The Network

11

Her letter arrives the next day. Kamal brings it to me while I’m drinking tea on the balcony.

A mon tres cher Antoine,

I cannot describe my feelings at this moment so I will not try. I am happy that we have met and I will always treasure the time we have spent together. But soon you will leave Khartoum and we will both be alone. When that happens, I know only that for one of us, or both of us, there will already be too much pain. Let us not make that pain greater than it needs to be. Please respect my wish that we not meet again.

Je t’embrasse,

J.

Her housekeeper is outside, watering the bougainvillea, and greets me with a smile. Jameela is not at home, she says. I know, I tell her. I just want to leave her a present, I explain, and take the bags upstairs to her bedroom. The rose petals are fresh and fragrant. They are mixed with hibiscus and jasmine. I plunge my hands into them and scatter them over every surface, across the bed and dresser and bookshelves, until there is a thick layer of them from one side of the room to the other. The note which I leave on her table, by way of an answer, reads: ‘Please come to a picnic on Friday morning, to discuss your important letter (bathing suit optional).’

On the Friday, when I drive to her house Jameela is still in bed. She descends a few minutes later in a pair of white silk pyjamas, brandishing the note I’ve left.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asks. She’s trying to look angry.

‘Trust me,’ I say. ‘We’ll be back by this evening. Just one picnic and then I’ll leave you alone.’ Which I have no intention of doing.

At the airport an official leads us to the plane. It’s a Cessna 172R with just enough range to get us to our destination and back. I’ve already filed a flight plan and the plane is chartered for twenty-four hours. I haul my bags into the hold.

‘Are you at least going to tell me where we’re going?’ asks Jameela.

I pull open one of the bags and show her a pair of diving fins.

‘You wanted the sea. I’m taking you to the sea.’

She shakes her head very slowly, but she can’t conceal the faintest of smiles.

‘You’re crazy,’ she says.

I press a hundred-dollar bill into the hand of the official, who mimics a machine gun as he warns me thoughtfully not to stray into Eritrean airspace. After a few minutes of pre-flight checks we’re airborne, heading north-east from the city and watching the Nile snake away under our port wing.

Jameela’s head is pressed against the passenger window in silent fascination. Over the intercom I hear her voice from time to time, pointing out the features of the landscape beneath us. Later I hear a strange sad music in my headset and realise she’s singing to herself.

Two thirds of the way, a range of black and waterless mountains looms out of the wilderness below. Beyond, we can make out a thin blue band on the horizon which I point out to Jameela, who bites her lip in anticipation. I make the aircraft swing from side to side in celebration and Jameela’s face bursts into a dazzling smile of delight. Then, just shy of three hours’ flight time, I talk to air traffic control at Port Sudan and begin our descent.

Above the coast I turn south and the lonely Red Sea port of Suakin passes under us. It’s an ancient place, abandoned by the Ottomans in the 1920s, now inhabited by a dwindling local population and crumbling steadily into the sea. A few minutes later I spot the airstrip and make a single low pass. There’s a solitary white jeep parked by a tin shed at the end of the runway, and beside it stands the driver, waving his arms slowly above his head. I think almost warmly of Halliday, who hasn’t had long to make the arrangements I’ve requested.

It’s a dusty landing. I taxi down to the shed, turn and cut the engine. There’s a blissful silence. The driver runs forward to help us with our bags, and we bundle into the jeep and head for Suakin. At the ramshackle port we transfer to the boat he’s found for us. It’s an ageing Zodiac with powerful twin outboards, and I don’t ask where it comes from. Nor does our driver ask where we’re going. Some black identification numbers on the prow suggest a military provenance, so perhaps he’s got a cousin in the army. He runs over the controls with me and points out the several large jerrycans of water aboard, as well as a box of fruit which he indicates was his personal idea. I reward him appropriately and arrange when we’ll meet. In the meantime he’ll return to the aircraft and guard it in our absence.

Not far away we see several fishermen selling fresh catches from their boats. One of them is hacking steaks off what looks like a small version of a tuna fish. He cuts two wedges of the dark flesh for us using a blackened machete, which he has to knock through the fish with a mallet. We stow it in the Zodiac with our things, I set the GPS to start acquiring, and the engines splutter into life.

We motor out of the channel and into the open sea, bouncing across the water under the sun. It’s burningly hot, and I’m grateful when Jameela, who’s been eyeing me throughout all this with a mixture of suspicion and admiration, takes off her scarf and ties it over my head. It’s the first time I’ve seen her without it. She runs her fingers through her long dark hair as if a portion of her spirit has been released with it, leaning into the wind like a dog from the window of a car, and she’s loving it as I hoped she would.

Fifteen minutes later the coastline behind us is a thin black line. But ahead, just where the GPS predicts, a dozen deserted islands have sprung out of the sea. Some are tiny and barren, others larger with thick bands of vegetation stretching along the bleach-white sand of their coastlines.

‘Choose your island,’ I say.

She points her slender arm to a small sandy cove a few hundred yards distant, flanked by rocky entrance spurs, between which stretches a dark green canopy of trees. We haul the Zodiac onto the beach and take the extra water and bags to the treeline, where I fuss over an improvised camp. There’s no sound but the ticking of the cooling engines. I look up to see Jameela running to the water and plunging in, fully clothed.

Then she races back to me and flings her arms around me.

‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ I hold her wet body against mine, savouring the scent of her skin for a few moments until she releases herself and rummages in her things to find her swimsuit.

