Devil’s Harvest (33 page)

Now it was Bartholomew’s turn to sit upright. This was what Todd had been sitting on. His suspicions immediately turned to Hussein. The Saudi had been playing him off against the Chinese, passing on bidding details. He’d feared it all along.

‘Deng’s daughter appears bent on exposing the involvement of the ministry and this country in the strike. Her agenda is unclear, but, given that the target was her father, this may simply be an emotional personal response. However, we believe that she is being assisted by a British national – a professor from Bristol University. He’s actively assisting her in the field. And we have reason to believe that he constitutes part of a wider initiative.’

‘A fucking spy!’ Richards had roused himself from his punch-drunk stupor.

‘Yes, “a fucking spy” as you so eloquently put it. And that brings me to you, Captain.’

The tension between the two of them was unbearable – Richards clenching his fists as if poised to charge, Todd’s smile sickle-thin.

‘The professor interacts with the Chinese via an operative at Zhejiang University. Their communications are elaborately encoded, posing as mathematical and scientific data, and are transferred via an intermediary at Bristol, a colleague of the professor’s. We haven’t been able to decipher any code as yet. But, the professor has a wife …’ Todd paused and looked down at his notes. ‘Jane.’

While the name meant nothing to Bartholomew, an animalistic noise emanated from Richards, a strangled groan of horror. The captain turned quite pale and his lower lip seemed to be quivering. Todd turned to Bartholomew, his eyes sparkling with something akin to delight.

‘So, Air Marshal, if you’re battling to follow, let me summarise for you. The foreign operative now in Sudan – using the code name Birdman – has a wife here in Bristol. Jane. Who works at Filton for this country’s arms manufacturer and who is having an affair with your second in command on the Reaper Project. Perhaps the most sensitive operation currently being conducted by the British Empire anywhere in the world. Facts I assume you were blissfully unaware of until now?’

There was a menacing pause after this statement. Todd looked as if he might pounce from the chair like some kind of raptor.

‘However, I understand that you’re the one who sought her raised security clearance in order that she could assist on the project. This appears to be something of a modus operandi with the professor and his wife: her previous extra-curricular relationship was with a horticulturist, one Jason Long. He has a postgraduate degree in communications, worked in the military and would now have the world believe that he has “dropped out” in order to potter around with compost and dahlias. We believe that he may be the handler for the couple.’

Bartholomew felt his pulse racing, a thudding that hurt his chest and made his eyes water. This would be when his heart finally gave out. He would thrash and his face would contort and the unmoving Todd would continue to smirk while he died on MI6’s beige carpets. He should leave, but he knew if he tried to stand up he would faint. He was stuck, like a baited bear, waiting for his torturer to finish him off.

‘MI6’s view is that we’re facing a sophisticated operation aimed at undermining this country and you’re unwittingly responsible. I say unwittingly, but we’ve taken careful note of your impending retirement, your failing health, your decision to bring the said Jane closer to the project, and several large payments into an offshore account from a well-monitored Saudi dealer. We also note a rather disastrous decision involving a dingy and unlettable apartment in Corfu. This may add up to nothing, Air Marshal, but I give you my assurance, if this blows up, we’ll make you the very centre of the shit-storm.’

To Bartholomew’s surprise, Richards appeared to be crying, his body shaking and his hands covering his face. Under different circumstances, he would have been quietly pleased that the young buck’s sexual indiscretions had caught him out. Apart from an embarrassing misunderstanding involving a Thai escort, his own bedroom exploits had been limited to fumbling and gasping in the dark with Lilly. But the enormity of the calamity left him unable to feel anything. He was utterly numb, aware only of his collapsing cardiorespiratory system.

Todd, on the other hand, was clearly made of steel, lacking in any compassion, observing the crumbling British air-force captain before him with cold boredom.

‘Listen very carefully to me, both of you.’

Richards stopped snivelling, like an obedient schoolboy, desperate for paternal guidance.

‘This gets cleaned up now. It goes no further. This is the terminal point for all current operations. The Reaper Project closes. You make it your personal priority to clean all traces. The paper trail disappears. It never happened.’ Todd retained an unsympathetic expression, despite each cutting instruction.

‘Air Marshal, the Saudi connection is severed. Permanently. You wait for a dignified period of time. Then you both hand in your resignations.’

