A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  She was almost forty.

  She didn’t even own a car.

  She left the kitchen and walked down the hallway, her fingertips sliding along the wall. There was a black Karrimor rucksack hanging on a peg on the wall, its straps fastidiously folded and taped. Her crash-bag, Jonah had called it. The night before he had left, he’d packed it and insisted that she keep it ready for instant departure.

  “You need to be ready at a moment’s notice,” he’d told her.

  “Why?” she’d asked, amused by the gravity of his expression. She’d put such things behind her. That was why they had come to Barnhill, to put their wildness behind them. She’d imagined it was simply force of habit in him.

  “Trust me,” Jonah had said. It was only much later, days after he’d gone, that it occurred to her that these were the very the same words that she’d used to him in Baghdad in March 2003 in the last days before the war, when falling for him felt like utter madness, when everything that she did, every word she said, every man she fucked or betrayed, everything she revealed and the many things that she kept concealed, all of it was about getting back her stolen child.

  She drifted from room to room in a sleepy daze with the dog following. There was a thin layer of peat dust from the fires in the kitchen and the drawing room that covered everything. It needed dusting. She needed to find a morning routine again.

  She opened the door to Jonah’s study and stared at the empty desk and the wall beside it, which had a profusion of jottings, press cuttings, photographs and maps pinned to it. The collage, he called it—the research matter for his memoir. She sat in the swivel chair and leaned back to study the wall. She had taken to randomly reading the press cuttings, the items of interest to Jonah that were highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker. This time, she read a cutting from the Daily Mail: “Aviation International Services do not now and have never conducted so-called rendition flights.” Beneath it there was an article from the Washington Post with the headline: AL QAEDA CASH TIED TO DIAMOND TRADE. Beside that, with an arrow linking the two, there was a 2004 printout from Wikinews: “The bodies of eleven disemboweled people have been found in a mass grave in the Sulaymaniyah region of Kurdistan, according to the United States military in Iraq. The bodies have not yet been identified. Reports quote an estimate that the bodies may be more than a year old.”

  Then there were the faces. She recognized some of them—the obvious ones, including Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, US vice president Dick Cheney and the Abu Ghraib guard Linndie England. There was a Polaroid photograph of Monteith, head of the shadowy unit of the Ministry of Defence known only as the Department, and until 2003 Jonah’s boss. Then there were other faces, faces remembered from her own past, the evidence of an unexpected and at times troubling intersection between her life and Jonah’s. There was a Pakistani brigadier, whose face she remembered glimpsing in a tunnel in the Tora Bora mountain range of Afghanistan. There was even a photograph of her husband Bakr, the father of her son. He was sitting in a restaurant in Kuwait City in 1990, looking sleek and well fed a few months before the Iraqi invasion.

  Others she did not recognize, including one of a man at the center of the collage, a head shot taken for an Interpol Red Notice. Nor ed-Din, it said in large text above the photo. Beneath it, under the heading “Aliases,” were half a dozen names.

  He was smiling.

  A wry, self-mocking smile that made a parody of the mugshot. He was good looking too, beautiful even, with large, oval eyes with dark, almost feminine eyelashes, a straight nose, defined cheekbones and full lips. There was something about him that reminded her of her husband as a young man, when she had first met him in the North-West Frontier, and had felt intoxicated by his beauty and his elusiveness. His eyes seemed to follow her around the room.

  It wasn’t the only photograph of Nor. There were several. One of him in the midst of a crowd at a demonstration protesting about the plight of Muslims in Bosnia; another of him in ranks of uniformed officer cadets, with the caption Somme Company, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst; and finally, a Polaroid of two young boys in swimming trunks with the sea and what looked like a Crusader castle in the background. In the margin of the photograph Jonah + Nor, Lebanon had been written in purple felt-tip pen.

  Childhood friend, soldier, activist, criminal …

  She wondered about Nor ed-Din’s place in Jonah’s confessional memoir. There had been plenty of opportunities to read Jonah’s work-in-progress but she had deliberately not taken them. It wasn’t through lack of interest; more that she was unwilling to be drawn into a situation where she felt obliged to reciprocate. She had concluded long ago that there was a limit to what she was prepared to share. She had not told Jonah that she recognized the Pakistani brigadier. There were certain things that she kept back.

  She went upstairs. In the bedroom, she picked up her dressing gown from the floor and hung it on the back of the door, a half-hearted attempt at tidying. She hesitated at the foot of the bed. Feeling disconsolate she remained standing there, staring at Jonah’s side. She remembered sleepless nights listening to his breathing and his nighttime mutters. He slept facedown, spread-eagled, arms and legs outstretched, often poking out of the covers, his pillows discarded on the floor. For several weeks after he had left, she slept with one of his pillows sandwiched between her thighs.

  Perhaps she should have been more open with him.

  She missed their lovemaking. She missed his hands, the walnuts of bone and sinew at the knuckles, the flat and broad pads of his fingertips tracing conversations over her skin, and the way he brought her to climax.

  She slipped into the unmade bed, her fingers reaching between her legs. She came with her eyes closed and her mouth open, out of time for a few seconds. The little death. Oblivious. Nowhere.