She changes under a towel and I struggle not to show any reaction as she throws it aside. She wears a cream two-piece swimsuit which I’m guessing she bought in Paris and which makes her skin seem all the darker. I keep forgetting she grew up in Paris. The headscarf she wears in the city sends out a protective signal that cools the physicality of encounters between the sexes. Out here she’s not wearing it and the signal has evaporated, and the shock of closeness makes me faintly nervous. I see her body silhouetted as she turns towards the water and adjusts the strap of her top. Her legs are long and graceful and my eye rests guiltily on the flare of her hips beneath her slender waist, and I am filled with longing.

We walk to the beach with the fins and snorkels. For the next couple of hours, hardly aware of the time that is passing, we float on the water’s surface, gazing into the silent world in front of our masks. The water is spectacularly clear, and every fish we see is a strange and unexpected shape, and each one seems as bright and delicately coloured as a living rainbow. Then we walk along the sand together, picking at shells until she notices the redness of my shoulders and suggests we return to the shade above the shoreline.

I collect some wood from under the canopy of trees, and when I’m out of sight of Jameela take the satphone from its waterproof case and send our exact location to Seethrough via the GPS function on the keypad. He’ll relay it to the buffoonish Halliday at the embassy in Khartoum so at least he’ll know where to find us if, as I fantasise, I get stuck on the island with Jameela. Then I make a small fire, wait for it to burn down, wrap the fish we’ve bought in thick green leaves and put it into the embers. The white wine I’ve procured from the regional security officer who doubles as barman at the Pickwick Club is slightly warm but hits the spot, and in the heat it makes us pleasantly drunk. It’s the first time I’ve seen Jameela drink wine. She allows me to feed her slices of mango, and we let our faces get very messy.

She sees me look at my watch and asks when we have to leave. We need to fly before dark, I tell her. I can fly at night but I’d rather not.

She looks pensive. ‘Let’s stay,’ she says. ‘Here on the beach. Under the stars.’

I have, as it happens, considered this possibility, and brought two nylon hammocks with us for the purpose. She’s impressed, as I hoped she would be.

I tie them between the trees, side by side a few yards apart.

‘Separate beds. I must be old-fashioned,’ I say.

There’s a force of attraction between us that’s no longer a secret. It’s invaded my body and thoughts. I wonder how long we can preserve its innocence, which is a fragile thing that won’t survive if we both cross the line that we’re now drawing towards and from which it will be impossible to turn back. But we both know what intimacy is and the pain that comes with its dissolution, and perhaps it’s this that gives us the strength to approach the line more cautiously.

‘Thank you,’ she says, but then she doesn’t make things easier by drawing her body against mine and resting her head on my shoulder, so that I can look down the muscles of her long back towards the swell of her hips.

I build up the fire and we sit by it as the sun falls into the sea and the world turns to shadows. Jameela’s face gleams in the light of the flames and seems more beautiful to me than ever. When I add wood to the fire a shower of sparks rises and imprints itself among the stars overhead. They’re so bright, and there are so many more stars than are visible in England I can’t even make out the constellations I can see at home.

We clamber into our hammocks. She’s close enough for me to hear the sound of her hand against her skin as she rubs mosquito repellent over her arms. We’re tired and happy.

‘I enjoy our friendship, Jameela,’ I say, half to myself.

‘Moi aussi,’ she answers from the edge of sleep.

When I wake, Jameela’s not in her hammock and I have a sudden sense of panic until I catch sight of the splash of her fins. She’s already in the sea, snorkelling. We breakfast on mangoes, wash in the water, and then it’s time to pack. As I’m doing up the bags I imagine once or twice that I hear the sound of an engine, dismissing the thought each time because the islands are uninhabited and the water is too shallow for fishing. Then as we’re getting ready to put the bags in the Zodiac, we hear the distinct whine of an outboard motor, which gets suddenly louder as a boat rounds the mouth of the cove and heads for the very spot where we’ve dragged the Zodiac onto the beach.

‘Fishermen,’ says Jameela.

They don’t look like fishermen to me. We watch them together in silence, and Jameela’s look of unease mirrors my own as they come to a stop a few yards away from the Zodiac and cut their engine.

Without acknowledging us, they point out the Zodiac’s features to each other as they drift nearby. I wave, but the wave isn’t returned, which is unusual. I wave again, thinking that perhaps they haven’t seen us. But we’re less than a hundred yards away and they must have. They lift their propeller from the water and one of them jumps overboard to pull the boat to the shore. The other, who is bare-chested, picks up what looks at first like a harpoon, but it isn’t.

‘Oh my God,’ whispers Jameela, ‘he’s got a gun. They must be pirates.’

‘Keep very calm please,’ I tell her. My mind is going through a list of options which is not as long as I’d like it to be. I have no weapon. We are barefoot. There is no shelter and nowhere to run.

They look the part. The one who pulls the boat ashore is a bulky man with cropped hair and deep black skin. His chin protrudes like the kind of fish that patrols the floor of the sea. The bare-chested one has wild-looking hair and seems to be giving the orders. The weapon is an AK-47 with a folding metal stock, a variant known in Russian as the Partisan. He barks something at us as he approaches but I can’t tell what language he’s speaking. Whatever he’s saying it’s not particularly friendly, and as he nears us he shifts his grip on the weapon so that his left hand moves under the stock as if he’s planning to use it. He’s lean, strong and young, which is not good from my point of view.

‘Speak English?’ I call out, to try and slow down the whole process.

He’s asking a question which I can’t understand a word of, but it doesn’t sound like he’s inviting us back to his place.

‘He’s speaking Amharic with a weird accent. He wants the key to the boat,’ says Jameela in a shaky voice. ‘Give him the key.’

