Some day Nor would talk.
September 2001
The message was written in the layer of white ash on the hood of an abandoned car on Broadway: PUNISH. It wasn’t clear whether the person who had used a finger to scrawl the message was referring to what had happened or to some future act of retribution. Standing on the pavement beside the car, Jonah watched another convoy of Humvees, dump trucks, bulldozers and backhoes trundle south through the parted sawhorse barriers.
‘
A whirlwind is coming
,’ Nor had told him, two months before in Sierra Leone. ‘
When it has passed nothing will ever be the same …
’ He’d been right. You could tell by the look on people’s faces that something terrible had happened. And that many Americans were thinking that this was the worst thing that had ever happened – the world had turned on its head in a day.
‘We’ve spent five years trying to get people to listen. But nobody took us seriously. They were oblivious. It was too exotic a threat. Too primitive …’
Jonah glanced across at Mikulski, who was staring at the pillar of ash spiralling upwards, hundreds of feet over Manhattan and the Hudson. It was the first time that Mikulski had spoken since Jonah had met him at the barricade on the corner of Varrick and Houston. Mikulski had produced his Treasury Department ID and soldiers dressed in flak jackets and gas masks had waved them through. They had walked together down the empty, ash-covered pavements into the Financial District.
Mikulski looked as if he had hardly slept for several days. He had a steely expression on his face that suggested deep-rooted anger.
‘I said to people: you don’t understand. Random slaughter is a way of life out there, from Algeria to Afghanistan. Bombs, earthquakes, mass starvation – whole regions of the world strewn with failing states. They just didn’t get it. People thought that we were immune, that somehow our ideals and beliefs would shield us.’
Mikulski was right, Jonah thought; in the world that he knew this sort of thing happened every day. Hatred, not love, was all around. Eventually, inevitably, it had found its way to America.
‘Where were you?’ Jonah asked.
‘When the first plane hit? I was walking down West Broadway. I heard the roar of the engines. I looked up and it struck the North Tower.’ He glanced across at Jonah. ‘I was still standing there with my mouth open when the second plane hit.’
Mikulski’s office had been in the US Customs House in World Trade Center 6, the eight-storey building that was destroyed when the North Tower collapsed on it. They had been due to meet there on the afternoon of the 11th. Mikulski was on loan to the US Treasury from the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence office. His particular speciality was tracking terrorist financial links.
Mikulski returned the question. ‘Where were you?’
‘On a plane,’ Jonah replied, ‘on my way here.’
It was already clear that 9/11 was the fixed point around which they would orientate themselves for the foreseeable future. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Jonah’s 747 had been diverted to an air force base at Gander in Newfoundland. It had joined thirty other passenger jets that were parked on a runway built for cold-war-era nuclear bombers in expectation of a very different kind of Armageddon. The small, dilapidated town adjacent to the runway had struggled to accommodate several thousand unexpected guests, and by the time Jonah and his fellow passengers had disembarked from their plane, the only remaining place to sleep was the benches of a Pentecostal church. He had spent five nights in the church.
‘What will happen now?’ Jonah asked.
Mikulski unfolded his newspaper and held it up for Jonah to see. On the cover was a picture of President George W. Bush and below it the headline:
Justice will be done
.
‘We’ll go after them, wherever they are. We’ll hunt them down.’
Revenge was the word on everyone’s lips. In the early hours of one morning in Gander, Jonah had found himself sitting on a pew in the church next to a straight-backed, grey-faced woman with a Bible on her lap. He hadn’t meant to intrude on her prayers but it was the only pew without someone stretched out on it, and she had offered him a weary smile. He had spoken to her out of politeness and in return she had confided in him. She spoke softly, without betraying any emotion: her daughter had been ‘taken’ in the attacks. She had been ‘judged’. The daughter had worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower, just above the point of impact. Jonah had been stunned by the woman’s composure.
‘We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government,’ the woman explained. ‘We’ve stuck our finger in His eye. The Supreme Court has insulted Him over and over. They’ve taken His Bible away from the schools. They’ve forbidden little children to pray.’
