Uncommon Enemy (21 page)

After Martin’s Z training finished there was no reason for he and Charles to remain in touch. Charles was posted to Geneva and Martin, as soon as he had qualified as a
lawyer, volunteered to be part of the Z section deployment against the Taliban regime and the growing al-Qaeda threat, before looking for a permanent job. At his last meeting with Charles he turned
up carrying a copy of the Koran.

‘Required reading?’ asked Charles.

‘Just to show I’ve made an effort.’

‘Your Afghan tribesman won’t appreciate it. He’ll never have read it.’

‘By the time I’ve finished with him he’ll be a holy warrior. Unless I die of boredom first. It’s worse than the bloody Bible. No stories.’

Charles considered the cheerful young man before him, conscious of what he might have called parental concern, if he had had any right to such a claim. ‘Watch your step out there. Keep
your nose clean.’ He would like to have told Sarah what was happening, but there was no chance of that, either. ‘Ask your Z people to let me know when you’re coming back. We can
have a beer.’

‘Not much hope of one out there, from what I hear.’

They parted with handshakes and jocular restraint.

During the next two years in Geneva Charles worked mainly on resurgent Russians, part of the time with Sonia, Matthew’s former secretary, who had been promoted. Just after 9/11 he was
asked to cover for Martin’s Islamabad case officer, who had been taken ill. The region was in ferment when he flew out to Pakistan. Martin had extended his Z section assignment and had still
not begun to practise as a lawyer.

Going through the file again shortly before his arrest, Charles came across a photograph of Martin he had taken outside Peshawar during that trip. This was a bearded Martin in tribal dress posed
against the rugged hills of the border country. Rock-strewn folds of hard, unforgiving land stretched into the blue distance, beyond which was war. It was a landscape of harsh beauty and Martin,
tough, spare and relaxed, looked comfortably part of it. His task had been to train and supply arms to the anti-Taliban tribes and to gather any intelligence he could on UBL. He was not supposed to
engage in combat, but Charles soon suspected he was doing just that. There was nothing on file about it and he doubted that Martin’s regular case officer ever realised.

‘You’re on your own,’ he remembered warning him. ‘If you’re caught over there no-one in London will acknowledge you.’

‘And if I’m killed I’m dead. I sort of guessed that.’ Martin grinned. ‘But I can imagine no other work. It’s not work, it’s life, it’s being more
vividly alive. How’s your desk?’

‘Less exciting than this, but just as real. More so. Desks win in the end. It’s time you came back and got started. Or you’ll have to qualify all over again.’

‘Thanks, uncle. Give me five years to think about it.’

Peshawar was a Wild West town and they were drinking green tea on the veranda of the place where Martin was staying. It seemed to be part hotel, part trading post and part informal military
headquarters.

‘Sarah’s in Brussels,’ Charles said. ‘Her husband left the Foreign Office for the European Parliament.’

‘Still spying for the French, is he?’

Charles shrugged.

‘Landed on his feet by the sound of it. She’ll enjoy it, anyway.’ Martin gazed at the hills beyond the town. ‘Long way from here, Brussels.’

‘You’ll have to come back one day. Unless they bury you here.’

‘Maybe. I’m going over tomorrow. Just a quick in and out to see one of my merry men. Come with me.’

‘That’s
verboten.
Very
verboten
.’

‘Of course, I was forgetting the desk. And the pension. Important considerations at your age.’

They crossed the border together the next day. Charles allowed Martin to assume he had been goaded into it, but in fact it was because he was reluctant to leave the vigorous, likeable and
independent young man of whom he felt secretly proud.

They left early in the morning in Martin’s battered Toyota Landcruiser, bumping over tracks and non-tracks. It was not until some time after they had crossed it that Martin told him the
border was behind them.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ said Charles.

‘The border’s pretty theoretical in this part of the world. Pretty confusing, too. Nobody knows who to trust any more. Farther in we travel in the dark, on foot.’

Charles had pictured sitting around a campfire and talking late, perhaps telling Martin of his origins, if it felt right. But the reality was a cold, fire-less and sleepless night in the hills,
talking until dawn with one of Martin’s sub-agents. Or, rather, not talking in Charles’s case, since the other two conversed in a local language and Charles was confined to listening,
nodding and smiling. The agent, a wiry, wizened man with white hair, treated him with dignified courtesy.

