by Simon Conway
“I’m just passing through.”
“Heading anywhere in particular?”
“Just traveling,” she said.
“My father was Scottish,” he said, apropos of nothing.
She had her own Scottish blood, on her mother’s side; a great-great-grandfather who owned a plantation in Surinam, and bequeathed it to the young slave that he married on his deathbed. Like the Lebanese, the Scots seemed to get everywhere.
“It’s so beautiful, you wonder why anyone would leave.”
Because they are no longer safe, she thought.
“It’s a landscape to lose yourself in,” he said, and sighed. “I had a messy split with a long-term girlfriend. I needed some space, some thinking time. You know. I’ve been driving, staying in local pubs, and walking. You can walk for hours without coming across another person.” He glanced up from the road and regarded her with intensity. “Are you in a relationship?”
The question floored her. “He’s gone,” she said.
“Gone?”
She bit her lower lip and stared out of the window. It was more information than she had meant to share.
“Is he coming back?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then they were in the shadows, bracketed by dense forestry blocks—dark rows of Sitka spruce that rose hundreds of meters on either side of them. The dog leaned with the curves. It was like being in a tunnel: suddenly dark and intimate, enough to make you paranoid.
“You think you know someone,” he said, with his eyes on the road. “You live with them; you share your dreams and your secrets. And then just as suddenly they’re gone and you’re left wondering whether you knew them at all.” He paused and grimaced. “I’m sorry. It must hurt.”
“Must it?” she wondered.
“We’re running away,” he said, blithely.
She repeated the mantra. “I’m just traveling.”
“I didn’t know where she was at first,” he continued. “I thought about following her, but I didn’t. I don’t know whether that was the right decision. Would you find him, if you could?”
“Maybe,” she murmured.
“Did he leave any clues?”
“No.”
She felt panic rising. When Oban came into view, she felt paralyzed. This was her stop. Her plan had been to take the direct ferry to Barra, but if she got out now she’d leave a trail a child could follow.
“Look,” he said, with a calculating smile on his face. It occurred to her that it was the smile of a man convinced of exactly what was going to happen next. “I don’t mind taking you wherever it is you want to go. I mean, I don’t have much else to do.”
“Inverness,” she told him. “That’s where I’m going.”
“OK,” he said slowly, the smile faltering.
“Perhaps you could drop me in Fort William?”
“Sure,” he said.
They did not talk for a while. Outside Oban he opened out the throttle and the landscape streaked by. They crossed the bridge at Connell and drove north alongside the banks of a loch. What seemed like intimacy between them had turned into unease.
He switched on the radio. There was more news from hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. A reporter was broadcasting from the Louisiana Superdome: “We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the center and there is no one to get them. We saw a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed up to the wall and covered with a sheet. Right next to her was another dead body wrapped in a white sheet. Right in front of us a man went into a seizure on the ground. No one here has medical training. There is nowhere to evacuate these people to. People have been sitting there without food and water and waiting. They are asking, ‘When are the buses coming? When are they coming to help us?’”
He turned off the radio.
“You scratch under the surface and there’s anarchy,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you are. It would be the same here, a flood like that. People would die in droves.”
They stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Spean Bridge for fuel. He paused with his key in the ignition, the engine vibrating beneath her soles.
“I don’t mind taking you to Inverness,” he told her.
“Thank you,” she said.
While he was filling the tank, she headed for the toilets. She was halfway across the concrete apron before she realized that she had left her bag in the car. She went back for it.
“I’m not going to do a runner,” he said in an amused tone.
“I need some stuff,” she said lamely.
In the toilets, she released a jet of dark yellow piss into the pan. She was dehydrated and light headed, strangely otherworldly. She knew she must run. She finished and wiped herself. Next, she unlatched and shoved the small frosted-glass window open to reveal a view of a row of bins and the pine woods on the hillside beyond. She opened the window to its full extent, climbed on to the toilet seat and turned to pick up the dog. It went through the window first and then the rucksack and finally she squeezed out after it. She dropped to the ground on all fours.
She walked quickly past the bins and into the pine woods with the dog following. She quickly spotted a path and ran along it until she reached a Forestry Commission track. She could hear him shouting in the woods behind her. She followed the track for fifty meters or so and then struck out into the woods, with the morning sun behind her. Eventually she reached a tarmac road. A holidaying couple gave her a lift to Mallaig, where she caught the ferry to the Isle of Skye. Further lifts carried her northwards, the single-track roads unrolling like ribbons over the blind summits and plunging slopes of the island.
She spent her second night on the run in a grove of alders beside a river on the Trotternish Peninsula. She dreamed that night of the sea, of waves breaking on a desert shore and a voice calling her name. At first, she thought it might be Jonah, but it was Nor, squatting on the sand some distance off with his hand reaching out to her. He was wearing the same mocking smile as on the Interpol poster; he was saying, “Come and find me …”
In the morning, she took the ferry to Barra.
