The colonel sat back in his chair.
“The best form of defence may be attack. But to attack you have to survive, to defend yourself,” the sheikh said trying to reassure him. “There is no point blowing yourself up or being caught. What use are you then? You’ve lost. The most important lesson Jaz has to learn is staying clean. It’s we who have the time, the resolve. We can wait and fight another day.”
“I know, I know.”
“Look at the insurance markets,” the sheikh continued. “These aren’t politicians. They are not trying to scare people or control them: they just need to know what the real vulnerabilities are.”
He produced some documents from a folder and handed them out. As he did so Jaz noticed a small bird land on the windowsill, seemingly entranced by his stuffed cousins on the opposite wall.
“Look at the first sheet,” the sheikh instructed, “from the Insurance Information Institute in the US. These are the real numbers produced for the financiers on Wall Street. Its shows the relative costs of so called terrorist attacks and big storms.”
They looked at the figures. “The World Trade Centre garage attack was Ramzi Yusef’s first attempt with the truck bomb back in ’93,” the sheikh explained.
World Trade Centre: 9/11 $11.9 bn
IRA Car bomb Manchester: $0.8 bn
World Trade Centre garage attack: $0.8 bn
And then in another column:
Hurricane Katrina $41.9 bn
Hurricane Wilma $10.6 bn
“No one has even heard of Hurricane Wilma,” the sheikh said, his voice rising to a higher pitch, “and yet 9/11 was only slightly more effective. Even the biggest attack can’t match a minor weather storm.”
They were looking at the second sheet now.
“I have summarised this for clarity,” he explained, “but the key figures are: sarin gas attack with no less than 1,000 kg of the stuff causes $21 billion of property losses. Anthrax attack, $35 billion. And a dirty bomb causes $62 billion. And just look at this: attack at nuclear power plant $202 billion. It must depend where you hit it, I guess, but that’s four Hurricane Katrinas.”
“Why so much?” asked Jaz.
“Because, as the major says, it’s all about electricity. They can’t operate without it. Everything collapses.”
His audience was concentrating, trying to draw out the lessons but the sheikh brought the meeting to a close. “Plenty to think about. And there are limits to what Jaz can do alone. By the way there is a British woman coming tomorrow. Something about folk music. I think it’s best if you move out for a night – you can stay in the guesthouse in town. Your luggage has already been sent there.”
*****
“But what do you mean he won’t see me? I have driven for over 12 hours.” Natasha had come to the view that the best way to tackle mid-level officials in Pakistan was to shout at them. But as she was discovering, in Dera Chamak normal rules didn’t apply. The sheikh’s decisions were unquestioned, immutable, quasi-divine edicts, shout all you like.
She even thought she saw him at one point, a tall man surrounded by retainers walking through a courtyard. Given that he was wearing a red cloak with gold lining, it was a sighting she wanted to confirm. “Is that him?” she blasted at the man who had been sent out to deal with her. “What happened to hospitality around here?” He didn’t answer but the nervous flitting of his eyes back and forth between visitor and master told her what she needed to know.
She decided to resume the battle in the morning. Pointing to her guards who looked somewhat nervous at being so deep in Baluchistan she said: “Give them food and somewhere to sleep and have the musicians ready for me tomorrow.”
A guide showed her to her bedroom. She closed the door, slumped into a chair and worried about whether the whole trip might have been a bad idea. “Long drive, bit of peasant warbling and long drive back home,” she grumbled to herself. As she unpacked her sponge bag she saw she had forgotten to take out her vibrator and imagined the shocked expression of some security goon sent by the sheikh to search through her room. “Probably have a coronary,” she said under her breath. She tried to conceal it in a folded blouse. And then, after sorting through what she would wear for the musicians, she saw the burqa. She’d told Razia to make sure it was always packed. The Israelis who had trained her how to wear it in Baghdad had told Natasha she tended to move too quickly and to stride with too much purpose in a burqa - in a way that alerted local eyes and left a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. But after plenty of practice in Iraq she reckoned she became quite good at doing downtrodden. And it gave a thrilling feeling of anonymity.
“Well having come all this way,” she whispered to herself: “Why not?”
Three hours later when the last glow of daylight had gone, she completed her preparations by putting on a pair of long nylon black gloves favoured by the more devout Baluch women. It was another tip the Israelis had given her: pale hands stand out. She slipped out of her room, the back of her burqa trailing behind her.
Closing her door she moved towards a column and looked around. A guard with a Kalashnikov hanging by a leather strap over his shoulder was sitting on a chair. He stared ahead and away to Natasha’s right, picking at his teeth with his fingernails so as to clean them and listening to a tinny portable radio. Protected by the sound she moved through the shadows to an arch that led to a public courtyard. She looked through the grill of her burqa and told herself to shuffle. There were other women in burqas here, some with children pulling on their arms.
She saw a small bazaar of roughly constructed wooden stalls, each lit with a single bare light bulb hanging off a long looping overhead cable. She made out some of the items for sale: cigarette lighters, bright yellow scratch cards for mobile phone credits and cheap plastic cups and plates from China. One stall was selling meat that was almost invisible under a thick, buzzing and constantly moving coat of flies. A donkey-drawn cart laden with a heap of unsold stumpy cucumbers was making its way out of town. An advertising billboard for a dentist depicting a huge set of perfect white teeth set in bright pink gums grinned at her.
