by K J Griffin
‘Don’t worry, Max,’ Eitan laughed. ‘I’ve already reserved her for you. You remember the drill, surely? She’ll be back with you just as soon as we’ve finished business?’
‘To business then,’ Clayton laughed, holding up a glass for Ronny Eitan to chink with his own.
‘To you, Max, for you know how much your success means to me. Indeed, when you do eventually make it to the top job, Max, we at Mossad will feel we’ve as good as got our own man as the head of MI6, what with all the scrapes and games you and I have been through together!’
Clayton smiled again, but his stare hardened.
‘That’s laying it on a little thick, Ronny. But sure, old friends stick together. Well, usually…’
‘And now you want another little favour. You said you wanted to know what the Ramlis are up to, Max.’
‘That’s right, the Ramlis, Ronny. Got anything for me?’
Eitan smiled.
‘Yes and no. What I’ve got might not help you answer the question you asked when you called from London, but it’s related—and big.’
‘Go on, Ronny, I’m listening.’
A claim which Eitan knew to be true, for Clayton’s legendary drinking prowess was exceeded only by his ability to recall almost verbatim the conversations he picked at between bottles.
Eitan pulled a black and white photo out of his jacket pocket, placing it on the table by Clayton’s champagne glass.
‘Recognise this man, Max?’
‘Can’t say I do. Short, plump, balding, trim moustache, looks Arab. Should I know him?’
‘Maybe you won’t know the face, but you’ll know the name and will have heard of his work: Lockerbie (we suspect), inside Israel (many times), and, we think, mixed up in the World Trade Center bombing in New York, some say 9/11 too. Name’s Abu Fawaz, a Palestinian who travels on a Jordanian passport. Best explosives expert on the wrong side. Member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.’
Clayton scowled at the picture and passed it back.
‘So this is what Abu Fawaz looks like today,’ he whistled. ‘Hasn’t grown any prettier, has he? But why are you showing me his murderous Palestinian face, Ronny?’
Eitan lit a second cigarette.
‘One of my men in Lebanon spotted Abu Fawaz moving quite openly in Beirut not long ago. Crossed, we reckon from the chaos in Syria. We tailed him to the airport, where he boarded an Emirates flight from Beirut to Cairo. Naturally, my man called ahead and had someone in Cairo meet our friend at this end. But Abu Fawaz only changed planes here. Three hours later he boarded a Yemenia flight from Cairo to Sana’a. Fortunately, we have people in Yemen these days, so again the same airport welcoming committee was organized for Sana’a.’
‘Getting closer to Ramliyya,’ Clayton teased, ‘but when does our villain cross the border?’
‘He doesn’t. He is driven from Sana’a to an isolated villa on the Red Sea coast, near Al-Hudaydah. Next day he’s joined by this man.’
Eitan pulled out another photo. ‘Name of Khalid Chentouf. Algerian. Mixed up in the highjacking of that oil refinery in the Algerian desert. One of sources has him as the brains behind the attack.’
‘Go on,’ Clayton urged. Eitan always spun a good story.
‘My man in Yemen waited for three days. Nothing happening. Nobody coming and going in or out of the villa. But the fourth day was more interesting.’
Eitan took out another grainier photo. Like all good card players, his better cards came out later, even if they looked more dog-eared.
‘Does the name Toshi Yokochi mean anything to you, Max?’
Clayton stared at the photo. The shot was angular and unclear.
‘Yokochi? You’re pulling my leg, Ronny!’ Clayton chuckled. For in MI6’s South Bank HQ the name of the world’s most elusive terrorist planner had become a standing joke. The prevailing opinion was that Yokochi didn’t exist, or if he did, was an amalgam of several separate identities. ‘I’ll put it in the Yokochi file,’ had become the byword for admitting a complete balls-up.
But Eitan sighed with genuine regret.
‘Had the video run on longer we would have obtained proof that Yokochi does exist, and is still active. Unfortunately, the operative who took this video met with certain difficulties shortly after taking the still you see before you.’
Clayton looked sceptically at Eitan.
‘So if it’s true then, Ronny, that Yokochi is still in the business, what the hell would he and those other undesirables be planning? Why the secret pow-wow in Yemen?’
