Over time both had come to understand that their world was infested with enemies and that killing them was a sacred duty.
It gave them a role and a status – and a bright, guiding star in the darkness around them.
They came from different tribes that had shifted for generations across Jordan, Syria and Iraq, sucking in the angry and resentful, barking and growling at each other across the wastelands of their impoverished towns and cities.
From time to time they fought – or got bored and made fragile peace.
For now, as so often, they resided in sullen standoff, aware that fighting could break out again between them at any time. Provocation might come in the form of a careless insult or an accidental killing. Everywhere lay tripwires, some cultural or religious, others more simple – the carve-up of a criminal enterprise, the endemic jealousy between crooks and killers.
And there was the crime of sowing fitna, the Arabic word for strife or division – an accusation – that covered so many misdemeanours, both real and imagined, and could so easily get you killed.
The two men agreed they would hunt together – but it wasn’t out of trust. On the contrary, they would watch each other’s every move, day and night, to ensure there was no betrayal before the job was done.
‘Today we are brothers,’ said the one from the Hateen refugee camp. He was small and wiry and spoke from the right side of his mouth in short, guttural gasps.
‘And tomorrow?’ The other man grinned and slapped him on the shoulder.
His companion didn’t return the smile. ‘Tomorrow there’ll be apricots,’ he said. ‘We’ll see who gets the bigger share.’
From the upstairs window in the shack, Ahmed watched them leave.
For him, Zarqa was the story of everything that had gone wrong in the Arab world. Crime and child prostitution were endemic. Every extremist stripe in the region had embedded its cells and assassins there. From morning till night the mosques shook with hatred and invective. Broken roads and houses lay festering and unrepaired, while in offices high above the filthy alleyways, fat, lazy officials stuffed their wallets with bribes and protection money. The city was a running, incurable sore.
So there was no way to trust anyone who had grown up there. Ahmed had told the men to arrange a rendezvous within eighteen hours. For now, their greed would keep them focussed and busy.
In the end, though, they’d betray everyone – him included – the way they always did. They couldn’t help themselves.
TWENTY KILOMETRES FROM SYRIA/JORDAN BORDER
Mai could feel the hands gripping her, the cold rush of air outside the car and the voices, nervous and high-pitched that seemed to float in and out of her hearing.
And then there was the softness of a mattress beneath her, a pillow and the long-forgotten smell of clean cotton.
Someone took her left hand and held it tightly. The grip was reassuring.
‘Can you hear me?’ It was Lubna, right up close, whispering. ‘They’ve gone to find a doctor. They want to help us.’
Gradually she opened her eyes and took in the surroundings. They were in a small bedroom with a makeshift curtain across the window. An electric heater whirred in the corner. She could see a child’s cot, standing at a crazy angle, because the wooden legs had collapsed.
The baker’s wife came into the room. ‘How are you feeling?’
Mai nodded. ‘Where are we?’
‘My brother’s house. He’s an honest man, but he’s scared of you being here. He has a young child. I told him we would go once the doctor arrives. But we don’t have long.’
‘And your husband?’
‘I don’t trust him. Or his friends.’
‘What friends?’
‘Jihadis, killers. People who fill his head with nonsense. I have nothing to do with them. All they know how to do is murder.’
Mai was wide awake now. ‘I don’t want to put your family at risk.’
The baker’s wife sat down on the bed beside her. ‘We’re all at risk. No one remembers a time when we felt calm or happy or certain of anything. But there is still right and wrong. And some of us even remember the difference. I don’t know who you are – but I won’t betray you.’
Someone knocked at the door and an elderly figure in a black anorak and dark pullover shuffled nervously into the room. Mai took in the wisps of grey hair and the pale skin. He wore thick spectacles, with the frames bound together by sticking plaster. She thought he looked just as sick and tired as she did.
He sat on the bed. ‘I was a doctor a few years ago. I retired, but there’s no one except me in this district.’ He held up his palms and shrugged. ‘So my retirement has been postponed. You speak Arabic?’
She nodded.
‘I don’t wish to ask questions, because it is better for both of us that I know nothing. But I need an idea of what happened to you – the bare outlines.’
‘I was tortured over several days – sometimes I was badly beaten.’
‘I understand.’
She could see the sadness in his eyes and wondered how many such stories it had taken to implant it.
He examined her without comment, noticing how she winced when he touched her swollen stomach.
‘You feel light-headed? Difficulty in breathing?’
‘Yes. I’m very tired.’
He turned away and reached into the side pocket of the anorak. ‘I have nothing to offer you except painkillers.’ He placed a small bottle on the bed beside her. ‘They will work for twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six, but you need to be in hospital. You have internal bleeding from the beatings. I don’t know how serious it is – but the signs are bad enough. You should have specialist care.’ He stopped and rubbed his eyes. ‘I can’t offer you that – there are no facilities here and no money for them. I’m sorry there’s so little I can do for you.’
He sat on the bed for a moment, then straightened suddenly and got up, as if he had made a decision.
