A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “What is your status in your country?” Tariq asked.

  “I am a fugitive.”

  “When did you last see Nor?”

  “In Nevada in 2002. He was on his way to Iraq.”

  “Why do you want to speak to him?”

  “He is planning a terrorist attack in my country. I want to stop him. It’s a trap.”

  “Why do you care about him?”

  “He is my friend.”

  The car shot out of the narrow alleyway and bounced onto a busy tarmac road.

  “We are taking you back to your hotel.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Jonah protested.

  “Tomorrow you must take a bus to Damascus. Tell them at the border that you want a transit visa and that you are traveling overland to Turkey. We will be waiting for you at the central station in Damascus.”

  The car rattled to a halt opposite the hotel.

  “We will be waiting for you,” Tariq repeated, in an encouraging tone.

  Sure enough, they were there in the crowd at Damascus bus station the following day. Zein darted forward through the heaving mass of people and their suitcases and cardboard boxes and wicker baskets full of chickens. He took Jonah’s backpack from him and led him by the hand back through the crowd to the Mercedes, where Tariq was waiting.

  “Is Nor here in Syria?” Jonah asked.

  “You must be patient,” Tariq told him.

  It was the first time that Jonah had got a clear view of Tariq. He was younger than Jonah had expected, and slight, with slender fingers that he used to punctuate his speech, and large brown eyes. A familiar type, Jonah thought.

  “Are you Nor’s friend?” Jonah asked.

  Tariq looked at him. “Yes, I am his friend.”

  “Then you must help me.”

  Zein propelled the Mercedes forward through the bus-station crowd with one hand on the horn and the other gesticulating out of the window.

  “Where are we going?” Jonah asked.

  “You will see,” Tariq replied, staring back over his shoulder to see whether they were being followed.

  The car entered a warren of narrow streets festooned with electrical cables and laundry. They careened around corners and accelerated across intersections. Several times people were forced to jump out of the way.

  Abruptly, the car slammed to a halt beside a small metal door set in a high wall. Zein leapt out and banged on the door with his fist. Tariq reached forward and placed his hand on Jonah’ s shoulder. “Be calm,” he said.

  A few moments later a man with a Salafist’s beard and a Kalashnikov stepped out of the doorway and cast a wary eye up and down the alleyway. He ordered them to get out of the car and watched while Tariq patted Jonah down. Satisfied, Tariq took Jonah by the elbow and guided him through the door, along a corridor that was damp with mold and down a steep flight of rough concrete steps to another metal door. Tariq knocked on it and waited. The door opened and a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfed them. Jonah heard a man screaming. Two men in balaclavas loomed out of the smoke with Kalashnikovs in their hands. Behind them there was another man in a balaclava holding a video camera. The door behind Jonah closed. Tariq and Zein had gone. The two men marched Jonah down a corridor to a windowless room with a wall that was hung with green jihadi flags and lit by floodlights. In front of the flags there was a blindfolded man in an orange jumpsuit. He was handcuffed to a chair on a large plastic sheet. He was slumped forward, and quietly groaning. Opposite him there was a large man with a full beard with two white tufts that stretched from his ears to his chest. He was sitting on a bench with a scimitar that he was sharpening on a whetstone resting on his knee.

  “Are you Jonah known as Ishmael?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is your passport?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Jonah handed it to him.

  “Lock him up.”

  The two men in balaclavas led Jonah through another door and down a corridor and bundled him into a cell.

  When he woke, he could hear footsteps and whispering voices outside the door. He was lying on a cracked concrete floor, handcuffed to a radiator in an otherwise empty room. There was no window, only a ventilation grille that was far out of reach. Other prisoners had been held in the room before him; their names were scratched on the wall behind him, none of them more than a couple of feet above the floor. He wondered whether any of them had survived.

