by K J Griffin
‘Of course. You are a very attractive young lady, Miss Sophie.’
‘I mean—I sleep with him, you understand?’ she persisted.
Al-Ajnabi squinted silently into the distance again, declining to comment. Her persistence seemed to irk him.
‘Yes, well—as long as we understand each other from the start,’ Sophie continued. Then, more cheerily,
‘So, when are we going to do it?—‘bed duty’, I mean. We might as well get the first one over with as soon as possible. Tonight, even, is fine by me.’
For a tense second Sophie thought she had caught a hint of alarm in his face; the pipe had fallen limp in his hand. But just as quickly he recovered some poise.
‘As you wish, Miss Sophie. Tonight is as good as any other.’ ‘Good…well…we’ll see each other later, I suppose—after nine, when I’m allowed to your party, perhaps. Meanwhile, I’d better get on. I’ve got my things to unpack. Then I must go into college and get down to some work.’
Al-Ajnabi smiled humourlessly and watched Sophie get up.
‘I will send Hasan to knock for you at nine,’ he scowled, waving a dismissive hand. ‘Meanwhile your other commitments are your own concern. You do not need to explain them to me or to anyone else here.’
But as she walked off he called after her,
‘Be sure to have Hasan take down your bank details. He will pay the first instalment of your allowance immediately.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied and turned again towards the house, entering by a set of French windows that led to the widest room Sophie had ever set foot in. Here too the Regency décor had been ransacked and replaced by what looked like the contents of Ali Baba’s cave: billowing coloured silks of every hue, delicately latticed wooden screens and furniture; jewelled trinkets and rich Persian carpets that adorned both floors and walls. Sophie snooped for a while, marvelling here and there at a succession of opulent distractions, and it seemed to take her forever to cross what she imagined had formerly been a period ballroom, before she emerged at the far end and found herself in a long, panelled corridor. She followed it to the left, where an open door attracted her curiosity. Perhaps she would find Hasan inside? She called out. No answer. An impulse sent her inside.
In front of her lay a series of offices. But unlike the rooms she had seen so far, these were decorated with modern sophistication: airy whites, abstract designs and rubbery plants. A whole network of computer terminals, CCTV screens, phones and printers gave the rooms an aura of control-centre importance. And walking into the last office, which faced the peristyle garden at the front of the house, Sophie saw the backs of two computer operators.
She cleared her throat, “Hi, do you work here?”
A trendy looking, casually dressed young man swung round from his screen.
“Oh, hi! Are you looking for someone?” he stammered, looking very flummoxed.
But before Sophie could answer, a young woman sprang up from the adjacent terminal and raced towards her, standing straight in front of Sophie in an effort to block the doorway.
‘Excuse me, do you have permission to be here?’ The flat, London voice was more aggressive than assertive.
Sophie was flustered. She began to apologise and back away.
‘Wait a minute, please,’ the young woman continued sharply, reaching for a phone. ‘Does Prince Omar know you’re here?’
‘Omar? Well, no, as a matter of fact, I don’t think he does. I was looking for Hasan, you see; on Omar’s own instructions. Do you know that I am Omar’s new personal assistant.’
The young woman was not satisfied. With a nerve-twitch of irritation she dialled a number and talked cagily to a voice on the other end. Sophie had the impression that the girl was talking to Hasan, not Al-Ajnabi.
‘All right, you can go now,’ she huffed, eventually slamming the receiver down. ‘But you really shouldn’t come here again without Omar’s explicit permission. At least, those are the instructions Mr Hasan gave me.’
Sophie mumbled another apology and hurried off. As ever with Al-Ajnabi, just as she started to feel relaxed about him and his environment, a few words, or an incident like this would spring up to reinforce a perpetual feeling of unease. And when it came to business, her host was evidently as obsessively secretive as he was about his personal life.
