His immediate response was to dial back her number, but the phone was switched off. The initial relief upon seeing her number had been replaced by fear and anger. He stood up, hands clenched. His phone rang; this time the number was withheld, meaning it could only be one person. He pressed the green talk button on the screen.
‘You fucking bastard,’ he shouted.
‘Ah, Julian, I thought that would grab your attention, old comrade. Sorry I sent it from her phone but I don’t have a camera on mine. I’m old fashioned that way.’
‘I’ll break your neck if you hurt her.’
‘My dear fellow, as you have seen from the video, I have already hurt her. But that is nothing compared to what can happen to her. She is an English rose, Julian, and there is something about her, something I find quite appealing. She likes to share her feelings—’
‘Listen, you sick bastard—’
‘No. You listen. I have asked you to do something for me. I need you to do it before the end of the night. I want you to focus your mind on it and when you get tired, I want you to look at the video again so you are, what do you say, rejuvenated. I will send you another video in, let’s say, eight hours, and this time she won’t look as attractive as she does now.’ The phone went dead and Julian flung it against the back of the sofa, then immediately retrieved it and checked it was OK. He’d let Boris get to him. He should have played it cool. But when he looked at the video again, and again, the anger welled and he threw his glass at the wall where it shattered into tiny imperfect cubes that skittered noisily across the wooden floor, the amber whisky flowing down the wall blurring through his indignant tears. Boris held what was dearest to him – he had no choice but to deliver.
He wiped his eyes, pulling himself together. He wasn’t the one beaten and tied up. He looked at his stupid triangle of fears again, crossed out being unattached, which now looked crass, and wrote instead being without Sheila.
THIRTY-NINE
Mojgan was lying on the hotel bed, her back supported by numerous pillows, her freshly washed hair spread out to dry, netbook on her lap, analysing the information downloaded from the key-logger taken from Rami’s computer. Every keystroke had been recorded. Every website and password with it. A whole day’s worth. She enjoyed this bit of the process, she had to admit, even though it could also be depressing. She called it ‘peeling the onion’, where someone’s life unfolded before her in thin layers of websites visited, medical conditions searched for, emails sent, videos watched. From the sort of pornography viewed (she had seen it all, some of it harmless, but sometimes she had to physically block the screen with her hand before its unpleasantness was imprinted on her brain) to the shopping sites visited, to the news sites and blogs read, to the balance in their bank accounts. She could build up a detailed picture of someone that was often in stark contrast to the image of respectability and self-assurance they tried to present in public.
Rami Haddad was a Lebanese Maronite Christian whose parents had been killed by Palestinians in Lebanon. This she knew because of certain emails he’d replied to from someone in the USA who’d contacted him thinking he might be related to the Haddads from a village in north Lebanon. He was also, based on an online credit card transaction, a paid-up member of a casino in London, and gambled online during work hours using real money. He had visited, among work-related sites, something called Ruby’s Secrets, which turned out to be an agency where the women charged from £300 to £500 an hour and £750 to £2,000 a night. Curious about what they had to do for that sort of money, a perusal of the website explained that they were ‘companions’ who could accompany you to dinner or the theatre, and that many were ‘graduates from top universities’, although the pictures of them, once she logged in using Rami’s password, showed them in various poses designed to be ‘sexy’, in expensive-looking underwear, and each had a small biography of their interests (contemporary fiction, cinema, current affairs, etc.), their vital statistics, including whether they were ‘natural’ – which Mojgan took as a reference to breasts – and a list of the services they offered, most of which were acronyms that Mojgan couldn’t decipher. Some things were spelled out more clearly – things that wouldn’t even have occurred to Mojgan to do. She made no judgement about these women; they had prostitutes in Iran (the Head of Vice in Tehran had been caught in a brothel with five of them a few years ago), although online agencies such as this were non-existent, as far as she knew, and she ought to know.
Out of curiosity she checked the page Rami had looked at. The woman on it looked familiar. Yes, of course; it was difficult to tell because she was posing in underwear and her face was not completely visible but it was definitely her – the woman she had passed in the lobby at Hadfish when she’d left. Beside her ‘services offered’ it said, like some of the others, GFE. She was about to look it up when her mobile phone vibrated twice on the bed beside her. She picked it up to see a text message from the usual ‘Number Unknown’.
Call us now.
She felt a lurch in her chest. She had never had a message like that, couched in such direct terms. Call us now? Farsheed would have used the agreed code if he’d needed to speak to her; this wasn’t from him. She would have to recall the number in Tehran, the line to the office. It was four p.m. here which meant it was eight o’clock there. With trembling fingers she replaced the SIM card in the phone, switched it on and dialled the number. There was a delay before it rang with an other-worldly distant sound. It rang. After twenty-odd rings it was answered.
‘Yes?’ said a female voice.
‘It’s Bahamin. I’d like to speak to my uncle.’
