A Loyal Spy (26 page)

He met her again a few days later, at the British embassy. She was standing alone by the bar with a large gin and tonic in her hand. Just looking at her made him contemplate a lifelong relationship.

‘Somebody kissed you,’ she said.

‘No, nothing so dramatic; I recovered my glass eye.’

‘It suits you. You look good now the bruises have gone down. You have a kind of asymmetrical beauty.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘That’s easy: I’m a Brit.’

‘That’s not really what I meant.’

She smiled wryly. ‘I needed a drink and there isn’t anywhere else to get a drink in this town. Don’t you have bad nights?’

‘Plenty.’

‘You chew your nails,’ she observed. ‘You look the worse for wear.’

Jonah looked down and considered the seamed scar tissue and calloused ridges, the autobiography of his hands.

She said, ‘I thought you’d be dead by now.’

He looked up from his hands. ‘Why?’

‘You seem to have a habit of being in the wrong place.’

He laughed. ‘Story of my life.’

‘How did you lose your eye?’

‘I got blown up by a tank mine. In Gornji Vakuf.’

‘I was in Zenica for a while,’ she said, distantly. ‘It was a tough time.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Looking for someone.’

‘Someone?’

She frowned. ‘I heard a rumour that my husband had been fighting with the Muj against
the Serbs and I went looking for him.’

‘Did you find him?’

She looked at him. ‘No. And I didn’t find him in Peshawar, or Kandahar or Grozny, either.’

‘I guess you must have wanted to find him.’

‘Are you mad?’ she retorted. ‘I wanted to know he was dead. Shit. That way I might get my son back.’

She lit a cigarette. Her eyes closed as she drew the smoke into her lungs – she radiated anger like heat from a fuel rod. ‘They’d been gone for years by then but there were always rumours. When you live with uncertainty like that it can drive you crazy.’

She turned away from him and stared out across the city and beyond it to the desert, its vast blackness. It was later that night and they were standing on the roof of the nomad museum in Hawalli. Somewhere out in the darkness, there were three hundred thousand combat-ready Coalition troops, waiting for the order to move.

‘There’s a storm coming,’ she said.

‘You can tell?’

She looked back at him. ‘I saw the weather forecast, that’s all.’

He felt as though he were falling. He reached out with his fingers until they came into contact with her hair. He gathered it in a thick bunch in his hand and leant forward, drawing her lips to his. They kissed.

She told him that she wanted her son back and that she would do anything –
anything
– to get him back. It was easy to believe. He wanted to help her. He wanted nothing more than to fall in love.

MIRANDA

A term used for the practice of some dissidents who concealed their true allegiance behind the outward veneer of conformity
.

6 September 2005

At dawn Miranda went down to the river and washed her face and hands. She filled her water bottle and rolled out her yoga mat. She saluted the sun and gave herself for half an hour to the rhythm of her breath.

When she was done she rolled up her mat and stuffed her sleeping bag into the rucksack. She changed her underwear and socks. She ran a brush through her hair.

It was time to stop dwelling in the past. Her son was dead, buried in the graveyard of a Christian convent on the north side of Baghdad. Her husband Bakr was dead, killed in a shoot-out in a Shiite slum in 2003. She had spent two years guarding orchids on a remote Scottish island, living in a kind of limbo. Now Jonah had disappeared, the police were looking for him and it was up to her to find him.

She strode down off the hill into the village of Ardfern with the dog at her heels and crossed the square to the public toilets. In one of the stalls she unzipped the lid of her crash-bag and removed the plastic envelope that she had dug up the evening before. Inside it in an ankle wallet there was a thousand pounds and a thousand dollars in cash. Jonah was thorough; she had to give him that. She switched her wellies for the Caterpillars and attached the wallet around her left ankle with the Velcro fastening. She packed her waterproofs in the crash-bag and put the beanie hat on her head. She opened the stall door and the dog was sitting there, waiting with his tongue hanging out. Five minutes later she was striding down a road hemmed in by weathered stone walls.

