by Simon Conway
“That’s ludicrous.”
“Is it?” Alex said. “How well do you really know him?”
“Well enough.”
“You can explain that to Monteith.”
“You’re taking me to Monteith?”
“He’s coming to us. First, he has to come out of hiding.”
“He’s in hiding?”
Alex laughed. “Right now, I’d say Monteith’s not far behind Bin Laden on the CIA’s most wanted list.”
“And what about you? You were one of the Afghan Guides.”
“You think that this is government work? You think that any of this is official? I’m still Monteith’s boy. I’m as deep in the shit as you are.”
His phone rang. “Yes? Right. OK. We’re approaching now. Are the cameras down?” He paused, listening. “Good. What about the perimeter?” He glanced across at Miranda. “OK. That’s grand.”
He cut the connection.
Staring up at the nearest tower with its garish cladding of mustard and fire-engine red, taking the full force of the rain on her upturned face, Miranda was filled with a profound sense of unease. Nothing about the Red Road Flats looked safe. On the approach to the estate, the only shops that weren’t boarded up were a heavily fortified betting shop, a solicitors’ office and a fish and chip shop. There was a primary school ringed by a barbed-metal stockade at the base of the cluster of towers but no children in sight. Waste ground stretched for as far as the eye could see. They were somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow, but it reminded her of the Balkans in the nineties, when she’d been looking for her husband. Alex had already told her that many of the inhabitants of the towers were refugees from the Balkans, Kosovars and Bosnians. She remembered trudging up and down countless staircases, and sitting with soldiers on the bare boards of unheated apartments on the front lines. She had offered packages of tea, coffee, butter, slivovitz—whatever she could get her hands on—in return for news of the Arab fighter named Bakr. She had not found him, although she had collected reports of his deeds. Most of it was garbage, lies told in exchange for what she was offering, but she developed a talent for spotting the truth among the falsehoods, enough to keep her going, even though he was always a few steps ahead of her. Her life seemed to be repeating itself.
They had parked beside a shipping container, in a small car park at the foot of one of the towers. Water was running off a grass bank, washing a tide of litter across the tarmac. There was only one other car in sight, the carcass of Jonah’s Land Rover. The windows and wheels had been removed and it was sitting on four breeze blocks.
“Jonah was here?” she asked.
“Before he took off,” Alex acknowledged. “Excuse me.” He spoke briefly into his mobile phone. “We’re on our way up.”
She watched a woman in a headscarf pushing a pram between the large granite boulders at the approach to the tower. The boulders had presumably been put there to keep joyriders off the small playground with its rusty swings and slide.
“It’s on the fifteenth floor,” Alex said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. He went around to the trunk of the car, popped the lid and removed a pair of green Wellington boots. He swapped them for his shoes. “The elevators don’t work.”
He set off across the tarmac. She stood for a moment, with a protest half formed in her head, but he was already halfway to the tower’s entrance, and the only alternative appeared to be to stay and get soaked in the car park. Reluctantly, she followed, with the dog at her heels.
At the entrance, there were three sets of fire doors, one after the other, like airlocks, and she had to set her shoulder to each successive door to force it open. The wind howled between her legs and she heard snatches of what sounded like distant shouting. In the foyer, the elevator’s doors gaped. A cardboard sign announced it was out of order. She made for the stairs. Alex was ahead of her, and as she climbed after him, up steps that were scattered with broken glass, it was if she were ascending through a subterranean passage. Somewhere above she heard a woman shouting abuse and a door slam. At each level, there was a fire door with a wire-core glass window like an embrasure which looked into a passageway. She was forced to pause several times and catch her breath. There was a sense of people shrinking back into the shadows before her. She felt her discomfort intensify, as if experiencing an ear-popping change in altitude.
On the fifteenth floor, Alex was waiting for her by the elevator shaft, with his hands on his knees and his head down, sweat pouring off his brow.
