Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

'You are the Outsider to us. I am told to escort you. I am told to bring you to the heart of the family. I do not know where you have come from, who you were. I do not ask. Two are already lost, but four remain. If I ask whether you can read the American manual of the Stinger, then you tell me something of yourself. My ignorance is your protection.'

'I am asking you, is their weight worth the life of the camels, do they slow us? What is more important? You and me or the Stingers?'

He knew the answer, expected to be told what he knew. 'Tell me.'

He did not know what the pale, watering eyes saw, but they speared at him and the voice grew in its pitch. 'I think you show ignorance. Perhaps it is only the Stingers, if they work, that will get us, you and me, through to those who wait for us.'

'The next time we stop, I will open a box, take the manual…'

'And read it?'

'… and read it. I will, because of my importance,' Caleb said.

For a moment, Hosni struggled to rise in his saddle, but the pinions held him. Caleb saw the man who had fought the Soviets, who had given his life to the struggle of the Emir General, saw the controlled anger.

'I warn you, ignorance you will learn from – vanity will destroy you. With vanity comes arrogance, with arrogance comes failure…

Imagine. Caravans move, columns of men move, mule trains move.

Men struggle not only through this desert but through mountains, through passes, through streets and through the alleyways of souks, they come from the doorways of mosques and from the entrances to caves. You are only one man. Do you believe the organization of the Emir General depends on one man, whose past gives him importance? We are many. A hundred men move – some will be slopped, some captured, some will be killed – and they will be replaced by another thousand. In an engine, you are one tooth in one cog. I ask of you, never again show me your vanity,'

Caleb flinched. The boy close behind him would have heard the attack, and the guide in front. It was as if he had been struck. He felt small, a pygmy dwarfed by this needle-thin old man whose hand he had kissed in love.

'The next time we stop I will read the manual.'

A dozen men and women sat in two lines, divided by computers.

Two lines of six, facing each other, separated by the screens and keyboards.

The raindrops, from their run between the car park and the Libtary entrance, were on the shoulders of Lovejoy's coat and the waxed waterproof loaned to the American. The skies outside were ashen and the forecast was for rain all day, then an unsettled week no clear blue skies on the horizon.

He spoke quietly to the chief librarian. He'd telephoned her in the morning and been told at what time the Internet class was scheduled to finish. He didn't do tourist trips. They'd stayed in a hotel just outside the centre of Wolverhampton, gone early to bed because the American seemed exhausted from his overnight flight. Over breakfast Lovejoy had made his calls, which had culminated in a less than frank conversation with the chief librarian. This was the first step. He had not taken the American for a drive round the sights of Wolverhampton, but had killed time in the hotel lobby. The first step always made Michael Lovejoy nervous, and his justification for going to the Library had been brief and terse.

The Library was three miles south-west of Wolverhampton, nine miles north-east of the Birmingham city plazas. After eight phone calls, Lovejoy had spoken to the chief librarian and had heard what he wanted. She was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Aggie, who was careful in her appearance and had the brightness of enthusiasm. To her, Lovejoy was a lecturer from the University of Birmingham. The American, a complication to the cover story, was not introduced, had been told not to speak, just smile.

'Right, well done, everybody, the hour's up… ' Aggie's voice boomed in the Library's quiet.

It reflected her endeavour. The interior was bright, cheerful and clean. It had a section at the far end for magazine reading, and the newspapers. There was an annexe for children, surrounded by shelved picture books and boxes of toys. Away, against the end wall, was the double bank of computers. She might have been speaking to juveniles, but those she addressed were in their twilight years: 'If you could, please, switch off, close down. You're making great progress, I'm very pleased.'

Lovejoy held the audio-cassette player, and the American had the tape in his pocket.

'I'm going to ask you to meet Michael – he's from Birmingham University and he's needing some guinea-pigs for a social-awareness project.' She spoke slowly as if she might not be understood, and loudly because the majority of them wore hearing-aids. She'd explained on the phone earlier that her Internet Familiarization class for Senior Citizens, starting at eleven, offered him a chance to meet older community members in a group. That day, and he'd checked it out, there was no specified gathering of the elderly at either the working-men's club or at the British Legion. It was, in his opinion, the best chance of meeting men and women whose lives were embedded in the area, born and reared there, worked and retired there. They looked up at him, tired eyes magnified by spectacles, and he thought he saw an expectation of interest after the struggle to master the computers' intricacies, and the Internet that was now forced on them. 'I ask you to listen very thoroughly to what Michael says, and then help him. He's relying on you.'

She waved for them to leave their blank screens and follow her to the chairs in the magazine reading section. They straggled after her, live men and seven women, all ethnic white, all with pale, aged faces; two used wooden walking-sticks and one had a metal hospital slick. She arranged the chairs so they made a half-circle behind a table, and they sat. Lovejoy put the cassette player on the table and reached out for the American to pass him the tape; he slotted it into the player. He sensed the scepticism of the American behind him.

They hadn't spoken much so far. It was a long journey from the Caribbean sunshine of Guantanamo Bay to a public library three miles south-west of Wolverhampton.

He lifted his voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very grateful for your time. You are the experts and you can help me. Aggie tells me that all of you have lived here all your lives. You'll know accents, you'll be able to place one. For my social-awareness project, I need to test your knowledge of where an accent comes from, which community it originates from. I'm going to play you a tape. You won't understand the language used on the tape, and that must not bother you, but I want to see if you recognize from what area that voice comes. Please, don't guess. I need you to be certain.'

He used his winning smile. Mercy Lovejoy liked to say that that smile, cultivated over more than two decades as a counter-intelligence officer, would calm an enraged bull in a china shop, would allow him access into the secrets of any life. The smile, deprecating and almost shy, always charmed.

'You will hear a voice in American, ignore it – then a voice, a woman's, in a language you won't understand, ignore that as well, then you will hear a male voice, and that's the one my project is interested in.'

His finger hovered over the 'play' button. Only very rarely did Michael Lovejoy, officer of the Security Service charged with Defence of the the Realm – the safety of these elderly men and women and their children and their grandchildren – meet ordinary people. His work days were spent roving in the electronic and cyber world of National Health Service records, National Insurance contribution numbers and the statistics of personal bank accounts. To confront ordinary people, who knew nothing of his world, challenged his mettle. He felt a small shiver of excitement. He pressed the 'play' button.