When the room had awoken, when light distinguished it from the mystery that had gone before, he got up and fetched a bottle of mineral water, then coffee. I padded about naked on the rope carpeting, visiting the outside loo, rewrapping myself in linen. Strangely, I knew there would be no peace for me in this house any more. Not like the day before. I must shake the dust from my heels again. I dressed and moved to the living area.
“Sit down,” said Yusef, suddenly but not unkindly. And I obeyed.
“It may be better if you don’t fly from Beirut.”
“You don’t say . . .”
“You can be tracked too easily. They may decide . . . you might get taken again.”
“I’m hoping I could get taken again anyway.”
I weighted the words to express their puerile ambiguity.
What could he mean? I couldn’t schlep back into Israel. Syria was out of the question.
“Do you want me to take the train?” I said at last.
“I could get you to Egypt,” said Yusef.
Now I really did laugh, genuinely. A huge release of tension. I wanted to tell him about my dream, but I wanted to laugh at him more.
“Seriously, Nat. By boat.”
No, not seriously, Yuse. Not remotely seriously. I’d taken my chance with Beirut. I’d survived Israel. I had a mission. That morning, I felt invincible.
Then Aysha stuck her head round the door. Someone was here for us. A lady. Sarah appeared behind her and just walked in.
“Yusef?” she said and held out her hand to him. So she hadn’t met him before, and I was glad.
There was very little small talk. Sarah was working, I realised. The three of us were at a meeting and there was a single item on the agenda: my transfer to the UK.
Yusef’s Mediterranean cruise was summarily dismissed. It was to be another private flight, another identity. I looked at the Lebanese passport Sarah gave me. Republique Libanaise. Black and shiny. Pages of Arabic, French and English. The fat, squat cedar tree on the front. Crisp but not new. And my picture on the main page again, a different one this time. Sarah’s file on me must have damn near crashed her laptop. It was stamped with a faded officialdom. It felt like mine.
“It’s OK,” said Yusef. “It’s safe. I said I’d keep you safe. We do this often. You’ll go out our way.”
We? Was it Yusef that Sarah spoke to on her smart Israeli terrace? I didn’t like that thought so much and shut it away.
“She is part of a language-teaching delegation that flies regularly between Italy, Britain and Beirut,” cut in Sarah. “There will be six of you. You’re invisible.”
That wasn’t quite true. But my visibility had disappeared behind the name in the passport. Huda Serrano.
“Why can’t I stay here?” I asked and I meant it. “If it’s so easy to get a new identity, why don’t I just disappear here?”
“Now you’re not in Jerusalem they wouldn’t have to explain you away,” said Sarah. “Mad or dead, they’re not bothered.”
“But you took me out of Jerusalem.”
“They were on your case, Nat. It would only have ended in tears.”
“So tell me how I’m meant to be safer in London? They’ll find me easily there.”
“We’re going to give you something to protect you,” said Sarah.
“So Yusef tells me,” I said and I was conscious of lining up with Yusef against Sarah.
“We’re going to give you a list of names—”
“Oh God, not again,” I said. “I’m not being your go-between. I’m not being your little postman. Look what happened last time.”
“But this is different. Names of those working for the Quartet in Palestine.”
I paused to absorb this.
“But they know who they are. They’re their own people,” I said blankly.
“They don’t know we know. And they’ll keep you safe,” said Yusef. I clocked that for him it was all about keeping me safe and I liked that.
“But that was what I was swapping in Jerusalem in the first place. That was the whole point. Mutually assured blown covers.”
Sarah looked at Yusef. Then she looked back at me.
“Those envelopes were empty,” she said. “Decoys.”
Yusef sucked air through his teeth. I felt the wave break over me. Nobody spoke.
“So it was all. . . only about me,” I said eventually to no one.
Sarah just looked at me.
“I won’t pretend that you aren’t doing us a favour by taking this back to London. There’s no exchange this time. Just telling them we know. But it will keep you safe,” she said.
“If anything happens to me, you publish the list?”
She just looked at me, then down at my passport.
“Will you do it?” asked Yusef.
“I don’t suppose there’s much choice,” I said to the window. “Who do I tell?”
“You don’t have to tell anyone,” said Sarah. “You’ll just need to forward an email to the Centre when you arrive and they will take care of everything. You’re just the fence. No one will touch you. But it has to come from you.”
“OK,” I said.
But I was already forming another plan. And I wasn’t going to share it with Sarah. There was unfinished business and there could be no redemption without it.
Yusef drove me to the airport the next morning. I’d said that if I’d been followed, then they’d know who he was taking, but Yuse just shook his head firmly.
“They don’t know where you are.”
Funny, he’d picked me up at the airport when I first arrived in Beirut. He hadn’t had much English then. He seemed more remotely Middle Eastern. My courier, I’d thought, good. I’d hardly looked at him, though I thought I was friendly enough, asking about local matters, how the job would shape up. Now here he was dropping me at the same airport, his sometime lover, with a forged passport, saving my life, apparently.
I tried to calm down, distract myself, by wondering
