Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  “We?”

  “I’m British.”

  “Ah, this is what you meant. I thought…no, never mind. You will need stitches.”

  Jonas felt alarmed by the gentle pressure already being exerted on his thin cover story, and before any real questions had been asked of it. He knew that he was no match for a skilled interrogator, just as he had been no match for a professional surveillance team. People these days talked about comfort zones. His comfort zone was a tiny room off the back stairwell where the cleaners stored their carts at the end of a working day. His comfort zone was a studio apartment, a neatly organized bookshelf, the same meal every night. Why had he imagined he would be able to handle the real world? He didn’t even play chess against real people. He couldn’t even handle an open-plan office.

  “I’ve got to go,” Jonas said weakly.

  “It’s important that the cut is properly cleaned. I will have to insist, as would any responsible doctor. After all, it was our fault. It won’t take long. Please make yourself comfortable. Would you like to take your coat off? No? It looks a little like an American flag, your coat, all these tiny gold stars. Like you have wrapped yourself in a flag. Would you describe yourself as a patriot?”

  A drop of water fell from Jonas’s chin, ran down the smooth slope of the raincoat and disappeared into a tear in the plastic just above his left elbow. He closed his eyes in the hope it would shut down any conversation. For a while the only noise was the sound of Raza’s steady breathing. Jonas set about countering a Spanish Opening, but after only eight moves found himself imagining that he was playing against his father. Before long his defences were in disarray and both his rooks were vulnerable. He had been a strict father, an Old Testament father, more judgement than love, or so it had appeared to the dark-eyed little boy who filled his storehouse with grievances that were a sort of wealth, like things that could be hoarded and weighed and treasured. Forgiveness would have felt like poverty. By the time his father began to soften, it was too late. Jonas was bruised, wary of other people and the unmanageable demands of friendship, not to mention love. Now that it was no longer possible, he wanted nothing so much as to talk with his father. In the instant he had heard of the kidnapping their bitter history of disagreement – about politics, about the Bible, about chess – had been revealed as an illusion, as an unforgivable trick he had played upon himself. He wanted to tell his father that he was good at his job, that he was trying to make friends. He wanted to tell him how working in intelligence had changed his attitude to the Bible, that he finally understood how messiness is what makes something true because if four Russian defectors gave identical accounts of something they would never be believed. He wanted to ask him how everyone else seemed to know how to live but it was still such a mystery to him.

  “This cut is deeper than it appears,” said Raza.

  In an odd way, Jonas suddenly realized, it was the fact that their relationship had been so difficult that had led him down this path, that was driving him to find some way, any way, to get his father released. A good relationship, he imagined, might have felt complete; he would have been able to let his father go knowing he had said everything he wanted to say.

  “Do you have health insurance?” asked Raza.

  Jonas was determined not to be drawn into conversation. He screwed his eyes tight, as though in pain. He thought about his mother, on her own back in England, about the phone calls and emails in which he had told her he was still overseas with work but hoped to return soon. He listed significant dates in the history of Lebanon: 22 November 1943, 16–18 September 1982, 14 February 2005. He thought through what he knew of Hezbollah: the kidnapping of Western hostages between 1982 and 1992, the Marine barracks bombing of 1983 that killed two hundred and forty-one Americans and fifty-eight French, the network of international drug traffickers and money launderers that funded their activities.

  He remembered a trip to Berlin several years earlier at the invitation of German intelligence. The traditional formalities of a liaison visit had been observed: the awkward dinner, the visit to a tourist attraction – in this case Checkpoint Charlie – and the pre-Snowden noises about greater openness and joint working. No need for aliases in Western Europe any more, everyone in London agreed. He was there to observe the debrief by the BND of a German national who had disappeared early one morning from the street outside his Beirut apartment only to reappear two days later. The German authorities were considering advising their citizens to leave Lebanon but had decided to consult with their European partners before taking what would be in diplomatic terms a drastic measure.

  The man described having been pulled into a car, a dark blue Mercedes estate smelling of thyme and coffee and with more than the usual number of aerials and a number plate that started with either a three or an eight, and made to lie on the floor with a rolled-up carpet on top of him while being driven at a sedate pace for between forty-five and fifty-five minutes. He was shown a handgun but at no stage was it pointed directly at him. A pillow was provided for his head. They put him in a basement – air-conditioned, well-lit, clean, with a proper bed and fresh sheets in a side room for when he grew tired. The room was seven paces wide and twelve and a half paces long. It had no windows and the door was metal. There was always a fresh bottle of water on the table and they gave him a choice of pizza, sushi or mixed grill at every meal time except breakfast, when they brought him eggs, cheese and fresh bread, whether he wanted it or not.

