Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  Silence, crackle, silence. Jonas was out of ideas. “Hello?” he asked.

  “Hello?” said Tobias eventually. “Hello? Jonas, are you there?”

  “I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

  “…me this. The last time I…my hotel room, you didn’t have a phone with you. Do you remember? You said that if anyone from your team needed to contact you they would find a way. But when the American knocked at the door you didn’t even consider the possibility that it might be one of your team. You didn’t even consider it, Jonas! What if there was a problem, what if…danger? You just said it would be room service and hid in the wardrobe.”

  Jonas scrambled for an answer. That he had told his team to walk in without knocking? That he had set up some other, more circumspect system for delivering messages – someone whistling in the corridor, say, or a pebble against the window? “They would have knocked in a different way,” he said. “Three taps, a pause, another two taps.”

  It was not as though he had failed to prepare. He had written out answers to questions Tobias might ask him about risk, about the life Maryam could expect in the UK, about recent air bombardments. He had written out a moral justification of bribery alongside the details of one of the few money-transfer bureaus still operating in Aleppo in case he needed to send funds. He had written out details of persuasion techniques he had found in one of the self-help books – “ask for a small favour before you ask for a big one”, “frame your objective using positive language”, “use fluidity to negate the perception that you lack confidence” – and practised motivational speeches in the bathroom mirror. He had thought he was prepared for the call, but he was completely unprepared for what he was being asked.

  “I don’t believe you,” he heard. “I just don’t believe you any more, Jonas. I’m afraid this will be the last time —”

  “Are you ready for the plain truth?” Jonas said quickly. Two teenage boys walked past him, wide-eyed at the sight of the blood smeared down one side of his face. He stared back and they quickly looked away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea how this sort of thing works – no one on the outside does. You’ve been stopped a couple of times at an airport and all of a sudden you’re able to spot patterns, you know what looks right and what doesn’t. Do you know why we don’t let you see other people? Because you’re an alcoholic, and alcoholics behave in unpredictable ways. Because when you’re tortured by Daesh you won’t be able to describe anyone other than me. Because it confuses people in your position when they meet too many people in my position – it dilutes the impact, any personal affection you feel is divided between two people, it’s easier for you to walk away. We make this sort of calculation. But the fact that we are calculating about it only means that we think it is important, that we want to get it right. Nothing I’ve said should change what we are doing together, which is trying to save a life. Now tell me where you are.”

  The rain had stopped. Jonas felt drained of energy, of words, of blood. He had nothing left to offer. He wondered if part of him wanted Tobias to give up and come back to Beirut, if the guilt he was feeling for sending such a good man into a place like Syria had weakened his resolve to get his father back at all costs. It was difficult to know why else he might have suggested Tobias would be tortured, why he had called him an alcoholic. It was as though he was trying to loosen the threads of obligation that bound the priest to his task.

  “Hello? Hello?” he said. Maybe this was the end. He was surprised it had worked this far. Perhaps it had been too much to claim that he was working on behalf of a government, that he was competent and trained, that he was not on his own. He should have known he would never have been able to disguise that. When he looked in the mirror he could see it himself. It was not loneliness that was visible so much as an air of neglect, as though love left a mark on people and he had been passed by.

  “…outside Aleppo,” he suddenly heard Tobias say. “It is worse than I could have imagined…armed children on the streets, stray dogs everywhere, human and animal waste, every building you can see is… Nobody has enough food. If neighbours have a dispute they resolve it with…tell an armed group that the other is not devout and he will be put in prison. Kidnappings for money happen every day.”

  “Tell me about the church council.” He felt light-headed and leaned on the payphone to stay upright. “Have you been able to make contact with the church council?”

  “The what? Oh, yes… The problem is that everybody changes their phones at least once a week because of the flying things. I don’t know what I should call them. Angels?”

  Better than nothing, thought Jonas.

  “I have spoken to several people,” Tobias was saying. “…contact with the group that has the British…er…thing. The news I have had until now is not positive. Nothing is certain, but several people told me that he is very ill and will not recover without… One person told me that he has died. I don’t know whether this affects your calculations. Do you want me to continue?”