She had decided to follow Jonah’s trail. She didn’t know of any alternative. She was going to Barra to find Jonah’s friend and former colleague Andy Beech.

She continued down the road but faster, battling the urge to run.

She was standing at the side of the deserted, faintly steaming road, a solitary figure with a dog. She felt exposed in unsecured circumstances. The car whistled past with its stereo thumping, braked suddenly and backed up to where she was standing. It was a sleek, lozenge-shaped sports car in shiny aluminium. The music stopped and the window purred down.

‘Does it bite?’ he asked, just audible over the motor.

‘Only when provoked,’ she replied.

‘Going north?’

She visibly hesitated. He shrugged and was already looking into his wing mirror when she surprised herself by opening the door. The dog slid in and hopped into the back. She got in after it.

‘Thanks,’ she said, squeezing her rucksack into the space between her feet.

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘North,’ she said, looking at the road ahead.

A few seconds idled by. She pulled the seat belt across her chest. He glanced at her. His eyes were very blue, almost colourless. ‘Just north?’ he asked.

‘Where are you going?’ she responded.

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘Fort William to start with. I can drop you anywhere on the way.’

‘Fine,’ she said.

He accelerated rapidly away from the kerb and they drove for a while in silence. The car’s interior was leather and chrome, with the intimacy of a cockpit. Now it was filled with paw prints and the damp, mossy smell of the dog. It leant forward between them with its eyes on the road. The minutes flashed by.

‘I used to have a dog,’ he said.

She glanced at him, surreptitiously studying him. He had sharp cheekbones and blond unruly hair that curled above the collar. She noted the curve of his brawny shoulders and the swell of his chest under his open-necked white linen shirt, and the Breitling watch on his wrist.

‘Somebody stole her,’ he explained. ‘The dog, I mean.’

He was wearing a pair of leather driving gloves, which struck her as strangely anachronistic.

‘Does he have a name?’ he asked, meaning the dog.

She shook her head.

‘He should have a name,’ he chided her, gently.

They purred along the coast road, with open moorland on one side and the steely, reflective surface of a loch on the other.

‘Were you waiting long?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘When I picked you up,’ he explained, ‘had you been waiting long?’

‘No.’

They turned a corner and the windscreen was awash with dazzling white light. He flipped down the sunshade with an impatient flick of his fingers and the sunlight flashed on the stainless-steel bezel of his watch.

‘You don’t look like a local,’ he said.

‘I’m just passing through.’

‘Heading anywhere in particular?’

‘Just travelling,’ she said.

‘My father was Scottish,’ he said, apropos of nothing.

She had her own Scottish blood, on her mother’s side; a great-great-grandfather who owned a plantation in Surinam, and bequeathed it to the young slave that he married on his deathbed. Like the Lebanese, the Scots seemed to get everywhere.

‘It’s so beautiful, you wonder why anyone would leave.’

Because they are no longer safe
, she thought.

‘It’s a landscape to lose yourself in,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I had a messy split with a long-term girlfriend. I needed some space, some thinking time. You know. I’ve been driving, staying in local pubs, and walking. You can walk for hours without coming across another person.’ His glanced up from the road and regarded her with intensity. ‘Are you in a relationship?’

The question floored her. ‘He’s gone,’ she said.

‘Gone?’

She bit her lower lip and stared out of the window. It was more information than she had meant to share.

‘Is he coming back?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Then they were in the shadows, bracketed by dense forestry blocks – dark rows of Sitka spruce that rose hundreds of metres on either side of them. The dog leant with the curves. It was like being in a tunnel: suddenly dark and intimate, enough to make you paranoid.

‘You think you know someone,’ he said, with his eyes on the road. ‘You live with them; you share your dreams and your secrets. And then just as suddenly they’re gone and you’re left wondering whether you knew them at all.’ He paused and grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. It must hurt.’

‘Must it?’ she wondered.

‘We’re running away,’ he said, blithely.