Methodical to the end, Eitan rummaged inside his jacket for the ace of trumps.
‘What are they planning, Max? Who knows? But your call got me thinking. Funny time you picked me to start asking questions about the Ramlis.’
The Israeli handed his last photo to Clayton.
‘You probably don’t know this man. Name’s Hasan Mahmoud. Ramli of Somali extraction. Leading figure in General Madani’s rebellion. Captured and sentenced to be beheaded with nine other officers from Madani’s rebel units. Story my boys heard was that Hasan is standing in line watching impassively as his eight co-conspirators are sliced one after the other in front of his eyes. The sword, as you can imagine, is getting blunter all the time; the executioner’s arm is growing tired, too. It’s taking two or three chops for him to get the heads off by now. Hasan is pulled out, forced to kneel in the pool of blood that has spewed out of his friends’ necks. He hears the babble of excited voices all around, waits for the blow that will come any second at the base of his neck. Suddenly, there’s a commotion behind him. Hasan hears an authoritative voice speaking in broken Arabic. The voice tells the executioner to stop. The next thing Hasan knows, he’s being forced to his feet; handcuffs are whisked from his wrists. Seconds ago only a blade away from hell, now Hasan is standing in the blood-stained square a free man.’
Clayton looked absorbed.
‘Want to know Hasan’s rescuer? The very same foreign mercenary who put down the coup, the man known today as Prince Omar Adil ‘Al-Ajnabi’ Al-Janoubi. Want to know what Hasan does today? Personal assistant to Prince Omar Al-Ajnabi.’
‘And now both men are in England,’ whistled Clayton, ‘keeping the whole country guessing about where and when they’re going to start chucking the Ramli petrodollars around. Thanks, Ronny, this is interesting stuff. I’d better have a close look at our beneficent Prince Al-Ajnabi. Don’t like the sound of some of the friends his PA keeps. By the way, do you know where Yokochi and company were heading when they left Yemen?’
‘We don’t, Max. My men were busy getting out themselves. Not much of this kind of work is done in Yemen in person any more; mostly comes form US drones as you know,’ he laughed. ‘Naturally, you’ll keep your eyes on our Ramli friends in Britain. And if there’s anything going down that may interest us, you’ll let us know, yes?’
‘Of course, Ronny, Clayton smiled. ‘That is, if your boys in Britain haven’t got to the goodies first.’
Eitan seemed to be stirring himself to leave. But before he rose, he poked a podgy finger at Clayton.
‘And if Abu Fawaz turns up, remember we want him, Max. Any others you can keep—even Yokochi, if he surfaces again.’
‘That’s a deal, Ronny,’ Clayton grunted, swigging the last of his champagne.
‘With anyone else I’d feel duty bound to stay, Max,’ the Israeli smiled. ‘But I know my going won’t spoil your night.’
‘Don’t worry, Ronny. I’m sure I’ll find other company.’
Clayton stood up, shaking Eitan’s hand warmly. But just as Eitan was about to leave he remembered something and reached inside his jacket pocket.
‘Oh, nearly forgot. You might as well keep the photographs, Max. There’s one other you should take a look at, too. Westerner. Tall, well-built, blond, close-cropped hair. Didn’t mean anything to us. Have your lot look him up.’
Clayton looked straight past his friend and his eyes rested on Aisha, sitting alone
at a distant table. Eitan guessed the direction of his old friend’s thoughts, turned and called over in Arabic, taking his leave as Aisha returned with a sly smile.
Clayton watched Eitan’s corpulent profile retreating past the front of the podium towards the exit. At one point the Israeli’s balding head was almost brushed by a belly dancer’s modestly covered breasts. Clayton smiled at Aisha and invited her to join him. Time to throw out the champers and hit the Scotch. He summoned the manager and gave his order.
Now, with Aisha’s hand gently stroking the inside of his thigh, Clayton sat back and admired the belly dancer, regurgitating what the Egyptian and Eitan had told him that evening as he watched her swaying abdomen and swollen breasts careening to the soft music. It was the Egyptian’s unconnected mention of South Africa that had first sent his thoughts spinning back to the past, a destination they were now reluctant to leave.