‘And the Bristol professor? Deng’s daughter?’ Bartholomew’s voice was rasping. The ache in his abdomen had spread into his chest, as if his bloated stomach could leave no space for him to breathe.

‘Don’t worry about them. We’re working on that. In our own way.’

‘I’m afraid I heard someone else say that. It may be too late.’

For the first time, Todd’s impassive demeanour cracked. His eyes widened and a red flush of anger appeared about his neck. ‘What the hell have you gone and done now, Bartholomew? You’d better not have let that bloody Saudi idiot off his leash.’

Chapter 19

MALUAL KON VILLAGE, NORTHERN BAHR EL GHAZAL, SOUTH SUDAN

Margie was up early to see them off. She looked freshly scrubbed and her entire frame gleamed, if rather pucely, in the morning heat. Gabriel expected to see steam rising off her as she stepped out from the shade to give them a farewell embrace. The parting was harder than he had anticipated. Alek had tears in her eyes as she turned away, leaving Gabriel alone with Margie while she went to say goodbye to some of the other staff members. Gabriel felt anxious about leaving. The camp had somehow been a safe haven. Margie wrapped him in a maternal embrace from which he did not recoil.

‘I’m so lost out here,’ he found himself saying to her, ‘buffeted from one place to another. I can’t read people, I don’t understand the conversations that happen around me. I felt a strange kind of grounding here at the camp.’

It was a breathy rush of honesty that surprised him. There seemed to be no time for pretence. This was it, he realised. He could sense that time was running out. His life was slipping through his fingers like powdery sand, and his cupped palms were almost empty.

‘Ah, love, I knew you’d fall for me Islay charms in the end,’ Margie joked, but she was watching him with large, sympathetic eyes. It only made his emotions more unmanageable. He felt he had only minutes to grasp the remainder of his life, only seconds in which to explain himself.

‘Should I be scared? Am I in danger?’

The questions sounded ridiculous, and also profound. How was it that his life had changed so entirely that he could be asking them, early in the morning, the sun coming up over the rising smoke of a UNHCR refugee camp?

‘Honey, out here, you’re always in the path of danger. But the truth is, you walk across a street in Manchester or London, you’re in danger too. Some kid could run you down in his unlicensed street racer.’

For a moment, Gabriel was confused as to whether he had told Margie the mundane story of his morning slap outside the university. It was the strangest continuum, from that insult to this place now, as if the one had somehow led to the other.

‘Just a different kind of danger, I suppose,’ Margie continued. ‘And I prefer this. None of it makes any sense. But this feels more real. And generally I know my enemy out here. I feel less confused here than in a big city where no one stops to care. Always on the move, but with no reason to go. While here everyone stays still, though they have all the reason to keep going.’

Gabriel considered the wisdom and irony in this. Perhaps adversity could enhance a life. Though he doubted the refugees around him would consider this particularly wise.

‘You may be right, Margie. I can’t tell yet. My problem is that I don’t have any kind of grasp of what the danger is out here.’

‘Well, just be careful, Gabriel my dear.’ Margie frowned with concern, her brow crinkling into small rolls of fat. ‘And please look after her.’ She gestured to Alek who was striding back up towards them. ‘She deserves better than she has received so far.’

Margie gave them both a last hug before handing Gabriel a parcel of fruit and bread. He half-hoped that they could delay their departure further, but Alek had clambered into the passenger seat and was looking away from them both, staring out across the horizon of shelters. Margie held his door open for him.

‘You come back and marry me, lad. Or there’ll be real danger in your life,’ she chuckled to herself.

He put his hand into his pocket for the keys and instead pulled out the AK-47 bullet he’d picked up in the graveyard, hard and cold. There would be no reprieve.

The journey, heading west from the camp, was slow going. Alek seemed distant, her head resting on the side pane, her thoughts with others. They hardly spoke for hours, battered by endless kilometres of treacherous road. The landscape was depleted of people. Boredom seemed to be the only kind of threat. They stopped at a roadside clearing to eat the fruit and bread from Margie in the shade. The air was sticky and midges tickled Gabriel’s cheeks and lips as he ate. The combination of starch and fruit gave him indigestion, but he’d learnt to eat whenever the opportunity presented itself. Alek didn’t seem hungry and picked at the bread with spindly fingers, letting half of it fall as crumbs to the ants and beetles below. A small sparrow tweeted with interest and, unable to resist the temptation, flew down, landing near her feet.