  She missed the way he flexed his fingers when he was talking to himself, conducting his interior monologues. He was lousy at disguising his dreaming. His eyes took on a faraway look. For someone so transparent, it was amazing to her that he should be able to keep so much hidden.

  She missed his shambling gait and his scarred skull, the bear-like qualities that he ruefully acknowledged. She missed his suspicion of closed doors; his need for an immediate exit close to hand. She missed his irrepressible daughter Esme, the bear cub, who swept through the house like a typhoon—a wild-haired mess of cuts and grazes and half-finished sentences.

  She missed his curious stare.

  She felt a constricting sensation in her chest. There were times when she dismissed Jonah as a child, one who imagined a dream and its fulfilment as one. She had come to despise the impulsiveness in him.

  She dressed in sweatpants and a sleeveless top and went back down the stairs to the kitchen. She stared again at the postcard Blu-tacked to the fridge. Beyond it the vodka ticked like a clock.

  She turned away and drifted again from room to room. Passing a window, she saw that two roe deer had appeared out of the mist and were crossing the track: a female and a fawn heading toward the far corner of the garden. She could see from the fawn’s kidney-shaped rump patch that it was a male—a mother and son. Sometimes it felt as if even nature was mocking her.

  At dawn, she rolled out her yoga mat on the grass and for an hour or so the cadence of her breathing marked the boundaries of her world.

  She saluted the pale orb of the sun, her body moving to the rhythm of her breath, rising on the in-breath and falling on the out-breath. Up dog. Down dog. At the end of each cycle she leapt to the front of her mat and in doing so became a virtually unconscious being, in a pure present, free of the past or any anxiety about the future. She held warrior pose, sinking deep in the lunge with her arms outstretched. She turned her hands this way and that, to deflect the pain. She held the pose for longer than she had ever done before, feeling the strings of muscle running down her arms as taut as cables.

  She finished with a headstand, and held it for several minutes before easing down, and pausing in corps
e pose to let the tension run like water out of her neck and spine. She rolled over on to her back, closed her eyes and felt herself sinking, sinking.

  For a while she slept.

  Eventually she woke, rolled over on to her right side and got slowly to her feet. She squatted and rolled up her mat. There was no anger in her, only sadness. She padded back into the kitchen and drank from the tap. Then fed wood into Aga, put the kettle on the hob and switched on the radio to listen to the Today show, another of his morning rituals. He’d flip the switch and lean against the sink with his arms outstretched like an athlete limbering up and wait for the hourly bulletin. Always he expected some new terror, and they rolled in like waves: Beslan, Madrid, Istanbul, Marrakesh and London.

  She listened for a while: reports from New Orleans of the descent into anarchy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at a benefit concert the rapper Kanye West saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”; in Iraq, a surge in car bombings, bomb explosions and shootings as the country sank inexorably into sectarian civil war and the historian Francis Fukayama saying, “We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day”; and a report from the Stratford Street mosque in Beeston in Leeds on the origins of the July 7 London bombers, a commentator saying, “It is easy for such movements as Hizb-ut-Tahrir to get into the minds of youngsters who are to an extent empty vessels. The information is easily accepted because of its seeming coherence and, more importantly, because many of those they seek to indoctrinate have nothing to offer in return. This is not discovery through the exchange of ideas. This is writing onto a blank page.”

  In her twenties, Miranda had been married to a man who introduced her to the intimate workings of guns and bombs. He had scooped her up like flotsam in the courtyard at Green’s Hotel in Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier and taken her away to the Lion’s Den, the al-Ansar Camp in the Tora Bora mountain range. She remembered sitting on a wooden bench in a segregated classroom of pious female students who were as careless with their own lives as they were with others’. She’d watched him in front of the blackboard, scratching his chalk diagrams from right to left, his lessons randomly punctuated by the sudden rattle of tins and the sprint for the shelters as the Russian Sukhois roared overhead. She knew how easy it was to make tricycloacetone peroxide from the combination of hydrogen peroxide, acetone and sulfuric acid, ingredients readily available in paint thinner, antiseptic and drain cleaner. The key was in the percentages and maintaining a stable temperature.

  She knew that the AK47 assault rifle has only eight moving parts. It can be stripped in under a minute and cleaned quickly in almost any climatic conditions. She could close her eyes and recite the order: release magazine catch, remove magazine, cock rifle, release the catch on the right side of rear sight, push piston assembly cover forward and detach from piston assembly and bolt.

  She had glided between worlds of opulence and worlds of desolation. She had become pregnant in a cave in the Lion’s Den and given birth to a boy nine months later in an air-conditioned palace in Saudi Arabia. She had called him Omar, firstborn. She had drifted between cities: Riyadh, Beirut, Kuwait City, Baghdad …

  In 1991 the Iraqis had snatched her from occupied Kuwait and imprisoned her in the prison at Abu Ghraib. They had come into her cell on a Thursday and removed her son. It had taken her ten years of searching to find his grave.

  Her father had been a fighter. His father had been a fighter. The Isaaq clan were fighters. When she was five, her father, who had fought the Ethiopians in the Ogaden and turned against his former mentor, the dictator Siad Barre, would clench a fist that was mottled pink with scars and hold it out.

