by James Wolff
“Call them off. I want nothing to do with you and your friends and your grubby profession.”
“I wonder if our professions are so different,” said Jonas. “We both listen to secrets, we both exercise authority. We both feel some embarrassment at what we are, I suspect.”
“Please do not compare the Church with whichever squalid part of the secret world you represent.”
“Do you want to discuss the reputations of our respective organizations? I’m not sure yours would come out on top.”
Jonas felt that he had to be bullish, to shoulder his way quickly through the crowd of objections being placed in his path. There was no time to engage in a discussion of the merits of collaboration. The bartender was casting frequent glances their way and Jonas saw there was a limit to how long he would tolerate two foreign men who ignored the women in order to argue at the bar. He put another twenty-dollar bill down and signalled for more drinks. He blamed himself for having forced a priest drinking gin in a brothel into a conversation about reputation. It was to be expected that Tobias would fear his own character had marked him out as weak. This was an error Jonas should not have made. Even the rawest recruit to counterterrorism understood the disjunction between public display and private life: in one, the insistence on law and the violent denunciation of those who believed otherwise; in the other, prostitutes, drugs, petty crime. There was little to be gained from trying to make someone face up to the inconsistencies in their life, especially if you needed results quickly.
“So we are both as bad as each other,” Tobias said. “Please, I do not wish to discuss any of this with you further.”
“You don’t know what I want yet.”
“Oh, I know what you want. Everyone wants the same thing these days: aid workers, politicians, journalists. The real ones and the fake ones. You wish to talk about Syria. You wish to talk about the refugees, the fighting, which roads are closed and which roads are open, what the Syrian people feel, what will happen to Lebanon, but most of all you wish to talk about the terrorist groups.”
“I know you’ve had contact with them,” Jonas said.
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know that you learned Arabic in Aleppo as a young priest, fresh out of seminary, and came back ten years ago, to everyone’s surprise. I know that soon after your return you cut ties with the Church in Rome, or they cut ties with you. I know that four months ago you left Syria because of threats made against you by pro-regime militias. I know that you have been involved in three attempts to secure the release of hostages taken by extremist groups and that on two of those occasions you were successful.”
“I would have expected your information to be more accurate – or is the British government getting its facts from the newspapers these days? Listen, the greatest danger to me and those I was trying to help came from people who believed that I was working for an organization like yours.” There was alarm in his pale, bloodshot eyes. “I do not see your government being part of the solution. I do not see spies playing a positive role in any of this. Nobody trusts you, on either side. You believe you must do everything in secret, but it is inevitable that the results of your work sometimes become public, and then we see mass surveillance, torture, rendition, illegal wars. What else is there beneath the cover?”
“Bonhoeffer worked as an agent of the Abwehr against the Nazis and was aware of —”
“Stop. If I did not know you had searched my room you could perhaps use this argument to some effect.”
“My point is that neither of us is operating in a vacuum. There are other people competing in the same space – people who want to do far worse things.”
“Worse than Iraq?” Tobias asked. “Worse than Abu Ghraib? Worse than Guantanamo?”
Or worse than Mosaddeq? Jonas wondered. Or Balfour? He had spent long enough studying the Middle East to know how poor the West’s record was, and long enough working in intelligence to understand how partial its successes were, how corrosive its impact on lives could be. Jonas suddenly felt very tired. He had little to offer by way of defence. The truth was that he felt deeply shamed by those overseas adventures carried out in the name of national interest. He thought of E. M. Forster’s line about being given the choice of betraying his country or betraying his friend and hoping he had the guts to betray his country. What were those national interests Jonas had worked for so long to protect? He wasn’t sure any more. When he thought about his country, he thought of those people he loved. He didn’t think of its politicians, its oil companies or arms manufacturers. He didn’t think of ideology, either. Each day Jonas walked down the Beirut street that Kim Philby had been living on when he defected to the Russians. He had told his wife one evening that he was going out to meet a friend and then telephoned while she was preparing their children’s dinner. She had been too busy to take the call. He never returned. She wrote afterwards that for months and months she wished she had taken that call. That was where ideology got you, thought Jonas.
Father Tobias had been quiet for a while. He tapped his watchmaker’s fingers steadily against the side of his glass: tick, tock, tick, tock. The barman had lost interest in them and was smoking a cigarette in the open doorway. Outside the rain drummed on the cars; it streamed above the blocked gutters.
“There is nothing left for us to speak of,” said Tobias.
At the back of the bar the fat man had stopped dancing and was kissing one of the women while the other one watched.
“I am sorry that we shall not see each other again,” he said. “I was beginning to look forward to our chance encounters. You must think I am very naive! Certainly too naive to be of any use to you in your business. I thought, here is someone as lonely as me, someone who is also suffering some kind of loss but does not wish to speak of it, someone who can minister to me just as I minister to him. All right, yes, he wears the same clothes most days and looks as though he does not eat enough, but I am in no position to judge.” He emptied his glass. “I was so happy that you chose to pick up that letter and become my friend. Now I understand that you probably read it first.”