NOR’S CONFESSION
September 7, 2005
Miranda walked up the lane hunched against the spindrift rolling off the dunes. The house was dark granite with white-painted shutters, and the stone walls snaked across the waterlogged fields from it in a riot of brambles. Scuds of cloud raced across the sun and pools of water shimmered like mirrors. A toad leaped out of the brambles into the road and the dog followed it with his snout as it crossed to the opposite verge. Above the rock peak of a nearby hill a pair of choughs wheeled and cawed. She caught the smell of peat smoke on the offshore wind.
Approaching the house, she skirted the deepest mud in the yard, noted the Land Rover hard against the steading wall and stepped up to the door. She knocked and waited. Knocked again.
A window was heaved open on the upper story and Miranda stepped back from the door to get a better view. A woman stuck her head out of the window, her long auburn hair blown across her face.
“It’s Miranda,” she called up, “I need to speak to you.”
The woman swept her hair away from her face. “Miranda,” she repeated.
“I’ve come from Barnhill.”
“Barnhill?”
“On Jura. I’m Jonah’s friend.”
“Wait,” replied the woman from the window.
Miranda waited. What else was she going to do? Where else was there to go? This was the only lead she had.
A minute or two later the door opened. The woman’s eyes were strikingly blue but she’d been crying and there were dark smudges under them. A small boy with large and reproachful eyes clung to her right leg. Small boys were the worst—they gave Miranda a plummeting feeling. She struggled to maintain her composure.
“You’re Flora Beech?” Miranda asked. Jonah had told her that Andy Beech was married to Monteith’s estranged daughter Flora.
“I am.”
“I need to speak to you.”
Flora Beech chewed on her fraying lower lip and stared suspiciously from the hallway.
“Please,” Miranda urged.
After a pause, Flora stepped back and the child shuffled after her, clinging to her leg.
“Come in.”
Miranda followed Flora and her son down a narrow and darkened corridor that was lined with a montage of framed photographs and into the kitchen. Flora stood for a few moments in a sleepy daze and then tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and wiped her nose. “Tea?”
Miranda nodded. “Please.”
Flora filled the kettle from the tap and set it on the Rayburn.
Miranda squatted down and smiled at the boy. “What’s your name?”
The boy shrank behind his mother’s leg.
“His name’s Calum,” Flora told her. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for Jonah.”
Her face twisted. She turned on Miranda angrily. “He’s not here anymore.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Could I speak to your husband?”
“He’s gone,” she said bitterly, and pressed a fist against her forehead.
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
Miranda considered this information gloomily. “How long has he been missing?”
“He’s not missing, he’s just gone. He walked out.”
Miranda struggled to understand. “Did he leave a note?”
Flora looked furious. “No.”
Miranda tried to keep her voice as calm as possible. “Have you told the police?”
“He is the police, and like I said, he’s not missing. He left.” The kettle began to whistle and Flora turned back to the Rayburn. She flung two tea bags into a teapot.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Miranda asked.
“Down the hall on the left,” Flora said without turning.
It took a moment for the dizziness to subside. Miranda sat with her head in her hands. Jonah was missing. His friend and colleague Beech appeared to have walked out on his wife and son. The policemen Mulvey and Coyle—if they were police—had suggested that there was a threat against the UK from a former colleague of Jonah’s, Nor ed-Din. Persons unseen, possibly also the police, had broken into her house and planted evidence—if it was evidence—that seemed to give a date and rough location to the threat.
She had no idea what to do next—who to tell or what to tell them. That was the trouble: she didn’t know what anything was about. Flora, who she knew little about beyond the fact that she was Monteith’s daughter and Beech’s wife, wasn’t exactly being friendly.
On her way out of the bathroom, she felt for the switch and lit up the hallway. A collage of framed family photos ran the length of the wall. There were generations of Beech ministers and their wives and children in color and black and white: Calum clutching a collection of outsize shopping bags; Flora with flowers in her hair ducking through an arch of raised swords on their wedding day; and at the end of the hall a lurching revelation that caused Miranda to put her hand on her chest and feel her heart thumping.
She remembered Jonah’s words, spoken to her the evening before he left: “Beech and I worked together in Afghanistan.”
It was a group photo of five lean and bearded men on the knife-edge of a mountain ridge with an apparently endless succession of crumpled, dun-colored ridges marching into the distance behind them. They were in mufti: patched and threadbare shalwar kameez and chest webbing, with black turban cloth wrapped around their necks, and they were so caked in dust that they seemed camouflaged. Each one carried a rifle, a Kalashnikov, and they stared into the camera with defiant expressions.
Monteith, the short, barrel-shaped man with ginger hair who had interviewed her in London on her return from Iraq—Flora’s father—was standing at the center of the picture with the others flanking him. Jonah was standing on his left beside Beech and had his arm around the shoulders of a fourth man she did not recognize. And finally, lounging insouciantly on a slab of rock with his feet dangling, was the man who had picked her up in his sports car on the road north of Gallanach, and driven her as far as Spean Bridge.