She’s standing next to me and has wrapped a towel protectively around her waist, but she’s still a sight to behold and the effect is not missed on our visitors. The one with the weapon looks at her and says something to his partner, who advances towards Jameela. He tries to grab her wrist, which is still wet and allows her to break free, so he has another go and the same thing happens. On a third try he pins her arms against her body from behind and lifts her from the ground as she kicks frantically and uselessly against him.

It’s obvious they want to take Jameela, and once they’ve got her, getting the key to the Zodiac isn’t going to be too difficult to achieve after a 7.62-millimetre round has passed through my head. But there’s something so improbable about the timing of their arrival and the fact that only Seethrough knows our exact location that I’m not too bothered. I’m impressed, in fact, with the thinking that’s gone into it, but I mustn’t let it show because I’ve got a part to play.

‘Tell your friend not to do that, please,’ I say to the one with the weapon. ‘It’s rude.’

I take a step towards him because I need to see the position of the selector lever on the right side of the AK. And to put a little more space between him and his friend. The safety’s on, which gives me a slight but meaningful advantage. I raise my hands a little further, take another step towards him and now start babbling in English, which I’m hoping will make him think I’m telling him something important.

He bares his teeth in a snarl as I near him and raises the line of the weapon so that it’s centred on me. The muzzle resembles a giant cannon, which gives me an unpleasant feeling, but his finger hasn’t moved to the safety yet. I hope Seethrough has built in some form of compensation for the men he’s sent, because they’re not only doing a very good job of pretending to be pirates, but what’s about to happen is going to hurt one of them a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.

He raises the barrel of the AK to my chest and pokes it into me, barking another incomprehensible instruction. I raise my hands a little higher. It’s a textbook replay of the very same defensive drills I did with H all that way away in Herefordshire, which does indeed seem a very long way away.

He pokes it into me again, stepping towards me now, and since all good and probably bad things come in threes, I wait for the third time. At the instant he gives another push with the weapon, I bring my left hand down hard and fast onto the barrel and turn my body to the left. He lurches forward and my right hand connects with his chin and drives it up and back, forcing him to try and regain his balance by stepping away from me. But my foot is there to meet his, and as he begins to tumble his left arm leaves the weapon by reflex in the attempt to break his fall. I yank it by the barrel and it passes almost miraculously into my hands. His efforts to scramble to his feet again are put to an abrupt end by the single round I fire into the sand just near his ear.

There’s a scream of fright from Jameela, and then an immense shrieking fills the air as a cloud of birds erupts in a single swarm from the trees behind us. Jameela and her attacker are momentarily frozen in surprise. She breaks free from him, and in an impressive move whacks him squarely on the jaw. He’s about to retaliate, but seeing his friend cringing on the sand has a different idea and sprints for the trees. I fire two rounds by his feet and he gets the message.

We need to leave. Jameela gathers up the bags as I cover the two men, make them take off their shoes just in case anyone feels like running anywhere, and direct them on their knees back to their own boat. I’d rather they didn’t go and fetch any of their friends, so I break off the top of the spark plug of their outboard with the butt of the AK. Having to paddle with their hands will slow them down and have the added advantage of keeping their minds off robbery and kidnap.

Jameela finishes loading the boat and throws a look of contempt at the men.

‘They would have killed us,’ she says in a frightened voice. Then she shouts something at them in what I suppose is Amharic and probably a curse.

‘Want to shoot them? The sharks will be happy if you do.’ I offer Jameela the AK, guide her hand to the grip and the trigger, and point out the foresight for her to line up on her cowering targets.

‘They would have killed us,’ she repeats.

‘Women with guns.’ I shrug my shoulders at them as if the decision is out of my hands. ‘Scary, isn’t it?’

They’re not laughing.

We move out of the shallows and throttle up the engines. The two stranded men are stooping over their boat as we gain distance. Jameela sits next to me, gripping me in silence and looking back from time to time as we race across the water. At the halfway point I pass the AK to Jameela. I’d love to keep the weapon, but it would be hard to explain. She flings it into our foaming wake and returns to my side.

The first moments of intimacy are never really equalled. She hasn’t tidied up the rose petals, and their perfume wraps itself over us as we fall onto the bed and submit to the momentum that feels as though it was set in motion the instant we first saw each other. A frontier rushes beneath us as if we are entering territory new to us both, and where before there has always been restraint, there is now abandon.

Her skin is still salty and smells of the sea, like a mermaid who has miraculously survived the journey ashore. She laughs, weeps and laughs again, grips me repeatedly with unexpected force, then gives way again as if her body has returned to liquid and been reclaimed by the sea. I have never given myself so fully before, nor received so generously.

I wake in the night with a shock, as if roused by a gunshot. The shots I fired on the beach have been carried into my dream. Somewhere a dog is barking. Jameela is asleep next to me like a baby, half-wrapped in a sheet. I go to the bathroom to drink from the tap and notice the pattern made by all the sand washed off our bodies in the shower. Then I retrieve the satellite phone and step onto the balcony, where the air smells of dust and jasmine. I prepare a coded sitrep for Seethrough and thank him for his part in the arrangements of the previous day. I’m not really expecting an immediate reply and I’m just sitting in the silence thinking of Jameela when I see the blinking light in the phone display that signals his reply: your reference ‘pirates’ not understood please confirm.

And it’s only after about a minute of thinking this over that it really hits me.

I see Jameela every day, and return to her home with her after she’s finished work. The hours of daylight are spent in anticipation of the hours of darkness, when we can travel ever deeper into the territory of intimacy that has opened itself to us. I planned nothing of this when we first met. But now it has us in its grasp and we are powerless against it, and care nothing about where it will take us.