“I should quit smoking,” he groaned.
“It’ll kill you,” she said, quietly. She was reminded suddenly of the whiff of stale smoke carried into the house at Barnhill on someone’s clothes. She felt a sudden wave of fear.
Alex straightened up and pushed through the fire door. There was a stocky man in jeans and a hoodie standing in the passageway beyond. His face was almost entirely in shadow.
“This way,” the man said, as if he had been expecting them.
Halfway down the passage, the man stopped in front of a gray, steel-plated door with a plastic number and a spyhole. He produced a key from his pocket and let himself in. Alex and then Miranda and the dog followed. There was a short hallway with several pairs of running shoes neatly arranged against the skirting board and a door that led through to a living room.
Beneath the living-room window there was a cheap synthetic sofa and opposite it two matching armchairs. Alex collapsed into the nearest armchair. Miranda looked around. There was a glass coffee table with a packet of cornflakes, a bottle of Irn-Bru, a pile of loose papers, an overflowing ashtray and a couple of Xbox consoles on it. In the corner of the room there was a television set. On one wall, there was a framed quotation from the Koran and an Islamic calendar. The place stank of cigarettes and unwashed bodies.
“You can withdraw to the perimeter, Taff,” Alex told the man in the hoodie, and waved him away. “Wait for further instructions.”
“OK, boss,” the man identified as Taff said.
“Have a seat,” Alex told her.
“What’s going on?” Miranda asked.
“Sit.”
She sat on the sofa and the dog ranged up and down the skirting boards.
“Monteith is coming,” Alex told her. “He wants to talk to you.”
“How long will he be?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Not long, I hope. He has to be sure that he’s safe.”
“Doesn’t he trust you?”
“Of course, he trusts me,” Alex said irritably.
This is fucked, she thought. She was suddenly desperate for a pee.
“I need to go to the toilet.”
He didn’t seem to be listening. He was scratching the dog’s neck. “Good boy,” he said.
She stood up. “I need to go to the toilet.”
He glanced up at her. “First door on the right,” he said.
She got up and went through the door into the narrow corridor that led to the rest of the flat. She closed the door behind her. There was another door immediately to her left and one to her right. She opened the door to her left. It was a bedroom. There were two single beds with bare mattresses. On one of the beds was a large cardboard box marked HEXAMINE BLOCKS FOR CAMP STOVES. There was a rolled-up prayer mat and propped against the far wall a samurai sword. She closed the door softly. The door to the right led to the bathroom. There was a toilet, a sink and a bath with a shower attachment and a shower curtain that was stained with mildew pulled across it. She dropped her trousers and peed in the bowl. When she was done, she turned on the seat, searching for paper. There was none visible. She looked around. With a feeling of trepidation, she pushed aside the shower curtain. The bath was filled with several industrial-sized bottles of drain cleaner and some discarded fertilizer bags. She stared at the empty bottles and torn-open bags. It took a second or two for the significance of them to sink in, and then she felt the panic welling up and threatening to overwhelm her. She pulled her trousers up, flushed th
e toilet and then stared at the handle, her fingerprints clearly visible on the chrome surface.
Shit shit shit
She opened the door and almost jumped out of her skin. Alex was standing right in front of her.
“Why don’t you make some tea?” he said in an amused tone. He inclined his head. “The kitchen’s that way.”
He made no effort to make room for her and she had to brush past him to get down the narrow corridor. She felt his breath on her neck—his extreme alertness, arousal even. She took two more steps and opened the remaining door.
She stepped into the kitchen. It was here that they had manufactured the explosives. There was a gas mask and beside it a row of cloudy retort bottles and several glass beakers on the linoleum-topped table. The kitchen counter was stacked with coffee filters, ice-cube trays and several large bags of salt.
“They seemed to know what they were doing, don’t you think?” Alex asked her from the doorway. “Real professionals. You’d know, right? Isn’t this what they taught you in the Lion’s Den?”
