A Loyal Spy (21 page)

‘It won’t come to that. We look after our people.’

‘Who are you talking about? Who’s this
we
? The Department? My father? Do you think he feels any loyalty to Nor? You know him better than that.’

Jonah had sighed. ‘I need to talk to them.’

‘You can go out there and join them. I’ll leave you to it. Catch some moles. I’m going to bed.’

‘Wait …’ he said.

She had paused in the doorway to the hall, with her head down. ‘What are you going to do, Jonah? Tell me that you love me, after all? You’re married, remember.’

‘Flora.’

She had seemed to shrink in the darkness as if it would provide camouflage.

‘Flora.’

She had moaned softly. He had put his hand on her shoulder. She had shrugged it off and pulled away from him.

‘And maybe there isn’t a shred of loyalty in you either,’ she’d hissed.

It was the summer of 1993 and a truck flying the black-and-white flag of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir led a crowd of about a ­thousand students down Brick Lane and along Whitechapel High Street past the East London mosque. Shopkeepers and local council tenants had spilled out on to the street to watch. Stewards in day-glo vests led the chanting: ‘Jihad for Bosnia! Jihad for Palestine! Islam is the solution!’

A police van brought up the rear. The crowd was young and predominantly Bangladeshi. The boys wore baggy jeans and the women were veiled but shouted with a gusto equal to the men’s.

Monteith had followed at a discreet distance with Jonah walking by his side. ‘They don’t look much like jihadis,’ Jonah had observed.

‘Hizb are the flame under the kettle,’ Monteith had replied. ‘It’ll take time but eventually they’ll reach boiling point.’

‘Are they being watched?’

‘You mean by someone other than us? MI5, for instance?’ Monteith had snorted derisively. ‘I told you when you joined that you would find it a lonely business working for me.’

Jonah remembered that on his first day as one of the Guides, Beech had told him that it was Monteith’s curse to be an unfashionable prophet. A Cassandra
.
Monteith was widely derided across the intelligence community for conjuring threats out of thin air.

‘Hizb are currently banned from preaching in the local mosques. But that’s not going to stop them. The Hizb is organic. They don’t need offices, mosques or schools. They have a cell structure and they spread like a cancer, by mutating and replicating. Each cell, or
halaqah
, has about five members. They meet once a week and are commanded by a
mushrif
,
or teacher. They go out and recruit and break off to form new cells.’

At the front of the march, a young man had climbed the tailgate of the truck and was shouting into a megaphone: ‘Brothers, we are bringing jihad to the streets of the capital of the
kuffar
, the unbelievers.’

The crowd cheered.

‘A year ago nobody was using the word jihad. Hizb brought it here.’

‘What do they want?’

‘The Hizb? Destroy the West and its puppet regimes in the Muslim lands. A global Muslim nation. More immediately they are looking for volunteers to be trained overseas and sent back here to form the nucleus of a future uprising. Talk of the devil, look there. Your two o’clock. There he is.’

An older man with a limp was passing a dry cleaner’s shop window, shadowing the crowd.

‘His name is Farid. He’s Pakistani,’ Monteith had explained, ‘a Pashtun from Quetta. He lost the leg to a Soviet mine in Afghanistan in 1984. He’s over here recruiting for the training camps. He’s also Pakistani intelligence, ISI through and through.’

As if on cue, Nor had climbed on to the truck and snatched the megaphone. He had recently been thrown out of the army on a trumped-up charge of possessing drugs – but in reality, he was Monteith’s latest recruit in the war on extremism, fresh from several months’ training at the intelligence school at Chicksands. He’d shouted: ‘Crusader, invader! Saladin is coming back!’ A cheer went up from the crowd and Nor had rewarded them with his most ebullient grin. He’d started a new chant, ‘USA! USA! You will pay!’

The older man had been watching Nor intently.

‘Do you think Nor’s ready?’

‘He’s ready,’ Monteith said. ‘Now it’s up to the Pakistanis.’

Jonah kissed Flora beneath a riot of honeysuckle in Monteith’s garden at the end of that summer. They had kissed with a ferocity born of two years of frustration and longing.

Monteith was having a party to celebrate Nor’s successful penetration of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir. They were all there: Nor, Beech, Lennard, Alex and their wives, partners and children. Flora had rigged fairy lights in the garden. Even Monteith had been in a jovial mood.

