by James Wolff
“An odious man named Harvey paid me a visit yesterday,” Naseby said as he fiddled with his seat belt. His freckles seemed to have darkened since their last meeting. All that tennis, Jonas thought. “It’s not just happening here. It seems the Americans have got a bee in their bonnet, they’re sticking their oar in all over the shop. Wanting to know what intelligence you’ve had access to, what jobs you’ve worked on, what high-level US reporting you might have seen. Not to mention what the hell it is you’re doing out here. The Foreign Office has had some of it, No. 10, our place, your place – I’m told it’s what they call a full-court press. Ever heard of one of them? No, me neither. More like pressing all the bloody buttons at the same time, like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
“What does he look like?” Jonas asked.
“Eh?”
“Harvey.”
“Oh, very…average.” Naseby started the car and pulled out. At some point, Jonas noticed, he had put on a pair of beige driving gloves. He took a turning that led in the direction of the sea. “He spoke to me as though I was his lackey – do this, do that. You know what I can’t understand? How they have the nerve to lord it over the rest of us when the single biggest theft of intelligence in history has just taken place right under their noses. On their watch, one might say. But rather than putting their own house in order they wag their fingers at us as though we have a problem of the same magnitude. And we don’t, do we, Jonas?”
“What did he want you to do for him?”
“I really shouldn’t say.” They took a left and then a right into a scruffy narrow street edged with plastic rubbish bags. The indicator of a black Toyota behind them was flashing repeatedly even though there were no turnings in sight. Without thinking about it Jonas memorized the number plate. “But since you ask.” Naseby lowered his voice to a whisper. “He wanted us to run traces on someone called Father Tobias Hoffman. A Catholic priest who has dabbled in the hostage game. Defrocked, actually – or rather laicized, I think that’s the word for it. Practically ordered me to go to the Swiss and see what they have on him. He has this theory that you’re somehow in cahoots with the priest, that you’ve got him running errands on your behalf.” Naseby looked across to evaluate the effect of his words. “To be frank, Jonas, he sounds like the last person someone as sensible as you would go to for help. Got your head screwed on the right way. I’ll tell you what we’ve found, though, if you like, just in case you do ever run into this chap. Forewarned is forearmed, et cetera, et cetera.”
He made these words sound like a piece of obscure Latin wisdom. The traffic had thickened and slowed. Jonas opened his window to let in the sounds of the street, busy like an orchestra tuning up, the engines and radios and pedestrians and horns, and the smell of the sea. His head pounded and his left eye was partially closed by the swelling. He would have asked where they were going but didn’t want to acknowledge that Naseby was in control. There was a plan, he knew that much. At some point in the past few weeks he had crossed the line that separated the general public from that small group of individuals for whom there would always exist a secret strategy.
“There’s really no need,” said Jonas. “Thomas Hoffman, is that what you said his name was? I’ve never heard of the man.”
“Turns out we hadn’t either. There’s some stuff on Google about a big success he had a year or so ago getting three aid workers freed. Saintly priest secures release of hostages, that sort of thing. In interviews he took the usual kind of anti-government position, Iraq war, Bush and Blair, blah blah, we’ve all heard it ad nauseam. A European service told us he had stumbled into the middle of a release they had already arranged – one of these countries that pay ransoms behind the scenes. If anything he slowed the process down, added a few new layers that had to be smoothed out, and then the papers heralded him as the architect of the whole thing, whereas the truth was that he almost brought the house down.”
They had pulled on to the Corniche and were driving by the sea, glittering in the sunshine like a thousand tiny camera flashes. The wide pavement was crowded with walkers, runners and cyclists.
“Come to think of it, grab that file off the back seat and take a look, Jonas. It’s for Harvey’s lot but I suppose there’s no harm in you having a peek. I’ve never been much of a stickler for the rules, me.”
Jonas continued to look out of the window. He didn’t want to give any indication that Tobias’s name meant anything to him. In any case, he had already read every available newspaper article that mentioned him, and he knew there was no prospect of Naseby showing him any real intelligence. Anything in the file masquerading as an official report would have been dreamed up overnight by back-room staff in London.