  “Are you tough, little bird?” he would ask.

  “I’m tough,” she would say.

  “Then hit my fist.”

  She swung, crushing the knuckles of her tiny hand.

  “Is that as hard as you can hit? Do it again, harder this time.”

  She swung again.

  “Are you tough?”

  “I’m tough.”

  “Hit me again.”

  She struck again, sobbing, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Come on. You’re tougher than that. Hit me.”

  An uncle once said that she was tougher than her father—the same uncle that felt her up when she was fifteen. The second time that he tried it she’d been ready for him. It was Eid. They were upstairs at her parent’s house. When her uncle pressed himself against her she slipped a draftsman’s blade from her sleeve and sliced through the fabric of his trousers, causing him to widen his eyes comically. She had told him that if he ever attempted to touch her again she would cut off his penis.

  After a shower, she stared at herself in the full-length mirror. Five foot ten in bare feet, she stood with one hand on the taut plain of her stomach and the other on her forehead, pushing back the unruly strands of her hair. She had strong cheekbones and knowing eyes. She could be thirty.

  She bared her teeth. She said: “You used to frighten people.” She wondered when something would happen.

  INSPECTORS CALL

  September 3, 2005

  She was hiking down off the moor when she spotted the car coming around a bend in the hard-core track, some five or six miles distant. It was pelting with rain and a scouring wind was coming in from the northeast. She stopped in the shadow of a basalt outcrop and called the dog to her side. It came alert and raised its snout to the air.

  “Stay,” she murmured.

  She studied the approaching car through her binoculars. It was a Peugeot 206, white with red stripes, and marked Metropolitan Police. It was a long way from London in a 206. Be careful what you wish for, she thought. She briefly considered making a break for the mainland but quickly discounted the idea. There was chaos in Baghdad, New Orleans, London, a thousand other places … what possible reason could there be for her to leave the island? She resumed walking and the dog stayed close by her side.

  The car was still some way off when she entered the cottage, rolled down her waterproofs and stepped out of her Wellingtons. She fed the dog with a handful of dried food in its bowl, caught her reflection in the mirror on the wall and tucked a lock of hair behind an ear.

  She put the kettle on the Aga and waited for the knock on the door. Wait, she told herself. Wait a beat.

  There were three of them: two in uniform at the fore and, behind them, a third in a knee-length leather coat and mud-spattered jeans. The policemen stood sheltering from the rain in the porch, with their shoulders hunched and water dripping off the peaks of their caps. The third stood out in the yard, his unshaven face locked in a ferocious grimace.

  “This is Barnhill, is it, ma’am?” asked the taller policeman, with a mustache.

  “Yes,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mrs. Miranda Abd al’Aswr, is that correct?” asked the shorter one, taking his time to pronounce her name correctly. He removed his peaked cap and tucked it under his arm. His hair was plastered against his scalp. She almost felt sorry for them but their expressions were devoid of good humor.

  “Yes, I’m Miranda.”

  “I hope we’re not disturbing you?”

  “What do you want?” she asked. What was there to disturb?

  “We’re making inquiries about a Mr. Jonah Said,” said the shorter one.

  “What is it?” She heard her voice becoming strident. Inside she quaked.

  “We understand that you are an acquaintance of Mr. Said, a close friend?”

  “What’s happened to him?”

  An insolent silence followed. They seem to be deliberating whether to answer.

  Eventually, the taller man replied. “He’s missing.”

  “Unless he’s here?” added the shorter one.

  “He’s not here,” she told them. “He l
eft a couple of weeks ago.”

  The kettle began to whistle on the stove. The taller one looked over her shoulder into the kitchen. “Can we come in?”

  She turned her back on them, went over to the Aga and removed the kettle. When she turned back they were standing in the kitchen, dripping on the floorboards. The taller one removed his cap. She couldn’t see the third.

  “I need to see some identification,” she said.

  Begrudgingly they showed her their passes. They looked real enough. So did the uniforms. The taller one with the mustache was an inspector and the shorter one a sergeant. Their names were Coyle and Mulvey.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  “Please,” said the taller one, the inspector named Coyle. “Both white. No sugar for me.”

  “I’ll have two,” Mulvey told her, and after a pause he said, “please.”

  The third man slipped through the door and stood by the entrance to the hall, in a rapidly expanding puddle of water.

  “And your friend …?”

  Sergeant Mulvey stared at her for a moment without comprehension.

  The man dug around in the pocket of his leather coat and retrieved a crumpled business card, which he offered to her. It said Mark Mikulski, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “I’m only here to, uh, observe …” he said, in a North American accent.

  “Do you want tea?” she asked.

  He shook his head, dislodging further droplets of rain. Then he looked around and, spotting a chair by the wall, he sat down in it. Inspector Coyle frowned, as if sitting amounted to a breach of protocol. There was clearly tension between these neatly turned out policemen and their unshaven companion.

  She made three teas and was careful to discard the tea bags in the compost bin. Coyle stepped aside to let her get the milk carton from the fridge. She sniffed at it before pouring.