Читать книгу State Of Attack - Gary Haynes - Страница 19

Chapter 10

After a full ten seconds, Habib opened a desk drawer with his free hand and took out a silver Zippo. He lit up and took a long pull on the cigarette before taking a disposable cellphone from his inside jacket pocket.

He’d get paid by the Americans. He liked that, even though he had put his pension, if not his life, in jeopardy. But he consoled himself by thinking that if the worst happened, he and his young family could run, and there were a lot worse places than the US to run to. They would put him into some sort of witness protection programme. It would be fine.

He laughed out loud like a crazy man. Habib, the double agent. Yes, he liked that. And the best part was that he would get paid whether the general died or not, given what he knew was about to transpire.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the seemingly boundless cityscape, at the blocks of glass and steel and the powder-blue tiles of the ancient minarets. These were the two stories of Turkey, he thought, at once a modern free market economy and a Muslim state that still believed dogma was relevant. As a result, he foresaw a great calamity about to afflict his country, the strains of which were already apparent. The dichotomy between women who wore make-up and Gucci shades, and those who wanted to beat them for not wearing the hijab.

But most of all he feared the Sunni-Shia conflict and all of its violent offshoots. He didn’t want his wife and two girls to be around when the streets were filled with sectarian gangs and armed militias. He had joined MIT to protect them, but, the dangers of his duplicity aside, no one could protect them from what was coming, he believed. He glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision and looked down at the windowsill. A moth was there, with speckled brown wings. It was crawling around as if it was drunk. He looked closer and saw that it was dragging one of its back legs behind it, which had been clearly rendered useless. He put his outstretched fingers close to it, as if he was coaxing it to climb up. But the insect just scuttled around even more slowly in a decreasing circle.

He thought about opening the window to let it fly out but quickly realized it was dying, probably of old age or sheer fatigue. And as he looked at it dragging its leg behind it in that self-defeating circle, he saw the general in his mind’s eye.

He’s just left, he texted with his thumb.