A Loyal Spy (31 page)

Jonah looked out across the water. It didn’t seem to matter how bad it got, Alex would find a way to profit from it.

‘Beech said that Monteith has been suspended?’

‘Monteith’s a spent force,’ Alex replied. ‘Fisher-King has washed his hands of him. Five have stepped in with an audit team headed up by a wizened old spy-catcher called Holdfast. They’re going through all the files. They’re putting names to faces. It’s only a matter of time before they pin the Kiernan assassination on you. You’d better start making plans. If I was you I’d be liquidating my assets, preparing to disappear somewhere without an extradition treaty. I’ve heard Venezuela is nice. Mongolia less so …’

‘And you? What are you going to do?’

‘What I always do. I’m cutting a deal.’

‘With who?’

‘Listen to me, none of us owes a damn thing to Monteith.’

‘And the rest of us? Do you owe us?’

‘I’m sorry, Jonah, but you had your chance. You could have put a stop to all of this but you did nothing. I’m not taking a fall for you. And as for the others, Beech should be fine, he walked away, after all. He can justifiably claim he knew nothing. And Lennard, he’s in Burma, mate, he’s revoked all things material. He’s already in a cell.’

‘Where is Monteith?’

‘He’s hiding out down near Bristol at his old alma mater, Clifton College. It’s a little puppy kennel for would-be imperialists. They’ll love you down there. Tell him to find somewhere better to hide.’

When he returned to the car park, Jonah discovered that his Land Rover had been stolen. He contemplated walking back to the visitors’ centre to tell Alex but then thought better of it. He could do with a walk. He set off along the Thames path.

He spent that night in a hotel in Earl’s Court frequented by backpackers. He lay on a single bed and stared up at the water-damaged ceiling. He could hardly bear to acknowledge the scale of his betrayal of both Beech and Miranda. Beech, who was an honest and loyal friend, and Miranda, who had given up everything to go with him to exist in virtual exile in Scotland, and who had waited patiently while he wrote his ridiculous memoir.

At the same time he could not clear from his mind the memory of Flora clinging to him, her mouth hungrily searching for his. He felt inflamed.

How much Flora was in love with him he did not know; she had once asked him whether it was a game of secrets. He wanted to tell her that it was not.

In the morning Jonah took a taxi to Paddington and a train to Bristol. He found Monteith sitting at a long oak refectory table in the Clifton College school library with a pile of manuscripts on the table in front of him. Term had ended and the school was deserted.

Monteith looked up with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and gave him a candid stare. ‘Were you followed?’

Jonah shrugged. ‘If there were enough of them and they were working in shifts. Do you know anyone that good?’

‘Maybe,’ Monteith replied.

‘With respect, I don’t think that they need to follow me to find you. They probably already know where you are. You should move somewhere more secure.’

Monteith grunted and returned to reading the manuscript on the desk. ‘
The present age is generally thought to be more chaotic than those which went before it
,
he said, reading from the manuscript.
Life has become more controversial; controversy is more violent; the unintelligent are perverting science into a new form of superstition.
For science read security and they could be talking about the present day. It is ironic really.
The letter was signed by four Old Cliftonians: Field Marshal Haig, Birdwood, who commanded the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli, the poet Henry Newbolt, and Younghusband.’

Monteith was an avid student of Francis Younghusband, the repressed, headstrong Edwardian explorer who’d shadowed the Russians on the North-West Frontier, opened an overland route from China to India, and led a quixotic military invasion of Tibet. He was a student of anything that touched on the clandestine quest for information and power in the huge uncharted expanse of mountainous territory between the empires of Britain and Tsarist Russia that had been popularly known as the Great Game.

‘Come on,’ Monteith said, pressing his hands palms down on the table and rising, ‘let’s go for a stroll in the grounds.’ He picked up a canvas Gladstone bag by its handles. They walked past empty classrooms and down a steep set of stone steps and across a quadrangle.

‘It’s difficult to see now from looking at the current crop but Clifton’s founding ambition was to produce the sort of men who would run the British Empire. It was remarkably successful. Thousands of them set forth over the years: soldiers, sailors, political agents, civil servants. Men of moral and political integrity, imbued with the qualities of administration and leadership, and unsparing and unstinting of themselves in their country’s service.’

