Seeing Jaz approach them in the garden the sheikh waved towards him beckoning him over and spoke in a softer voice so only the colonel could hear.
“Colonel, I am not looking for a martyr. In fact I want you to look out for him. He is family to you. Three promises. First, if you say so I’ll call it off. Even at the last minute. Second, my top priority is that he comes out of this alive. And third, if you perform this service for me, then I will be in your debt.”
The colonel squeezed his ear lobe as he contemplated the sheikh’s words.
“One other thing. An intelligence type, Major Ali, will be joining us. ISI, ex UK. We go back a long way. Not as long as you and me, Colonel, but a long way still. He prays a lot. But you can trust him.”
And then more loudly looking up: “Jaz, come and join us.” He lifted the china plate. “I have some rather fine biscuits from the UK you may enjoy.”
*****
“Come on baby. Party time!”
Natasha Knight’s pre-posting briefings for Peshawar had at least been consistent. “Closed society, very tough nut to crack,” a man from the research department had said. “Not sure how much point there is your doing this,” her Pashtu teacher had remarked. “From what I have heard, if a foreigner speaks the lingo it just makes them more suspicious.” Valedictory despatches written by former occupants of her post had been equally discouraging. “Any westerner resident in the city,” one rather bitter predecessor had written, “will be blocked, ignored, lied to and cheated. Then he can settle down for breakfast. ”
Which is why there were more than a few furrowed brows at MI6 headquarters on the Thames when, just two weeks after her arrival, Natasha Knight came up with the name and location of a British Pakistani who was later arrested by the Frontier Constabulary as he travelled in a taxi on his way to blow himself up outside a hotel favoured by foreigners. And the furrows turned to raised eyebrows, and even the odd sharp inhalation of breath, when, a month later she produced intelligence that enabled the Peshawar police to search the home of an official from the provincial antiquities department and locate 15 one kilogram bags of refined heroin.
“We are awfully pleased with the way things are going,” Keane had said on the secure line. “Great start! The tribals seem to be losing their touch.”
“Oh really,” she replied sardonically
“No?”
“Mothers and toddlers group.”
He spluttered with incomprehension.
“Well, you know what women are like. They love to gossip.”
As she lifted Rosie from her cot and passed her to the maid, she walked by the bedroom window scanning the road for suspicious vehicles. All the previous agents in Peshawar had reported that they were under obvious, constant supervision, 24 hours a day. And yet she had never seen anyone watching or following her.
At first she had thought she must be missing something. But as she later discovered from a document that that found its way into her possession, it was not only her own boss who found it difficult to believe that MI6 would post a single mother to Peshawar. As the ISI major in charge of counter espionage in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa, formerly North West Frontier Province, had written: “MI6 appear to have knowledge,” he had written, “that we have blown the cover of successive British cultural attachés over the years. So they have now appointed a woman with a child to that post. We should work on the assumption that the British have inserted someone else into the city under deeper cover.”
No wonder the ISI wasn’t monitoring her movements: it was too busy scouring the city for a British spy.
*****
“We better start as we mean to go on. Your mobiles.”
The sheikh was standing, hands outstretched, in a small room that led on to two bedrooms: one for Jaz, the other the colonel’s. There were flat cushions all around the walls and on top of them bolsters for leaning against. In the corner there was the muted rattle of an ancient, grey-white fridge.
The colonel emerged from his room, the sound of cricket commentary in the background. He looked slightly dishevelled as if he had been sleeping.
“Is that really ...”
“It’s the government’s greatest weapon.”
“But I need to call Islamabad. People will be wondering what’s become of me.”
The sheikh contemplated the problem and then raised his voice calling for a servant. “After your row with the chief yours may be monitored. Use a local one. Who are you calling?”
“Well there’s a retired brigadier I know. He can tell everyone else I am looking after Jasir, sorting out his house and so on.”
“Fine,” the sheikh said. “I’ll arrange it.” He then looked at Jaz: “Yours too.”
“Can’t I just use it for texting?”
“Better to be on the safe side.” And then as he held out this hand and took the phone he ushered him out of the room: “Come outside. We need to talk.”
It was mid morning and already over 40 degrees. Jaz rearranged his headscarf so it shaded his face. In the distance a group of four men were gesticulating at each other, apparently having an argument.
“Have you ever been in trouble with the police Jaz? In the UK I mean.”
“No.”
“Ever spoken to a policeman?”
“Well stop and search you know. But that happens to all Pakistanis.”
“Will you be missed at work?”
“With minicabbing you just turn up when you want to work. But yeah if I am away for a bit they would want to know what had happened. I said I’d be away for a week. People come and go the whole time.”
“You better call then. I’ll find a phone for you to use.” The sheikh stayed silent for a few seconds, apparently deep in thought, and then: “Are you a bit of a loner Jaz?”
“Just keep to myself, that’s all.”
“Very wise.”
They were close to the group of men now and could hear raised voices. One man, the shortest of the group, thrust his shoulders back.
“What do you want from me?” Jaz asked.
Before the sheikh could answer, the man who had been strutting spat on the ground and lunged forward his fists clenched.