But stepping inside her own apartment gave Sophie a thrill of unaccustomed luxury. All that space, the sumptuous décor, all those electrical gadgets she had never been able to afford. She prowled round each room several times, taking it all in, leaving her boxes piled just inside the front door. But on the third lap, guilt pulled her up; she had been neglecting her friends. She rummaged in her jeans pocket and dug out her mobile. No answer from Joanna. Her ex-housemate must have gone to the Library. Then she remembered Darren Chapman and dialled him in his London office.
She had met Darren at a college party the year before. Three years her senior, the high-flying ex-collegiate was already a young prodigy at the Guardian. And on that night last September, holding centre-stage in the middle of the first-floor rooms, the inexhaustible raconteur had managed to slip out a tentacle and pull Sophie into his circle the moment he saw her stepping over the comatose bodies by the doorway. Sophie had taken to him straight away, too, but not in the way Darren was hoping for. She liked his drive, the non-stop chat and the Woody Allen glasses. But she had always resisted the temptation to take them off, ruffle that wild, curly black hair and give Darren the big wet kiss that would have left him unfamiliarly speechless.
‘Hello, Darren, are you busy?’
‘Soph! About time! Hey, what’s happening? Joanna’s just texted me to say you’ve moved out—been whisked off by some dark man in a dark car with diplomatic plates. You’re not shagging the Crown Prince of Lesotho, are you?’
Sophie laughed, giving Darren a carefully edited account of her move that omitted all but the barest description of her mysterious host. But when she had finished, the young journalist still sounded sceptical.
‘Don’t like it, Soph. All sounds like some elaborate hoax to me. Philanthropic millionaire? My arse! Are you sure you’re being sensible about this?’
She was.
‘Well, I’m not! Tell you what, I’m coming up to Oxford tomorrow lunchtime. Let me take you out and fatten you up a bit. And if we’ve got time after that, I’ll come over and check out the strange ghoul that’s dragged you into his haunted house.’
As she rang off Sophie remembered Marcus with a pang of conscience. At Marcus’s own insistence their relationship had never been ‘heavy’—to Sophie’s thinking, sometimes so light she could have watched it float away above the dreaming spires. She paused by the window to think about her predicament: Tonight she would be sleeping in another man’s bed. All right, nothing would be happening—it had better not—but she felt treacherous nevertheless. Marcus was only the second boyfriend she had ever slept with, and she had never dreamt of two-timing either. Was she being fair on Marcus now? Should she tell him? What would he say if knew of her ‘arrangement’ with Al-Ajnabi? Probably nothing much, would brush that blond fop of his and say, ‘Ya, well, Soph…bizarre…absolutely bizarre!’
The movement of a bodyguard outside the window pulled Sophie from her thoughts. Time to go to college and get on with some work. She was getting behind. Marcus could wait till later, till after the ‘event’.
South Bank, London
Contacts! Clayton was thinking, triumphantly looking at the dismal south of the river view he was shortly going to leave behind for a week back on the trail. Contacts—you couldn’t bloody beat them!
For all the theorizing and analyzing the ‘deskies’ like his boss, the Director-General, did, those pencil-necks didn’t stand a chance of hitting the jackpot because they didn’t know where to put the coins or pull the levers.
Most of the other cretins around him had never strayed too far from ‘recognized procedure’, had done nearly all their snooping by mainframe computer; had never got r
at-arsed with the grey men in dim bars or swapped scorecards with the blokes on the other teams in windswept car parks. You scratch about in my grey areas, I’ll arrange your promotion—that was how they operated on the front line. And that, he recognised, was how Max Clayton had got where he was today.
Take that Kennedy bloke, for example—another appalling ‘deskie’. Didn’t have much more on the situation in Ramliyya than you could find in your average almanac! But with one phone call to the right man, yours truly had just arranged a stopover in Cairo en route to other business in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong that was bound to give him the low-down on whatever it was those Ramli ragheads were up to with their dodgy dollars.
Clayton checked his watch again. It was still before ten, and his British Airways flight to Cairo didn’t take off till three in the afternoon.
