The Network - Jason Elliot [106]
The pain makes me tremble. The suture needle is crescent-shaped and glides through my skin while the old man holds the two sides of the wound together. He’s unflappable and would have made a good surgeon’s assistant. He even mops the sweat from my head as I do the sewing, and cuts the black thread where I point, just above the final knot. Then I drench the wound in the Betadine again and cover it tightly with the bandage.
‘Khelaas. I will pray at the shrine for your health,’ says the old man. ‘Insha’allah you will recover quickly.’
‘Insha’allah,’ I hear myself whisper.
The pain invades my whole leg now. I feel the double toxins of adrenalin and exhaustion, and though my mind is still racing I long for sleep. But there’s one more thing. When the old man leaves, I take the satphone and thank God and the Mahdi that I can receive a signal near the window.
There’s a watery-sounding ringtone and a succession of clicks.
‘Hope you I didn’t wake you up,’ I say when it answers, ‘but they say cowgirls don’t sleep much.’
‘Goddamn it, Tony, you sound like you’re at the bottom of a creek. You on a satphone?’
‘I need to find a good travel agent,’ I tell her. ‘Someone to get me home quickly without showing up on anybody’s grid.’
‘Hell,’ she says, ‘so long as it’s illegal, I’ll help any way I can.’
This distant promise of help fills me with the strange urge to cry. I tell her where I am, that I need a new passport, ticket and some supporting identity. She doesn’t waste time on trying to find out how I came to be on the run from the Sudanese secret service. She just wants to know my exact location, preferred time frame and route for the exfil, whether the immigration system at the airport is computerised, and whether local law enforcement has a photograph of me. She asks what languages I speak. I tell her I’ll buy her dinner at Nora’s in DC when this is all over.
I feel burningly hot and then cold. I can’t sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool of black thoughts and things I don’t understand and my feelings are too strong for me to think properly. I feel brutalised by the thought that Jameela was expecting my arrival in Khartoum and played along with every part of it. I wonder, since everyone else I’ve trusted seems to be lying to me, whether Grace will betray me too.
Halfway through the night, sleep closes in on me.
So it’s with nothing short of a feeling of the miraculous that I open the package that arrives at dawn the next day. The old man delivers it when he comes to wake me, saying that a child came to the shrine and asked that it be given to the foreign guest. There’s a printed reservation number for my ticket, a Canadian passport in the name of Cousteau and a worn leather wallet complete with credit cards. There are even some Canadian dollars in it. I see from the passport that I entered Sudan three weeks earlier. I was told the CIA station in Khartoum had been shut down but they’ve obviously kept some talented employees on the payroll, and I’ve never been quite so grateful for the no-nonsense American attitude towards getting things done.
The rest is a gamble. If the police are stopping cars on the way to the airport I’ll call it off and try my chances to the south. But if they’re only checking passports, I have a good chance of slipping through. They won’t have my photograph, and only the two Mokhabarat officials can personally identify me.
I take a taxi to the airport and sit in the car with the driver until I see a party of foreigners disembarking from a hotel minibus. I pay the driver extra and ask him to wait, though