York, and the CIA in Albania. He’s not on any watch list, and you know relations between everyone in Washington are at an all-time low.’
‘What do I say to the Americans? They’re being a bit tricky about access.’
‘I’ll see to it that you get in this afternoon. Present yourself at the US Embassy at three unless you hear from me.’
‘And RAPTOR?’
‘Just see Khan, do your stuff and send back a report to the Bunker. Believe me, they’re very preoccupied with the other nine active suspects and it will only confuse things if you start kicking up in your usual way.’ He paused and laughed quietly. ‘So, no break-ins for the moment, Isis. Keep your powder dry and use those observant eyes of yours. I’m afraid I can’t brief you more clearly than this, because things are very fluid: I’m relying on you and Harland to respond in a way that I know you’re both capable of.’ He gave her a number, then hung up, leaving her sitting in the cool of the communications room, wondering what the hell was going on. Her father had observed that the Chief might be waiting to make his move, but with only three or four weeks left of his tenure, it seemed a little late. Besides, everything he was interested in seemed way off the point.
She left the Embassy and walked out into the dust and noise of Rruga e Durresit, along which she had noticed some shops. She entered one of the boutiques, a sad little place with almost no stock, bought two brightly coloured T-shirts and a canvas shoulder bag she had seen some of the Tirana women carrying. In another, where there was more sense of actual commerce, she chose a belt and some jeans with studded seams. She moved on to a market and threaded her way into a rickety wood and tin structure pierced with shafts of light. Beyond the pyramids of vegetables and boxes of live chickens, she found a woman with a tray of cheap costume jewellery, and bought some imitation gold bangles and a necklace of white and black plastic beads. She turned to the adjacent stall, which was run by a young man with a wispy moustache, and bargained for a black fish-net shawl and a pair of high-heeled ankle-length boots with a cowboy fringe at the top. She placed all her purchases in a white supermarket bag, together with some fruit, and walked purposefully through the stall holders, who had now cottoned on to the presence of a foreigner and were plucking at her jacket.
By ten-thirty, she reached the hotel and, deciding that she would wait for Harland to contact her, went to the swimming pool with a couple of books and a newspaper.
When the doctor first came to Khan in the headquarters of SHISK, the Albanian intelligence service, and treated him for the abscess and broken lip, Khan assumed he was Albanian, but through the days of his interrogation he had learned that the man was Syrian. The SHISK interrogators referred to him as The Syrian or The Doctor, the latter always accompanied by a brief ironic smile that puzzled him. The Doctor also had a habit of making notes when Khan was answering a question. What did a doctor need to know about his past in Afghanistan? More unnerving was the way he interrupted proceedings by leaving his chair near the window and walking over to grasp one of Karim’s arms or dig his thumbs into the tendons at the back of his leg. While the doctor went about his curious inspection, the two Albanian interrogators would sit back and light up; the Americans, of whom there were never fewer than three, stretched, rubbed their necks and murmured under their breath.
At first he was reassured by The Doctor’s presence, thinking it would protect him from the treatment meted out to the other prisoners, but he gradually came to resent, then loathe the strange prodding and pinching that went on. Besides this, the expression in the man’s face had hardened in blood-chilling appraisal. He wished fervently never to be left alone with this man.
The interrogations had followed the same pattern since the first days, when he had given them the outline of his story from Bosnia to Afghanistan. Their interest focused on the last four years. They took it for granted that he met and knew the leadership of the Taleban and al-Qaeda, although he told them over and over again that he was just a mountain commander and had little experience of the regime, and none of the terrorist training camps. But, prompted by the Americans, the Albanian intelligence officers went on asking: ‘Where did you train? Who trained you? What methods were you taught – car bombs, sniper attacks, butane bombs, timing devices? What about dirty bombs?’ Did he know of any radioactive material coming over the border from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan? He had admitted being in that area during the summer of 1999, they said, so he must have known of the shipments of strontium and caesium chloride. He insisted that he didn’t know anything about these shipments, but would not have hesitated to tell them if he had known. He was numb with repetition, going over the details so often that the words lost meaning for him.
