A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “Is that how you’d do it?” Jonah asked, caving in, as he usually did.

  “They’re certainly vulnerable,” Alex said, thoughtfully. “Crisps and soda pops would be their downfall. Twice a week, regular as clockwork, you’ve got loaded vans delivering pallets of soft drinks and confectionery for the vending machines. You hijack one of those, pack it with explosives and drive it in. You kidnap the driver’s family, threaten his wife and kids with electric drills, sure enough he’ll get the gate opened. You wouldn’t need to get as far as the underground car park, the chicane at the entrance would do. Detonate it and then swarm the place with jihadis with shaped charges. You make your own access. You could send a bulldozer in after the truck to mount the ramps and get access to the foundations in the car park, that’s if you wanted to bring the whole building down. But, basically, you’re looking for the server. Knock that out and England’s flying blind. All the secrets up in smoke. Of course, to spread the confusion, you could set off secondary devices at the police station two doors down opposite the Esso garage, Fire Brigade HQ up by Lambeth Bridge and behind us at Cobalt Square.”

  “You know, you have every teenage boy’s fantasy job?”

  Alex grinned expansively. “Of course, I do.” The grin disappeared just as suddenly. “Which is why I take personal fucking affront when I learn that somebody, who clearly hasn’t been listening, fails to perform a simple task as instructed and as a result puts all of this in jeopardy. What happened?”

  There wasn’t much point in a lengthy explanation. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “That doesn’t cut much ice with Fisher-King.”

  “Is that who you are answering to now?” Jonah asked.

  “Fisher-King is who we are all answerable to: you, me, Monteith.”

  “What do you want?” Jonah demanded.

  “Hear me and believe what I say. I have been given unequivocal direction. If Nor fucks up, this country will no longer be safe for you. Witnesses will come forward and be offered immunity from prosecution in return for testimony that you conspired to kidnap your wife’s lover. Do you understand?”

  Jonah thought of his one-bedroom flat in London and his bolt-hole in Edinburgh that the Department might or might not know about—the meager threads of his life. Ever since the Department had conspired to organize the kidnap of his wife’s lover and frame him for it, he had been aware that, one day, he might be forced to leave the country or face the prospect of disgrace and a lengthy prison sentence.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Come on,” Alex said. “Fisher-King wants to speak to you.” He strode off along the footbridge.

  They fell into step with Fisher-King, heading north on Albert Embankment towards Lambeth Bridge.

  “He doesn’t want you in the building,” Alex had explained as they hurried to catch up with him. “He’ll brief you on the way to his weekly meet with Five.”

  Fisher-King glanced at Jonah briefly and returned his attention to the pavement ahead. He wore a pinstriped suit, knee-length cashmere coat, silk scarf, gleaming handmade shoes. As ever he looked immaculate.

  “You have jeopardized us all.”

  Jonah waited. This wasn’t going to be a dressing-down; that wasn’t the way Fisher-King operated. That was what Alex was for.

  “Winthrop has asked for you again,” Fisher-King informed him. “Nor’s your joe. Winthrop wants you to run him again.”

  “Why?”

  “I think his idea is to put Nor back inside al-Qaeda.”

  “That’s insane,” Jonah protested. “How could we ever rely on anything that Nor told us? How would we know he was on our side?”

  “Winthrop has the vice president’s ear. That has allowed him to bypass the usual channels. He’s a force unto himself.”

  “You can’t agree to this,” Jonah told him.

  “I don’t believe that you have left us with much choice.” Fisher-King came to a sudden halt and turned on Jonah. “You need to control this. You need to control Nor.” He looked at his watch. “I’m late.”

  He strode away.

  Jonah glanced back, down the length of the nave towards the church doors, and saw Monteith approaching with his head bowed. Droplets of rain covered the shoulders of his Barbour jacket and the brim of the hat that he clutched to his chest.

  Monteith sat in a pew beside him. He looked up at the main altar and nodded in respectful acknowledgement. His gaze returned to Jonah, and he looked directly into his eyes.