  Twice the men in balaclavas came into the cell and beat him with sticks. They beat him about the thighs, the shoulders and the back. Jonah was no stranger to being strung up and beaten. He knew that you go into a kind of glide. One blow becomes much like another—he could sustain a certain amount of it. It was important to let it wash over him. He also knew how to behave. He knew from his training that interaction with his captors should be kept to a minimum. He must not make eye contact. He should not be uncooperative or short-tempered. But on this occasion, he felt outrage. He had come of his own free will.

  The second time, one of the Salafists got too close and Jonah tripped him up and was on in him in a second and, using his head as a battering ram, broke the man’s nose and dislodged several teeth.

  He felt exultant. They beat him unconscious.

  They had rigged a blackboard on the wall behind the camera so that he could sit on a chair with his cuffed hands wedged between his knees and read the text while staring into the camera’s lens.

  “The British state will taste a tiny portion of what innocent Muslims taste every day at the hands of the Crusader and Jewish coalition to the east and to the west,” Jonah said. Blood spooled out of his mouth as he spoke. “The duties of Islam are magnificent and difficult. Some of them are abominable. The hour of death can be neither hastened nor postponed. Death will find you, even in the looming tower …”

  He looked around him. It was satisfying to engage the fear in their eyes. He was convinced that they had been instructed to keep him alive.

  “Come on, then …” he said, in a low voice.

  They advanced on him with sticks.

  “Jonah!” He woke with a shudder. Tariq was squatting on the floor well out of reach.

  “Nor says that you are beautiful, but you think that you are ugly,” Tariq told him. “I believe he must be right. He understands people. He is not frightened to say what he thinks. Is it true that he was your student?”

  “He was my friend,” Jonah replied.

  “He says that you taught him everything he knows, that you are the one who made him into an instrument of God.”

  “Not me,” Jonah says.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To warn him …”

  “He is warned. He knows that he is in danger. He is content. He is in danger but your country is in greater danger. Do you understand? You should be proud of him.”

  “Where is he?”

  Tariq’s chest swelled with pride. “He’s in Iraq, fighting the crusaders.”

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “He is leaving soon. He is going to take the fight to the crusaders on their home soil. He says that he is going to sweep away an entire Kufr city. He says that you will be amazed. I believe him.”

  SYSTEMS SABOTAGE

  September 7–8, 2005

  They came for him at dawn, in the midst of a sandstorm.

  “We must leave at once,” said Tariq. His phone rang and he listened and nodded before someone cut the connection. One of the Salafists knelt beside Jonah and unlocked his handcuffs while another held the barrel of a Kalashnikov against his temple. It was satisfying to feel the man’s fear as he fumbled with the lock. “Get up,” said Tariq. “Follow me.”

  Jonah climbed shakily to his feet and staggered after him into the corridor.

  “Quickly,” hissed one of the Salafists, and prodded him in the back with his gun. Jonah spun around and yanked the gun out of his hands. The Salafists fell over themselves to
get out of his way. He threw the gun after them.

  He climbed the stairs and went through the metal door and down the corridor and out into the alleyway where the car was waiting with Tariq at the wheel.

  They turned on to a main road and lorries roared past. Tariq slapped his palm on the horn and kept it there until he found a gap in the traffic.

  “Where are we going?” Jonah asked.

  “Iraq,” Tariq replied irritably. He switched on the windshield wipers to try to clear the dust.

  They left the outskirts of the city and passed empty fields and rows of pylon lines. After an hour or so Tariq stopped the car and told Jonah to get in the trunk.

  “Be very quiet,” he told him, before slamming the lid closed on him.

  The car started again and they drove for twenty minutes or so before slowing to a halt. For a while they proceeded in fits and starts as if lined up in a queue. The trunk steadily filled with a fine cloud of dust. Jonah pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose. He heard voices and imagined papers being inspected and perhaps money changing hands. There was no attempt to search the vehicle. They set off again. Jonah groaned and stretched limbs that were numb from remaining still for so long. Suddenly, the car veered off the road and rattled along the verge for a while before stopping. The doors slammed. Seconds later, Tariq opened the trunk and helped Jonah out. “Welcome to Iraq.”

