by Chris Ryan
Buckingham followed the crowds. He knew where they were headed, and was happy that he could peel away from them after five minutes, and cut through several side streets that took him in a broadly westerly direction towards the souq where his RV was to take place.
Three stalls lined the exterior of the souq. One sold cloth – it was piled high in neat compartments behind wooden counters – and sandals, hundreds of them hung up on the walls and from the ceiling, which filled the air with a smell of new leather. The second sold pungent dried fish from enormous bins. The third sold dates – huge baskets of them, many different varieties, some as fat as oranges. Buckingham took up position outside the date stall. He checked his watch. Almost 4 p.m., which meant he had arrived bang on time.
He glanced around, trying not to look anxious, but at the same time trying to ascertain if any of the pedestrians milling around this area were watching him. He had seen a picture of this Ahmed back in London, but it was difficult to distinguish individuals among a crowd all wearing the same garb. He took a starched handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and dabbed his sweaty forehead.
A voice in his ear. Arabic. ‘Dates? You want to try them?’
Buckingham looked round sharply. A rather seedy-looking stallholder was giving him a toothless grin. Buckingham shook his head and looked away.
‘Very good dates!’ the stallholder insisted.
‘Leave me alone,’ Buckingham snapped back in Arabic.
‘I give you a good price!’
Buckingham rounded on him. ‘Leave me alone!’
The stallholder looked offended, but he retreated behind his baskets of dates.
Buckingham checked his watch, silently cursing himself for making such a scene. He should have just bought some dates and remained forgettable. He wasn’t cut out for this sort of work. Two minutes past four. He felt slightly sick. What if Ahmed didn’t turn up? Informants like him were notoriously unreliable. Would Selby insist on him staying here in Riyadh until they made contact? Buckingham muttered a curse under his breath, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his right sleeve. He wished he was back in his London flat with a bottle of decent claret at his side.
‘Mr Buckingham?’
Buckingham started. The voice – low and calm – came from over his left shoulder. He spun round. A handsome Saudi man in traditional Arab dress was standing just half a metre from him. He had dark skin, brown eyes and a very neatly trimmed goatee beard. He didn’t look Buckingham in the eye, but instead made a show of surveying the scene in front of him.
‘Mr Al-Essa,’ Buckingham said, before adding a traditional greeting: ‘As-salaam-alaykum.’
‘Wa’alaykum salaam,’ the Saudi man replied. ‘I suggest we dispense with the formalities, Mr Buckingham. Please call me Ahmed.’
Buckingham was about to say ‘Hugo’, but held back at the last minute. He wanted this foreigner to give him a bit of bloody respect, to show him who was boss.
‘Were you followed from the airport?’ Ahmed asked.
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Buckingham replied with false confidence. In truth, he had absolutely no idea whether he’d been followed or not. He hadn’t even been looking.
‘I need to worry about a great many things,’ Ahmed said. ‘Meeting you is not entirely safe for me. Shall we walk?’
Buckingham jutted out his chin. He didn’t like this man’s tone. ‘I’d rather talk,’ he said.
But Ahmed had already stepped out into the crowd while putting on a pair of dark aviator shades. Buckingham had no option but to follow. ‘I apologise that I cannot meet you in more comfortable surroundings,’ Ahmed said. ‘I find I can never know quite who is listening. At least in a crowd our conversation is private, even if our meeting is not.’
‘It’s not entirely convenient,’ Buckingham said.
‘Do you know where we are?’
Buckingham nodded. ‘Just to the west of Dirah Square.’
‘And do you know what the Western tourists call it?’
Buckingham hesitated. ‘Of course. They call it Chop Chop Square.’
Nobody could live in Riyadh for any amount of time without knowing about Chop Chop Square. Most of the time it looked like any of a number of broad plazas in the Saudi capital. Sandwiched between the Grand Mosque and the medieval fort of Qasr al-Masmak, it was lined with benches and palm trees. On some days there would be a market there. On others, it served a very different purpose. In the centre of the square there was a single drain. The drain was not there to capture rainwater. It was there to capture blood, because Chop Chop Square was where the judicial beheadings of the kingdom of Saudi took place. In all his time in Riyadh, he had avoided this place. The idea of being present at an execution made him feel weak and nauseous.
