A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “A limb for a limb,” a voice said, in his dream. He felt its searing breath on his face.

  “Who’s limb?” Jonah wondered.

  “In revenge, there is life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The bogeyman’s here.”

  Jonah’s eyes were drawn to the tree line. A man stepped out of the shadows at the forest’s edge. He was naked and smeared with ash. He had a bandana tied around his shaven skull and a machete in his hand.

  “He’s come to take your hands …”

  Jonah began to struggle, but the men had him pinned down, their arms hooked through his elbows. His hands were numb, all the blood drained out. The bogeyman approached.

  Nor lifted his hands from Jonah’s and the men tightened their grip on his forearms. His fingers poked out like sticks. The bogeyman raised his machete, swinging it in a great arc. The starlight glinted blue on the nicked blade.

  Nor’s eyes shone.

  He hit the fast-reverse button: it was moments before the concussion. The scrum was holding. Jonah was dug in and low against the ground, with a string of pain from his heels to his thighs. The ball was in the thicket of feet in front of him. Looking back through his legs, he saw Nor just behind him, impossibly low, as if he were on starter’s blocks, waiting for the ball.

  Nor’s eye shone. Go on, Chewy …

  Jonah heaved.

  Yes …

  Jonah imagined the wet crunch of the blade on flesh and bone and his severed hands flopping on to the grass. He saw himself as the limbless beggar from the football match, pleading with his coat-hanger claws.

  Go on …

  He bared his teeth and gave up his thoughts. He swung to the right and bit off an ear. The man screamed.

  The blade came slicing down and Jonah surged upwards and to the side and the screaming man on his right tumbled forward on to the stump and into the path of the falling machete. Jonah’s forehead connected with the jaw of the man on his left. Teeth flew. Then he was on his feet, swaying and snorting like an enraged bear. He spat the lump of gristle in his mouth on to the ground. Things leaped in and out of focus. He looked from right to left: Nor was squatting, very still, on the balls of his feet; one man was hunched over the stump with the machete stuck in his head; another was spread-eagled on his back; a third man, the one in the Tupac T-shirt, was stumbling in the direction of the tree line and the bogeyman was on his knees crawling after him. The killing was not done. With his bound hands, Jonah tugged the machete out of the man’s skull. He took five steps, sloshing through the mud. He counted them, one after the other. Focus came and went. The bogeyman rolled into a ball, like a frightened millipede. Jonah thought, You’re dead. He brought up the blade and swung it down, and brought it up and swung it down.

  “Stop!” A shout.

  He staggered backwards, staring wildly.

  There was a loud crack and he wondered for a moment whether he’d been shot. Missed. Nor would not miss again. He closed his eyes, giving himself to the coming bullet. Nothing. He opened his eyes. Nor was standing with the stock of the Kalashnikov fitted to his shoulder, his eyes narrow as slits and his tongue thrust deep into his cheek; his finger tightening on the trigger for a second time. Crack. He shot the remaining fighter just a couple of steps short of the tree line. Then he turned to Jonah, pointing the rifle at him.

  “I’ll shoot you dead.”

  Jonah exhaled, staggering back and forth. His head was thumping like a hammer. He sank to his knees. I don’t have it in me to take you on.

  Nor acknowledged Jonah’s response with a quick nod of the head and walked among the wounded, dispatching them, one at a time, with the barrel pressed to each forehead before gently squeezing the trigger.

  Then he turned to Jonah, pointing the rifle at him again. “Tell Monteith to beware the sky.”

  A moment’s pause. The sky? “Why?”

  “A whirlwind is coming, Jonah,” Nor said softly. “When it has passed, nothing will ever be the same.” Then he ejected the cartridge, cleared the breech and threw the rifle to the ground. “You’d better run for your life.”

  Jonah staggered into the jungle. Soon afterwards he heard the hammering of automatic-weapons fire.