Of course, he was aware that the Egyptian’s mention of South African mercenaries, and especially Critical Interference, had to be a simple coincidence, but it had resurrected a psychologist’s database of memories he did not care to remember. So why was he still thinking that way? South Africa? Mercenaries? Critical Interference? Impossible, Max! he mumbled to himself, loud enough to elicit a look of surprise from Aisha. Impossible! For he had done all the legwork himself and seen the evidence with his own eyes. He had been all the way to Walvis Bay to match the charred fragment of jaw to the dental records. The man was dead. That was certain. So why the sudden flash of paranoid guilt after all these years? He was being ridiculous. Ridiculous, but piqued nevertheless. Oh yes, he would follow this one up carefully and personally when he got back to London from Hong Kong.
He gulped the Scotch in one go and winked at Aisha. The sight of her sweet face channelled his recollections in another direction, to the distant memory of another woman—a woman who had left a very bitter taste in his mouth. He rattled the remaining ice cubes in his glass like conjuror’s dice that transported him to a magical world somewhere between the delicious exoticism of the present and the nostalgia of the past. He was on a high; time to leave while the mood was right. Putting a hand on Aisha’s knee he popped the question.
‘Mafii mushkula, nimshi al attuul,’ she whispered, giggling, and they headed to the exit hand-in-hand after the Egyptian manager had accepted a very large sweetener in his sweaty palm.
Chapter 13: Oxford: October 15
Toshi Yokochi was a name that couldn’t be matched to a face, or, could be matched to too many faces. He was a name that carried someone else’s passport. The sort of people who knew Yokochi usually thought he was someone else; the sort of people who were looking for Yokochi usually found someone else. It was said that he was the founder of the Japanese Red Army; had masterminded nearly every terrorist attack against the West since the early Seventies; now lived in Manila, Beirut, Aden, or Los Angeles.
Omar Al-Ajnabi felt he could be pretty sure that he was getting the real thing when he watched Hasan swish the dark-blue Jaguar with tinted windows onto the gravel at the front of his Folly Bridge mansion.
The two men walked purposefully from the car, through the colonnaded entrance, and up to the first-floor reception room where Al-Ajnabi was waiting, scrutinizing a map of Great Britain that lay stretched out across a walnut table. He looked up to acknowledge his Japanese visitor, offering him a cautious welcome. Both Hasan and Yokochi joined him at the table, while Hasan called Mousa for refreshments.
‘Were your trips successful?’ Al-Ajnabi asked while Yokochi squinted taciturnly at the map.
Yokochi restricted himself to a nod, absorbed straight away in the red circles on the map. Al-Ajnabi sneaked another glance at him, admiring the complete anonymity of the man. Yokochi was the perfect grey man. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, handsome nor ugly. The gold-rimmed glasses that Hasan had described as Yokochi’s only distinguishable feature were missing, probably replaced by contact lenses. The Japanese planner was the sort of man who filled queues, made the ghostly cupboard opening and closing noises from the adjacent hotel room, neither frowned nor smiled when babies dribbled on him on train journeys.
‘So I can assume that you have made all the arrangements’ Al-Ajnabi asked.
‘I have made all the arrangements according to the outlines I was given in the meetings with Mr Hasan in Egypt, Italy and Yemen.’
‘Good. And you have received all the agreed funding?’
Again, Yokochi nodded, producing a laptop, which he booted and placed on the table in front of Hasan and Al-Ajnabi. There was a good deal of fiddling with codes and passwords before Yokochi had Hasan close the shutters and help him set up the projector. With the beam trained against the blank white wall opposite the door, the Japanese began to run through the presentation in his mesmerizing drawl.
* * *
London: October 15 11:00 a.m.
As he had done every Wednesday morning for the last six weeks, Dave Lohman met the smartly dressed Ramli, Saeed, in Green Park. The weather was fine and mild. Kids who should have been at school and office workers who should have been in the office were out in the sunshine, flaunting their truancy across the park.
Lohman didn’t know anything about the Arab other than his name, but Neil Smedley had said that he was one of the ‘good guys’, and that was all that counted. And the cash incentives were bloody generous, too.