  “My favorite bloody place,” Jonah replied through gritted teeth, rubbing the backs of his legs to rid them of cramp.

  “Come on, get in the car,” Tariq said.

  They drove for several hours on a narrow strip of blacktop across a bleak and unremitting landscape filled with clouds of ocher-colored dust and the wreckage of abandoned vehicles. On the outskirts of a town they turned off the road and pulled up alongside a beaten-up Land Cruiser parked next to a gas pump. Tariq jumped out of the car and Jonah followed. Tariq gripped Jonah by the upper arm and steered him towards the Land Cruiser. There were several men inside: the driver and another in the passenger seat beside him; two more Iraqis were squatting on a pile of wooden crates in the back. They were covered in dust. All had their features obscured by scarves.

  “Get in,” Tariq said, and slid in along the bench seat beside him. The driver turned the key in the ignition and the engine started with a throaty growl. They drove off, abandoning Tariq’s car.

  The man in the passenger seat unwrapped the scarf that disguised his features and turned to look at Jonah. By the light filtering through the dust-encrusted windows, Jonah recognized the harrowed beauty and numinous stare of his oldest friend.

  “Hello, Jonah,” he said.

  “Hello, Nor.”

  Iraq was a place of barren desert and swirling dust, and endless potholed roads, desiccated orchards and drab, empty settlements. The only sign of the occupation was the Apache helicopters, sleek as hunting wasps, which skimmed along the distant horizon.

  They were racing south. Jonah was wedged in the bench seat between Tariq and another Iraqi with a Kalashnikov between his knees.

  “Why would you willingly walk into a trap?”

  Nor glanced back at him. “What makes you think that I haven’t worked that into my calculations?”

  “They’ll stop you long before you present a real danger,” Jonah said. “You won’t get within a mile of the Thames Barrier.”

  “Maybe I don’t need to,” Nor said, his cold eyes roaming the desert outside. “The other side may be strong but they are not strong in all things and our side may be weak but we are not weak in all things. This is what I tell my people: we are small and agile and we have surprise on our side. We create our own superiority. I say it is up to us to identify and exploit our enemy’s key vulnerabilities. I say, when you are trying to create the edge, the first thing you need is an imbalance, an asymmetry.”

  A mobile phone on the dashboard began to vibrate. Nor snatched it up and listened briefly before cutting the connection. He sat up, took a water bottle from between the seats, poured water over his hand and slapped it on his face. He was energized again.

  “We’re going to see a man about a map.”

  The convoy was pulled over by the side of the highway. Three armored black Humvees, two of them with .50-caliber machine guns on top. The top cover gunners were wearing black body armor over their fire-retardant Nomex jackets and helmets that made them seem bulbous headed and insect-like. Graysteel was written in white lettering on the side of each vehicle.

  The Land Cruiser pulled alongside the middle Humvee, close enough for Nor to speak to its passenger, an American with a buzz cut, sunglasses and a T-shirt with a logo just above the left breast of a wolf’s head in a rifle’s crosshairs. Jonah had seen the logo before but he couldn’t remember when. The American passed over two packages. One was bulky and the other was flat.

  “You’ll receive the balance on completion of the task,” the American told him.

  “Jolly good,” Nor told him with a mocking smile, and winked at Jonah. He nodded to the driver and they drove off. He tossed the larger package to Tariq in the back and ripped open the flat one. Inside was a map. Nor unfolded the map on the dashboard and Jonah saw that it was an Iraqi pipeline schematic printed by the American company Halliburton.

  Beside him on the seat, Tariq opened the larger package and removed several bundles of hundred-dollar bills held together with rubber bands. He grinned broadly and held them up for all to see.