“Stop!” The sheikh spoke softly but they all heard him and, turning, were shocked to see him. They stood like naughty schoolboys.
“I don’t have time for this now,” the sheikh sighed. “All four of you go to the prison and I’ll see you later.”
Jaz’s mind flashed back to when he was a child, when he too had spent 24 hours in the sheikh’s prison for throwing a stone at an old lady. He remembered how the guards only locked it at night. “Do they ever run away? The prisoners?” he asked. He had been wondering about that for years, never imagining he’d have the chance to ask the sheikh himself.
“Where would they go?” And by way of explanation he said: “I know them; I know who they are, who they married, where they live, what their children are doing. They are my people.”
All passion spent, the four men ambled off to hand themselves in.
“About your question Jaz, what I have in mind. I will answer it, but first I must ask you a bit more. What about your home, where do you live?”
“In Waterloo,” he looked at the sheikh uncertain, “It’s in south London near a railway station.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Right. Well I have a flat there. I rent it.”
“How do you pay?”
“I pay the landlord. He lives in the same block of apartments.”
“Cash?”
“Yeah. That’s what he wants.”
“Are you up to date?”
“Not really. I owe him some.”
As they spoke, the call to prayer amplified by a loudspeaker at the top of a minaret pierced the quiet. Groups of men started to move towards the mosque.
“Girlfriend?”
Jaz hesitated: “Maybe. Not sure.”
The sheikh paused to interpret the remark.
“That would
be the texting?”
“Guess so.”
The sheikh didn’t press it. “She’ll wait,” he said and then: “Young man, you may just be perfect.”
*****
Natasha looked at Rosie and worried. There were, she knew, many good things about not bringing her up in the UK. For the thousandth time she mentally ran through the list of what, if they could carry on living abroad, Rosie would avoid: consumerism, bad schools, lack of courtesy, drugs, drink, jingoism, narrow mindedness and insularity. But still she worried. Especially as in Peshawar it was proving virtually impossible to get out of the house. She worried that Rosie was becoming like bin Laden’s children and grandchildren, stuck in their compound unable to play with anyone else. Children of the war on terror: isolated, hidden. At least bin Laden’s progeny had each other to keep themselves amused. The mother and baby group was a real blessing but at once a fortnight it was hardly enough for Rosie and, for that matter, for Natasha either. She realised the extent of the problem the day she had asked Rehmat to buy a paddling pool and put it in the garden: Rosie had loved it but a puritanical bearded neighbour had complained that he could see the child’s bare flesh from his upstairs windows and requested that both mother and child conduct themselves with greater modesty.
She tried to imagine the good things she could do if she were in the UK. She would go shopping. Peshawar’s markets were now too insecure for an American or European to go browsing. She would visit friends and family. For obvious reasons that couldn’t happen in Pakistan. She would go to the park. In Peshawar there were none or at least none she would dare use. She would visit friends. Rosie needed more friends. She would go the Natural History museum. And then she had an idea. The museum……. Why not? Peshawar Museum. She’d leave Razia at home. Just her and Rosie. Mother and daughter. A day out.
Which is why the next morning, with Rosie’s pram in front of her, she was on the Jail Road arguing with an ill-dressed gunmen with, she noticed, his safety catch off.
“The museum is closed madam. Closed.”
It was 11 o’clock in the morning. Natasha looked at a hand painted sign, just behind the guard, with the museum’s opening hours.
10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Monday to Thursday.
10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Friday
Please keep your cant clean.
Natasha grimaced. The phrase was everywhere. Some years earlier a Pakistani army officer had been impressed on a visit to the UK by the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. Apparently unaware of base British vocabulary, he had fashioned his own version for the Peshawar cantonment.
“It says it’s open. Look!” Natasha pointed at the sign.
Natasha moved Rosie’s pram closer to the gate just in case any of the traffic veered towards them. Theoretically the road had two lanes in each direction but was in fact a confused mass of hooting, hand-painted trucks, buses, tractors, minivans, motorbikes (somehow carrying mum, dad and up to three children), horse drawn carts weighed down with anything from vegetables to metal rods for reinforcing concrete, Japanese saloons, four-wheel drives and weaving in between them all the ubiquitous three wheeled motorised rickshaws. Even though they were by far the puniest vehicles, the rickshaws’ rattling two stroke engines made the greatest noise of all.
The guard, who was sitting on a plastic chair with an electric fan blowing air in his face barely moved. Unhappy that Rosie was breathing in the exhaust fumes, Natasha decide to skip the normal escalatory steps and went straight for her trump card. She pulled out her mobile: “I’ll call the director,” she announced despite the fact that she knew neither his name nor number.
The man was out of his chair now. “Madam, madam please.” With no attempt to offer an excuse for his earlier refusals, he opened the metal gates that led onto a long sweeping drive and, on either side, beautifully maintained lawns edged with deep purple bougainvillea tumbling onto the grass.