“It was taken in Afghanistan. Jonah and Beech and my father were part of a Special Forces unit called the Afghan Guides,” Flora told her from the kitchen doorway. She held out a mug of tea, which Miranda gratefully accepted. Flora seemed to have calmed down a little. “Beech said that if anything ever happened to him, I should destroy the photo.”
“Why?” Miranda asked.
“Officially, the Guides didn’t exist.”
Miranda pointed at the man who had given her a lift. “Who’s he?”
Flora considered the photo. “Alex Ross.”
“Is he still with the Department?”
“No. Well. Not overtly. It’s complicated. Alex works for a private security firm that undertakes the kind of work that governments need done but don’t like to be associated with.”
“He gave me a lift yesterday.”
Flora pursed her lips and said, “He was probably the one that I liked the least.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve brought them here.”
Flora shrugged. “Beech said you were trouble.”
Miranda smarted at the comment but let it go. After all, it was mostly true. She was trouble. It followed her everywhere she went. She felt chastened.
While Flora was bathing Calum and putting him to bed, Miranda drifted from room to room. Eventually, she found herself in the study, standing behind the broad expanse of a desk with a desktop computer on it, staring at the books—mostly well-thumbed paperbacks with cracked spines—crammed upright and on their sides on shelves that reach to the ceiling. The fireplace stacked with peat. A fistful of pens jammed in a mug. A litter of paper clips. A small wooden icon with flecks of gold leaf. She found herself reflecting on this need so evident in both Jonah and Beech to have somewhere away from the turmoil of the world. Jonah had spoken wistfully to her of his envy for Beech, who had chosen to walk away from a life of espionage in favor of the relative quiet of a policeman’s life on a small Hebridean island. Looking around, she saw it as the mirror of the island hideaway that Jonah had chosen for himself twice now, first in his marriage and more recently with her at Barnhill, and which on both occasions he seemed to have been unable to sustain.
She looked up to find Flora standing in the doorway in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She was holding a plate with two pieces of buttered toast. “Dinner?”
Miranda took a piece and Flora had the other. Flora paused between mouthfuls and said, “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. About you being trouble. I had no right.”
“It’s OK,” Miranda replied.
“Why did you come here?” Flora asked, after a pause.
“I’m looking for Jonah.”
“He did come here, right after he …” Flora tailed off awkwardly.
“… left me?” Miranda finished for her.
“It wasn’t about you.”
“Then what was it about?” Miranda asked.
There was a pause.
“It wasn’t about you,” Flora repeated, softly.
“The police came to Barnhill, looking for Jonah,” Miranda told her.
“Did they say why they were looking for him?” Flora asked.
“No.”
Flora nodded as if this was not unexpected. “Anything else?”
“They showed me a photo of a British-born Jordanian called Nor ed-Din.”
“I’m sure they did,” Flora told her.
“What do you know?” Miranda demanded.
Flora stared at her for a second. Then she sighed. “You might as well hear it from him.”
She went over to the computer and Miranda followed.
“Sit down,” Flora said, indicating the chair before the monitor. “It’s connected. The video link is on
the first bookmarked site.” Miranda sat and gripped the mouse. The monitor lit up. She clicked on the web browser and pulled down bookmarks. The first was a page and download link grabbed from YouTube. Someone, presumably Beech or Flora, had originally typed Nor ed-Din into the search facility. Top of the list was a freeze frame of Nor’s face staring out of the tube and beside it the title:
A Spy’s Confession
The Koran commands you to speak the truth, even if it be against your own selves (more)
Miranda glanced up at Flora, who was standing at her shoulder.
“Go on,” Flora said.
Miranda clicked on the screen and the clip played. Nor spoke slowly and carefully in English, as if he was reading from a prepared statement: he addressed the camera and began with a phrase that Miranda recognized as originating from the Egyptian Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, “al-Islam huwa al-hull”—Islam is the solution. He stated that given the continuing occupation of Islamic lands by the Crusader forces of America and Britain, he had no alternative but to go public with the details of the assassination of the CIA agent James Kiernan at the hands of rogue elements within the British intelligence services, and his hand in it. He briefly described his career as a British undercover agent embedded in the Pakistani Intelligence Service, the ISI, and that organization’s extensive links to Islamist elements—including al-Qaeda—operating within Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. He described how he was cruelly abandoned by the British for more than two years following the capture of Kabul by the Taliban and how in that time he found God’s true path and nurtured within himself a murderous desire to seek vengeance upon the kuffar, the unbelievers, who had led him so far from the path of righteousness. He described the ease with which he tricked the British into killing Kiernan. He described the subsequent cover-up. He named the rogue intelligence unit known as the Department, and its controller, the war criminal Monteith. He committed himself to further acts of violence upon the agents of the Crusader nations, specifically revenge against the hateful British. He ended by saying: “Soon I will come to your country and I will launch an attack that will amaze the whole world. A tide of destruction. I swear to God, the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England …”