‘I told him you’re a famous English warrior,’ said Martin, ‘a great chief in England and that you’ve killed six Arabs with your bare hands. Most Afghans hate the
Arab fighters.’

Charles tried not to show that he was shivering.

The following night, slipping gratefully into clean linen sheets in the head of station’s house in Islamabad, he felt for the first time that he must be growing old. Or, at least, that he
was no longer young. Roughing it has ceased to be an adventure. In fact, he no longer sought adventure.

He took early retirement in the new century, not very long after 9/11 and the proclamation of the War on Terror. By then he was beginning to feel that he should have gone ten
years before, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. That had been his territory. The new war had brought a new world and a new language, exciting because of its urgency and
the immediacy of results, but essentially short-term, hectic and – relatively – easy. Results came quickly or not at all. He felt as he imagined a cricketer must feel when playing the
twenty-overs game instead of a full five-day Test. It lacked the intellectual allure, the ideological and tactical complexities of the near century-long struggle against communism. Also, his
operational appetite was fading. Espionage was still the great game, but he had played enough. It was time to go, before repetition dulled his edge and made him careless. He would write his
long-contemplated book on Francis Walsingham.

Matthew Abrahams, by then chief, tried to persuade him to stay. ‘The Cold War is over, but some of the eternal verities remain. Russia is still Russia and China is still China. National
interests are undimmed. Their missiles still point at us; they’re spying as much as ever. You may think yourself an unwanted Cold Warrior but within a few years that’s precisely why you
– we – will be wanted again. Except that, unless we stay, we’ll be forgotten. There’s still a lot you can contribute.’

But Charles went. The last he heard of Martin at the time was that he still loved his Afghans and was increasingly involved in tracking down al-Qaeda.

Reading the file, more recently he learned how Martin had set up his own legal practice in England, dividing his time between that and his Afghan work. Charles had accepted, reluctantly, that
they would never meet again, as with Sarah. Yet still he carried within him the conviction that somehow, before life ended, all major threads must be gathered for some final account. Who would
gather them, and how the account was to be rendered, was something he had no feel for, until that grey day in Scotland when Matthew Abrahams rang.

W
alking to Pimlico took longer than Charles thought and his attempt to recall everything he might need caused him to loosen his normal grip on
time. He ran the last few hundred yards, but she was already there when he arrived. She was texting, and didn’t see him until he was at the table.

‘Sorry, just a work thing for tomorrow.’ She turned off her phone and put it in her handbag. ‘You look exhausted. D’you feel all right?’

‘Better than I must look. No reason I should be tired. Haven’t done anything all day.’

‘No, but you’ve been arrested. You’ve been done to, which is worse. Now, tell me everything. Why you’re back at work, what you’re doing, how the arrest came about,
everything, all over again if you can bear it. Start from the beginning.’

His story lasted well into their main course. He talked quietly, pausing whenever he noticed that the young couple at the next table had fallen silent. The man kept stealing looks at Sarah, as
men had always done. It pleased Charles to think he wasn’t alone in finding her still attractive, but fortunately the couple were mainly occupied by their own soulful conversation and did not
appear to be listening. The woman did most of the talking and the man most of the nodding.

When Charles finally finished his account, Sarah seemed more curious about him than about what had happened. ‘You haven’t found or lost any wives along the way in the years since we
met?’

‘No wives. The odd girlfriend here and there.’

‘How charmingly accidental that sounds. More often here than there, I bet. Now, tell me about this Walsingham book. Why – no, your house, your house in Scotland, let’s do that
first.’

He described his house.

‘Sounds worryingly remote,’ she said.

‘That’s why I’m there.’

‘But you shouldn’t be. Not too much, not on your own. You’ll turn in on yourself. And it won’t help with your book. You’ll be bored.’

‘And boring?’

‘I never said that.’

