It was a bizarre sight, and no one was more astonished than The Doctor, who remained in the passenger seat of the truck as if he had suffered a seizure. Foyzi opened the door and pulled him down into the road at gunpoint uttering many imprecations under his breath, then took him by the scruff of the neck and marched him to the rear of the truck. Harland and Herrick followed.
They went through all the cells. Two men were released but neither bore the slightest resemblance to Khan and were told to make a run for it while they could.
‘Maybe they’ve got him on another truck,’ suggested Colonel B, wiping his face. ‘Inform this cunt that you will shoot him if he doesn’t tell us where Karim Khan is.’
Foyzi placed the silencer of his pistol against The Doctor’s temple. After a moment of deliberation, The Doctor lifted his head and pointed inside the truck.
‘There’s a compartment in the floor,’ shouted Isis. ‘Look, there are two hinges.’
They wrenched the door up with crowbars. Beneath the steel plate Khan was lying bound, gagged and blindfolded in a space not much larger than a coffin. His feet were a blackened mess and his groin was stained with blood and urine. The rest of his clothes were sodden. They lifted him from this hold with infinite care and moved him to the light. Herrick took off the blindfold and gag and told him he was in safe hands, but he seemed not to understand and moved his head rhythmically from side to side like a blind singer.
‘For the love of God…’ said one of Colonel B’s men.
‘No,’ said Harland, remembering with an almost physical pain his own time at the hands of a torturer. He shook his head and turned to The Doctor ready to kill him.
The Colonel put up his arm. ‘We’d better be about our business,’ he said. ‘Get Khan into Harland’s vehicle and give him a shot of morphine.’
‘What about this man?’ Harland asked, pointing to The Doctor. ‘He knows Isis. We can’t leave him here.’
The Colonel nodded. ‘I rather thought we’d take him with us.’
‘And?’ said Harland.
‘Well, obviously we can’t take him all the way home to Syria or Iraq, or wherever the devil he comes from, but we can certainly give him a ride to, say, the middle of the Sinai desert.’
Harland, Isis and Foyzi got in with Khan and made their way through the remainder of the smoke. Colonel B’s men melted into the cemetery, two of them running The Doctor towards a container lorry waiting with its engine ticking over a little way off.
The radio came to life again. It was Guthrie. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to join me in thanking the Captain for a perfect landing. Local time is 4.25 p.m. The temperature is ninety-two degrees. Welcome to Cairo. Please remain seated until the aircraft has stopped moving.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The island where they took Khan lay some two hundred miles south of Cairo, below a great bend in the Nile. Thirteen hours after leaving the cemetery they made a rendezvous with a boat named Lotus, hidden at the edge of a sugar plantation. Khan’s stretcher was loaded across the bow and secured with ropes. The boatman pushed off into the current and, using only a long oar at the stern, steered them downstream towards the island. There was no man-made light to be seen for miles around and the moonless night had an infinite clarity. When the boat found a breeze in the centre of the river, Herrick peered down at Khan to see if he was cold. She watched his eyes open and then his entire face spread and relax. A curtain was being drawn back.
The Lotus glided silently towards a cleft on the island and the boatmen punted the last few yards to the bank with the oar. The shapes of several men appeared and moved down to the river’s edge to catch the boat and lead it into a berth of ancient wooden piles. One man waded through the water holding up a white robe. It was Sammi Loz. He bent down, touched Khan’s shoulder and said something. There was no response.
‘How bad is he?’ he asked Harland.
‘Not good.’
The stretcher was borne up the bank by four men to a group of single-storey buildings arranged loosely around a courtyard and hidden from the river by a screen of vegetation. At the corner of the courtyard, light came from an open door, revealing a room with a faded mural of flowers and exotic birds, a low wooden bed, some chairs and a couple of oil lamps. They lifted Khan from the stretcher and laid him on the bed. He stirred and seemed to recognise Loz, then Herrick, but he plainly doubted what he was seeing and tried to reach out to touch Loz’s face.
Loz told him to stay still, lifting Khan’s head to give him some water and a sleeping pill. When Khan’s eyes closed a few minutes later, Loz set about removing the rags from his friend’s emaciated body with a pair of surgical scissors he’d found in the medical bag. He took each strip of cloth and dropped it neatly into a pile. Then he asked Foyzi to run a light over Khan very slowly so he could see the extent of his injuries. He stopped to look at the burns on his genitals where the electrodes had been applied. He sponged away the grime and blood and dabbed the livid red and black weals with anti-bacterial ointment. With Herrick’s help he rolled Khan onto his side so that he could treat similar injuries on his back, buttocks and the inside of his thighs. Then he cleaned and dressed the chafe marks on his hands and ankles.
Khan’s feet presented a greater problem. They were so swollen and bruised that it was hard to distinguish the toes from the rest of the foot. Loz suspected there might be one or two broken bones but said he wouldn’t be able to tell until Khan had had an X-ray. There was little he could do, apart from giving him painkillers and arnica to help the bruising. He said that many weeks of physiotherapy lay ahead.
Throughout the hour he spent tending his friend, Loz paid as much attention to the general trauma as to the particular injuries, judging the position of his spine and shoulder blades now that he was in repose. He touched the back of his head, neck and pelvis lightly, gazing up to the flickering light on the ceiling to concentrate better on the distortions and misalignments that his fingers found. Occasionally he shook his head but said nothing. At length he asked Foyzi for a pen and paper, and made some notes on his lap.
Harland signalled to Herrick that he was going outside. She followed. They had agreed during the journey that one of them should always be with Khan and Loz to hear anything that passed between them, but Khan was obviously going to be out for some time and Foyzi was keeping a close eye on both of them.