  “Nor is being held at a camp in the Nevada desert, under the auspices of a CIA program named Anabasis,” Monteith said. “It’s a covert operation to equip and deploy Iraqi defectors, mostly former Iraqi army, to destabilize Saddam’s regime. That’s the cover. I think that Eschatos is Winthrop’s creation, a program hidden within a program, to shield it from congressional oversight. And that’s about all I know.”

  “Winthrop wants me in Nevada?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to go?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want. Fisher-King is calling the shots. I’ve been given my orders. So have you. When the Americans say jump, you jump. They’ll let you know when they need you.”

  “And until then?”

  “Lie low. Stay out of trouble.”

  It was still dark when Jonah arrived at Prestwick Airport, about forty miles west of Glasgow. Several months had passed since his return from the Sahara, months of kicking his heels at Dreghorn Barracks in Edinburgh, but then, finally, in June 2002, the summons came and he was on his way to Nevada.

  His transport across the Atlantic was a Gulfstream V on the return leg of a rendition. As it fueled, in a remote corner near the freight terminals, he stood on the grass beside the tarmac, rubbing the back of his neck in the autumn rain. There was no one else to be seen. The only marking on the Gulfstream was the company name on the tail: AVIATION INTERNATIONAL SERVICES.

  When fueling was complete he was invited on board. Jonah sat in a window seat, buckled up and stared out at the parking apron.

  Presently, the Gulfstream trundled out on to the runway. Rain swept the windowpane beside him, the drops driven diagonally by the wind. Inside the plane, it smelled of disinfectant and some of the stains on the upholstery may have been blood and shit. There were boxes of adult nappies stacked at the back of the plane. Staring around him, Jonah felt something like a moral objection. But he knew that in the post-9/11 world objections like these had been overridden. It seemed that anything was permitted in the name of homeland security.

  The plane’s crew were deeply suntanned and almost indistinguishable. They smiled constantly and they had an eye-glazed gonzo look.

  “This is a very strange war,” he told the loadmaster, who offered him orange juice in a paper cup.

  “Yes, it’s weird,” the man acknowledged. “We can’t even talk about it.”

  Nothing could be talked about. Jonah was on his way to Eschatos, which was hidden inside Anabasis. On his way to his oldest friend, who was also his bitterest enemy.

  GREEKS, DIAMONDBACKS, SCORPIONS

  June 2002

  The Anabasis camp was located on a derelict air force base at an Energy Department nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. Jonah was met at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas by Pakravan, who drove him in air-conditioned silence, sixty miles across a baking salt pan, to the camp.

  “We don’t usually welcome outsiders here,” Pakravan told him, after half an hour or so.

  “I’m not here to get in your way,” Jonah told him.

  “Some people criticize us as warmongers,” Pakravan said pointedly. “That’s always the way with those who want to create freedom and a better life.”

  As they approached the outskirts of the camp, they drove past a squad of men on an assault course. Black stick-like figures in the shimmering heat haze. Pakravan told him that they were Iraqis and that they called themselves Scorpions 77 Alpha, after a former Special Forces unit disbanded by Saddam Hussein. “As s
oon as we get the green light, they’re going in behind enemy lines.”

  They drove across the base, past abandoned hangars and tarpaper shacks, to its farthest reaches. Pakravan parked beside a stack of sea containers. He got out of the car and pointed across the desert in the direction of a pile of boulders, at a blazing point of light.

  “He’s over there,” Pakravan told him. He got back in the car and drove off.

  At first, Jonah thought it was a huge mirror, solar panels perhaps, but as he approached he saw that it was a classic Airstream—a silver-skinned, bullet-shaped trailer. There was a cardboard sign with BACK TO BAGHDAD written above the door and a young Arab sitting, smoking a cigarette, on the steps. He had dark eyes and hair, the lush curls framing his face, and an adolescent’s slim hips. Nor’s taste, Jonah thought.

  “Is Nor inside?” he asked.

  The young man shook his head. Beside the trailer there was a washing line with a length of what looked like snakeskin pegged to it. The skin was marked with a diamond pattern and it was as long as Jonah was tall.

  “Where is he?” Jonah asked.

