Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  Together they took the pictures Tobias had stored in the wardrobe, wiped them clean of dust and tried to match them against the patches of darker paint, unbleached by sunlight, where they had previously hung. Tobias took down the wooden cross and packed it away in his small bag. He pulled out the nail and did what he could with his hands to sweep up the plaster that fell to the floor, but he found it hard to balance and began to breathe heavily. “I don’t want to leave a mess,” he said quietly to himself. He went to the bed and sat with his head in his hands for a while and then he lay down and fell asleep. Jonas left the hotel soon afterwards. He didn’t see anyone waiting for him. It was three days before he had the first message from Tobias saying that he was in Syria.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  Jonas smoked a cigarette in the doorway of the internet cafe and watched the rain. His dark hair lay cold and damp against his head but his clothes were kept dry by the blue plastic raincoat he had found that morning at the back of a kitchen cupboard he had never thought to look in before, along with a child’s shoe and two blank cassette tapes. The coat was torn in places, decorated with tiny gold stars and several sizes too large for him, but it was better than nothing.

  He was frightened. It seemed to him that there was no edge to his thoughts, that the city shared his state of restless alarm. Above him wires that hummed with secret information were slung between rooftops like a fine net that held everything down. He understood why the car horns were so insistent. What he didn’t understand was why the small, angry Chinese man in sodden tennis shoes was using the payphone across the street when he carried what looked like a mobile in his pocket. Jonas had heard stories about investigative targets becoming so paranoid that they accosted passers-by, thinking them to be surveillance officers, and he had seen letters from members of the public who believed themselves to be under investigation, complaining about the clicking noise on their telephone line or post that had gone missing. It surprised him, though, that he had been on the outside for a matter of weeks and already he was proving susceptible to the same kind of irrational, runaway anxiety, however quickly he might dismiss it. That they had stitched tracking beacons into his clothing, that they were using satellites to watch his every step, that they had found a way to stop him sleeping at night. He needed to make a phone call.

  Getting Tobias to accept the need for tradecraft had been a challenge. Jonas had tried to persuade him that at the very least they would have to disguise the nature of their emails and phone calls. Pleased to have a task he could think his way through, he had devised a system according to which he would communicate as though he were a fellow priest making general enquiries about how Tobias was getting on. In his replies, Jonas had suggested, Tobias should refer to the “church council” instead of the kidnappers, “church funds” instead of ransom, “icon” instead of hostage, and so on. He wrote out a list for Tobias to memorize. It was probably longer than it needed to be: number sixteen stipulated that “Monday” should be used in place of “Tuesday”, “Tuesday” in place of “Wednesday”, and so on. By the end the whole thing seemed hugely complicated and faintly absurd even to Jonas; he wasn’t surprised it was difficult to get Tobias to take it seriously, especially after a few drinks.

  “I like the idea of making the church council a substitute for terrorists,” he had said, looking down the list. “It tells me you have had some experience of church councils. The last time I went before one – well, it is sufficient to say that I walked into the room a priest and I walked out of the room a former priest, at least in their eyes. They were very hard with me. There were people in there with no understanding of human weakness. Less than an hour to reach their decision, one from Rome and the other from Columbia, or was it Peru, two fat bishops hurrying to attend their lunch appointment. All because of that tiny little thing on 15 May 1985, or maybe it was August the year before that really upset them, it all depends on your point of view. I tried to keep it from them but it’s hard to hide something like that. I tried to say it was a mistake but they could see I didn’t mean it. Still, it took them twenty years to get round to —”

  “Tobias? We need to focus. If you don’t think the code works, suggest something else,” Jonas said. “You’re the one who will have to defend it. But we won’t be able to speak over an open line without using some form of cover.”

  “You even look as though you might be a priest. It is this Old Testament beard of yours,” he said, reaching out a hand to smooth Jonas’s cheek. “These simple clothes you wear. You know that colour is not a sin?”

  “Please, Tobias. This might seem silly now, but it’ll be very important once you’re inside Syria.”

  “Perhaps it will be better to promote you to bishop. In case you need to give me instructions. How proficient is your Latin?”

  In the end the wording he had used in his email could not have been more plain, or more alarming: “I have arrived. Please call me. It is urgent.”

  Jonas had to find a payphone far enough away from the internet cafe that his call would not be linked to Tobias’s email. The last thing he could do was allow anyone to follow him. He knew that he had come close to ruining everything by leading the American, Harvey, to Tobias’s hotel, a mistake he couldn’t afford to repeat under any circumstances.

  The problem was that when it came to surveillance he didn’t know what he was doing. The Americans would have resources he wasn’t aware of, they would use techniques honed over the years to allow them to follow highly skilled Russian and Chinese spies around Western capitals. What chance did he have? How could he ever be sure he was alone? The answer came to him late one night as he tried to sleep. They weren’t in a Western capital. They were in a city largely without CCTV, a city where few streets had clearly marked names. They were in a city that still bore the scars of a fifteen-year civil war, a city still divided along confessional lines, a city large swathes of which were controlled by Hezbollah. He would make that work in his favour.

