Free A Loyal Spy by Simon Conway Page A

homicide cop turned FBI agent. When Jonah had first contacted him after his return from Sierra Leone he had hoped that Mikulski would be able to offer some advice on how to track the sale of the diamonds, in the hope that it might lead to Nor, but that wasn’t his only motivation for asking for a meeting. Jonah had been ready to tell all. In the weeks following his return from Sierra Leone, he had convinced himself that it was better to confess and hope for clemency than leave it to Nor to reveal all in some spectacular stunt. He had not consulted Monteith before arranging the meeting. He was in no doubt that Monteith would regard what he was contemplating doing as treason. But he had reasoned that he was under a greater obligation to tell the truth than to simply protect the Department.
    By the time he had boarded the plane for New York, Jonah had made his mind up. He was going to confess. But events had intervened. Terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Standing beside Mikulski in the window of the legal firm, and staring down at the fiery inferno that was all that was left of the towers, he knew that there would be no confession. The world had irreversibly changed. He was as tied to the lie as the rest of the Guides.

MIRANDA
Hijra: Flight
    ‘I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak from the evil of what He has created, from the evil of darkness when it gathers, from the evil of the women who blow on knots, from the evil of an envier when he envies.’
    Koran, Sura 113

The woman who blew on knots
    2 September 2005
    Some time before dawn she found herself at the door to the farmhouse, sure in the knowledge that there would be no further sleep that night. She stood for a while, naked in the doorway, staring out across the water at the mainland. The air was cold and thick with the smell of brine, and soon the first mist would roll off the water. The chill burned her cheeks, breasts and thighs. She thought, as she had so often done before, that her life was a mystery that had unravelled in directions unforeseen.
    The dog slid between her legs and sprinted off after distant rabbits. She didn’t feel tired. She felt lost. She had no cable, no lifeline, to show her the way. She turned from the doorway and retreated to the kitchen. From the freezer box in the fridge she removed a bottle of lemon vodka, the last of the batch. She poured herself a measure in an empty jam jar from the draining board and downed it in one gulp. It burned.
    She felt a rush of sudden anger. There were times when it felt as if a band of steel were tightening against her skull.
    Even in his absence Barnhill was full of Jonah’s presence. She often started, her head turning as fast as whiplash to catch him, but she was always too slow. He was never there. It was just his ghost haunting her, an invisible companion to the dog that followed everywhere at her heels.
    She glanced at the postcard tacked to the fridge door; Jonah’s only message since he had left the island. The picture was a photograph of the Bala Hissar fortress in Peshawar. She turned it over. The stamps were from Pakistan, postmarked Peshawar. She had contemplated buying a ticket for Pakistan and setting out in pursuit of him – after all, she knew Peshawar well – but something had made her stay put. She distrusted the postcard’s provenance. There was a simple written message,
I have things to take care of
, and the address written in a scrawl beside it. The subtext eluded her. She clung to the thought that there might be some further communication from him, some sort of explanation.
    Then there was her job, if it could be called that. From the beginning of April she had been employed by Scottish Natural Heritage to monitor the habitat of rare orchids on the island’s machair, the sand-dune pasture on the windward side of the isle of Jura that was classified as a special conservation area. In the last two months she had logged frog, Hebridean,