by Jason Elliot
He’s not prepared for the move. As his centre of gravity shifts over mine, I heave on the arm and straighten my legs, pushing my hips into his and propelling his body over my shoulder. I release the air from my lungs and a yell explodes from my abdomen. His body flies over me. He’s heavy and smashes a chair as he falls, then tries to roll and get onto his knees, so I kick him in the face as his head is rising. He lurches to one side like a torpedoed boat, his right hand moving to the holster on his left, but I’m above him before he can unclip the pistol, and swing the edge of my hand onto his nose. There’s a crunching sound and he’s unconscious before his head hits the floor.
I want his pistol, but the time it takes me to release it is too great, and his partner seems to be flying through the door, weapon ready. But not quite ready enough. If he’d come into the room in a firing stance he might have found the time to shoot me, but his right arm is flailing and I throw myself at him before he can take aim. We end up half in the doorway, and his right arm flies back and the pistol clatters down the tiles of the stairs. I feel his nails dig into my neck. I can smell his breath and the oily scent of his skin. I drive my forearm into his throat without giving him a chance to draw breath from the fall that’s winded him, and hear a gasp as he begins to choke. If I can keep up the pressure it shouldn’t take too long.
I don’t want to kill him. My right foot finds the door frame and I use it as a brace to put all the force I can summon onto his windpipe and my weight onto his chest until he runs out of air and passes out, but I’m not expecting what happens next. His left hand is free and has found, perhaps from his belt, a short-bladed knife, the tip of which he manages desperately to sink into the calf muscle of my left leg. It’s strange. I don’t feel much, except the warmth of the blood as it spreads across the fabric of my trousers. But his next attempt will probably end up in my ribs. I don’t want to, but I release the hold from his throat and grab his wrist with both hands to twist the knife out of his hand, but he’s too strong and I can’t do it. He’s sucking the air back into his lungs like a diver who’s just surfaced. It’s time to bail out.
I roll back into the room and tear his partner’s pistol from its holster, cock it on the move and turn. The doorway’s empty. He’s pulled himself down the stairs to try and get his weapon back, but I’m there, thank God, before he reaches it, and fire five rounds into the stairwell above the outline of his body until he’s screaming at me to stop.
The contest is over, but whoever has driven Jameela away will sound the alarm. I need information. I don’t know these men who have burst into my life, and I don’t know why they have. I don’t know why they’ve taken Jameela, and I don’t have much time to find out. If I get away within a few minutes, a dim reasoning tells me I can make it to the embassy and take refuge there. But I need this man to talk first. With the muzzle of the pistol jammed into the back of his neck, I don’t give him time to think between questions.
‘Amur amniyati,’ a security matter, he says. That the reason they’re here.
‘What security matter? What matter?’
‘Al jasoos. Britaniyyah. Spy … spy,’ he splutters. ‘British spy.’
I realise I’ve broken the rules somewhere, but how I’ve been classed as a spy is a mystery. I need to know what, or who, has betrayed me.
‘Why?’ I yell. ‘Why do you want me?’
He shakes his head furiously, or as much as the space between his head and the ground allows.
‘La, la. Not you,’ he says. ‘The woman.’
The world’s gone mad. I suddenly hear my own breathing, but I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say. I can make no sense of this. Jameela isn’t a British spy. Jameela is the woman I love. Jameela has nothing to do with all this.
‘Explain.’ I dig the pistol deeper, which has the desired effect.
‘She is agent. She meet with your MI6 from embassy. Every day.’
The answer comes in a rasping whisper, half in English, half in Arabic, but I still can’t believe what I’m hearing. Jameela, he’s telling me, meets a contact from the British embassy every day in a hotel for a few minutes of conversation. He doesn’t know why they meet, he says. That’s why they’ve been watching her. It’s one of their SOPs to take an interest in anyone who meets the intelligence officials of another country.
I can understand that much. But when I ask him to describe the agent she meets with, he gives me a perfect description of Halliday.
