The Network - Jason Elliot [105]
‘Amur amniyati,’ a security matter, he says. That the reason they’re here.
‘What security matter? What matter?’
‘Al jasoos. Britaniyyah. Spy … spy,’ he splutters. ‘British spy.’
I realise I’ve broken the rules somewhere, but how I’ve been classed as a spy is a mystery. I need to know what, or who, has betrayed me.
‘Why?’ I yell. ‘Why do you want me?’
He shakes his head furiously, or as much as the space between his head and the ground allows.
‘La, la. Not you,’ he says. ‘The woman.’
The world’s gone mad. I suddenly hear my own breathing, but I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say. I can make no sense of this. Jameela isn’t a British spy. Jameela is the woman I love. Jameela has nothing to do with all this.
‘Explain.’ I dig the pistol deeper, which has the desired effect.
‘She is agent. She meet with your MI6 from embassy. Every day.’
The answer comes in a rasping whisper, half in English, half in Arabic, but I still can’t believe what I’m hearing. Jameela, he’s telling me, meets a contact from the British embassy every day in a hotel for a few minutes of conversation. He doesn’t know why they meet, he says. That’s why they’ve been watching her. It’s one of their SOPs to take an interest in anyone who meets the intelligence officials of another country.
I can understand that much. But when I ask him to describe the agent she meets with, he gives me a perfect description of Halliday.
‘Thin, like skeleton,’ he says, and mentions his glasses and his stupid mop of hair. The same Halliday who so enjoys playing the buffoon, and who’s pretended from the start never to have met Jameela.
It’s only when I discover the camera in Jameela’s apartment, he says, that they decide to bring her in to question her. It’s not me they wanted.
But they’ll want me now.
It’s time to disappear. I lock the two Mokhabarat men in the bathroom leaving the key in the door so at least their rescuers won’t have to smash it open, and though I doubt it’ll win me too many favours, leave the unloaded pistols outside the door on the floor. In my go bag there’s a first aid kit from which I take a bandage to bind my leg. Then I limp to the main road and take a taxi to my guest house.
There’s no time to do much packing. The taxi waits outside for me. I change out of my blood-soaked trousers and re-bandage my leg. I head for the north of the city, making sure on the way to casually ask the driver where I can find trucks heading for the Eritrean border. When he comes forward to help the police with their enquiries, perhaps he’ll throw them off my trail. Then I take a bus west across the river and head for Omdurman, towards the last place they’ll look for a foreign fugitive.
Beneath the silver dome of the Mahdi’s shrine, the elderly guardian remembers me, and greets me with a warm but grave look of concern as he notices my limp. He escorts me to the buildings behind the shrine. I don’t make any attempt to conceal the trouble I’m in. I tell him I’ll understand if he is unable to give me refuge and offer to make a contribution to the upkeep of the shrine. He eyes the bundle of hundred-dollar bills I put before him. There is a grave and untainted steadiness to his eyes, which perhaps a lifetime of prayer and piety has forged into his soul. Meeting his gaze, I have a momentary sense that my own life seems a frivolous thing. I am saved from the inexplicable impulse to admit to this when he chuckles loudly.
‘We will show you more mercy than the General Kitchener showed to our warriors, but not for money. Your protection is my duty, as a Muslim.’
He hands me back the bundle and leads me to a small room where there’s a simple bed. I sit. He points silently to my leg as if