Naseby continued, unperturbed. “He had clearly developed a taste for publicity because he decided to have another go at it six months later, except this time the hostages ended up dying. Because of his cock-up. He says the wrong thing to the wrong person, Jonas, or he gets the politics mixed up. Negotiation is a complex business – it’s more than telling people what they want to hear. He just hasn’t got the temperament for it. But I expect he has learned this by now, and the hard way, after what happened last time. God knows what they did to him, but you don’t come away from an experience like that without a few screws being shaken loose. Of course, his drinking will rule him out of any similar escapades in future.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me about someone I’ve never met and have no connection to,” Jonas said.
“There are a few other bits of tittle-tattle, but I won’t tell you about those as it’s all a bit seedy – hand in the offertory box, getting a little too close to the prettier members of his flock, that kind of thing. I’m not one for gossip. Suffice it to say there’s a reason crackpots like him end up in these remote places.”
Jonas found himself getting angry. How many times had he denied Tobias now? It felt like an act of disloyalty to let this pass unchallenged. “Couldn’t a statement like that apply just as well to you and me?” he asked, and immediately felt disappointed that he hadn’t found something better to say.
Naseby continued as if he hadn’t heard anything. “If we wanted anything other than gossip we’d have to go to Le Corps de la Gendarmerie in the Vatican, and I can tell you from experience that’s like getting blood from the proverbial stone. Now there’s an organization that could teach us something about secrecy. I’ll take lessons from the Vatican, not the bloody CIA.” He reached for the CD box and tried for several moments to open it with one hand. “Let’s have some music,” he said. He pressed the plastic case against his thigh to hold it in place and pulled at it with his fingertips until the case popped open, sending the disc spinning into the footwell on Jonas’s side. “Be a good chap,” Naseby said, his eyes on the road.
The first track was a ballad, sung in Arabic. It might have been that the sun was shining and he was by the seaside, or that he didn’t know where he was being driven but sensed everything was in hand; either way, Jonas found himself thinking again and again of his childhood. He barely thought of England any more, except when he spoke to his mother. He felt increasingly disconnected from his past. It came back to him now as a series of frozen images: a vicarage, its carpets in shades of brown; a stained-glass window leaking smudged, waxy light; and a solitary, serious, dark-haired boy with a frown on his face, arranging his toy cars in a long line and inching them forward one by one. He had been an only child with few friends. There had been no one with whom he could explore the wildness inside himself. He saved his pocket money, did what he was told and found his modest portion of the things that boys long for – adventure, mystery, danger – in those hours when he took his father’s keys and slipped into the empty church on his own. He would wander methodically between the stiff-backed pews and kneel to explore with his hands and his eyes the uneven stone floors like those of a long-lost temple, and when he felt brave enough he would climb the twisting stairs to the pulpit, spinning like a
rocket that had just taken off, lifting through the pale light where galaxies of dust drifted. Sometimes he would pray, too. After careful consideration he had concluded that prayer in a church must be especially effective. Imagining it, he saw a rope bridge stretched across a yawning black abyss filled with poisonous spiders and woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, and he would have to consider each word carefully so as not to stumble and say the wrong thing by accident and change the world in a way he hadn’t intended, and he would get eaten by all those wild animals. He only felt safe when he was back in his bedroom, managing the traffic jam that snaked across the floor.
