The Hidden Oasis (59 page)

His voice stuttered to a standstill, his grin freezing and then fading as for the first time he really took in the scene in front of him: Molly Kiernan, a black walkie-talkie clasped in her hand, standing side by side with Romani Girgis. Both relaxed and smiling, neither seeming remotely uncomfortable in the other’s presence. Quite the contrary. They looked, if not exactly like bosom friends, certainly not sworn adversaries either. Business associates, that was the impression Freya got – old business associates who, if their satisfied demeanour was anything to go by, had just clinched a large and extremely lucrative deal.

‘Molly?’

Flin’s tone was suddenly uncertain, eyes moving back and forth between Kiernan and Girgis and beyond them into the trees behind, where he could see figures moving around in the distance, lugging what looked like large aluminium cases.

‘What’s going on, Molly?’

Kiernan’s smile widened.

‘What’s going on, Flin, is that thanks to the both of you …’

She tipped a nod at Freya.

‘… we’ve found the Hidden Oasis. Sandfire’s goal has been achieved, the project can be signed off, the world’s already a safer place. Smile, you’re heroes!’

She held up her walkie-talkie and tapped a finger against
it as though taking a photograph before stepping forward and clapping them both on the shoulders.

‘And to answer your earlier question,’ she continued, slipping between them, going up to the Antonov and leaning her head through the door, ‘we had a satellite tracker on the microlight, were on your tail the moment you took off. A surveillance unit kept an eye on you through the night, we camped forty kilometres away, which is how we were able to get here so quickly. Oh Lord!’

She had spotted the mummified corpse, her face wrinkling in disgust. Behind her Flin was still trying to make sense of the situation.

‘Am I missing something here?’ he asked.

‘Hmm?’

Kiernan withdrew her head and turned towards him.

‘Am I missing something, Molly? Who exactly are “we”?’

‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

‘No, it’s not obvious,’ Flin snapped, his tone hardening. ‘It’s not obvious at all. So why don’t you enlighten us. Who are “we”?’

‘Me and Romani, of course.’

She sounded like a parent explaining something to a particularly obtuse child.

‘You’re working for Girgis?’

He was wide-eyed, disbelieving.

‘Well, on balance I’d say it was more a case of Mr Girgis working for us, although like any relationship over the years—’

‘Over the years! What the hell are you telling me, Molly? How long has this been going on?’

‘You want, like, precise dates?’

Flin’s entire body tensed, his arm coming up, finger jabbing at Kiernan.

‘Don’t piss me around, Molly. This drug-dealing pimp piece of shit cut a friend of mine’s throat, very nearly killed both of us …’

He waved a hand towards Freya.

‘I’m not in the mood for games. I want to know what’s going on and how long it’s been going on for, and I want to know now. You hear?’

Kiernan’s mouth tightened, as though she was not used to being talked to in this manner and didn’t much appreciate it. She stared at Flin, eyes steely, then, with a nod, smoothed down her dress and sat back in the plane’s doorway, arms folded.

‘Romani Girgis has been working for us since 1986. April 1986, to be precise, which is when we approached him with a view to procuring a quantity of fissile material to aid our Iraqi allies in their struggle against Iran.’

Flin looked across at Freya, then over his shoulder at Girgis – grinning smugly on the other side of the clearing – and then back at Kiernan.

‘Your government’s behind this?’ His voice was incredulous. ‘It was your
government
that was going to give Saddam the bomb?’

Kiernan’s mouth tightened further, puckering into something just short of a snarl.

‘I only wish that had been the case,’ she replied. ‘Sadly it wasn’t. We were happy to finance the Iraqis, give them intelligence, weaponry, even chemical agents, but when it came to providing them with the wherewithal actually to finish the job – to eradicate Khomeini and his Koran-toting
madmen – Reagan bottled it. Worse than bottled it – half his goddam administration were supplying
Iran
with arms.’

She shook her head in disgust. A pause, then:

‘Which is why a group of us decided we would have to intervene and take control of the situation. For the good of America. For the good of the whole free world.’

‘A group of you?’ Flin’s mind was whirring, trying keep up with it all. ‘Group of who? CIA?’

She gave a flick of the hand, dismissing the question.

