A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  He lay back on the tabletop with his mouth open and his eyeballs rolled back into his skull. She felt a shudder of elation. For the first time since she had left the island of Jura she felt truly fearless and bold.

  She took him by the hand and led him up the stairs to the bedroom. They removed their remaining clothes and she pressed herself against him. He held her away for a moment to look at her and she felt triumph as she recognized the need rising in him again. He turned her around, bent her over the bed and lifted her hair from the nape of her neck, wrapping it around his fist and pulling her up so that she was pressed against him, his breath on her neck, his other hand cupping a breast, the arm rising across her collarbone and encircling her neck. She was trapped with his penis pressing against her. He went in, pushing into her, and she felt as if she were falling. She felt so full. He made a roaring sound, and spent himself again.

  They lay together in the bed, with the sheets and blankets tangled between their legs, sleepy and hot, with his sperm trickling out of her, and it felt as if some part of her was melting.

  She felt at peace. She remembered Saira once describing Stockholm syndrome to her, the fondness and loyalty one could come to feel for a captor.

  “What happens at high tide?” she asked.

  “I press speed dial.” He put his mobile phone against a nipple and moved it downward across her belly until it pressed against her labia. He whispered in her ear. “And everybody’s dead.”

  JONAH

  Covert Transit

  “… of three days’ journey.”

  The Bible, Jonah 3

  FROM FALLUJAH TO DOVER

  September 9–11, 2005

  Jonah fell. It was no more than fifty feet from the bridge to the surface of the Euphrates, no more than a second of weightlessness before he plunged into the water. But in that second after he was shot, and while he was falling through the air, he stared wide eyed into the approaching depths and saw death there waiting. Its howling maw. You have betrayed everyone that ever loved you. Then he struck. He was dragged down. He took a breath and water filled his lungs. Panicking, he tried to scramble for the surface, but he was tricked by the current and instead funneled down into the murky depths, among dark and menacing shapes. Voices whispered to him. Traitor! Adulterer! Thief! Close to passing out, he gave up the last of his breath, watching the air bubbles rising around his face, urgently seeking the surface. Then a moment’s clarity, a life-saving spark—sheer bloody-mindedness—caused him to strike out with one arm and chase the path of his ascending breath. His head broke the surface, his mouth open and gasping, filling his lungs with the humid night air. Above him were cars and buildings, a moving field of light. And he was spinning, powerful currents swirling and eddying around him, sweeping him toward the center of the river. There was no strength in him to fight it and so he let himself be carried forward.

  He had been shot in the front of his upper body, he was sure of that, in his neck, shoulder or chest. There was no pain as such, just a dull throbbing. His left arm was paralyzed but his right arm was working, and soon he discovered that by using the blade of his good hand as a rudder, he could edge across the face of the current. He must get ashore and soon if he was to survive.

  He steered toward the bank.

  Soon, his fingers slid through soft mud and he grabbed a fistful of reeds, and, using the current’s momentum, allowed himself to be washed on to the rubbish-strewn bank. He could not afford to rest. He knew that he must keep going if he were not to be sucked back into the water. He crawled forward one-armed through the ooze, grabbing debris and other organic matter, anything he could get a purchase on to haul himself forward.

  Creatures scuttled across him. A nauseating stench filled his nostrils. He could no longer see and he had no idea how far he had to go. His left arm felt massive, like an anchor dragging alongside him. His legs were useless. He was cold and getting colder. He must keep going. Death would not have him yet.

  It felt like crab claws tickling his sides, then a wet sponge on his face and a snuffling sound. A dog licking his face. Jonah smiled. It was Esme’s nameless dog to the rescue. Then two hands, rough and calloused, traveled up and down his body, exploring his pockets and unbuckling his belt.

  “I can give you money,” he said.

  A man grunted in surprise. Jonah wondered what language he had spoken and tried again, careful to use Arabic. The man shooed the dog away from Jonah’s face and leaned down to look at him. He was a large man in a grubby djellaba. His breath was if anything worse than the dog’s.