Jonas was surprised to find that he had underestimated the value of friendship. He had underestimated its impact on Tobias, clearly, but what really surprised him was its impact on himself. He was doing this out of love, or so he had thought. How then could he have turned out to be so indifferent, until this moment, to the affection he had cultivated in Tobias? What was wrong with him that he was willing to destroy this man’s life all over again? He saw himself in the mirror above the bar – his dark hair and beard sparkling with rainwater, his features made severe by exhaustion – and wondered how it had come to pass unnoticed that deceit had been worn into him like grooves in a record until all he could play were false notes. It hardly mattered, but he understood finally that he needn’t have lied. He might have laid out his case simply and truthfully and asked for help. When had his innocence left him? He remembered as a child seeing a priest wearing running shoes beneath his robes and feeling a sense of loss, just as he had when he learned that what made aeroplanes fly was a clever tangle of wires, that there was no magic involved. The shoes that Tobias wore were thin and wet from the rain. They seemed magical to Jonas in ways that he could not begin to explain.
“I am sorry to send you back to your masters with nothing,” said Tobias.
You’ve got it all wrong, Jonas thought. I’m not doing it for them – I’m doing it for my father. The wind blew through the open door and scattered a pile of coasters. They lay across the bar like the squares of a broken chessboard.
“The woman in the photograph,” he said finally, letting the cold come close to him like a skin. “If you help us, we’ll get her out.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jonas had grown tired, during the three months that had passed since his father’s kidnapping, of people telling him to be patient. He had heard it on a weekly basis from SIS, the Foreign Office and the police, and it was a guaranteed occurren
ce on those days that he had spoken with his own senior managers. The staff counsellor they had insisted he see had phrased it differently. “It’s a waiting game,” she had said. He sat stiffly, looking at the floor, the knot of his tie so fierce that it lifted the points of his collar. “You must feel so powerless,” she said. He wasn’t sure whether he was being consoled or instructed.
It came to him around that time that he was powerless only so long as he allowed himself to be constrained by their rules. He had been subjecting his life, he realized, since the news of his father’s kidnapping had come through, to the same fretful risk assessment, the same concerns about reputation, the same obsession with worst-case scenarios that had come to characterize his working life. He had no one to blame for this but himself. It was only now that he had begun to act outside the rules he understood just how much power he had.
Evidence of this was a visit early one Friday morning from a stranger in tennis whites carrying in one hand what he insisted on calling an intelligence update and in the other a cottage pie cooked by his wife. To Jonas, who didn’t have an oven, the two were of equal value.
“Gas mark six, forty minutes. Those are your orders. Valerie is worried sick about you, as are we all. Not eating enough, that sort of thing. By the look of you she’s on the right track. She’ll have a fright when I tell her about this beard you’re sporting – boys left to their own devices, I can hear her voice as if she were in the room. I’ll have to talk her out of sending a barber round. Between you and me, the pie is a bit stodgy, but it’ll put fuel in your tank.”
Desmond Naseby introduced himself as a visiting SIS officer who had dropped in to Beirut to see a few old friends, brush up on his Arabic, take the temperature of the place. They sat in the living room of Jonas’s small, sparsely furnished flat, ten minutes’ walk from the sea. Naseby moved a chessboard to one side to make space for the cottage pie on the low table between them and then paused, as though he had spotted a clue to the identity of the other player among the pieces. He looked so excited that Jonas didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer. Naseby had somehow punched a hole with his thumb through the silver foil and he licked his finger clean while looking carefully around him, as if trying to commit to memory the layout of the room. He had already wandered in and out of the bedroom and kitchen, explaining that he had a niece thinking of coming out to study whom he would need to advise on accommodation, rents, that sort of thing. It seemed odd to Jonas that a man so interested in kitchens that he opened all the cupboards would fail to notice that there was no oven.
“She’s thinking of doing something at the American University here,” he said. “It’s a pity that the language school in the mountains where I learned my Arabic closed decades ago. Place called Shimlan, but everyone used to call it the spy school. Heard of it? George Blake was the most celebrated alumnus. Broke out of Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and fled to Moscow. That’s where they all end up. Even this Snowden chap, funnily enough. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that.”
It was hard to tell Naseby’s age. Jonas knew that the school in Shimlan had closed in 1978, meaning that Naseby must be at least in his early sixties, but his plump face and long sweep of red hair made him appear younger. The sun poured through the windows and Naseby’s tennis whites glowed as though stitched from light.
“Thought I’d pop by on a whim, introduce myself. I’ve got a game just around the corner in half an hour, so I won’t stay long.” Jonas didn’t ask how Naseby had come by his address. “Probably worth us starting with first principles, make sure we’re both on the same page. We’re devastated about your father. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult this has been for you. There will be some people who ask whether it was wise for a British civilian with no training to go within a million miles of Syria, humanitarian mission or not, but I’m not one of them. People like your father make the world go round, far as I’m concerned.” Despite sporting a pair of bare legs, Naseby’s manner was businesslike, and Jonas, dressed in a pair of pyjamas worn through at the elbows and missing three buttons, felt that he was on the back foot. He ran a hand through his beard to see whether any food had settled there and found a piece of eggshell from breakfast the day before. “You’ll be keen to see the latest intelligence update,” Naseby said, handing a file to Jonas. “There’s a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes, and I’ve persuaded London to direct even more resources this way. Quite a coup, by the by. This one is different, Jonas. We all understand that. You’re one of the team.”