The British-built red-brick building, a mix of a Victorian town hall and Mogul palace, loomed above them. Two storeys high, it was crowned with domes, and on the corners of the building turrets echoed the minarets of nearby mosques. A hundred years after its construction it remained one of the grandest buildings in Peshawar.
Having stormed the front gate Natasha found that their advance was now totally unopposed. The tiny square ticket booth, obviously added to the main structure as an afterthought, was empty: in fact there seemed to be no staff at all. Unsure whether to leave a few rupees on the booth’s ledge, Natasha decided it would probably be stolen and it would be better to pay on the way out.
Inside, the museum was dark and at first she found it difficult to see. Rosie too noticed the difference and was restless in her pram. Natasha took her out and comforted her.
“Look at all the things, Rosie. There’s Buddha. Big Buddha.”
Natasha pointed at a larger than life statue of the man in grey stone.
Rosie gurgled.
As her eyes adjusted Natasha saw they were in a hall as big as a cathedral and with every move they made sounds reverberated around the steeply pitched vaults above and the stone floor on which she walked. The display cases, made from mahogany and glass, and with tiny hand written labels, reminded Natasha of museums in Carlisle when she was a child.
Natasha saw a sign pointing to a cafeteria in one direction and a section entitled: “Life of the Pashtun Tribes” in the other. Thinking that might be more interesting she put Rosie back in her pram and headed for a side aisle off the main hall. They walked past cabinets full of every weapon man had ever devised: swords, daggers, spears, bows, arrows, and even British-era rifles. Natasha wondered how suitable it all was for Rosie. There were life size models of men replete with curly black moustaches wearing bullet-studded bandoleers across their long loose shirts.
“Let’s see if we can get some tea,” she said.
Turning round she pointed the pram in the direction of the cafeteria and looked ahead for any sign of life. She’d been there 15 minutes and not yet seen a single employee: it was amazing that there were any artefacts left all. Maybe, she thought, Peshawar’s criminal classes did not understand the value of some of things on display.
When she got to the cafeteria she saw a sign: CLOSED. Natasha looked at Rosie.
“It wasn’t much fun was it my love?” she said. “Let’s go home.”
*****
Major Ali Khan formerly of Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, arrived at the fort three days later. Slim, with a head of thin, slicked-back black hair and a small neat moustache, he spoke in curt, economical sentences. His beige trousers had immaculate sharp creases; his shirt was not only pressed but also starched.
Soon after his arrival the colonel saw him being swept away by the sheikh. They did not emerge for four or five hours.
At the sheikh’s command, couched as ever in a polite request, the four men met by his fleet of red Land Cruisers at six the next evening. As a gesture of good will the Pakistani government had been sending the sheikh one of these vehicles each year for over two decades now. They were pickups and he had some of them fitted with heavy machine guns mounted on tripods and bolted onto the metal floor at the back of the vehicle. But apart from his occasional hunting expeditions, he rarely used them.
The sheikh then caused a ripple of panicked confusion by dismissing both his domestic staff and a group of armed guards who were climbing into another of the Land Cruisers. He asked Major Ali if he would drive.
“With Allah’s blessing.”
They set out as dusk was falling. The biscuit shades of the sand around them gave way to darker tones nearer the horizon. Jaz scanned the view for signs of life. He could see nothing: not even a shrub. The colonel’s more practised, military eyes saw more. Every half mile or so, hugging the ground or shaded by wind scooped dunes, he made out the forms of Kalashnikov-toting guards who must have been pre-positioned to protect them as they made their journey. He wondered, not for the first time, how Pakistan’s soldiers, if it ever c
ame to it, could hope to defeat the tribesmen. Whenever he had been deployed in deserts he had been surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a modern army: vehicles, food, tents, communications systems. The sheikh’s men seemed to manage with a flask of water, a few dates, a pair of sandals and an ammunition belt.
After 40 minutes of jerky progress up a stony, dried out river bed, they reached a plain and a huge tent that stood proud against the horizon, its door flapping in the light evening breeze. Taut, roughly sewn animal hides were draped off a central wooden pole. Inside, the ground was covered in carpets and cushions. Outside a fire was burning although there was no sign of the person who had lit it.
“Mecca?” The major asked looking at his watch. The colonel looked at the sky orientating himself.
“Over there, just to the left of that dune,” he said in Punjabi.
“You military types!” the sheikh said. “Let’s stick to English, shall we, then we can all understand each other.”
The major took one of the smaller carpets and, placing it at the edge of the tent facing in the direction the colonel had indicated, knelt down. For five minutes he rose and fell genuflecting and murmuring his prayers.
“La ilaha il Allah,” No one is worthy of worship except Allah.
The others waited in silence.
When the major had finished and moved back to the centre of the tent the sheikh began: “We are alone,” he confirmed. “So let me tell you a bit about Major Ali. He is a man who over the years has picked up much experience ...”
“Allah has been very kind,” the major said with a pious smile.
“... in both Europe and Kashmir. He has worked in London and with many martyrs in Kashmir. Including some Chamakis.”
The major said: “With Allah’s blessings.”
“He will be able to help us.”
The colonel and Jaz smiled and nodded at the major.
TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Page 8