  “You’re alive,” the man said. He grinned toothlessly and shook his head in wonderment.

  “I’m glad,” Jonah told him, “because this would make a shitty paradise.”

  “You’re a gift,” the man said.

  “Get me to a phone,” Jonah said.

  The man took hold of him by the ankles and started to drag him through the debris and waste.

  He heard the first note of the dawn call to prayer. He opened his eyes. Two donkeys were staring down at him. They were attached to a wooden cart that was stacked high with rubbish.

  He looked to one side. He was lying outstretched on a concrete apron beside the river. At the back of the cart he could hear the dog yelping at what it thought was a game and the man muttering as he shifted bundles of trash to make a bed.

  Rag-pickers, charcoal burners … Jonah wondered what it would take to get found by actual Search and Rescue. A different line of work perhaps? He shut his eyes against the throbbing in his head and waited for the sun to come.

  “You are lucky the bullet did not break up in your body. Your clavicle is fractured but not splintered,” a voice said. He opened his eyes. An elderly man in a white coat was holding the bullet up to the light with forceps. He had a hooked nose and prominent chin and resembled a geriatric Mr. Punch. Behind him on the wall there was a poster with all the different breeds of dogs on it. Somewhere close by, several dogs were barking. “Frankly, I am more concerned about your swim in the Euphrates. You are very lucky that old Hassan found you. I am giving you intravenous antibiotics. When did you last have a tetanus shot?”

  He realized that the man was speaking to him in English. “I need a telephone. I need to speak to Yakoob Beg,” he said, struggling to hold a thought.

  “Yes, yes, it is being taken care of,” said the man in the white coat. He held a needle up to the light and with one eye closed threaded suture material through it. “We have heard all of your speeches. We have spoken to Mr. Yakoob Beg in Kabul. A very nice man. Now hold still. I’m going to stitch you up, first the deeper layers and then the surface skin.”

  Jonah wondered whether he’d heard right. “You’ve spoken to Yakoob Beg?”

  “Yes. As soon as I have finished here, you are leaving. You are going home.”

  Home?

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jonah watched as several times the man pulled the thread tight, tied a knot and snipped the ends of the thread with scissors.

  “I’m not feeling any pain,” Jonah told him.

  “That’s because you are receiving five-star service, no expense spared, orders of Mr. Yakoob Beg and courtesy of the swiftest international cash delivery I have ever encountered. I gave you enough ketamine to knock out a bear. I worked at Baghdad zoo for a while, before the current difficulties. You are like a bear, I think?”

  “I’m hallucinating,” Jonah said.

  “No doubt. You know I must tell you, I’m not used to patients who can speak.”

  “Where am I going?” Jonah asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “I don’t want to know. And frankly it’s better for me and for old Hassan if you don’t remember us. If we are asked, we will say that we were coerced.”

  There was the sound of vehicles growling to a halt and several cars doors slamming. Then shouting. Someone banging on a nearby door.

  “You will need to have the sutures taken out in about seven days.” The man smiled. “
If you are still alive, of course.” He paused. “I hope they don’t break down the door.”

  They broke down the door. There were four of them and more outside, and drifts of blue smoke followed them in as they came barreling down the corridor. They were carrying M4 carbines with underslung grenade launchers and wearing body armor and helmets. The man in the white coat backed against the wall with his hands in the air.

  “I’m Sergeant Stone,” the nearest one yelled in Jonah’s face. “Third Squad, First Platoon, Charlie Company. I’m your escort out of here. This way please, sir.”

  He grabbed Jonah by his good arm and together they ran out into the smokescreen, toward four Humvees that were rolling back and forth so that snipers couldn’t get a fix on a door. He was bundled into the back of the nearest one. He wedged himself against a storage rack, with his sling braced against his chest, and the top gunner’s legs in front of him. The vehicle’s sound system was cranking out the Eminem and Obie Trice track “Go to Sleep”:

  Die, motherfucker, die! Ugh, time’s up, bitch, close ya eyes …

  Opposite him a soldier who could not have been more than eighteen scowled ferociously at him.