It was after dark and they had found each other on one of the pathways through the lush foliage that almost swallowed the house, and Flora had taken him by the hand and led him farther into the shadows. They had been silhouettes in the darkness, reaching for each other, her hands on his shoulder and then cupping his face.

Afterwards, she had slipped out of his arms and gone back to join the party. He followed more slowly. He remembered his wife looking up at him as he approached with a question in her eyes. But he was a professional deceiver. A spinner of lies. Absent-mindedly he’d run his fingers through her hair.

A couple of weeks later Nor had left for Bosnia with an aid convoy. He’d been in Split, waiting for permission to cross the border, when he was approached by a Pakistani ISI agent and encouraged to travel to Pakistan. At the beginning of summer he had arrived at the HUM offices in Lahore and after a few days in the city had been sent up to Miram Shah, the dusty town close to Afghanistan that was used as a staging post for recruits heading to the training camps around Khost.

And so Nor’s career as a double agent in the pay of both the Pakistani ISI and the British intelligence services began.

February 2002

Justine woke, her large eyes blinking uncertainly. She wriggled in the bag and fought to get an arm clear. She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking the sand out.

‘Have you been awake all night?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘About your friend?’

He did not answer.

‘You must be freezing,’ she said.

It was true, he was cold.

‘Come here,’ she said, and partially unzipped the sleeping bag. She worked her body close to his. He put an arm around her shoulders and she rested her head against his chest, her hair against his chin.

The dawn was coming. With his binoculars he scanned the horizon. There was no sign of Zalik or of Nor. He sensed through his arm the shiver of her body. He felt a chasm inside himself and a corresponding emptiness in her.

‘It’s bloody cold,’ she mumbled.

He surprised himself by brushing aside a strand of her hair and kissing the nape of her neck. She looked up at him and he cupped her face in his hands and her eyes did not close. They kissed ardently.

She pulled down the zipper farther. He slipped in, pushing his boots against the bag’s stitching, and heaved his weight against her. She reached behind him and pulled up as much of the zip as she could. He kissed her again. He ran his hands under her blouse. Her nipples were as hard as stones against the rough palms of his hands. She pushed down her jeans and he slid his hands downward and pressed his fingers between the cleft in her legs, parting the folds of flesh, hooking a finger inside her. She shifted against him and moaned softly. He kissed her neck, her nipples and the lobes of her ears. He unbuttoned himself. She kicked out of a trouser leg, raised one thigh and, reaching down, steered him inside her. He gasped. They were two patches of heat in the expanse of night. He plunged into her and he felt the zipper tear against the small of his back.

They were filled with wildness and abandon. She came quickly, with her eyes wide open. He took longer, and when he finally came, rearing above her, it felt as if some part of him had torn inside.

Afterwards, they drank from his bottle of duty-free. Then he crawled out of the bag and did up his buttons, refeeding his belt through the loops. They did not speak again. He assumed that she was embarrassed or even frightened. He had been told once that the expression on his face when he was coming was terrifying.

He lifted the binoculars and scanned the horizon.

Zalik returned soon after, appearing soundlessly from behind a nearby acacia tree. He squatted on the sand beside them. Jonah wondered whether he’d been watching them. Justine wouldn’t look at him.

‘Two men crossed the Berm last night,’ Zalik said. ‘They passed east of here. One of them is injured.’

‘Are you sure there were two?’ Jonah asked.

Zalik did not reply.

After a pause, Jonah asked, ‘Can you take us to them?’

Zalik stood up and, without answering, started walking back towards the car. Justine hurriedly bundled up the sleeping bag and stuffed it into her bag. They followed.

He was sitting slumped in the shadows of a cave. One of his legs was bent under him so that he appeared to be kneeling. The other was outstretched but ended just below the knee in a bloody stump. They had followed the trail of blood up the rocky slope from the wadi floor. For a moment, standing at the mouth of the cave, Jonah felt a momentary sense of relief that events had been taken out of his hands, but it was soon followed by shame and a plunging sense of desolation. This was not the way for it to end.

