The Heights. Parker Bilal

older. She would soon pass the forty mark and maybe that was significant. Birthdays were not something that she celebrated. They were as meaningless to her as Christmas.

      She hadn’t always felt that way. She still had fond memories of Ramadan in Tehran with her grandparents. The whole house would be full of relatives. So many aunts and uncles whose names she could barely remember. But they all knew who she was; the little girl who lived in England and whose Farsi was a clunky hash of misunderstandings topped with a bad accent. But she was one of them. They made that clear. She belonged. After the breaking of the fast the long nights were spent wandering the lighted avenues. She recalled squares full of people enjoying the cool night air, the endless rounds of greetings, the pastry shops and ice-cream parlours that buzzed with cheerful energy. It was like a month-long party and everyone was in on it.

      The box contained a jumble of pictures, snapshots saved from her childhood along with prints from before the digital era struck. The earliest ones were colour faded, tinged now with a reddish orange hue. One showed her as a little girl with long black hair, standing next to the penguin enclosure in Regent’s Park. That was always her favourite spot. She had even gone there a few times as an adult. The picture would have been taken by her father. She held it up, closer to the light to see better. Her mother looked younger than she remembered. How old would she have been then? Probably not much older than Ray was now.

      The last time Crane saw her mother was in Tehran in 1995 when she was taken away by the Republican Guard. She was a few months shy of sixteen at the time. Her father was teaching at the university. Both of them were. What she didn’t know then was that Edmund Crane was also an agent for British Intelligence.

      Twelve years later found Crane in Iraq in 2007, working for the SIS herself, assisting Stewart Mason. She was assigned to a special investigations unit: Directorate for Operational Research and Intelligence Strategy (DORIS), which was a long-winded title for a unit that nobody really knew the purpose of. She found herself working alongside an international team from a range of different backgrounds. The idea being to bring their varied experience to bear on the way the war was going, to pinpoint weaknesses and, above all, to make predictions about what was to come. The war in Iraq was into its fourth year. The insurgency was changing up its tactics, metamorphosing into something that would eventually become Islamic State. Their job was to look under every rock, to talk to prisoners, soldiers, civilians, ex-Baath officials. All with the idea of building up a composite of the mental state of this nation which was unravelling under the pressure of the occupation. People no longer had jobs, they were frightened for their future, their children.

      Another picture from around the same time showed all three of them. This was when they were visiting Tehran, staying in borrowed accommodation or with friends. These were her father’s rebellious days, when he had turned his back on his family and refused to take their money. Her mother found work teaching at Tehran university and father was writing a novel instead of finishing his doctorate on Macaulay. He still dressed like a hippy in those days, his long blond hair already thinning to reveal the bald patch that would eventually take over the top of his head. Looking at the picture now, she imagined it was easy to see what her mother saw in him. You could see in his smile that he was still open, easy-going. All of that was to change. It must have been around then that he was recruited.

      They were afraid of bombs, of kidnapping. These kinds of things could lead people into dangerous areas. DORIS’s job was to identify what those areas were and who was being drawn to them.

      The picture she held in her hand now showed a group of them. It was taken on one of their regular Friday barbecues. Their forward operating base was a handful of shipping containers set in the corner of a US military base outside Fallujah. They were close to the east-west highway that ran from Baghdad to Amman. The photograph was a print one of the others had made and sent to her. She was the only woman in the picture. They were all holding up bottles of beer and smiling. Her eye was drawn to the bearded man standing next to her. Orlando Araya. A Mexican American who had worked for the DEA before transferring to counter-terrorism. He was brought in as a specialist in urban warfare and indoctrination. For a time they had been close, although she had never really been sure whether he was completely honest with her about who he was working for. Orlando was smart. He played his cards close to his chest. They had a thing that, like everything out there, was built on the fact that all was temporary. He was transferred to Afghanistan and then disappeared below the surface. She had no idea where he was now.

      She was rotated out, first to Dubai, which she hated, then to northern Iraq. It was there in 2013 that the event that really triggered the end of her time with the SIS and with Stewart Mason occurred. In February of that year she had been in a convoy heading east away from the Syrian border when they were ambushed and taken hostage by a small militia group. They were lucky in the sense that these were basically criminals hoping to cash her in for a fat prize from Islamic State. The disadvantage was that they were undisciplined. Crane was locked into a tiny space no bigger than a large closet. Her fear of confinement stemmed from there.

      It was the longest six weeks of her life. Every day, every hour, felt like her last. She was convinced that she was going to be raped and murdered, dumped by the side of the road. They bought into her cover as an NGO trying to help women. The fact that she spoke Arabic helped her. The men weren’t sure what to make of her. She was lucky also that Islamic State couldn’t make up their minds. Messengers went back and forth but there was always a problem of some kind. When she was finally liberated by a group of Kurdish women fighters she was literally hours away from being handed over.

      It wasn’t a time she talked about much, but seeing her father had brought it all back. She had decided long ago that the easiest way of dealing with him was just not to. Cut all ties and keep her distance. She had never forgiven him for abandoning her mother. She knew that she would never get over that, so the easiest thing was to let go of him. Which had worked fine until the moment Marco Foulkes walked into her office.

      What should have been a straightforward job was proving to be anything but. Marco was using her, or trying to. She was pretty sure of that now. What intrigued her was how it tied in to Howeida’s disappearance, and also to her father’s financial situation.

      Dropping the pictures back into the box, Crane slid the lid into place. Instead of rummaging around in her past she ought to have been out there with her partner, working on this investigation. And that was another problem. She was beginning to ask herself if Cal Drake really was a suitable partner. He seemed to have his own issues and by the looks of things would not be able to give his full attention to this case, or any other for that matter, until he had put to rest whatever it was in his past that was bothering him.

      ‘What kind of a mess have I got myself into?’ she asked herself aloud.

      14

      The sound of a helicopter rattled overhead, bringing Drake instantly awake. The sound always triggered a visceral memory that left him gasping for breath, his fingers clawing at the sheets, waiting for his mind to settle. As he stared at the ceiling he realised he had been dreaming about Zelda.