A veteran busker, Lohman had to chuckle at the number of guitars he seemed to be getting through all of a sudden, as he strummed a living around the West End tube stations. But that didn’t matter because Saeed was a generous patron of street art. Every Wednesday the Arab turned up with an envelope stuffed with cash and another large guitar case waiting on the park bench beside him. This week was no exception.
‘Good morning’ seemed to be as far as the Ramli’s English went. The Arab said it, Lohman repeated the words and the two men smiled at each other. Lohman sat down beside Saeed on the park bench. Saeed got up and left, walking westwards towards Mayfair.
A couple of minutes later Lohman was also on his feet, the shiny new guitar case tucked incongruously under the arm of his shabby jeans jacket. He cut southwest towards Hyde Park corner and then on to Victoria Station, where he hurried down to the Underground, coming out on the eastbound platform of the District Line.
At the end of the platform he knocked on the door marked ‘Staff Only’.
The West Indian greeted him familiarly,
‘Hey Dave! Same again, man?’
‘That’s right, mate,’ Lohman grinned, handing over the case and a thick wad of fifty-pound notes. Just as he didn’t know where Saeed got the cases came from, Lohman hadn’t a clue who the West Indian passed them on to, or where they ended up. But Smedley had said it was for a good cause and he trusted Neil. So who gave a shit?
* * *
London: October 15, p.m.
The night spent captive and neglected in Al-Ajnabi’s bed had left Sophie in a dark mood that wouldn’t shift the following morning. Jumbled flashbacks of the night before haunted her thoughts. True to form, Al-Ajnabi’s behaviour had been eccentric in the extreme: she could not remember him coming to bed; there had not been any sign of him in the morning, nor had the sheets on his side of the bed borne any physical imprint. Again, it was as if her very presence in his bed had repulsed him. But Sophie drew little comfort from his lack of sexual interest; curiously, that somehow made her even more wary and raised even more questions about why he insisted on this mutually repellent ritual. If he wasn’t after sex, did he have something altogether more ghastly in mind?
By lunchtime Sophie had worked herself into a frenzy of doubt. She had as good as decided to leave Al-Ajnabi’s house that afternoon, even if that meant having to leave Oxford too when her money ran out. In her confusion, she missed a lecture, wrote a bad essay, bumped into Marcus on Broad Street, and unjustly vented some of her pent-up anger against him. Thank God she was meeting Darren for lunch! She would get thoroughly pissed with him in one
of those trendy restaurants on Little Clarendon Street.
‘What the hell have you got yourself into, girl?’ Darren Chapman asked over lunch, chin dropping down towards his pasta when Sophie told him some of the details of her new housing arrangement. But even with Darren, Sophie felt the need to round the exact size of her ‘allowance’ to manageable proportions, conceal the ‘bed duty’ and normalize some of Al-Ajnabi’s quirkier conversations.
‘Irish chap—what did you say the name was?’ Chapman queried, taking a tablet from his pocket and scrunching up the glasses on his nose in the effort of concentration. Sophie repeated Hennessy’s name and described some of the other guests she had met at Al-Ajnabi’s party the night before, while Darren was busy with the stylus.
Chapman couldn’t believe his luck. To his amazement, he was unearthing some fantastic and totally unsolicited stuff on the Ramli prince who had made the home news big-time that morning with more announcements of his great British spending spree. But instinct told the journalist that there was more still that Sophie wasn’t telling him yet. And more important than the sniff of a scoop, his darling Sophie was starting to eat right out of his hand. Good-bye, Marcus Easterby, handsome blond fop! Take your sports car and drive it straight down the first hole of Daddy’s Surrey golf course! To press home his advantage, Chapman ordered another bottle of tongue-loosener.
Over dessert and a second bottle of Australian Chardonnay, at Chapman’s gentle persuasion, Sophie began to talk about her host’s strange political outbursts, his explanations for Hennessy’s presence in his house, and his aura of implacable hostility towards certain undisclosed enemies. Over coffee and more Chardonnay, Chapman had Sophie talking about Al-Ajnabi’s enigmatic past; by Gaelic coffee and Chardonnay that was beginning to taste like an unfortunate blend of all the residual flavours in his mouth, Sophie was hinting that her host had disclosed a sexual interest in her (naturally, she’d been quick to thwart it!).