They walked past the chapel and a memorial to those who had died in the South African War.

‘Isn’t that when we invented the concentration camp?’ Jonah asked.

‘Don’t be flippant.’

In front of the playing fields there was a statue of Field Marshal Haig, the inventor of trench warfare.

‘I’m trying to remember how many people died on the first day of the Somme,’ Jonah said. ‘Twenty thousand, was it?’

Monteith blithely ignored him. ‘I often wonder what it was like for them, when the school had only just been founded. How they went out into the world, conscious that they were the first and that it was up to them to set the school’s reputation. Sit down.’

They sat on a bench, looking out over the empty playing fields.

‘For the rest of us it was merely a question of trying to live up to the standards that they set,’ Monteith continued. ‘I’ve tried my best. There have been some nasty jobs that have had to be done and I’ve not shirked from them. I’ve seen them through. I don’t regret trying to assassinate Bin Laden in ’99. If we had succeeded the world would be a very different place today.’

‘We were played,’ Jonah told him.

‘My overriding concern has been to protect the safety and security of the British populace.’

Monteith was staring intently at the dark strip of woods in the distance.

‘Is everything all right?’ Jonah asked.

‘Can you see someone?’

‘Why?’

‘I thought I saw someone.’

Monteith reached inside his canvas bag and produced a pair of binoculars and turned to focus them on the woods. After a pause he said gloomily, ‘Ramblers.’

Jonah studiedly Monteith discreetly; he looked tired, but not unhinged.

‘You sound as if you’re disappointed.’

‘I want them watching me,’ Monteith explained, in a tone that suggested that he was having to explain himself to a small child. ‘That way I’ll know where they are when I decide to disappear.’ He returned the binoculars to the bag. ‘We’ve got a problem, a serious bloody problem.’

‘Go on.’

‘Fisher-King is suffering selective memory loss. He says he never sanctioned the parlay with the mullah. As if he wasn’t there, sitting at the back of the room with his bloody sanctimonious smile. He denies all knowledge of an order to assassinate Bin Laden or a conversation with our American cousins. He knows nothing about the death of Kiernan or the Department’s involvement in it. He knows nothing and his organisation knows nothing. Instead, Fisher-King has chosen to accuse the MoD of running a black-ops kill squad run by yours truly and staffed by a gaggle of mulatto flotsam of questionable loyalty.’

‘Mulatto flotsam?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘I’ll try not to be offended.’

‘I’m offended on your behalf. But that’s not the worst of it.’

‘Go on …’

‘They’re going to let the plot run. They’ve no plans to intercept Nor before he gets here.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because Fisher-King thinks that he can score a propaganda coup and smash an al-Qaeda cell in this country if they can lure Nor here and catch him red-handed. He probably thinks they’ll give him a knighthood. How could he be so bloody foolhardy?’

‘Where is Nor now?’

‘The video confession was uploaded in an Internet café in Peshawar.’

‘Pakistan,’ Jonah mused. ‘How is Pakistan these days?’

‘Most of the money that doesn’t go to service their international debt is spent by the military, which doesn’t leave anything over for schools or hospitals. And the military, which I would say is the last bastion of credible power in the country, is increasingly infiltrated by Islamist factions allied with jihadist elements and assisted by our old friends in the ISI. Efforts to impose rule over Baluchistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have largely been in vain. The Pakistan army was recently kicked out of South Waziristan by well-armed jihadis. Kashmir is a mess and there is, of course, the threat of loose nukes.’

‘So it’s my kind of place.’

‘It is,’ Monteith replied, without smiling. ‘I suggest that you get yourself there straight away. Find Nor and finish the job once and for all. I mean kill him.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘I can’t afford for you to get cold feet again.’

‘I’ll do the job,’ Jonah told him.

‘Good.’

‘But I’m not going to be able to take a step without the ISI knowing about it.’

‘Of course.’

Jonah realised with a sinking feeling that he had no means of secure communication with Miranda. No means of telling her that he would not be coming straight back. A second betrayal.

