A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

Jonah discovered that the driver’s name was Zalik and that he had originally been a road construction worker employed by a Spanish company, but that he had joined Polisario after the Spanish abandoned the colony and the Moroccans invaded.

  After six hours, they reached Birlehlu. There wasn’t much there but a corral of junked trucks, a cluster of sheet-metal huts constructed from flattened oil barrels, a few shipping containers and, some distance off, an abandoned colonial-era schoolhouse that housed the rescued migrants. They arrived in the early afternoon when the sun was so bright you had to squint to see through the windshield.

  Jonah wandered from room to room through the schoolhouse with Justine following. In one a line of African men in ill-fitting, blue boiler suits queued up to be inspected by a Spanish medical team. In another, two Bangladeshis wrapped in silver-foil blankets were staring disconsolately at the floor. They had paid a people trafficker in Dhaka several thousand dollars each to smuggle them to Europe. They had been wandering in the desert for four days before a Polisario patrol found them.

  “I thought I must die,” one of them said to Justine, in halting English.

  There was no sign of Nor. Jonah stepped out into the courtyard, into the burning sunlight, and shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat ran down his back at once.

  “Where’s he from, this friend of yours?” Justine asked.

  “He’s from Jordan,” Jonah replied, reluctantly.

  “We need to go north if we are going to find him,” she said, “toward the Berm.”

  A pile of sardine tins stamped MAROC lying discarded in a dry river bed marked their passing. Zalik squatted down beside the tins and turned them over in his hands. “They came this way,” he said, and then pointed to a nearby fold in the ground. “There are mines there.”

  They got back in the Land Cruiser and drove a few kilometers farther along the wadi, following tire tracks in the soft sand.

  At a waterhole in a place named Budib they encountered a nomad family with a herd of camels. A woman in black robes and her pigeon-chested son sat on a bank of sand, watching their camels gathered above a cluster-bomb canister that was being used as a water trough. Tennis-ball-shaped explosive submunitions were scattered across the floor and sides of the wadi.

  Zalik spoke to the woman and her son for a while and Jonah stood listening. They had not seen any migrants for twenty-four hours. Jonah worried that the escape route might have closed.

  “How long have you known this friend of yours?” Justine asked.

  “We were at school together. His father knew mine.”

  “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  “Let’s find him first,” he said.

  “We are close to the Berm now,” Zalik said.

  They parked the Land Cruiser at the base of a slope that was littered with hard black volcanic rock and set off up it on foot. They walked across a baking plateau. Zalik pointed to an escarpment that was about a kilometer away. It was the Berm. It was unmistakably man made, a stark black line following the summit of the escarpment. Individual bunker positions and communications arrays were visible at intervals along the Berm. At the foot of the escarpment piles of stones at intervals marked the perimeter of the minefields.

  They walked down a narrow gorge, and approached a line of sand dunes. Zalik showed them to a hollow that was dotted with thorn bushes.

  “Wait here,” he said. He set off across the dunes.

  The moonlight was blue and palpably cold. He sat in darkness, on the crest of the dune, waiting for the dawn. Zalik had vanished and Justine was huddled beside him in her sleeping bag. He glanced regularly at her, every few minutes, but his main focus was on the distant Berm, and the direction that Nor was expected to come from, if he came. Most likely it would not be this night. He listened to the sound of the wind rustling in the thorn bushes in the wadi below.

  His life was such that he was often awake when others slept. He hadn’t planned it that way. He hadn’t envisaged it, but that was how it had turned out.

  CATCHING MOLES

  September 1992–September 1993

  He remembered his surprise on receiving the letter from Nor in which he told him that he had joined the British Army. He remembered thinking incredulously: what are you playing at? He remembered the subsequent drive up from the intelligence school at Chicksands to the military academy at Sandhurst. He had arrived after dark and found Nor lined up on show parade, the nightly punishment ritual in which those guilty of a transgression of discipline were forced to parade in their best uniform Blues in front of the college steps for inspection by a typically fearsome company sergeant major—Nor was on his fourteenth consecutive night of show parade. Jonah had hung back in the shadows at the edge of the square to watch.