The elements themselves seem to be conspiring in our favour. One afternoon Jameela calls to say she’s returning home early. I drive to her apartment to meet her, and we sit on her balcony, where the air smells so strongly of jasmine, and drink cold white wine. I notice that the sky seems darker than it usually is and wonder if a storm is coming in.

‘Not a storm,’ says Jameela, as if she knows something I don’t. ‘Come.’

We climb to the roof by some narrow brick stairs and she points over the rooftops. Beyond the river to the west, rising out of the desert beyond Omdurman, is a sight I’ve never even imagined. A billowing wall of sand, a thousand feet high I’m guessing, is rolling towards the city. It stretches for what must be miles, an opaque, boiling, blood-orange wave, creeping visibly towards us. The scale of it is stupendous, like a biblical plague. The outline of the city seems puny against the advancing bulk of sand, and the sky grows darker as it nears as if under the command of an irritated god. I have no idea what will happen when it reaches us.

‘Have you seen this before?’

‘It’s a haboob.’ She smiles. ‘The desert’s way to clean itself. It’s beautiful.’

It’s a magnificent reminder of the scale on which nature prefers to do things. We watch its course for a few minutes. Its beauty is inescapable. But as I look at it I feel more than anything a sense of foreboding, as if a kind of reckoning is about to unfold. It signifies only danger to me. Then I turn to Jameela and see her beauty and am reminded how often beauty and danger can be found close together, and the symmetry of the moment seems complete.

‘It will pass,’ she says. ‘We should go inside.’

We leave the roof and return inside, and close the doors and windows of the apartment in turn. The sky darkens even more. We can smell the sand as the haboob advances into everything, suffocating even the daylight and robbing the world outside the windows of colour like an eclipse of the sun. We retreat to the bedroom and make love once more as if to take shelter in one another, celebrating our intimacy in defiance of the affliction visited on the city beyond us.

Later, lying against each other in the muted light, feeling as though we’ve survived a natural disaster, Jameela speaks, prompting me to wonder whether she can read my thoughts. She faces away from me and asks quietly if I am awake.

‘I know you are a spy,’ she says. ‘I don’t care.’

‘I’m not a spy,’ I tell her.

There’s a long silence. She’s not happy with my answer.

‘But I do know people who are.’

‘They sent you here?’

‘Yes.’

‘To spy on me?’

‘No.’ Lie. ‘My meeting you has nothing to do with that.’

‘What do they want?’

‘To find out about bin Laden and his people.’

‘From me?’

‘No. From anybody.’ Lie.

Another long silence.

‘I knew sooner or later somebody would come,’ she says.

She rolls over, looks into my face without speaking and runs her finger across my eyebrows, my nose, my lips.

‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ she says.

I omit no detail of what she tells me, writing for reasons of security at a glass table from which the imprint of my pen can’t be lifted, and with a single sheet of paper at a time. She begins with the story of her husband, one of bin Laden’s many half-brothers, and describes her marriage in Khartoum six years before and her early meetings with his family members at parties and gatherings. She names the dozen other bin Laden brothers she has met, and describes their prosperous lifestyles, their homes in California and London, their love of business, racehorses, boats and cars. These are not the profiles I’m really expecting. Bin Laden himself, she says, is one of the few brothers who lacked the family’s love of wealth, perhaps because he’s the only child of his father’s tenth wife and lost his father when he was a teenager. Much of this, she says, she knows from her husband, who worked on the periphery of bin Laden’s circle, helping to raise money for his projects in Sudan. Her husband is a good man, she says, but fell under the spell of the extremists who formed bin Laden’s closest associates. I’m guessing that this is one of the reasons for their separation but I don’t ask.

Bin Laden has been in Sudan for several years when she meets him, not long after what is said to have been an attempt on his life by the Sudanese authorities, acting on instructions from powerful Saudis who are hoping to silence bin Laden’s criticisms of the Kingdom. It’s in Sudan, says Jameela, that he acquires a penchant for black women, and has a string of Sudanese girlfriends. Can’t really blame him for that, I’m thinking. His other great fondnesses are for earth-moving machinery and hunting with falcons. He also has an incongruous love of growing sunflowers.

The bin Laden I know from the cables and reports I’ve read over the previous year bears no resemblance to the man Jameela describes. The impression of a bloodthirsty mastermind simply doesn’t tally with the diffident, almost shy man she knows from family meetings and parties. He’s known to his admirers as a quiet philanthropist, sponsoring construction projects in Sudan and encouraging wealthy Saudi friends to invest in farming and real estate there. But those who knew him better, says Jameela, observed a man going through changes.

The unworldly teenager she’s described is marked by a single overwhelming experience: his involvement with Afghanistan. It’s there, after living and fighting among Afghan mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation, that his life is given a different direction. He becomes passionate about supporting the Afghans in their struggle against their invaders, and puts his personal fortune to work sponsoring camps, hospitals and a support network for Afghan fighters and their relatives. Like so many others, he simply falls in love with the place.

The simplicity and austerity of life in Afghanistan leaves a deep mark on him. When he returns to Saudi, he sees his own country through different eyes: a place run by corrupt and worldly men who care little for the true face of Islam. It is this true face that he has encountered in Afghanistan. He works against the Saudi regime, and when American troops arrive on Saudi soil for the Gulf War he calls for the overthrow of the royal family. He wins friends in low places and is forced to leave his homeland.