‘Let me explain something to you, Jonah.’ Monteith was staring fixedly into the distance with his fists clenched on his knees. ‘After the ambush and the death of Kiernan, I came under considerable pressure to take action against you. Fisher-King accused you of being in league with Nor. It didn’t help that your personal life was a mess. The collapse of your marriage was judged to be a destabilising influence. I had to fight to keep you. At the same time, I had to fight to maintain my own standing. The Department was threatened. Certain compromises had to be made. I did not approve the kidnapping of your wife’s lover six years ago. I did not initiate it. In fact I argued against it. But my arguments did not prevail. I regret now that I did not fight harder for you. You have never given me any reason to doubt your loyalty.’

In all the years that he’d known him, Jonah had never heard Monteith admit a mistake, let alone make an apology. He came from a generation of soldiers who viewed any admission of failure as a weakness. It was unnerving. ‘I need to leave for the airport,’ Jonah told him.

Monteith studied him for a while. ‘Very well.’ He opened his canvas bag again and delved about in it, retrieving a passport. He handed it to Jonah.

‘They’ve put a stop on your personal passport. This one should still be good. I pocketed it before I left.’

The passport was Belgian. Jonah flicked through the well-worn pages, noting the mishmash of immigration stamps. He stopped at the photo page. ‘Is that the best photo of me you could find?’

Monteith grimaced. ‘You look almost human.’

‘My name is Ishmael?’

‘Ishmael was Abraham’s oldest son, born by his wife’s servant Hagar. He was the world’s first bastard.’ He cleared his throat. ‘
He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him.
Genesis sixteen; verse eleven. Rather apt, I thought.’

Next Monteith passed him an envelope packed with cash.

‘There’s ten thousand dollars in there. In addition I have a line of credit with Yakoob Beg that you can utilise. I warn you, Jonah, they’re preparing to make a scapegoat of you. You’re not safe and nobody around you is either. I shredded everything I could before I left but it won’t make any difference. They’ll build a conspiracy out of your schooldays with Nor. They’ll use the kidnapping as evidence of sociopathy. With her history, they’ll have a field day with Miranda. She’ll be cast as an accomplice. They’ll plant evidence tying you to the plot. And it’s certain they’ll use it as the pretext to bring down your mother and end the reforms to the intelligence community that she has championed. The only chance you have to prevent all that is to find Nor and put a stop to him before he gets anywhere near this country.’

August 2005

In Peshawar there was a layer of brown smog that trapped the acrid smoke from the refuse fires of Afghan refugees. Each morning Jonah sat in the courtyard at Green’s Hotel and listened to the songbirds in cages on the roof. For four days he had been waiting on permission to travel up into the tribal areas in the mountainous border regions where Afghanistan blurred into Pakistan.

It was a week since he had travelled as Ishmael to Lahore via Dubai. In Lahore, he stayed in a cheap hotel above a row of gold shops and ate curried chicken and dhal on Annarkali Street. The following morning he flew to Peshawar, the bustling city at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the gateway to Afghanistan.

It was more than six years since he had last stayed at Green’s Hotel. That was in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of the CIA agent Kiernan, in the final days before Monteith, who was terrified of discovery, dispersed the Afghan Guides to the four winds. Jonah was sent to the Kosovo/Albanian border and a few weeks later his wife ended their marriage. Six years in which the landscape had irrevocably changed: Iraq and Afghanistan were under occupation and there was a blockade of fuel and food supplies to the tribal areas, where thousands of Pakistani troops backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery were rolling northwards into the Pashtun villages, searching for jihadis.

And two men in a beat-up Toyota Hilux followed him every time he stepped out of the hotel.

Ms Nasir of the Narcotics Section of the Home Department of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas had all the trappings of a Pakistani bureaucrat – a dingy private office, a locked filing cabinet, a huge red telephone and a stapler, a desk fan for when the electricity worked and a view out of the window of a jumble of bricks. Her purpose was to stamp and initial permits for the tribal areas. It was a job that gave her absolute bureaucratic power and she knew it. On his first visit Jonah filled in the forms and told her that he was looking for his brother; on the second he brought her a packet of duty-free dates from Dubai; and on this third visit a bottle of perfume.