After two hearings, the professor of phonetics at King's College, London University said, 'Well, you're wrong. I'm sorry to disabuse you. It's not a matter of argument, but a fact. The accents are not from the same place. What you have called Tape Alpha, the Briton reading Pashto, is quite different to a trained ear from Tape Bravo. I regret any disappointment that may cause you, but facts are facts. Tape Alpha is Birmingham, with only marginal similarities to Tape Bravo.
Tape Bravo is the Black Country. Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have a tutorial.'
They were out on the street, hurrying through the sluicing rain across the car park, and the American was struggling into the old waxed waterproof coat.
Lovejoy said, 'Don't look so bloody miserable. The Black Country is not at Kandahar, or Peshawar, or in the Yemen. Forget that pedantic buffoon. The Black Country is on the immediate north-west boundary of the city of Birmingham. You did well. Fifteen miles from Birmingham, maximum. You did very well.'
He stood in the doorway, had pressed the bell and waited for it to be answered.
The maid, a Filipina, faced him.
Eddie Wroughton walked past her, went into the sitting room. The Belgian woman was watching a video in her housecoat and painting her nails in a cerise that matched the lipstick.
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a juice from the fridge. For a man who was rated clever, intelligent and cunning, he had taken a giant risk in returning to the villa in daylight, when spying neighbours and gossiping servants would see him. Three times he had tried to ring Juan Gonsalves and three times he had been told that Mr Gonsalves was 'in a meeting', and would get back to him.
Wroughton's mobile had not rung.
From the kitchen, he heard the shopping instructions being given to the maid. There was an officer serving in Riga, Penny, who had his photograph beside her bed. She had told him of the photograph in one of her many unanswered letters. He had no thoughts of Riga, or of the risk, only of the agronomist's wife. He heard the front door close.
If his friend, Gonsalves, had returned his calls Wroughton would not have been in the agronomist's kitchen, would not have been frustrated into taking the risk. He wondered whether the paint on her nails was dry, whether the lipstick on her mouth would smudge and run. His name was called, not from the living room but from the bedroom.
He craved to erase the humiliation of the lobby below the Agency's floor.
His shoes and clothes were scattered over the tiled floors of the kitchen and the living room and he was naked when he reached the bedroom, except for his tinted glasses. He hated his eyes to be seen: they might betray his humiliation.
Between patients, the receptionist brought Bart a printout of the extension contract offered him by the real-estate company.
He had won.
The offer was for an eighteen per cent reduction in monthly payments.
That was victory.
When she'd gone out, as he waited for the next patient, Bart surprised himself: clumsily, he danced a little jig. He hopped from foot to foot, in tune to the whistle from his lips. He had won the victory by his boldness – Christ! He thought, as he skipped, of the many who had walked over him: in particular, Eddie bloody Wroughton – not that he would gain his freedom from Wroughton, but the victory was a moment of success to be savoured.
The German patient spoke shamefacedly of snoring problems; Bart spoke of lymph-node complications, the patient's wife spoke of the disturbance in her night's sleep; Bart spoke of a consultant who was a very decent Greek at the ear, nose and throat section of the King Fahd Medical City. They were relieved and grateful.
'I'll make the appointment, Mr Seitz, I'll take care of everything.
Leave it to me. You didn't tell me your business in the Kingdom.'
'I took early retirement from the Luftwaffe. Now, I train air-traffic controllers for the Saudi Air Force.'
Bart wrote up his notes. 'Do you now? That must be fascinating.'
'Complete chaos, it blows my mind.'
Never looking up from the notes, with studied casualness, Bart asked, 'What in particular do you find stressful about your work?'
He was a worm at the core of an apple – victory on his rent or not, he was still Eddie bloody Wroughton's man.
Caleb rode with Hosni. He sensed the wind slackened, but the smell was worse. Fahd's body was bloated by the sun's heat, and the wind carried to him the stench, sweet and sickly. He remembered the smell of the bodies in the trenches after the big bombers had gone over.
The sand grains were plastered round the old Egyptian's eyes.
They were dulled as if the life was going from them, and Hosni's head never turned to him. He rode with him for kindness. He thought of how it must have been when the missiles had come down.
And how it would have been, in a half-light, when the camels had scattered, when Hosni's own had stampeded, its passenger strapped on, shaken, jolted, deafened, and not knowing. From a past life, a memory surfaced… There had been an old man who walked beside the canal, sunshine or rain, with a stick, and the kids had shouted at him and he had flailed the stick around him, but had not seen them.
Caleb had been one of the kids. He had thought of the old man beside the canal, his stick and the jeers, and he rode with Hosni.
Hosni was so frail, so weak, and Caleb thought his courage was an inspiration.
'What, Hosni, can you see?'
'I see what I need to see. I see the sand, I see the sun.'
'Is there something a doctor can do?'
'A year ago, perhaps there was something. Two years ago, for certain a doctor could do something. We were hunted, first in the Tor a Bora, then in caves on the border. I could not go to Quetta or to Kandahar to find a doctor. I was with the Emir General. If I had gone to find a doctor and been taken… I knew too much to go to Quetta or Kandahar. In Oman I saw a doctor.'
'Was there nothing he could do?'
The head came up and the smile cracked the face; the caked sand spilled down from it. 'He could do something. He could tell me. I have from the doctor a diagnosis. It cannot be treated, it is not reversible, it deteriorates.'
'What?'
'Maybe I washed in dirty water. Maybe I waded a stream that was polluted. It could have been long ago, right back in the days when we fought the Soviets and I was beside the Emir General. The doctor had a fine name for the condition, onchocerciasis, and a finer name for the parasite, Onchocerca volvulus. The doctor in Oman was a very educated and well-read man. The parasite is a worm that can live for fourteen years in the body. The female enters the body through any lesion, a scraped knee or cut foot, as you go through dirty and polluted water, and it breeds larvae. Soon your body is the home of many millions of worms and they roam through you. Some, it does not need to be many, make the long journey to the backs of your eyes.
They live there, the little worms, eat there and breed there. The diagnosis is eventual blindness.'
'How much time do you have?'
'I have enough time to do what I wish to do. Do not be frightened for me.'
'Tell me.'
'I will not live to go blind.'
'Explain.'
'There is a suitcase or a bag that a brother prepares. In the bag are materials. I handle them, I work with them. I have said I will do it.
To touch the materials is to walk away from life. When the bag or case is sealed it can be carried in safety. I dream of it. The dream sustains me in this hell. And I dream of the young man who will carry the case or the bag, and he is my friend.'