A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Is this what you wanted?”

  “Fuck off,” Jonah told him. “You are one who is blackmailing me.”

  Their waiter returned. He said, “Is everything OK?”

  “No, Kevin,” Alex replied. “Things are not fucking OK. We need another bottle, two bottles, in fact.”

  The waiter retreated.

  Jonah had been back from northern Iraq for a week, staying in transit accommodation in Redford Barracks on the southern outskirts of the city. He was aware that he was being kept in isolation, at arm’s length.

  “I don’t like this any more than you do,” said Alex. “You were given a clear choice. Eliminate Nor or face the consequences. Instead, you stood by and allowed him to make a mockery of the Americans. They are absolutely furious. They are accusing you of being in league with Nor to steal the diamonds. For Christ’s sake, they think you’re a double agent! An al-Qaeda plant! They’re demanding your head on a platter.”

  “And you mean to give it to them?”

  Alex exhaled loudly and pushed back his chair.

  “Actually, no.”

  “No?”

  “Monteith has other plans for you. He has a job, an opportunity for you to redeem yourself if you survive. He’s waiting for you in London.”

  Jonah considered this unexpected development.

  “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just disappear when Nor did?”

  “Maybe because I’m not in league with him,” Jonah retorted. “Maybe it’s because I’m not a traitor.”

  Alex regarded him skeptically. “You’d better go and catch the shuttle.”

  “I need a proper drink first,” Jonah told him.

  The following morning Jonah was sitting in a private briefing in Monteith’s gloomy basement office. His head was thumping like a steel drum. He’d flown down on the first flight with his forehead pressed to the back of the seat in front. He was full to the brim with self-loathing.

  “Her name is Miranda Abd al’Aswr,” Monteith told him, sliding the photograph across the Formica tabletop. “She’s a British national. Her father was a Somali dissident, living in exile here in London, and her mother a nurse from Surinam. Her background is as exotic as yours, though in her case the mix of races seems to have produced beauty rather than brawn. The parents died while she was still at school. A car crash. She was kicked out of school, she drifted for a while, then she dropped out of sight. We don’t have anything on her until she turned up in Kuwait in the late eighties with a Saudi husband, Bakr Abd al’Aswr, a businessman who ran the Kuwaiti branch of a family conglomerate called Azzam Holdings. The family came out of the Hadhramaut, the same Yemeni province as Bin Laden. We have reliable reports that place Bakr in Afghanistan with Bin Laden in the mid-eighties, before relocating to Kuwait. He disappeared a few days after the Iraqi invasion in 1989. She stayed. She runs a museum of Arab and Islamic artefacts in the Hawalli district of Kuwait City. Clear so far?”

  Jonah squinted at the photo. It was difficult to make anything out through the dark panes of his sunglasses. He couldn’t take them off without revealing that he’d lost his glass eye while vomiting in the back of a cab the night before. He settled on a grunt that he hoped Monteith would interpret as an affirmative.

  “We have intelligence that suggests that Bakr al’Aswr was involved in the procurement of weapons of mass destruction for Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son. We understand that the invasion of Kuwait may have disrupted a plot to smuggle a cargo of something unsavory out of the former Soviet Union. In the confusion of the invasion, the cargo went missing. We understand that a sweep of loose containers conducted by an overzealous UN logistician may have thrown up the cargo again. It is close to being found and the plot has now been reactivated. According to our source, who is close to them, Miranda is in negotiations with a hybrid gang made up of cyber-criminals and former intelligence operatives who are searching for the cargo. The gang operates out of a travelling bazaar called the ‘sheep market’ that moves around within the demilitarized zone between Iraq and Kuwait. We believe that they are close to finalizing a deal to sell it to elements close to Saddam.”

  Jonah frowned, struggling to understand. “And what do you want me to do?”

  “You know the drill. Penetrate. Listen. Observe. Maintain your cover.”

  “And my cover is?”

  “You’re being rotated in as a British military observer attached to the United Nations Iraq Kuwait Observer Mission. That gives you free access to the demilitarized zone and the opportunity to make contact with Miranda and the hybrid gang. You’ll go under your own name. If they do any digging they’ll find a disaffected army officer under investigation for kidnapping. You have the perfect cover. You’re in disgrace.”

  “And if they find the cargo?”

  “Stop them.”

  A pause.

  “And if I refuse to go?”

  “Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred pounds; in all likelihood, a dishonorable discharge and off to prison for kidnapping.”

  “And if I go?”

  “We do you a deal. Witness retracts her statement and the police go back to chasing ordinary decent criminals.”

  “And the Americans?”

  “You pull this mission off and we’ll give you a new identity and a bolthole. It’ll blow over.”

  “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Then I guess I’ll go.”

  “Good. You’ll like the zone. It’s your kind of place. It’s drowning in the excrement of the devil.”

  “It’s my kind of place,” Jonah agreed.

  “And another thing …”

  “Yes?”

  “The Russians are paying an interest.”

  Jonah groaned. “Great.”

  “I’d stay away from them if I were you.”

  He staggered out of the office and down the corridor past the thumping boilers and into the men’s room where he threw up in the nearest stall.