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.
“Mine’s white with one sugar.”
She took a deep breath and went over to the counter, picked up the kettle and carried it to the sink to fill it. There was a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade lying on a chopping board beside the sink. Miranda stared at it, listening to the water running into the kettle. She tried to decide whether she was in a sufficiently life-threatening situation that she might need it. When she looked up she saw that Alex was watching her. He looked amused.
“Give me the knife,” he said, holding out his hand to her.
She paused.
“Give me the knife,” he repeated, menacingly.
She picked it up and held it out to him, handle outwards. “That’s a good girl,” he said, taking it from her. He tapped it against his thigh. “The tea bags are in the cupboard.”
She carried the kettle back to the wall socket and plugged it in. Next, she opened the wall units. The first cupboard that she opened was stacked with jars of Vaseline. She stood for a moment, holding the door handles. Petroleum jelly: they’d used the Vaseline as a plasticizer. And her fingerprints were all over everything. She was conscious that he was watching her. She closed the doors calmly and opened the adjacent unit. Inside there was a packet of tea bags, a bag of sugar, a sliced white loaf, some honey and jam.
She dropped tea bags into two mugs.
“We think that they were here for two to three days,” Alex told her. “They ate eggs, toast and honey. They prayed. They manufactured explosives. Then they walked out the door. How much by weight do you think they made?”
The kettle boiled and she poured water on the tea bags. Her gaze was drawn inexorably to the fridge. She was in desperate trouble—she knew that—she shouldn’t touch anything else, but she wanted to know. She opened the door and the interior light clicked on. On the shelves were rows of glass beakers, twenty or so, some with a residue of yellowish liquid. It was as she’d guessed: they had made red fuming nitric acid using a mixture of sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate, obtained from drain cleaner and fertilizer. They had heated the mixture in retort bottles, and then collected the acid in glass beakers cooled by iced water. They had then mixed the acid with powdered hexamine from the fuel blocks to create the explosive slurry RDX. Adding a plasticizer and plastic binder had given them a malleable explosive.
To get at the milk she had to remove a beaker. She set it gently on the counter and reached in for the milk. She sniffed at the carton. The milk was fresh. They had made their explosives and left. Not long ago. She closed the fridge door without returning the beaker.
She poured milk on his tea and added a spoonful of sugar. She handed him the mug. He took it in his left hand. He was holding the knife in his right. She held her own mug of tea in both hands and sipped at it, watching him over the rim.
“I’ve been reading your file,” Alex told her. “It turned out that the Americans had much more on you than we did. A hard-copy file: longhand, cross-referenced entries, Post-it notes, the lot. I assume that they bought it in a job lot from the Pakistanis. It’s now circulating. We know that you were at the Lion’s Den. We know about the sleepovers with your husband’s business partners in Baghdad. There’s a school of thought that says that you’re a dangerous terrorist.”
The doorbell rang. Alex smiled menacingly. “He’s here.”
WHY ISN’T SHE WEARING GLOVES?
September 8, 2005
When Monteith stepped into the kitchen, she was standing with her back to the sink, as far from Alex as she could get.
Monteith was wearing a Barbour jacket over a shabby tweed suit, the same suit that he’d been wearing when she last saw him in August 2003, after Iraq, when he had spoken to her in his basement offices in Whitehall. Away from his desk he looked shorter than she remembered. His brogues were muddy and his thinning hair was plastered to his skull. He seemed tired, like a man who had been thinking too many gloomy thoughts. He didn’t look at her at first. He stood and studied the room, the chemical apparatus, bottles and beakers, and crusts of explosive residue. He held out his hand briefly for the dog to sniff.
“Well?” he asked.
“They came in on last Friday’s Dubai–Glasgow flight,” Alex told him. “Four Pakistan nationals with temporary work visas. The names on the airline tags in the rubbish match those we obtained from the Home Office. The photos on their visa applications match those passed to us by Yakoob Beg.”
