‘Are you all right? You’re not ill or anything, are you?’
Sak’s head jolted up off his hands, which were on the table, and the sudden movement tipped sideways a pile of books. He saw the cleaning woman, anxiety cutting across her face. He stammered that he was fine.
‘Don’t mind me saying so, but you don’t look it — you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
He opened a book but barely glanced at the pages. She started close to him, as if to emphasize her displeasure at finding someone studying in the school’s sixth-form library, and not a pupil or teacher but in the white coat of a laboratory technician. He ignored her, did not flinch when the vacuum-cleaner thumped against his feet under the table — no apology — and did not move a centimetre when a damp cloth was wiped hard on the table surface. Their eyes never met, and she moved away with her vacuum-cleaner and cloth. He called himself Sak. The name was bred from his split life, his split cultures and split races. To his mother, British born, he was Steven Arthur King, her maiden surname. To his father he was Siddique Ahmed Khatab. With his mother’s family he was anglicized; when he had visited his father’s relations in the Pakistani city of Quetta he was Asian … A racial hermaphrodite, a college guy had called him. Now the name Sak suited him, and the kids he worked alongside were rather taken by it, as if it had uniqueness. It was his position as a laboratory technician that was unique.
He had left Imperial College at London University in the summer of 1997, at the age of twenty-two, with an upper second-class degree in nuclear physics, to the huge delight of the one-time Miss King, now Mrs Khatab, and his father. Eleven years later, bruised by what had happened to him, and harbouring the secret, he was a laboratory technician in a comprehensive school on the edge of the West Midlands. The work was humiliatingly easy, barely taxed him. But since his world had collapsed, Sak had allowed himself to be recruited. If he had had a confidant, which he did not, he might have admitted to offering himself for recruitment. He had two attractions for the recruiting sergeants operating from a villa on the northern outskirts of Quetta.
He thought himself rejected and betrayed.
He had worked from ’97 until his dismissal in ‘02 in the secret world of nuclear weapons.
Sak was gobbled and sent back to the UK to wait and sleep.
He was a dour man, and as he approached early middle age, with receding hair to prove it, there was little about him that was romantic, and such fantasies were rarely in his mind. A brush contact that morning, walking the last couple of hundred yards to the school gates, not seeing the man whose shoulder had hit him — couldn’t have said what he was wearing, what his skin colour was — and Sak had realized that a minutely folded piece of paper was in his hand. Had looked round, had seen only droves of kids coming to school.
Sak was ordered to be ready to travel; the details would follow.
He had not gone home. He had stayed in the library, and the story, in minutiae, of what had been done to him ran over and over in his mind.
High above the port of Dubai, the wind off the Gulf rocked the crane driver’s cabin — not yet as high as the Dubai World Trade Centre, which had thirty-seven floors, but climbing.
Not a bird but a man, the Crow could look down on the lights of the creek, the ruler’s office, the yacht club and the docks, and far out to sea where the container ships and tankers were anchored, all brightly lit.
He was squashed into the small space behind the heavily padded chair in which the crane driver sat. The name ‘the Crow’ came from the pitch of his voice, which croaked when he spoke. His vocal cords had been minimally damaged in Afghanistan twenty-one years before by the shrapnel of shell-casing fired from a Soviet 122mm howitzer artillery piece. That period of his life was hidden, and those who needed to have the scars explained were told of an operation, successful, for throat cancer. He was known as the Crow across the construction sites of Dubai.
The Crow’s responsibility was to keep teams, from labourers to skilled craftsmen, working efficiently on the developments along the coast. He was supreme at his work, in demand and a trusted friend of architects and quantity surveyors. He was admired by potential purchasers of property. He had been hauled up by the hydraulic winch, in a secure basket, to the cabin because the driver had reported stress on the cables running the length of the crane’s arm, and to see for himself the shake. That he went himself, in the middle of the night, was a mark — so the professionals who relied on him said — of his dedication to the projects on which he worked.
They knew nothing.
The crane’s driver had returned the previous day from a month’s rest in his home town of Peshawar, on the fringe of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, and a slim, rolled piece of paper had been retrieved from a tiny pocket sewn inside the waist of his trousers. The Crow had thanked him gutturally, then read the message sent in answer to a note he had sent with the driver when he had gone home. There were no bugs and no cameras in a crane cabin that rolled in the blustery wind some two hundred and fifty feet above the Gulf shoreline. He read it, digested it, then methodically tore the paper into myriad tiny pieces, then let his hand go to the window and opened his fingers. The pieces scattered and gulls chased them.
He was asked by the driver if it was good.
The Crow growled, ‘As good as the cables under your crane arm.’
They laughed. High over the harbour, above the dhows and yachts, a ripple of laughter, a meld of shrill and a black crow’s call, spilled down. The driver radioed for the basket to be made ready.
The Crow stepped over the void between the cabin and the basket floor, feeling it pitch. He waved at the driver, then was lowered at speed.
Then — because such men did not sleep — he went in search of the hawaldar in his home beyond the Fish Roundabout. The hawaldar had prepared for the Crow the details of the transaction that had been taken back to Peshawar, passed on and moved forward until it had reached a compound hugging the foothills of a mountain range. The answer, by a similarly complicated route, cut-outs, blocks and checks, had returned in the lining of the driver’s trousers. The hawaldar whom the Crow would see had in the financial world connections dedicated to the Islamic faith who could guarantee great sums of money, coffers and treasuries of it, with no electronic trace and beyond the reach of investigators.
The Crow would tell him to make the arrangements, then wait to be told of his own travel schedule.
He climbed from the basket, did not need a hand to help him. The wind ripped his hair, and he was smiling. He said to the site’s night foreman, ‘There’s no problem with the cable. The driver’s an old woman, frightened of his own shadow. The cable is fine … Everything is fine.’
Once a fortnight, Luke Davies did the late evening shift.
The girl who was doing night duty was away down the corridor, would have been getting chocolate out of a machine, or a coffee. The area, open plan, around his desk was empty and the ceiling lights were dimmed. The girl would be looking after a dozen desks during the night and would not be relieved till after six in the morning. He rather envied the quiet and the peace she would experience after he’d gone and she had the area to herself. He tidied his desk a last time, dumped a final file in the small floor safe beside his knees, closed its door and flicked the combination to random numbers.