered Queller talking about bin Laden back in Washington all those months ago.

  ‘Why wasn’t something done, if you knew he was such a threat even back then?’

  ‘I knew. As I said, others were not convinced. They still aren’t.’

  He told her that SIGINT had picked up several potential threats to US diplomatic installations in the meantime, but that the intelligence machine had not acted on them.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ she asked, experiencing again that strange sense of disjunction. She had a feeling that whatever came out of the rubble of the bombs, it would not be clarity.

  Queller’s answer confirmed her suspicions.

  ‘Traffic work is like netting chaos. There are hundreds of thousands of interceptions every day. You’ve got to think of the size of the NSA’s collection system versus the amount of information in the world. Even at high speed – chomping through billions of bits a second – it is never going to cope. You can’t have total awareness, so you have to put in filters. Then you miss stuff because the filters might be too specific. Very few inputs of information meet the criteria for forwarding to analysis.’

  Miranda looked at the one-armed man, and felt a sense of awe about the hidden world he was describing. A world that was a sort of deepening gulf, a place where information was endlessly proliferating, resistant to explication or validation.

  ‘And then, when we do get a hit, we can’t be sure it’s not degraded intelligence. High-level targets very often know we’re on to them. I’ve been monitoring bin Laden data for years and I’ve learned that he just likes to taunt and provoke. He even gave an interview on CNN – less than a year ago. There was even one in Reader’s Digest.’

  ‘Does he think he won’t be caught, going on TV or speaking to people like that?’

  ‘He thinks Allah is protecting him.’
<
br />   ‘So he’s kind of open about his plans?’

  ‘He uses a portable satellite phone, like those used by ships or explorers. Yes, he chats away. But he is open about particular operations only in the most rhetorical way.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This might give you an idea,’ Queller said. He dug around for a piece of paper. ‘British MI6 sent this through yesterday. “To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the kufr armies, shattered and broken winged, depart from all the lands of Islam.” That was sent to a London Arab paper in February. Kufr means unbeliever. It is a reference to our forces in Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘So where is bin Laden now?’ she asked, lifting her hand to touch one of the healing scratches on her face.

  ‘Still in Afghanistan, I guess. We have a satellite that passes over one of his camps there. But it’s hard to tell where exactly. Probably some other hideout in the mountains. Or in Yemen, where his family are originally from. Or somewhere in Kashmir, hoping things will flare up between India and Pakistan. He can’t go back to Saudi – he grew up there – they’ve expelled him and withdrawn his passport. He had operations in Sudan at one point. And sleeper cells all over the world, from which he can draw support if need be.’

  They took a break for coffee. She went out into the car park to ring Nick on her mobile, but she could get no sense from the manager at the hotel on Zanzibar, who just kept saying he was not there and that he didn’t know where he was. He said he thought he had perhaps gone back to Lyly. Or was on a visit to the USAID headquarters in Nairobi.

  Worried, Miranda walked back to the lobby of the Kili. She had been missing Nick more since the bomb, and was surprised he hadn’t called; he must have heard about it. Again she wondered if it was too much to expect him to have tried to get in contact with her. Her heart grasped at the possibility that it was simply that the phones were inoperative. The idea that he might have got caught in the blast in Nairobi was too horrible to contemplate; his name wasn’t on the list of American dead, anyway.