Travel lust gripped him. Even after all these years, he was never happier than when he watched the aircraft wheels fold in over those reservoirs around Heathrow. Something about being back in England still pricked the conscience. Too many bad memories, he guessed. After all, it had been the desire to escape abroad that had made him leave the army and join the Service in the first place. The past was a pigsty, and a large chunk of the mess being mashed up and mauled under the hooves of the greedy trotters was of his own making.
Chapter 10: Oxford: Tuesday, October 14
‘Has Miss Palmer left the house?’ Al-Ajnabi asked Hasan, still sitting where Sophie had left him on the balcony overlooking the river.
‘Yes, Hadratak,’ replied the Somali. ‘She left twenty minutes ago.’
Al-Ajnabi smirked; he had never succeeded in making Hasan drop the honorific, even when they were alone, even after all these years.
‘Good. Then wait here. I will need you to drive me into town,’ he nodded, getting to his feet and pulling a mobile phone from his pocket. It had been a morning for phone calls, both local and international. From here until the big day the tedium of texting, calling, re-checking and fine-tuning arrangements would only increase.
Ten minutes later Hasan dropped Al-Ajnabi on the corner of the High Street and Cornmarket. Dressed smart but casual, with the collar of his black leather jacket turned up against the chill, only the deeply engrained suntan marked him as anything other than local. But Al-Ajnabi hadn’t come for sightseeing or to wallow in the nostalgia of days gone by—all those sandy-brown university buildings held little appeal.
He quickened his pace past the chain stores of Cornmarket, biting his lip against the chill breeze, the overwhelming bitterness still undigested inside.
The stench of a McDonald’s air vent made him feel like retching uncontrollably into the swirls of twisted litter that danced a mocking jig around a black metal dustbin. Before his time in England was out, he vowed, the streams of shoppers and students now side-stepping the mess would no longer file by in ignorance; they would understand such visions for what they really represented: the death-masks of the ten billion mark.
A punky girl selling Big Issues stopped him outside Boots. He gave her a fifty-pound note and told her to clear up the mess. At first, he thought she would refuse. She stammered for a few seconds, then checked the note, holding it up to the pale sky in suspicious pursuit of a watermark. When she found it, she stuffed the note down her chest and set to work half-heartedly on the mess all around. Al-Ajnabi watched in silence as the girl performed her side of the bargain, then disappeared around the corner of Turl Street.
Stepping out over paving stones in immaculate blue jeans and black leather boots, it felt good to be free of the restraint of traditional Ramli dress and he set a brisk pace to celebrate this modest boon. Before long, as his stiff pace took him far enough away from the shops and shoppers, he felt calmer and he slackened his pace to enjoy the unfamiliar taste of down-to-earth anonymity. Part of him had been reluctant to come here to the UK and risk everything he enjoyed, everything he had created. And risk it for what? The prospect of making a few ripples in a poisonous pond? Who did he care for so much that he would risk his future, his reputation, his very life even on what would most likely prove to be an utter debacle? Until very recently, he had been sorely tempted to abandon his plans and carry on leading a simple life of freedom, wandering the wide-open spaces of the less-developed world like a rider of the Apocalypse. For there would surely always be a few uncontaminated corners of Planet Earth left for the Last of the Nomads, safe enough from Wal Mart and Walt Disney till his strength failed him and till he curled up in some remote mountain hideaway to draw his last breath.
But that would have been the defeatist and self-indulgent choice. There had to be a few kindred spirits left in the world; he knew there were others who cared. And he had come here to find them. Find them and act. Find them and strike for change before the joy-riding world leaders of the Unstoppable Beast looked on in apathy while the last tree in the Congo rainforest was felled and shipped to a lumberyard in Shanghai, while the super-sized populations of the ‘developing world’ drank the last drops of the Nile and the Ganges dry from dust-bowl riverbeds.
Oh yes, the ‘developing world’ was just that these days—developing into poor copy of the West—no more than an investment opportunity away from becoming an over-populated, urbanized and polluted garbage dump. And while the feeding frenzy was in runaway full-swing, even to question the right or the feasibility of ten billion humans to drive Nissan Quashgais, to buy fracked gas for their homes piped in from Texas or to drink bottled mineral water air-freighted from Scandinavia was a heresy so obscene, it would earn you viral vitriol on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.
