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.