‘OK. Let me find him and I’ll ask him to call you back. Does he have your number?’
‘Yes, he does.’ She hung up and changed the SIM card yet again, putting the next one in and cutting the old one into pieces with some nail scissors. She then waited, taking the phone into the bathroom when she needed to use the toilet, making sure she still had a signal. Perhaps she was going to be asked to abort the mission. But then why not just send the abort code, or why hadn’t Farsheed contacted her through the word game? Just to be sure, she logged in as Mawlana and left a message for Shamsuddin, who’d had no activity since their last game twenty-five hours ago. It had been hours since she’d eaten, yet the gnawing in her stomach wasn’t hunger, although she knew she should eat. But she didn’t want to leave in case she got the call while she was out, and this wasn’t the sort of hotel that did room service. She drank water instead.
To distract herself she looked further at what Rami had been up to on his computer. Among various emails he had written was one to another software company to say that he was pleased to tell them that Hadfish’s head of development, Julian Fisher, was now dedicating his whole time to working on their contract and would definitely have something to them ‘by the end of tomorrow’. The email mentioned that, ‘as agreed’, he would update someone called Boris, ‘should there be a problem’.
The call came as she was dozing on the bed, half watching TV: a talent show similar to the one in Farsi she and Farsheed watched back home made by exiled Iranians and broadcast from London where they picked it up, like millions of other Iranians, via their illegal satellite dish on the roof. She muted the TV and answered the call.
‘Hello?’
‘Bahamin?’ She recognized the stern voice of Farsheed’s boss.
‘Yes, Uncle.’
‘You need to go home, Bahamin.’
‘But Uncle, I haven’t finished my studies.’
‘You will finish your studies at home.’
Was he calling from Baku? She wanted to ask if she could talk to Farsheed.
‘My cousin, the one with the glasses, he is still with you?’ A long pause at the other end. ‘Uncle?’
‘Your cousin has been in an accident. You must go home to visit.’ She felt herself go dizzy even though she was sitting on the bed. On TV a boy with a Justin Bieber haircut was silently singing, beseeching the audience. ‘
Bahamin?’
‘Is he OK? What kind of accident?’ she asked.
‘My dear, it is not the time to—’
‘Just tell me, Uncle. Do not spare me.’
‘It was a car accident. A work-related car accident. Return home as soon as possible. It is not safe.’ He hung up before she could quiz him and, out of habit, she removed the SIM card and cut it repeatedly with her scissors until it was in unnecessarily tiny pieces, adding them to the others on the bedside table. She didn’t like the fact that he had hung up; it gave her a bad feeling. There would be little point in ringing back – she would just get the duty officer again and no one would return her call.
Instead she got on the Internet, scouring newsfeeds for news from Baku, looking at more and more obscure news sites until lighting upon a short item on a local Baku newspaper website in Azeri about a car crash just outside Baku in which three Iranian tourists had been killed. No other cars were involved in the accident. No suspicion of foul play was mentioned. A work-related car accident.
The gnawing in her gut, the crushing feeling in her chest, the silent scream from a primal part of her brain: all these things told her that, without any doubt, her beloved Farsheed was in that car.
FORTY
Boris couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get it right. He got the impression, from her accent, that the woman on the other end was Polish.
‘I booked her before, the English girl.’ It had been difficult to find an English girl he’d liked in the plethora of escorts that worked in London. They were mostly eastern European or Russian, and he really wanted that repressed sexuality (or at least an ersatz version of it) that middle-class English women exuded like no other. It was a perfume; he could smell it. That’s why he’d had to go upmarket, paying over the odds for someone with the education to be able to talk about books and philosophy before stripping to reveal very expensive underwear. Talking to Sheila, being enclosed with her in the small room, drinking wine, had reminded him of his suppressed needs. As he got older he needed to find his pleasures where he could, even if it meant paying for them. Also, there was a certain frisson to be had with having a woman come to the house while Sheila was imprisoned upstairs. And who knew when he would get another chance? He could feel things were closing in on him; he could see a long future without women.
After some dithering the Polish woman at the other end told him that he would be contacted within the hour. They never gave out personal contact details, and when he got the call it would show up as a withheld number, a small detail that reminded Boris that no matter how friendly and intimate the woman sounded on the phone, he was still living a fantasy that he paid for. But then most of his life had been about sustaining fantasies of one form or another – ones that were far larger and involved a lot more people than just himself and a woman pretending to find him fascinating. Fantasies masquerading as belief systems and not recognized as such.