  The only way to lose surveillance, he decided, was to lead them towards an area in which they were unable to operate. Such an area was the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahieh – a district avoided by foreigners, where heavily armed checkpoints could appear at a moment’s notice, where people daubed anti-Western slogans on walls, where the peculiar driving style required by surveillance would be noticed by a local population targeted by numerous ISIS car bombs. Surveillance teams are subject to risk assessments, he thought, just like everyone else in government. The only drawback was that for his plan to work he would have to go to Dahieh himself.

  Jonas tried to dampen his paranoia by thinking logically about what surveillance would look like. He drew up a list in his head as he walked. 1. A man or a woman, on foot or in a vehicle. 2. Aged somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five, assuming that the older they got the more likely they were to be promoted off the streets into a managerial position. 3. Possibly on mopeds or motorbikes or even bicycles. 4. Some with military backgrounds, visible in a certain kind of physicality but also in a thoroughness of preparation: they would have good shoes, waterproofs, a bag with water and food. Anyone in flip-flops or sandals could be discounted. 5. A few Mediterranean-looking but the majority western Europeans. 6. Phones bought clean for this operation and therefore cheap; no one would authorize the purchase of twenty smartphones for a single job. Without smartphones they would be reliant on paper maps, they would be looking around for street signs. 7. No more than a dozen individuals, and the utility of each team member would decrease each time they got close enough that he saw their face. In other words, Jonas thought, they couldn’t do this forever. They could be beaten.

  Walking through the backstreets, taking every turning that took him towards Dahieh, he soon lost track of time, watching to see who came with him. The rain was keeping most people off the streets and he saw no sign of Hezbollah other than their distinctive yellow flag on a handful of lamp posts. It wasn’t long before he didn’t know where he was. Once or
twice someone followed him round two corners in succession and he would slow down, or speed up, or cross the road to get a good look at them; he must have stopped to retie his shoelaces a dozen times. No one stayed with him for long. He found it was more difficult than he had expected to spot unusual behaviour. Either everyone was acting suspiciously or no one was – he couldn’t be sure. He felt foolish and might have concluded that spying was a fundamentally unserious pursuit if only he hadn’t needed to speak with Tobias so urgently. With its hide-and-seek and make-believe, its puzzles and code words, its insistence on the sanctity of secrets, spying seemed to belong to the realm of childhood. He remembered reading of Kim Philby that what had allowed him to retain through adulthood the undergraduate ideology that led him to betray his country was the simplistic, closed and unreal world of espionage itself. There were good guys and bad guys, and everyone knew who they were. Philby would have done a better job of anti-surveillance than he was managing, Jonas thought. All those meetings with his Russian handlers in London parks. Chalk marks on benches, bread for the ducks. The loose brick in the graveyard. God watched you all the time but you could never see him. In the dark you whispered prayers to him like secrets. The rain came down and he pressed on, looking for surveillance, looking for a payphone, looking for his dad.

  2

  Jonas had no idea where he was. It was getting dark and the rain was falling heavily. It had been two hours since he had read the email, nine hours since it had been sent, three days since Tobias had left Beirut. The email had come from a Lebanese IP address, but that didn’t mean anything: the infrastructure in Syria had been so degraded by the war that people there regularly dialled in to Lebanese providers. Had Tobias run into some kind of practical problem? He had said he would stay with friends along the way but had refused to give any details or accept any money for himself, claiming that since he had no intention of bribing anyone his expenses would be minimal; Jonas couldn’t imagine him changing his mind on that. He couldn’t imagine either what sort of help Tobias would think he could provide from Beirut, even with the array of resources he undoubtedly assumed Jonas had at his disposal. Tobias knew better than anyone that the challenge he faced was to persuade the right people that the message he carried was genuine – it was not a logistical matter, it would not require great feats of endurance. It was only fifty-two miles to Damascus, one hundred and eighty-six miles to Aleppo, two hundred and forty-four miles to Raqqa. If Jonas kept on walking he would be there in three days.

  The street he was on was narrow and steep and the wind flung the rain against the tall, grey buildings. High above him he could see someone securing their shutters against the storm. He was startled by the shout that came at him from an open doorway.

  “My friend! My friend!” He whistled to help Jonas locate him. “Where you are going?”

  Jonas looked around. The man waving at him was young, muscular, in his early twenties, dressed in camouflage trousers and a tight red T-shirt. His dark hair was slicked back.

  “You are lost? I gonna help you, my friend,” he said, beckoning Jonas towards him. “Where you are from?”

  “England.”

  “What you do here?”

  “Just a tourist.”

  They were standing in the doorway. Rain had filled the slack awning above them so that it hung dark and plump, as though a body had been hidden there. Water spilled over the edges and clattered to the pavement.

  “No, what you do here?” He pointed at the street. He wore rings on both hands. “What you do in this place?”

  Jonas had expected something like this. In fact, he had hoped for it, since it suggested he had walked far enough into a Hezbollah area to compromise any surveillance behind him. Nonetheless he felt his breath coming fast. All he had to do was stay calm, make his excuses and leave. He tried to smile.