Within seconds Natasha’s senses were jangling. Beyond the fort’s main entrance, she saw a Pakistani in Western clothes, immaculately ironed. He was walking with a younger man into a one-storey building which as she moved closer she could see bore the legend: CHAMZAK GEST HOUSE. TURIST PALASE.
“Slow down!” she urged herself as she made her way towards them.
As she followed them into the reception area the two men were at the desk picking up their keys “Now then,” the receptionist said, turning to the rack of keys behind him, “18 and 19.”
Without replying the two men took the keys with outsize brass fobs and moved off to their left. Natasha looked around hoping to see another woman. Plates of half eaten chicken and rice lay by an armchair with a greasy shiny patch where countless heads had rested. A man with a hard, angular face and dirty blue shalwar kameez dotted with patches of grease eyed her suspiciously.
And then behind him, in the gloom, a flash of sky blue. A burqa disappeared into a bedroom. Razia made her way towards it seeing in the corridor a trolley filled with cleaning materials. A yellow nylon duster stuck out from the top.
Grabbing the trolley, Natasha wheeled it round and headed in the direction of the two men, scanning the doors.
And there at the end of the corridor she saw them both going into the same room. She was out of sight of the receptionist now and picked up her pace reaching the door they had entered. 18. She looked behind her and across the corridor was 19. She searched the trolley and found a brass fob with the master key.
Her heart hammering, she held her breath. Two minutes and out.
It was a simple room. Beside the bed there was a low table with a wooden lamp. Beside stood a cheap plywood wardrobe and, on a chair at the foot of the bed an open suit case. Leaning down, she rifled through it. Nothing but a copy of the Qur’an and some pressed, starched shirts. The
man with the Western clothes.
It was then she heard a noise in the corridor. The trolley was being moved.
Natasha looked for a window. And as she did so she saw a note pad on the bedside table. With one rapid movement she knelt down beside the bed, grabbed the pad and lifting her burqa, thrust it into the elastic band of her pants.
And then without looking up she folded over the corner of the sheet and blanket making it ready for sleep.
She heard a cough.
The older of the two men she had seen outside, the Western-dressed one, was at the door. He looked uncertain.
Move. Slowly Natasha thought. Slowly. Down trodden. Put upon.
She edged towards him lowering her head.
The man, reluctant to challenge a woman, was staring at her unsure how to react.
Natasha kept moving. Just a few feet to go.
She brushed passed him and reached out for her lifeline: the trolley. And she moved away she could feel his eyes boring into her back, appraising her.
“Stop!” he said. She ran, thrusting the trolley behind her.
She heard him crashing into it and, reaching the lobby, saw the receptionist staring opened mouthed. She rushed past him and out into the open air. And then, making an abrupt halt, she hunched her shoulders and mixed into the groups of evening shoppers. Don’t look back the told herself. Just look oppressed.
As she made her way back to the fort she could not resist stopping in a doorway and taking a look at the paper pad. With a groan she realised it was blank. All that risk for nothing.
Moving wearily without conscious effort she eventually reached her room took off the burqa and lay exhausted on her bed. Screwing up her eyes with frustration she felt for the pad and held it under the bedside light. And suddenly she was alert. Because there on the top sheet were traces of what had been written - presumably with hard biro - on the page above. She changed the angle of the pad under the light and made out a list, an aide-memoire: CCTV, ANPR, DNA, MOBILE and COMPUTER.
*****
“Welcome!” the sheikh looked up as, the next day, they came upon him working on some papers in the garden.
“Someone was in my room,” Major Ali said. “Dressed as a woman.”
“Did they take anything?”
“A note pad but there was nothing in it.”
“It’s not the first time. I‘ll look into it.” And then, “Well anyway the British Council woman has left, folk music ringing in her ears. So it’s back to business.”
And so the routine began again. More bomb making, reducing the size now, testing to see how small Jaz could make a bomb before it became too ineffective. More talk of targets, more discussion of how to evade detection,
“What about money?” Jaz asked when the sheikh came up to their eyrie. “I am already late with my rent and as soon as I am back he’ll want it. And I haven’t been earning.”
The sheikh sat down to indicate it was a topic he took seriously.
“The tube bombing in London cost £8,000 pounds - $12,000 - but that was for four people and included flights out to Pakistan and back. I’ll give you whatever you need. But the problem is taking the money to the UK. I have funds there but it is all in banks.”
Major Ali interrupted: “Hand carrying is out. The bags – and not just carry-on bags - are screened for cash now. Sniffer dogs.”
“How much cash would he be allowed to take?”
“Ten thousand. But if they find anything over one thousand they will start asking questions.”
“A gift from a kindly uncle,” the sheikh suggested.
“Maybe,” the major tightened his eyelids in thought, calculating how it would work. “But there would be lots of questions and they would keep a record. And don’t forget. It probably wouldn’t arise, but if they needed to they could tell the money has come from here.”
“Here as in?”
