A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  The dawn was coming. He scanned the horizon with his binoculars. There was no sign of Zalik or of Nor. He sensed through his arm the shiver of her body. He felt a chasm inside himself and a corresponding emptiness in her.

  “It’s bloody cold,” she mumbled.

  He surprised himself by brushing aside a strand of her hair and kissing the nape of her neck. She looked up at him and he cupped her face in his hands and her eyes did not close. They kissed ardently.

  She pulled down the zipper farther. He slipped in, pushing his boots against the bag’s stitching, and heaved his weight against her. She reached behind him and pulled up as much of the zip as she could. He kissed her again. He ran his hands under her blouse. Her nipples were as hard as stones against the rough palms of his hands. She pushed down her jeans and he slid his hands downward and pressed his fingers between the cleft in her legs, parting the folds of flesh, hooking a finger inside her. She shifted against him and moaned softly. He kissed her neck, her nipples and the lobes of her ears. He unbuttoned himself. She kicked out of a trouser leg, raised one thigh and, reaching down, steered him inside her. He gasped. They were two patches of heat in the expanse of night. He plunged into her and he felt the zipper tear against the small of his back.

  They were filled with wildness and abandon. She came quickly, with her eyes wide open. He took longer, and when he finally came, rearing above her, it felt as if some part of him had torn inside.

  Afterwards, they drank from his bottle of duty-free. Then he crawled out of the bag and did up his buttons, refeeding his belt through the loops. They did not speak again. He assumed that she was embarrassed or even frightened. He had been told once that the expression on his face when he was coming was terrifying.

  He lifted the binoculars and scanned the horizon.

  Zalik returned soon after, appearing soundlessly from behind a nearby acacia tree. He squatted on the sand beside them. Jonah wondered whether he’d been watching them. Justine wouldn’t look at him.

  “Two men crossed the Berm last night,” Zalik said. “They passed east of here. One of them is injured.”

  “Are you sure there were two?” Jonah asked.

  Zalik did not reply.

  After a pause, Jonah asked, “Can you take us to them?” Zalik stood up and, without answering, started walking back toward the car. Justine hurriedly bundled up the sleeping bag and stuffed it into her bag. They followed.

  He was sitting slumped in the shadows of a cave. One of his legs was bent under him so that he appeared to be kneeling. The other was outstretched but ended just below the knee in a bloody stump. They had followed the trail of blood up the rocky slope from the wadi floor. For a moment, standing at the mouth of the cave, Jonah felt a momentary sense of relief that events had been taken out of his hands, but it was soon followed by shame and a plunging sense of desolation. This was not the way for it to end.

  Beside him, Zalik flicked on the torch. The cave was decorated with ancient pigment: hundreds of handprints pressed into the walls and roof by long-forgotten hunters. He wondered whether it represented some kind of warning. Kneeling beside the dead man, Jonah touched his face. His skin was still warm. His eyes were open. It was not Nor. Jonah breathed deeply from his abdomen and, despite everything, gave brief thanks. He glanced up at Zalik, who was standing, watching him. “The other one?” he asked.

  Zalik shrugged.

  They headed back down through the piles of rock to where Justine was waiting. Turning a corner in the narrow wadi bottom, they found her dancing barefoot on the sand, her hips swaying to some interior rhythm, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other; Nor was sitting cross-legged on the boulder beside her with his head covered by a black turban. They were smiling. Seeing them together, with their smiles connecting, Jonah felt a sudden stab of what could only be described as jealousy.

  “He says that you’re the devil and that that you tried to take away his God, Jonah,” Justine announced. She pirouetted, and shook her bottom at him as she offered the bottle to Nor, who declined graciously. “He also says that he was your best student. He says that you taught him everything he knows.”

  All Jonah could think of was that the old Nor would have accepted the bottle, the old Nor had a passion for vodka. The old Nor didn’t have a God to appease.

  “You took your time, Sensei,” Nor teased.

