The Network (10 page)

Seethrough has said he’ll contact me again in a week’s time. But the lack of news makes me anxious, and the evenings fall heavily. My working routine has gone haywire. I drink a bottle and a half of wine every night, and I’m smoking again, a vice I’ve managed to evade for over a year. For most of the week I avoid contact with people, stop shopping and, worst of all, run out of decent red wine. I take to going for long walks alone and driving Gerhardt cross-country on the muddy tank routes over Salisbury Plain, thinking to test my nerve in the event of getting caught and arrested by the Military Police. I shouldn’t, because it would be a bad moment to be arrested. But you do odd things when the craving for adrenalin begins to set in.

Then two things happen. The following Saturday morning, along with a reminder that I haven’t paid my television licence, a postcard arrives from Afghanistan. It’s strangely timely. On the front is a poorly reproduced colour photograph, probably taken in the 1970s, of a turbanned Kuchi tribesman leading a caravan of camels, silhouetted against a background of barren mountains. It’s postmarked Kabul, but I can’t make out the date. Nor do I recognise the hand. It reads,

Be doubly warned that the journey here takes at least thirteen hours, in temperatures of up to forty degrees. We all look forward to seeing you here. Please do keep in touch. Your old friend, Mohammed.

I’ve had the occasional letter and postcard from Afghanistan, but I’m embarrassed not to remember a Mohammed who considers himself to be my old friend. Certainly not one who speaks English well enough to know his prepositions and such an expression as ‘be doubly warned’. I think of the English-speaking people I’ve met in Kabul and on de-mining missions over the years. Most of them are foreigners. I wonder if Mohammed might be a Western-educated Iranian. But my mind’s a blank. I’ve simply forgotten. Odder still, it’s winter now and nowhere in Afghanistan does the temperature reach forty degrees. Perhaps the card was posted months before, and has only just been flown out. The Taliban postal service is hardly famous for its swiftness. I walk into the living room, put the postcard on the mantelpiece and stare at it. It bothers me that I can’t identify the sender. I decide I’ll leave it there until I can.

The second event is a phone call from Seethrough. I’ve yet to get into the habit of calling him Macavity. When the mobile he’s given me begins to ring, I have no idea at first what it is. The tone resembles a two-tone police siren, and makes me think some kind of alarm has gone off in the house, only there aren’t any alarms in the house. After a few moments of bafflement, I find the handset with its blinking green light, disconnect it from the charger lead and press the answer button.

‘This is Macavity,’ says a watery-sounding voice, as the data packets are digitised and encrypted, then reassembled again in the handset. At some point the Firm’s special microchip begins sending out its impenetrable white noise. ‘Confirm please.’

‘This is Plato,’ I say, feeling silly.

‘All well?’

‘Can I change the ring tone on this thing?’ I ask.

‘No, you can’t. Now just listen. I’m going to send you someone.’

‘That’s nice,’ I say. ‘Will she jump out of a cake?’

‘It’s a he. He’s going to help you to get up to speed on a few things. If you get along, I’ll send him with you. He’s ex-Regiment and I want you to do whatever he asks.’

‘Whose regiment?’

‘The Regiment.’

That’s different. The Regiment is what the SAS calls the SAS. I picture a black-booted figure in body armour and respirator, Heckler & Koch MP5 at the ready, swinging through the window of the house as I lie in bed reading the Sunday papers.

‘I hope it’s not Andy McNab,’ I say. ‘He’s far too intellectual for me.’

‘Don’t be facetious. It’s not Andy McNab; it’s the fellow who trained him.’

That shuts me up.

‘Roger that. When?’

‘That’s his business. Just be nice to him. He’ll introduce himself as a friend from London. By the way, he’s a Mirbat vet, so I advise you not to mess him around.’

‘A what?’

‘Mirbat. Look it up. I have to go. Good luck.’

There’s a
bleep
, and a recording of a severe-sounding woman’s voice repeats, ‘Please hang up, please hang up.’

