To emphasise this point, Berisha opened a door and allowed two fighting dogs to bound into the stable and sniff around Khan’s feet.
Skender went rigid. ‘Mr Berisha will discover the truth of your mission if he has to rip your testicles off with his own teeth.’
‘I can see that Mr Berisha is a man of standing,’ said Khan, making sure that he did not give the dogs the slightest provocation. ‘But tell him I could not be a plant because he chose me. Mr Berisha walked to the line and chose me himself. Vajgelis could not have engineered that.’
‘Mr Berisha believes he was tricked by Vajgelis to think you are important to him,’ said Skender with a note of sympathy entering his voice. ‘He says you are worthless. Now he is having to pay money for his cousin who is with Vajgelis and that makes Mr Berisha very angry. He says he may kill you now because you are a worthless piece of shit. Forgive me, Mr Khan, this is Mr Berisha’s words, not mine.’
‘But it is obvious that I am worth more alive than dead.’
Skender tried to translate this but was suddenly silenced by a dusty cough that rose from the depths of his lungs and convulsed his whole body. At one point Khan thought he’d pass out from lack of oxygen but Skender eventually managed to recover and drank a little of the konjak. Then he wiped his eyes and nose with his shirt- sleeve, throwing Khan a glance of terrible resignation.
‘You should see a doctor.’
Skender shook his head and inhaled gently so as not to aggravate his lungs again.
‘Tell Mr Berisha that I will only talk to him if he pays for your medical help.’
‘I cannot tell him this,’ Skender looked shocked. ‘You do not bargain with Mr Berisha. Mr Berisha is the boss here.’
The driver made them go back over the ground they’d covered while he finished the bottle. Then his head began to droop. He got up, ejected the dogs and announced that he would decide what to do in the morning. In the meantime both Khan and Skender would sleep in the stable under guard. Skender seemed to have expected this and, without complaint, lay down on a rough blanket and wrapped the free side around him. Khan was cut down and his possessions thrown at his feet. He pulled them into some order but instead of laying out his bed-roll, he propped himself up and tried to block out the smell of drains that seeped from under the wall. Any fears he had about falling into too deep a sleep soon vanished with the sounds that came from the house, the unmistakable noise of a woman being beaten and taken by force.
Khan looked over to Skender who raised his hands above him hopelessly. ‘In what neighbourhood in London you were living?’ he asked by way of distracting them from the murderous noises next door.
Khan replied that he had shared an apartment in Camden Town with some students.
‘I am living in Hoxton,’ Skender said. ‘ There was I happy.’ His cough began again, with a more rasping note.
Khan listened for a while then reached down to the bottom of his trousers and silently made a little opening in the seam. From the cavity in the material he withdrew a roll of money slightly thicker than a cigarette. He got up, crab-walked over to Skender and placed the four twenty dollar bills – half of what he had left – in the palm of his hand. ‘This will buy you a visit to a doctor and some medication. It seems that I may not need it now.’
Skender shook his head but his hand closed around the money. ‘Thank you, Mister Khan.’
‘I want you to do something for me in exchange. Do you have a pen?’
He produced a stub of pencil from his pocket and handed it to Khan, who quickly wrote a message on one of the three remaining postcards.
‘I want you to send this to America by airmail. If I am killed, please write separately to the address and tell them how and where I died. You understand? Tell him what is happening to me.’
Skender took the postcard and slipped it into his clothing. Khan scuttled back to his bundle to await his chance to escape, reflecting that he had never been in as wretched and menacing a place. Berisha was, he thought, probably mad. He felt that anything could happen to a human being who came into Berisha’s orbit. For a time he listened to a young woman’s voice alternately wailing and remonstrating until the volume of the TV was turned up and a soccer game drowned her words.
Next thing he knew it was daylight. He woke to see Berisha sitting not far from him, holding a cup. He was dressed in sports kit – trainers with a gold Nike flash and an outlandish American football jacket with a dragon emblazoned up one side. Beside him stood Skender and two men in uniform.
‘Mr Berisha has made decision,’ said Skender apologetically. ‘You must go with these men from police.’
Isis Herrick was met at Newcastle station by her father, who had bought himself a new car, a replacement for the dark blue Humber Super Snipe that had met with an unspecified end a month before. The Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire was older and less sedate. Herrick eyed it with little enthusiasm, but the journey to Hopelaw village fifteen miles over the Scottish border passed without incident and the car did seem to make her father happy. As they climbed through the moorland, upholstered in the soft green of new bracken, her spirits lifted and she told him that she was coming round to the Siddeley.
They didn’t talk properly until after lunch, when they took a walk up to Hopelaw Camp, an iron-age fort above the house. They reached a flat rock pitted with ancient cup and ring carvings and sat down. The discussion was new for them: they had never spoken about her job, let alone discussed individual operations, and she thought they would find it awkward. But he listened to her acutely, gazing south, his eyes watering slightly in the breeze, occasionally pressing her for detail.
‘When your mother died,’ he said, ‘I thought the best thing I could do was to keep you out of this business. But it wasn’t my choice, was it? You did what you wanted and you never asked my advice.’ He searched her face. ‘But at least you’re doing so now.’
He picked up a field snail’s striped shell and examined it carefully. She knew it might appear in one of the paintings her father had been producing on and off since he was required to find himself a convincing cover during World War II in the Pyrenees. Herricks were now more sought after than ever; they fetched thousands of dollars in America and on the continent, although his work was generally disdained by art critics for the simple reason that they missed the point of minutely recorded still lifes. One said that they were just ‘quotations’ from nature.
He peered at the shell again. ‘It’s the surface of things that’s usually important. Most people don’t understand that everything is staring them in the face. They just have to look a little harder than they are accustomed to. Here, have a squint at this.’ He handed her the shell and a magnifying glass. ‘You’ll see that there’s a yellowish varnish that’s been worn away in some parts by the sun, and beneath that there are little ripples made as the snail secretes the substances that make the shell. From the top you can see the black stripe achieves a more or less perfect spiral, yet there are flaws in the design that remind you of the miracle of its creation. Here you have all you need to know about the snail, but it’s remarkable how few people are willing to spend time looking closely at anything.’
She had heard the lecture before. She handed the shell back to him. ‘It’s lovely. But what do you think about this operation?’
The old man looked across the hills, and she wondered whether she should be bothering him with it. ‘Intelligence work contradicts my view about the surface of things,’ he said, ‘I think your operation is probably destined to failure because of that.’
‘How?’
‘Because you can’t get an idea what these people are planning from simply watching them. Before the attacks on America in 2001, I understand various security agencies had those characters in their sights. The cell in Germany was under surveillance and I believe someone in the FBI had noticed that they were taking flying lessons. They were looking but they didn’t see.’
‘That was a failure of the system – people not putting it together with other data.’
‘Data! How I do hate that word.’
‘You know what I mean, Dad – intelligence. They weren’t analysing it properly.’
‘The only way to deal with these bastards is to penetrate their organisation and that’s going to take a long time, unless you’re lucky enough to have one of them drop into your lap. None of it’s going to mean much until you’ve got the man on the inside telling you what’s going to happen.’
She told him about the murder of Youssef Rahe.
‘That’s a bad sign,’ he said. ‘It means they know you tried and are now aware of the process which led him to
