81

This area didn’t have streetlighting. I wasn’t complaining – I always felt safer in the dark. I stood against the fence, trying to get some pitta bread down my neck. There was no curtain across the target window, and the fan kept going. Somebody had turned the light on but I still hadn’t been able to see who.

Another light came on, somewhere on the ground floor this time. Weak light spilled over the wall.

I now understood how difficult it must have been for the women in the Emirates food hall to hoover up their Big Macs. Getting anything through the hole in Ali’s mum’s old burqa was proving very difficult indeed. Most of it seemed to miss and tumble down the black material.

No way could I have got away with what I wanted to do tonight without some sort of cover. Burqa’d up, I passed for a very chunky university girl. If Arab men could cover up and get through airport security on their sisters’ passports, I should be able to mince about at night in this kit to my heart’s content. If not, I’d soon find out.

Snatches of waffle and banter filtered through from the far side of the tall plywood sheets that encircled the building site. I looked through the gap where two sheets didn’t quite meet. Blankets were spread out round a fire, with pots and pans rigged over the flickering flames. The wood spat and split, completing the western campfire effect. It could have been a scene from a John Wayne movie – except that these boys, truck drivers, I guessed, were in dishdashes and had a TV perched on top of a pile of concrete blocks, next to a fat extension reel. The other end of the lead disappeared in the direction of a genny I could hear ticking away in the distance.

A couple of students walked hand in hand across the far side of the square, giving the odd giggle along the way. I stayed in the shadows and thought about Ali. I wondered what he was going to do. Tell the police? Tell his sister, and she’d tell the police? She was going to be really pissed off with me. I didn’t know, and I tried not to care. Whatever, it was out of my hands. All I could do was what I was doing now – keeping eyes on the target and trying to identify whoever was in there.

I’d had no choice in my treatment of Ali, but that didn’t stop me feeling sorry for him. First his dad’s illness had screwed up his university plans, and now I’d done the same with his dreams of a journalistic career.

Fuck it, there was nothing I could do but cut away from all that and get on with the job.

I needed to get a trigger on the target and find out who was in there. Altun had to be somewhere with the Pakistan delivery. Whether he was sitting under that ceiling fan or not, I still needed to find a way of making entry on target tonight. Short of bursting straight into M3C’s airport HQ, I had nowhere else to go.

I needed to find a good OP, ideally high up in an unoccupied building that was still under construction and looked right down on the target. The closer of the two minarets fitted the bill. My only problem would be getting into it. I couldn’t just sashay past the lads round the campfire – it wasn’t that kind of party. Nor could I get over the fence. I’d checked. It wouldn’t happen. The only way was to head for the uni and see how I could make my way from there.

Before I did anything, I had to finish getting some more bread and water down my neck – instead of down my burqa. I didn’t know how long I was going to have to be up there, or the next time I’d get a chance to eat or drink.

I was finally done. I brushed the crumbs off the black material and moved onto the pavement, day-sack over one shoulder. I blended in pretty well, I thought, apart from being a foot taller than the rest of the girls. I just hoped my size-ten Timberlands wouldn’t stick out too much, and that nobody stopped me to sympathize about how badly the diet was going.

I went back into the square and followed the other students down to the right of the target, trying to avoid taking long paces or looking like I was about to enter a boxing ring. Paralleling the road that led to the university via the construction site, I lost eyes on target. I wouldn’t have it again until I got into my OP, but it was worth the risk. If I stayed at ground level I wouldn’t see jack.

A hundred metres or so past the square, the students were starting to bunch. By two hundred, they were crossing the road and coming in from all directions, bottlenecking at what I assumed must be the entrance. I joined the mob.

We surged through the gates into a big, brightly lit open space with marble flooring. A mosque reared up on the far side, another couple of hundred metres away. Its huge square façade and minarets towered above us, floodlit from the ground like something from Cape Canaveral. The spotlights were harsh enough to make God blink.

The square was humming with chat and ring tones. The girls laughed, glanced at their homework and munched peanuts or other stuff out of bags. It could have been almost any university campus, almost anywhere in the world.

I worked my way to the right of the mosque, where a tree-lined border had been planted to give the square some shade. I kept moving, making sure I didn’t bump into anybody or anything and draw attention to myself. It was easier said than done, when the hole I had to look through was smaller than a Warrior’s letterbox. I wanted to move through this lot like oil, not giving a single person cause to stop, stare and wonder what class the big bird was in.

I headed beyond the trees and into the stretch of shadow where the floodlights between the old and the new part of the campus didn’t meet. I picked my way over mounds of earth and rubble for about twenty metres until I was in total darkness. I took off the burqa, folded it up and shoved it into my day-sack. I’d need it again to get out.