The university buildings along Broad Street and Hollywell made Al-Ajnabi think of the more personal scores that he had also come to settle. But looking back, he had mixed feelings about what had happened. Yes, they had thrown him out onto the garbage tip back then. But it was only by standing on the outside looking in that he had discovered which was the shittier place to be.
By the time he had arrived on the working class Cowley Road Al-Ajnabi was feeling much better. The walk and the thoughts had re-stoked the anger he needed to see this business through, convinced him that right was on his side.
The Bullingdon Arms, Neil Smedley had told him, was a popular, downbeat evening haunt for Irish, hippies and less career-conscious students. On this Tuesday lunchtime it was deserted—tacky plastic in the front bar, sawdust and wooden benches in the rear, presided over by an Irish landlord with a Gerry Adams stare and a contempt for most of the customers and any of the drinks save Guinness or Bushmills.
‘They’re waiting for you round the back, Sir,’ the austere landlord welcomed him with such a reverential calm, Al-Ajnabi wondered what on earth Neil had told him, but he followed the landlord’s nod, checking the toilets and corridor that led to the rear, then stepped into the sawdust-strewn courtyard.
The group was there as arranged, huddled quietly around several corner tables.
‘Good to see you again, Omar,’ said a tall, burly young man getting to his feet. He had close-cropped blond hair, stubble, studs and tattoos; the accent was Yorkshire; the heavy, grey sweater emphasized a considerable chest.
Al-Ajnabi shook his hand warmly, ‘You too, Neil. Are you ready for business?’
‘Aye, ready as I ever was,’ he smiled. ‘Let me introduce you to the lads and lasses,’ and he pointed to the twelve young men and women now staring wide-eyed at the architect of a plan they were to serve but of whose true compass they were unaware.
‘So, the twelve disciples!’ Al-Ajnabi smiled, sitting down on the corner of a neighbouring table. Neil, to his left, began working his way around the tables, introducing each person to Al-Ajnabi by first name or nickname alone.
The names and faces were already familiar to Al-Ajnabi from the computer dossiers Hasan had prepared. He had comments for several of the representatives whom he had met before. At other times, he acknowledged them silently, sipping his Guinness and nodding while Neil spoke. And when the big Yorkshireman had fin
ished, Al-Ajnabi took a long pull on his Guinness and looked seriously at the group.
‘OK. Some of you may have met before during training in Yemen and Eritrea. As you will be aware, for security reasons you should not know anybody else’s real name or location. I understand that each section has received all necessary funds and equipment?’
‘Aye,’ said Neil, ‘they’re all ready,’ and the calm stares around the table confirmed his words.
‘Good. Then you can expect the show to begin on time. By October 30th I want every team ready to go operational. From now on, you’ll be contacted by Neil, or by Mr Y. All you need to know about Mr. Y is that he will coordinate our operations and his word will be as good as mine once the game is in play. Mr. Y. will notify Neil within the next week of a code for verification of all instructions and Neil will pass this on to all of you individually.’
Al-Ajnabi paused to look at their faces, wondering if he could rely on each one of them when the time came.
‘Now to the most important point,’ he continued. ‘Remember that each individual unit is part of a wider team and that it is the coordination of all our efforts, rather than any particular individual action on its own that will bring us significant success. All of you are veterans of dozens of direct action campaigns and many of you have been inside for your troubles.’
He paused to take a pull on his drink, checking for reactions over the lip of his pint glass; but he met only silence, a few grim nods and some serious stares.
‘But none of you,’ he carried on, ‘will ever have been involved in anything on this scale before; and whether we fail or succeed it is very likely to be your last ever action.
Again, Al-Ajnabi paused to see his words met by more nods and a few strained smiles.
‘Good, then,’ he concluded, ‘when you leave this pub it will be the last time you will see me or anyone else here, except, maybe, Neil. So it just remains for me to wish you all good luck—and try to enjoy yourselves!’