A Loyal Spy (16 page)

December 2001

It was Monteith who was responsible for the departmental mantra that
the best lies are sandwiched between truths
. You have to believe it yourself, Monteith would say. And mostly he did.

He was Jonah Said, spawn of a Palestinian biologist and a black barrister of Guyanan descent. He had been born in the USA, while his father was studying for a PhD and his mother was volunteering at a civil rights centre. But he was raised and educated in England, in suburban obscurity, and as far back as he could remember the things he had aligned himself with were designed to outrage his parents’ liberal sensitivity. He ran wild at school, failed his O-levels, was a pothead from fourteen to seventeen and deemed responsible for a flurry of hastily terminated teenage pregnancies. He pulled himself together briefly enough to sit his A-levels at a community college, and against all expectations secured a university place in Edinburgh to study Arabic. On obtaining an undistinguished degree, he spent a couple of years back in the USA, mostly in New York, where he lived a nocturnal life, tending bar and sampling the range of available drugs, settling on crack as his narcotic of choice. He lost touch with his parents. His abiding memory of that time was of travelling down a tunnel, a shaft of light crackling at the edges – night after night – from the stack of liquors to the customer to the till. He joined the British Army in 1989, catching a plane back to the UK and walking into a London recruiting centre. It was a characteristic­ally impulsive gesture that possibly was prompted by the death of a friend in New York as the result of a heroin overdose (an occurrence that he failed to mention in his interview for the Regular Commissions Board). Against all expectation he was awarded a commission. It was conceivable that the army was under some pressure to recruit from ethnic minorities, and after all, his parents were by that stage pillars of the establishment, his father an eminent professor and his mother a Queen’s Counsel, soon to be elevated to the House of Lords. In quick succession he attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Platoon Commanders Battle Course in Warminster. His army career was at best undistinguished. He served as an interpreter in the first Gulf War, a platoon commander in West Belfast, a liaison officer in Bosnia, and most recently as an instructor at Catterick Army Garrison in Yorkshire.

Other facts were hidden. That he was polyglot; that he obtained a master’s degree in Dari and Pashtun at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies under an assumed name. That he had earned but was deprived of the right to wear both the Commando dagger and the Parachute wings. That he had completed selection at Hereford. That he was on permanent attachment to a super-secret arm of the UK Defence Intelligence Agency colloquially known as the Department, which had been cut adrift of the Ministry of Defence and was nominally answerable to the Secret Service, MI6, but utterly deniable in the event of compromise. That it was his home. And his garden was the failed, failing or rogue state. He slipped in and out of ransacked cities, jungle hideaways and mountain caves.

What was also clear was that all those years ago, when he rode a train out of the suburbs, he had no intention of ever going back.

It was always strange to be back. It was 29 December, the day after his meeting with Winthrop. He was due to fly to Afghanistan that night. He had decided to visit his father first.

He parked the car under an old yew tree and sat for a while listening to the slow swish of the wipers on the windscreen, staring fondly over the steering wheel at the large and rambling red-brick Victorian building with its wooden clock tower and glass conservatories.

He remembered a wildcat childhood spent clambering across its roofs and racing through its hothouses, hiding in long-neglected cupboards, pulling open drawers of pinned butterflies and beetles and peering at specimen jars filled with coiled, unsettling shapes floating in formaldehyde.

Built in the 1870s, and set in twenty-four acres of Berkshire parkland dotted with fishponds, Silwood Park was the home of Imperial College’s research station and had been the location of his father’s office for as long as Jonah could recall. It was also at Silwood, at the start of an unusually hot summer, when the whole of England reeled in the heat, that Rashid ed-Din, a young Jordanian biologist with a doctorate from the American University in Beirut, had arrived at the faculty and moved into an office across the hall from Jonah’s father. He had brought with him a veiled wife and three children, including a quicksilver son named Nor.