  “Show pockets clean,” the sergeant major had yelled, and the line of young officer cadets turned out their pockets and stood holding them between their forefingers and thumbs. The sergeant major had marched up the line with his pay stick tucked under his arm. He had clattered to a halt opposite Nor and bent almost double to inspect his pockets. After a few moments, he had straightened up, inhaled a lungful of breath and begun to yell.

  “Sand! Sand!!! You’ve got sand in the seams of your pockets, Mr. Din! I don’t know where the fuck you think you are, you miserable little Ali Baba, but you’re not in the fucking desert now! You’re not buggering camels and gobbling sheep’s eyes! You’re not flying around on a fucking carpet! You’re not wearing a tea towel on your head! Look around you. Can you see a shimmering oasis fringed with gently swaying palm trees? Can you? A camel-hide tent filled with dancing virgins and burnished silver platters of Turkish Delight? Look at me, Mr. Din, do I look like I jumped out of a lamp to grant you a fucking wish? I most certainly did not! You’re at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Mr. Din. You’re in Her Majesty’s army, wearing Her Majesty’s uniform. You are, without doubt, the most woeful example of a cadet that I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to turn into an officer, and if you don’t want to spend a thousand and one nights on show parade you had better get your miserable house in order. Show again!”

  And so Nor was sentenced to another night on show parade, and so it went on and on. The sergeant major had stalked off the parade square, leaving one of the color sergeants to fall out the cadets.

  Afterwards, Nor had walked back towards the accommodation blocks with his eyes downcast. Jonah had fallen into step beside him. Nor had looked up but did not appear surprised.

  “This is your fault,” he had told Jonah. “You have to get me out of here.”

  It was close to midnight by the time he had turned off the dual carriageway, following the signs for the air force base. It was the spring of 1993, less than a week after Nor had been thrown out of the School of Infantry at Warminster, and dishonorably discharged from the army—less than a week since he had been set on a path that would eventually lead him to the Northwest Frontier.

  The entrance to the married quarters was a mile or so beyond the floodlit perimeter fence that surrounded the runway. He had almost missed it. People often did. There was a narrow lane with a dead-end sign, leading to an estate of red-brick 1950s housing tucked inconspicuously in a fold in the ground. He had driven between rows of identical houses on avenues named after distant battlefields, and turned into a cul-de-sac reserved for senior officers’ families.

  Monteith’s cottage was located down a hard-core track that ran alongside one of the houses and then branched off into a stand of old oaks and overgrown rhododendrons. To get there Jonah had to open a gate and drive noisily across a cattle grid. It was typical of Monteith: of the military, but not in it.

  It was said that the first true test of any fresh recruit to the Afghan Guides was to find Monteith’s cottage. There was even a rumor that a kindly army padre had taken it upon himself to gently inform luckless recruits that he found wandering the mowed lawns of the married quarters that their services were no longer required and that they should return to
unit. The cottage was an old gatehouse protecting a long-neglected track from the days before the air force base when the lands had been part of a family estate. It was brick and wood, with a flint tiled roof, mullioned windows and a carved oak doorway that was bleached with age. It sat amid dense vegetation surrounded by a dogwood hedge that was clotted with clematis and honeysuckle.

  Turning a corner in the track, he had been surprised to see Flora’s dented VW Beetle parked beside the hedge. As far as he had been aware, Monteith and his daughter Flora were not on speaking terms. Jonah hadn’t seen her for more than six months. He’d felt a sinking feeling. He’d said to himself, why is everything so bloody complicated? He knew what his wife’s response, under different circumstances, might be: Life is complicated. But his wife hadn’t been around to offer her particular brand of wisdom and it wasn’t a problem that he could go to her with.