They sat down on an open terrace a little distance away. For several minutes Harland stared down at the insects that had gathered round a light, then shook himself from his reverie and looked at her vacantly. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘What we need is a drink and a smoke. I’ve got some whisky in my bag. Have you got any cigarettes?’
She shook her head.
‘Damn.’
Foyzi came through the door and tossed him a packet of Camel Light. ‘Compliments of the establishment,’ he said, turning back to Loz.
‘Who the hell is Foyzi?’ asked Herrick quietly.
‘He’s in your business, actually - a freelance, as fly as you get. But he’s reliable and loyal.’
‘And all this?’
‘He must have done a deal with the local Islamist nutters for the island. This area is crawling with them. They hide out in mountain caves either side of the Nile.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘He’s Jordanian, based in Turkey. He had something to do with the Iraqi opposition but now works all over the Middle East. I came across him about a year ago when the UN needed a line to Hamas. Foyzi fixed a meeting in Lebanon.’
‘And you trust him?’
‘Yes, so does the Chief.’
They drank for a further fifteen minutes, then Harland looked at his watch and said they should call Teckman. He set up the satellite phone in a clear patch of ground nearby and plugged it into a laptop equipped with powerful encryption software. He dialled three times before getting through to one of the duty officers at Vauxhall Cross. There was a further delay while the office patched through the unscrambled call to the Chief. Harland passed the handset to Herrick. ‘You’re the secret servant round here,’ he said. ‘I’m just the help.’
The Chief came on. ‘Your father is going to be fine - a suspected fracture in his wrist, that’s all. They’ll be back with us by midday today. What about our friends?’
‘He’s sedated, and the osteopath is doing a good job, as far as one can tell.’
‘Well, we’ll send reinforcements to you later. Two of your colleagues are nearby.’ He paused. ‘You’ve all done very well, but now comes the hard part. I need you to get as much as you can, as soon as possible. I know the fellow is in a bad way but you should make a start tomorrow. You can use the computer to send your reports. I’d prefer you do that than spend any time speaking on the phone. If you log on now, Harland will find a message.’
Harland was signalling that he wanted to talk to Teckman, but before she could tell the Chief, he had gone.
‘What’s the bloody hell’s he playing at?’
Herrick told him about the message. For the next ten minutes Harland struggled with the decryption program. Eventually she took over and retrieved the email.
‘Good news, I hope?’ she said.
He shook his head.
‘Well?’
‘It’s nothing important.’
‘Anything that comes through that computer is important. I need to know what it says.’
Harland lit another cigarette. ‘This is personal. A deal which I don’t propose to discuss with you.’
‘If it has a bearing on this situation, I insist you do,’ she snapped.
‘It doesn’t, except that I may have to leave the island over the next day and a half. This is your business now. I don’t work for HMG. I’ve got another job to go to. And I
do
have to go - the Secretary-General is leaving for Syria and Jordan tomorrow. I must find a way of joining him.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘You’ve got Foyzi. You won’t have any problems. ’
‘Oh yeah, stuck on some bloody island in the middle of the Nile with a known Afghan veteran and a man who has direct links with Hizbollah. That’s to say nothing of the minor interest the Egyptian government and the Americans have in finding Khan and apprehending those who freed him. And when you throw in the Islamic jihad skulking in the mountains, the whole thing is a mere picnic. You bloody well can’t leave me here. I need you. Tell me why you’re really going. It’s not your job.’
Harland shook his head. ‘Look, you knew I had a deal with the Chief. In return for helping to get Sammi Loz out of Albania and bringing him here, the Chief said he would find a friend of mine. And he has now given me the information. This is something I have to do.’
‘Well, which is it? This friend or the job?’
‘Both.’
She sighed heavily and swallowed the remainder of her whisky. ‘I need sleep. I can’t think about this any longer.’
They got up and went to Khan’s room. Loz was sitting on a three-legged stool watching him sleep. He looked up.
‘Thank you for rescuing my friend,’ he said. ‘You have undoubtedly saved his life.’
‘We weren’t doing it as a favour for you,’ said Herrick.
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but you risked much. I am grateful to you both and so will Karim be when he’s able to speak.’
‘Which will be tomorrow. We need to talk to him as soon as he wakes in the morning.’
‘That will be too soon,’ said Loz evenly.
‘Too bad,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you need some rest, Isis. You look tired.’
‘Don’t tell me what I need. Just make sure he’s ready to speak to us by morning.’
Loz was taken aback. Even Harland was surprised by the sudden flare of temper.
She woke six hours later, and for a few minutes stared through an open door, astonished by the intense, green lush-ness that surrounded her. Apart from a few bird-calls there was a strikingly profound stillness, and she felt that only now had Cairo stopped ringing in her ears. She swung her legs from the bed and glimpsed a reed bank through the trees.
A few minutes later Harland called out from the courtyard and announced he was bringing her coffee. She drew over her the blue cloth that had served as a blanket during the night and said he could come in.
‘Feeling better?’ he said, as his head came round the door. He handed her a bowl of thick, black coffee, and held up a dark blue robe with a hood. ‘It’s been suggested by Foyzi that you might be prepared to wear this while you’re here. He says you won’t be so conspicuous to people passing in boats. If it makes you feel any better, they’ve found me one as well.’
‘That’s fine. Leave it over here,’ she said.
He dropped it on the bed.
‘What about Khan?’
‘He’s still asleep.’
‘Something came to me in the night,’ she said. ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it - a sense that we’re looking at the wrong thing.’
‘Maybe.’ Harland’s shrewd eyes narrowed. ‘Let me know when you think of it. I’ll go back to them now. One of us should be there when he wakes. Why don’t you get something to eat from Foyzi and then relieve me in an hour or so?’