‘Thin, like skeleton,’ he says, and mentions his glasses and his stupid mop of hair. The same Halliday who so enjoys playing the buffoon, and who’s pretended from the start never to have met Jameela.
It’s only when I discover the camera in Jameela’s apartment, he says, that they decide to bring her in to question her. It’s not me they wanted.
But they’ll want me now.
It’s time to disappear. I lock the two Mokhabarat men in the bathroom leaving the key in the door so at least their rescuers won’t have to smash it open, and though I doubt it’ll win me too many favours, leave the unloaded pistols outside the door on the floor. In my go bag there’s a first aid kit from which I take a bandage to bind my leg. Then I limp to the main road and take a taxi to my guest house.
There’s no time to do much packing. The taxi waits outside for me. I change out of my blood-soaked trousers and re-bandage my leg. I head for the north of the city, making sure on the way to casually ask the driver where I can find trucks heading for the Eritrean border. When he comes forward to help the police with their enquiries, perhaps he’ll throw them off my trail. Then I take a bus west across the river and head for Omdurman, towards the last place they’ll look for a foreign fugitive.
Beneath the silver dome of the Mahdi’s shrine, the elderly guardian remembers me, and greets me with a warm but grave look of concern as he notices my limp. He escorts me to the buildings behind the shrine. I don’t make any attempt to conceal the trouble I’m in. I tell him I’ll understand if he is unable to give me refuge and offer to make a contribution to the upkeep of the shrine. He eyes the bundle of hundred-dollar bills I put before him. There is a grave and untainted steadiness to his eyes, which perhaps a lifetime of prayer and piety has forged into his soul. Meeting his gaze, I have a momentary sense that my own life seems a frivolous thing. I am saved from the inexplicable impulse to admit to this when he chuckles loudly.
‘We will show you more mercy than the General Kitchener showed to our warriors, but not for money. Your protection is my duty, as a Muslim.’
He hands me back the bundle and leads me to a small room where there’s a simple bed. I sit. He points silently to my leg as if he wants to see the wound. I pull the fabric of my trousers to the knee, and as I take the bandage off, it starts pouring blood again, and I realise it won’t close on its own unless it’s immobile and bandaged for several days, which I don’t have. When I make a sewing gesture with my hands he understands immediately and fetches a towel. From my go bag I take the first aid pouch, and retrieve a small bottle of Betadine and a suture kit. I give the old man one surgical glove and put the other one on my left hand.
The pain makes me tremble. The suture needle is crescent-shaped and glides through my skin while the old man holds the two sides of the wound together. He’s unflappable and would have made a good surgeon’s assistant. He even mops the sweat from my head as I do the sewing, and cuts the black thread where I point, just above the final knot. Then I drench the wound in the Betadine again and cover it tightly with the bandage.
‘Khelaas. I will pray at the shrine for your health,’ says the old man. ‘Insha’allah you will recover quickly.’
‘Insha’allah,’ I hear myself whisper.
The pain invades my whole leg now. I feel the double toxins of adrenalin and exhaustion, and though my mind is still racing I long for sleep. But there’s one more thing. When the old man leaves, I take the satphone and thank God and the Mahdi that I can receive a signal near the window.
There’s a wate
ry-sounding ringtone and a succession of clicks.
‘Hope you I didn’t wake you up,’ I say when it answers, ‘but they say cowgirls don’t sleep much.’
‘Goddamn it, Tony, you sound like you’re at the bottom of a creek. You on a satphone?’
‘I need to find a good travel agent,’ I tell her. ‘Someone to get me home quickly without showing up on anybody’s grid.’
‘Hell,’ she says, ‘so long as it’s illegal, I’ll help any way I can.’
This distant promise of help fills me with the strange urge to cry. I tell her where I am, that I need a new passport, ticket and some supporting identity. She doesn’t waste time on trying to find out how I came to be on the run from the Sudanese secret service. She just wants to know my exact location, preferred time frame and route for the exfil, whether the immigration system at the airport is computerised, and whether local law enforcement has a photograph of me. She asks what languages I speak. I tell her I’ll buy her dinner at Nora’s in DC when this is all over.