When she ordered coffee rather than a pudding he realised there wasn’t much time. ‘It’s good to talk again,’ he said, conscious of a change of tone. ‘More than
good, whatever the circumstance. But there’s something that worries me over and beyond what’s just happened to me. It’s Martin. I haven’t seen him since a couple of years
after you and I last met. That breakfast at Daly’s.’

Her expression did not change but the corners of her mouth tightened, emphasising lines she never used to have. ‘I’ve no idea what’s happened to him. He’s certainly not
been in touch with me. I assumed you would know all about him since he’s the case you’re investigating.’

‘I know only what the file says. After you and Nigel left for America he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan on our behalf. He became a very good agent, did a lot of things, took a lot of
risks. He set up a charity – an educational charity – then came back and set up his own legal practice. He raised money for the charity, went back and forth quite a lot and has been
peripatetic ever since.’

‘He’s not married? No children?’

‘He’s certainly not married, not here, anyway. He may have wives or concubines over there. The file implies that there have been women in his life but no identities or suggestions of
anyone permanent. Nor any hint that you and I might be grandparents.’ He smiled.

She did not. ‘He’s been working for you – your office – Nigel’s office – throughout?’

‘Yes and no. He continued for quite a few years, even after he converted. Then there was a long gap, until very recently.’

‘He converted? To what?’

‘Islam.’ Again he saw her mouth tighten. ‘I don’t know why. It’s in the electronic bit of the file, which is much less informative and doesn’t go into detail.
Just refers to it. The Taliban were making life difficult for his charity.’

‘What sort of charity?’

‘Educational, as I said. Not just children. Adult literacy too, especially women. That’s what the resurgent Taliban didn’t like. They targeted teachers, schools, family and
tribal heads. He stuck it out there for a while, but in recent years he’s spent more time in the UK as things have become more difficult.’

‘Doing what? Where does he live?’

‘Birmingham. He runs his legal practice from his house, specialises in Pakistani work, attends the local mosque. He’s well-regarded, apparently. Respected as a good
Muslim.’

‘Perhaps he is.’

‘You’re not surprised?’

‘I’d never have predicted it, but now you say it’s happened I can believe it. He always wanted a cause. I’d have predicted civil rights, human rights work, that sort of
thing. Maybe this is that sort of thing.’

He noticed she hadn’t touched her coffee, which was just as well, because he had some way to go. ‘It seems that they – the office, the new SIA – picked him up again once
we became seriously re-involved in Afghanistan. They wanted to know if he would travel back there, get in touch with his old contacts, report on the Taliban insurgents and AQ in Pakistan. Risky for
a Westerner. But his past credentials were supposed to stand him in good stead, provided enough of his old contacts survived.’

‘Has he grown a beard?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen him. There’s no recent photo.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘It took months for anyone to contact him. They even had to have a risk
assessment for themselves, all the usual modern nonsense. Finally they allowed themselves to go and see him. Martin doubted that his old contacts would be much use now; but he agreed to ask around
because he has business in Pakistan, anyway. Travels to and fro, so he could test the water. Well, he went and it worked. Not many of his old contacts survive but those that do are influential and
he came back with some intelligence. He always did, he was always a good producer, happy to spy on terrorists. Since then it’s become a regular thing, a trip every couple of months or so.
Just after his penultimate trip he was summoned back, urgently. This was unprecedented. His case officers didn’t think he should go. Neither did he. Then, I believe, Nigel went to see him,
alone. After which he did go, and hasn’t been heard of since.’

‘Nigel – are you sure? He never said anything to me.’

‘I’m not absolutely sure, no. There’s nothing on file about it. But I do know he got Martin’s current address and telephone number and can’t think of any other
reason he’d want them. He’d have seen him during the weekend before Martin left. Since then, ever since Martin’s been missing, there’ve been indications of attack planning
by two extremist groups in this country. The groups don’t know each other – one’s in Birmingham, the other in High Wycombe – but they’re both in touch with a
mysterious individual who seems to be coordinating them. No-one knows how he communicates but the groups refer to him between themselves as al-Samit – the Silent, or the Silent One.
Presumably he communicates only face to face or by courier. Nigel has put something on file about that, saying he thinks it might be Martin. He reckons he’s been turned and is now working
against us.’