  “Nothing. Just walking around.”

  “Why you are walking in the rain? Nobody other he is walking in the rain.”

  “Nobody?” This might be his chance to confirm he hadn’t been followed. “You haven’t seen any other foreigners here today?”

  The young man laughed. “No foreigners they gonna come here, my friend.”

  “No strangers, no outsiders?”

  “You know why?”

  “Why what?”

  “No foreigner he is gonna come here. To this place. Because they will be scared.”

  He was in the clear; he could call Tobias. The open doorway behind the man was dark. Jonas could make out a flight of stone steps, a torn political poster, a swaying light bulb.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize where I was. Thank you for the offer of help, though.”

  “Passport, passport.”

  “What?”

  “Give me passport.”

  “Why do you need my passport?”

  The young man stepped out and spat into the street. He whistled loudly, turned and stood close enough that there was no easy way for Jonas to leave the doorway.

  “You are walking like this.” He wiggled his hand like a snake in front of Jonas’s face. “You are not looking at the things like a tourist he is gonna look. You are walking very quick like there is a problem somewhere. You are not a tourist.”

  Two other men were walking up the street towards them in the rain. One of them carried a radio in his hand.

  “All right, I’ll leave the way I came,” Jonas said quickly. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone.” He tried to edge to one side as he spoke but the young man pushed him backwards and he slipped on the wet floor so that his head banged against the sharp edge of the metal door. The man was lifting his hands as though to placate or reassure or threaten – he couldn’t be sure. Later on he realized that he should have remained calm and handed over his passport and told them a story about how he was a pro-Palestinian activist from the UK who wanted to see at first-hand the neighbourhood so viciously bombed by Israel in 2006. But instead he decided that he had to get away before the other men arrived. It was the wrong decision. He pushed hard against the door to gather momentum and with his head down drove outwards to force his way on to the street. He heard a cracking noise and felt a smear of something sticky near his eye that might have been the man’s blood or his hair gel. Then the other two men were suddenly next to him and there was something professional about the way they restrained him without causing any harm. But the young man, his mouth wet and lurid with blood, wasn’t going to let it go, and he stepped round and swung a punch while Jonas’s arms were pinned at his side. And the last thing Jonas remembered was the torn poster and the light bulb swaying wildly above him, as though trying to tear itself free from the ceiling.

  3

  “When you have calmed down you will understand that you overreacted out there.”

  This seemed to Jonas a harsh assessment, given that he had just been knocked out. A cut had opened above his left eye. He was seated on a wooden chair in what looked like a cellar. Water was dripping somewhere nearby. The throbbing in his head made it difficult to focus on anything but he could see his wallet, passport and keys clearly enough on the table in front of him.

  “Do you know why the people here are nervous? Do you understand why the boy wanted to see your passport?”

  The man angled a lamp to point directly at Jonas. He was wearing a grey shirt and a black knitted tie and sitting in a wheelchair; he pushed himself out from behind the table so that they were next to each other. With a piece of cotton wool he began to dab gently at the blood on Jonas’s face. “My name is Raza,” he said. “Don’t look so frightened. The last thing we want is for you to go home and tell everyone that this is what Lebanon is like.”

  “I thought I was being mugged,” said Jonas. “Or kidnapped.”

  Raza was in his sixties, thin and upright, with bright unblinking eyes, grey hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His legs were covered with a pink blanket. There were slight traces of a French accent in the way he spoke English.

  “Pe
rmit me to explain the situation,” he said. Jonas could see scarring on his neck that began under his beard and continued beneath the shirt collar. “On one side we have Daesh. They pack vehicles with explosives and drive them into our most crowded squares on market day in order to kill as many Shia as possible. Everyone knows they have numerous European fighters among their ranks. Now, I would be surprised if you were one of them, but please understand that this may be what our young friend outside was thinking. Consider your behaviour, consider your appearance. He did not have the advantage of studying you up close and seeing that you may have grown your beard long, as many Western fighters in Syria do, but you have neglected to shave your moustache in accordance with the Sunnah.” He pressed the cotton wool against Jonas’s bloody eye. Warm pink water made a tapping noise against the oversized plastic raincoat. “On the other side we have Israel. They bombed this neighbourhood in 2006 and it is a certainty that they will bomb it again at some point. They know where the people they wish to kill are living and which buildings are used by whom because they send spies here to collect the kind of detailed information their satellites cannot see and to leave markers that are visible only to their fighter jets. Alternatively, if fighter jets are not appropriate, they will send someone to place a bomb in the headrest of a car seat or strangle a person with a towel in his hotel room.” He took a pair of tweezers and picked a piece of grit out of the open cut. “So you will understand that we are a nervous neighbourhood. We are curious when strangers come to visit. We like them to ring the doorbell and introduce themselves first.”

  “They used stolen British passports for that operation,” Jonas said. It seemed a good idea to show that he wasn’t on Israel’s side. “There was a row. We expelled some of their diplomats.”

  They were both quiet for a minute. There was mint and garlic on Raza’s breath. Jonas could feel warm water running down his face.