‘I have to be truthful with you. Wherever you’re going, you need to go quickly. If you don’t get the internal bleeding stopped within two days, you’ll probably die. I’m very sorry but you need to know this.’
Mai gave a thin smile and patted the old man’s hand. A few weeks ago his words would have come as a terrifying shock. Now they seemed so mundane, so ordinary. Whichever way she looked at it, there was nothing special about her case. The whole of Syria was facing the chopping block. Blood on the streets. Death at every corner. Escaping it, would have been little short of miraculous.
After the doctor had left, she managed to prop herself up against the wall.
In the distance she heard shouts and angry voices. A woman began crying. Doors slammed.
Would the country ever dry its eyes and hold a normal conversation?
Of course, one fine day across a wooden table in a burned-out building, a collection of posturing liars would sign a peace treaty – but no one would respect it.
We Arabs don’t do compromise.
For decades to come they would queue up to die in feuds and vendettas.
In the twisted, senseless philosophy of the time, dying was much, much easier than staying alive.
No requirement to live with guilt or shame, no need for explanations, duties or responsibilities. No accounting necessary for your sins or your mistakes.
A hole in the ground got you out of all that.
Maybe that explained why she could accept it so easily for herself.
WASHINGTON DC
It was three a.m. when Lydia tiptoed out of the bedroom. Vitaly hadn’t moved for more than an hour, exhausted by the events he had set in motion, fearful that they could end up destroying him.
‘If anything happens to me,’ he had said after switching out the light, ‘don’t go back to Moscow and don’t stay here either. Trust nobody. Especially people from the embassy.’
‘But why are you so worried?’
‘Because I know what they’re like. Moscow is beside itsel
f at the potential of this operation. But if it goes wrong they’ll be looking for a big scapegoat and when they find one, there’ll be no mercy.’
Inside the study, Lydia located Vitaly’s briefcase and snapped the locks.
There were several messages from Moscow. It seemed Vitaly had suspected he was being kept out of the loop – so a friend in the Foreign Ministry had supplied him the latest information from Ahmed.
She could sense the urgency in the texts – sharp stabs of information, the caveats and qualifications, the talk of sources who lied frequently but sometimes, tantalizingly, told the truth. The impossibility of knowing for certain which they were doing and when.
Some facts lasted an hour, others barely a few minutes. Rumours came and went, a dozen a day.
‘We believe nothing that we hear and only half of what we see.’ Ahmed’s judgement as the people of Syria and the tribes and the proxy fighters from a hundred different places around the globe, fought, stumbled and died across the country.
His team had crossed the border from Jordan, heading for a tiny, grey village that might already have been destroyed. No maps could reflect the physical realities in a fast-changing civil war. And yet, if she was still alive there, crouching in a cellar or an attic, or outside in cold, rough country, an American woman was running for her life against the odds, as the men of violence scoured the villages along the border.
Standing in the cold, dark study, Lydia could feel her pulse begin to race. She photographed the key messages and had begun replacing the papers when a single paragraph from the Federal Security agency in Moscow caught her eye. Once the American woman had been extracted, Vitaly would be recalled to Moscow to brief the intelligence chiefs. The talks were to have a single focus: how to blackmail Harry Jones.
Maybe Vitaly was right to be worried. The stakes were rising fast.
Lydia went back to bed but she couldn’t sleep.
LONDON
‘Sam.’
‘Margo.’
He had arrived first at the café at St Pancras Station and was halfway through a sandwich. He started to get up, but she waved him back into his seat. ‘What news from your contact?’
He finished his mouthful. ‘The Russians are still trying to locate the woman. Once they have her, they intend bringing her over the border into Jordan.’
‘How long?’
‘Not sure. Maybe in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘OK. I need to see Manson.’
‘And then?’
She looked hard at him across the table and breathed in deeply. ‘And then I’ll get my orders.’
‘If they send you to Jordan, I could be of help to you.’
‘How?’
‘I’ve worked there many times – and behind the scenes we have some good contacts.’
She got up to leave. ‘You people …’
Sam looked puzzled. ‘What?’
She shrugged. ‘The deals you all do. Government to government. Out of sight, never mentioned in public. You wriggle, you manipulate, you buy weapons, you sell weapons. And you go on doing it year after year. You live well and prosper while everyone else does the dying. Take a look out there, Sam. More and more people are dying – and you say you want to stop this? You want to stop propping up Arab dictatorships that do your dirty work for you? When you go home after all this, are you really going to do things differently – or are you just going to call in another debt when you need it from me? Which is it going to be?’
He stared at her intently but he didn’t speak.
‘You know what I really love about the Middle East, Sam?’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Absolutely nothing.’
As she spoke, Manson stared out of the window towards the Houses of Parliament. It occurred to her that he had already made up his mind what to do – the only remaining question was when.
‘OK.’ He turned back to face her. ‘You need to get yourself to Jordan.’
‘I’m booked on the 14.35 to Amman. I’ll be in there by tonight.’