Jonas flicked through the papers. He had a good memory and processed information quickly; facts clung to him, whether he needed them or not. He could still recall without difficulty the number plate of every car his parents had driven, the names and dates of tenure of the eighteen permanent British representatives to the United Nations, the code names and file numbers of many of the terrorist suspects, numbering in the hundreds, whose files had crossed his desk. But he had to look twice through the papers Naseby had given him because there was nothing there his memory could take hold of, certainly no classified information, just a typed summary of recent press articles, open-source satellite imagery of northern Syria and some stills of the kidnappers taken from an old YouTube clip. He had expected nothing more, but couldn’t help smiling when he saw that Naseby had even included a weather forecast for the next ten days.
“Come now, you understand that I can’t bring you the kitchen sink,” Naseby said. “Telephone numbers, IP addresses, sigint – I know what you’re after. The vetting people in your office have put you on some sort of gardening leave arrangement, as I understand it, which means that your security clearance is a bit up in the air. My hands are tied. The long and short of it, however, is that there’s been some real progress in recent weeks. We believe your father is being held in the Raqqa area by the same group but that certain power shifts within the extremist landscape have changed the mood music significantly. The cognoscenti in Whitehall are very confident of a breakthrough in the next few weeks.”
“What kind of breakthrough?” asked Jonas.
“That the people holding your father will come under the control of more moderate forces within the broader opposition and be persuaded to release their hostages. There are plenty of people out there speaking with a more sensible voice.”
“Without any ransom being paid,” Jonas said.
“You know the British government’s policy on that as well as I do. It’s just not going to happen.”
“So they would release him for what – good PR?”
“This is a different kind of conflict, Jonas. These nut-jobs are all over the internet. Did you know that the Shabaab have a Twitter account? Christ, can you imagine the mujahideen running round Afghanistan in the 1980s stopping to update their Facebook status? But this global jihad stuff has always been about PR. 9/11 was the biggest PR stunt ever. There is no way that extremists – in the numbers they are now – are going to defeat the West militarily. The only hope they have is to recruit, recruit, recruit, and they do that in the same way that the British army does it, by making slick videos aimed at boys who don’t know what else to do. Be the best you can be: kill the kuffar, but make sure it looks good on film. I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this – you’re supposed to be the bloody expert. Funny thing is, recruitment in my day was the tap on the shoulder. Everybody ridicules it as old hat, but it’s the same system the jihadis use. Tazkiya, they call it. Referencing. You only get in if someone vouches for you. With a bit of luck that’s the only thing we’ve got in common with those chaps who’ve taken your old man.”
As he spoke, Naseby nudged at a dead cockroach on the floor with the toe of his tennis shoe. Jonas knew how the cockroach felt. He had no aptitude for conflict, but understood that he would have to push back, for appearances’ sake. He needed Desmond Naseby for his plan to work. It was important that the report sent back to London – he was under no illusion that Naseby had passed
by “on a whim” – did not suggest that Jonas was under control and no cause for further concern. If he had known Naseby was going to pass by he would have prepared the flat. An empty bottle of whisky would have done some of the work, or vodka, even better, with more than one glass. As things stood, however, he was going to have to raise the temperature if he hoped to leave a dent in Naseby’s self-satisfied veneer. The problem was that he found it difficult to fault anyone’s position in this matter. He could see the logic in the British government’s policy of not paying ransoms, and more than anything he envied Naseby that blithe confidence which allowed him to assure a person in Jonas’s position that he was doing his utmost while on his way to a tennis match. He even felt some admiration for the kidnappers, young men so committed to their beliefs that they had left home and travelled to a foreign country where they might die. At times he felt more than admiration for them. He felt kinship, as someone also pursued by his own government, as someone also likely to die in a foreign country.
Jonas’s father had been part of a church delegation visiting Syria to offer support to Christian communities being targeted – their churches demolished, their leaders killed, their members forcibly converted to Islam – by ISIS and the other extremist groups that together controlled most of northern Syria. The Syrian government had welcomed the idea, which presented an opportunity to highlight the barbaric nature of elements within the opposition, and the British Foreign Office had reluctantly approved – or agreed not to oppose – the visit on condition the group did not travel beyond Damascus or allow itself to be manoeuvred into making public statements in support of the regime. The schedule had been the subject of protracted negotiations. The final version included visits to one church of each of the main denominations, a tour of the Umayyad Mosque, a meeting with the minister for religious endowment and a public statement against attacks on Christians made alongside a handful of pro-regime Islamic clerics.