  “Are you mean-mugging me?”

  “Sir, you’re in a four-vehicle convoy,” Sergeant Stone called out from the front seat. “Tango’s One through Four. This is Tango Two. We’re heading east on Route Fran.”

  “‘Why are you still alive?”’ the turret gunner sang.

  “Where am I going?” Jonah shouted.

  “Wayne County Jail.” The sergeant grinned manically. There were several rifle shots nearby and then a burst of automatic fire. Jonah tried to curl up on himself. Then he realized that there was something wrong with the noise, it was coming out of the speakers. It was part of the track. The eighteen-year-old opposite him was laughing uproariously.

  “‘Rot, motherfuckers, rot! Decay, in the dirt, bitch, in the motherfucking dirt! Die nameless, bitch.’”

  “I’m just fuckin’ with ya!” Stone said. “We’re going to Camp Baharia.”

  “Every day in this fuckin’ place,” Command Sergeant Major Frydl said, “we see the strange and the downright weird.”

  They were sitting in a refrigerated Portakabin surrounded by cinder-block walls in Camp Baharia. The walls were gray, but now and then patches glistened purple—he was pretty high on the ketamine and prone to hallucinations. There were no windows.

  “If it was my call,” Frydl continued, “I’d really tighten things up around here. We’ve got people here who are spooks, mercenaries, assassins, God knows what. I got Delta boys coming in from all over Anbar and depending on me for their next meal.”

  “What am I doing here?” Jonah asked. He knew people who claimed to have gone into combat on ketamine but he had never believed them.

  “I don’t know what you are doing here,” Frydl said. “With respect, sir, I’m not your commanding officer or your goddam shrink. I’m waiting for a phone call.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  There were people that he needed to speak to … Monteith, Yakoob Beg. He wished that there was a phone line to Barnhill—he felt a strong need to explain himself to Miranda, to apologize.

  “Let me guess, sir, you want me to step outside my bomb-proof office into the world of shit outside so that you can whisper secrets down my phone line? I’m not fuckin’ stupid. Get a phone card like everyone else.”

  The phone rang. Frydl picked it up. He nodded and put the phone down.

  “You’re out of here on the next convoy,” he said. “And by the way, sir, you look like shit.”

  The convoy was four kilometers long with forty vehicles: armored trucks, MRAPs and Humvees. Jonah sat in a litter of canned coffee drinks and sodas between Ensler, the blurry-eyed nineteen-year-old driver of Truck 21, and Blickstein, the vehicle commander. Ensler had already been driving for fourteen hours. Jonah recognized several of the tracks on the iPod playlist, including “Hell’s Bells” and “Welcome to the Jungle.” There were several others that he thought were by Metallica and Slayer. The playlist belted out of the speakers on a continuous loop. Apart from the occasional flash at the edges of his vision, he wasn’t that high. It was manageable.

  “Three southbound cars in the northbound lane,” reported the first truck, and each vehicle commander repeated it like a mantra as the cars approached. Three southbound cars in the northbound lane … Three southbound cars in the northbound lane …

  Twenty times before they caught sight of the cars and then it was their turn and Blickstein said, “Three southbound cars in the northbound lane.”

  The cars drove past, the Iraqi occupants inside staring sullenly out at them. Blickstein made his finger and thumb into a gun and fired an imaginary shot.

  “How often do you get shot at?” Jonah asked.

  “Every fuckin’ day,” Blickstein said.

  The mantra continued, nineteen more times: Three southbound cars in the northbound lane.

  Jonah was sitting shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth with a spoon when he was approached by a security contractor with Redbriar Security written on his black baseball cap. He was in a massive logistics base in the middle of the desert. The chow hall was as large as an aircraft hangar and had a sign that said WE NEVER STOP SERVING.

  “You’re Ishmael?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I’m delivering you to Mosul.”

  “I have difficult news.” There was something in the tone of Yakoob Beg’s voice that made Jonah pause before he confirmed that he was indeed listening. “Prepare yourself …”

  “Tell me.”

