Page 160 of Never

‘Who’s the informant?’

Tamara lowered her voice. ‘Haroun.’

Dexter laughed. He said to Doyle: ‘He’s not exactly crucial to our operation.’ Turning back to Tamara he said: ‘You’ve only had one meeting with him.’

‘At which he gave me valuable intelligence.’

‘Which was never confirmed.’

‘My instinct tells me he’s genuine.’

‘Women’s intuition again. Sorry. Not good enough. Postpone.’ Dexter ushered Doyle into the meeting room.

Tamara took out her phone and wrote a one-word reply to Haroun:

Tomorrow.

She went into the meeting room and sat at the conference table to wait for the training session to begin. A minute later her phone vibrated with a message:

Your jeans are now 11 American.

Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, she thought. No problem.

***

The museum was about three miles north of the American embassy. Traffic was light and Tamara was early. The museum was a new modern building in a landscaped park. There was a statue of Mother Africa in a fountain, but the fountain was dry.

She took out the blue scarf with orange circles, put it over her head and tied it under her chin, just in case Haroun had forgotten what she looked like. She wore a scarf most of the time; with her usual dress and trousers she did not look noticeably different from a hundred thousand other women in the city.

She went inside.

This had not been a good choice for a clandestine rendezvous, she saw immediately. She had imagined that the two of them would be lost in a crowd, but there was no crowd. The museum was almost empty. However, the few visitors all looked like genuine tourists, so with luck no one would recognize Tamara or Haroun.

She went upstairs to the skull of the Toumai Man. It looked like a lump of old wood, almost shapeless, barely recognizable as a head. Perhaps that was not surprising as it was seven million years old. How could something have been preserved that long? As she was puzzling over this, Haroun appeared.

He was wearing Western clothes today, khakis and a plain white T-shirt. She felt the intensity of his dark-eyed gaze as he looked at her. He was risking his life, again. Everything he did would be extreme, she thought. Having been a jihadi he was now a traitor to the jihadis, but he would never be anything in between.

‘You should have come yesterday,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t. Is this urgent?’

‘After the ambush at the refugee camp, our friends in Sudan are thirsty for revenge.’

It never ends, Tamara thought. Every act of vengeance has to be avenged. ‘What do they want?’

‘They know the ambush was the personal plan of the General. They want us to assassinate him.’

No surprise there, Tamara thought; but it would not be easy. The General’s security was tight. However, such things were never impossible. And if the attempt succeeded, Chad would be plunged into chaos. She had to sound the alarm about this.

She said: ‘How?’

‘I told you that the Afghan taught us how to make suicide bombs.’

Oh, Christ, she thought.

Two tourists came into the room, a middle-aged white couple in hats and sneakers, speaking French. Tamara and Haroun were speaking Arabic, which the visitors almost certainly could not understand. However, the newcomers strolled across to where Tamara and Haroun stood, by the cabinet containing the skull. Tamara smiled and nodded to them, then said quietly to Haroun: ‘Let’s move.’

The next room was empty. Tamara said: ‘Go on, please. How will this take place?’