‘I’m not going into that here. Like-minded individuals from across the military, Pentagon, Intelligence – that’s all you need to know. Patriots. Realists. People who knew evil when they saw it, and saw it plain and clear in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’

Flin rolled his eyes in disbelief.

‘And this group of like-minded realists decided that the best way to ensure stability in the Gulf was to drop an atomic bomb on Tehran?’

‘Exactly so,’ replied Kiernan, either not noticing, or else choosing to ignore Flin’s sarcasm. ‘And given what’s going on with Ahmadinejad at the moment I think we’ve been proved about as right as we possibly could have been. Snakes, every single one of them. Snakes and scorpions.’

She gave a nod as if to emphasize this assessment. Unfolding her arms, she smoothed down her dress again, her eyes never leaving Flin. The Englishman had the same dazed, befuddled look on his face as when he had run into the wooden doors back in the tunnel, his mouth opening and shutting as though he had a hundred and one questions to put and wasn’t sure where to start. Beside him Freya stood mute and expressionless, no more able to believe
what was happening than Flin, the burning of the hornet sting on her neck all but forgotten.

‘Why the hell bother with Girgis?’ Flin asked eventually, struggling to control his voice. ‘If you’ve got all these people in the military, the government … Why not just slip Saddam a couple of your own bloody warheads? It’s not like you haven’t got enough to go round.’

‘Oh please!’ Kiernan shook her head, her tone again that of a parent exasperated at her offspring’s stupidity. ‘We’ve got leverage, but not that much leverage – it’s not like you can just fill out a requisition form or something: “Excuse me, Mr Quartermaster, could you put aside two nuclear bombs, I’ll pick them up this afternoon.” This whole thing was seriously off-piste, had to be kept way out beyond any normal channels. Sure we set the deal up, provided the intelligence, went fifty-fifty on the finance with Saddam, but we were so far behind the scenes we might as well have been in a different theatre. In terms of day-to-day management, it was very much Romani’s show.’

‘But with you pulling the strings,’ said Flin.

‘But with us pulling the strings,’ she conceded.

He shook his head and swept a hand through his hair. His face seemed unable to decide whether to settle into an expression of disbelief, outrage, shock or black amusement.

‘All that bullshit about tracking Girgis, intercepting the plane …’

‘Well obviously we
were
tracking him,’ said Kiernan. ‘Just not for the precise reasons I gave you.’

He gave another shake of the head.

‘And when it all went tits up?’ he asked, jerking a thumb towards the wreckage of the Antonov.

Kiernan shrugged.

‘Again, obviously, we had to do a certain amount of finessing, bury our own involvement – we couldn’t exactly go around saying “Sorry, guys, we’ve lost 50 kilograms of uranium we were in the process of smuggling to Saddam Hussein.” To all intents and purposes, though, the narrative was pretty much as I told it the other night. We got on with searching from our end, Romani from his end, the only real difference being that both ends were actually working towards the same end, if you get my meaning. Given the complexity of the situation, I think we did a pretty damned good job.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ. And you think Khomeini was the mad one.’

For a moment Kiernan made no response to this, eyes boring into him, jaw set, back ramrod straight. Then, slipping from the doorway and transferring the walkie-talkie to her left hand, she walked over and slapped Flin hard across the face.

‘Don’t you dare take the name of our Lord in vain,’ she spat, her face purpling, her mouth contorting into a rictus of fury. ‘And don’t you dare presume to judge me. You have no concept, no concept whatsoever of how wicked and dangerous these people are. Oh please sir, please sir …’

She raised an arm as if trying to attract the attention of a teacher, her voice slipping into a grotesque parody of that of a little girl, all coy and innocent and squeaky.

‘… I want the world to be a nice place and everybody to be friends and nobody to do anything nasty. Try living in the real world, asshole!’

She dropped her arm again, flecks of spittle popping from
the corners of her mouth; there was something savage in the way her eyes glared at Flin.

‘You think Saddam was bad? Take it from me, he was a goddam saint compared to those rag-head Shia lunatics running Iran. You forgotten the Tehran Embassy siege? The Beirut Embassy bombing? The Beirut barracks bomb? My husband died in that attack, my Charlie, and Iran was behind it, just like they’re behind half the terrorist groups across the region: Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad …’

With each name she snapped her fingers in front of Flin’s face.