I feel burningly hot and then cold. I can’t sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool of black thoughts and things I don’t understand and my feelings are too strong for me to think properly. I feel brutalised by the thought that Jameela was expecting my arrival in Khartoum and played along with every part of it. I wonder, since everyone else I’ve trusted seems to be lying to me, whether Grace will betray me too.
Halfway through the night, sleep closes in on me.
So it’s with nothing short of a feeling of the miraculous that I open the package that arrives at dawn the next day. The old man delivers it when he comes to wake me, saying that a child came to the shrine and asked that it be given to the foreign guest. There’s a printed reservation number for my ticket, a Canadian passport in the name of Cousteau and a worn leather wallet complete with credit cards. There are even some Canadian dollars in it. I see from the passport that I entered Sudan three weeks earlier. I was told the CIA station in Khartoum had been shut down but they’ve obviously kept some talented employees on the payroll, and I’ve never been quite so grateful for the no-nonsense American attitude towards getting things done.
The rest is a gamble. If the police are stopping cars on the way to the airport I’ll call it off and try my chances to the south. But if they’re only checking passports, I have a good chance of slipping through. They won’t have my photograph, and only the two Mokhabarat officials can personally identify me.
I take a taxi to the airport and sit in the car with the driver until I see a party of foreigners disembarking from a hotel minibus. I pay the driver extra and ask him to wait, though I’m not planning to come back, and amble to the group of tourists, who are gathering up their bags. Scanning the building for signs of extra security, I break away from the tourists, head for the airline counter, and give the reservation reference to an attractive Sudanese girl wearing a purple veil. She thanks me and hands me a ticket in my new name. She bears a cruel resemblance to Jameela, whose face haunts me now. Then I head for the immigration desk, where the group I joined earlier are fussing over their departure forms, and fill out my own, remembering only at the last minute to check my signature against the one in my passport, which I copy as well as I can.
I will myself to be invisible, merging into the flow of the others in the hope that I’ll look like a member of the group. We go through security and form a line ahead of the final passport check. I’m nearly there. I shuffle forward, looking at the ground, not daring to look up and draw attention to my face. But I can’t resist a glance around to see what’s happening, and it’s at this precise moment, as if the very atoms in my surroundings have conspired to make it happen, that the uniformed immigration officer looks straight at me.
I turn my eyes away, but he calls out to me, and suddenly the world begins to slow down as if I’m in a dream, and I feel my heartbeat pushing up into my throat as he calls out again, tapping his pen on the kiosk to get my attention.
I pretend not to notice and turn towards the doors, wondering if there are any police between me and the exit, and whether I can make it to the taxi before things turn noisy. But the woman ahead of me in the queue, an earnest American in a safari hat, is tapping on my shoulder to get me to turn around, and now it seems the whole line is staring at me.
I’m trying hard to disguise my own dread. I wonder if I can manage the sprint to the doors, but my leg won’t take it. I force a bewildered smile to my face. The official is waving me impatiently towards him. I feel as if I’m standing above an open trapdoor and about to be forced to take a step forward. I walk to the booth, where he’s pointing his finger energetically at me. It’s only then I realise dimly that I’ve seen him before, and that it’s the same officer who stamped my passport when I first entered the country.
He takes my passport, opens it at a random page without even looking for my entry visa, and brings down the exit stamp with a thump. He doesn’t notice that I have a different name and nationality now. He points to himself and then to me, and with the same gleaming smile that flashed at me on the day of my arrival, says, ‘My friend.’
Then he returns my passport to me, and the pen I have earlier lent him, and waves me on.