A strong stream, the water brown and silty, passed close by, gurgling as it pushed through matted layers of grass and shrubs. It paused in a wide, slowly turning pool, a thin, foamy layer in the middle, before diving through the mouth of a pipe leading underneath the road. On the other side, it continued, filtering off again through the undergrowth.

Gabriel slid down the embankment, leaving his sandals behind and letting his feet crush into the matted grasses. The water lapped over his feet as he washed his hands, sticky from the mango he had just eaten. He stripped off down to his underpants – no longer self-conscious – and waded into the stream, until the water rose above his knees. He splashed it up onto his chest and under his arms. It was cooling and, though filled with grit, cleaner than the sweat and dirt that covered him. He rubbed his chest and legs with his palms, watching the brown rivulets trickle back into the water. There was probably some good reason not to wash in such a stream, he thought, and Alek would no doubt point this out to him in due course. Some terrible river parasite that would enter his body and devour him from the inside out, or a waterborne disease that would kill him in hours. He wondered if he cared any more.

Then he heard the squelch of bare feet in the mud behind him. He half-turned to see the willowy figure of Alek, crouching down in the shallows and also washing her hands and feet. Her scarf was draped over her shoulders and upper arms. Gabriel wondered again about the strange mark he had glimpsed at the swimming pool in Wau. She caught him looking at her and turned away, patting her cheeks with her hands. Stretching one arm upwards, she hooked the back of her top and pulled it off her body, together with the scarf, in one easy, fluid motion. The sight of her half-naked was dramatic and Gabriel couldn’t look away. But it wasn’t the vision of her painfully thin body, her almost absent breasts, or the sweep of her dark torso that captured him. The bicep of her arm had been burnt with a deep injury that still seemed to glow with pain, the skin folded in welts like waves retreating on a fierce tide.

Gabriel realised he was staring at the crude, deliberate shape of an open eye branded into her skin. The scar looked recent, alive somehow, but may have been old; it was hard to tell.

Alek saw his mouth part in horror, but she said nothing. Instead, she leant forward and scooped water up, splashing it over her chest, the streams flowing off the tips of her nipples.

‘It’s the scar of one who’s been abused,’ she said eventually. ‘Like the mark on the outside of spoiled fruit.’

She was talking to the water, but as Gabriel started to formulate a question, she turned to look at him. ‘Like memories, it can never be erased. Don’t ask me more. What’s done is done and we go on.’

She scooped some more water onto herself and then loped out of the river, pulling her clothes back over her wet skin.

‘We should get going. We’ll be there in a few more hours.’

‘Where, Alek? Where will we be in a few hours? Don’t tell me it’s where the plants are. I’ve given up on believing that. You haven’t been straight with me – not once since we first met in Juba. I don’t think I can believe anything you tell me.’

Alek looked at him sadly, but did not protest.

‘Where will we be?’

‘We will be where we need to be.’ With that, she turned and made her way up the embankment.

It was maddening, her arrogant assumption that he would continue on whatever path she chose. And yet she was right, he had no options, and even if he did, even if he could turn around and miraculously find himself back in his damp home in Clifton Village, with sleet pattering on the bedroom windows, it was too late. He had come too far and seen too much. Did he have a choice? Perhaps, but only as a notion. In reality, his destiny was hopelessly in Alek’s slim hands.

Gabriel pulled on his shorts, his shirt clammy on his skin. There seemed to be no way to get clean, to rid himself of the sweat and dust that had collected on him. He picked his way over the grass, taking care not to injure his delicate toes and feet.

Voices drifted down from the road above him as he made his way up the slope to the Land Cruiser. He looked up to see three soldiers standing at the back of the vehicle, trying to open the rear door. Gabriel looked around but couldn’t see their vehicle. It was as if they’d materialised out of the bush. As he approached them, he saw that they were young, in their early twenties, perhaps even younger. They looked both nervous and exhausted, their arms and faces grimy. Their uniform was an assortment of camouflaged military issue and ill-fitting civilian clothing. One looked to be only a boy, with an incongruous strip of bright-pink material tied around his head as a bandana. An older one had a dirty bandage wrapped around his forearm, the blackened crust of blood attracting flies.