‘I refuse to go there, Mr Al-Essa. We can find somewhere much more suitable for our . . .’
‘I insist,’ Ahmed said, turning to look at him. Buckingham saw his own sweaty, crestfallen face in the aviator shades. ‘There is something I want you to understand.’
Buckingham suppressed a shudder, and dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief again. ‘Now look here, Mr . . .’
But Ahmed was already walking away. Buckingham had to follow.
Two minutes later, they turned a corner and found themselves in Chop Chop Square itself. It was busy – there must have been five hundred people there, Buckingham estimated, lining the perimeter and looking on to the centre of the plaza, where three police cars were parked, seemingly randomly, alongside a nondescript and unmarked pale blue van. There were the occasional shouts from the crowd, and a general buzz of excitement and impatience. Over the heads of the assembled people, Buckingham could just make out a woman kneeling on the ground, her hands tied behind her back, flanked by two Saudis in tan uniforms, armed with rifles. A few metres beyond her, standing by one of the police cars, was a burly looking man in a white dishdasha and red-checked headcloth. A scabbard hung by his belt, with the hilt of a sword protruding.
Buckingham felt his limbs go weak. ‘Oh, good Lord . . .’ he breathed.
As they loitered at the back of the crowd, nobody seemed to pay Ahmed and Buckingham any notice. They were all too busy looking towards the centre of the square. Buckingham felt his extremities trembling.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s really not necessary to . . .’
‘It is necessary,’ Ahmed said.
Buckingham looked back towards the centre of the square, at the woman kneeling on the ground. He swallowed hard, but found himself horrifically drawn to the scene. ‘Who is she?’ he asked.
‘A maid from one of the hotels,’ Ahmed said. ‘Accused of apostasy. It is a crime, in Saudi Arabia, to renounce your religion. Ordinarily, if the family of the accused’s victim requests clemency, it will be granted. But apostasy is a victimless crime. The maid has no hope of surviving.’
Buckingham was revolted by the scene, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the man with the sword as he stepped forward towards the prisoner. There was a hush among the crowd. Even from a distance, Buckingham heard a faint hiss as the executioner slid the sword from its scabbard. The blade was about four feet long, rather narrow, and slightly curved at the end.
‘If she is lucky,’ Ahmed said quietly, ‘the executioner will remove her head with a single swipe of his sword. He has plenty of practice, so he is skilled.’
The executioner stepped forward. He was now standing right by the prisoner. Buckingham would have expected her to be writhing and screaming, but in fact she was strangely still. She clearly knew there was no way out.
Suddenly, there was a shout from the crowd. Buckingham realised that several people had turned to look at him. One of them grabbed him by the wrist and started yanking him through the crowd towards the front. He went weak with panic. A sea of people opened up in front of them as Buckingham, terrified by this unexpected turn of events, didn’t know whether to shout in protest or remain submissive. He found himself jabbering quietly and incoherentl
y, struggling ineffectually to escape the Saudi man’s grasp, but in ten seconds he was at the very front of the crowd. The man who had grabbed his wrist shouted, in Arabic: ‘The infidel! Look at the infidel!’
He felt his knees go weak. What were they doing? What the hell was going on? A wild, irrational thought struck him: was he being taken to the executioner too?
No. The man holding him kept Buckingham at the front of the crowd. The condemned woman looked towards him and their eyes met. Buckingham had never seen an expression of such hopeless fear.
It wasn’t to last for long.
The executioner put his right leg forward, his left leg back. He weirdly reminded Buckingham of a person stretching his calf before doing some exercise.
He gently touched the back of the prisoner’s neck with the blade. Buckingham saw her body tense up with a jerk.