  Jonah had pressed the bell. The door opened and they stood there for a moment in the darkness. Then she’d reached up with her hands resting on his chest and lightly brushed her lips against his cheek. It was all he could do not to pick her up.

  “Come this way,” she’d said, and stepped deftly out of reach. He’d followed her down the hall, watching the sway of her hips beneath her robe. In the kitchen, she had leaned forward over the porcelain sink, to stare out of the window facing the back garden. He’d stood beside her for a moment and waited while his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.

  “He’s been out there since the sun went down,” she had whispered. “He hasn’t moved an inch.”

  Nor was squatting, balancing on the balls of his feet, in the center of the lawn. His head was bowed and his hands were resting lightly on the grass. Jonah had felt his heart sink—Nor was losing it. It had taken him longer to locate Monteith. He was sitting with his back to a tree on the edge of the lawn.

  “The whole county is infested,” Flora had said. “You’d think there was plague.”

  Jonah had struggled to make sense of the scene for a moment and then he recognized the irregular mounds that littered the lawn—molehills. He’d almost laughed out loud.

  “He caught one last night,” she’d said. “Just reached down and plucked it out of the hole. Amazing. Dad never taught me to catch moles.”

  “Nor me,” Jonah had replied. “In fact, the only advice that he gave me was to find a shadow and stand in it.”

  “You’re standing in a shadow now,” she’d said, without looking at him.

  He’d shrugged in response. “It’s getting to be a habit.”

  She had turned, and the little light there was shone on her face and her upturned nose and he’d wanted to reach out and kiss her.

  “Stop it,” she’d whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you think you’re playing at?”

  “I don’t know. I just, just …”

  “Not that. Him. Nor. I thought you weren’t supposed to get sentimental with your agents. Treat them like dirt and when you’ve finished with them throw them to the wolves—isn’t that what your mentor, my precious father, says?”

  “Nor’s made for the work,” Jonah had protested.

  “You’ve known him since you were a child,” Flora had said. “He looks up to you. You should listen to him talking about you. I’ve had to the last couple of days. He’s practically in love with you. Are you ready to ditch him in some forgotten hellhole when it all goes wrong?”

  “It won’t come to that. We look after our people.”

  “Who are you talking about? Who’s this we? The Department? My father? Do you think he feels any loyalty to Nor? You know him better than that.”

  Jonah had sighed. “I need to talk to them.”

  “You can go out there and join them. I’ll leave you to it. Catch some moles. I’m going to bed.”

  “Wait …” he said.

  She had paused in the doorway to the hall, with her head down. “What are you going to do, Jonah? Tell me that you love me, after all? You’re married, remember.”

  “Flora.”

  She had seemed to shrink in the darkness as if it would provide camouflage.

  “Flora.”

  She had moaned softly. He had put his hand on her shoulder.

  She had shrugged it off and pulled away from him.

  “And maybe there isn’t a shred of loyalty in you either,” she’d hissed.

  It was the summer of 1993 and a truck flying the black-and-white flag of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir led a crowd of about a thousand students down Brick Lane and along Whitechapel High Street past the East London mosque. Shopkeepers and local council tenants had spilled out on to the street to watch. Stewards in Day-Glo vests led the chanting: “Jihad for Bosnia! Jihad for Palestine! Islam is the solution!”

  A police van brought up the rear. The crowd was young and predominantly Bangladeshi. The boys wore baggy jeans and the women were veiled but shouted with a gusto equal to the men’s.

  Monteith had followed at a discreet distance with Jonah walking by his side. “They don’t look much like jihadis,” Jonah had observed.

  “Hizb are the flame under the kettle,” Monteith had replied. “It’ll take time but eventually they’ll reach boiling point.”

  “Are they being watched?”

  “You mean by someone other than us? MI5, for instance?” Monteith had snorted derisively. “I told you when you joined that you would find it a lonely business working for me.”