  Beams of light shone out of nothingness and were fractured by a whirl of black cloth. Death was approaching, pulling at the hood of a robe. Jonah cowered in the corner. Then there was a flashlight in his face and his eye was filled with dazzling prisms.

  He heard a woman’s voice speaking in English. “It’s a clear violation of his rights and of your mandate. You can’t hold him like this.”

  A second voice, a man with a Russian accent, replied, “The matter is he’s a suspect.”

  “Christ, Nikitin. There’s such a thing as due process. Even here.”

  The man identified as Nikitin protested, “He stole a UN vehicle.”

  “He’s a UN observer. He’s entitled to drive UN vehicles.”

  “You say that.”

  “He’s UN. I’m telling you. He’s just been posted in.”

  “And the dead Norwegian?”

  “Turn the body over to the embassy.”

  “The incident is being investigated by the police.”

  “The Iraqi police? The Mook? Don’t make me laugh.”

  A hand took Jonah’s upper arm, and the woman said, “On your feet.”

  Within seconds they were out of the container and into a grotto of camouflage netting, and after it a blaze of light and then cool shadow, and the sensation of entering a medieval town. Rising above them was a warren of routes and dwellings, a jumble of wooden and steel stairways, exposed balconies, passageways and alleyways. Everywhere there were washing lines and TV and radio aerials.

  Jonah was following a tall, dark-haired woman in a black robe as she strode across the stage created by the pool of downlight from a skylight far above. Russian soldiers struggled to keep up with them. Jonah could hear distant noises—an argument, chickens, pop music—and smell cooking, garbage, sweat and urine.

  In the less than twenty-four hours since Jonah had touched down in Kuwait City, Odd Nordland, the UN logistician, had had his throat c
ut in a toilet stall in the Desert Palm bar on the Iraqi side of Umm Qasr, and Jonah, who had fled the scene in Odd’s car, had been tracked down and beaten up by Russian soldiers. After a bloody interrogation, they’d thrown him in a shipping container.

  He called out, “Where am I?”

  “Not Kansas,” the woman replied briskly.

  “And you’re not Judy Garland,” he retorted. You’re Miranda Abd al’Aswr.

  She spun around to face him, with her hands on her hips and her elbows out at angles, and anything else that he might have said became an irrelevance, because he was thinking that Miranda was by some distance the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. Monteith’s photo didn’t do her justice. To his eye, she was five-ten with a mane of hair as black as molasses. Her teeth were bright white, her grin a slash of light in the encircling gloom. He felt a heady rush of excitement.

  “We’re in the Russian compound in Umm Qasr port,” she said. “There’s about six or seven hundred Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in here without a fan between them. They have no showers, no hot meals, and no place to take a shit. It tends to make them irritable. So, if it’s OK with you, I’d like to leave.”

  He wanted to reach out with one hand and touch her, to place his fingers against the slender curve of her neck. He saw the blood rise in her cheeks. She threw up her arms in exasperation, turned on her bare heels and strode away.

  “Sure, let’s go,” Jonah said. He hurried after her.

  They emerged from the building into daylight. They were walking across a large courtyard formed by a wall of double-stacked freight containers. There was a battered Nissan Patrol parked on the far side of the yard. Jonah noticed that Miranda’s ankles and the skin of her bare brown feet were covered in floral hennaed patterns.

  “My name’s Jonah,” he called out.

  “I know,” she said.

  There was a sudden commotion off to their flank and Miranda cursed. A Russian officer had appeared and he was shouting and gesticulating at the guards on the gate. Abruptly, a hand gripped Jonah’s shoulder and a group of soldiers placed themselves between him and the woman.

  “Ribbet,” he called out. He was being dragged back to the building, his heels raising clouds of bone-dust.

  “I’ll get you out,” she shouted.

  “Ribbet!”

  “Why do you keeping saying that?”

  “If you’d kissed me I’d have turned into a prince,” he shouted.

  He met her again a few days later, at the British embassy. She was standing alone by the bar with a large gin and tonic in her hand. Just looking at her made him contemplate a lifelong relationship.

  “Somebody kissed you,” she said.

  “No, nothing so dramatic; I recovered my glass eye.”

  “It suits you. You look good now the bruises have gone down. You have a kind of asymmetrical beauty.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s easy: I’m a Brit.”

  “That’s not really what I meant.”

  She smiled wryly. “I needed a drink and there isn’t anywhere else to get a drink in this town. Don’t you have bad nights?”

  “Plenty.”

  “You chew your nails,” she observed. “You look the worse for wear.”

  Jonah looked down and considered the seamed scar tissue and calloused ridges, the autobiography of his hands.

  She said, “I thought you’d be dead by now.”

  He looked up from his hands. “Why?”

  “You seem to have a habit of being in the wrong place.”

  He laughed. “Story of my life.”

  “How did you lose your eye?”

  “I got blown up by a tank mine. In Gornji Vakuf.”

  “I was in Zenica for a while,” she said, distantly. “It was a tough time.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Looking for someone.”

  “Someone?”

  She frowned. “I heard a rumor that my husband had been fighting with the Muj against the Serbs and I went looking for him.”