  They kept on returning, in their patient questioning, to a particular day three weeks earlier. The tall, thin one with a reedy voice and acne scars on his face and neck would ask him in formal, heavily accented German to describe the day, a Tuesday, starting from the moment his alarm went off, and the older one in brown corduroy trousers who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and liked to pace about would shake his head each time he got past five o’clock in his narrative without having admitted to whatever it was they were looking for. It was not until the second day, the eighth or ninth retelling and the first use of violence – in this case the brief application of a lit cigarette to a patch of skin just above the elbow – that he mentioned a phone call he had made in the middle of the afternoon, immediately after his wife had left the house with the children, to a young French woman he had slept with twice while on a diving holiday in Sinai the previous month. This triggered a round of extremely detailed questions about the affair – almost as though, he complained, they didn’t really believe the woman actually existed. What district of Marseilles was she from? Did the yoga studio she worked at have a website? Would he be so kind as to describe their lovemaking? He was returned to his Beirut apartment that evening in the same gentle manner, a tube of antiseptic cream in his pocket, completely in the dark about what had happened.

  The likely cause of the incident was apparent to Jonas, once he had been permitted to ask two clarifying questions of the German. In his written report he highlighted several pertinent factors. The first was an Iranian delivery the CIA had watched several months earlier being moved through eastern Turkey, down to the coast and on to a ship that stopped for a matter of hours in Beirut before continuing to North Africa. The second was humint from a source related by marriage to a programmer in Hezbollah’s technical section suggesting that around the same time the group took receipt of Iranian equipment that would allow it to capture communications data in bulk and search it for (among other things) handsets or SIM cards that were only in contact with one other phone, or that were only used for short periods of time before being switched off again. The third was that a large number of travellers crossed from Sinai into Israel. What seemed most likely, Jonas suggested, once the German had confirmed that he had used a dedicated, unregistered mobile to contact the young woman and that she had spent at least a weekend or two at some point in the Israeli resort of Eilat, was that she had inadvertently given her lover – in communications data, at least – the profile of someone secretly in contact with an Israeli, which is to say an Isra
eli spy.

  “Do you have health insurance?” Raza asked again.

  Jonas didn’t know what to say. Did Raza want to be paid for his services? If that was all it would take to get away from him he would happily pay any sum. It seemed like an odd question, but Jonas had no experience of such things. A typical tourist would certainly have insurance, given Lebanon’s reputation, but the last thing he wanted was to be caught out in a lie. This was one of the few things he thought he knew about interrogations, that you should stick to the truth wherever possible.

  Raza pressed the tweezers hard into the cut above Jonas’s eye until he pulled backwards and cried out.

  “My apologies,” said Raza. “I am a little out of practice. But it seems I have got your attention. I was only going to point out that your insurance is probably invalid since the accident occurred in a part of Beirut the British government advises its citizens to avoid,” he said. “Do not worry, however – I can put the stitches in myself, if you will allow me.”

  “Are you a doctor?” Jonas asked.

  “Enough of one to do some simple stitching.”

  “I’m not feeling very well – I think I should go.”

  Raza took a gentle hold of Jonas’s wrist and felt for his pulse. “I will be the judge of that. The truth is that you may be too unwell. Tell me, how long have you been in Beirut?”

  He has your passport, Jonas thought – he already knows the answer. He tried to control his breathing. “A few weeks.”

  “That is a long visit for a tourist, no? You must have been to every museum in the country several times over.”

  “I’m thinking of staying out here to learn Arabic. Maybe get a part-time job teaching English. It’s all a bit up in the air, to be honest.”

  “You have enough money to stay here indefinitely?”

  “Probably not. I’m playing it by ear, to be honest.” He wondered whether repeating “to be honest” underlined his truthfulness or flagged him as a liar. He decided not to risk saying it a third time.

  “What is your occupation?”

  “I work in a bookshop.”

  “Do you have any friends here?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Just the odd person I’ve met. No one I would call a friend.”

  “Have you had any contact with the British embassy?”

  “No.”

  “Have you met any diplomats, even in a social setting?”

  “No, why would —”

  “What brought you to this area today?”

  “I wasn’t lying when I told the man outside that I was just going for a walk – I had no idea where I was. But I completely understand that people here are nervous of strangers, and I’m sorry for any problems I’ve caused. You have been very kind to me.”

  “Not at all. It will only take another few minutes to put the stitches in.”

  “Listen, thank you for the offer, but I really should go.” Jonas pulled his hand away and stood up. The cellar walls came close and then retreated. He felt dizzy and had to lean on the chair for a moment while his head cleared.

  “At the very least let me call you a taxi,” Raza said. “Which hotel are you staying in?”

  Jonas was about to name a big hotel in the centre of town when he caught sight of his keys on the table. He put them into his pocket along with his wallet and passport. They didn’t look like hotel keys – there was no room number, no logo.

  “I’ve rented an apartment.”

  “An apartment? And you are a tourist? How unusual. This is quite a commitment for someone so unsure of their plans.”

  Jonas took an unsteady step towards the door and pulled at the handle. It was locked.

  “I have no objection to you leaving,” Raza said quietly from his wheelchair. “But you will do me the courtesy of listening to what I have to say first. I would like it very much if you called me on this number within the next forty-eight hours.” He wrote on a piece of paper and pushed it across the table. “I think that we could have a fruitful conversation on several topics. What do you say? And before you tell me that you don’t have a phone, Mr Jonas, or some other kind of nonsense, please be aware that I found receipts for two of them while I was looking through your wallet.” He rolled his wheelchair around the table. “You must understand that this is not your playground. You are not free to do whatever you wish. There are consequences – you have experienced this yourself today. But there may also be rewards.”