  Jonah remembered that on his first day as one of the Guides, Beech had told him that it was Monteith’s curse to be an unfashionable prophet. A Cassandra. Monteith was widely derided across the intelligence community for conjuring threats out of thin air.

  “Hizb are currently banned from preaching in the local mosques. But that’s not going to stop them. The Hizb is organic. They don’t need offices, mosques or schools. They have a cell structure and they spread like a cancer, by mutating and replicating. Each cell, or halaqah, has about five members. They meet once a week and are commanded by a mushrif, or teacher. They go out and recruit and break off to form new cells.”

  At the front of the march, a young man had climbed the tailgate of the truck and was shouting into a megaphone: “Brothers, we are bringing jihad to the streets of the capital of the kuffar, the unbelievers.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “A year ago, nobody was using the word jihad. Hizb brought it here.”

  “What do they want?”

  “The Hizb? Destroy the West and its puppet regimes in the Muslim lands. A global Muslim nation. More immediately they are looking for volunteers to be trained overseas and sent back here to form the nucleus of a future uprising. Talk of the devil, look there. Your two o’clock. There he is.”

  An older man with a limp was passing a dry cleaner’s shop window, shadowing the crowd.

  “His name is Farid. He’s Pakistani,” Monteith had explained, “a Pashtun from Quetta. He lost the leg to a Soviet mine in Afghanistan in 1984. He’s over here recruiting for the training camps. He’s also Pakistani intelligence, ISI through and through.” As if on cue, Nor had climbed on to the truck and snatched the megaphone. He had recently been thrown out of the army on a trumped-up charge of possessing drugs—but in reality, he was Monteith’s latest recruit in the war on extremism, fresh from several months’ training at the intelligence school at Chicksands. He’d shouted: “Crusader, invader! Saladin is coming back!” A cheer went up from the crowd and Nor had rewarded them with his most ebullient grin. He’d started a new chant, “USA! USA! You will pay!”

  The older man had been watching Nor intently.

  “Do you think Nor’s ready?”

  “He’s ready,” Monteith said. “Now it’s up to the Pakistanis.”

  Jonah kissed Flora beneath a riot of honeysuckle in the gardens of Monteith’s garden at the end of that summer. They had kissed with a ferocity born of two years of frustration and longing.

  Monteith was having a party to celebrate Nor’s successful p
enetration of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir. They were all there: Nor, Beech, Lennard, Alex and their wives, partners and children. Flora had rigged fairy lights in the garden. Even Monteith had been in a jovial mood.

  It was after dark and they had found each other on one of the pathways through the lush foliage that almost swallowed the house, and Flora had taken him by the hand and led him farther into the shadows. They had been silhouettes in the darkness, reaching for each other, her hands on his shoulder and then cupping his face.

  Afterwards, she had slipped out of his arms and gone back to join the party. He followed more slowly. He remembered his wife looking up at him as he approached with a question in her eyes. But he was a professional deceiver. A spinner of lies. Absent-mindedly he’d run his fingers through her hair.

  A couple of weeks later Nor had left for Bosnia with an aid convoy. He’d been in Split, waiting for permission to cross the border, when he was approached by a Pakistani ISI agent and encouraged to travel to Pakistan. At the beginning of summer, he had arrived at the HUM offices in Lahore and after a few days in the city had been sent up to Miram Shah, the dusty town close to the Afghanistan that was used as a staging post for recruits heading to the training camps around Khost in Afghanistan.

  And so Nor’s career as a double agent in the pay of both the Pakistani ISI and the British intelligence services began.

  A LOYAL SPY

  February 2002

  Justine woke, her large eyes blinking uncertainly. She wriggled in the bag and fought to get an arm clear. She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking the sand out.

  “Have you been awake all night?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “About your friend?”

  He did not answer.

  “You must be freezing,” she said.

  It was true, he was cold.

  “Come here,” she said, and partially unzipped the sleeping bag. She worked her body close to his. He put an arm around her shoulders and she rested her head against his chest, her hair against his chin.