Burnt Shadows (43 page)

       
‘I’m an employee of A and G,’ Raza said, carefully placing
Mother Goose
on the bedside, next to Harry’s reading glasses. ‘You can’t tell me what to do. Come to think of it, I may be in charge of operations here now. I’m the seniormost employee.’

       
‘You may want to reconsider your attitude.’ Steve sat down on Raza’s bed. ‘I employ your employers. I’ve just been on the phone with them, in fact. They’ve given me operational control until they fly in a replacement. It’s really a dry run for them and me – if things work out well I’ll be taking over Harry Burton’s office soon. Next door to yours, I understand?’

       
‘I’ll draft my letter of resignation right away.’

       
‘That’s nice. But don’t forget the ninety-day waiting period before it comes into effect. If Kim Burton is putting Harry on ice until you get to New York, check she has enough ice to make it through to April.’

       
Raza closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

       
‘Please. You have other people here who can translate. Just let me go for the funeral. Harry was . . .’ His voice refused to continue.

       
Steve stretched himself out on Raza’s bed, adjusting the flame on the lantern in the space between them so that shadows flung themselves across the walls and on to the ceiling.

       
‘Harry was the man I admired above all men,’ he said. ‘He never knew that. A visionary. And now what is he? A piece of rotting meat.’

       
‘Please let me go for Harry’s funeral.’

       
‘But the one thing he wasn’t a visionary about was the TCNs. I tried telling him. Sure, they’re cheap. And no one in their own countries cares what’s being done with them. But what do you do about the question of allegiance?’ He played with the flame control, shadows alternating between lurking and leaping. Raza could feel the sweat spread under his armpits, wetting the blood on his shirt into pungency. Steve turned to look at Raza. ‘That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m asking your opinion.’

       
‘They’re desperate for money,’ Raza said, pulling his legs up against his chest. What was Steve trying to suggest? That one of the TCNs had smuggled in an Afghan? ‘Their allegiance comes from their need to keep getting the pay-cheque. And their sense of brotherhood to each other.’ He closed his eyes. He could see himself behind the till of one of Hussein and Altamash’s supermarkets – scanning the barcode on a packet of milk, opening the cash register, answering customers’ queries about where to find the flour. It was an image of peace. He knew then he wasn’t just going to quit A and G; he was going to walk away from this whole life. It was nothing without Harry.

       
‘But you don’t need the pay-cheque, Raza Ashraf of Karachi and Hazara. You’re not one of the grunts who know their positions can be filled by a million other desperate rats if they mis-step even slightly. You’re the ageing boy wonder – the translation genius. You can name your salary in corporations around the world. And you certainly have no sense of brotherhood with anyone.’

       
‘My allegiance was to Harry. His family and mine—’ Again his voice cut out. When he had told Hiroko she had to break the news of Harry’s death to his daughter he thought of the American woman he had never met as his family, closer in some ways than Hussein and Altamash of Ashraf Stores, Dubai.

       
‘I was there, Raza. In Pakistan, nearly twenty years ago. When you sent Harry Burton from your house accusing him of being the cause of your father’s death.’

       
‘I loved Harry.’ He said it quietly, simply, the stark truth of it never evident to him until that moment.

       
‘Is that why you signalled the gunman to fire?’

       
‘I . . . what?’

       
Steve reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out Raza’s satphone.

       
‘And is that why you made a call a few days ago to a known supporter of the Taliban in Kabul?’

       
Blood and shadows everywhere. The Commander?

       
‘I didn’t know  . . .’

       
‘And am I really going to have to track down whoever called you from that PCO in Kandahar – Taliban HQ – just a few minutes before Harry died, or are you going to spare us some time and just tell me, Raza Hazara?’

       
‘I haven’t used that name in twenty years. I was a boy then.’

       
‘I was standing next to you, you lying filth. Just a few hours ago when the call came. I could hear the man on the other end of the phone. Raza Hazara. That’s what he said.’ Steve stood up, picking up the copy of
Mother Goose
as he did so, along with Harry’s satphone and the handgun from the bedside-table drawer. ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ he said conversationally and walked towards the door, book in hand. Opening the door, he pointed to the two contractors standing guard outside – they were the ones Raza had dismissed as ‘hired help’ just a few days earlier.

       
‘Could you give me my phone,’ Raza said, holding out a hand and then quickly withdrawing it as he noticed its tremble. ‘I need to call A and G – their lawyers should probably know you seem to be accusing me of something.’

       
Steve shut the door and walked back to Raza, vastly amused.

       
‘Do you really think A and G is going to get into a legal tussle with the CIA just when they’ve finally got what they’ve wanted for the last decade – a slice of government action? And over you?’

       
‘You have no evidence. I can explain the phone calls.’

       
‘Oh, you can explain anything, I’m sure. But here’s the bad news for you: I saw you signal the gunman and I saw you duck just before he opened fire. That’s sufficient evidence in my world.’ He put a hand on Raza’s shoulder. ‘I know what you’re all about. And I’m counting on your cowardice – tell me who else was involved before this gets unpleasant.’ He stepped back. ‘I’ll give you time to think it over. You’ll see sense.’

       
He left, quietly closing the door behind him.

       
There was a place in Raza’s mind where nothing existed but the practical application of selected facts – it was the part of his brain he used when reading reports or sitting in on A and G meetings in which it was manifest that his company was in business with murderers and thugs. That part of his brain had once allowed him to sit through a meeting in which a new client of A and G’s extolled the effectiveness of rape as a tool of war. Raza impassively translated every word he said. Afterwards, Harry had found him in the A and G Olympic-sized pool, swimming furious laps, and said, ‘I’ve made it clear I’m not getting involved with this contract.’ Raza replied, ‘Even so, I’m really quitting this time. Don’t think a raise will change my mind.’ Harry crouched by the side of the pool and placed his hand on Raza’s slicked-down hair. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, son,’ he said, and Raza stayed.