  “Who’s your friend in the cave?” Jonah asked, stonily.

  Nor’s mouth narrowed to a pout. He didn’t want the mood broken. “A fellow traveler. One less fortunate.”

  “Who was he?” Jonah demanded furiously.

  “A Saudi. He was rendered out of Kandahar on the same flight as I was. Does that satisfy you?” With that Nor sprang down off the rock. He was still pale and far too thin but his face was flushed with excitement. They shook hands and then, to Jonah’s surprise, Nor embraced him. In all the time they had known each other, Nor had never once embraced him. Afterward, they stood with Nor’s hands grasping Jonah’s upper arms. “You should be happy. You were going to have to kill him anyway, to maintain my cover.” Then he leaned forward and whispered in Jonah’s ear, “Unless of course it was me you were planning to kill?”

  “I’m here to make sure you’re OK,” Jonah replied, stiffly. Not for the first time he wondered how it was that Nor saw through him so easily.

  “I’m OK,” Nor told him, serious for a moment. “Now where are we going?”

  “South,” Jonah told him. “People are waiting for you.”

  Nor reached out and took Justine by the hand. “Show me to my next mission,” he said, and he tightened his grip on Justine’s hand as he grinned at Jonah. “It’s the beginning of a great adventure.”

  They camped on the plain, beside a jumble of volcanic boulders close to the Mauritanian border. While Zalik made tea, and Justine carried a bucket of water into the thorn bushes to wash, Jonah and Nor climbed the rocks. They sat side by side on the summit and watched as the red orb of the sun sunk below the western horizon. Jonah glanced sidelong at Nor, who had his eyes closed and his chin raised and appeared to be speaking under his breath. He wondered whether Nor was praying. He did not know what to make of this new, serious-minded Nor. He couldn’t help but remember Sierra Leone, the moonlight on the nicked edge of a raised machete, his arms outstretched and Nor squatting over him, his words venomously spoken: fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them. He did not know whether the piety disguised a murderous fanaticism. Carefully, Jonah slid his Gerber blade out of its sheath and rested it against his thigh, so that it was hidden from view, with his hand resting on the molded plastic grip.

  Eventually Nor opened his eyes, and finding Jonah staring at him, smiled gently.

  “How are you?” Jonah asked.

  “I wouldn’t recommend the Dark Prison, even for a long weekend.”

  “They couldn’t just release you,” Jonah explained patiently—agent to joe—reflecting on how easy it would be to slip back into the old roles. “It was necessary to maintain your cover.”

  Nor rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette. “You never could tell when I was teasing you. Have you really stopped smoking?”

  “Yes.” It was always Jonah’s role to be the ham-fisted one. Nor had an unerring capacity to make him feel like the bluntest of instruments.

  “I’m impressed. How’s Monteith?”

  “Worried about what you might tell the Americans,” Jonah replied, tightening his grip on the knife. His mouth was dry and he felt a plunging sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  “I bet he is. And I expect he’s not the only one. How’s Alex?”

  “Alex has made a new life for himself in risk consultancy and he’s feeling very protective of it.”

  “Protective enough to have me silenced?”

  There was a pause. Jonah chose his words carefully. “What do you think?”

  Nor hung his head and nodded as if to acknowledge the direction in which they were heading. “And the other
s? What about Lennard?”

  “He’s in a monastery in Burma. He has a new and unpronounceable name. I don’t suppose he cares.”

  “And Beech?”

  “Beech is a policeman on a small Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland. He married Flora a couple of years ago.”

  Nor looked up sharply. “Beech married Flora Monteith?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have married Flora.”

  Jonah shrugged. “It didn’t work out that way. She’s pregnant, I think.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” he lied.

  Jonah had gone in search of Flora right after his marriage broke up. Of course he had. It was the summer of ’99 and she was living in a flat near the tube station in Ladbroke Grove. He’d buzzed the entry phone of her flat at 2 a.m. after spending several sleepless hours pounding the streets rehearsing what he wanted to say. “What are you doing here?” she’d asked, standing in the doorway, once he’d made his way up the stairs.