I’m impressed. Both by the mobile, which seems to do its job, and by a man who seems to do his. A man so busy he has no time for small talk. I’m about to reattach the handset to its cable when looking at it gives me an idea. Hearing Seethrough’s voice has reminded me of the mobile’s other functions, and I wonder now if they really work.

There’s a way, I realise, to test the infrared. I can switch my video camera to ‘nightshot’ mode, when the camera uses its own infrared source to film in total darkness, and then see what the mobile looks like. And it’s easy to test the ultraviolet function. There are dyes that show up under ultraviolet light in all sorts of things.

As soon as it’s dark, I’m thus able to waste several hours. In pitch blackness, viewed through the camera in infrared mode, the little screen on the mobile is, as promised, as bright as a searchlight. It lights up the entire room and is even visible from under a blanket. Handy, as Seethrough has suggested, for landing a helicopter in the garden.

The ultraviolet is equally distracting. It makes my fingernails seem luminous. I wave it over objects that take my fancy, and discover the hidden watermarks and security devices in my chequebook and passport. There are hidden phosphor bands on stamps, and images and tiny flecks of specially dyed paper in banknotes, invisible to the eye in ordinary light. Shining as if white-hot in the darkened room, they seem strangely beautiful. I also look at the postcard with it, and am disappointed to find there’s no hidden message.

It’s Saturday evening. I’m alone, and feel alone. As night falls, the familiar beast of despair begins to creep up on me. I have no tobacco and am too lazy to go and buy any. Worse, there’s virtually nothing to drink but a final bottle of Château Batailley, which I’ve promised myself I’ll save for a special occasion. This calls for a difficult decision. It’s either the Batailley or the sole other source of alcohol in the house: roughly half a bottle of Armenian cognac, which a so-called friend has palmed off on me as a gift. It’s so bad I haven’t touched it for six months, having discovered what damage it can do to the untrained nervous system. I retrieve it from the back of a kitchen cupboard, mix a slug with some mineral water and discover to my surprise that it’s quite drinkable. I also find a cigar, which I’ve similarly promised myself to save for a special occasion. I light the cigar, dig out my topographic maps of Afghanistan, and return to the cognac.

At ten o’clock I lurch into the grey morning with a sharp pain in my head where the cognac has etched Category 2 damage in the region of my cerebellum. The house reeks of cigar smoke, so I throw open the windows and put the coffee percolator to work in the kitchen. Taking the first sip, I hear myself whisper, ‘I must not do this again,’ and wonder how often I’ve uttered the same words. My Afghan maps are scattered on the floor by the sofa where I’ve fallen asleep. As I’m gathering them up there’s a triple knock at the door. I flee upstairs, throw on some clothes and return to the door.

The daylight is painfully bright. In front of me stands a clean-shaven middle-aged man with a sheaf of paperwork in his hand, and for a terrible moment I think of all the letters from the Television Licensing Authority which I’ve thrown away unopened.

‘Good morning, sir. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

I don’t like the ‘sir’ part. It makes him sound like a policeman. But he doesn’t look like one. He’s wearing a black suit like an undertaker’s, for which he’s grown slightly too big, and a tie with green and red diagonals that hurts to look at.

‘Of course not,’ I reply with an unconvincing smile.

‘I wonder if I can ask whether you read the Bible?’ he asks. Resting in the crook of his arm like Moses in a basket is a sheaf of denominational literature.

‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

A smile of pleasant surprise spreads across his face, but it’s not a morning to give the enemy too much room for manoeuvre, because I don’t do religion on a hangover.

‘I also read the Qur’an. I have a soft spot for Marcus Aurelius too, and he was a pagan.’

The smile fades. He’s not really expecting this and a slight stutter comes into his voice. ‘But … but do you believe your actions in this life make a difference in the world to come?’

‘If we’re going to be judged on something in an afterlife, I think it’ll probably be our
inactions
. It’s not difficult to live a pious life, if you think about it, imagining you’ll be saved if you stick to a few rules. But think of all the good things you could have done but didn’t because you were too lazy or complacent. I think we’ll be judged on our potential.’

