A Loyal Spy Read Free

mimicked him – holding it up to his remaining eye for scrutiny. It looked like an impossibly large grain of salt. Jonah had read that once upon a time diamonds were said to reveal the guilt or innocence of accused criminals and adulterers by the colours they reflected. By rights, in Sierra Leone, Jonah thought, the diamonds should be blood red.
    There was the sound of a throat being cleared close behind him and the cold O-ring of a muzzle was placed against the back of Jonah’s neck. The sound of insects thickened around him.
    ‘Put your hands up,’ said a voice that was calm but authoritative, and suddenly familiar from a long-ago children’s game. Silwood Park in the endless summer of 1976: a skinny boy pointing a stick at him. Jonah glanced at Farouz, who shrugged and mopped his brow. So much for a deal cut on behalf of his delinquent nephew.
    The muzzle was removed. The man with the voice that had sent him spinning back through time stepped back, safely out of reach. ‘Turn around.’
    It couldn’t be.
    Jonah took a deep breath and obeyed.
    There were three of them and he recognised them immediately. One of them he knew from grainy mugshots in ‘most wanted’ posters, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Ghailani had bought the truck that carried the bomb that destroyed the US embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. The second was Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese diamond broker on the UN watch list, and the third, the one who was pointing a pistol at him – a black moulded-polymer sub-compact – was the custodian of a deep, dark secret. Jonah would say that Nor ed-Din had been his best student and his oldest and dearest friend, but the last time he had seen him he was lying face down in a pool of icy water in the Khyber Pass, and for many years Jonah had been under the impression that he had killed him there.
    Nor held out his hand for the diamond and Jonah dropped it into his upturned palm. He wanted to say, ‘Hey, Nor, welcome back from the dead.’ But Nor was a professional secret-keeper –
trained by the best
– and it seemed from the expression on his face that they had never met.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Nor in Arabic.
    ‘Buying diamonds,’ Jonah replied, also in Arabic.
    ‘The diamonds here are no longer available for sale.’
    ‘Then I guess I’d better go back the way I came,’ Jonah told him, but he could see from the expression on their faces that this was not an option. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’
    ‘Nevertheless, trouble has come,’ said Nor, and gestured to the guards with a flick of his narrow, tapered fingers. ‘Take him.’
    They dragged Jonah down a jungle trail to a clearing with a single breeze-block hut and threw him inside. For several hours he listened to the steady footfall of the guards circling the hut and occasionally the sound of Nigerian Alpha jet fighters buzzing the jungle to the west.
    Afternoon sun poured through the gaps in the thatch roof and created pools of light on the dirt floor. Jonah squatted on his haunches and watched as a fly writhed on its back in its death throes. Soon afterwards an ant emerged from a crack in the breeze-block wall. It darted this way and that with its antennae writhing. It found the fly carcass, circled it, and then went back to a second scout. They met antenna to antenna as if talking and then the second scout returned to the crack. Almost immediately a column of ants marched out and smothered the fly. They dismembered it and carried the pieces back to the nest.
    The next time he saw it happen, he waited for the second scout to return to the crack and then reached down and removed the fly. Sure enough, a column emerged but when they found no fly they turned on the scout and tore it limb from limb. It occurred to him that the impulse to kill the bearer of bad news is hard-wired into all creatures.
    He couldn’t help wondering whether he had been dealt a similar fate.

Pipe dreams
    September–October 1996
    It was 27 September. On an