Kalas sensed that the dynamic in the room had changed slightly. The man sitting at the table opposite was looking over the shoulder of the woman he was having dinner with, oblivious both to her conversation and the view. That, Jeff knew, could only mean one thing. Several other men, and a couple of women too, were watching someone who’d entered the room. He resisted the temptation to look around.
Hands closed over his eyes from behind. ‘Guess…’ said the woman’s voice.
‘Umm…Penélope Cruz?’
‘Oh, do you like her?’ said Skye. She let her hands fall away and took the seat beside him. ‘You know, she’s very short.’
‘Yeah, but feisty,’ said Jeff as the waiter brought the bottle of vintage Veuve to the table and presented it to him for approval. Jeff nodded. Yes, she was wearing the white dress and her thick caramel hair was free of any clips or bands. It fell around her shoulders and down her back and stopped where her nipples were thinly disguised behind the stretch fabric. It was a hot night and she had chosen not to wear a bra. Even now, after several months, Jeff found it hard not to stare at her, as did every other man in the restaurant.
‘Do you know, I love this hotel but I’ve never eaten here,’ she said, smiling at Jeff as the waiter poured her a flute of champagne.
‘Well, actually, no; I didn’t know that. Good, it’ll be our restaurant, then.’
‘Like it’s our pool,’ she said.
‘Exactly.’ Jeff looked at Skye, her brown eyes sparkling like the lights on the water outside, and he thought his heart would burst. Was being so captivated by a woman such a bad thing? He wondered whether, somehow, what he was about to do and say was lacking reason. He knew he was taking a big chance, but this girl was worth it. ‘Skye, do you love me?’
Skye looked around, a little embarrassed, her smile just a touch wary and different to the carefree one she wore when she first sat down. ‘Jeff, you know how I feel about you.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Jeff…’
‘Well?’
‘Okay, I love you.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘And now you may have your reward.’ He removed his hand from his pocket, placed it on the white damask tablecloth and then took it away, leaving behind a purple velvet box.
‘What’s that?’ Skye asked, intrigued, expectant, frightened and inquisitive all at the same time. Jeff was married, wasn’t he? This couldn’t be what she thought it might be, could it?
‘Well, go on, my little chicken basket…open it?’ he said playfully, sitting back in his chair, sipping at the flute.
Skye reached forward. She took the box and held it in the palm of her hand, weighing it. She was scared to open it.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman. Open it!’ he said, rolling his eyes.
Skye flashed him a smile and opened the box. Inside was not what she expected. She removed the stone and held it between her thumb and forefinger, more intrigued than anything else. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a diamond. An Argyle diamond from Western Australia,’ he said with a broad grin. ‘Uncut, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’ She turned it over in the light. It looked like a little chunk of dirty, vaguely pink glass. ‘Jeff, I…I don’t know what to say. It’s beautiful. Why —’
‘I’ve left Doreen,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I want to be with you.’
Skye found it hard to keep the mixed emotions that swept over her from showing on her face. She was frightened by Jeff’s proclamation, but at the same time excited by it. ‘Why —’
‘Why? For me, for you — us,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Skye, I want things to be open between us. You’ve asked me a few times what I do for a living, where the money comes from. I want to tell you. Now. There are a few things I want you to know.’
Seven hours later, at four in the morning, Skye sat naked on her bed, knees drawn up to her chin with her arms wrapped around her legs, rocking slightly. They’d had sex, but Skye had only been physically present. Jeff had asked whether something was wrong and Skye had taken the opportunity to tell him that the migraine threatening her all day had finally arrived, as indeed it had, her vision fractured by what appeared to be slivers of brightly coloured glass. Soon the headache would begin, pounding at the back of her brain like a heavy brass knocker rapping impatiently.
At the restaurant, Jeff had eventually gotten around to telling her where his money came from, about the two men at the pool — everything. Everything he knew, at any rate. Skye had listened attentively while inside, in her mind and belly, separate tornadoes whirled and she felt as if she were sitting on the deck of a ship being tossed in a storm rather than on a chair in a four-star restaurant. Jeff laundered money or, more accurately, exported money for people he believed were selling massive amounts of marijuana and heroin in Australia, exchanging millions of dollars for Argyle diamonds, which were easy to slip out of the country. He didn’t appear to realise that he was dealing with terrorists rather than drug barons, and that the money he was siphoning out of Australia was being used to cause violent death and destruction, most likely throughout South East Asia. God, our embassy in Jakarta! And then there were the hundreds or possibly thousands of addicts he was helping to supply with heroin, a drug that would surely kill them. Wasn’t that just as bad? Skye knew that she had important information, a link to their most wanted terrorists, that her employer would have far more than a passing interest in obtaining. If she gave it up, she would be giving Jeff up. He would share the same fate as that of the terrorists. ‘Oh, Jeff, you are a foolish man,’ she said aloud to the raindrops that spattered her window.
Skye slipped off the bed and found her rucksack. The phone number she’d written down was there. She dug around until she found the card. She dropped the bag, and then went back to the bed and resumed the knees-up position with the card beside her. If she called it and spoke to the task force in Sydney, Jeff would not be the only one in a shit storm of trouble. But did she have a choice?
Camp Echo, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
She had tried to get to hospital, but there was a war on and priority for beds was given to wounded Israeli soldiers, not to migrant Saudi labourers who could well be spies. And so Kadar Al-Jahani had watched his mother die a ghastly death, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck by the baby she had just given birth to. The infant had somehow come to life and wound it around her throat like a tourniquet and pulled it tight. The sight of this was enough to make Kadar, the little boy watching on, tear the very skin from his face with horror. And so his mother had given birth in the street to the unholy creature. The baby, stillborn, had killed her, and then the rats had come to finish the job. He watched them rip and gnaw at his mother and then feast on the baby’s corpse. The maggots came next, wriggling through their nostrils and eye sockets, singing joyfully as they burrowed through the flesh between skin and bone.
The rats were carrying him now, bearing him along the street, back to his bed. The anguish he felt at seeing the death of his mother took on the colour green. It became a liquid that filled his head and leaked from his nostrils and he began to gag. He couldn’t breathe. Harder and harder he struggled to drag in the oxygen. He was drowning in nothingness. And then it took on the familiar taste of sand, hot and dry and unforgiving. The taste of it filled his mouth, the ever-present grit of the Holy Land.