I roll back into the room and tear his partner’s pistol from its holster, cock it on the move and turn. The doorway’s empty. He’s pulled himself down the stairs to try and get his weapon back, but I’m there, thank God, before he reaches it, and fire five rounds into the stairwell above the outline of his body until he’s screaming at me to stop.
The contest is over, but whoever has driven Jameela away will sound the alarm. I need information. I don’t know these men who have burst into my life, and I don’t know why they have. I don’t know why they’ve taken Jameela, and I don’t have much time to find out. If I get away within a few minutes, a dim reasoning tells me I can make it to the embassy and take refuge there. But I need this man to talk first. With the muzzle of the pistol jammed into the back of his neck, I don’t give him time to think between questions.
‘Amur amniyati,’ a security matter, he says. That the reason they’re here.
‘What security matter? What matter?’
‘Al jasoos. Britaniyyah. Spy… spy,’ he splutters. ‘British spy.’
I realise I’ve broken the rules somewhere, but how I’ve been classed as a spy is a mystery. I need to know what, or who, has betrayed me.
‘Why?’ I yell. ‘Why do you want me?’
He shakes his head furiously, or as much as the space between his head and the ground allows.
‘La, la. Not you,’ he says. ‘The woman.’
The world’s gone mad. I suddenly hear my own breathing, but I’m not saying anything because I don’t know what to say. I can make no sense of this. Jameela isn’t a British spy. Jameela is the woman I love. Jameela has nothing to do with all this.
‘Explain.’ I dig the pistol deeper, which has the desired effect.
‘She is agent. She meet with your MI6 from embassy. Every day.’
The answer comes in a rasping whisper, half in English, half in Arabic, but I still can’t believe what I’m hearing. Jameela, he’s telling me, meets a contact from the British embassy every day in a hotel for a few minutes of conversation. He doesn’t know why they meet, he says. That’s why they’ve been watching her. It’s one of their SOPs to take an interest in anyone who meets the intelligence officials of another country.
I can understand that much. But when I ask him to describe the agent she meets with, he gives me a perfect description of Halliday.
‘Thin, like skeleton,’ he says, and mentions his glasses and his stupid mop of hair. The same Halliday who so enjoys playing the buffoon, and who’s pretended from the start never to have met Jameela.
It’s only when I discover the camera in Jameela’s apartment, he says, that they decide to bring her in to question her. It’s not me they wanted.
But they’ll want me now.
It’s time to disappear. I lock the two Mokhabarat men in the bathroom leaving the key in the door so at least their rescuers won’t have to smash it open, and though I doubt it’ll win me too many favours, leave the unloaded pistols outside the door on the floor. In my go bag there’s a first aid kit from which I take a bandage to bind my leg. Then I limp to the main road and take a taxi to my guest house.
There’s no time to do much packing. The taxi waits outside for me. I change out of my blood-soaked trousers and re-bandage my leg. I head for the north of the city, making sure on the way to casually ask the driver where I can find trucks heading for the Eritrean border. When he comes forward to help the police with their enquiries, perhaps he’ll throw them off my trail. Then I take a bus west across the river and head for Omdurman, towards the last place they’ll look for a foreign fugitive.
Beneath the silver dome of the Mahdi’s shrine, the elderly guardian remembers me, and greets me with a warm but grave look of concern as he notices my limp. He escorts me to the buildings behind the shrine. I don’t make any attempt to conceal the trouble I’m in. I tell him I’ll understand if he is unable to give me refuge and offer to make a contribution to the upkeep of the shrine. He eyes the bundle of hundred-dollar bills I put before him. There is a grave and untainted steadiness to his eyes, which perhaps a lifetime of prayer and piety has forged into his soul. Meeting his gaze, I have a momentary sense that my own life seems a frivolous thing. I am saved from the inexplicable impulse to admit to this when he chuckles loudly.
‘We will show you more mercy than the General Kitchener showed to our warriors, but not for money. Your protection is my duty, as a Muslim.’
He hands me back the bundle and leads me to a small room where there’s a simple bed. I sit. He points silently to my leg as if he wants to see the wound. I pull the fabric of my trousers to the knee, and as I take the bandage off, it starts pouring blood again, and I realise it won’t close on its own unless it’s immobile and bandaged for several days, which I don’t have. When I make a sewing gesture with my hands he understands immediately and fetches a towel. From my go bag I take the first aid pouch, and retrieve a small bottle of Betadine and a suture kit. I give the old man one surgical glove and put the other one on my left hand.
The pain makes me tremble. The suture needle is crescent-shaped and glides through my skin while the old man holds the two sides of the wound together. He’s unflappable and would have made a good surgeon’s assistant. He even mops the sweat from my head as I do the sewing, and cuts the black thread where I point, just above the final knot. Then I drench the wound in the Betadine again and cover it tightly with the bandage.
‘Khelaas. I will pray at the shrine for your health,’ says the old man. ‘Insha’allah you will recover quickly.’
‘Insha’allah,’ I hear myself whisper.
The pain invades my whole leg now. I feel the double toxins of adrenalin and exhaustion, and though my mind is still racing I long for sleep. But there’s one more thing. When the old man leaves, I take the satphone and thank God and the Mahdi that I can receive a signal near the window.
There’s a watery-sounding ringtone and a succession of clicks.
‘Hope you I didn’t wake you up,’ I say when it answers, ‘but they say cowgirls don’t sleep much.’
‘Goddamn it, Tony, you sound like you’re at the bottom of a creek. You on a satphone?’
‘I need to find a good travel agent,’ I tell her. ‘Someone to get me home quickly without showing up on anybody’s grid.’
‘Hell,’ she says, ‘so long as it’s illegal, I’ll help any way I can.’
This distant promise of help fills me with the strange urge to cry. I tell her where I am, that I need a new passport, ticket and some supporting identity. She doesn’t waste time on trying to find out how I came to be on the run from the Sudanese secret service. She just wants to know my exact location, preferred time frame and route for the exfil, whether the immigration system at the airport is computerised, and whether local law enforcement has a photograph of me. She asks what languages I speak. I tell her I’ll buy her dinner at Nora’s in DC when this is all over.
I feel burningly hot and then cold. I can’t sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool of black thoughts and things I don’t understand and my feelings are too strong for me to think properly. I feel brutalised by the thought that Jameela was expecting my arrival in Khartoum and played along with every part of it. I wonder, since everyone else I’ve trusted seems to be lying to me, whether Grace will betray me too.
Halfway through the night, sleep closes in on me.
So it’s with nothing short of a feeling of the miraculous that I open the package that arrives at dawn the next day. The old man delivers it when he comes to wake me, saying that a child came to the shrine and asked that it be given to the foreign guest. There’s a printed reservation number for my ticket, a Canadian passport in the name of Cousteau and a worn leather wallet complete with credit cards. There are even some Canadian dollars in it. I see from the passport that I entered Sudan three weeks earlier. I was told the CIA station in Khartoum had been shut down but they’ve obviously kept some talented employees on the payroll, and I’ve never been quite so grateful for the no-nonsense American attitude towards getting things done.