The sun was slanting through the high-vaulted roof of the souk, throwing down shafts of light in which dust motes and thin drifts of cigarette smoke swirled lazily. Miles Brookhaven began to relax as he walked down the long central avenue, breathing in smells of powdery piles of spices, reaching over to touch the shiny purple skins of aubergines, and exchanging a shouted greeting with the stallholder.
He stopped at a food stall on the corner of one of the side aisles where the same old man who’d been there since God knows when had a juicing machine. As he usually did when he took this route, Miles stopped for a glass of fresh orange juice. Against the wall behind the counter a shawarma of meat the size of a tree trunk rotated on a long sharp pole. Miles propped one hip on a stool in the corner, from where he could look down the main aisle, the way he’d come, but his eye was drawn to the spit. There was something different. Usually, as he drank, he would watch a short balding man called Afiz, his apron stained by the spattering juices, wielding a long knife of incredible sharpness, peeling shavings of meat off the shawarma like strips of wallpaper.
He and Afiz had established a friendly unspoken ritual – Afiz would turn and gesture to Miles with his knife, as if to ask You want some? Miles would shake his head and hold up his glass to show that was what he’d come for. Afiz would laugh and turn back to the shawarma.
But it wasn’t Afiz who tended the spit today. Instead a young man held the long knife. He was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and long black hair tied back into a knot, and he stared at Miles with dark indifferent eyes, then turned away to serve a customer. He had none of Afiz’s practised delicacy; instead he just hacked at the meat, which fell in chunks instead of paper-thin slices. That seemed odd, Miles thought as he sipped his juice. Holding the glass in one hand he reached into his pocket for some coins to pay, and it was then he sensed movement, looked up and saw the young man coming towards him, holding the knife in one hand, his eyes glazed and hostile.
Not pausing to think, Miles tilted his glass of juice and hurled its contents straight into the eyes of his attacker. The long-haired youth was caught by surprise, blinking furiously, trying to get the juice out of his eyes. Miles took a step back, and as the young man lunged forward, swiping hard with the knife, he threw the empty glass at his face.
It hit the youth square in the eye. He yelled in pain and dropped the knife, which fell onto the tiled floor of the stall and bounced from its point, erratically, before landing at last, like an offering, at Miles’s feet. As Miles bent down and grabbed it, the young man ran out of the far side of the stall.
Miles stared at the fleeing figure and when he turned back he saw that the juice man had fled as well. The commotion was drawing a crowd. Miles understood from the jabber of Arabic that they were wondering what this Westerner was doing, holding that knife. He put it down on the counter and without looking around strode quickly down the aisle towards the exit from the souk. The last thing he or his colleagues needed was the attention of the police.
By the time he’d reached the modern end of the souk, no one in the crowd of shoppers seemed to be taking special notice of him. He slowed to a stroll, forced himself to breathe normally and began to review what had happened. Was the young man just another extremist who hated Westerners? He didn’t think so. The fact that he’d been working at the stall where Miles regularly stopped – and that the juice man had fled as well – made it seem more likely that he’d been targeted.
Perhaps the group he’d been working with had been penetrated – but by whom? That was what made it hard to deal with the rebels. Too many conflicting interests; too many irons in the fire. Your enemy’s enemy wasn’t necessarily your friend. Whatever the explanation, he couldn’t go on using the same cover. It was time to move on.
Outside in the bright sun, Miles realised that his hand felt sticky, raised it and found it covered in blood. More blood was running down the sleeve of his jacket, and moving his shoulder made him wince in pain. That swipe with the knife must have connected.
He’d begun to feel faint; best get back to the office fast. He heard a gasp and looked up to see a young woman staring in horror at his jacket. Behind her a little man with a bushy black moustache was pointing at him. The blood was flowing fast down his arm now, dripping from the cuffs of his shirt and jacket onto the paving stones. His vision was blurring, and he’d started to sway as he walked. Seeing him stagger, the little man put his arm round him, waving with his other arm at a taxi. ‘Hospital, hospital,’ he shouted at the driver, and as he bundled him into the back of the car, Miles passed out.