  “Did you find him?”

  She looked at him. “No. And I didn’t find him in Peshawar, or Kandahar or Grozny, either.”

  “I guess you must have wanted to find him.”

  “Are you mad?” she retorted. “I wanted to know he was dead. Shit. That way I might get my son back.”

  She lit a cigarette. Her eyes closed as she drew the smoke into her lungs—she radiated anger like heat from a fuel rod. “They’d been gone for years by then but there were always rumors. When you live with uncertainty like that it can drive you crazy.”

  She turned away from him and stared out across the city and beyond it to the desert, its vast blackness. It was later that night and they were standing on the roof of the nomad museum in Hawalli. Somewhere out in the darkness, there were three hundred thousand combat-ready Coalition troops, waiting for the order to move.

  “There’s a storm coming,” she said.

  “You can tell?”

  She looked back at him, “I saw the weather forecast, that’s all.” He felt as though he were falling. He reached out with his fingers until they came into contact with her hair. He gathered it in a thick bunch in his hand and leaned forward, drawing her lips to his. They kissed.

  She told him that she wanted her son back and that she would do anything—anything—to get him back. It was easy to believe. He wanted to help her. He wanted nothing more than to fall in love.

  MIRANDA

  Tagiya: Dissimulation

  A term used for the practice of some dissidents who concealed their true allegiance behind the outward veneer of conformity.

  YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE A LOCAL

  September 6, 2005

  At dawn Miranda went down to the river and washed her face and hands. She filled her water bottle and rolled out her yoga mat. She saluted the sun and gave herself for half an hour to the rhythm of her breath.

  When she was done, she rolled up her mat and stuffed her sleeping bag into the rucksack. She changed her underwear and socks. She ran a brush through her hair.

  It was time to stop dwelling in the past. Her son was dead, buried in the graveyard of a Christian convent on the north side of Baghdad. Her husband Bakr was dead, killed in a shoot-out in a Shiite slum in 2003. She had spent two years guarding orchids on a remote Scottish island, living in a kind of limbo. Now Jonah had disappeared, the police were looking for him and it was up to her to find him.

  She strode down off the hill into the village of Ardfern with the dog at her heels and crossed the square to the public toilets. In one of the stalls she unzipped the lid of her crash bag and removed the plastic envelope that she had dug up the evening before. Inside it in an ankle wallet there was a thousand pounds and a thousand dollars in cash. Jonah was thorough; she had to give him that. She switched her wellies for the Caterpillars and attached the wallet around her left ankle with the Velcro fastening. She packed her waterproofs in the crash-bag and put the beanie hat on her head. She opened the stall door and the dog was sitting there, waiting with his tongue hanging out. Five minutes later she was striding down a road hemmed in by weathered stone walls.

  She had decided to follow Jonah’s trail. She didn’t know of any alternative. She was going to Barra to find Jonah’s friend and former colleague Andy Beech.

  She continued down the road but faster, battling the urge to run.

  She was standing at the side of the deserted, faintly steaming road, a solitary figure with a dog. She felt exposed in unsecured circumstances. The car whistled past with its stereo thumping, braked suddenly and backed up to where she was standing. It was a sleek, lozenge-shaped sports car in shiny aluminum. The music stopped and the window purred down.

  “Does it bite?” he asked, just audible over the motor.

  “Only when provoked,” she replied.

  “Going north?”

  She visibly hesitated. He shrugged and was already look
ing into his wing mirror when she surprised herself by opening the door. The dog slid in and hopped into the back. She got in after it.

  “Thanks,” she said, squeezing her rucksack into the space between her feet.

  “My pleasure,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “North,” she said, looking at the road ahead.

  A few seconds idled by. She pulled the seat belt across her chest. He glanced at her. His eyes were very blue, almost colorless. “Just north?” he asked.

  “Where are you going?” she responded.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “Fort William to start with. I can drop you anywhere on the way.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  He accelerated rapidly away from the curb and they drove for a while in silence. The car’s interior was leather and chrome, with the intimacy of a cockpit. Now it was filled with paw prints and the damp, mossy smell of the dog. It leaned forward between them with its eyes on the road. The minutes flashed by.

  “I used to have a dog,” he said.

  She glanced at him, surreptitiously studying him. He had sharp cheekbones and blond unruly hair that curled above the collar. She noted the curve of his brawny shoulders and the swell of his chest under his open-necked white linen shirt, and the Breitling watch on his wrist.

  “Somebody stole her,” he explained. “The dog, I mean.”

  He was wearing a pair of leather driving gloves, which struck her as strangely anachronistic.

  “Does he have a name?” he asked, meaning the dog.

  She shook her head.

  “He should have a name,” he chided her, gently.

  They purred along the coast road, with open moorland on one side and the steely, reflective surface of a loch on the other.

  “Were you waiting long?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “When I picked you up,” he explained, “had you been waiting long?”

  “No.”

  They turned a corner and the windshield was awash with dazzling white light. He flipped down the sunshade with an impatient flick of his fingers and the sunlight flashed on the stainless-steel bezel of his watch.

  “You don’t look like a local,” he said.