He’s hounded from country to country, and settles in Khartoum. A puritanical hardness has entered him. He bans music in his household and puts his teenage sons through hard physical tests. Two years after his arrival in Sudan the Saudis strip him of his citizenship and freeze his assets. Around him circulates a loyal entourage of ‘Arab Afghans’ from the days of the jihad in Afghanistan, and their agenda becomes increasingly political. A few of them take an interest in steering bin Laden in a new and more violent direction, simultaneously nurturing his grievances and idealism in accordance with their own more cynical agendas. By the time bin Laden is expelled from Sudan and returns to Afghanistan in 1996, he has fallen entirely under their spell, espousing a new kind of global jihad which makes no distinction between its targets and their civilian subjects. Jameela lists the names of his radical associates with contempt, calling them cold-hearted hypocrites who have brought shame on Islam, men who exploit the legitimate grievances of ordinary people for their own violent ends. She tells me the names of the organisations they use and of the places in Khartoum where she thinks they sometimes meet. With other men, she says, suffering leads to goodness. But not with these ones.

By the time she’s finished I’ve filled a dozen pages. When she leaves in the morning I rewrite them using the pen supplied to me by Seethrough and the pad of water-soluble paper that he’s shown me how to use with it. Double spaced and in capital letters. Then I press the blank sides of a twenty-page United Nations de-mining report against each page in turn, and press them together for several minutes as the invisible dye contained in the ink of my report transfers to the blank sheets. Even under a microscope, there is no physical disturbance to the fibres of the paper, and the ink is virtually undetectable using chemicals. Then I re-staple the pages, and the result is what looks like an ordinary printed document, together with a scribbled covering note, sealed into an envelope addressed to a Mr Halliday of the British embassy. I burn my original notes in the kitchen sink, then run the tap over the sheets of my finished report. They dissolve within seconds into a translucent sludge. Then I throw a single unused sheet which I didn’t need into Jameela’s waste-paper bin. It misses by a tiny fraction, and bounces from the rim onto the floor.

I wonder, now, about such things.

A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball and propelled by the force transferred by the muscles of my hand and arm, tumbles through the air. Its direction and speed is in turn influenced by the immeasurably smaller forces that act on it from the air through which it passes. The resulting momentum, partially dissipated by the metal lip of the waste-paper bin, determines its final position, a few inches from the edge of the wall under Jameela’s dresser. And this tiny deviation from its intended goal, of which the paper itself cannot possibly be conscious, prompts me to stand up and retrieve it from the floor with the intention of putting it into the bin where I had hoped it would land. But as I lean down to pick it up, something catches my eye.

On the floor tile at the base of the wall under the dresser where the paper has ended its flight is a tiny mound of white powder. It must be recent, otherwise it would have blown away or been swept away by now, and I can’t help but wonder where it comes from. It’s the kind of mound generated by making a small hole in a wall with an electric drill. I smell it. It’s plaster dust. I look up to see where such a hole has been made, bemused at the same time by the habit of my own curiosity. An oil painting hangs directly above the dresser. It’s a sample of raw but striking art from a local painter, depicting half a dozen women in brightly coloured tobes carrying pots of water on their heads. The dust, I reason, must come from the hole made to hang the painting. But this would have been made months or even years before, and no trace would be left today.

The dust, I decide, comes from a hole in the wall which is actually above the frame of the painting. I haven’t noticed it before because it’s just a few millimetres across and just above the frame. But this is the puzzling thing: the dust made by the drilling of the hole hasn’t fallen onto the frame of the painting but onto the floor instead, which suggests that the painting was removed when the hole was made. None of which would have the slightest significance, had I not, out of curiosity, run my finger over the hole, which turns out not to be a hole at all but a slightly convex bump. It’s the wide-angle lens of a covert fibre-optic surveillance camera.

It’s not exactly a three-pipe problem, but it does raise questions. If the hole was made from the side I’m on, there’s the question of who made it. I can’t really picture Jameela with a covert entry and surveillance kit, so it’s probably been made by someone who’s got access to the other side of the wall. Whoever it is has a strong reason for wanting a camera that looks into Jameela’s bedroom, and provides a panoramic view of the bed on which I’ve spent a good part of the preceding week with her.

It strikes me, the following morning at 5 a.m. as I’m about to break into the neighbouring apartment, that I’m here because of the irregularity in the flight of a ball of paper. Which suggests to me that large events are determined, at least in part, by smaller events, and those in turn by even smaller ones. Following this idea to its extreme is problematic, because you end up with the vibration of atoms determining every measurable event; and if everything really is determined, no action has any significance other than its own unfolding, and one may as well stay in bed. Thinking of the flare of Jameela’s hips beneath the slimness of her waist, staying in bed does indeed seem like the most sensible thing. But I know intuitively that the apparently random position where my sheet of paper came to rest and the sense of foreboding I felt on seeing the giant haboob are somehow connected. Not by scale, but by their significance.

My lock picks live in a panel of my wallet that only the most diligent search would uncover. They are made from a high-tensile ceramic coated with tungsten carbide and are much stronger than steel but have no detectable metal content. The six picks are black, and moulded, like the pieces of an Airfix model, into a panel the size of a credit card with a thin plastic cover, which I now slide off and twist out the tension wrench. I put the short end into the keyway, using my third finger to apply pressure and resting the other two gently on its length. With the other hand I use the snake pick to lift all the pins in one go, listening as they snap down when the pressure from the tensioner is released. Five tiny clicks tell me it’s a five-pin right-handed lock.

To judge from the slightly gritty feedback I’m getting from the pins, it’s either a fairly new lock or there’s dust on them. Probably both. It doesn’t matter which. I push the diamond rake to the back of the lock and work it a few times to get the feel of things, then work the pins one by one, feeling the tiny variations of pressure in the tensioner as the cylinder struggles to turn. There are few tasks more satisfying that can be accomplished with the fingers of the human hand than picking a lock. One minute you’re locked out, blocked from your goal by a device that seems so inflexible and defiant. Then comes the magical moment as the tensioner gives way, the cylinder turns, and the door swings magically open.