The executioner raised the sword high above his head. Sunlight glinted on the metal. He swung the blade back down in a single, well-practised, smooth motion. Buckingham clenched his eyes shut, but not quickly enough. He saw the blade slice effortlessly through the muscle and bone of the prisoner’s neck. He heard the distant, wet thud of the blade splitting the flesh. He saw a momentary gush of blood spurt from the severed neck, as the head rolled to the ground and the body slumped to one side. There was a strange, involuntary moan from the crowd.
Buckingham felt an almost overpowering desire to vomit. He pressed his free hand to his mouth, and only just managed to keep it in. The Saudi man who had grabbed him released his wrist. Without even a word or a glance, he melted away with the rest of the crowd. But while all the other locals were leaving the centre of the square, Ahmed was walking towards Buckingham. His face looked deeply sorrowful.
‘I am told her body will be put on display for three days after she has been beheaded,’ Ahmed said quietly as he stared impassively towards the centre of the square.
From the corner of his eye, Buckingham saw the executioner carefully wiping his sword with a large piece of white cloth. Two soldiers were bending down to pick up the body at either end. A third had efficiently wrapped the head in another piece of cloth and was carrying it towards the pale blue van. They all appeared entirely unmoved by what had just happened. The aftermath of the execution was clearly of very little interest to the crowd, either, which was already quickly thinning out.
‘Why . . . why did that man grab me?’ Buckingham asked weakly. He realised that his heart was pumping, and he was slightly short of breath.
‘Because you are an infidel. It is said that if the last face the condemned person sees is not a Muslim’s, all hope of reaching Paradise is lost to them. That is why they pulled you to the front of the crowd: to ensure that poor woman is damned for all eternity.’ He bowed his head and paused for a few seconds, allowing Buckingham to steady his breath. ‘Perhaps you are wondering why I brought you here,’ he continued. ‘Let me explain. Whenever I am in Riyadh, I come here to remind myself of what occurs on a regular basis.’ He gave Buckingham a strange, sad smile. ‘I’m sure you have been told that my reasons for . . .’ – he glanced around, and seemed to search for words that wouldn’t incriminate him – ‘. . . for helping you are broadly financial. They are not. I am a proud Muslim, but this? This is not right. I can only hope that the West’s influence on Saudi, and on my own poor country of Qatar, will put an end to atrocities like this.’ He turned to look at Buckingham. ‘All that remains here is for a janitor to wash away the blood from the ground. I do not think it is something we need to watch, do you?’
Pale-faced and subdued, Buckingham shook his head. Ahmed turned and walked away from the square, Buckingham following. He was finding it difficult to get the measure of Ahmed. It was a given, in this line of work, that informants were likely to be peculiar people. And Buckingham supposed it made some sort of perverse sense that Ahmed would want to justify himself and what he was doing.
Ahmed led them to a small, bustling cafe five minutes from Chop Chop Square. There was no sign here that a woman had been casually executed nearby. They took a seat in the corner. Ahmed ordered coffee in small, handleless cups, and a plate of sweet cakes. Then he turned to Buckingham, his expression serious. ‘So, Mr Buckingham, what is it that I can do for you?’
Buckingham sipped his coffee. He noticed that his hand was still shaking slightly, and he took a moment to steady it. He drew a deep, calming breath. ‘You can tell me about the Caliph,’ he said. He immediately noticed a slight tightening around Ahmed’s eyes. His informant took a sip of his own coffee, then neatly placed his cup on the table in front of him.
‘You want to know what a caliph is?’ Ahmed asked. He didn’t catch Buckingham’s eye.
‘Not a caliph, old sport,’ Buckingham said. His voice cracked slightly as he spoke. ‘The Caliph.’
No response.
‘London is getting chatter about a Middle Eastern figure – possibly Qatari – who goes by that name. We’re very keen to find him. We know you have a large, gossiping workforce. Let’s face facts – there must be a substantial number of people in your employment who actively support the extremist policies of ISIS and the like. We know that you keep your ear to the ground for information such as this. Your intelligence has been very useful to us in the past. Someone in your organisation must have heard of this character. I need to find out as much about him as possible.’
