The Network - Jason Elliot [83]
There’s a satellite picture of the city on which a number of key points are marked, to which now Seethrough points.
‘On Mondays our target drives on her own to a refugee camp called El Salam in Jabal Awliya, about forty klicks south of the city. Your best place for a first meet will be on the road, out of the city and where nobody’ll be watching.’
‘So what do we do, give her a puncture?’ I’m half-joking, but he’s already considered the scenario and his seriousness comes to the surface again.
‘No. She parks in a gated compound at home and at work. A puncture’s too unpredictable in any case. If she’s clever she’ll suspect something. Better to be in charge of the moment ourselves, and make it quick and unexpected.’ He doesn’t elaborate. ‘You’ll get help with it when you’re there.’
His eye falls back to the photograph of Hibiscus, and lingers there.
‘Ant,’ he says. ‘CX is like an investment account. You have to have some capital to put in to start with. That’s you. It has to outperform anything else in the same field. If the CX reaches the threshold, you put some more money in. But if you’re putting in money and nothing’s happening, you close the account. I’m giving this a couple of weeks. Three at the outside. That’s what you’ve got to work with. George here will run you through the SOPs and help you sort out your legend.’
Then he leaves.
I spend an hour with ‘George’, a retired Security Branch officer who’s previously served in Khartoum and now offers his services to the Firm in the manner of a consultant. It’s a challenging hour, which begins with a geography lesson.
‘The Sudan is the largest country in Africa,’ he begins in a dreary monotone, ‘and the tenth-largest country in the world, with a population of approximately thirty million.’
I haven’t been this bored since Sandhurst.
‘The capital Khartoum is centred around the confluence of the two major tributaries of the Nile, the White Nile and Blue Nile, the latter being the source of most of the Nile’s water and fertile soil, but the former being the longer of the two.’
George uses a pencil to point to the features on the map, but is careful not to let its tip make contact with the paper. ‘The White Nile rises in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, and flows north from there through Tanzania, Lake Victoria, Uganda and southern Sudan, while the Blue Nile starts at Lake Tana in Ethiopia, flowing into Sudan from the south-east. The two rivers meet at Khartoum.’
He moves on to history, racing me through the Mahdist revolt against the British that leads to General Gordon’s untimely demise at the siege of Khartoum in 1885, the British withdrawal and subsequent reoccupation after Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman, where Churchill rode with the 21st Lancers. He mentions the long British efforts to resist the unification of Egypt and Sudan until the country’s independence in 1956, when a seventeen-year-long civil war began. He points out that the ongoing civil war has been rekindled after a hiatus of ten years, and is now being fought between the government of the north based in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army based in the south. The SPLA, he points out, is a non-Arab secular movement with an interesting history, having been supported in turn by the Soviets and the Americans.
Consulting nothing but his own memory, he moves on to average temperatures and rainfall. Land use and natural resources. Different types of law enforcement. Different types of electrical outlets, traffic hazards and places to visit. He points out that the city is divided into three parts: Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North or Bahri. Alcohol can be legally served only in the small Pickwick Club, which forms part of the British embassy.
My initial bemusement has turned into a kind of awe. He identifies the location of the UNICEF headquarters in Street 47, the whereabouts of the British embassy, the embassies of several other countries that can serve as a refuge in an emergency, and the location of other emergency