She repeated the mantra. ‘I’m just travelling.’

‘I didn’t know where she was at first,’ he continued. ‘I thought about following her, but I didn’t. I don’t know whether that was the right decision. Would you find him, if you could?’

‘Maybe,’ she murmured.

‘Did he leave any clues?’

‘No.’

She felt panic rising. When Oban came into view, she felt ­para­lysed. This was her stop. Her plan had been to take the direct ferry to Barra, but if she got out now she’d leave a trail a child could follow.

‘Look,’ he said, with a calculating smile on his face. It occurred to her that it was the smile of a man convinced of exactly what was going to happen next. ‘I don’t mind taking you wherever it is you want to go. I mean, I don’t have much else to do.’

‘Inverness,’ she told him. ‘That’s where I’m going.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, the smile faltering.

‘Perhaps you could drop me in Fort William?’

‘Sure,’ he said.

They did not talk for a while. Outside Oban he opened out the throttle and the landscape streaked by. They crossed the bridge at Connell and drove north alongside the banks of a loch. What seemed like intimacy between them had turned into unease.

He switched on the radio. There was more news from hurricane ravaged New Orleans. A reporter was broadcasting from the Louisiana Superdome: ‘We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the centre and there is no one to get them. We saw a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed up to the wall and covered with a sheet. Right next to her was another dead body wrapped in a white sheet. Right in front of us a man went into a seizure on the ground. No one here has medical training. There is nowhere to evacuate these people to. People have been sitting there without food and water and waiting. They are asking, “When are the buses coming? When are they coming to help us?”’

He turned off the radio.

‘You scratch under the surface and there’s anarchy,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter where you are. It would be the same here, a flood like that. People would die in droves.’

They stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Spean Bridge for fuel. He paused with his key in the ignition, the engine vibrating beneath her soles.

‘I don’t mind taking you to Inverness,’ he told her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

While he was filling the tank she headed for the toilets. She was halfway across the concrete apron before she realised that she had left her bag in the car. She went back for it.

‘I’m not going to do a runner,’ he said in an amused tone.

‘I need some stuff,’ she said, lamely.

In the toilets, she released a jet of dark yellow piss into the pan. She was dehydrated and light headed, strangely otherworldly. She knew she must run. She finished and wiped herself. Next she unlatched and shoved the small frosted-glass window open to reveal a view of a row of bins and the pine woods on the hillside beyond. She opened the window to its full extent, climbed on to the toilet seat and turned to pick up the dog. It went through the window first and then the rucksack and finally she squeezed out after it. She dropped to the ground on all fours.

She walked quickly past the bins and into the pine woods with the dog following. She quickly spotted a path and ran along it until she reached a Forestry Commission track. She could hear him shouting in the woods behind her. She followed the track for fifty metres or so and then struck out into the woods, with the morning sun behind her. Eventually she reached a tarmac road. A holidaying couple gave her a lift to Mallaig, where she caught the ferry to the Isle of Skye. Further lifts carried her northwards, the single-track roads unrolling like ribbons over the blind summits and plunging slopes of the island.

She spent her second night on the run in a grove of alders beside a river on the Trotternish Peninsula. She dreamt that night of the sea, of waves breaking on a desert shore and a voice calling her name. At first she thought it might be Jonah, but it was Nor, squatting on the sand some distance off with his hand reaching out to her. He was wearing the same mocking smile as on the Interpol poster; he was saying, ‘Come and find me …’

In the morning she took the ferry to Barra.

7 September 2005

Miranda walked up the lane hunched against the spindrift rolling off the dunes. The house was dark granite with white-painted shutters, and the stone walls snaked across the waterlogged fields from it in a riot of brambles. Scuds of cloud raced across the sun and pools of water shimmered like mirrors. A toad leapt out of the brambles into the road and the dog followed it with his snout as it crossed to the opposite verge. Above the rock peak of a nearby hill a pair of choughs wheeled and cawed. She caught the smell of peat smoke on the offshore wind.