I clear the lock and close the door gently behind me. Jameela has told me that the apartment is empty and that nobody lives there, and she’s right, almost. Nobody lives there, but the place isn’t entirely empty. There’s just enough light to make out the shapes of things, and I feel my way from room to room and then up the stairs. The layout of the rooms is the mirror of Jameela’s apartment. In the bedroom that lies next to Jameela’s there are two folding tables against the wall and two empty chairs. A black fibre-optic video cable comes out of the wall above them, more or less where I expected it. What I didn’t expect is the sophistication of the equipment. The cable feeds to a digital video recorder, next to which there’s a control console, flat-screen monitor and a keyboard. It’s all switched off, which suggests that the watching is done selectively. I squat by the edge of the table and study the equipment without touching anything, and I can hear my heartbeat pulsing in my ears. A strong smell of stale cigarettes comes from an unemptied ashtray, and there’s a crumpled empty packet of Marlboros on the floor. Then a muffled thump sends a shock wave through me and I leap to the door.

Someone has come in downstairs. I can just make out an exchange of male voices. There’s no time to leave by the window. A light goes on at the foot of the stairs. I close the door silently and go to the adjoining bathroom and feel my way into the shower, leaving the curtain open and pressing myself against the tiled wall. A yellow band of light spreads under the bathroom door as the light goes on in the room, and I hear voices and footsteps.

My heart’s thumping now and feels like it’ll jump out of my throat. I close my eyes and try to regulate my breathing. The bathroom door opens and the light, which seems blindingly bright, comes on for a few seconds and then, to my inexpressible relief, goes off again. They are checking the place but not searching it, and not really expecting to find anyone. They have perhaps seen me follow the path to the entrance of the building, and wonder why I haven’t reappeared. Perhaps I should, to appease their curiosity. Perhaps they have decided I have gone into another apartment. Perhaps they have seen nothing at all, and one of the men who works the equipment has simply come back for something he’s forgotten. But I doubt it.

I leave the apartment via the roof, cross it noiselessly, and climb down by the steps that lead to Jameela’s balcony. A few moments later I am lying at her side. For another hour I can’t sleep.

I half-expected them to come for me, though I’m not sure why, and I’m not anticipating being detained for long. I wonder if Jameela is still officially married, and whether the technicality of adultery will see me expelled from the country. We are lying naked next to each other when the buzzer sounds. I have never heard it before and wonder what it is at first, but the loud simultaneous pounding on the door confirms the unfriendly nature of the visit.

Jameela and I dress hastily and are buttoning our clothes when two black men wearing suits and open shirts enter the room and announce abruptly in Arabic that they are members of the Mokhabarat, the intelligence and security service.

‘I am a British citizen,’ I say in English, holding my passport in front of me. ‘I have the right to contact my embassy.’

The man nearest to me looks me up and down with a scowl, takes my passport and flicks through it. Then he hands it back, and his reply stuns me.

‘You are British. She is not.’ He points to Jameela on the far side of the room and snaps his finger. The other man grabs her arm and leads her to the door.

‘I’m sorry, Antoine,’ she says. She looks utterly demoralised and bites her lips as her eyes fill with tears.

‘Jameela, what is happening? Tell me what is happening.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says again.

The man pushes her though the bedroom door and guides her down the stairs without looking back. The sight of her disappearing has a strange effect on me. I cannot bear the thought of her being harmed. I see the sudden image of the haboob and the boiling wall of sand drawing towards me, and feel myself being swallowed in its immensity. I try to follow her down the stairs, but the other man blocks my way by putting his arm across the doorway.

His eyes have a fierce coldness to them. He looks straight at me and says something slowly in Arabic which I don’t understand, but the language of threat is universal and the cruelty in his eyes tells me the warning is a serious one. Something in me is snapping. It’s as if I can hear it, taking up the final moments of strain before it reaches its limit and shatters into fragments. I don’t want it to, because there’ll be no return when it does. I meet his gaze.

‘Let me go, now,’ I say very slowly.

‘Mister,’ he says, ‘you should not fuck Sudan woman. She make too much noise.’

People will always tell you about the horrors of conflict, but seldom about the exhilaration that so often accompanies it. War is one of the rare performances on the human stage where every taboo is lifted, every restraint lifted, and the limits removed from behaviour that’s unthinkable in peacetime. The result is that people do extraordinary things, sometimes performing acts of selfless courage that defy belief, and at others carrying out acts of depravity that make the world shudder. The lack of limits brings out strange things in people. It’s as if, when war is declared, something else takes over where reason leaves off, a promise of freedom that will always be denied in ordinary life, the taste of which is incomparably sweet. Perhaps that’s why war is likened to a fog, a mist, a haboob even. I know there is no return from this. I have declared war.

I push his arm sharply in the crook of his elbow, and as it gives way I walk out of the room. He doesn’t like that idea. Almost instantly I feel his arms on me, grabbing me from behind and pulling me violently back inside. But I’m not in the mood to be thwarted now. I draw my mind and breath towards my centre of gravity and keep my balance, turning as he pulls me so that I move around him, then drop suddenly to one knee as I sense his momentum beginning to follow mine. As his body begins to fall onto me, I reach back with both hands to get a grip on his wrist and upper arm, and pull as hard as I can.

