‘Maybe they wanted something from Stansell. Maybe they want to keep him alive.’
‘As I said, there is only the very merest chance.’
‘As long as there is that chance, I will continue to search for him.’
‘Then you should prepare yourself for death also, Tom Girling.’
‘I almost died once at the hands of these people, Lazan. They killed my wife. They can’t do any worse to me now.’
Lazan took a deep breath. ‘Stansell told me about you and Asyut. Believe me, I am sorry for what happened. But look at me, Tom Girling. In 1982, I got shot down over the Beka’a Valley after a Syrian MiG driver put a heat-seeking missile up the jetpipe of my F-4. It was a bad ejection, you know. The cockpit coaming removed most of my right knee on the way out and I’d broken three vertebrae, although I didn’t know that at the time. When I came to, they had me tied to a bed-frame in a blackened room, in the basement of some house in a village, God knows where. I could hear my navigator close by, crying. I think he was in a next-door room, or maybe it was upstairs, I don’t know. He was a young kid of twenty-one, a good kid, a brave kid, with seven Syrian MiGs and Sukhois to his credit. I thought he was crying for his mother, or that like me, he was scared out of his wits. We had every right to be scared. You see, we had fallen into the hands of Hizbollah…
‘When they eventually threw him into my cell, there was just enough light to see him. He was slumped unconscious in the corner of the room, his head hanging on his chest. I called to him, but he didn’t answer. I knew he wasn’t dead, because he was still whimpering. Somehow, I managed to untie myself and crawl over. I touched him on the shoulder and he fell forward, his head in my lap. There was a lot of blood, mostly on his face. From the ejection, I thought. I tore a sleeve off my shirt and tried to wipe his cheek, but — ’
He paused to take one last drag of the cigarette. ‘But it just came away in my hand. The whole right side of his face. They’d used acid on him. A whole bottle of acid. Drip, drip, drip, until there was almost nothing left. He died in my arms a few hours later, but it felt like days. Like you, Tom Girling, I was so angry that I forgot my pain. I wanted them to come for me. I wanted to kill them with my bare hands. But that night, when they did come, I saw the thick rubber gloves on their hands, and I saw the smoke-brown bottle one of them carried, and I wasn’t brave, I wasn’t the lion I convinced myself I had become. I wept like a baby and I screamed when they tied me again to that bed-frame. And I carried on screaming many hours after they had finished. Drip, drip — ‘
‘Jesus Christ, Lazan, that’s enough,’ Girling blurted. He kept his eyes on the floor, unable now to turn them to the Israeli. The face of the young navigator had become Mona’s face.
Lazan tapped Girling gently on the leg with his cane. ‘I was lucky. I had a combat rescue team come for me in a CH-53. You, on the other hand, are quite alone. Are you sure you are ready to face the beast, Tom Girling? For it is here, you can count on that. Though you cannot see it, it is everywhere. All you have to do is provoke it…’
Girling decided to pour himself a whisky before he turned in. He sat in one of the big armchairs and willed the alcohol to work on the tautness that had made his muscles and sinews ache and his head hurt. He tried to tell himself that the symptoms were a product of the day’s exertions, but it was an unconvincing argument. His mind drifted time and again to Lazan’s words. They had raked up such feelings of bitterness in him that his mind teemed with images from the past. He could feel his white side, his positive side, struggling against the black, but try as he might, his thoughts always ended on that stretch of dust-track. He could feel his arms pinioned behind his back. He felt the panic and despair, too, as the life slipped from her with every new blow to her body; and there was nothing he could do about it. Finally, he saw the wild face of the man who gave the orders swing round, his eyes latching onto him. Like a bird of prey, seeing its quarry scurrying for shelter, and knowing there is no escape for it. In the darkness of his apartment, Girling saw that face with a disturbing new clarity. For today, somebody had given it a name.
He snapped on the light and fumbled for the bound volume of Dispatches beside him. He began skimming over its pages, trying to distract himself. His fingers flipped the pages mechanically and week after week of that distant year passed before his eyes.
And then he stopped. Girling stared down at the open pages. At first, he didn’t know what it was that had made him halt here, then he understood. A page had been ripped from the volume, leaving jagged stubs protruding from the spine of the binder. He prised back the other pages to see if any words were discernible on the remaining scraps of paper, but he could make out no more than a few letters. He was reaching for his pen to jot down the details of the missing page, when he heard the noise outside the door. His ears pricked at the sound. One of his neighbours returning after a late dinner? But a minute later there was a faint shuffling sound in the corridor. He put the whisky and the binder on the floor by his feet. He stood up and found the hairs lifting on his forearms, the skin at the back of his neck prickling against his collar. He moved quietly to the door.
He stopped and listened. Over the sound of his own breathing and the blood rushing in his ears, he heard clearly the light movement of feet on the other side. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a gun. He looked around for something to take to the enemy, knowing as he did so that he had nothing to protect himself just as Stansell had had nothing…
The rap on the door sounded like a burst of machine-gun fire. Long after Girling had recoiled from the jamb, he stood there trying to fight the pervasive numbness that gripped him. He considered shouting for help, but realized that they could have the door down in a moment and history would repeat itself.
And then he heard his name. He reached for the latch and drew it back, his heart hammering so hard against his chest he felt light-headed.
The voice reached him a fraction before the dim light of the distant lamp illuminated the face of the man that spoke it.
‘So now you, too, have found fear, Tom.’ It was said without mockery.
Mohammed Hamdi stepped forward a little way, until the glow of the lamp-shade reflected off the thick glass of his spectacles. ‘I would have stopped you on your way in just now, but I did not want the Mukhabarat to see us together. Did you know there are two of them watching you?’
Girling nodded. He ushered his father-in-law inside and shut the door.
‘If the Mukhabarat had seen me speak to you, they would arrive at my door wanting to know why,’ Mohammed Hamdi continued. ‘Um Mona has suffered enough without the attentions of the Mukhabarat.’
From the way he used this term of respect for his wife, it was as if Um Mona — the Mother of Mona — had never been given any other name. While Girling caught his breath, the ex-policeman reached for his cigarettes.
‘There is a place near here. I meet with some of my old colleagues from work. It does me good to talk, to relive the old days. She’s not a bad woman, you understand. But she does not see with the clarity with which I see things now. I do not have much time.’ He paused. ‘I cannot stay long, and I do not want to stay long. You and I have never seen eye to eye and I doubt if things would have changed had my daughter lived. You are an ‘agnabi. Our ways are different. But until today, I never took you for a man of integrity. I saw the look in your eyes when you told me what you had come here to do. I saw the hatred, and just now I saw fear, too. I never confronted those who took Mona from our midst, for I thought to have done so would have been to question my faith, my very reason for existence. But I know now how wrong I have been. These people need to be hunted down, all of them. I could not do it, because they act in the name of the God in whom I believe, but you, Tom Girling, are an ‘agnabi…’