A Loyal Spy (46 page)

‘Die, motherfucker, die! Ugh, time’s up, bitch, close ya eyes …
’

Opposite him a soldier who could not have been more than eighteen scowled ferociously at him. ‘Are you mean-mugging me?’

‘Sir, you’re in a four-vehicle convoy,’ Sergeant Stone called out from the front seat. ‘Tango’s One through Four. This is Tango Two. We’re heading east on Route Fran.’

‘
Why are you still alive?
’ the turret gunner sang.

‘Where am I going?’ Jonah shouted.

‘Wayne County Jail.’ The sergeant grinned manically. There were several rifle shots nearby and then a burst of automatic fire. Jonah tried to curl up on himself. Then he realised that there was something wrong with the noise; it was coming out of the speakers. It was part of the track. The eighteen-year-old opposite him was laughing uproariously.

‘
Rot, motherfuckers, rot! Decay, in the dirt, bitch, in the motherfucking dirt! Die nameless, bitch.
’

‘I’m just fuckin’ with ya!’ Stone said. ‘We’re going to Camp Baharia.’

‘Every day in this fuckin’ place,’ Command Sergeant Major Frydl said, ‘we see the strange and the downright weird.’

They were sitting in a refrigerated Portakabin surrounded by breeze-block walls in Camp Baharia. The walls were grey, but now and then patches glistened purple – he was pretty high on the ketamine and prone to hallucinations. There were no windows.

‘If it was my call,’ Frydl continued, ‘I’d really tighten things up around here. We’ve got people here who are spooks, ­mercen­aries, assassins, God knows what. I got Delta boys coming in from all over Anbar and depending on me for their next meal.’

‘What am I doing here?’ Jonah asked. He knew people who claimed to have gone into combat on ketamine but he had never believed them.

‘I don’t know what you are doing here,’ Frydl said. ‘With respect, sir, I’m not your commanding officer or your goddam shrink. I’m waiting for a phone call.’

‘Can I use your phone?’

There were people that he needed to speak to … Monteith, Yakoob Beg. He wished that there was a phone line to Barnhill – he felt a strong need to explain himself to Miranda, to apologise.

‘Let me guess, sir, you want me to step outside my bomb-proof office into the world of shit outside so that you can whisper secrets down my phone line? I’m not fuckin’ stupid. Get a phone card like everyone else.’

The phone rang. Frydl picked it up. He nodded and put the phone down.

‘You’re out of here on the next convoy,’ he said. ‘And by the way, sir, you look like shit.’

The convoy was four kilometres long with forty vehicles: armoured trucks, MRAPs and Humvees. Jonah sat in a litter of canned coffee drinks and sodas between Ensler, the blurry-eyed nineteen-year-old driver of Truck 21, and Blickstein, the vehicle commander. Ensler had already been driving for fourteen hours. Jonah recognised several of the tracks on the iPod playlist, including ‘Hell’s Bells’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. There were several others that he thought were by Metallica and Slayer. The playlist belted out of the speakers on a continuous loop. Apart from the occasional flash at the edges of his vision he wasn’t that high. It was manageable.

‘Three southbound cars in the northbound lane,’ reported the first truck, and each vehicle commander repeated it like a mantra as the cars approached.
Three southbound cars in the northbound lane … Three southbound cars in the northbound lane …
Twenty times before they caught sight of the cars and then it was their turn and Blickstein said, ‘Three southbound cars in the northbound lane.’

The cars drove past, the Iraqi occupants inside staring sullenly out at them. Blickstein made his finger and thumb into a gun and fired an imaginary shot.

‘How often do you get shot at?’ Jonah asked.

‘Every fuckin’ day,’ Blickstein said.

The mantra continued, nineteen more times:
Three southbound cars in the northbound lane.

Jonah was sitting shovelling mashed potato into his mouth with a spoon when he was approached by a security contractor with Redbriar Security written on his black baseball cap. He was in a massive logistics base in the middle of the desert. The chow hall was as large as an aircraft hangar and had a sign that said we never stop serving.

‘You’re Ishmael?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘I’m delivering you to Mosul.’

‘I have difficult news.’ There was something in the tone of Yakoob Beg’s voice that made Jonah pause before he confirmed that he was indeed listening. ‘Prepare yourself …’

‘Tell me.’