  It came to Jonas all of a sudden that there was an advantage to the situation he was in. There were disadvantages, certainly, chiefly that he was finding it difficult enough to deal with the attentions of British and American intelligence without introducing a group like Hezbollah that had an entirely different agenda, that was able to operate outside any legal framework, that had hundreds of people on the ground. But he also knew that Naseby would see Jonas’s phone making contact with a new Lebanese number and quickly reach the conclusion, based on locational data and voice analysis, that he had established contact with a member of Hezbollah. This, he knew, would alarm London and Washington – and he needed to keep increasing their sense of alarm if his plan was to have any chance of working.

  Jonas picked up the piece of paper. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Outside it was still raining. It had been four hours since he had read the email, eleven hours since it had been sent.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  Jonas had a keen sense that he would need to do better. This was true of his ability to detect and evade surveillance, to withstand questioning, to persuade others to do what he wanted. In getting this far he had relied heavily on luck and Father Tobias’s native kindness, but as things progressed he knew he would be subject to a pressure that was more intelligent, more calibrated, more sustained that anything he had experienced so far. To succeed he would have to stop making mistakes.

  For any change to take hold, though, to the extent that it could not be dislodged at the surface by mere circumstance, it could not be limited to behaviour, it must be deep-rooted, it must require a change in character. He would not just need to do better: he would need to be better. He would have doubted that real change was even possible had he not seen his own character fall apart so quickly in the weeks after his father’s disappearance. It had turned out that for his character to be a discernible thing, a thing that could be described as this or that, it needed to be propped up by other things: a job, people, daily routine. In isolation there was nothing other than a random assortment of traits, like items forgotten in the bottom of a drawer: a fondness for peanut butter, the ability to sing entire hymns from memory, the habit, only recently discovered, of being most prone to tears just as he was falling asleep.

  That only religious examples of meaningful and dramatic change came to his mind suggested it would be a difficult process. The thief on the cross, Jonah before and after the whale. Did anyone take such stories seriously? Was an experience like that of St Paul on the road to Damascus really possible? Surely the modern equivalent was the experience of those young men who had kidnapped his father, and it was called radicalization. He knew that was a real thing; he had spent eight years studying the evidence. Perhaps that should be his goal, he thought. Perhaps to match them he needed to go through what they had gone through: a cleansing, a sharpening, a shift away from the centre towards the margins. Perhaps he needed to get extreme.

  Through the sheets of rain he saw a telephone.

  2

  “I don’t believe a word you have told me.”

  Jonas was standing by the side of a busy road, his face turned away from the oncoming traffic. The plaster Raza had given him for his eye had been dislodged by the rain and he was trying to staunch the flow of blood with the sleeve of his plastic raincoat.

  “Why is it always you, Jonas, why is it only you?” The line crackled and settled. “…stopped at an airport there were always two people. Why have I never met one of you
r team? Why does nobody ever phone you? Why do you never send a message to…” Another crackle, longer this time. “…never talk about your colleagues? Why is it that when the hotel maid tells me that someone has broken into my room she describes a man with dark hair and a beard? He looks like a gravedigger, she said. This one man does all the surveillance, he does all the breaking into hotel rooms, he does all the talking. He can obtain visas without any difficulty but under no circumstances must he be contacted through the embassy.”

  Jonas didn’t know what to say. “This is standard field protocol,” he said. He had never heard anyone speak like that but wondered whether the problem was that he hadn’t been cinematic enough. “A covert operative in hostile territory is trained to carry out a wide range of tasks.” Should he keep going? “It’s in section 4, subsection B2 of the field manual under the heading —”

  “What are you talking about?” said Tobias.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about my team.” At the other end Tobias was quiet. “Hello? Can you hear me?” Jonas cupped his spare hand around the telephone to ensure he would be heard above the roar of traffic. He had to do something quickly in case the line was cut. “Jack is my right-hand man,” he shouted. “He’s been organizing logistics behind the scenes – the vehicles, the encrypted phones, the hotel rooms. Can you hear me? He’s only been with us for the past year but he’s got a great career ahead of him. A very solid operator. Mahmoud and Hilary have been working all hours on surveillance duties.” Mahmoud and Hilary? His only hope was that the phone line would make parts of this incomprehensible. Now that he had started down this path he had to keep going. How could he make these people sound real? Give Jack a shock of unruly red hair, Hilary a glass eye? “Mahmoud was there in the bar that night when I told you what this was all about, Tobias. He’s a local guy, medium height, stocky. You might remember him – he was talking to a woman with peroxide-blonde hair.” Was it conceivable that anyone would actually name and describe an entire covert team over an international phone line? “Then there’s Luke. He’s always asking to meet you, always asking how you are, if you’re getting enough rest.”