‘You and me,’ said Harland, grinning.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
He touched her lightly on her forearm and let his hand rest there.
‘The question now is am I going to allow myself to be seduced by you?’ She looked at him with an open expression that made him think she was considering it with the same fierce logic that she applied to everything else.
‘I’m not necessarily seducing you,’ he said. ‘I’m more one for synchronised desire.’
‘Really? That strikes me as an unworkable strategy. How do you know when you’re synchronised?’
Now he was embarrassed. ‘Believe me, I’m rather out of practice.’
‘Why don’t I make some coffee and you can try to remember what to do next.’
She divided the rest of the wine between them, then scooped up the dishes and went inside. He heard a clattering as everything was chucked into the dishwasher, then some music that was very familiar to him. ‘What’s that?’ he called through the window. ‘Where have I heard it before?’
Her head appeared in the window. ‘It’s Sufi music. You heard it on the island. When I was in Sudan I bought this in the market. It’s wonderful, but I was worried it would seem silly and out of place in England.’
She reappeared a few minutes later with coffee. ‘You know there’s one thing I slightly resent about you and the Chief. Leaving me on that island with Khan and Loz. I was very exposed.’
Harland nodded. ‘The Chief told me you had backup. By the time I left, Sarre and Lapping were within a few minutes’ boat ride.’
‘But I didn’t know they were there and they couldn’t know what was going on. What kind of backup is that?’
‘I suppose he felt he had no option, because there were so few people at his disposal. But he was right in one way. You drew them out and got the crucial information about Yahya and the time frame we’re working in.’
‘Still, it was bloody irresponsible of him, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, but I’m afraid I was partly to blame. I insisted on leaving. I had to go.’
‘Alpha shit,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Still, you pulled a rabbit out of your own hat, though it turns out to be a much smaller one than mine.’ She smiled mischievously at him.
They were both aware that they were marking time, but Harland reckoned he had made one move and that it was now her turn. The music slipped into the night to entice the uncomprehending world of a London suburb, and they watched each other. Without warning, she moved from her chair to stand over him, then put her hands down to his jaw, cupped his face and bent down to kiss him.
‘We don’t have to go to bed,’ she said. ‘But I thought I’d let you know that we are synchronised.’
‘Good,’ he murmured as she kissed him again.
‘But on the whole, I think I’d like to go to bed very soon – with you.’
‘Yes,’ said Harland. ‘That seems a good idea.’
They left the table and went to her bedroom, which struck him as a remarkably private, perhaps even lonely, place. It was bare but comfortable, and on one side of the bed there was a stack of books and a picture of a small girl and a woman standing in the shade of a tamarisk tree. The woman looked remarkably like Isis, but he knew it must be her dead mother, and that the girl with her face creased with laughter was Isis. He suddenly felt the scale of her loss all those years ago and turned to her and held her, partly because of this flash of understanding, but also because he was desperate now to end his own long, morose isolation, and prove to himself that he could love and listen as well as the next man. She wriggled free to undress, which she did with little fuss, then stood before him without the slightest embarrassment. Harland was aware of his inability to grasp the whole of her in his mind – to resolve the neat white figure in front of him with the turbulent, driven person he’d seen working in the field. She came to him, hung her arms round his neck and told him to take off his clothes. At length they fell to the bed and became lovers. Finally Isis grew silent and went to sleep in his arms. His eyes closed too, but less happily. In his mind were three words – victim, survivor, person; the three stages he had been told the torture victim must go through. Was he yet the person he had once been? Was this thing that had happened to him fourteen years ago in the cellar of the house in Prague still distorting him? He was now certain that was what his bad back had been all about; not Eva’s disappearance, or the air crash.
As Sammi Loz had said, the body remembers. Old pain – that’s what he had to ditch to become a person again. He looked down at Isis’s face and remembered why he had first been drawn to her. It wasn’t her looks, which in fact had taken him some time to get used to. It was her conviction that no matter what Khan had done or might be, his torture would be a crime.
Then he closed his eyes.
Some time later they were woken by the phone ringing. Harland heard her answer to the Chief. They were expected in the office at 6.30 a.m. the next day.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Early next morning a group of about thirty people assembled at Thames House. Herrick and the key members of the SIS team arrived shortly before Vigo entered the building. The Chief had evidently spoken with him overnight and agreed that the man Vigo had identified in the Bosnian photographs as Jamil Rahe was the only hope of tracing Youssef Rahe and Sammi Loz. Vigo was once again the architect of a plan, but now he had the support of the entire security establishment and, though looking drawn, somehow managed to present a picture of righteous self- possession.
Jamil Rahe had been traced to a maisonette in a quiet street in Bristol, and a surveillance team was already in place. At 8.15 a.m. a uniformed policeman and a member of the local Special Branch, posing as an immigration official from the Home Office, approached the building and rang the doorbell. The exchange with Jamil Rahe was relayed to Thames House from a microphone in the Special Branch officer’s briefcase, and it was agreed that their manner was striking precisely the right balance between suspicion and reassurance. They explained that a form had been overlooked in the processing of Jamil Rahe’s application for political asylum and that it must be completed that day to make everything legal. Across the street a cameraman, hidden in the back of a TV repair van, silently recorded the scene. The three men were still talking on the doorstep when the first images arrived through the secure internet server at Thames House. One glance showed that he was the man from the Bosnia photographs. These images were then forwarded by email to a laptop in the possession of Special Branch officers on the roof of Heathrow’s Terminal Two.
At length, the big Algerian offered the two officers coffee while he filled in the form. They went in, and within a very short time the plain-clothes policeman had secreted a tiny transmitter in Rahe’s home so that the sound coming to Thames House was of much better quality. Jamil said he was familiar with the form they’d brought and insisted that he had already filled in one like it. The officers apologised. While he sat at the table writing, they gently questioned him about the kind of welfare benefits he had been claiming, his prospects of work and his wife’s attendance at a language course. Once or twice Rahe’s replies seemed rather too considered, particularly when one of the officers mentioned that with his brother Youssef in London things would not be as difficult for him as it was for other new immigrants. The fifteen minutes of talk and coffee passed off very amicably, yet by the time they left, saying that this would certainly be the last he saw of them, Jamil was plainly on his guard.
Five minutes later, the police at Heathrow contacted Thames House. Three plane-spotters had identified the Algerian definitely as the man who stood with them on the observation platform on May 14 and on several occasions before that. Jamil Rahe was now confirmed as a very significant element in the story, and not for the first time the Chief looked towards Herrick and winked his thanks. Now all they had to do was wait for Jamil to make contact with someone.
An hour passed, during which the Chief and Barbara Markham, the Director General of the Security Services, discussed the raid on Youssef Rahe’s bookshop in Bayswater. The Security Services wanted to move on the premises immediately, but the Chief argued that they should wait for as long as possible, although plainly it had to be done by the time the arrests started across Europe the following morning. Eventually they compromised on 5.00 p.m. that afternoon, with the agreement that the staff of the Secret Intelligence Service would have the run of the