Monteith grunted and made no comment.
“They were employed by an Aberdeen-based commercial diving company called Filkins-Storr that provides offshore divers to the North Sea oil industry,” Alex explained.
“And?”
“Filkins-Storr obtained visas for four divers who answered an advertisement calling for experience of welding and drilling work, surveying and working with explosives.”
“And?”
“They didn’t turn up for work in Aberdeen on Monday.”
“What pictures do we have?”
“Just the photos with their visa applications.”
“Cameras?”
“Here?” Alex shrugged. “They’ve been down for the last week. You could ask Border Agency at the airport.”
“Any sign of the Security Service?”
“None.”
“I don’t like this,” Monteith said. He looked across at Miranda and frowned. “Why isn’t she wearing gloves?”
“You don’t need to give me a lecture on forensics,” Alex told him.
She looked from Alex to Monteith. Alex stepped up to Monteith and stuck the knife in his back.
Monteith didn’t seem particularly surprised. He tried to reach around to grasp the knife but the attempt defeated him and he toppled face forward, crashing into the table, smashing several bottles, showering the room with broken glass. The handle of the knife stood proud from his back. He looked up at her and then rolled off the table, landing on his back, the force of the fall pushing the point of the blade up through his ribcage. The dog cowered.
“This one they will pin on you,” Alex told her in a matter-of-fact way, “as well as the deaths of tens of thousands of Londoners. When the flood waters subside, you’re the one they’re going to be pointing their fingers at. You’re going to be the stuff of screaming headlines.”
There was something incredibly smug about him. He seemed to assume that because of his physical strength he was invulnerable. He was mistaken. She was of the Isaaq Clan. It was her father who had taught her that the results of most fights depend on speed in the first few moments. When she had moved to England from Somalia and was put in a girl’s boarding school, she encountered for the first time the persecution of those who are different. In her new class, she was the only one with dark skin and black hair. There was one girl in particular, in a class several years above hers, who taunted her. The girl was brutal, feared across the school, even by the teachers. She didn’t
stand a chance. Miranda followed her into the showers one night. She didn’t bother working herself into a fury and she didn’t give the girl the chance either. She just went straight up to her and head-butted her, breaking her nose. She kicked her legs out from under her, and slammed her head up and down off the tile floor a couple of times. Nobody bothered her after that.
This time she didn’t pause either. She grabbed the beaker from the countertop and flung its residue of nitric acid in Alex’s face. He screamed and staggered backwards, folding over on himself. She jumped over Monteith, and dashed out of the room and into the corridor.
“Come on!”
She glanced back. Alex was holding the dog by his collar and in his other hand there was a gun. He reached over the dog to point it at her. He was screaming.
She didn’t have any choice.
She ran across the living room and out into the passageway. Pressing her face to one of the windows, she saw a van disgorging men into the car park. Already doors were being slammed the length of the passage. She ran to the stairwell, leaned over the railing and saw two men in hoodies, several floors below, advancing up the stairs. She took a deep breath and headed down toward them. On the next level down, she pushed through the fire door and ran down the passage. Halfway down she passed a small black girl with dandelion hair and the sharp, Semitic features she associated with the Horn of Africa, standing in the doorway of a flat. She stopped.
“Help me,” she said in Somali.
The girl stepped aside and gestured for her to come in. She found herself in a living room with a television playing Islam Channel. A woman in a black abaya but with her face uncovered looked up as she entered.
“Help me,” she said again.
The woman looked at the child and they reached some unspoken agreement. The girl took Miranda by the hand and led her down a corridor that was the mirror of the one in the apartment above. The girl opened the door to her room. There was a bed with a colorful bedspread covered in toys. The girl led her to a built-in cupboard and opened the door. At the bottom of the cupboard was a cubbyhole, created from cushions and pieces of embroidered cloth.