CHAPTER 50
Language was the problem. The older monk only spoke a few words of English, but he smiled a great deal, and Cass decided Ajahn Lee’s letter had worked. He was invited to take a shower, and when he emerged in bare feet, a fresh tee shirt and a pair of sandals was waiting. Then he was handed a phone that the monk had just used to call a number.
It was Jon, checking if he was OK. “I have asked them to give you a phone to contact your friends, Cass. They tell me you need shoes and clothes. Ajahn Lee is visiting the town, but I have told him where you are. He is leaving us today.”
The call was short but enough to calm Cass. He slept on the floor of the temple, but it was a restless sleep. He woke frequently because his feet were sore, blistered, and bleeding. His leg muscles ached, and his head pounded. When he did fall asleep, small sounds woke him—creaking from the roof timbers, a gecko chirping, a dog barking, and a cockerel crowing in the darkness. And then there was that dream again.
He was opening the door of Faisal World Travel to escape the rain, and Khan had emerged from the back of the shop.
“You want to go somewhere, young man?”
“Maybe.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Khan.”
“How is your mother?”
In the dream, Khan was pulling on his beard, scratching between the buttons of his waistcoat, and staring at him.
“Good, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Your family is from Jalandhar?”
“I am British, sir. I have never been.”
“I am from Jagrawan. You know it?”
“I have not been to Pakistan, sir.”
“You want to go?”
“Maybe, sir . . . someday.”
“You have family there.”
“I think so, sir. My mother and grandmother speak about family.”
They did, often, but the names had meant nothing. Also, the old photos they passed around were just pictures of strangers, old people in a village setting. They meant nothing, but had one of them been his father?
That was when Cass suddenly woke and sat up to find himself in total darkness. What had woken him was the memory of one of those old photos his grandmother would sit and look at when he was young. He could see her holding it, pointing to it, talking in Punjabi.
It was not the people he remembered though, but it was the photo of a young goat that had been of most interest to him as a boy of around ten. Goats, after all, were not seen around Shipley Street.
Perhaps the photo had been taken twenty years ago, but in it was his grandmother, younger then but still recognisable by the yellow shalwar kameez and a show of grey hair beneath the head covering. And his mother, sitting next to her, was much younger and almost unrecognisable and surrounded by other women who might have been family or friends. And there was a black tousle-haired girl of about ten, smiling and holding the young black and white goat in her lap.
And behind the women sat serious men, all but one with bushy black hair, beards, and moustaches. And he remembered his grandmother pointing at the beardless one with his intense-looking eyes and his shirt undone to expose the neck of a white vest. And Cass remembered her saying something about him. He couldn’t remember what she’d said, but it was as if this was why she was showing it to him. His grandmother had been proud of that man.
Perhaps it had been going through the photos on Mrs. Nong’s computer and once again seeing the faces of the countless men for whom he had made passports, but in the darkness, something suddenly struck Cass.
It was the man’s eyes, his hair, his nose, and the clean-shaven face. It was identical to the man he’d given the package to in the mountains in Syria—the man who’d shaken his hand, patted his back, and said something in Arabic or Punjabi that Cass didn’t understand. It was the man who’d glanced back at him with a smile as he reboarded the truck. It was the man who had spoken to him in perfect English, as if he’d known him, “Ah, Qasim Siddiqui. Welcome to the front line. Qasim. A man. A handsome man.”
In the middle of the night, in the total darkness, something struck Cass. The man in that old photo of his grandmother’s was so similar to one of the photos on the memory stick it could easily have been the same man.
And then still more horror struck. Could Kett be his father?
Cass reached for the phone he’d been given earlier and called Kevin’s number, but the phone was engaged. He tried again. It was still engaged. Frustration and annoyance took over. Was Kevin talking to someone more important than him?
He breakfasted on bananas and mangoes and then tried Kevin’s phone again. It rang. “Kev?”
“Yeh. I’ve got so much to tell you, Cass. We—”
“Listen, Kev. What’s happened about those photos?”
“I told you, Cass. They’re with the private investigator Colin Asher in London. They’re trying to identify them.”
“I think one of them is Kett, Kev.”
“Who’s Kett?”
“Kett, man. Do I have to explain everything? What do these friends of yours in London do? I thought they were professionals.”
Cass was losing his patience.
“He’s one big-time terrorist, man. Don’t you understand? He’s like Osama Bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and some others, and I think he’s the one trying to organise Southeast Asia terrorist groups in Malaysia and Indonesia. I think I was supposed to be part of it. He had plans for me. That’s why I got sent out here. You understand, Kev?”
There was such a long silence from Kevin that Cass almost gave up.
“Jeez,” he almost screamed. “If you don’t understand all this, Kev, then I need to talk to that guy Colin Asher or whoever he is and the guy Kurt’s with. It’s tough here, man. You understand? For all I know, the police or Kett’s team might already know where I am. If they suddenly arrive here, there’s only one way out for me and that’s to head back into the jungle in a pair of bloody flip-flops. I’ve got blisters bigger than you’ve ever seen, so I don’t expect to get very far . . . and this isn’t my phone. I don’t think these monks ever leave this place and . . .”
Kevin felt out of his depth.
***
Problems around Park Road suddenly seemed minor compared to Cass’s situation. He wanted to tell Cass about what they’d just found in Khan’s room, but it didn’t seem important right now. He’d heard of Osama Bin Laden and knew he was dead, but who the other guys were, he had no idea. “Stay cool,” he said for something to say.
“Cool, Kev? You got no idea how hot it is here. What’s this guy Colin Asher’s phone number? Can I trust him?
“Yeh. Definitely. He’s OK. His assistant is a West Indian guy called Ritchie and—”
“Jeez, Kev. Just give me his number, will you? Stop wasting time.”