He’s not prepared for the move. As his centre of gravity shifts over mine, I heave on the arm and straighten my legs, pushing my hips into his and propelling his body over my shoulder. I release the air from my lungs and a yell explodes from my abdomen. His body flies over me. He’s heavy and smashes a chair as he falls, then tries to roll and get onto his knees, so I kick him in the face as his head is rising. He lurches to one side like a torpedoed boat, his right hand moving to the holster on his left, but I’m above him before he can unclip the pistol, and swing the edge of my hand onto his nose. There’s a crunching sound and he’s unconscious before his head hits the floor.

I want his pistol, but the time it takes me to release it is too great, and his partner seems to be flying through the door, weapon ready. But not quite ready enough. If he’d come into the room in a firing stance he might have found the time to shoot me, but his right arm is flailing and I throw myself at him before he can take aim. We end up half in the doorway, and his right arm flies back and the pistol clatters down the tiles of the stairs. I feel his nails dig into my neck. I can smell his breath and the oily scent of his skin. I drive my forearm into his throat without giving him a chance to draw breath from the fall that’s winded him, and hear a gasp as he begins to choke. If I can keep up the pressure it shouldn’t take too long.

I don’t want to kill him. My right foot finds the door frame and I use it as a brace to put all the force I can summon onto his windpipe and my weight onto his chest until he runs out of air and passes out, but I’m not expecting what happens next. His left hand is free and has found, perhaps from his belt, a short-bladed knife, the tip of which he manages desperately to sink into the calf muscle of my left leg. It’s strange. I don’t feel much, except the warmth of the blood as it spreads across the fabric of my trousers. But his next attempt will probably end up in my ribs. I don’t want to, but I release the hold from his throat and grab his wrist with both hands to twist the knife out of his hand, but he’s too strong and I can’t do it. He’s sucking the air back into his lungs like a diver who’s just surfaced. It’s time to bail out.

I roll back into the room and tear his partner’s pistol from its holster, cock it on the move and turn. The doorway’s empty. He’s pulled himself down the stairs to try and get his weapon back, but I’m there, thank God, before he reaches it, and fire five rounds into the stairwell above the outline of his body until he’s screaming at me to stop.

The contest is over, but whoever has driven Jameela away will sound the alarm. I need information. I don’t know these men who have burst into my life, and I don’t know why they have. I don’t know why they’ve taken Jameela, and I don’t have much time to find out. If I get away within a few minutes, a dim reasoning tells me I can make it to the embassy and take refuge there. But I need this man to talk first. With the muzzle of the pistol jammed into the back of his neck, I don’t give him time to think between questions.

‘Amur amniyati,’ a security matter, he says. That the reason they’re here.

‘What security matter? What matter?’

‘Al jasoos. Britaniyyah. Spy… spy,’ he splutters. ‘British spy.’

I realise I’ve broken the rules somewhere, but how I’ve been classed as a spy is a mystery. I need to know what, or who, has betrayed me.

‘Why?’ I yell. ‘Why do you want me?’

He shakes his head furiously, or as much as the space between his head and the ground allows.

‘La, la. Not you,’ he says. ‘The woman.’

The world’s gone mad. I suddenly hear my own breathing, but I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say. I can make no sense of this. Jameela isn’t a British spy. Jameela is the woman I love. Jameela has nothing to do with all this.

‘Explain.’ I dig the pistol deeper, which has the desired effect.

‘She is agent. She meet with your MI6 from embassy. Every day.’

The answer comes in a rasping whisper, half in English, half in Arabic, but I still can’t believe what I’m hearing. Jameela, he’s telling me, meets a contact from the British embassy every day in a hotel for a few minutes of conversation. He doesn’t know why they meet, he says. That’s why they’ve been watching her. It’s one of their SOPs to take an interest in anyone who meets the intelligence officials of another country.

I can understand that much. But when I ask him to describe the agent she meets with, he gives me a perfect description of Halliday.

‘Thin, like skeleton,’ he says, and mentions his glasses and his stupid mop of hair. The same Halliday who so enjoys playing the buffoon, and who’s pretended from the start never to have met Jameela.

It’s only when I discover the camera in Jameela’s apartment, he says, that they decide to bring her in to question her. It’s not me they wanted.

But they’ll want me now.

It’s time to disappear. I lock the two Mokhabarat men in the bathroom leaving the key in the door so at least their rescuers won’t have to smash it open, and though I doubt it’ll win me too many favours, leave the unloaded pistols outside the door on the floor. In my go bag there’s a first aid kit from which I take a bandage to bind my leg. Then I limp to the main road and take a taxi to my guest house.

There’s no time to do much packing. The taxi waits outside for me. I change out of my blood-soaked trousers and re-bandage my leg. I head for the north of the city, making sure on the way to casually ask the driver where I can find trucks heading for the Eritrean border. When he comes forward to help the police with their enquiries, perhaps he’ll throw them off my trail. Then I take a bus west across the river and head for Omdurman, towards the last place they’ll look for a foreign fugitive.

Beneath the silver dome of the Mahdi’s shrine, the elderly guardian remembers me, and greets me with a warm but grave look of concern as he notices my limp. He escorts me to the buildings behind the shrine. I don’t make any attempt to conceal the trouble I’m in. I tell him I’ll understand if he is unable to give me refuge and offer to make a contribution to the upkeep of the shrine. He eyes the bundle of hundred-dollar bills I put before him. There is a grave and untainted steadiness to his eyes, which perhaps a lifetime of prayer and piety has forged into his soul. Meeting his gaze, I have a momentary sense that my own life seems a frivolous thing. I am saved from the inexplicable impulse to admit to this when he chuckles loudly.

‘We will show you more mercy than the General Kitchener showed to our warriors, but not for money. Your protection is my duty, as a Muslim.’