  Jonas pushed his forehead against the payphone. He rolled his head to the side and pressed hard until the edge of the metal hooked into the torn skin above his eye. The pain was a distraction from thoughts of his father. He started to bleed again. “Calculations” focused him on the need to remain professional. This was the kind of intelligence to hold at arm’s length: uncorroborated, single source, pure rumint. He felt his father slowly slipping away, like a boat from its moorings.

  “We’ll just have to work more quickly,” he said. “What else have you heard?”

  “Security is very tight. He is moved every few days. He has not had any contact with other hostages. One person said he was in Raqqa, another told me he has been in Mosul since the beginning. I don’t think this will be of much use to you.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “They are going to broadcast another video of him in the next few days to increase the pressure on your government. He has refused to be filmed making political statements, and this has had consequences.”

  For weeks Jonas had been reading reports that another video was going to be released soon. He followed social media closely; it was the only source of intelligence he still had access to, the only source the government could not turn off. Each day he read the tweets and postings of dozens of foreign fighters in Syria and watched videos released on the Al Furqan YouTube channel. His notebook was filled with details of individuals and their accounts. What was said was mostly propaganda and gossip, but so was much of the raw, unassessed intelligence that came into Thames House or Vauxhall Cross. He applied himself to it diligently. At night in his apartment he grew a vast spider diagram that sprawled across dozens of pieces of paper on his bedroom wall. He looked for individuals who had inadvertently revealed their location and tried to link them to his top-tier targets, he examined postings for changes in language or tone that might reflect a recent move or promotion, he studied fighters who had been silent for long periods of time only to reappear noisily, suggesting they had been deployed on some kind of sensitive duty, like protecting senior leaders or transporting hostages.

  This was how he spent much of his time. More often than not, with all those images on his bedroom wall, he would dream of his father, of desert landscapes and crusader castles, of rescue attempts that were unsuccessful because of some minor failing on his part, such as a key he couldn’t turn in a lock or a form he had filled out incorrectly. Jonas knew it wasn’t good for him. He had lost any softness in his body, despite his best efforts to maintain the semblance of a healthy routine: regular meals, plenty of fresh air, exercise. The stress must consume its own share of calories, he thought, like a virus inside a computer, drawing down the battery in secret. His reflection in shop windows had become that of a stranger. It was not simply the beard but the gauntness in his face, the blankness of his expression. The hunched posture of an office worker had been replaced by a new alertness, as though the kidnappers might appear before him at a
ny moment. He tried to fill his mind with other facts to counterbalance his obsession with them. That his nightly walk along the Corniche – from the St George Hotel at one end, past the lighthouse and Pigeon Rock to the beach at Ramlet al Bayda at the other end – took him anywhere between sixty-two and seventy-two minutes. That he had to climb forty-one steps to reach his apartment. That he couldn’t eat more than seventy grams of rice in one sitting, that it took fourteen minutes to cook.

  “How are you holding up, Tobias?” he asked. The blood was pouring from the cut above his eye. It was cold and sticky in his beard. “I don’t want to interfere in your private business” – he heard distant laughter – “but we can talk about things like your health if you want. I can’t imagine it’s very easy for you to be coping with that alongside everything else I’ve asked you to do.”

  Tobias hesitated before answering. “I am dealing with it, Jonas,” he said. Another pause. “I went to see a doctor shortly…here.”

  Another crackle. He waited for it to pass. “Was it useful?”

  “They had run out of medication. She gave me a leaflet.”

  “Did it have any helpful advice?”

  “In its own way.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Jonas, we do not need to —”

  “We can discuss this. How you’re feeling is important.”

  “Oh, reduce the amount you drink slowly rather than…Let the people around you know that you are planning to cut down. Things like this.”

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “Avoid stressful situations.”

