Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’
Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to… PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight-’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’
Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away – let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’
Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.
7
Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.
Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.
Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.
With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar – on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody – so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable – a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.
The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the engine. Refuelling, or yet another checkpoint? Under the emergency decrees all Iranians now required a permit to travel between cities; that had always been the case for foreign journalists, but Martin had never felt compelled to break the rules before, back in the days when it would have been easy. He checked his watch and guessed they were somewhere close to Ahvaz, which would put them within a hundred kilometres of their destination, but his phone hadn’t been able to get a GPS signal since he’d crawled into the hiding place.
He heard the rear door open and someone heavy climb into the truck. A stack of crates was scraped across the uneven metal floor, as if unloading had begun, but the driver had assured them that there were no deliveries to be made along the way. Martin felt the floor vibrating under approaching footsteps; one instinct commanded him to move as far away from the intruder as he could, but instead he used his millimetres of freedom to slide his body in the other direction and brace himself against the thin sheet of rigid plastic that separated him from the cargo area. Something hard struck the partition: a baton, or maybe a rifle butt. There was a pause, then two more blows in rapid succession. Martin didn’t flinch; his weight against the plastic kept it from buckling, absorbing the energy and deadening the sound of the impact. The cavity was meant to be packed with insulating foam; without his intervention it would have sounded hollow as a drum.
But did it sound like foam, or did it sound like flesh? He waited for an angry shout, an imperious command; a blade thrust through the plastic, or a bullet.
The floor vibrated again, the intruder retreated. The door swung closed.
After the truck had been unloaded in a noisy warehouse, the driver parked nearby and unscrewed the panels that concealed his extra cargo. Behrouz was released first, but he was still bent double and massaging his legs when Martin emerged, hobbling and squinting. He’d grown used to the smell of machine oil from the compressor, but it had been masking the cargo area’s own distinctive scent of unwashed refrigerator. He glanced over at Behrouz. ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can find me a hot bath in the next fifteen minutes.’
Behrouz snorted. ‘What am I now, a tour guide? Don’t be such a wimp, we’ve got work to do.’
‘That would sound much more convincing if you showed signs of being able to walk.’
The nervous driver hurried them out of the truck onto a dark side-street, then took off with a deafening squeal of rubber. They were both wearing heavy coats and woollen hats, but away from the freezer they were overdressed for a summer evening this far south. Abadan was on an island bounded by rivers, fifty kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf. To the west, across the Arvand River – renamed Shatt al-Arab once crossed – was southern Iraq; Basra wasn’t far upstream.
Behrouz had brought a map of the city; he led the way to a truck-stop offering fast food and, most urgently, a toilet. In the restaurant, Martin slung his coat over his shoulder but kept the woollen hat on; in spite of the balmy weather many of the customers were wearing them, and though he’d always look foreign close up in good light, he still hoped that out on the street the right cues would prevent too many second glances.
The oil refinery was visible for miles, the vast complex lit up like a NASA launch site. Though it had been bombed into the ground by Saddam Hussein in 1980, it had been built up again after the war until it was once again the most productive in Iran, churning out nearly half a million barrels a day – when it was operating.
As they drew nearer to the complex, the streets became crowded; the picket line itself was still not in sight, but there were so many people coming and going – supporters bringing food and supplies to the striking workers, or people just wanting to witness the spectacle – that street vendors had set up half-a-dozen stalls. Martin saw a group of soldiers lined up in front of a government building, but they looked more uncomfortable than threatening.