Not many tourists, thought Porter. I’m going to stand out like Victoria Beckham in the local Primark. I’m probably the first white guy mad enough to come here in years.
He checked the bus schedule. The Sidon bus had rolled into town ten minutes late, but he still had twenty minutes to spare before the next bus headed out to Anjar. Take in the sights, he thought to himself with a grim smile.
Walking across to the shop, he took a bottle of water from the cooler cabinet, chose a couple of bars of chocolate, and handed across a Lebanese twenty-pound note to pay for them. He didn’t say anything, and although the woman serving could see he wasn’t local, she didn’t seem to care. A small boy was emptying out his pockets, seeing if he had enough coins to buy a packet of sweets. He glanced suspiciously at Porter, then looked away. Porter took the coins he’d been given in change, and handed them down to the boy. He started to say something in Arabic, but Porter just shook his head and turned round.
No need for the thanks, mate, thought Porter as he walked back towards the bus stop. Where I’m going, I won’t be needing any loose change.
I’m dealing in a harder currency.
Blood.
Another hour, another bus station.
Porter stepped down from the ten-year-old Mercedes vehicle and glanced around. It was gone six now, and the skies were growing darker: back in England it would be pitch black by this time, but the days were longer out here. The journey had taken longer than expected. His bus had left twenty minutes after the scheduled time, and had taken fifteen minutes longer than it should have done to get to Anjar: the driver had picked one woman up, then turned round and gone back again when it turned out she had forgotten something. The waiting was driving Porter crazy. Just get on with it, he muttered to himself. I want to get stuck into this mission.
There were two food stands at the far end of the bus station, and a couple of guys were hanging around the ticket office. One of them, Porter noted, very obviously had some kind of gun tucked inside his leather jacket. They glanced at Porter, but neither seemed very interested. All through the journey, Porter had been watching, wondering whether the Firm had put some kind of tail on him. It was, he well knew, their most obvious move. After all, he was going to lead them straight to Katie Dartmouth’s kidnappers. Follow him, and they’d find her. All they would have to do then was rustle up a crack unit from Hereford to go and get her out. The only risk was, if the tail was spotted, Porter would be killed on the spot. Then they would have nothing. If there was a tail, he had to spot it before Hassad did.
As much as he scanned the bus and the streets for evidence of anyone keeping tabs on him, he felt certain he hadn’t seen the same face twice throughout the whole journey. He hadn’t seen anyone acting suspiciously. There was nobody lurking in the shadows. And no passing of the watch from one person to another. Not that he could see anyway.
Either they are not here, or else they are bloody good.
He started walking towards the bar. It was just a single room, built into a ragged concrete structure on the street directly opposite the bus station. There were a couple of cars parked alongside, and a few plastic tables and chairs. About a dozen guys were sitting around outside, drinking coffee and tea, and there were heaps of dog ends at their feet. Sandwiched close to the Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli borders, it was hardly surprising Anjar didn’t exist as anything more than a brutally fought-over dot on a map. Why the hell would anyone want to live here? Porter wondered. There was nothing to tie you to the place except for war, poverty and anger.
Crossing the road, he paused before the entrance to the bar. It had no name, just a dirty brown awning that would provide some shade when the sun was shining. Still, there was no mistaking the place. Anjar only had about four proper streets and two of those appeared to have been abandoned. It had a couple of shops, but this was the only café or bar. Porter started to step inside, yet for a brief moment he could feel himself hesitating. This is the line, he thought to himself. On one side, there’s this world. On the other a different one, probably the next world, if that happens to exist.
Cross it and there’s no going back.
Sod it, he told himself with a grim smile. There’s nothing to go back to. And the next world probably isn’t so bad. There’s bound to be a place where a bloke can doss down for the night. Who knows, you might even be able to get a drink.
The only trouble is I wouldn’t ever see Sandy again.
The guy at the counter looked around thirty, with a black T-shirt, and blue jeans hanging loose over his white trainers. There were a few men inside the bar: where they stashed the women in this place, Porter had no idea, but he hadn’t seen any apart from at the shop and on the bus. The men were all drinking tea and pouring over a single copy of a newspaper. There was some kind of discussion going on, but whether it was about sport, or politics, or business, Porter couldn’t tell. He nodded towards the barman. There were some beer bottles in the cooler, and Porter felt tempted. A beer was just exactly what he needed right now. Lebanon was a Muslim country, but it wasn’t dry like some of them. Still, the locals hardly ever drank, and ordering a beer would only attract attention to himself. And that was the very last thing he wanted.
‘A coffee,’ he said in English.
He’d learnt a few words of Arabic back in the Regiment, but he didn’t want to try them out now. The barman looked at him, his expression puzzled. Not many English guys up here, thought Porter. The only foreigners you ever got around this place were probably Israelis and they didn’t usually get out of their fighter jets to say hello.
‘You speak English?’ said Porter.
The man nodded. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘You want coffee?’
‘That’s why I asked for it,’ said Porter.
The man went to the machine behind the bar. ‘Where you from?’
Porter took the small white china cup that had just been placed on the counter, and flicked away two flies that were sitting on the sugar bowl next to it. He pushed a couple of Lebanese one-pound coins across the bar. For a moment, he thought about lying. The British weren’t popular in Lebanon: they never had been, and they’d got a lot less so since the Iraq war kicked off. He didn’t need to get into any kind of argument with the locals. He could pretend to be Australian or a Kiwi: the trouble was they would probably recognise the accent. And who knows, they probably hate the Aussies as well. ‘England,’ he said.
A couple of the men from the group around the newspaper looked at him. One of them had narrow eyes and a thick scar that ran down the side of his cheek and into his neck. He spat the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and ground it beneath the heel of his boot. You don’t need a translator to figure out what he’s saying, thought Porter. He’s tooling up for a fight. And the next thing he wants to put underneath that boot is my face.
‘You hear about the English girl,’ said the barman. ‘The one who got kidnapped?’
Christ, thought Porter. It’s even a big story out here.
‘Something,’ he replied tersely.
‘What they think of that back in London?’ said the barman, with a smile.
‘Maybe they get their soldiers out of our country now?’ said the man with the scar, standing up and walking over to the bar.
‘We’re not in your country,’ said Porter.
‘The Arab nation is one nation,’ said the man. His scar quivered slightly as he spoke, as if it was the wound talking. ‘You occupy one land, you occupy all our lands.’
Shit, thought Porter. The last thing I need here is a bar-room brawl.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t really know anything about it. I’m just getting a coffee while I wait for the next bus.’