12
The Firm likes its staff to live nearby. It makes them less dependent on public transport in case of ‘incidents’ that mean they have to get to work in a hurry. North or south of the river doesn’t make much difference these days, and the stigma attached to living near the Firm’s former headquarters at Century House in dreary north Lambeth has been thoroughly exorcised. So Kennington is fine; anywhere near the Oval but south of the gasworks is desirable; Fentiman Road is very nice if you can get it; and the quiet streets off St George’s Drive in Pimlico are rather perfect.
Seethrough, I now discover, lives a little further away, but at under three miles it’s not so far as to refute his claim that he sometimes jogs to work. According to the BT engineer I rely on for the occasional discreet enquiry, he lives a stone’s throw from St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, and it’s here that I wait for him in Gerhardt with some food and a Thermos and enough paracetamol to keep the pain in my leg under control.
His house doesn’t have a garage so he has to walk from his car to the front door, and it’s 9 p.m. when I finally catch sight of him. He’s moving at a pace that makes it painful for me to catch up, and his hand is just moving to the keys in his pocket when he senses the presence of someone behind him. As I reach him, he turns his head slightly but not enough to see my face.
‘Keep your hands by your sides,’ I tell him, ‘and keep walking.’ I’m pointing the antenna of the mobile at him through the pocket of my jacket.
‘Alright,’ he says quietly and very slowly, in the manner of a surgeon on the point of extracting a bullet. Then he realises that it’s me.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’re supposed to be in Khartoum.’
‘Keep walking, please.’
‘Fuck is going on, Ant?’
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Just don’t do anything bloody stupid.’ After a few yards he regains his habitual composure. ‘You’ve got a bit of a suntan, Ant. And you’re limping. Are you sure you’re alright?’
I know he’ll try to work the conversation around so that he’s in charge of it. I’m almost curious to see how he does it. He’s throwing out lines now, to see which one I’ll bite at. We turn into Sydney Street and move south.
‘Who helped you out, Ant? Cheltenham says you made a call to an unlisted number in America.’
‘You were running Hibiscus without telling me,’ I say.
There’s a pause before he replies.
‘Yes.’ He purses his lips like someone who’s deciding from the look of the sky whether it’s going to rain. ‘Course we were.’
‘I need to know why.’
‘Perfectly normal precaution, and none of your business. How’d you find out anyway?’
‘I found out,’ I tell him, ‘because two armed Mokh
abarat officers came to take my source away, and that wasn’t in the plan.’
‘Well.’ He muses again. ‘They are very much more efficient than they used to be. Get picked up at her place, did you?’
He’s already figured out the scenario.
‘It wasn’t very nice. One of them tried to stab me too.’
‘Is that why you’re limping? Have you had it looked at? Christ, we would have brought you home.’
‘You were running Hibiscus before I ever got to Khartoum. You set me up.’
‘Rubbish,’ he says dismissively. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic. Keeping an eye on her was just a safety net. Imagine it hadn’t been us. Imagine someone else had got her on their payroll. Ever occur to you? Rate you were going, you might have compromised the entire op. Anyway it’s not unusual. Makes the source feel special, like they’re doing something important. Secondly we get to compare what she says with what you tell us. Like matching up a couple of fingerprints. If there are any discrepancies we know something funny’s going on.’
‘Were there any discrepancies?’
‘As yet, no. I wasn’t expecting any, but that’s how we do things.’ His tone softens, and I recognise the gentle introduction of charm. ‘We also get to see how you handle your first cultivation. I, personally, was impressed with the way you handled Rome. Your meeting there is already bringing us some half-decent CX. I thought you should be given a chance with Hibiscus, but not everybody agreed with me. You haven’t exactly come through the right channels, but you could have a future with the Service, Ant.’
‘I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.’
‘Excellent.’ He stops and turns to me. There’s a disarming grin on his face. ‘You’re showing the first signs of a competent Intelligence Branch officer. Wouldn’t it be better if I put that on your appraisal form rather than mention that you assaulted me with a weapon while I was on my way home?’
‘It’s not a weapon.’ I pull out the mobile from my pocket. ‘And I didn’t assault you.’