I felt no need to pray, and wondered if any goddess of the sun would watch out for me regardless.
I thought about Byron14, and mugurski71.
I thought about the Chrysalis diamonds, hidden back in my hotel room. Why had I stolen them? At first it had been part of a plan, a challenge, a thing to do. But Reina had died and I had been prepared to walk away until someone had said…
Perfection.
And Princess Shamma bint Bandar had been perfect, and so had Leena, and Reina had not been and she had died and perhaps…
… with the wisdom of hindsight…
… I had let a little bit of spite infect my professionalism.
Spite: malicious ill will. The urge to hurt or humiliate.
Byron14 had an agenda. That didn’t necessarily make Byron14 wrong.
I sat in thought for an hour and a half, until the motion of the sun pushed the shade away from my face and my skin began to burn. Then I went into a hall of white stone and crystal chandeliers, and wondered if this simple opulence, this elegant extravagance was what the Prophet had really had in mind when he preached, and listened to a lecture in English on the interpretation of the Hadith, and closed my eyes as the mullah talked, and thought some more.
Chapter 18
There’s a lot of crap talked about the darknet.
Encrypted data, hard (but not, please note, not impossible) to trace. It lurks beneath the internet, that public stewing ground of tracked data and tweets, like the submarine beneath the cruise ship. There, political dissidents post videos of their kin being slaughtered by the powers that be; here, the factory workers in Yunan driven to despair, their final moments shown as they throw themselves from the highest windows. Their deaths are filmed on a smartphone and smuggled through the Great Firewall of China; the man who died that day made your computer, and it was cheap — will you, knowing his suffering, buy elsewhere? (But it was cheap! So wonderfully cheap!) Governments use the darknet to negotiate and communicate away from prying eyes. The US Navy invented it, and through it treaties are salvaged, truths revealed.
Anonymous don their Guy Fawkes mask and take down government servers and giant corporations, fight for petty feuds and noble causes. Today a DDOS attack against the Russian government in retaliation for the death of a journalist who spoke out over Ukraine. Tomorrow a police server is wiped in Scotland Yard, erasing records of one of their kind and, incidentally, securing the freedom of two aggravated assaulters, three burglars and a rapist.
Causes are sometimes blind, they say. Sometimes people are hurt in the fight for freedom.
Free to look at child pornography.
**My website has over 40,000 positive reviews and over 3,000 images!!**
Or perhaps:
Heroin, uncut, 2kg slab direct from Afghanistan. This is the highest quality, carefully packaged and delivered. Please place your offers with the subject line, “Auction bid”.
There is no act too degrading, no violence which cannot be indulged on the darknet. Pay in USD, euros, bitcoins or yen, someone, somewhere, will make your dreams come true.
On the day I was to exchange $2.2 million worth of diamonds with an anonymous user by the name of mugurski71 in a café in Oman, I took a gamble on Byron14, and sent a decoy in my place.
Her name was Tola, and she had been trafficked from Thailand four years ago into domestic service. Her passport was taken by the agency who’d arranged her transit, her salary was held back for “security requirements” and after three weeks in the house where she was labouring, the fifty-four-year-old father-of-nine attempted to rape her. She bit his ear hard enough for him to need stitches, and she was arrested. Once he was out of hospital, the man didn’t press charges, but the agency which had trafficked Tola gave him compensation for his trouble and had Tola in a brothel in the desert before the cheque had cleared.
“I’m nice,” she said, when I phoned. “I have good French.”
I told her to meet me in the souk, and left a mobile phone on the table in the café where the transfer was to take place.
Through the mobile phone’s camera, I watched her face bob in and out of focus. She didn’t pick up the phone, didn’t examine it, expressed no curiosity about anything. Just sat and waited, her features stuck in tiny motion, like a piece of degraded film on a loop.
From my phone a few shops away, I sent her location to mugurski71 and waited.
They arrived in seventeen minutes, and the moment they did it was obviously a trap. The man who went into the café was respectable enough: a cream linen suit, sunglasses, hair receding from his high forehead and a silk handkerchief folded in his jacket pocket. The seven armed men who positioned themselves around the little shop and nearby pathways didn’t even bother to hide their weapons; one, an idiot who deserved to lose both his testicles in the inevitable slipped-trigger, had a gun lodged in his trouser belt.
All this I saw as I walked between them, examining the sights of the market like a good tourist. In my ear I could hear a conversation unfolding in the café that I was happy not to be a part of.
Where are the goods?
Good. Good good.
Where are they?
You know place near here? I know place near here.
Do you understand what I’m talking about?
Good good. Yes, of course, very good.
Tola leaning across the table, one hand reaching out to caress the buyer’s thigh. A slap; he pushed it away, she recoiled, animal hurt now on her features.
I dialled the mobile phone in the café.
mugurski71 answered.
“Yes?”
“Too many guns in the room,” I said. “Diamonds say bye-bye!”
He tried to speak, but I hung up, pulled out my battery and SIM card, and threw them in the rubbish on my way out.
I left Oman that night, stealing a ticket from a passenger on a cruise liner heading for the Red Sea. I couldn’t use the passenger’s cabin; she had shouted her way back on board, and a search was quickly underway for the stowaway. But I could sit by the bar, ordering a series of desultorily alcohol-free concoctions and waiting for security to give up, declare “Maybe you lost it, ma’am,” before we pulled out of port. I could bring no luggage that would attract attention, so walked round with my stolen goods, and stayed awake until 3 a.m., when I finally managed to snooze during a screening of a bad romantic comedy in the ship’s all-night cinema lounge.
By day I slumbered on a balcony overlooking the sea, as the engines roared above and grumbled below. I bought a bikini from the over-priced on-board shop, changed in the toilets, swam in the cruiser’s outdoor pool, washed myself in the fountains that spurted up either side of the deck, dried in the sun, met a preacher and his wife, a retired commander of the RAF, a former tap-dance teacher and her four abhorrent children, a man who reported himself to be in “commodities” and who I suspected of being an arms dealer, and a group of student actors who every day put on the “happy matinee show for the kiddies!” (The Big Friendly Giant) and then in the evening, on the same stage, performed the “grown-up show for culture” (Richard III).
“I play King Richard,” whispered one conspiratorially. “It’s a big part, I mean, a big deal, and like, an amazing role, just so amazing, but between you and me, I’m happier being a talking broccoli in the matinee.”
“I didn’t realise there were any talking broccoli in The Big Friendly Giant.”