They showed him books of photographs, brought by the Americans in two metal cases. This was a welcome break in the routine. He used these to show that he wanted to cooperate, and for all of two days they went through the four or five hundred faces of men who were suspected of having trained in Afghanistan. He gave them names of about a dozen he had fought with, and pointed out that three of the men – a Saudi, a Yemeni and another Pakistani with a British passport – were dead. He had seen the young Yemeni killed in front of him by a Northern Alliance rocket, and he’d buried him with five others under a mound of rocks, the ground being too hard to dig.
The interrogators returned again and again to the al-Qaeda camps. Khan explained that he had gone already trained, battle-hardened from Bosnia. As far as tactics and weaponry went, he knew much more than any of the men he fought with, but he had absolutely no contact with the terrorist training camps. During the last two winters, he had been trapped at the front with no supplies, freezing his arse off, men dying of cold and illness all around him. They had radio contact with Kabul but nobody seemed to care about them. ‘I was a soldier,’ he concluded wearily. ‘I was nothing to them, and the Arabs mostly kept to themselves.’
‘But you were the big hero from Bosnia. You commanded Arabs in battle with the Northern Alliance and on the Tajik border,’ said one of the interrogators.
‘The Arabs without money stayed with us, yes. And they became good fighters. But the rich ones always bought their way back south. I saw them come and knew they would not last more than a few weeks. You may have heard of the different Arab words for them. Tharwa were the rich ones, Thawra were the revolutionaries. It is an old joke in Arabic – a pun, I believe.’
‘Why didn’t you leave earlier?’ asked one of the Americans. ‘You say you hated the Taleban and you had no respect for the Arabs, yet you stayed in Afghanistan longer than anyone we have interrogated. Why?’
‘I was committed to the men I fought with. There were ten of us who’d been together since ninety-eight. We survived all the hardship together, the dangers and the crazy decisions that came from men in Kabul who didn’t have to fight. We ate with each other, shared our possessions; we saved each other and buried our brothers. When you’re out in the mountains like this for years, depending on one another, without supplies, you don’t think about what is going on in the outside world. It’s easy to become cut off…’
‘Myopic,’ offered another one of the Americans.
‘Yes, myopic. I was guilty of that. Yes.’
‘Horse-shit,’ said a man named Milo Franc. He was leading the American team and was easily the most hostile. ‘That’s hypocritical horse-shit, Khan. You’re a mercenary and you fought for a regime that executed women for reading school books!’
‘I didn’t support those things.’
‘You enjoyed killing. That’s the truth, isn’t it? You’re a professional killer. And when your people in Afghanistan were thrown out, you were ordered to the West to kill again.’ He paused and lowered his voice. ‘You left Afghanistan in December – is that right?’
Khan nodded, and stared at the patterns of chips in the wall paint. He knew every square inch of the room and was familiar with the routine noises coming from the street: the surges of traffic, the calls of vendors who appeared at exactly the same time every day, and the sound of students issuing from an academy up the road.
‘So,’ said Franc, hitching up his trousers. ‘At the same moment the leadership disbanded all al-Qaeda fighters and told them to continue the struggle from their own countries, you get it into your head to return to London to complete your medical studies. You go over the border at Spin Boldak and dodge around until you make contact with your family in Lahore. You went through Quetta, travelled north to the tribal areas then doubled back westwards to Iran. We have the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency report, so we know all this. It just so happens that at exactly that moment, hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters took the same route from Mashhad or Zabol in Iran, two cities you admit visiting. And you’re saying that all this is coincidence?’
‘Yes, I wanted my old life back. I realised I’d made mistakes with my life. I wanted to go back… to leave the killing and become a doctor.’
‘That’s crap. You were a lousy student and your professors in London – the ones that remember you – say