  The young man pointed to a nearby trail. Jonah held his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun and squinted in the direction that the young man was pointing. The trail crossed an empty salt pan, shining white under the sun. It seemed to be heading in the direction of a distant mesa.

  It took him half an hour to cross the salt pan. From there he made his way up a volcanic slope and followed the crest of a ridge north-west. The back of his shirt was soaked in sweat. Twice he saw drags—the S-shaped tracks left by snakes in the sand. And once a hairball, the remains of a rodent. At the end of the ridge was a rockslide, a jumble of rocks and shadowy spaces, with the trail leading down. Snake country. Nor was sitting among the rocks, about halfway down, with a garden pump sprayer, an axe and a six-foot length of cane by his side. He looked up as Jonah topped the rockslide.

  Jonah paused for a moment and then, when Nor inclined his head in invitation, eased himself down through the rocks towards him.

  Nor passed him the pump sprayer; from the smell, it was full of petrol. “You took your time,” he whispered. He lifted the cane. There was a fish hook attached to the end of it. He nodded towards the hole beside him. “Give it a good dose.”

  With the tank in his left hand and the sprayer in his right and several loops of hose in between, Jonah leant forward and inserted the nozzle in the hole. He pumped the tank several times. The hole filled with the smell of petrol.

  “Out the way,” Nor hissed. Jonah scrambled backwards. Swiftly, Nor poked the cane in the hole. A flick of the wrist, and then the rattlesnake was out of its den, taut as a spring on the end of the hook. Nor brought it crashing down on a rock, scooped up the axe and decapitated it.

  They sat back and watched as the body writhed and the mouth opened and closed on the severed head. “There are in Medina ‘Jinns’ who have accepted Islam, so when you see any one of them, pronounce a warning to it for three days, and if they appear before you after that, then kill it for that is a devil,” Nor said, quoting from the Hadiths. “It’s a western diamondback. Good eating. Better than MREs—Meals Rejected by Ethiopian—which are about the only other food available here. Have you met the neighbors?”

  “You mean the Iraqis?” Jonah asked.

  “Sure. Are they still clambering all over their play park?”

  “You’ve been making friends,” Jonah observed, wryly.

  “Why should I make friends?”

  “It could save your life.”

  “Please don’t insult my intelligence.”

  The snake was finally still and Nor looped it around his neck. He picked up the cane and the axe, leaving Jonah to follow with the pump sprayer. They hiked back along the ridge and down the slope on to the salt pan.

  “What do you know about Xenophon?” asked Nor.

  Jonah shrugged. “It’s all Greek to me.”

  “Ha, ha. You’re funny, but not as funny as these chimps trying to pass off a disaster as a victory. I studied Greek, remember. At that school that we went to and that for some inexplicable reason you seemed to love.”

  “I hated it too.”

  “Don’t give me that. You loved it. You’re a fucking slave to institutions. Altar boy, soldier, spy—you’ll always belong to some club or other.”

  “And you’ll always be getting thrown out of them,” Jonah retorted.

  Nor grinned. “Very good.”

  “You were giving me a lesson in Greek,” Jonah told him.

  “Sure. I was giving you the benefit of my insight and wisdom. I’ll tell you about Anabasis. Anabasis is a book written by Xenophon. It tells the story of the invasion of Persia in 400 BC by a force of ten thousand Greek mercenaries led by Cyrus the Younger. The Greeks won the first battle, at a place called Cunaxa. So far so good. But what no one here seems to have taken on board is that Cyrus died on the battlefield. The expedition collapsed. The Greeks had to fight all the way back to the Black Sea. They were swallowed by the sand.”

  “So they score low in ancient Greek. What about Eschatos?‘”

  “That’s just scary end-of-the-world shit. Wait until you meet Pastor Bob. These guys have rebuilding Solomon’s temple on their agenda.”

  “What do they want you to do?”

  “Me? Deep penetration job.”

  “In Iraq?”

  “Of course, in Iraq. We’re all going to Iraq: armies, agents, saboteurs—the whole shebang. Saddam is history.” He put on an accent, in mockery of Pakravan, and said: “The president has said so, and he’s a man of his word.”