  “You know why I’m here,” he’d said.

  “Stop right there,” she’d told him, and then after a pause, in a soft voice, she’d dropped her bombshell. “I’m getting married.”

  He remembered being stunned. It had seemed so unfair. He’d married the wrong person and now he’d meant to put it right. How it always should have been. How could he be thwarted now? It was finally possible. Where was the justice in that?

  “I didn’t know,” he’d said.

  “You will soon. You’re the best man. I’m marrying Beech.” And he hadn’t known what to say.

  “He’s here if you want to speak to him,” she’d told him.

  He’d staggered back down the stairs.

  A couple of months later, he had stood beside Beech at the altar, in a morning suit that was bursting at the seams, with the ring tightly clenched in his oversized hands. And when the time had come for the priest to ask whether there were any objectors present, he had not said a word. What right did he have? He’d screwed up one marriage already. He had wanted to punch his hand through a wall.

  Jonah and Nor sat side by side on the rock and the desert stretched away in all directions.

  “And you?” Nor asked, staring at his feet. “Do you care?”

  “You were my joe and you betrayed me,” Jonah said, the fury there in the knot of his shoulders and in the grip of his hand on the knife.

  “Did I?”

  “You lied to me. As a result, we executed a CIA agent. For Christ’s sake, the guy had a wife and two kids.”

  “Are you going to kill me, then?” Nor asked.

  There was a pause.

  “I haven’t decided,” Jonah replied, carefully.

  Nor stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t know whether you remember this, but you once offered me a definition of friendship, of true friendship. It was at Chicksands, at the intelligence school, when you were turning me into a spy. You told me that a true friend is someone who you could rely on to help you bury a body with no questions asked.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well. Kiernan had to die.”

  “Why did he have to die?”

  Nor looked across at him. “He was poking his nose in where it wasn’t welcome.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s best if you don’t know.”

  “Best?”

  “Safer for you.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Jonah told him.

  “Besides, you should be glad it’s turned out so well. Killing Kiernan was an easy way to prove that my oath, my bayyat, meant something. It gave me instant credibility. It infiltrated me inside the upper echelons of al-Qaeda.”

  Jonah was incredulous. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nobody has got as close to Bin Laden as I have.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You must be fucking crazy. We sacked you in ’96.”

  “And all this time I’ve been working for you, inching myself closer every day.”

  “Why should I believe that?” Jonah asked softly.

  “Because you want to,” Nor replied, “because I’m your oldest friend and because I make you feel guilty.”

  “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “Come off it, Jonah. You never had a clue who I was or what I believed and you never bothered to find out. You were too busy playing the elder brother and protector and then, of course, your best role, the one you were meant for, agent and handler.”

  “You were a willing volunteer.”

  “Sure, I was. I fell for it. All that patriotic duty shit. Playing the secret agent. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. You made me a traitor to my own race.”

  “And what are you now?”

  “I’m just the same as I always was. A loyal spy.”

  “But who’s loyal spy? Tell me why Kiernan had to die.”

  Nor shook his head, and smiled wryly. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

  “I couldn’t,” replied Jonah. It was true. The anger had abated. He had decided that whatever happened would happen. He’d take the consequences. He thought: You remind me too much of myself to kill you. But, of course, there was a time, in Afghanistan back in 1999, when he thought he had.

  The moon had risen but the sun had not yet fully set. They seemed to have fallen between times—an interstice, a truce. Below them Justine emerged from a thorn-bush-filled wadi wearing a sarong. Her hair hung in wet ringlets on her shoulders. She headed back to the fire that Zalik had built beside the Land Cruiser. Jonah would have liked to go back down to her but he guessed that the intimacy of the night before was unlikely to be repeated.

  “Do you see much of your daughter?” Nor asked, matter-of-factly.