  A storm came. He couldn’t see more than a couple of steps ahead. In the darkness, there was no boundary between land and sky. Rain poured down from the canopy and rushed along the forest floor. He was stumbling along a path that had become a torrent of water. There were crashing sounds all around that he was convinced were trees falling. He kept moving forward. Leaves and vines whipped him. Thorns ripped at his face and clothes. The ground gave way and abruptly he was tumbling in a mudslide. He slammed into a tree. He folded around it. He was numb and cold; only the cuts on his face felt real.

  A family of charcoal burners found him in the wake of the storm. He was unconscious and still clinging to the tree, his fingers gripping the bark. They had to peel them off, one by one, before cutting off the plastic cuffs. He was too large to carry, so they made a sled from fertilizer bags and dragged him through the forest to their camp.

  When he woke up he was on the sandy floor of a tent, lying wrapped in blankets. There was a fire burning beside him. The logs were crackling, sparks falling on the ground.

  One of the charcoal burners was leaning over him. “Who are you?”

  He almost laughed. It was such a great excuse to be an amnesiac, to be reborn. Unfortunately, he remembered everything.

  “The cat’s out of the bag,” he said.

  “You have a fever,” the man said.

  And a splitting headache.

  With Nor dead there had been some hope of keeping the assassination of Kiernan a secret and avoiding a vengeful American response; with Nor alive there was no such hope. They would always live with the fear that Nor would talk. And he would talk, Jonah was sure of that. The only possible reason Nor hadn’t done it in the last two years was because he was keeping it up his sleeve, ready to produce it with a flourish for maximum, catastrophic effect.

  Someday Nor would talk.

  THE FALLEN TOWERS

  September 2001

  The message was written in the layer of white ash on the hood of an abandoned car on Broadway: PUNISH. It wasn’t clear whether the person who had used a finger to scrawl the message was referring to what had happened or to some future act of retribution. Standing on the pavement beside the car, Jonah watched another convoy of Humvees, dump trucks, bulldozers and backhoes trundle south through the parted sawhorse barriers.

  “A whirlwind is coming,” Nor had told him, two months before in Sierra Leone. “When it has passed, nothing will ever be the same …” He’d been right. You could tell by the look on people’s faces that something terrible had happened. And that many Americans were thinking that this was the worst thing that had ever happened—the world had turned on its head in a day.

  “We’ve spent five years trying to get people to listen. But nobody took us seriously. They were oblivious. It was too exotic a threat. Too primitive …”

  Jonah glanced across at Mikulski, who was staring at the pillar of ash spiraling upwards, hundreds of feet over Manhattan and the Hudson. It was the first time that Mikulski had spoken since Jonah had met him at the barricade on the corner of Varrick and Houston. Mikulski had produced his Treasury Department ID and soldiers dressed in flak jackets and gas masks had waved them through. They had walked together down the empty, ash-covered pavements into the Financial District.

  Mikulski looked as if he had hardly slept for several days. He had a steely expression on his face that suggested deep-rooted anger.

  “I said to people: you don’t understand. Random slaughter is a way of life out there, from Algeria to Afghanistan. Bombs, earthquakes, mass starvation—whole regions of the world strewn with failing states. They just didn’t get it. People thought that we were immune, that somehow our ideals and beliefs would shield us.”

  Mikulski was right, Jonah thought; in
the world that he knew this sort of thing happened every day. Hatred, not love, was all around. Eventually, inevitably, it had found its way to America.

  “Where were you?” Jonah asked.

  “When the first plane hit? I was walking down West Broadway. I heard the roar of the engines. I looked up and it struck the North Tower.” He glanced across at Jonah. “I was still standing there with my mouth open when the second plane hit.”

  Mikulski’s office had been in the US Customs House in World Trade Center 6, the eight-story building that was destroyed when the North Tower collapsed on it. They had been due to meet there on the afternoon of the 11th. Mikulski was on loan to the US Treasury from the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence office. His particular specialty was tracking terrorist financial links.