Jonah had first spotted the boy from a lookout post in an unruly thicket of rhododendrons on the outer edge of the ornamental gardens. He had almost completed his first cycle of daily perimeter checks and was wondering how the day would unfold. It must have been mid-morning, and already the sun was baking hot. He lay among the leaf litter and stared across a drought-racked lawn at the boy, who was sitting by one of the fishponds, with his feet immersed in the water. Nor was wearing only a pair of shorts, and the first thing that Jonah had registered was that his skin tone was not so very different from his own. In such circumstances boldness was required. He had crawled out of his hide, climbed to his feet and approached slowly, careful to remain out of the boy’s line of sight. He remembered that the ground was hot beneath the soles of his feet.

He had been almost within touching distance, when Nor had casually glanced over his shoulder at him. ‘I thought it rained here?’

‘Not this summer,’ Jonah had replied, mid-step.

‘Do you always sneak up on people?’

‘Not always.’

‘Where are you from?’

Jonah had shrugged uneasily. ‘Here.’

‘You don’t look like you’re from here.’

‘Neither do you.’

‘I’m not,’ Nor had said, indignantly.

Every year on 5 November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot – the failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of English Catholics in 1605 – a straw-stuffed guy in the likeness of one of the academics was burned on a bonfire down by the largest pond. Jonah remembered the excitement that had filled him the year that his father was chosen. It seemed strange now: after all, his father was a Palestinian Catholic.

He had driven the twenty-five miles from London to Silwood Park ostensibly at his mother’s request, though the request had been made some weeks before. He was in a rented car. He didn’t own his own car, or much of anything else for that matter. He’d been divorced for over two years. That brief chapter –
house, car, dog
– was now over. He got out of the car and stood in the drizzle. His shoulders ached from driving down through the mist and he stretched, working the blood into his muscles. He had not seen his father for six months, not since before Sierra Leone and 9/11. His mother had briefed him on what to expect. Even so, it was still a surprise to see the collection of BBC Bristol vans and caravans parked on the gravel forecourt and on the lawns.

He followed electrical cables up the steps and into the building. Inside it was almost unbearably hot and he caught a whiff of something earthy with a hint of decay in the still air. He didn’t recognise it. He slipped off his jacket and eased his way down the passage towards the great hall.

Viewed from the entrance to the hall the raiding colony seemed to be a single living thing, the feeder columns writhing from side to side on the lengths of dockyard rope that coiled through the rooms. He stepped between the rails laid for a track dolly and followed one of the suspended ropes down a corridor towards his father’s office.

In a side room he glimpsed one of his father’s PhD students emptying out a bucket of leaves and petals on to an old billiard table. She was wearing a white paper suit and a shower cap. He saw that the table legs were standing in plastic buckets filled with water. She waved as he passed. His father had always had a devoted student following.

He went down the steps into the atrium and stood among the African palms, staring upwards at the ropes converging to form a single trunk that ran the length of the hothouses. Up in the foliage a camera panned on the end of a gib-arm. Across the room, a cameraman sat in front of a flickering monitor. Jonah walked over and stood at his shoulder for a while. On the screen an apparently endless column of worker ants carried leaf fragments in one direction and a line of unburdened workers advanced purposefully in the other. Wedge-headed soldiers with massive jaws flanked the gangways, separating the opposing columns and maintaining the direction of travel. It was difficult to comprehend the scale of the enterprise.

‘There is no mind,’ Joseph Said called out as he hurried across the atrium towards him. He stopped just short of him and looked Jonah up and down, as if he were a stranger. There was a bright yellow butterfly on the shoulder of his threadbare tweed jacket. ‘It’s shaped but leaderless.’

He was thinner. He seemed to get thinner each time Jonah saw him, thinner and taller, as if he were being stretched. He was an old man, with dark spots on his hands and neck, but his eyes were still striking. They sparkled with amusement. For a moment Jonah wondered whether he recognised him.

‘It’s the largest colony of leafcutters outside the Amazonian rainforest,’ his father told him. ‘They range sixty metres on the longest rope. They’ve taken over the whole building.’

‘It’s impressive,’ Jonah said, after a pause.

His father held him at arm’s length and winked. ‘They let me get away with anything now.’

