We send a report to London and receive a signal from Macavity approving our forward passage. We’re nearly ready to move now, but I must try to make contact with Manny one last time before we go. On the Monday, once again, I change into my shalwar kameez so as to be relatively invisible, adjust my nylon belt and holster and slide home the loaded Browning. I put my phone in one pocket, one of the silk E amp; E maps in the other, and walk ten minutes from the house before hailing a taxi.
There is no one waiting for me at the palace, and once again I have to struggle with my disappointment. I have one more day to try, and then we’ll have to move because we can’t wait another week. Apart from anything else, I’m not happy about the risk of our meeting place having been compromised, which increases as more time passes.
For the final time I repeat the process the following day. The taxi driver asks if I’m Iranian, and I tell him I’ve grown up in Iran but come back recently. He gets talking about his life.
‘I fought with Massoud in Panjshir at the time of the jihad,’ he says, referring to the period of the Soviet occupation. ‘I was wounded and went to live with my cousin in Mazar. After he was killed I had to fight with Dostam. When we came to fight in Kabul I was captured by the government and my brother paid for my release with his house. Then the Taliban accused me of being a spy and tortured me. They put me in a freezing basement and beat me with cables. My uncle gave them his house, so they let me go. I was lucky. What is there to come back to?’ he asks cynically, waving a hand towards the destruction on either side of the road.
I reach the palace at exactly six o’ clock. There’s no one around. I walk across the central courtyard and marvel as I always do at the volume of gunfire that must have once filled the air. But it’s silent now, and nothing stirs but the light breeze that so often rises in the moments just before dusk. I observe my feelings of disappointment as if from afar. The first few times I came I was full of expectation, but the emotion’s gone now and I’m forced to admit that I’m merely a solitary spectator at a forgotten battlefield of which the world knows nothing.
I’m full of morbid thoughts about the uselessness of the destruction around me and the folly of the people who inflicted such misery on themselves, albeit with considerable help from abroad. I walk on impulse along the arcade of the eastern wing and enter one of the ruined rooms. The empty windows stare back at me, but then something catches my eye. It’s a tiny fire, burning at the far end of the building. It’s in the north-east corner of the building and corresponds exactly, I now realise, to the position of the pinprick I made in the note.
I hear the crunch of my footsteps amplified by the bare walls as I approach the flickering light, beside which a human shape is crouching. For a moment I allow myself to believe that at last Manny has made an appearance, then curse myself again because I know it can’t be him. The figure is wrapped in a dark pattu and doesn’t move as I approach. But the coincidence won’t let my mind rest, and I have to make sure.
‘Peace be to you, watandar. May this traveller warm his hands on your fire?’
In a slow gesture, as slow as a man on the point of death, a lean and dark-skinned arm emerges from the shadowy bundle as if to offer me the place opposite. A ripple of shock passes through me as I register how thin the arm is, like that of a starving man. There’s not enough light to make out the face, and a nightmarish train of thoughts suddenly spins across my mind. Perhaps it really is Manny, but he’s been disfigured or suffered some cruel affliction that’s left him withered and prematurely aged.
‘Manny?’ I say his name experimentally, because I’m not sure. I can just make out the grey bundle of beard that hangs from a chin and the vague contours of a face within the shadows. The outstretched hand looks horribly old, and repeats the beckoning motion for me to sit. I’m only a few feet from him, and the fire is between us. The stone floor is cold.
‘Manny? Say something, Manny. You’re scaring the shit out of me.’
Then with unexpected suddenness the face looks up at me. It’s not Manny. It’s a half-toothless old man, whose gaunt and almost fleshless face looks into mine as the flames bring to life a mad glint in his eyes, and from his ruined gums comes a wheezing cackle.
‘Oh Christ.’ I leap up in fright. ‘Oh Christ.’ My heart’s pounding and the spell is broken. I take several steps backwards, slipping on the rubble as the old man’s dreadful laughter subsides.
And then I hear the voice.
‘As you were, Captain.’
I whirl around in reflex, and my right hand flies by instinct to the grip of the Browning. Behind me, ten feet away and emerging from behind one of the plaster pillars, I see Manny, dressed in a black shalwar with a pattu thrown over one shoulder. He’s tanned and lean and has a full beard, but it’s him, unmistakably, and he’s smiling now and throws his arms open towards me.
‘You bastard. You absolute bastard,’ I say. ‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to stay in touch?’
‘Sent you a postcard,’ he says as we walk towards each other. We embrace, and I feel his chest trembling, as he does mine, with the breathless rush of feeling somewhere beyond laughter and tears that expresses all the long-awaited relief of deliverance.
Sometimes, just sometimes, your hopes are exceeded beyond all measure. What you dared to hope for is not only granted but heaped up with unexpected dividends you haven’t been able to imagine. It’s akin to falling in love with someone whom it seems likely will never glance at you, and then finding that your feelings are reciprocated with even greater intensity.
I had thought Manny dead, or at best imprisoned or gone mad. But I’ve seen him in the flesh now, and I still can’t really believe that he’s alive. It’s not only that. He’s sane. His sense of humour is intact. My greatest fear, worse than the fear that he’d been killed, was that he might have become like the men he’d been living among.
‘We have our way and they have theirs,’ he says when I share this fear with him. ‘They are human too,’ he adds. And though he has the odd habit of speaking in Pashtu when he gets excited and cursing in his prison Chechen, his mind seems whole and healthy.
‘It’s time to come home,’ I tell him.
‘Home,’ he repeats, as if dimly recalling an old friend. ‘Yes. I need to come home.’
‘When we’re back from the op I’ll get you out.’
He looks at me and shakes his head as if I haven’t understood.
‘I can’t just disappear.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need to die,’ he says, and for a moment I’m full of dread.
‘You don’t need to die,’ I tell him.
‘Why are you so stupid? I need to be seen to die. If I just disappear I’ll be considered compromised. All the plans I know will be changed. All this will be useless.’
From his pocket he produces a memory disk the size of a cigarette lighter. I’ve never seen one like this before.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
He holds it up solemnly between us with the fingers of both hands, in the manner of a priest about to administer the sacrament.
‘Unless we stop it,’ he says, ‘it’s the future.’ The light is fading now. ‘Can you get the contents to London, flash priority?’
‘What’s on it?’
‘It’s better I don’t tell you. There’s no time to explain now. It’s everything I know. They’ve got plans you can’t imagine. Huge attacks. New York, London.’ He shakes his head. ‘The Sheikh wants a war, a global war. This is how he’s going to get it.’
I can’t help thinking as he speaks that perhaps he’s grown too enthused by the ambitions of the men whose world he’s managed to infliltrate. I doubt whether Islamic militants, especially those living in a remote corner of Afghanistan, have either the means or know-how to provoke what he calls a global war.