Safiq recoiled. Whatever this mad Somali was planning, he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to fight because he didn’t want to die. Safiq wanted to live. He saw Juma stare at young men in the crowd. Older family members were holding them back, telling them not to volunteer.
Safiq realised Juma was losing his audience. The Somali reached for his weapon. But then the woman next to him grabbed his hand. Safiq didn’t know who she was, but he saw her give Juma a stare and shake her head: no weapons.
Then the woman jumped up on the crate beside him. ‘People, my fellow Africans,’ she shouted. ‘I have made it to America, and you can too.’ She had to raise her voice even louder, over the crowd’s reaction. ‘There will be no fighting. No guns will be fired. You will all be safe, and soon you will all be free.’
Arguments were breaking out amongst the people in front of Safiq. The woman at the front strained to listen to them, cupping her ear to keep out the wind. ‘You ask “how?” Let me tell you how: we will travel in a ship that the rich European immigration police will let through,’ she shouted. ‘It is not a ferry for people. It is not a container ship. People, we will travel in an oil tanker.’
The people around Safiq were listening now.
‘And to get through the blockade, we will not travel straight to Italy,’ the woman explained, shaking her head. ‘Many of you have tried that, and we all know what happens. No — to reach the West, first we will go east. We will reach the shores of the New World through the capital of the Old World: Rome.
A middle-aged man in the crowd raised his voice in reply. ‘But how will we sail to America?’
Safiq laughed and nodded. It was a fair question.
The woman tried to laugh too. ‘America is too far to sail. Our oil tanker will not sail over the Atlantic. But we have another way to reach America. How we will reach America from Rome must though, for now, remain secret.’
She had them intrigued, hopeful even.
‘But I promise you, if you come with me to Rome, I will get you into the United States,’ she vowed. Then she closed the deal. ‘And even Rome is far, far better than this dockside.’
Safiq was persuaded. Within minutes, he was part of a jostling queue eager to board the Al-Afrique oil tanker. It took more than an hour for the guest workers and their families to embark. Conditions inside the empty supertanker were no better — or worse — than the dockside. Now, though, Safiq and all the other migrants were going somewhere. They had hope, and that hope was leading them to freedom.
The one man who was not free was taken on last. Juma mocked him as he boarded. ‘Come on, Senator — I thought you wanted to go home.’
‘Be pleased I’m not getting the other things I want,’ retorted Sam Roosevelt.
‘Like?’
‘Like, you dead, Juma.’
Juma tried to laugh. He kicked the Senator to make the point, then ordered that Sam Roosevelt was frogmarched with him onto the bridge.
Juma nodded to his crew, and they radioed to the tugboat in the harbour. The anchor was raised and the moorings released.
Slowly, gracefully, the supertanker full of human cargo, driven by a pirate captain from the slums of Somalia, was hauled out of port into the Mediterranean Sea.
Below deck, Safiq felt the movement of the ship and knew: his journey to America had begun.
Thirty-Six
The police spread through Speakers’ Corner. Some jogged to the edge of the crowd, others tried to seal off the area. The helicopter above radioed down their assessment: the escapee could not have got far.
Then everybody was checked. Policemen systematically filtered through all the tourists, passers-by and families. They even made sure a woman in a hijab wasn’t really Myles in disguise. One man complained when his hood was pulled down. A policewoman had to apologise.
Initially they found nothing. So more police cars came, with more officers inside them. Myles, they assumed, had gone to ground, which meant the police had to be efficient. They would check everywhere, looking in every possible hiding place. It was still just a few minutes since their man had been positively identified in Connaught Square — by the anti-terrorism police who had shot the African gunman. So they knew Myles could not be far. Myles would not be able to escape their cordon…
But he already had.
As the police were spreading out through Speakers’ Corner, Myles was walking behind the London-to-Oxford coach. As the driver finished stowing the baggage from the pavement side of the vehicle, Myles opened the roadside compartment. He bent down, slipped in, and closed the luggage door behind him. The driver had returned to his seat and started the bus moving while the police were still checking faces in Hyde Park.
Myles escaped just before the cordon was set up.
He wondered whether any of the traffic had seen him sneak aboard. He had stepped in front of a taxi to climb into the underbelly of the coach. But unless the police set up an instant roadblock, it would probably be several hours before the information trickled back. And by that time, Myles would be far away.
Myles felt the vehicle move off, and heard the sounds of London traffic passing by. He used the journey to plan his next moves. He needed to tell Helen he was safe, and for that he would send an email. But he couldn’t use his own email account — the police would be watching that. So, when he got to Oxford, he would set up a fresh account at an internet café and contact her through an alias.
He wouldn’t be able to go back to his flat — too dangerous. That meant he needed to get clothes, money and food. Since he had an hour and a half in the coach’s luggage compartment, he was able to look through some of the bags. In the half-light, Myles was lucky enough to find a fresh shirt and a coat which almost matched his tall frame. Getting dressed in the confines of the moving compartment took longer than he wanted it to — he was jolted and thrown as the bus turned corners — but he managed. He also found a small purple backpack, a cigarette lighter, some sandwiches and some money — euros. He took them all, promising to himself that his actions in the coming days would justify this small act of theft.
Myles realised that leaving the bus might be harder than getting on board. And having rummaged through much of the luggage on board, he had to exit before people collected their bags. So he waited until the bus was starting to drive more slowly, indicating it had reached the busy city streets of Oxford, then opened the compartment. He looked at the streets and saw he had timed it right: he was in his hometown. And when the vehicle was travelling slowly enough, he rolled out onto his feet, stumbled, and fell onto the pavement. He was soon up again and tried walking along the street as if nothing had happened.
No one had seen him disembark, although watching the bus as it drove off, the storage compartment door still open, Myles knew he would be tracked soon. He had to be fast.
First, he went into an internet café frequented by students in the city. There he created a new email account and typed out a quick message:
Helen,
We need a better cursus than this.
Yours.
He left the message unsigned, knowing Helen would look up the word ‘cursus’ and, when she found out it was the Roman postal system, guess the email came from him. It was cryptic, but Myles hoped she would understand: they needed a code which would allow them to communicate in secret. He knew the police would probably understand the message too, but he had faith that Helen would think of a way to evade their eavesdropping. He pressed ‘send’.
Then Myles went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University’s central library. In case the librarian at the door knew he was on the run and might report him, Myles entered through an open fire escape, ducking his head in case the entrance was monitored by CCTV. He made his way to the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Reading Room, where he hunted down the one book he needed most. He scanned along the shelves until he found it — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — and carried it to one of the desks.