They kissed three times on the cheeks, the Palestinian way. His mother’s comment to Jonah, over a teacake in the tea room at the House of Lords, had been: ‘He’s completely out of control. You have to speak to him.’

Jonah wondered what it was that he was expected to say. It was usually Jonah’s sister who acted as intermediary between his mother and father, who edited and softened, protecting them from each other’s more fervent outbursts. He settled on the mundane. ‘How do you keep them from escaping?’

His father grinned. ‘Vaseline on the steel hawsers that hold the rope. The students keep them greased. We’ve only had a few minor breakouts.’

The cameraman beside him stifled a chuckle. ‘Relatively minor, then. They are pretty vigorous.’

Jonah wanted to say,
I love you, old man
. But they did not do large talk. Instead his father took Jonah by the arm. ‘It’s the closest thing to farming in nature. Workers go out foraging for leaves, which they cut up with their jaws and carry back to the nest. The leaves are used as compost to cultivate garden colonies of fungi. Enzymes from the fungi digest the cellulose cell walls of the leaves and make them suitable for eating. The garden is vital for the ants’ survival; without the continuous farming and feeding of the fungal colonies, the ant colony will die. Come, let me show you the nest.’

They walked down a corridor that had seemed endless to Jonah as a child, ducking to avoid the teeming trunk.

Standing at the entrance to the lecture theatre, with the river of ants just above his head, Jonah was reminded of a scene from the film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. The nest resembled a mountain: a pile of leaf litter and humus, rising several metres from a huge glass tank that took up most of the stage.

‘How many of them are there?’ Jonah asked.

‘It’s hard to say, eight million or so. As many as live in London.’

‘What are you hoping to learn?’ Jonah asked.

His father’s fingers tightened around his bicep. ‘On the face of it, we’re trying to study their reproductive cycle.’

‘But in fact?’

His father pointed across the aisle to the nearest row of seats. ‘Sit down.’

They sat side by side and contemplated the teeming mound.

‘It’s a city,’ explained Joseph Said. ‘A mega-city. It’s no less artificial or volatile than any other city. London. New York. Bombay. Here in captivity, with its population prevented from escape, it resembles a city under siege. I’ve christened it Gaza City.’

‘Is this a protest?’ Jonah asked gently.

‘Not really.’

‘But you’re making a point?’

His father smiled ruefully and patted Jonah on the knee. ‘The truth is I find their mindlessness comforting.’

It was too painful, and Jonah turned away to stare at the far wall. It wasn’t fair.

‘We lifted this nest from a remote corner of Venezuela, where stunning flat-topped mountains called
tepuis
rise out of the forest. It’s an ecologically pristine environment. And it’s doomed. Their flat tops mean that the animals have nowhere colder to climb to if the temperature rises. Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for the planet, I think.’

He paused.

‘Come to my office,’ he said abruptly, and got to his feet. ‘Let’s sit and have a coffee. You can do your mother’s bidding.’

Jonah followed him back down the corridor to his office with its view of the grounds. He looked around, searching for familiar items. He spotted the narghile pipe on the top of a bookcase and on the wall the framed deeds to the family home in Bethlehem, where his father had been born and which Jonah had never seen. The house was now occupied by an Israeli family that his father had been conducting good-humoured correspondence with for several decades. His father pulled a bag of coffee out of a drawer and ducked out into the corridor to fill his dented aluminium coffee pot with water. A familiar ritual.

‘Where have you been?’ he called out.

Jonah waited for him to return.

‘I was in Sierra Leone,’ Jonah told him, ‘and after that New York. I’m flying to Afghanistan tonight.’

‘Wherever there is trouble, that’s where you are,’ said his father, lighting the gas-ring stove he kept on a table beside his desk. He set the pot on the stove. ‘When are you going to tell your mother what you do?’

‘I’m not in any hurry,’ Jonah replied.

‘You should tell her what you do,’ his father said. ‘Soon I’m going to forget. Somebody in the family should know.’

This was how they communicated, in this particularly English way, by means of hint and pause, in which what was happening to his father was described by what was not said rather than what was. Funny, really, when you thought about it, given that neither of them was really English.