  Jonah was in the front seat of an armored Redbriar Range Rover, racing north on the highway with a satellite phone held to his ear.

  “Monteith is dead.”

  Jonah closed his eyes and opened them again. “How?”

  “He was murdered. And Beech too. Somebody is killing the Guides.”

  He struggled to articulate words. “What about Flora? What about Beech’s wife and their son? What about Miranda?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  There was a pause.

  “It’s not safe for you to return to the UK,” Yakoob Beg said.

  “Nevertheless, that’s where I have to go. Can you contact Mikulski for me?”

  “I can.”

  “I want you to tell him that Nor is Winthrop’s joe and has been since ’96. Tell him that Winthrop conspired with Nor to have Kiernan killed to prevent him from exposing bribes paid by Lode-stone to senior figures in the Taliban.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Can you get me into the UK?”

  “Wait.” Beg moved away from the phone and then returned. “Your travel arrangements were designed to be deliberately flexible.” For a few seconds, Jonah listened to Beg flicking through the pages of his Moleskine and then he was talking to someone in heavily accented Russian on another phone. After a couple of minutes, he came back on the line. “Covert Transit has agreed to your request.”

  He had punched the numbers into the phone. It was simply a question of pressing the call button. But to do so would be to alert them that he was alive and that he was coming. It was foolish to think that Flora’s line would not be monitored. Besides, what would he say?

  I’m sorry. It’s my fault that Andy is dead. I should have finished the job and killed Nor when I had the chance …

  He set the phone down on the seat beside him. He had destroyed everything that was precious to him. There was nothing that he could say that would change that.

  “They got rich here,” Yanov said, “at this very spot, three thousand years ago, at the world’s first truck stop, on a highway that ran all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.”

  They were standing beneath the vaulted arch at the mud-brick Mashki gate in the ancient ruins of Nineveh. To the west lay the suburban sprawl of Mosul. The Redbriar security detail had dropped Jonah in the car park and directed him toward t
he ancient gate where the Bulgarian was waiting for him.

  “Until God made an utter end to the place.” Yanov flicked his cigarette butt away. He looked like a gangster complete with five o’clock shadow and a bespoke Turnbull and Asser shirt worn open necked with massive gold cufflinks. “Of course, the route is still viable, if your money is good.”

  Jonah met the black glitter of his stare.

  “You are Ishmael?” Yanov asked.

  “I am.”

  “I’m sorry that I couldn’t meet you in person in Fallujah but I find for extractions from Iraq on insecure routes it is best to subcontract the work.”

  “It’s an impressive level of influence that you have.”

  “It’s nothing really. A sentence inserted here or there by an amenable logistics coordinator in a set of routine orders. We do it all the time. This way, please.”

  They walked back through the gate to the car park where Yanov’s silver Mercedes E500 sedan was standing, with its engine running. “Any friend of Yakoob Beg is a friend of mine. Get in.” Jonah walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and climbed in. The air inside was freezing and stank of cigarettes. It made his eye smart.

  “Do you need a doctor?” Yanov asked, beating an impatient rhythm on the dash with his left hand, while his bodyguards climbed into their escort vehicles.

  “I’m fine for now,” Jonah replied.

  Yanov pumped the horn a few times with his fist and after a few seconds the vehicles set off.

  It was no surprise to Jonah that the Bulgarians were running people out of Iraq. In 1994, soon after he had joined the Department, Jonah had spent several months as a British Army liaison officer ostensibly monitoring the front lines in Gorni Vakouf in Bosnia but in fact gathering information on the movement of weapons through Croat lines and into Sarajevo by a gang calling itself the Covert Transit Directorate, led by a consortium of former Bulgarian secret service agents. The original Covert Transit Directorate had been established by the Bulgarian State Security Service in the 1970s, ostensibly as a means of smuggling weapons to Soviet-allied insurgent groups in Africa, but had soon expanded to include people-trafficking and drug-smuggling. Like most Soviet-era intelligence operators, Yanov and his colleagues had embraced the opportunities offered by the open market that followed the collapse of communism, initially in the Balkans and then farther afield.