Beside him, Zalik flicked on the torch. The cave was decorated with ancient pigment: hundreds of handprints pressed into the walls and roof by long-forgotten hunters. He wondered whether it represented some kind of warning. Kneeling beside the dead man, Jonah touched his face. His skin was still warm. His eyes were open. It was not Nor. Jonah breathed deeply from his abdomen and, despite everything, gave brief thanks. He glanced up at Zalik, who was standing, watching him. ‘The other one?’ he asked.

Zalik shrugged.

They headed back down through the piles of rock to where Justine was waiting. Turning a corner in the narrow wadi bottom, they found her dancing barefoot on the sand, her hips swaying to some interior rhythm, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other; Nor was sitting cross-legged on the boulder beside her with his head covered by a black turban. They were smiling. Seeing them together, with their smiles connecting, Jonah felt a sudden stab of what could only be described as jealousy.

‘He says that you’re the devil and that you tried to take away his God, Jonah,’ Justine announced. She pirouetted, and shook her bottom at him as she offered the bottle to Nor, who declined graciously. ‘He also says that he was your best student. He says that you taught him everything he knows.’

All Jonah could think of was that the old Nor would have accepted the bottle, the old Nor had a passion for vodka. The old Nor didn’t have a God to appease.

‘You took your time, Sensei,’ Nor teased.

‘Who’s your friend in the cave?’ Jonah asked, stonily.

Nor’s mouth narrowed to a pout. He didn’t want the mood broken. ‘A fellow traveller. One less fortunate.’

‘Who was he?’ Jonah demanded furiously.

‘A Saudi. He was rendered out of Kandahar on the same flight as I was. Does that satisfy you?’ With that Nor sprang down off the rock. He was still pale and far too thin but his face was flushed with excitement. They shook hands and then, to Jonah’s surprise, Nor embraced him. In all the time they had known each other Nor had never once embraced him. Afterwards, they stood with Nor’s hands grasping Jonah’s upper arms. ‘You should be happy. You were going to have to kill him anyway, to maintain my cover.’ Then he leant forward and whispered in Jonah’s ear, ‘Unless of course it was me you were planning to kill?’

‘I’m here to make sure you’re OK,’ Jonah replied, stiffly. Not for the first time he wondered how it was that Nor saw through him so easily.

‘I’m OK,’ Nor told him, serious for a moment. ‘Now where are we going?’

‘South,’ Jonah told him. ‘People are waiting for you.’

Nor reached out and took Justine by the hand. ‘So show me to my next mission,’ he said, and he tightened his grip on Justine’s hand as he grinned at Jonah. ‘It’s the beginning of a great adventure.’

They camped on the plain, beside a jumble of volcanic boulders close to the Mauritanian border. While Zalik made tea, and Justine carried a bucket of water into the thorn bushes to wash, Jonah and Nor climbed the rocks. They sat side by side on the summit and watched as the red orb of the sun sunk below the western horizon. Jonah glanced sidelong at Nor, who had his eyes closed and his chin raised and appeared to be speaking under his breath. He wondered whether Nor was praying. He did not know what to make of this new, serious-minded Nor. He couldn’t help but remember Sierra Leone, the moonlight on the nicked edge of a raised machete, his arms outstretched and Nor squatting over him, his words venomously spoken:
fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them.
He did not know whether the piety disguised a murderous fanaticism. Carefully, Jonah slid his Gerber blade out of its sheath and rested it against his thigh, so that it was hidden from view, with his hand resting on the moulded plastic grip.

Eventually Nor opened his eyes, and finding Jonah staring at him, smiled gently.

‘How are you?’ Jonah asked.

‘I wouldn’t recommend the Dark Prison, even for a long weekend.’

‘They couldn’t just release you,’ Jonah explained patiently – agent to joe – reflecting on how easy it would be to slip back into the old roles. ‘It was necessary to maintain your cover.’

Nor rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette. ‘You never could tell when I was teasing you. Have you really stopped smoking?’

‘Yes.’ It was always Jonah’s role to be the ham-fisted one. Nor had an unerring capacity to make him feel like the bluntest of instruments.

‘I’m impressed. How’s Monteith?’

‘Worried about what you might tell the Americans,’ Jonah replied, tightening his grip on the knife. His mouth was dry and he felt a plunging sensation in the pit of his stomach.