Stratton asked the taxi to pull over a hundred yards from the road that led to the entrance to his hotel.
‘That’s the hotel to the right of the minaret,’ he said to Abed, pointing at the stone tower. A small chamber at the top had been designed originally for a man to stand in, blasting the area with calls for Muslims to come to prayer. Now it concealed a set of tiny speakers. ‘It’s watched,’ Stratton added. ‘Understand?’
Abed nodded. He did not need Stratton to tell him to be aware of people watching and following him. He had been looking over his shoulder since the day he left Gaza.
‘Above the hotel, further up the road, are some shops. There’s a store where you can get something to eat. It looks a busy place. Find a way around from behind. Don’t go past the front of the hotel. I’ll see you inside the shop in an hour.’
‘Okay,’ Abed said as he opened the door and climbed out. Stratton tapped the driver on the shoulder and as the car drove away, Abed walked off in the opposite direction.
The taxi pulled up outside the hotel, Stratton paid the fare and the car drove away. He paused in the street long enough to glance up and down it, checking to see if there was any obvious evidence the entrance was being watched. There wasn’t and he didn’t expect there to be. The Israelis had had plenty of time to master the art of surveillance, and if they were here, he didn’t expect he would see them, even with his experience.
He walked into the hotel and asked for his key at the desk. The receptionist took it from a hook and plucked a piece of paper from a pigeonhole above it.
‘There’s a message from your friend Mr Stockton,’ she said with a pleasant smile. ‘He asks that you go to his room as soon as you get in. Number twelve. You can take the elevator through there or walk up to the first floor.’
‘Thanks,’ Stratton said as he took his key and headed through a stone arch and to the foot of the stairs. A minute later he was outside room twelve and knocking on the door.
Gabriel opened it and stood in the doorway looking accusingly at Stratton. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded.
Stratton closed the door quickly, not wanting the rest of the hotel to hear whatever was upsetting Gabriel. ‘What’s up?’ Stratton said, emphasising his calmness to offset Gabriel’s vexation.
Gabriel walked to the dresser and leaned heavily on it as if he could no longer support himself.
‘You okay?’ Stratton asked.
‘No, I’m not okay.’ Gabriel said, looking defiantly at Stratton. He then noticed the streak of dried blood coming out of Stratton’s sleeve and down the outside of his hand, but it was nothing compared to what was troubling him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Gabriel spat, pushing himself off the desk and walking across the room away from Stratton. He stopped by an antique wardrobe near the balcony and held on to it as he looked through the patio doors.
‘Has anyone said anything to you about me being a faker?’ Gabriel asked.
Stratton did not answer. No one had, but Gabriel appeared to be heading off somewhere and needed no encouragement from him.
‘Well, I am. Surprised? Or not? You know how I got into this business? How I became a so-called psychic spy? I was a teacher. Mathematics. Not a very good one either . . . It all ended, or began if you like, fifteen years ago after a car crash. I was in hospital for weeks. They thought I was going to die . . . or maybe it was just me who thought that. I can’t remember. During rehabilitation, I started to become eccentric. That’s not true, I was always eccentric. But unlike the English,Americans don’t appreciate eccentricity. Far from it. They don’t like it. They don’t understand it.The habitually unusual unnerves them. But after the accident, I felt strangely free. I’d escaped death and I could be myself. I had a new start in life and I didn’t care what people thought about me any more. I had become brave.They say that often happens after a near-death experience. I’ve always had strange thoughts, daydreams if you like. Mostly fantasies about things I wanted to be or do. There was nothing psychic about them. But as I got older I daydreamed less and less, as if I had lost hope. There seemed no point to dreams anymore. My life was dull and I had no future and so why bother fantasising? But after the accident, the reborn eccentric in me started to enjoy those dreams once again. Freedom to think what you want is a wonderful thing. When you are dull and unambitious, you restrict your thoughts when they become absurd and unhealthy. I used to feel guilty about having them. Well I got rid of all of that. I allowed myself to think what I wanted, and even shared them with others, anyone who cared to listen. Sometimes I shocked people and I began to like doing that. The nurses thought I was mad. My psychiatrist spent a great deal of my medical insurance money listening to my thoughts. What I didn’t know was that
‘A week after they sent me home, someone came to visit me. A man from the state department, or so he said. He was never very clear about that, although I remember he had great difficulty trying to avoid saying who he specifically worked for. I think he really wanted to tell me. You know how Americans are. Always wanting people to think they are special. Unlike you British who seem to revel in pretending to be nobodies. You can’t fool us though. We know you do it in the hope people will think you really are somebody . . . The man wasn’t the best communicator. It took some time before I realised he was actually trying to recruit me. Eventually he spelled it out and asked if I would attend an interview with a secret government intelligence department. He never said the words Central Intelligence Agency or Defence Intelligence but it was quite obvious.’
Stratton moved to the desk and sat in a chair beside it. Whatever it was Gabriel had to say he was taking the long route, talking more to himself it seemed, and Stratton didn’t feel like interrupting him.
‘A few days later,’ Gabriel went on, ‘I found myself in a sterile room in the Federal building sitting in front of several people who I later discovered were a mixture of psychiatrists, spooks and military personnel. Whatever it was they were looking for, I was apparently in ample possession of, and at the end of the interview they offered me a job that was considerably easier than teaching and far better paid. Basically, I was invited to spend my time sitting with a group of like-minded people searching the universe for matters concerning national security. It made no sense to me whatsoever and even sounded a little absurd but, being the pragmatist I am, I signed on the dotted line as soon as I could.
‘And so I became a remote viewer, a psychic spy. I couldn’t believe how my luck had changed. From a tiring, daily ritual teaching ill-disciplined children I did not respect, nor them me, to a revered position within the country’s national security advisory. And the job was very easy too. All I had to do was spend my time perusing the id and declaring my thoughts, no matter how bizarre, and collect a cheque at the end of each month. Sometimes a subject or person was introduced, a name or a picture, and we would go into session, and, at the end of it, after our thoughts were transcribed, they were taken away for evaluation. We didn’t always know what became of the transcriptions.
‘I took it quite seriously at first, even started to believe I could actually do it, but eventually I had to admit, to myself at least, that I was faking it. Of course, I wasn’t about to tell any of them that. It had become too attractive a lifestyle to throw away just because of an attack of honesty. So I kept schtum and worked on a technique of feeding off the others, importing strings of their thoughts, building on them and exporting my own versions. I must have been very good at it because one day I learned I had received the largest portion of the credit for finding the Lockerbie bomb. I expect there were other fakers in the group but it was near impossible to tell. Who could judge you? From our point of view the answers were all there somewhere in our ramblings, and it was up to the decoders to find them; if they could not, it was their fault, not ours.
‘Then one day some people from Stanford University arrived who believed they had found a way of accurately evaluating our abilities. The CIA had been spending a fortune on the institute’s research department. I was horrified. The lifestyle to which I had grown accustomed looked as if it was about to fall apart. Worse still, I was about to be exposed as a fraud. Iraq was the turning point. When we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, the hierarchy came down pretty hard on us and I came clean and told them I couldn’t do it any longer.And that’s when it happened. Perhaps it was because I had broken free of so many chains that restricted my clarity. I don’t know. But there I was, sitting alone in the viewing room, a tranquil place designed to be alpha provoking, waiting for the department head to call me upstairs to sign my release papers, when I saw the tanker and the horrors that were taking place on it. It was so real it frightened me. I automatically did what we always did during viewing sessions so that nothing was lost to memory and I wrote down what I had seen and drew sketches and doodled images; everything, no matter how trivial or bizarre, was placed on paper. I was called upstairs to the