‘Will the Israelis keep you up to speed?’
‘They say they will.’
‘Fine – we’ll have you met at the airport and given some equipment.’
‘That’s it? How about discussing what I’m going to do there?’
Manson raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t have a lot to say about the details. At this point you seem to know more than anyone else in this building about the situation. So get out there and finish this thing.’
She stood up. ‘No, no. Just hang on a minute. I’m not going anywhere until you define “finish this thing”.’ Her cheeks had reddened, the anger just below the surface. ‘This time you’re going to have to spell it out – words of one syllable. I don’t want any room for misunderstandings here. No word games.’
‘How clear can I be? Washington’s operative does not make it home. Is that understood? How you achieve that is up to you. You’re cleared to use any and all available means to prevent her getting back to the US …’
‘Cleared by whom?’
‘Upstairs, of course.’
‘Including killing her. Is that what you’re asking me to do?’
‘Any and all available means.’
‘I asked if that included killing her.’
‘Is there something about the grammar you don’t understand?’
‘I want it in writing. All of it. Every word you said.’
Manson turned his head away and opened a file on his desk. ‘We’re not in the movies, Lane.’ He looked down at the papers and began leafing through them. ‘Just go and do your fucking job.’
They kept him waiting in the secretary’s pool for more than twenty minutes. Typical Downing Street, he thought. Full of arrogant, young tossers who didn’t even wear a tie and knocked off at six, thinking they’d had a hard day.
‘Mr Manson?’
He got up. The secretary was holding a door open into a corridor.
‘Mr Sears will see you now.’
‘My appointment was with the prime minister.’
‘As I said’ – she raised an eyebrow, the voice a little firmer – ‘Mr Sears can see you now.’
Sears didn’t get up when he entered. Manson had met him only once before but he knew the type – back-room ferret, civil service string-puller, happiest in the shadows where decisions were ‘nodded through’ and sunlight rarely shone. He’d have good instincts, but only about self-preservation. He would know without thinking when to have an urgent appointment out of town or a sudden, critical attack of flu; how to scrape the excrement off his own shoes and make it stick to someone else’s.
He sat down across the desk. Sears looked up but waited a few seconds before speaking.
‘Let me just explain what we’re doing here and how I shall write up the notes of our conversation.’
‘I beg your pardon. At our last meeting …’
‘I always think it’s useful in these circumstances to work back from the destination we all want to reach.’
‘I see.’
Sears smiled without warmth. ‘I felt sure you would.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper from the desk drawer. ‘The line we’re taking is that you came to tell us about an American operation taking place in Syria – that’s to say the extraction of one of their agents via Jordan. We decided to send an officer just in case we could be of assistance, given our long-standing, amicable ties with the Jordanian government and our wish to offer any and every help to our allies.’ He looked up. ‘And that was all that was said. You didn’t have a cup of tea. You didn’t discuss any other business and the meeting ended’ – he looked at his watch – ‘at six minutes past three.’
Manson’s face remained expressionless. Tracks were being covered, stories re-written, just in case it all went to hell and ended up with questions in some ghastly parliamentary committee. Sears wanted the story straight in advance. He wasn’t seeing Manson to get a briefing, he wanted a ‘get out of jail’ card – with
‘I knew nothing’ printed in capital letters on the front of it.
Manson got up. He should have expected it, thought he knew all the bloody politicians by now – but Sears’s confidence and duplicity took even his breath away.
‘You won’t want to hear this—’
‘Then don’t tell me.’ Sears’s cheeks had reddened.
‘… but I’m going to anyway. As we discussed the last time we met, we’ve sent in one of our operatives. Very capable woman, as it happens, but it’s a risky business and I’m not sure she’ll complete the mission, even if she gets the chance.’
‘I really must be going.’ Sears stood up and put on his jacket.
‘She wanted detailed, written authorization which I, of course, was not in a position to give. So I have no idea whether she’ll go through with any of this.’
Sears pushed past him. ‘Then you’d better go and finish it yourself.’ The eyes stared straight ahead, the voice was hardly more than a whisper, but as Manson reflected later, the anger in it was quite unmistakable.
He smiled at the man’s discomfort. High time he grew up.
TWENTY KILOMETRES FROM THE SYRIA/JORDAN BORDER
If you have a story to tell about suspicious strangers on the run, then it doesn’t take long to get an audience. Not in Syria.
Within an hour, the baker had told his embellished, intriguing tale about two female fugitives to at least a half dozen people – one of whom made a phone call to a very interested party.
Just after midday, two men in jeans and hoodies pushed their way into his shop, waited till all the other customers had gone, and told him to close up.
The baker did as he was told, careful not to look the men in the eye, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement. Powerful people wanted to listen to his story. Sheikhs, he called them. Men of authority and principle who were committed to fight and kill the enemies of his religion. Now, at last, he had a chance to prove himself.
It was only when they bundled him, ungently, into the back of their car and pulled a balaclava back to front over his head, that some of the baker’s excitement wore off.
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