He hands me back the bundle and leads me to a small room where there’s a simple bed. I sit. He points silently to my leg as if he wants to see the wound. I pull the fabric of my trousers to the knee, and as I take the bandage off, it starts pouring blood again, and I realise it won’t close on its own unless it’s immobile and bandaged for several days, which I don’t have. When I make a sewing gesture with my hands he understands immediately and fetches a towel. From my go bag I take the first aid pouch, and retrieve a small bottle of Betadine and a suture kit. I give the old man one surgical glove and put the other one on my left hand.

The pain makes me tremble. The suture needle is crescent-shaped and glides through my skin while the old man holds the two sides of the wound together. He’s unflappable and would have made a good surgeon’s assistant. He even mops the sweat from my head as I do the sewing, and cuts the black thread where I point, just above the final knot. Then I drench the wound in the Betadine again and cover it tightly with the bandage.

‘Khelaas. I will pray at the shrine for your health,’ says the old man. ‘Insha’allah you will recover quickly.’

‘Insha’allah,’ I hear myself whisper.

The pain invades my whole leg now. I feel the double toxins of adrenalin and exhaustion, and though my mind is still racing I long for sleep. But there’s one more thing. When the old man leaves, I take the satphone and thank God and the Mahdi that I can receive a signal near the window.

There’s a watery-sounding ringtone and a succession of clicks.

‘Hope you I didn’t wake you up,’ I say when it answers, ‘but they say cowgirls don’t sleep much.’

‘Goddamn it, Tony, you sound like you’re at the bottom of a creek. You on a satphone?’

‘I need to find a good travel agent,’ I tell her. ‘Someone to get me home quickly without showing up on anybody’s grid.’

‘Hell,’ she says, ‘so long as it’s illegal, I’ll help any way I can.’

This distant promise of help fills me with the strange urge to cry. I tell her where I am, that I need a new passport, ticket and some supporting identity. She doesn’t waste time on trying to find out how I came to be on the run from the Sudanese secret service. She just wants to know my exact location, preferred time frame and route for the exfil, whether the immigration system at the airport is computerised, and whether local law enforcement has a photograph of me. She asks what languages I speak. I tell her I’ll buy her dinner at Nora’s in DC when this is all over.

I feel burningly hot and then cold. I can’t sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool of black thoughts and things I don’t understand and my feelings are too strong for me to think properly. I feel brutalised by the thought that Jameela was expecting my arrival in Khartoum and played along with every part of it. I wonder, since everyone else I’ve trusted seems to be lying to me, whether Grace will betray me too.

Halfway through the night, sleep closes in on me.

So it’s with nothing short of a feeling of the miraculous that I open the package that arrives at dawn the next day. The old man delivers it when he comes to wake me, saying that a child came to the shrine and asked that it be given to the foreign guest. There’s a printed reservation number for my ticket, a Canadian passport in the name of Cousteau and a worn leather wallet complete with credit cards. There are even some Canadian dollars in it. I see from the passport that I entered Sudan three weeks earlier. I was told the CIA station in Khartoum had been shut down but they’ve obviously kept some talented employees on the payroll, and I’ve never been quite so grateful for the no-nonsense American attitude towards getting things done.

The rest is a gamble. If the police are stopping cars on the way to the airport I’ll call it off and try my chances to the south. But if they’re only checking passports, I have a good chance of slipping through. They won’t have my photograph, and only the two Mokhabarat officials can personally identify me.

I take a taxi to the airport and sit in the car with the driver until I see a party of foreigners disembarking from a hotel minibus. I pay the driver extra and ask him to wait, though I’m not planning to come back, and amble to the group of tourists, who are gathering up their bags. Scanning the building for signs of extra security, I break away from the tourists, head for the airline counter, and give the reservation reference to an attractive Sudanese girl wearing a purple veil. She thanks me and hands me a ticket in my new name. She bears a cruel resemblance to Jameela, whose face haunts me now. Then I head for the immigration desk, where the group I joined earlier are fussing over their departure forms, and fill out my own, remembering only at the last minute to check my signature against the one in my passport, which I copy as well as I can.

I will myself to be invisible, merging into the flow of the others in the hope that I’ll look like a member of the group. We go through security and form a line ahead of the final passport check. I’m nearly there. I shuffle forward, looking at the ground, not daring to look up and draw attention to my face. But I can’t resist a glance around to see what’s happening, and it’s at this precise moment, as if the very atoms in my surroundings have conspired to make it happen, that the uniformed immigration officer looks straight at me.

I turn my eyes away, but he calls out to me, and suddenly the world begins to slow down as if I’m in a dream, and I feel my heartbeat pushing up into my throat as he calls out again, tapping his pen on the kiosk to get my attention.

I pretend not to notice and turn towards the doors, wondering if there are any police between me and the exit, and whether I can make it to the taxi before things turn noisy. But the woman ahead of me in the queue, an earnest American in a safari hat, is tapping on my shoulder to get me to turn around, and now it seems the whole line is staring at me.

I’m trying hard to disguise my own dread. I wonder if I can manage the sprint to the doors, but my leg won’t take it. I force a bewildered smile to my face. The official is waving me impatiently towards him. I feel as if I’m standing above an open trapdoor and about to be forced to take a step forward. I walk to the booth, where he’s pointing his finger energetically at me. It’s only then I realise dimly that I’ve seen him before, and that it’s the same officer who stamped my passport when I first entered the country.

He takes my passport, opens it at a random page without even looking for my entry visa, and brings down the exit stamp with a thump. He doesn’t notice that I have a different name and nationality now. He points to himself and then to me, and with the same gleaming smile that flashed at me on the day of my arrival, says, ‘My friend.’

Then he returns my passport to me, and the pen I have earlier lent him, and waves me on.