  “From the Christians, Emir. Gifts …”

  “An attack on systems can magnify the effect of a small attack into a major event,” Nor explained, his fingers tracing lines across the map. “Provided that we can identify a key enemy weakness, a small cell like ours, with minimal costs, can accomplish an attack that generates a rate of return that it is out of all proportion to the initial investment. Take the next left.”

  The driver glanced across at him, his teeth bright white in the sunlight. “Yes, Emir!”

  Nor took a GPS from the pocket of his jacket and switched it on. “The optimal size of an autonomous cell is between five and eight. Nine is the limit that I am prepared to work with. Any more and we’d show up on the radar.” He turned around and leaned over the back of the seat, so that he was face to face with Jonah. “Our small size is compensated for by the overall size of the market. The market behaves like a bazaar: people trade, haggle and share. For specific skills, we outsource to freelancers in the bazaar. For instance, for a vehicle-borne IED we buy in a hollowed-out car from a chop shop and a stack of artillery shells from a local insurgent group. We aim for simple attacks that have immediate and far-reaching effects. Our actions are designed to provoke copycat attacks, as other networks in the bazaar innovate from our original plans and swarm on identified weaknesses. At the same time, they create protective system noise that masks our identity.”

  “What were you doing in Pakistan?” Jonah asked.

  “Sourcing expertise,” Nor explained.

  “Explosives-trained combat divers for whatever you are planning in the Thames Estuary?”

  Nor grinned and turned back in his seat. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “You know I don’t. I never have.”

  “That way,” Nor said, pointing. They veered off the road and raced across the desert.

  “Stop!” Nor jumped out of the car and took several steps with the GPS in his hand. He stopped and scuffed the sand with his heel.

  “Here,” he shouted cheerily. “X marks the spot.”

  They all got out of the car. Tariq removed a spade from the trunk and Nor took it from him. Nor and Jonah stood opposite each other on the sand.

  “About six foot down,” Nor told him, before handing him the spade. He put on a pair of shades with small round lenses. They reminded Jonah of coins placed on the eyes of a corpse. “Dig.” Jonah began to dig. It must have been a hundred degrees, at least. Within seconds, he was sodden with sweat. Tariq took the video camera from the car and started to film him.

  “B
rother Ishmael,” Nor said, “tell me this, what gets larger the more you take away?”

  Jonah continued digging.

  “A hole!”

  “Am I digging my own grave?” Jonah asked.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Nor said. “You’re digging for oil.”

  Jonah threw the spade down. “What the fuck are you up to?” he demanded.

  “I’m getting even,” Nor told him, “for every insult, for every slight. I’m getting my own back.”

  “This is about revenge?”

  Nor produced a pistol from the back of his waistband and pointed it at Jonah.

  “Dig!”

  Jonah resumed digging.

  Nor shook his head wistfully and tucked the gun back in his waistband. “Look at the mess you are in.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Jonah demanded.

  “It means that your ridiculous sense of loyalty is going to be everyone’s undoing. You should have killed me when you had the chance. Think of all the lives you would have saved.”

  “There’s still time to stop you,” Jonah said as he dumped another spadeful over his shoulder.

  “No there isn’t. Not for you.” Nor looked away at the horizon and for a moment he seemed profoundly sad. Then he forced a smile. “It’s ironic really, the unforeseen consequences of what was set in motion on 9/11. The Sheikh’s intention was to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would bleed the United States financially, cut it off from its allies, and cause the Islamic world to rise up against it. His error was to think that the place where this would happen was Afghanistan and not Iraq. Bush and Blair gave us more than we could have hoped for. When I first started working with these people, just after the invasion, all it would have taken to put down their weapons was for the occupiers to leave. But now, if you ask them what they would do if the occupiers leave, they say that they must follow them wherever they go.”

  Jonah paused with his foot on the spade. “They know you’re coming.”

  “Of course, they do. I told them. I announced it to the world on YouTube. How else can I make the world sit up and listen? Keep digging.”