“Baluchistan, Dera Chamak even. I really don’t know how. But they can.”
The sheikh: “How much does he need?”
The major went through the major items. “Bike, rent, fuel, car batteries, the stuff for the bombs, money for the unforeseen. At least four thousand.”
“I am going to give you £900 now and £5,000 in London. And only such a small sum because it will attract less attention amongst my people there. But it should be more than enough. If you need more I will send more. I will arrange for the money to be delivered by one of my people. He will leave it at a specific location. I haven’t worked out all the details yet.”
“Timescale?” the colonel asked.
The sheikh stood up gathering his robe about him. “Don’t worry. It’s all in hand.”
“Sir?” The sheikh hadn’t even noticed Ravi as he sat in the corner consumed by his computer.
“Ravi?”
“Yes sir. I have been looking at the cars like you asked.”
The sheikh moved across the room and looked over Ravi’s shoulder. On the screen was a silver car.
“Jaz,” said the sheikh. “This is like yours?”
Jaz moved over to join them. “Yeah. Bang on. Ford Mondeo. Same year. Yup.”
The sheikh tuned back to Ravi. “How many have you found?”
“Six sir. There are sites for trading them.”
“Good work Ravi. Take down the number plates and give them to the major. And you can find out who owns the cars?”
“Yes. That’s all on one government computer.”
“Give that to the major too,” the sheikh said, tousling his hair.
The boy beamed. “Yes sir.”
*****
The email was waiting for Natasha when she got back to Peshawar. She looked at the coding at the top of the document and saw that while it had been sent to her from London, it had originated with the CIA in Langley that had recorded the conversation in October. A CIA analyst had prefaced the transcript with an explanatory note. The phone conversation had been red-flagged because of an anomalous indicator. A SIM card, purchased in Chamak, Baluchistan, had been used to call Islamabad and yet the conversation was in English. “In Punjab it happens all the time,” the analyst wrote, “but we set the parameters differently for the tribal areas. When the locals down there start speaking English it’s often worth listening in.”
The transcript, marked as having been recorded on 10th October, followed:
VOICE ONE: Hallo
VOICE TWO: Azam?
VOICE ONE: Look, I have to be quick. I am going to be here a few weeks.
VOICE TWO: What’s happened?
VOICE ONE: It’s my nephew, Yasir. He’ll be going back to London on the 22nd. I’ll tell you about it when I’m back.
VOICE TWO: So see you in a week or so.
VOICE ONE: No I mean December. In time for Christmas in London. I’ll be back after that.
VOICE TWO: Are you behaving as a colonel should?
VOICE ONE: (Laughter) Just about.
VOICE TWO: Are you alright?
VOICE ONE: Fine, Don’t worry.
Natasha clenched her fists enjoying the moment. How big was this? How serious? And she sat down to compose a dispatch that even Keane had to acknowledge was her best yet. In fact the best from Peshawar for many years. Maybe decades.
*****
The sheikh was walking with the major in his garden. They were loosely modelled on the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore although the sheikh, always reluctant to acknowledge anything positive about the rest of Pakistan, had never mentioned the source of his inspiration. Although he had planned his garden on a much smaller scale than the Moguls he had, like them, laid it out with square pathways, lawns and beds, consisting chiefly of roses and jasmine. Some of the lawns gave way to the ultimate desert status symbol: pools of water.
The Chamakis had in fact been blessed with a very reliable well just a mile away from Dera Chamak. There were two pipes running from the well: one for the sheikh’s fort and the other for the rest of the town. The town’s pipe led to a tank from which people
could fill containers. The sheikh had been delighted a couple of years before when a small earthquake had for some reason increased the flow of water. While the sheikh thought it was just good luck, many of his more devout tribesman took it as a sign that Allah was blessing his stewardship of the Chamaki people. He dreaded to think what would happen if another earthquake reduced the supply. If it was cut off altogether the tribe would simply have to move and the sheikh had considered, but never got around to, starting work on a reserve fort near another well just in case.
From time to time the sheikh stopped to lower his face towards a rose bud inhaling its fragrance into his lungs. “Lady Emma Hamilton,” he said after breathing the scent of a perfectly formed circular orange flower on a bush that had grown to waist height. “Had them sent from England must be 20 years ago now and they have never let me down.” The major, with an expression that suggested he thought such behaviour was slightly effeminate, decided to change the subject.
“There is something I need to tell you,” he said.
“Go on.”
“I guess you are aware you have ISI people in Dera Chamak?”
“There are some forces in this country no one can fight. Not even the president. They’re everywhere. And of course yes, they are here too,” said the sheikh.
“I have been missed in Peshawar and they already know I am here. They have asked me to a meeting. It would look odd if I didn’t go.”
“What do you propose to say?”
“Just that we are old friends and you invited me down here. They won’t suspect anything. It’s entirely routine.”
The sheikh looked into the middle distance thinking. “Where?” he asked eventually. “Where will you meet?”
“An ISI house by the mosque.”
“I know it. When?”
“It’s not yet fixed.”
“How are they communicating with you?”
“A note was slipped into my hand when I was walking through the market.”
“What about the colonel?”
TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Page 11