  Mikulski returned the question. “Where were you?”

  “On a plane,” Jonah replied, “on my way here.”

  It was already clear that 9/11 was the fixed point around which they would orientate themselves for the foreseeable future. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Jonah’s 747 had been diverted to an air force base at Gander in Newfoundland. It had joined thirty other passenger jets that were parked on a runway built for cold-war-era nuclear bombers in expectation of a very different kind of Armageddon. The small, dilapidated town adjacent to the runway had struggled to accommodate several thousand unexpected guests, and by the time Jonah and his fellow passengers had disembarked from their plane, the only remaining place to sleep was the benches of a Pentecostal church. He had spent five nights in the church.

  “What will happen now?” Jonah asked.

  Mikulski unfolded his newspaper and held it up for Jonah to see. On the cover was a picture of President George W. Bush and below it the headline: JUSTICE WILL BE DONE.

  “We’ll go after them, wherever they are. We’ll hunt them down.” Revenge was the word on everyone’s lips. In the early hours of one morning in Gander, Jonah had found himself sitting on a pew in the church next to a straight-backed, gray-faced woman with a Bible on her lap. He hadn’t meant to intrude on her prayers but it was the only pew without someone stretched out on it, and she had offered him a weary smile. He had spoken to her out of politeness and in return she had confided in him. She spoke softly, without betraying any emotion: her daughter had been “taken” in the attacks. She had been “judged.” The daughter had worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower, just above the point of impact. Jonah had been stunned by the woman’s composure.

  “We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government,” the woman explained. “We’ve stuck our finger in His eye. The Supreme Court has insulted Him over and over. They’ve taken His Bible away from the schools. They’ve forbidden little children to pray.”

  Jonah tried to ease himself out of the pew, but there was an unstoppable momentum to her softly spoken words.

  “The battle of America has begun,” she told him. “In the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. Retribution will be terrible to behold.”

  Not everybody in America had considered they were immune or out of reach, Jonah reflected. Plenty of people had been expecting it. They were the ones counting down the hours to the rapture. It was easy to understand how religious fundamentalists would latch on to the destruction of the towers as a foreshadow of the coming Armageddon. And both sides were at it: the symbolism was both biblical and Koranic. In the Bible, the people who built the tower of Babel were punished for their presumption; in the Koran, the people who failed to heed God’s messengers were destroyed in the punishment stories. As far as Jonah was concerned, Islamism and Christian fundamentalism were no different from each other—their adherents were both scrambling rabidly for the next piece of carnage.

  “This way,” Mikulski said, producing a torch from his battered leather coat. They entered the Century 21 department store and picked their way through the rubble and smashed goods to the emergency stairwell. They climbed to the fifth floor and entered the offices of a law firm. Walking over to the windows, which were blown out, they stepped out on to the ledge.

  “There,” Mikulski said.

  They were looking right into the heart of it, an enormous pile of smoldering wreckage. Parts of it were on fire. In the glare of the spotlights, they stood and watched firemen digging in the rubble and twisted metal. Just looking at it sucked all the hope out of you.

  “You have your answer, don’t you?” Mikulski said. “You know now why they were converting cash into easily transportable assets, because they know that we are going to come for them like a whirlwind and they know that if they can’t carry it they’ll lose it. Diamonds are among the easiest, and by far the most valuable by weight, of commodities to move. They don’t set off metal detectors. They don’t have any scent. You take a diamond that’s been cut and polished and there’s no human being on earth who can tell with certainty where that stone came from.”

  “We think they purchased about twenty million dollars’ worth.”

  “They want to be able to fund future attacks,” Mikulski told him. “This abomination isn’t enough for them; it’s not big enough or grotesque enough. Not by a long way. It’s only the opening salvo.”