Jonah tried to ease himself out of the pew, but there was an unstoppable momentum to her softly spoken words.
‘The battle of America has begun,’ she told him. ‘In the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. Retribution will be terrible to behold.’
Not everybody in America had considered they were immune or out of reach, Jonah reflected. Plenty of people had been expecting it. They were the ones counting down the hours to the rapture. It was easy to understand how religious fundamentalists would latch on to the destruction of the towers as a foreshadow of the coming Armageddon. And both sides were at it: the symbolism was both biblical and Koranic. In the Bible, the people who built the tower of Babel were punished for their presumption; in the Koran, the people who failed to heed God’s messengers were destroyed in the punishment stories. As far as Jonah was concerned, Islamism and Christian fundamentalism were no different from each other – their adherents were both scrambling rabidly for the next piece of carnage.
‘This way,’ Mikulski said, producing a torch from his battered leather coat. They entered the Century 21 department store and picked their way through the rubble and smashed goods to the emergency stairwell. They climbed to the fifth floor and entered the offices of a law firm. Walking over to the windows, which were blown out, they stepped out on to the ledge.
‘There,’ Mikulski said.
They were looking right into the heart of it, an enormous pile of smouldering wreckage. Parts of it were on fire. In the glare of the spotlights, they stood and watched firemen digging in the rubble and twisted metal. Just looking at it sucked all the hope out of you.
‘You have your answer, don’t you?’ Mikulski said. ‘You know now why they were converting cash into easily transportable assets, because they know that we are going to come for them like a whirlwind and they know that if they can’t carry it they’ll lose it. Diamonds are among the easiest, and by far the most valuable by weight, of commodities to move. They don’t set off metal detectors. They don’t have any scent. You take a diamond that’s been cut and polished and there’s no human being on earth who can tell with certainty where that stone came from.’
‘We think they purchased about twenty million dollars’ worth.’
‘They want to be able to fund future attacks,’ Mikulski told him. ‘This abomination isn’t enough for them; it’s not big enough or grotesque enough. Not by a long way. It’s only the opening salvo.’
Within the counter-terrorism community, Mikulski had a reputation for being a maverick but also for plain speaking and honesty. He was the son of Polish immigrants, a former Baltimore homicide cop turned FBI agent. When Jonah had first contacted him after his return from Sierra Leone he had hoped that Mikulski would be able to offer some advice on how to track the sale of the diamonds, in the hope that it might lead to Nor, but that wasn’t his only motivation for asking for a meeting. Jonah had been ready to tell all. In the weeks following his return from Sierra Leone, he had convinced himself that it was better to confess and hope for clemency than leave it to Nor to reveal all in some spectacular stunt. He had not consulted Monteith before arranging the meeting. He was in no doubt that Monteith would regard what he was contemplating doing as treason. But he had reasoned that he was under a greater obligation to tell the truth than to simply protect the Department.
By the time he had boarded the plane for New York, Jonah had made his mind up. He was going to confess. But events had intervened. Terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Standing beside Mikulski in the window of the legal firm, and staring down at the fiery inferno that was all that was left of the towers, he knew that there would be no confession. The world had irreversibly changed. He was as tied to the lie as the rest of the Guides.
MIRANDA
‘I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak from the evil of what He has created, from the evil of darkness when it gathers, from the evil of the women who blow on knots, from the evil of an envier when he envies.’
Koran, Sura 113
2 September 2005
Some time before dawn she found herself at the door to the farmhouse, sure in the knowledge that there would be no further sleep that night. She stood for a while, naked in the doorway, staring out across the water at the mainland. The air was cold and thick with the smell of brine, and soon the first mist would roll off the water. The chill burned her cheeks, breasts and thighs. She thought, as she had so often done before, that her life was a mystery that had unravelled in directions unforeseen.
The dog slid between her legs and sprinted off after distant rabbits. She didn’t feel tired. She felt lost. She had no cable, no lifeline, to show her the way. She turned from the doorway and retreated to the kitchen. From the freezer box in the fridge she removed a bottle of lemon vodka, the last of the batch. She poured herself a measure in an empty jam jar from the draining board and downed it in one gulp. It burned.
