Dark Winter

2

I was with her here in Penang on George’s instructions. As he kept on saying, ‘If someone hits you and they threaten to hit you some more, you’ve got to stop them. Period.’ But as always, of course, I was also here because I needed the money.

Suzy and I didn’t know the whole story, and that was fine by me. Too much information gave me a headache, and Suzy probably felt the same. We were just small cogs in a big machine. I’d learnt the hard way that it’s better to be just clever enough to plan and carry out the task you’re given, and not to ask the reasons why.

The job was deniable. The Malaysian government had no idea what was happening – not because they couldn’t be trusted: Malaysia had a strong, stable government and a good record against terrorism. It was just that the fewer people who knew what we were here for, the better our chances of success.

It was a joint US/UK operation, a first for me. There weren’t many Americans on vacation in Malaysia, especially with the current situation, but a Brit couple was quite a normal sight. Being sent back to the UK had been a bit like going back in time because it was the Yes Man who had given us our final brief, the very person I’d gone to the US to escape. I couldn’t say I enjoyed it much, but it was great knowing that I was only his property for a short while before I returned to the US and became George’s again.

The other first was that I’d never worked with another K. In fact, it was the first time I’d ever knowingly been within a hundred metres of one. It probably never occurred to Suzy that I was anything but a Brit operator like her – my cover documents certainly wouldn’t have told her. I was called Nick Snell again, the same cover as when I’d been a K.

On the final day of our preparation he’d sat on the settee in the safe flat in Pimlico, as wired as an army officer about to give a pep talk to his troops before they go to war.

The Yes Man always liked to talk about things he’d read in reports, forgetting that people like me and Suzy had got hold of the stuff in the first place. ‘Don’t you two believe the hype,’ he’d said. ‘That’s for those out there.’ He pointed at the window. ‘They need to think we are fighting the ignorant, destitute and disenfranchised – but we’re not. Nor are the enemy crazed, cowardly, apathetic or anti-social. If any of these terror groups relied on such maladjusted low life, they simply wouldn’t be able to produce effective and reliable killers who are prepared to sacrifice themselves in the process.’

‘No, sir.’

Suzy always called him ‘sir’.

I avoided calling him anything – just in case the words ‘arsehole’ or ‘bastard’ slipped from my lips by mistake.

All around us mobile phones started tuning up: it was like the digital version of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’. Their owners just stood up and walked away, not even looking to see who was calling. They knew it was God.

Suzy knew too. ‘Not long to go now.’

Malaysian mobiles could ring you five times a day for prayer, and also had a Kiblat finder to point the faithful in the direction of Mecca if they were stuck in the shopping mall and couldn’t make it to a mosque.

Suzy went back to mugging up on arse tubes, and smoked and drank without lifting her eyes from the page while I watched a couple stop and look at the menu board outside the Palace, then listened to the excited waiter rush out and try to lure them under the corrugated sheeting. He had to shout to make himself heard above the organist, who was now going on about a girl from Ipanema.

No need to hustle for business over at the mosque. Scooters and cars kept arriving, and plenty more came on foot. I let my gaze wander to the left, to a shack with a blue plastic tarpaulin over a scaffolding frame as an awning, surrounded by scooters and motorbikes in various stages of cannibalization or repair.

It was the entrance to the left of the workshop that I was most interested in. A neon sign with Chinese lettering was set into the road close by. I didn’t have a clue what it was advertising, but it lit up the doorway beautifully.

Five minutes went by before the target appeared. He was wearing a clean white shirt over grey tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops. He turned to his left, and walked along the cracked, greasy pavement past the workshop. I leant closer to Suzy and tapped the table lightly. ‘There’s our boy.’

Smiling at me, she closed the guidebook and put it into her bag. The Indian girl must have taken this as a sign we were leaving, and immediately came over and asked if we wanted more drinks. Suzy nodded. ‘Two more, the same.’

The target was in his late forties, Indian, Pakistani, maybe even Bangladeshi. He climbed gingerly over the metre-high spiky fence that divided the motorbike graveyard from the mosque. His short black gleaming hair was neatly combed back and kept in place by gel or tonic. We both watched as he removed his shoes, headed for the taps, then disappeared inside with the rest.

The drinks arrived and Suzy paid the girl, letting her keep the pound’s worth of change. Her face said we’d just made her day, but Suzy wasn’t being generous. We didn’t want her having to come back to us when we needed to leave in a hurry.

A couple of backpackers, gap-year age, came and sat down at a nearby table and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu as they checked out their red, peeling skin. Their conversation was drowned as the call to prayer wailed out from the loudspeakers in the tower, even bringing the organist to a standstill.

All we had to do now was wait for the target to reappear. We didn’t know his name. All we knew was that he was a member of the militant Jemaah Islamiyar [JI] group, and active in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand – all countries in the region that weren’t seeking to establish a Muslim fundamentalist state.

Jemaah Islamiyar means ‘Islamic group’ in Indonesian. Over many years they had attacked US and western targets all over South East Asia. George and the Yes Man weren’t the only ones who suspected that JI was a wholly owned subsidiary of al-Qaeda. Others argued that they weren’t too closely linked, and that JI’s original goals didn’t fully dovetail with the global aspirations of Osama’s boys. Whatever, it was only after the Bali nightclub bombing in October 2002 that the US finally designated them a foreign terrorist organization – something Malaysia had been wanting for years.

Indonesia had been the principal obstacle: the overwhelming majority of its 231 million population were Muslim – the largest Muslim population on the planet – and it hadn’t been willing to alienate its own people until JI had been caught planning simultaneous truck-bomb attacks against US embassies in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, even Cambodia.

My eyes were still on the mosque, but my ears were with the tableful of Brits knocking back the Tiger beer. They’d just been watching a government commercial during half-time, warning that if you were caught using a pirate satellite card you were liable to a fine of up to the equivalent of five thousand pounds, ten years’ imprisonment, and a whipping. ‘Shit,’ Suzy muttered, ‘you don’t want to mess with Murdoch, do you? It’s almost safer being a drug-dealer.’

The call to prayer stopped and the electric organ sparked up again, this time announcing the appearance of the Phantom of the Opera.

‘Taxi’s here.’ Suzy gave a slight nod in the direction of the workshop area, as a knackered red-and-yellow-topped Proton saloon pulled up. The cracked plastic Teksi sign on its roof disappeared from view now and again as a bus or truck rumbled past. The last four numbers on the plate were 1032, and that was the VDM [visual distinguishing mark] we’d been given. The driver was definitely our man.

I caught a glimpse of him waving no at a group of tourists in brand-new counterfeit Nike T-shirts. They drive on the left in Malaysia, and the vehicle was parked with the driver at the kerbside, so I couldn’t see his face clearly. In the glow from the neon sign he seemed to be lighter-skinned than the target, but not as light as the locals. Maybe he was Indonesian. He stayed in the cab, reading a newspaper with his arm out of the window, a cigarette in his mouth. He was the source, the one responsible for informing on the target. Perhaps he even knew what the target was up to. Whatever, he was the one who was going to help us.

We didn’t know the source’s identity, and I didn’t want to. He probably felt the same about us. All he would have been told was that people were going to be waiting out there for him to finish his part of the job so that they could do theirs. Once he was finished, that was it, he was out of the equation.

Now all three of us were waiting for the target to show his face, while everyone around us was either swigging beer, watching TV or comparing sunburnt shoulders. Suzy got out her guidebook again. It would have looked unnatural for both of us to be looking over there and not saying anything.