  Nor cooked the snake on a propane gas stove, under the camouflage net strung alongside the Airstream. First, he skinned it and then stripped out the intestine. He sliced it into roundels, which he flash-fried in a skillet with a splash of tequila and some chili flakes. He was drinking again, helping himself to the tequila as he cooked.

  “I’ve given up on Islam for a while,” he told Jonah. “I couldn’t keep up with the fury.”

  Jonah sat on a cinder block with a beer in his hand. He could see the lights of the Iraqi camp on the far side of the base.

  “Why do they want you to go to Iraq?”

  “They want access to the diamonds and their shadowy controller.”

  “The diamonds are in Iraq?”

  “If we were separated, our instructions as carriers were to make our way to the Ansar al-Islam enclave in Kurdistan.”

  Jonah considered this information. Ansar al-Islam was a Wahhabi Sunni group, from the Kurdish-controlled northern provinces of Iraq near the Iranian border, an area that was beyond Saddam’s reach. He’d read intelligence reports which suggested that Ansar al-Ilsam had offered safe haven to al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11 attacks. It seemed believable that al-Qaeda might move the diamonds there.

  “And what are your orders?”

  “You know. The usual shit: listen and observe, identify conspirators.”

  “Who will you report to?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “And you’ll report to your American friend Winthrop,” Nor replied. “Now there’s a man of vision and daring. So help me God, if I have to listen to any more of his shit …”

  “And if I report to Winthrop that you’re a lying sack of shit who is in all likelihood working for al-Qaeda?”

  “Nice turn of phrase,” Nor replied, “but I wouldn’t advise it. I mean, you wouldn’t want me to feel obliged to tell him about Kiernan, would you? How do you think that would go down in London?”

  Just before they ate, the young Arab who had been waiting on the steps of the Airstream earlier reappeared with a bag of coffee. His name was Mohammed and he was a Sunni, from Fallujah. His father had been a brigadier in the Iraqi army but had defected to the West and settled in Detroit.

  They ate the snake off paper plates. It tasted remarkably like chicken, as Nor had said it would. Then they drank coffee.

  “Winthro
p is coming tomorrow with an entourage,” Nor told Jonah, “his fussy Jews and his overweight pastor. You should go and greet him.”

  “You know I was never an altar boy,” Jonah told him.

  “Are you sure? I was counting on your experience to assist me tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see.”

  ESCHATOS

  June 2002–February 2003

  Winthrop arrived by helicopter in the mid-afternoon heat, wearing pressed chinos, tasseled loafers and a button-down blue Oxford shirt. He ran out from under the rotor’s downwash into the fierce Nevadan sunlight with a crowd-pleaser’s easy smile, and insisted on shaking the hand of every one of the fifty or so Iraqis lined up on parade to meet him.

  At Winthrop’s heels were two Pentagon policy warriors: Jabotinsky and Scholem—nicknamed by Nor the Murids, the Arabic word for disciple. They emerged squinting from the helicopter as if unused to sunlight. After the Murids, a balding, red-faced man in a linen suit eased himself out of the helicopter. He was bearded and the hair of his whiskers and mustache outlined the pinkness and fleshiness of his lips. Jonah guessed that he was Winthrop’s pastor.

  As soon as Winthrop was done pressing flesh, Pakravan led them across the parade square and into a nearby hangar.

  “There are nearly two hundred sovereign states in the world,” Winthrop told them. They were assembled on a half-dozen plastic chairs. Winthrop had loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He strutted across the hangar like a politician on a stage. “Most are unstable, veering between democracy and tyranny. Many are riddled with corruption and dominated by organized crime. Whole regions of the world—much of Africa, southern Asia, Russia, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and parts of South America—are strewn with corroded or failed states. Obliviously, we imagined that we were immune to the fallout from such chaos. We were not and we are not. We had our eyes closed. We didn’t see it coming. We got hit by a truck.”

  “Amen,” growled Pastor Bob, who’d scorned a chair and was standing with his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his crumpled linen trousers.