‘They are one of the most poisonous, satanic regimes ever to infect the face of the planet and by the mid-1980s, when you were just a schoolboy pissing around with your pathetic Egyptology, those of us with slightly higher responsibilities were having to face up to the fact that these murdering sons of Cain had a very real chance of defeating Iraq and becoming the dominant power in the entire Gulf. They’d already taken the Majnoon Islands, the Fao Peninsula, they were sinking oil tankers …’

Again, she clicked her fingers in Flin’s face, hammering home her point.

‘It was a catastrophe, unthinkable, the word’s key oil-producing region in thrall to a bunch of deranged Stone Age mullahs. Something had to be done. And those of us with enough guts decided to do it. And let me tell you, if we’d succeeded the world would be a damned sight safer place to live in than it is today, you have my word on that, a damned sight safer!’

She broke off, breathing heavily. Bringing up the back of her wrist, she dabbed away the spittle at the corners of her
mouth, eyes still locked on Flin, who just stood there, his cheek reddening from where she had slapped him. There was a long silence, broken only by the chirruping of birds and an occasional wheezing rasp as Girgis’s thickset colleague puffed on a cigarette. Then, touching the cross at her neck, Kiernan stepped away from Flin and sat back in the doorway of the Antonov.

‘I’m sorry for what you’ve been through these last few days,’ she said, smoothing down her skirt again as if to calm herself, her tone softer now, placatory. ‘For what both of you have been through.’

This with a glance at Freya, who stared back at her, unblinking and stony-faced.

‘And I’m sorry that I’ve used you, Flin, which I have these last ten years. As I’ve used a lot of people. I knew your background, what happened with the girl in Baghdad, knew you’d leap at the chance to redeem yourself, would do whatever you were asked to do. I played on that and I’m not proud of it, but the stakes were simply too high to allow personal considerations to get in the way. I did what I had to. For the greater good.’

‘It was you that tipped off Girgis, wasn’t it?’ Flin said, sounding more tired than angry. ‘Told him where we were? At the university, at the museum.’

‘Like I say, I did what I had to.’

‘But you were going to fly us out. Back at the apartment – it was
me
who insisted on staying.’

‘Oh come on! Sandfire was everything to you, your big chance to get your life back on track! It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure that if there were any stops you hadn’t already pulled out, stones you hadn’t already turned,
you sure as hell would if I threatened to stick you on the first plane back to England. And although I say it myself, it worked pretty well.’

She raised a hand, indicating the oasis around them. Flin sighed and turned, looking first at Girgis and his colleagues, and then at the figures moving in the distance beyond the grove. He caught glimpses of equipment cases, guns, men in what looked like radiation suits, which in the circumstances struck him as excessive. He didn’t pursue the thought, his mind too preoccupied with everything he had just heard.

‘What about Angleton?’ he asked, turning back to Kiernan. ‘I’m assuming he was your liaison with Girgis? Did all the running around while you played puppet-master behind the scenes.’

She stared at him, eyes narrowed. For a moment she was silent, then, suddenly, unexpectedly, she burst out laughing.

‘God bless you, Flin, but it’s comments like that that convince me you might be a fine Egyptologist, but you’d never have got very far in the world of Intelligence.’

Her laughter redoubled. Pulling a tissue from her skirt pocket, she dabbed at her eyes.

‘Cyrus Angleton was nothing to do with me, with Romani, with Sandfire, with any of it,’ she said, taking a breath, composing herself. ‘He was CIA Internal Affairs.’

Flin’s mouth opened, then shut again.

‘Lord alone knows how,’ she went on. ‘Because Sandfire was so tightly ring-fenced a goddam flea shouldn’t have been able to wriggle its way in, but someone, somewhere in the Agency got wind something wasn’t right – unusual payments, strange goings-on in Egypt …’

She threw up her hands.

‘Who knows what tipped them off? Angleton was sent out to investigate, top-level authorization. Their best man, by all accounts, a legend in the world of internal snooping. Highly decorated. Never failed to crack a case.’

She smiled, balling the tissue and returning it to her pocket.

‘Ironic, really, because from your perspective he was the good guy, was trying to help you. He’d worked out Sandfire wasn’t exactly what it seemed. That I wasn’t exactly what I seemed. He tried to head you off in Dakhla to warn you, take you both somewhere safe. Yep, he sure got to the bottom of things. Is still there, I expect. Right at the bottom.’