She felt a rush of sudden anger. There were times when it felt as if a band of steel were tightening against her skull.
Even in his absence Barnhill was full of Jonah’s presence. She often started, her head turning as fast as whiplash to catch him, but she was always too slow. He was never there. It was just his ghost haunting her, an invisible companion to the dog that followed everywhere at her heels.
She glanced at the postcard tacked to the fridge door; Jonah’s only message since he had left the island. The picture was a photograph of the Bala Hissar fortress in Peshawar. She turned it over. The stamps were from Pakistan, postmarked Peshawar. She had contemplated buying a ticket for Pakistan and setting out in pursuit of him – after all, she knew Peshawar well – but something had made her stay put. She distrusted the postcard’s provenance. There was a simple written message,
I have things to take care of
, and the address written in a scrawl beside it. The subtext eluded her. She clung to the thought that there might be some further communication from him, some sort of explanation.
Then there was her job, if it could be called that. From the beginning of April she had been employed by Scottish Natural Heritage to monitor the habitat of rare orchids on the island’s machair, the sand-dune pasture on the windward side of the isle of Jura that was classified as a special conservation area. In the last two months she had logged frog, Hebridean, northern March and early purple orchids, as well as sea bindweed, yellow rattle and red clover among the carpet flowers. She had even spotted Irish ladies’ tresses, a native orchid of Greenland, its seed probably deposited by migrating Greenland white-fronted geese in their droppings. Then there were the birds: corncrake, twite, dunlin, redshank and ringed plover. After Jonah had left she simply continued with her daily routine of hiking, note-taking and observations. If nothing else, it had provided a ready excuse for her restless meandering.
Beyond that, it was a struggle to remember how she had spent the time. There were piles of books, fragments of diary notes and observations, clues here and there, but nothing concrete, and certainly nothing to distinguish one day from another. They’d run together like goulash.
She was almost forty.
She didn’t even own a car.
She left the kitchen and walked down the hallway, her fingertips sliding along the wall. There was a black Karrimor rucksack hanging on a peg on the wall, its straps fastidiously folded and taped. Her crash-bag, Jonah had called it. The night before he had left, he’d packed it and insisted that she keep it ready for instant departure.
‘You need to be ready at a moment’s notice,’ he’d told her.
‘Why?’ she’d asked, amused by the gravity of his expression. She’d put such things behind her. That was why they had come to Barnhill, to put their wildness behind them. She’d imagined it was simply force of habit in him.
‘Trust me,’ Jonah had said. It was only much later, days after he’d gone, that it occurred to her that these were the very the same words that she’d used to him in Baghdad in March 2003 in the last days before the war, when falling for him felt like utter madness, when everything that she did, every word she said, every man she fucked or betrayed, everything she revealed and the many things that she kept concealed, all of it was about getting back her stolen child.
She drifted from room to room in a sleepy daze with the dog following. There was a thin layer of peat dust from the fires in the kitchen and the drawing room that covered everything. It needed dusting. She needed to find a morning routine again.
She opened the door to Jonah’s study and stared at the empty desk and the wall beside it, which had a profusion of jottings, press cuttings, photographs and maps pinned to it. The collage, he called it – the research matter for his memoir. She sat in the swivel chair and leant back to study the wall. She had taken to randomly reading the press cuttings, the items of interest to Jonah that were highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker. This time, she read a cutting from the
Daily Mail
– ‘
Aviation International Services do not now and have never conducted so-called rendition flights
’.
Beneath it there was an article from the
Washington Post
with the headline:
‘
Al Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade
’
.
Beside that, with an arrow linking the two, there was a 2004 print-out from Wikinews: ‘
The bodies of eleven disembowelled people have been found in a mass grave in the Sulaymaniyah region of Kurdistan, according to the United States military in Iraq. The bodies have not yet been identified. Reports quote an estimate that the bodies may be more than a year old.
’