While he waited for the phone call he opened his journal and tried to find something in it that would provide some solace. He found his page with the three headings, the three walls of his prison, as he saw them. He needed reassurance, something to tell him that what he was doing was right. He flipped through the earlier entries, the cuttings, the quotes, the numbers: plenty there to justify his actions, but would his actions have any effect? There was an inevitability about the path that his countrymen were going down, about where it led, so their actions were easy enough to predict. It was like watching the unfolding of a Greek tragedy, when you knew everything was going to end badly and all you could do was watch the flawed characters destroy themselves and everyone around them. All he was hoping was to lessen the destruction that was dealt in the process, reduce the collateral damage, as it was called. One of his phones rang and he still couldn’t tell from the ring which one it was, satellite or mobile. It was the mobile, a withheld number. He spoke to her, her voice softening his mind a little, her promise to come round as soon as she could hardening his cock a little.
FORTY-ONE
Julian was taken aback when he opened the door. Half hoping to see Sheila, despite the fact that she had a key and wouldn’t have needed to ring the doorbell, he was instead faced with the diminutive figure of Salma, her eyes reddened and puffy, her head and neck wrapped in a black headscarf, the edges overhanging her face like a hoodie, leaving only her small oval face visible. She was holding on to the handle of a wheeled suitcase with one hand and in the other held a small gun pointed at his midriff. She stepped forward, signalling to Julian that her intention was to enter the house. She closed the door behind them and gestured with the gun.
‘What do you want?’ he managed to say.
‘I need access to the control unit you have been working on,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse.
‘Who are you?’
‘Please, where is it?’ she asked, pointing the gun in his general direction.
‘It’s in the other room.’ He led her into the living room and pointed to the circuit board connected to his laptop.
‘Go and sit down,’ she said, pointing at the sofa with her gun.
‘Are you working with Boris?’ he asked, going docilely to the sofa and sinking into the cushions. He felt oddly detached from what was happening, as if watching the whole thing through a dirty window.
‘I don’t know this Boris,’ she said. She pulled a netbook from the outer pocket of her suitcase. ‘It is OK to unplug it?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I’m done.’
She unplugged the board from his laptop and reconnected it to her netbook. ‘I need you to explain what you have done,’ she said. She had put the gun down next to her netbook on the coffee table and the question was matter-of-fact rather than threatening, as if they were collaborating programmers. The gun was on the wrong side of the netbook from Julian’s tentative jumping-up-to-grab-it thought which he abandoned as soon as he had it, for no other reason than he no longer cared what she did to the circuit board. As long as she didn’t take it away, which didn’t look like her intention, then he was happy. ‘How have you managed something that doesn’t alter the code?’ she asked. ‘Surely they’ll check for any changes that you haven’t documented.’
Julian smiled, actually pleased that here was someone who could appreciate what he had done.
‘Yes, they’ll check the code of the actual control unit, but they won’t check everything on the chip.’
She frowned and her fingers worked quickly over the keyboard. The professional in Julian wanted to go round and see what she was doing but he thought it best to stay put.
‘What software are you using to access the chip?’ he asked, genuinely curious.
‘Eclipse.’
‘I use the same.’
The young woman looked at him as if he were stupid, which she made him feel, and he realized that her puffed eyes and reddened nose were caused by crying. Lots of crying.
‘So what have you done?’ she persisted.
‘These chips come with their own operating system, right? A library of software: print functions, temperature monitors, boot-up routines—’
‘I know what an operating system is.’
‘Of course, sorry. The point is that nobody, in all my years of programming embedded software, has ever checked these things. Even on the most sensitive of projects. I mean, all that stuff is just taken for granted. All they care about is the stuff you’ve been paid to write, not the stuff that comes on the chip in the first place. People treat them as blank slates but they’re not.’ Julian swore her dark eyes lit up for a second in recognition of what he was talking about.
She went back to the keyboard and hunched over the small screen. ‘So you’ve added a new library function,’ she said, in what Julian wanted to believe was a complimentary tone.
‘No, I’ve amended an existing function, one that monitors the temperature of the chip, so it now has a dual function. It just needs the GPS coordinates adding and those will be checked against target coordinates t
hat are programmed into the UAV. I assume that is what you are interested in?’
Her fingers left the keyboard and she studied him. ‘Who told you that? This Boris person?’
‘Yes. Are you sure you don’t know him?’
She ignored him, taking out her mobile phone and pressing a button on the side. A memory card popped out. She stuck it into the side of her netbook, ran her finger over the touchpad then tapped it. She waited for something to happen on her screen. Julian guessed she was loading stuff into the function he had hacked.
‘Your partner knows him,’ she said.
He sat up. ‘Sheila knows him?’
She frowned. ‘No, your partner. Your business partner.’
‘Rami?’
She nodded and he was going to ask her how she knew, then remembered that she’d spent two days in Hadfish. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for someone with her skills to get into Rami’s email account. She’d probably got his home address from Naomi’s computer.
‘I’m confused about all this. So do you work for the Israelis?’
She didn’t answer, instead working at her netbook, then she sat back and flexed her fingers. She would be compiling what she’d just added in order to post it to the chip. She seemed less distraught now that she’d been working for a while. Julian took his drink from the table, thinking if she was working for Israel she could have just done this back home, or in Leeds.
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