was not on the pages. He caught her eye… Eddie Wroughton was expert at reading the boredom factor in middle- aged women. She had a wedding ring on her finger. Married women were always the better targets – they were always more bored. She'd caught his eye, and had held it. He thought she matched his own interest. He stood, paused for a decent moment, then eased across the lobby towards her.
A quarter of an hour later, when he had learned she was Belgian, that her husband worked up-country, and her home telephone number, he left her with her magazine.
*
Jed staggered like a drunk. He came off the ferry that linked the accommodation area with Marine Corps administration from the Delta Camp and thought he might fall. He knew that the eyes of every civilian, officer and enlisted man who had sailed on the ferry were locked on him.
A headcold had gone feverish and forced him to his bed. Two whole days, two nights, and part of a third day he had been tossing under the sweat-damp sheet, dosed with pills, twisting, cursing.
Then frustration had forced him up and into his work clothes. He was unshaven, unsure whether he could manage a razor with his shaking hand. A lumbering shadow of himself, Jed made his way off the ferry and towards the shuttle bus.
The mission he had set out 011 hooked him. He had gulped down more pills, dressed haphazardly; the stubble on his face and the unbrushed hair gave him the appearance of a vagrant. He heard titters of laughter. He said nothing, but hauled himself heavily up the bus steps, then flopped on to the nearest seat.
He was dropped off at Camp Delta. He showed his card at the gate. 'You all right, sir?'
'Just fine, thank you, Corporal.' He wasn't 'just fine', he felt goddamn foul. Swaying, he made his way to a store shed, far in the wrong direction from the block where his office was. It was the territory of a giant-built Afro- American sergeant, a man to be treated with respect or steel shutters would block any chance of co- operation.
He gave the name of Fawzi al-Ateh. 'What's the classification, Mr Dietrich?'
He said that the classification was Not to be Continued With, and that the subject had been released. 'You're asking a lot of me, Mr Dietrich – for me to find an NCW who's not even here.'
He asked whether the NCW files had been pulped or shredded and his voice was deferential. He was told where they were, an annexe. He thanked the sergeant. He did not suggest the man put aside his magazine or his two-litre Pepsi bottle, or pull himself up and get himself into the annexe. He said he would be happy to go look himself for what he wanted.
'Don't mind me telling you, Mr Dietrich, but you're not looking your best.'
He went through the door behind the sergeant's desk, and closed it.
Jed passed the racks that held the current files of transcripts, floppy disks and audiotapes. Ahead of him was a wooden door that squealed as he opened it. After more than two years of Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, the annexe was still under-used. He flicked the switch and a dull ceiling light came on. The Not to be Continued With files and tapes were in sacks on the floor, not separated in any alphabetical system. He shared the annexe with a cockroach, more spiders than he could count and travelling caravans of ants. He had opened fifteen sacks before he found a date on a file that corres-ponded with that on which Fawzi al-Ateh had been bussed from Camp Delta to the airfield. He had checked nine envelopes, the thin brown pouches used for government service, before he unearthed the transcripts and audiotapes of the taxi-driver. He shoved the envelope under his arm, and left the annexe a little more of a mess than he had found it. It was an effort to walk between the store shed and the office block, and once he had to stop and lean against a fencing post.
He passed an FBI office. Through the open door a voice sang out,
'Hi, Jed, thought you were supposed to be down sick…' He smiled at the face behind the shoes on the desk and thanked the agent for his concern. He would shaft them.
In his room, he loaded an audiotape from Fawzi al-Ateh into his cassette-player and slipped on the earphones. He listened, then snapped down on the button. From his desk drawer he took the cassette that carried the voice of the Brit prisoner who claimed to have been nothing more than a religious student in Peshawar, and who had read a translated text in Pashto. Again and again, Jed played snatches of the two voices, till they rang and merged in his mind. His head was supported by his hands, which were clamped over the earphones… He was feeling weaker… The weight of his head grew… He sagged.
He opened his eyes. He knew he had fainted because the tape was finished.
But he had what he wanted.
Caleb and Ghaffur had ridden hard through the heat and caught the caravan in the late afternoon.
When they reached it, Ghaffur left him, urged his camel faster and went past the travellers to join his father at the head. The atmosphere for the last hour of the day, before they halted, was heavy with suspicion and dispute; Caleb was the cause of it. He saw Ghaffur chatter to his father, but Rashid seemed to ignore the boy. When the guide looked round, raked his eyes over those riding behind him, Caleb saw that the malevolence of the glance was not directed at him but fell on the Iraqi. It had been hotter that day than on any other; the heat, Caleb decided, and the lost water were the reasons for Rashid's temper. Because his camel had gone fast, Caleb was stiff, aching, and the sore blisters were growing where his thighs joined his buttocks.
Then the Beautiful One speeded up, lengthened her stride, without command. She passed Fahd, who looked away and would not catch Caleb's eye, and two of the bulls, who had the crates, and came level with Hosni's camel.
The Egyptian seemed hardly to see Caleb. His eyes were watery, without brightness and stared down only at the rein and the neck of the camel. The clothes on him hung looser than when they had started out, but even then they had flopped over the spare body.
Without shade, exposed to the ferocity of the sun, without sufficient water, Caleb realized how quickly the strength of the elderly Egyptian was waning. His own pains were severe and the blister sores were growing, but Caleb hid them because Hosni's pains and sores would be worse. It must have been his breathing, a little sucked intake as the Beautiful One lurched and the rough saddle sacking expanded the biggest of the sores, that raised the Egyptian's head a fraction.
'Thank you, Fahd, for riding with me. I will not fall, I…'
Caleb looked into the dull wet eyes. 'It is me, Hosni, I am back with you.'
'Ah, the noble one. The one with the conscience. What did you achieve?'
'I dug out the wheels, I cleaned the engine.'
'Did she thank you?'
'She thanked me.'
'How did she thank you?' Hosni's voice was mocking.
Caleb said firmly, quietly, 'She told me she was grateful for what I had done.'
The Egyptian, as if it were a great effort, threw his head back and snorted derision, 'She said she was grateful. Are we all now at risk because you dug out her wheels and cleaned her engine?'
'I did not put you at risk, I promise it.'
'Promise? It is a fine word, 'promise'. I would have killed her, we all would.' From the exhausted weakness of his face his voice came clear and strong. 'You will be asked to stand in a place where great crowds move. A thousand men, women and children will walk in front of you, will jostle behind you, will ignore you or will smile at you. Old men, pretty women and sweet, laughing children will pass by you – and if you carry out your order all are doomed… Can we now trust you? I am not sure, Fahd is uncertain, Tommy is certain we should not…'
'I will do what is asked of me. I made a judgement, 1 live by it.'
'If it had been a man, as gross as Tommy, as ugly as Fahd, as old and weak as me, would you have stopped to dig him out and clean his engine, or would he now be dead?'
'I live by my judgement,' Caleb said.
'But it was a pretty woman…' Hosni spat into the sand, and the hoofs erased his spittle. The coughing racked his throat. 'Because you ride with me, because you are from outside of us, of great value but new to us, I will tell you of the mistakes made by men of A1 Qaeda.
Listen well… Many mistakes, and all made by men who had faith and commitment but were careless or stupid… Ramzi Yousef will die in prison because a colleague left his laptop computer on a table in an apartment in Manila, and the whole of Ramzi's strategy was on the hard drive. Careless and stupid, and a mistake… Arab fighters posed for celebration photographs on the armour of destroyed Soviet tanks in Afghanistan, and ten years later one