       
As Raza changed into a shalwar kameez, first wiping blood methodically off his body with a wash cloth and the water from Harry’s bedside flask, he retreated to that purely practical section of his mind. Harry had chosen this structure for himself and Raza rather than any of the more spacious ones for a very particular reason – Raza moved his camp bed away from the wall and tapped on the floor until he heard the hollow sound which had confirmed to Harry the theory he’d constructed around the locals’ tales of the vanishing family who had lived here. (‘What about the dead boy?’ Raza had asked. ‘He was just a dead boy,’ Harry replied.)

       
Raza made his way around the room, picking up whichever items would be of use – a large knapsack, a bottle of mineral water, a torch, granola bars, a key, his Pakistani passport and US green card. What considerable space was left in the knapsack he filled with the vast sums of money Harry kept on hand to buy Afghan loyalty. He hesitated a moment over the photograph of Hiroko, Ilse and Kim in New York, and then decided against it. He wanted nothing on him which would tie him to anyone else. But he took Harry’s bomber jacket – his own was too stained, and the smell might attract wild animals.

       
The tunnel was narrow and musty, its roof too low for upright walking. Raza thought of Harry in here just weeks earlier, hunched over with his body angled sideways to ease his progress. ‘I feel like Alice in Wonderland stuck in that house,’ he’d groaned and Raza, slight enough to walk through with minimal discomfort, had laughed and said that if ever they really needed to use this tunnel as an escape route he’d go first because there was every likelihood that Harry would get stuck. ‘What then? You’d leave me?’ Harry said, turning to smile at Raza and tripping on a stone – here, here, the torch-light shining on the tunnel wall showed Raza the smear of dried blood from Harry’s temple. Raza wiped tears off his face and pressed them against Harry’s blood. Then, awkwardly – it required him to crane his neck uncomfortably – he pressed his mouth against the moist blood. But it still didn’t seem quite real to him.

       
It was almost an hour later that he finally emerged on the other side of the tunnel into a roofless structure which smelt faintly of livestock, no sign of habitation around. The scent came from the dun-coloured tarpaulin which Harry had found in a barn filled with goat droppings. Beneath it was a jeep.

       
Raza pulled off the tarpaulin, unlocked the jeep with the key from Harry’s bedside, and drove out of the derelict barn. Through the darkness he made out the faint outlines of mountains – the border, and Pakistan. He stopped the jeep, consulted his GPS. Pakistan was the obvious destination. Obvious to him, and to Steve. He might just be able to convince the Army guards at the border to phone Captain Sajjad Ashraf and receive assurances that Raza was just another Pakistani who the Americans had turned against after extracting all that was useful from him, but the bigger problem was the bounty hunters who prowled the border area, on the lookout for ‘enemy combatants’.

       
Raza stepped out of the jeep and unbuttoned the soft top. The stars glittered malevolently. One phone call from Steve – perhaps that call had already been made – and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit-card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life allowing him to wind a path back through a thicket of lovers to the specificity of the 3.13 a.m. call with Margo, the poem forwarded to Aliya, the box of Miami sand couriered to Natalie, but a different kind of evidence entirely. That nothing in the world could possibly show him to be Harry Burton’s murderer seemed barely to matter in the face of all that could be done to his life before that conclusion. If anyone even bothered with a conclusion. He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani.

       
Perhaps he should go back, back through the tunnel to Steve. Back where he could explain about the cricket ball and Abdullah’s brother, and the Commander – and Kim Burton could verify he had called her to discuss Abdullah. And what would that prove? Only that he wanted to help a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years who ran from the FBI. If Steve was looking for confirmation that Raza’s allegiance belonged to some brotherhood of jihadis he would find it right there, right from Kim Burton’s mouth. He leaned his head against the doorframe with a small pathetic cry.

       
No, there could be no going back – not to the compound, not to his life. He unzipped the knapsack, tossed out his passport and green card and watched the wind sift fine particles of sand on to the documents that made him legal. For an instant longer he breathed in deeply the desert air, everything around him vast and indifferent, and felt the terror of unbecoming.

       
Then he returned to the jeep, and plotted his course on the GPS navigation system.

35

In New York taxi cabs Hiroko always made sure she sat behind the passenger-side seat so the cabbies could turn to look at her as she talked to them about their lives – discussing everything from the disconnection between their families back home and their all-male New York world to every component that went into strike action: leasing and medallions, the TLC and the TWA, the brokers and the garage-owners. Through these conversations she began to understand a great many things about this varied group of migrant workers, including their network of communication – via CB radios, cell-phone networks, holding-lot conversations, driver-welfare organisations, the Taxi Workers’ Alliance.

       
It was the effectiveness of this network of communication – and Omar from Gujranwala’s willingness to put it in motion on her behalf – which had her walking into the reading room of the New York Public Library four days after Harry Burton died.

       
As she entered the cavernous reading room made cosy by its many desk lamps, Hiroko found the teacher in her beaming at the sight of all those heads bent over books, some thrum of energy and the turning of pages slipping the room out of the grasp of silence into the comfort of quiet. She walked down the aisle between desks, the chandeliers reflecting their light off the floor, turning it into a bronze river.

       
Halfway down the room, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man wearing a thick green sweater was sitting straight-backed in his chair, his fingers resting very lightly on the page of a book. The electric-blue tape which held together the frame of his glasses identified him as the man Hiroko had come to meet.

       
She sat down in the empty seat beside him. The expectancy of his glance towards her quickly shifted into discomfort, and he stood up, taking the book with him, and moved down to another chair which had empty seats on either side of it.