Ahmed stared out across the cafe. Almost absent-mindedly he took his coffee cup and drained it. Only when he had put the empty cup back on the table again did he turn to Buckingham. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ He made to stand up. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr Buckingham, I have business to attend to.’
Buckingham grabbed his arm. Ahmed looked at his fist in surprise.
Buckingham blinked heavily. He was still in a state of shock, but he managed to put a bit of firmness in his voice. ‘Sit down, please,’ he said quietly.
His informant meekly did as he was told.
‘You say you’ve never heard of the Caliph?’ Buckingham continued. ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you.’
Ahmed’s face grew angry. ‘Mr Buckingham, how dare you . . .’
‘It would be a simple matter,’ Buckingham interrupted, his words falling over themselves, ‘to let it be known that we’ve spoken.’
Ahmed fell silent. He eyed Buckingham carefully.
‘Let’s face facts, Ahmed,’ Buckingham said. ‘I can’t imagine that all your business associates across the Gulf are as well disposed as you are towards British Intelligence. And it would be the simplest thing in the world for a substantial payment to land in one of your bank accounts that could easily be traced back to Whitehall. And even easier to leak the paperwork.’
A mixture of emotions crossed Ahmed’s face. Irritation. Reluctance. Maybe even fear.
‘You are blackmailing me?’
‘I prefer to think of it as gentle persuasion.’
Ahmed bowed his head. ‘You ask too much,’ he said.
‘I don’t see why.’
‘Of course you don’t see why,’ Ahmed hissed. ‘That is because you know nothing of the Caliph.’ He looked around the cafe, as though he was checking whether anybody else was watching them. Then he pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and dialled a number. Buckingham, fluent in Arabic, understood the instruction he gave when the call was answered: Meet me outside the Saad Habbal cafe immediately. Ahmed hung up and then addressed Buckingham. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
A black Rolls Royce with tinted windows had already pulled up outside the cafe by the time they stepped outside, one passenger door held open by an Arabic man. Ahmed held out one hand to indicate that Buckingham should climb inside. Buckingham looked around a bit nervously, but then did as his informant told him. Ahmed climbed in next to him, and the vehicle slipped away into the traffic.
There was a glass screen dividing the front of the car from the back. Buckingham took that to mean they could talk freely. Ahmed removed h
is sunglasses, tucked them into his robes, then looked out of his tinted side window. ‘I know nothing of the Caliph except rumour and hearsay,’ he said quietly. ‘But what I have heard turns my stomach more than the sickening events we have just witnessed in Chop Chop Square.’
‘Go on.’
‘They say he is a man of great cruelty. He wishes to establish a single Islamist caliphate as it used to exist in antiquity, not only across the Middle East, but across Africa as well. Such a caliphate would be ruled under Sharia law, and sights such as the one we have just witnessed would be commonplace. You know something of how the Taliban ruled in Afghanistan, before 9/11. This caliphate would make their foul regime appear positively moderate. The rumour is that the Caliph is behind insurgencies across the Middle East and Africa. Islamic State, Boko Haram – few of their militants would recognise the Caliph’s face, or know his real name, but their activities have his fingerprints all over them. Or so it is said.’
‘How can we find out more about him?’ Buckingham demanded.
‘Have you not listened to a word I’ve said, Mr Buckingham? Nobody will talk to you about him.’ Ahmed gave him an angry stare, then suddenly flicked a switch on his door. The glass dividing screen slid down with a hiss, but the driver kept his eyes forward as he continued to negotiate the afternoon traffic.
‘Mustafa,’ Ahmed said, still speaking in English. ‘Tell this gentleman what you know about the Caliph.’
Buckingham happened to be watching Mustafa’s face in the rear-view mirror. The driver visibly flinched at the question. He didn’t reply.
‘Mustafa?’
‘I am sorry, sir. I do not know what you are talking about.’
Ahmed gave Buckingham a meaningful look, then turned his attention back to his driver. ‘It’s okay, Mustafa,’ he said. ‘What you say will not leave this car. I will see to it that you receive double pay for your troubles today.’