  “When I can,” he replied. Despite his ex-wife’s antagonism towards him she had continued to allow him to spend time with Esme when he was given leave. He supposed that he should be thankful for that.

  “What are you going to tell Monteith?”

  “The truth, that when it came down to it, we’re too alike, you and I. I don’t have it in me to kill you.”

  “Will that satisfy him?”

  “I doubt it. But there’s not much he can do about it. After tomorrow you’ll be an American asset, beyond his reach.”

  “I won’t tell them about Kiernan,” Nor said. “Why should I? I don’t want to end up back in the Dark Prison, any more than you do. Tell Monteith that your secret is safe with me.”

  At first it appeared to be a trick of the dissolving horizon. They had been driving for what seemed like hours across the remnants of a vast and ancient lake, their tires leaving tracks in the salt crust behind them. On Jonah’s GPS the Land Cruiser’s progress drew a line across an empty screen.

  Then it crystalized out of the haze: a burnished Land Rover, bright as molten glass, driving towards them. Zalik stopped the engine and squinted over the steering wheel at the approaching vehicle as they freewheeled to a halt.

  The Land Rover stopped alongside them.

  A man got out. It was Pakravan, the Persian-American with the boxer’s flattened nose. He was wearing the beard and shaven upper lip of a true believer. He walked over to the Land Cruiser and leaned in the window, resting on his beefy forearms.

  “Welcome to Eschatos,” he said.

  A REVERSE RENDITION

  February–June 2002

  They knew in London that he’d failed to kill Nor as instructed long before he landed at Heathrow. There was a text message from Alex waiting for him when he switched on his phone at baggage reclaim, a command—Footbridge at Vauxhall Bus Station. Now.

  It was time to face the consequences. He took the underground, travelling on the Piccadilly Line to Green Park and then on the Victoria line south to Vauxhall. He emerged from the underground and spotted the metal footbridge that spanned the roundabout. Alex was standing at the center of it, leaning on the railings.

  “Smile,” A
lex greeted him, mirthlessly. “You’re on Candid Camera.” He nodded in the direction of the MI6 building. “You’ve got to hand it to Terry Farrell. I mean, the man was not just an architect, he was a comic genius. Who would have thought of hiding our most secretive government offices inside a massive Inca pyramid on the banks of the most famous river in England? They were a bloodthirsty lot, the ancient Incas. And Terry Farrell was Maggie Thatcher’s favorite architect. Can you believe that they’ve written me a check and asked me to evaluate the threat? I was, like, are you serious? Between you and me, I’d have done it for Smarties.’ He lit a cigarette. “Of course, the IRA had a pop. They fired an RPG from Vauxhall Park. There, just the other side of the railway line. It didn’t do any damage to speak of. Bollocks, really …” Something caught his eye and he pointed down the line of railway arches. “Look down toward Albert Embankment, our side of the road, beyond the gay spa and the Portuguese deli. What do you see?”

  The hood of a police Range Rover was just visible poking out from under one of the arches.

  “The Director of Special Forces arrives in an unmarked forest-green Land Rover every Thursday morning with an armed police escort who wait outside for him. He leaves a couple of hours later. I’ve had a rotation of my people, collecting make, model and registration numbers of vehicles going in and out. We’re building a map. You’re probably wondering why we haven’t been spotted. I’ll tell you why. There’s a large transient population around here. Winos and junkies. So despite all the surveillance cameras—and as you’ve no doubt already clocked, there are plenty of them—it’s still difficult to keep track of individuals over an extended period.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Jonah droned, attempting to convey his wish for Alex to get to the point.

  “It’s not funny, mate. Well, it is, actually. There are a couple of grocer’s shops not five minutes from here in Oval that will sell you Tamil Tiger training videos under the counter. I’ve been watching them. The assault on Jaffna is particularly instructive: swarms of suicide bombers—men, women and children—all of them sprinting like fuck straight at enemy lines. They completely overwhelmed the Sri Lankan army and took the peninsula. You know the Tigers invented the suicide bomber?”