  Jonas slumped to the ground and watched blood drip from his head on to the dark-blue plastic raincoat with the tiny gold stars. Light-headed didn’t begin to describe it. Was it a ladies’ coat? He searched tirelessly for a label. 100% nylon, Made in China, 40 degrees.

  “Are you still there?” asked Tobias.

  “I owe you a great deal.” It must have looked as though he was a victim in the middle of his own crime scene. “Much more than you are aware of, and much, much more than I can explain right at this moment.” He closed his eyes. Something akin to sleep approached him but he fought to keep it at bay. “I may not have made this clear enough before now, Tobias, but you really mustn’t put yourself in any more danger than you have already. You’ve made contact with various people – that’s more than enough. It’s more than I expected, if I’m honest with you. The last thing you should do is meet anyone connected to the kidnappers face-to-face. I mean the church council. Is that clear, Tobias? We’ve got to think about your safety too. In fact, maybe it’s time to come back. You’ve done a great job, but let’s call it a day. When you get back here we can sit down together and talk this through. We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and me. You deserve to know the full picture after all you’ve done. Some of what I’ll tell you might come as a surprise, although you’ve already guessed half of it. Does it sound as though I’m making a confession? Tobias? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello?”

  3

  It was dark outside as he climbed the forty-one steps to his apartment. Inside everything was exactly as he had left it, except that a mobile phone he didn’t recognize had been placed at the centre of the living-room table. When it rang he didn’t know what to do. He looked at it for a while until it stopped ringing. Then it started again. He picked it up.

  “Almost midnight, Jonas: this is your wake-up call. Time to stop fucking around.” That same urban, nasal voice, hurrying through the words. “It falls to me as an American to point out the pitfalls of this free-market, capitalist project you got going on, trying to find the customer who’ll pay the highest price for the information you’re selling. That’s what you’re doing, right? You’ve tried Al Jazeera, now you go missing in Hezbollah-land. Before you do something you can’t take back there’s a few things you need to know about the practicalities of being a traitor. I’m a bit old-fashioned, I prefer the word ‘traitor’ even though I know everyone likes to say ‘whistle-blower’ these days. ‘Whistle-blower’ is a funny word, don’t you think, Jonas? Sounds like there’s a fire in the barn, like a fat kid’s flailing in the grown-up end of the swimming pool. Doesn’t sound like some geek’s copying terabytes of stolen data on to a USB. And they say that governments manipulate language. Anyway, back to my point, which is, number one, that you basically got two options in terms of how things play out for you: prison or exile. Or things go bad in a different way and you end up living in the broom closet down the hall from the visa office in some third-rate embassy, eating refried beans for the rest of your days, which is really a combination of the two. Nobody is going to take what you’re thinking of doing lying down, Jonas, kidnapped father or not. You continue down this path and you either get locked up for a very long time or you run to Moscow, those are your choices. Hezbollah and ISIS don’t have asylum programmes, Al Jazeera can’t put a stamp in your passport. Number two, it won’t work. I don’t know if you’re doing this to get your father freed or because you’re pissed at that cocksucker Naseby and his chums for not getting your father released. Either way, it won’t work. The ‘ideological’ traitors, and you should be able to hear from my voice that I’m putting quotation marks around that word, they don’t make the slightest bit of difference in the long run. The only thing WikiLeaks has achieved is to make sure everybody knows that diplomats sometimes only pretend to like each other and Arab dictators have their ice cream flown in. You really think we’ve stopped bugging the phones of European politicians? You need to accept your father’s not coming home. Even though I’m the least sentimental person in the world, Jonas, I do understand that this is a difficult message to hear, so assume that I am speaking with all appropriate measures of sympathy and respect when I say that I will personally make sure we drop the biggest fucking bomb available on the place they’re holding your father if we get even the slightest sniff that you’re cooking up some private deal. Leave this to the professionals. Leave this to government. It’s cute, that thing on your bedroom wall, all your coloured pencils lined up, looks like something they’d produce in the day care centre at Langley, but we both know you’re not a professional, not when it comes to intelligence collection – you belong behind a desk, not out on the street. You’re the fat kid struggling in the grown-up end of the swimming pool, you’re the cow burning in the barn. That fat ginger prick Naseby wouldn’t kick loose your file so we’re working up our own one. Our head-doctors are having a field day with you. They’re used to dealing with American problems – the jock with anger-management issues, the overachiever who under-eats – but now they’ve got all this Downton Abbey shit to get their heads round: English uptightness, too much education, a religious childhood. I’ve never seen them happier. I haven’t got close enough to see your teeth but I bet they’re awful. You certainly look like a mess. I came close, though, didn’t I? If only I’d pushed my way into that hotel room. What, were you hiding underneath the bed? Or in the wardrobe like a fucking…like a fucking talking lion? That cut above your eye is going to be nothing compared to what I do to you, you cunt. I’m almost sorry that someone else got to throw the first punch. You’ll never know when it’s coming. I might be sitting outside your apartment now, I might be inside your apartment already, I might be coming up behind you, swinging my fist —”