Jonah was in the front seat of an armoured Redbriar Range Rover, racing north on the highway with a satellite phone held to his ear.

‘Monteith is dead.’

Jonah closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘How?’

‘He was murdered. And Beech too. Somebody is killing the Guides.’

He struggled to articulate words. ‘What about Flora? What about Beech’s wife and their son? What about Miranda?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

There was a pause.

‘It’s not safe for you to return to the UK,’ Yakoob Beg said.

‘Nevertheless, that’s where I have to go. Can you contact Mikulski for me?’

‘I can.’

‘I want you to tell him that Nor is Winthrop’s joe and has been since ’96. Tell him that Winthrop conspired with Nor to have Kiernan killed to prevent him from exposing bribes paid by Lodestone to senior figures in the Taliban.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Can you get me into the UK?’

‘Wait.’ Beg moved away from the phone and then returned. ‘Your travel arrangements were designed to be deliberately flexible.’ For a few seconds Jonah listened to Beg flicking through the pages of his Moleskine and then he was talking to someone in heavily accented Russian on another phone. After a couple of minutes he came back on the line. ‘Covert Transit has agreed to your request.’

He had punched the numbers into the phone. It was simply a question of pressing the call button. But to do so would be to alert them that he was alive and that he was coming. It was foolish to think that Flora’s line would not be monitored. Besides, what would he say?

I’m sorry. It’s my fault that Andy is dead. I should have finished the job and killed Nor when I had the chance …

He set the phone down on the seat beside him. He had destroyed everything that was precious to him. There was nothing that he could say that would change that.

‘They got rich here,’ Yanov said, ‘at this very spot, three thousand years ago, at the world’s first truck stop, on a highway that ran all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.’

They were standing beneath the vaulted arch at the mud-brick Mashki gate in the ancient ruins of Nineveh. To the west lay the suburban sprawl of Mosul. The Redbriar security detail had dropped Jonah in the car park and directed him towards the ancient gate where the Bulgarian Yanov was waiting for him.

‘Until God made an utter end to the place.’ Yanov flicked his cigarette butt away. He looked like a gangster complete with five o’clock shadow and a bespoke Turnbull and Asser shirt worn open-necked with massive gold cufflinks. ‘Of course, the route is still viable, if your money is good.’

Jonah met the black glitter of his stare.

‘You are Ishmael?’ Yanov asked.

‘I am.’

‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t meet you in person in Fallujah but I find for extractions from Iraq on insecure routes it is best to subcontract the work.’

‘It’s an impressive level of influence that you have.’

‘It’s nothing really. A sentence inserted here or there by an amenable logistics coordinator in a set of routine orders. We do it all the time. This way, please …’

They walked back through the gate to the car park where Yanov’s silver Mercedes E500 sedan was standing, with its engine running. ‘Any friend of Yakoob Beg is a friend of mine. Get in.’

Jonah walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and climbed in. The air inside was freezing and stank of cigar­ettes. It made his eye smart.

‘Do you need a doctor?’ Yanov asked, beating an impatient rhythm on the dash with his left hand, while his bodyguards climbed into their escort vehicles.

‘I’m fine for now,’ Jonah replied.

Yanov pumped the horn a few times with his fist and after a few seconds the vehicles set off.

It was no surprise to Jonah that the Bulgarians were running people out of Iraq. In 1994, soon after he had joined the Department, Jonah had spent several months as a British Army liaison officer ostensibly monitoring the front lines in Gorni Vakouf in Bosnia but in fact gathering information on the movement of weapons through Croat lines and into Sarajevo by a gang calling itself the Covert Transit Directorate, led by a consortium of former Bulgarian secret service agents. The original Covert Transit Directorate had been established by the Bulgarian State Security Service in the 1970s, ostensibly as a means of smuggling weapons to Soviet-allied insurgent groups in Africa, but had soon expanded to include people-trafficking and drug-smuggling. Like most Soviet-era intelligence operators, Yanov and his colleagues had embraced the opportunities offered by the open market that followed the collapse of communism, initially in the Balkans and then farther afield.

‘Cigarette?’

