“Mr President, the potential trouble might come from the Sahrawi People’s Army, which wants independence for what we call Western Sahara. It has the support of the Algerians and the Russians. There are no specific threats yet. We have our best men in the field checking.” Leonard was on his best behaviour.
It was, perhaps, a blessing that Mike Kingdom couldn’t hear how Leonard was describing her.
“What’s so damn special about a pile of sand where nobody lives? Why are we all getting so worked up? This sounds like the Brits over the Falklands.” Conrad wasn’t buying any of this.
“Well, the Falklands was, firstly, about principle and, secondly, about the potential for oil.”
“Principles can be retrofitted, and Western Sahara doesn’t have gas – unless you guys haven’t told me something. So why should I get worked up?”
“Phosphates,” was all Leonard said.
“Great, we need fertiliser real bad, but there are other places.”
“It has seventy per cent of the world’s known reserve,” Leonard continued.
“Damn.” The President was digesting this fact.
“That’s why the Algerians, the Russians and, I might add, the Chinese (who are building a port in Algeria) are all behind the Sahrawis.” The DO, who was oddly very politically aware for an operational director, had put his head above the parapet now Leonard had prepared the ground.
“No, Mr President, this is about phosphates. The Algerians sell us gas anyways.” The Secretary of State knew the reality.
“Is this like the Contras in Nicaragua and the money from Iran?” Conrad paused. “Is this where the President shouldn’t ask any more questions?” He could see the word ‘impeachment’ appearing out of a desert mist.
“Mr President, I can assure you that the US is not actively involved in any illegal activity.” The DO knew the truth that it was the Moroccan secret service, the Direction Général de Surveillance du Térritoire (DGST), doing the dirty work for them.
The President had heard the word ‘actively’ and wisely let the whole of this pass.
“We just publicly support the UN-led peacekeeping force and objectives. We sit on the moral high ground and look down.” The Secretary of State was happy with the way this meeting had gone, given its starting point.
It was only Leonard who had begun to piece together the implications for the UK and French nationals who were caught up in the crossfire. As one of the casualties was a minister, the proverbial had not yet hit the fan.
“I said I wouldn’t ask any more questions, but I want reassurance that any terrorist threat to me or to the G20 is being dealt with by the CIA,” the President demanded.
“As Leonard said, we have our very best men on it, with full support, Mr President.” The CIA DO was very clear about this even if, in truth, he would have had kittens if he had been aware of the mess behind the scenes and that success depended on Mike Kingdom.
At that precise moment, the very best ‘men’ that the CIA could offer were completely unsupported and were either chained to a wall or standing outside a farmhouse, looking for a black-and-white dog. Was this the consequence of billions of dollars wisely spent? Who knows? But it was most certainly for the best that the President and 300 million Americans didn’t know the thin thread on which so much hung.
The CIA spent most of its billions of dollars enabling its operatives to operate and its analysts to analyse. This was not a glib statement, as despite various name changes, confusing the two was the surest way for both of them to fail. Mike was an analyst masquerading as an operative; this broke every rule and every protocol in every handbook.
She was cursing Leonard under her breath as she tried to work out what to do.
Never having read a CIA operational handbook, she was unlikely to benefit from their pearls of wisdom. Dylan had never been that complimentary about them. As to the analyst’s handbooks, she had read most of them and was very proud of her input to the one on database searching. She applied her analyst’s mind to an operational problem: what could go wrong?
She decided that the weird stone arch that looked like a mine entrance was the likeliest place to find Randy. Here, she was confusing the luxury of the analyst who can sift through twenty possibilities in any order without any direct consequence with the operative’s position that if you choose the wrong one, you’re compromised, tortured or dead. If Dylan was shouting from some distant place, Mike was not hearing him. It was a stupid decision.
She ran to the stone arch over the open ground in full sunlight. Halfway across, she thought about her exposure to anyone in the buildings and bent over in a strange, hunched gait that would have had no effect apart from slowing her down, simultaneously blowing any story that she was looking for her dog and concentrating her body mass so that a shooter was sure to hit her core organs. But she hadn’t read the handbooks.
She made it to the entrance, which resembled a cave, with the left half blocked in by an old stone wall. She stepped inside and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. There was no sound inside or out apart from some crickets on the dry bushes and the occasional vehicle on the road. She pulled out her phone and turned on the torch. She was right: it was an old irrigation system, and it disappeared away to her left, but the sides began to close in quickly and there were dust-covered cobwebs stretched across that hadn’t been disturbed for months. She turned around, choosing where to place her feet among the piles of stones.
The noise when Chips ran into the cave barking was deafening. It echoed down to the aquifer and back. He ran out and back to the farmhouse, only to be captured and finally tied up. Mike didn’t know this, and she crept up to the entrance as if there were an alternative to walking out into blistering sunlight in full view of the house. She ran back across to where she had started from and massaged her damaged left leg, which was beginning to hurt (she normally never ran anywhere). Rubbing her leg reminded her of the precariousness of life, and she took off her brown wig and wiped away the sweat before repositioning it.
Chips must be with people or he would be barking, she thought to herself. She edged towards the rear corner of the building and peered around it. There were two connected small sheds that looked as though they contained goats or cows. Voices were coming from one of them through a window, which was really just an opening with a large wooden shutter tied back against the wall. They were speaking Arabic, but she picked up some English, although not enough to make any sense.
Oddly, she couldn’t see any doors into these sheds. This should have set off alarm bells – it’s essential to always know where all the windows and doors are. They were actually at the back of the sheds, out of her sight, which meant she never saw the men appear until it was too late. There was no time to run.
“Have you seen my dog?” she asked as they approached.
“That is not your dog. We know that dog; it is Kella. It belongs to Meddur, the fish gutter.” The man in the shiny suit was now standing next to her.
“I know; he jumped into my car,” was her last pathetic attempt to extricate herself.
One of the Berbers, now behind her, was saying something in Arabic and pointing at the fisherman’s pickup, partially hidden in the trees.
“Why don’t you come inside and tell us why you have Meddur’s pickup?” This was asked in a way that did not allow for refusal.
There was no point trying to fight all the men. She smiled and walked between them as they went around the back of the sheds and in through a solid, faded-blue door. She found herself in a room with a chain attached to a ring on the wall and a bucket that smelt disgusting. Chips began barking, having heard human voices.
“Are you American?” The man in the shiny suit appeared to be the only one who spoke any English.
Mike did not need any of the operational manuals to know that, in this sort of situation, the last thing you say is that you’re American. She thought quickly; would being British be better? Probably not. “I’m Canadian; I’m touring Morocco with a friend.”
The three men in the room communicated in Arabic or some Berber dialect.
“Please take a seat.”
She turned around to look for somewhere to sit, and before she could think, she had been grabbed, pushed onto the floor and chained to the wall.