He’s frowning now.

‘I forget where I first heard the idea, but it does stay with you. I think it’s somewhere in the Qur’an.’

I pluck a copy of the
Watchtower
from his grasp and thank him warmly, saying I hope I’ll see him again soon. The speed at which he walks away up the drive suggests I won’t.

With a feeling of guilty victory I return to my coffee. Then I close the windows in the sitting room because the light is hurting my eyes, and sit down at the table, taking the postcard from the mantelpiece where I left it. I read it again several times. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the text. I wonder if the picture, depicting a nomad leading a line of camels, is intended to convey a meaning. It’s the identity of ‘Mohammed’ that bothers me. I wonder if it might be worth looking through my diaries from the period I was last in Kabul, but if the card was sent months earlier, whoever Mohammed is will have given up hearing from me.

I take the card to the kitchen and boil the kettle, hold the card in the steam and gently work a corner of the stamp with the tip of a knife. I’m not sure what to expect – anything strange or out of the ordinary.

As the stamp begins to curl back in the steam, what I see is even stranger. Under the stamp, in the same ink as the writing on the card, is a tiny drawing of a dinosaur with a smiling face.

It’s a stegosaurus.

Cryptography is the science of hiding the true meaning of a message by disguising it; encrypting it by some means known to the recipient but not to others. As long as the sender and the recipient keep their means of encryption secret, the effort needed by the codebreaker is determined by the difficulty of the code. Some codes, like alphabetical substitutions, are easy to crack because the frequencies at which letters appear in words are well known. Others, like one-time pads based on random numbers, can only be cracked by computers, if at all. The most complex codes that use block ciphers and multiple algorithms need both computers and time, and modern computing power means that few codes are truly impossible to crack, given enough of the latter. But the science of hiding a message by disguising it as something which on the surface appears innocent is called steganography.

Strictly speaking, a message written in invisible ink across an ordinary letter is an example of steganography: the visible or cover message is innocuous. It’s an ancient idea. Herodotus describes a king who tattooed a secret message on the shaven head of his slave, whose hair was allowed to grow before he travelled through enemy territory to deliver it. More recent applications allow secret text to be hidden in the data of digitised photographs sent over the Internet. The advantage of a steganographic message is that, unlike a coded message, the secret part doesn’t attract attention to itself. It resembles something ordinary, and hides itself thereby.

My ex-wife, come to think of it, has a steganographic personality: an innocent-looking face concealing a cruel agenda.

I decide it has to be the numbers: thirteen and forty. ‘Degrees’ in the cover message also seems to be an overt clue. I find an atlas and look up the latitude and longitude. Problem. Thirteen degrees north and forty degrees east puts me in the mountains of northern Ethiopia. Forty degrees west is equally challenging – somewhere in the mid-Atlantic trench. Southern readings for the latitude land me in thick rainforest in Mozambique and Brazil. The numbers are not an obvious location.

They’re too short to be a phone number or a postcode. The only other reference I can imagine they might give is a book code, indicating a page and line number in a book known to both sender and recipient. But I haven’t agreed on a book with anyone called Mohammed.

Then it hits me like a delayed reaction, as I hear the echo of my very own words: I also read the Qur’an. The ‘old friend’, Mohammed, is the clue. It’s so obvious I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realise. Now I regret my uncivil behaviour towards my visitor.

For centuries the
mas-haf
code, virtually unknown in the West, has been used in the Islamic world to encrypt messages using the numbers of the Qur’an’s sacred verses. Being identical in every version of the text, irrespective of country or date of publication, the verses retain the same numbers and provide thereby an unchanging key.

I go to my bookshelf, pull out an English translation and race to the thirteenth chapter, called Thunder. The fortieth verse, or
ay
a
, is a short one: ‘Whether We let you glimpse in some measure the scourge with which We threaten them, or cause you to die before we smite them, your mission is only to give warning: it is for Us to do the reckoning.’