  Jonas hung up.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jonas stood on his balcony. He was first made aware of the sun by the birdsong, and later by the shadows that appeared across the flat rooftops around him, crowded with aerials and wires and water tanks and hoardings. The sun began its climb into a cloudless sky. He hadn’t been able to sleep. His bruised, bloodshot eye looked so out of control in the bathroom mirror that he suspected the sticking plasters he had applied were being held in place by dried blood, stiff and flaky like rust on a chassis, rather than by any adhesive quality they had retained. He was surprised at how effectively a simple plaster could evoke childhood memories. It was that feeling of playing at doct
or, he thought, of cutting with clumsy fingers strips from a bundle of rough, sweet-smelling material like something from a field hospital, and camouflaging the wounds against his skin. He watched Desmond Naseby’s Audi complete its third pass of the building and pull into a spot opposite the entrance. The knock at the door came just under a minute later. Naseby gestured for him to step into the hallway.

  “God knows how, Jonas, but the Yanks – Jesus Christ, look at your eye!” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Didn’t I tell you these were dangerous waters? Looks as though a shark has been having a nibble at you. You can tell me about it later. I’ve got a coffee waiting for you in the car. The Americans have somehow learned of your…situation. We need to talk. No, not inside – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’ve had your place bugged from top to bottom.”

  Jonas followed him down the stairs. He hadn’t expected to go outside – he was unwashed, his hair was uncombed and he was wearing an old, oil-stained pullover of his father’s with patches at both elbows. Naseby was dressed in pressed beige chinos and a blue cotton shirt; a pair of expensive sunglasses held back his sweep of red hair. As they stepped out of the building he reached above his ear to tap them into place.

  “Don’t worry about the car,” he said. “You can speak your mind in here.”

  It was oddly cluttered, given that Naseby had only recently arrived in Beirut: an Arabic newspaper on the passenger seat, a pile of Lebanese and English coins, a shopping bag with flowers sticking out the top, a map of Syria marked with half-obscured circles and scribbled notes in red ink, a buff-coloured file with a rubber band around it. He tried to take it all in. There were two Starbucks coffee cups in the holders, each with the name “Richard” written on the side. Everything revealed something potentially useful. Having spent so long turning over the same old information, Jonas was greedy for something new, however incidental it might be, and he wanted to make sure he retained it all. He remembered a childhood game his parents would play with him when he was sick or it was his birthday in which he would be given thirty seconds to memorize a selection of objects on a kitchen tray before it was covered up. He had quickly learned that certain items – scissors, an egg timer, Sellotape – would always be used, because of their convenient size and the fact they were kept in the same place as the tray. He assumed the items in the car had been placed there to create a particular impression on him. If there had just been one or two things – the Fayrouz CD by the gearstick and the slim volume of religious poetry in the pocket of the door, say – he could believe that they were there by chance, but it was difficult to imagine that the pandemonium of detail on show to someone in his position could be anything other than deliberate. He remembered Naseby’s three passes of the building, unaware that he was being watched from the balcony. From this point onwards, Jonas told himself, he should assume that everything was deliberate.