Why not?
Jonah thought.
Almost everybody you know is dead.
Dead as a result of your own actions or lack of them.
He accepted a cigarette, his first for a couple of years. The sudden rush of nicotine made his head reel.

‘It’s in my blood,’ Yanov told him, sprawling beside him on the back seat of the sedan. They had picked up a driver in Diyabakir, the first of several relay drivers tasked with transporting them across Turkey. ‘I’m Bulgarian. I’m a smuggler. Some of my colleagues prefer to call themselves commodity traders or wholesalers but not me. I’m a smuggler. You want a drink? There’s a bottle of fine Scotch in the glove compartment.’

Sure enough, there was a half-finished thirty-year-old Lagavulin. ‘I don’t think that they made many bottles of this,’ Jonah said, holding the bottle up and reading the label.

‘Just over two thousand.’ Yanov winked. ‘I did an old friend a favour. Pass it over.’ He pulled out the cork with his teeth, took a slug and passed it to Jonah, who wiped the neck and took his own slug. They continued in that way for some time, passing the bottle back and forth, as the car raced west towards Istanbul.

‘Smuggling is my country’s cultural heritage,’ Yanov told him. ‘It’s how we cope. My country has always been squeezed between ideologies, between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, between Islam and Christianity, between capitalism and communism, between empires suspicious of each other. If you want to make progress in the Balkans you have to learn how to make the boundaries disappear. We can cross the roughest sea and traverse the highest mountain. We know every secret pass and, failing that, the price of every border guard.’

The only time that they stopped was to refuel or collect a new driver. Jonah slept fitfully and his dreams were filled with images of cataclysm, of a city swept away by an immense wave.

They entered Bulgaria at the Kapeten-Andreevo border crossing. From Bulgaria they drove through Serbia to Montenegro. The car was waved through each successive border crossing after payment of what Yanov referred to as ‘transit tax’ by means of bulky brown envelope.

Jonah first caught sight of the crystal-blue water of the Adriatic just north of Lake Shkoder, the cliffs falling hundreds of feet to the sea. In the port of Bar there were hundreds of sleek, expensive-looking speedboats bobbing in the packed marina, the fruits of a thriving trade in contraband.

‘This is as far as I take you,’ Yanov told him. ‘From here the Italians have you. They will deliver you to your final destin­ation …’

‘Thank you.’

They shook hands.

Jonah made the 130-mile sprint across the Otranto Strait to Italy with a cargo of cigarettes, landing on a beach in Puglia after midnight. Another Mercedes was waiting. They drove him to a truck stop outside Milan. From Milan to London Jonah travelled in a specially adapted ten-foot-by-ten-foot compartment hidden inside a standard truck-mounted shipping container. He shared the compartment with four Moldovan girls. He spoke to the Moldovans in pidgin Russian and they replied in pidgin English. They were expecting to work as shop assistants. It didn’t seem very likely.

Once in the European Union, Jonah did not have to cross a single police control point before Dover.

‘Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.’

Koran, Sura 4

Monday, 12 September 2005

A flood of commuters emerged from the buses and underground entrances and from the train station, looking dusty in the morning sunlight. The sky was a fierce blue but there were thunderheads advancing from the east and there was an ozone taste in the air as if lightning might strike.

Jonah was standing in the midst of a loose gathering of people arriving, removing their helmets and locking their bikes to the collection of steel hitching posts located opposite the entrance of 89 Albert Embankment, an office block with a café on the ground floor. Motorcycle couriers came and went. Close by, a cluster of early smokers were standing or sitting in a covered shelter that faced the side wall of the MI6 building with its loading entrance and green cathedral-like windows.

It was Monday morning. Dead on 9.50, Fisher-King strode past, briefcase in hand. Jonah followed from the opposite side of the road as Fisher-King walked along the pavement past the police building and Alembic House, towards the roundabout by Lambeth Palace. He crossed Lambeth Bridge. Instead of entering Thames House as expected, Fisher-King strode purposefully across Horseferry Road and down Dean Ryle Street, past the baroque church, St John’s Smith Square, with its leaning towers, and into the rows of Georgian houses beyond. Racing clouds made the streets narrow and elongate. Fisher-King did not look back once. He walked down Great College Street, past the crumbling wall of the medieval abbey precinct and through the gateway into Dean’s Yard. Jonah followed at a discreet distance.