The Network - Jason Elliot [121]
‘Looks a bit like a hearse,’ says H, ‘but very impressive. Let’s look at the manual and check the consumption. We need to sort out how much fuel we need.’
You never quite know what a person has gone through in life to make him what he is. This is especially true in Afghanistan, where no one has escaped the effects of more than twenty years of war without some sort of scar. I don’t want to pry too much into this young man’s life, but he’s a sullen character and I wonder what’s made him that way.
He comes to the house after dusk but before curfew begins. I’d prefer him not to know where we’re staying, but H and I agree it’s a necessary risk, and it would somehow be a breach of Afghan protocol to show mistrust. He’s supposed to be our ally, after all. Sattar is a member of the tribal intelligence unit raised by the CIA. He’s the only one who can provide a link to Orpheus because he’s the one who made contact with him in Jalalabad and knows what he looks like, though he knows nothing of my connection with him.
‘You remember this man?’ I ask, showing him the photograph taken of Manny earlier in the year.
‘The foreigner,’ he says.
‘You can deliver him a message?’
‘Sure.’
‘How will you do it?’
‘I will just do it,’ he says. ‘It will take a few days.’
‘You speak good English, Sattar.’
‘I learned at University of Kabul.’
‘I thought the university was closed.’
‘It was open when I was there.’ He smiles but only with the lower part of his face.
I’m not entirely sure I believe him. I don’t know when the university was last teaching English, but I’ve never met an Afghan who made the same claim and was under fifty years old. I wonder whether his English wasn’t acquired from a spell with the Afghan secret police or the Pakistani ISI, the intelligence service on which the Americans rely too much. And I know it’s wrong to expect him to be cheerful so that he better fits my idea of how Afghans should be, but he noticeably lacks the friendliness and spontaneity of nearly every Afghan I’ve known, and the combination of these things amounts to a kind of private suspicion. It’s not such an odd feeling to have towards someone who you know is a spy.
We talk over the situation around the country and discuss the best route to take for the operation, though I don’t reveal the exact location of where we’re going. He suggests as a precaution that we travel via Bamiyan, where the Taliban have a regional headquarters and can give us a letter of safe passage through the area under their control. I can’t help suspecting that this might be the trap that is waiting to be set for us, but I thank him for the suggestion.
‘What is the message?’ he asks.
I take out a fifty-afghani banknote, almost worthless in itself.
‘Give him this note,’ I say, ‘and this one only. Tell him it comes from England.’
He looks at it with an expression of disappointment. He doesn’t know that I’ve made several tiny holes in the note with the point of a needle. There’s one in the centre of the note, over the engraving of the Darul Aman Palace, and several more over the serial numbers in the corners. It’s taken me a while to find a note which contains the right numbers, but I’ve got about a thousand of them.
If Manny gets the note and knows it’s from me, he’ll know that there’s a message contained in it somehow, and will examine it minutely for clues. He’ll find the pinprick that shows him I want to meet at the ruined Darul Aman Palace. Then he’ll look at the numbers and realise they represent the time, 1800, and the days of the week, indicated by the Persian initials for Monday and Tuesday. I space the holes so that even under inspection they’ll look as though they were made by a staple, and add Manny’s initials to garble the signal. Only he will recognise them and know to eliminate them from the message.
‘How will I know if you’ve delivered it?’
‘You just wait,’ he says.
So I wait. The weekend passes. H and I visit the famous walled gardens of the sixteenth-century ruler Babur, who despite conquering much of Afghanistan and India expressed the