sideways. The regular flight from Riyadh had not come in that morning, and that would have been a Hoeing 737, heavy and stable. This aircraft was tiny in comparison, lightweight toy. It had climbed, shaking, as if it was punched, and while it had come round for the second attempt, Beth had gone out on to the patio. It made no sense to her that they should be flying, for evaluation and mapping, in such weather.
It had lined up again over the landing guide lights that were in the sand beyond the perimeter fence. Everything in Beth Jenkins's life, before these last several days, had been based on certainty. She clung to the trunk of the palm, and she saw what was different. There were no tubes under the wings. There had been tubes under the wings the last time she had seen the aircraft lift off.
She was confused, knew no answers, heard only the questions.
It rolled with the wind. It was over the runway, seemed to stop like the hovering shahin her patron flew. It lurched clumsily – she remembered the grace of its take-off. A wing went down, its balance was lost. In bad weather, her patron would not have risked the lives of his prized shahin or his hurr. He had paid – and had told her the money was well spent – a hundred and ten thousand dollars for the trained peregrine, and eighty thousand dollars for the saker falcon, and she thought this bird must have been valued at many millions of dollars.
Why would they risk it? It made no sense. Beth thought it was past the point of return, had to come down.
The right wing came up, it levelled, was a crippled bird and fragile. The left wing dipped.
No pilot. The only life in danger was that of the bird itself. The left wing-tip scraped on the Tarmac. It ran on, stopped, then turned. It taxied down the runway and, as if its engine was cut, came to a slow and hesitant halt. A jeep came from the little camp and sped towards it.
She went back into the bungalow and started to work again on her report on the ejecta field, but she could not concentrate… Nothing was certain, doubt ruled. He was with her. 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.' She hit the laptop's keys, but demons danced and she could not lose them. Beth could not make the link between the aircraft and him, but sensed it existed.
She wanted to cry out, to yell a warning, could not and the silence dripped around her.
He saw a man who was tall, athletically built, tanned, and not dressed for that morning's English weather.
Michael Lovejoy strode forward, not with a springing step because the legacy of the winter was increasing pain in his hip joints. The man had Lovejoy's name in big letters on a sheet of paper and held it up. The flight was in early and Lovejoy was late. The man wore heavy shoes, suede, and faded jeans with a brightly checked cotton shirt. There was a grip bag at his feet as he gazed around him, a frown of impatience writ large on a sunburned forehead. Lovejoy played at charm.
'Mr Dietrich – Mr Jed Dietrich? I'm Lovejoy, I was asked to meet you. Sincere apologies for keeping you hanging round. The traffic was awful.'
'Pleased to meet you. I was just beginning to wonder…'
His handshake crunched Lovejoy's fingers. 'I'm sure you were.
Anyway, all's well that ends well, don't you know? God, this place is a nightmare. Car's outside, bit of a walk, I'm afraid.'
Lovejoy rarely met Americans. Those he did were from the embassy's legal department. They were Federal Bureau of Investigation, men with cropped scalps, polished shoes and bow-ties, or women with flat chests, trouser suits and bobbed hair. As a breed, he was innately suspicious of them. When they came on to his territory it always seemed they expected his immediate and un-divided attention, and when he went on to their ground it always seemed they were busy and uninterested. He was not late because of awful traffic but because Mercy and he had lingered over breakfast.
He had brought his own car, a six-year-old Volvo estate that was good for ferrying the grandchildren.
In the multi-storey car park, after walking as fast as his hip joints permitted him, he unlocked the vehicle. He expected the American to comment on the child seats in the back. The cousins from across the water, both sexes, usually liked to talk kids and produce photographs from their wallets. There was no remark on the seats, or on the kids' clutter in the front from the school run Mercy had done the previous week. They pulled out.
'I see you've been in the sunshine, Mr Dietrich. You won't find much of that here… So, you've come in from Florida. Is that your workplace, or the end of a vacation?'
There had been no holiday that year for Michael and Mercy Lovejoy. The new conservatory at the back of their home had gulped the spare cash. Lack of funds had denied them the usual two weeks in a rented Cornish cottage and his summer leave had been spent decorating the dining room and the sitting room. When Lovejoy referred to other people's holidays there was often a barb in his tone.
The reply was crisp. 'I work at Guantanamo Bay.'
Last thing before leaving home for the drive to the airport, as Mercy had kissed his cheek, Lovejoy had told her: 'God knows what their Defense Intelligence Agency want from us. What I've always understood, they're the 'eternal flames' – you know, never go out.
Spend their days stuck in bunkers trying to make sense of radio traffic and – I suppose – looking over aerial pix with a magnifying-glass and searching for an oil drum of anthrax in suburban Baghdad.
Feel for me, darling, it's going to be grim.' He was a safe pair of hands. More important, as the trail of Al Qaeda funding grew colder, was iced over, in the City of London, his absence from his desk would matter little. Mercy had grimaced, had kissed him again.
'I am an interrogator at Camp Delta.'
'Oh, are you? Well, that's a rather interesting place.' He hoped the little intake of breath, sharp, went unnoticed. At Thames House there was a desk on the third floor that dealt with Guantanamo Bay and the eight Britons detained there. Five visits had been made to Camps X-Ray and Delta but he had never seen anything remotely relevant coming back, or not, at least, across his desk. He knew that High Court judges refused to denounce the detention without charge and trial of the Britons as illegal under international law; he knew also that the relevant government ministers obdurately declined to make a noise, or waves. The Britons were, as Lovejoy understood it, in a Black Hole.
The whole working life of Michael Lovejoy, twenty-eight years an intelligence officer with the Security Service and before that his fifteen years as an Army officer with the Green Jackets, had been governed by the Bible of Need to Know. Since marriage, only Mercy had needed to know – not the people he met in the pub or other guests at dinner parties and, often enough, not colleagues. Himself, if he had just come off a flight in New York or Washington, Lovejoy would have guarded his secrets closely, said what was necessary and not a damned word more. He listened.
'The only thing fascinating about Camp Delta is that it is bogged down in a rut – that is, one hell of a rut, like a tractor wheel makes in mud. We're just going through the motions. Not even a dozen times in two years – after the first splash of intelligence – have we learned anything new or important. We go to work, we talk to people, we read back the transcripts, and we fall asleep. We don't learn anything. Then it happens, and we're shaking. It happens.'
'Out of a clear blue sky is, I believe, the cliche.'
'Out of that clear blue sky comes a thunderbolt. Got me? We released a man. We're under heavy pressure to find a few innocents and ship them back with a fanfare, the full shebang. We released a man whom we believed to be a taxi-driver, from Afghanistan… '
Lovejoy waited – he was rarely impatient.
'I was on holiday, up in Wisconsin with my wife and kid and getting in some fishing before the winter came down. The taxi-driver, he made my list – I wasn't there when they decided to shift him.
We have the Joint Task Force 170, which is Bureau, Agency and us, but the Bureau, the Agency run it, we're country cousins. They made that decision. He was flown out. He was being driven into Kabul, asked for a comfort stop and did a runner. If he was just a taxi-driver, who cares?'
'You care.' A further talent of Lovejoy was his ability, with apparent sincerity, to flatter. Sandwiched among the lorries and vans, he drove at a steady pace, anxious always to relax his informant…
God, what would he do when he retired? What sort of man would he be? He dreaded the day. 'So, you came back from leave and found the taxi-driver gone.'
'I had a Brit in with me. Some creep, a nobody. I asked the questions I was supposed to ask – last week. You know how it is, that gut feeling. You get a match. It was his accent… I was a Cold War specialist when I started,
