The Network - Jason Elliot [84]
He shows me the target’s home address and her route to work. He shares with me a frighteningly long list of organisations considered to be terrorist outfits, all headquartered in the city. And he ignores my joke that, with so many terrorist organisations, it’s probably the safest city in the world to be.
My legend should remain as close to the truth in every detail. He asks if there’s a particular one that I’ll feel comfortable with. I suggest that I be working on a mine awareness project, since mine awareness is all the rage nowadays. He likes that, and notes it down in spidery handwriting. It will give me a reliable pretext to be in the UN building and to mix with its staff, because the UN has its own mine programme in the country, he says. We invent a mine awareness organisation based in London that sounds like the real thing but doesn’t really exist. He’ll have Central Facilities, whoever they are, check the name and print business cards with phone numbers that work in the UK. Then other details. The car reserved in my name at the airport is a four-wheel-drive Isuzu. My visa, he tells me, has already been applied for.
George gathers up the maps and papers and returns them to their files. I realise it’s the only trip I’ve ever planned where all the relevant documents are deliberately left behind in the office.
‘Khartoum?’ says H, when I call to tell him the op is on. ‘Well, say hello from me.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘Can’t remember now.’ I picture a wry smile spreading across his face, the way it does when he’s not telling the whole story.
10
No one who’s been to Khartoum can forget the place. You fly for hours over weird and lifeless corrugations of rock and desert until the land turns to the colour of mud. Then, descending towards the city, the sun flashes from a broad snake of water, and in the centre of a sprawling grid of roads and houses streaked with green lines of trees you see what looks like a crescent-shaped samosa, wrapped in the dirty braid of the Nile. This is Tuti island, where the Niles converge.
On the ground, the heat hits you like a wall, and suddenly your white face feels like a lonely beacon as you move among crowds of ebony-coloured faces. You feel the vastness of Africa, like a vibration that stretches back to the beginning of time. A reddish dust moves in snakish wisps above the surface of the tarmac and quickly settles into everything.
The entry stamp in my passport is a swirl of Arabic script, delivered with a flourish by an immigration officer who welcomes me to Sudan with a gleaming smile. I return the smile, and when his pen runs out of ink, I offer him mine.
‘Thank you, my friend.’ He beams and looks like he means it.
Changing money and collecting the car that’s waiting for me involves an hour of form-filling and official stamps. Then I pay a taxi driver to drive ahead of me to the district called Riyadh, and I follow him along a broad highway with chequered kerbstones, overlooked by giant advertisements which I try to decipher from the Arabic as I drive past. The taxi pulls over as we reach a grid of sand-covered streets lined with charmless modern villas, and the driver waves goodbye to me from his window.
I’m greeted by a housekeeper called Kamal, who guides my car into a small compound, carries my things indoors and prepares hot sweet tea, over which he alerts me gently to the danger of scorpions in my shoes in the mornings.
I shower and lie under the ceiling fan for a solid hour. Then out of curiosity I go by taxi to the centre of the city, a term the driver doesn’t understand, but suggests instead the presidential palace, which I remember lies near the water. He drops me near the palace, around which the city’s more interesting buildings lie, and for a couple of hours I walk along roads parallel to the banks of the Nile lined with fat palm