  Within the counter-terrorism community, Mikulski had a reputation for being a maverick but also for plain speaking and honesty. He was the son of Polish immigrants, a former Baltimore homicide cop turned FBI agent. When Jonah had first contacted him after his return from Sierra Leone, he had hoped that Mikulski would be able to offer some advice on how to track the sale of the diamonds, in the hope that it might lead to Nor, but that wasn’t his only motivation for asking for a meeting. Jonah had been ready to tell all. In the weeks following his return from Sierra Leone, he had convinced himself that it was better to confess and hope for clemency than leave it to Nor to reveal all in some spectacular stunt. He had not consulted Monteith before arranging the meeting. He was in no doubt that Monteith would regard what he was contemplating doing as treason. But he had reasoned that he was under a greater obligation to tell the truth than to simply protect the Department.

  By the time he had boarded the plane for New York, Jonah had made his mind up. He was going to confess. But events had intervened. Terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Standing beside Mikulski in the window of the legal firm, and staring down at the fiery inferno that was all that was left of the towers, he knew that there would be no confession. The world had irreversibly changed. He was as tied to the lie as the rest of the Guides.

  MIRANDA

  Hijra: Flight

  “I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak from the evil of what He has created, from the evil of darkness when it gathers, from the evil of the women who blow on knots, from the evil of an envier when he envies.”

  Koran, Sura 113

  THE WOMAN WHO BLEW ON KNOTS

  September 2, 2005

  Sometime before dawn she found herself at the door to the farmhouse, sure in the knowledge that there would be no further sleep that night. She stood for a while, naked in the doorway, staring out across the water at the mainland. The air was cold and thick with the smell of brine, and soon the first mist would roll off the water. The chill burned her cheeks, breasts and thighs. She thought, as she had so often done before, that her life was a mystery that had unraveled in directions unforeseen.

  The dog slid between her legs and sprinted off after distant rabbits. She didn’t feel tired. She felt lost. She had no cable, no lifeline, to show her the way. She turned from the doorway and retreated to the kitchen. From the freezer box in the fridge she removed a bottle of lemon vodka, the last of the batch. She poured herself a measure in an empty jam jar from the draining board and downed it in one gulp. It burned.

  She felt a rush of sudden anger. There were times when it felt as if a band of steel were tightening against her skull.

  Eve
n in his absence, Barnhill was full of Jonah’s presence. She often started, her head turning as fast as whiplash to catch him, but she was always too slow. He was never there. It was just his ghost haunting her, an invisible companion to the dog that followed everywhere at her heels.

  She glanced at the postcard tacked to the fridge door; Jonah’s only message since he had left the island. The picture was a photograph of the Bala Hissar fortress in Peshawar. She turned it over. The stamps were from Pakistan, postmarked Peshawar. She had contemplated buying a ticket for Pakistan and setting out in pursuit of him—after all, she knew Peshawar well—but something had made her stay put. She distrusted the postcard’s provenance. There was a simple written message, I have things to take care of, and the address written in a scrawl beside it. The subtext eluded her. She clung to the thought that there might be some further communication from him, some sort of explanation.

  Then there was her job, if it could be called that. From the beginning of April, she had been employed by Scottish Natural Heritage to monitor the habitat of rare orchids on the island’s machair, the sand-dune pasture on the windward side of the isle of Jura that was classified as a special conservation area. In the last two months she had logged frog, Hebridean, northern March and early purple orchids, as well as sea bindweed, yellow rattle and red clover among the carpet flowers. She had even spotted Irish ladies’ tresses, a native orchid of Greenland, its seed probably deposited by migrating Greenland white-fronted geese in their droppings. Then there were the birds: corncrake, twit, dunlin, redshank and ringed plover. After Jonah had left she simply continued with her daily routine of hiking, note-taking and observations. If nothing else, it had provided a ready excuse for her restless meandering.

  Beyond that, it was a struggle to remember how she had spent the time. There were piles of books, fragments of diary notes and observations, clues here and there, but nothing concrete, and certainly nothing to distinguish one day from another. They’d run together like goulash.