“Do you know Fayrouz?” Naseby was saying. “I first saw her perform in 1975 – a young case officer, fresh out of training and sopping wet behind the ears. Not the old camel you see before you now.” He moved his hand as though he was conducting the music and sang along in Arabic for a few lines. “I was on the hunt for my first recruitment and had zeroed in on a disgruntled minor Saudi royal who was in Beirut for the summer to pursue his passion for prostitutes and single malt. Oh, we had some enjoyable nights, I can tell you! This was in the days before all the bureaucracy that’s got us tied up in knots now, you understand.” They were driving into the sun. Naseby pulled down his visor and reached across to do the same for Jonas. “Abdullah worked in the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources – it wasn’t so long after the 1973 oil crisis; it’s hard to imagine now what a clamour there was for intelligence on OPEC’s next move. Problem with Saudi in our line of work is that there are no secretaries to target, that’s the difference with the Soviet bloc. Anyway, I sold him to my superiors as the next great white hope and got us a pair of extremely sought-after tickets to a Fayrouz concert. Baalbek or Beiteddine, I can’t remember which one it was. He blubbed his way through the concert, promised to work for us and took ten thousand of Her Majesty’s pounds. Hugged me at the airport like I was his nanny. Sentimental lot, the Arabs. I never heard from him again.”
Naseby sounded his horn as a scooter swung in front of him with inches to spare. The rider’s face was covered by a helmet, but to Jonas there was something familiar about his muscular build, about the red T-shirt visible beneath his sweatshirt. He touched the bruise above his eye.
“Bloody fool. Point is, Jonas, the Service gives out second chances. I got dragged over the coals for that one, as you would expect, but they’re not going to let a good man get away. I don’t want you to feel you’ve burned your bridges with everything that’s happened. In fact, the message I’ve been feeding back to London is that you’ve a darned sight more vim, more chutzpah to you than anyone expected. We want people like you – we’re not like the rest of Whitehall, we want people with a bit of light and shade in them.”
The scooter held its position several metres in front of the car, its rider stealing glances over his right shoulder to maintain a consistent distance. When Jonas leaned forward he could see a second and third scooter in his side mirror weaving their way aggressively through the traffic towards them.
“I’m pretty sure I can smooth any ruffled feathers and get you back in,” Naseby was saying. “Why don’t we start with some part-time work at the embassy to see how it all feels? That way you can stay in Beirut while we sort out the situation with your father. We’ll find you a quiet corner somewhere, get you back on the payroll. Shame to let all those degrees go to waste.”
Jonas thought through the implications of being followed by Hezbollah, if in fact it was them. Four days had passed since Raza had told Jonas to call him if he intended to stay in Beirut. On the second day he had returned home to find a small printed doctor’s appointment card, all the details left blank except for Raza’s number, in his mail box in the lobby. On the third day it was a small cardboard box left just outside his front door. Jonas had already carried the box inside and set it on the kitchen table when it occurred to him that it might not be safe. The idea proved hard to dismiss. It hadn’t felt particularly lopsided or heavy for its size, and when he closed the window and door and pressed his ear against it he couldn’t hear any noises. There was a smell, though, something sweet and sharp. He considered – and quickly discounted – various options: constructing a pole from wire coat hangers so that he could open the box from around a corner, throwing it into a bath filled with water, leaving it outside his front door.
In the end he dropped it from his kitchen window on to the empty street below. Two grey puppies hurried out from beneath a nearby parked car to investigate the commotion. By the time Jonas got downstairs they had decided there was little of interest in a box filled with fruit, other than the unexpected hostility of the pineapple, and they soon gave up on that to chase a passing taxi. A typed note was stapled to the inside lid of the box. “To speed your recovery. Please do not be frightened of a visit to the doctor. It will not be as painful as your last visit, I give you my word. Call me. R.” On the street the puppies bounced along behind the taxi like tin cans tied to the back of a honeymooners’ car.
“These chaps are getting a bit close, don’t you think?” Naseby asked.
The two new scooters had moved into place on either side of them. Jonas had said that he didn’t know anyone in Beirut and yet here he was, four days later, being driven around by a British spy. There was no way he could agree to meet Raza now. They would know exactly who Naseby was. By his own account Naseby had spent a lot of time in Lebanon over the course of his career, and the group was known to take counter-intelligence seriously. A story had broken in the media several years earlier claiming that Hezbollah had identified a network of double agents inside the organization because of the poor tradecraft of their American handlers, who chose to meet their sources in the same Beirut pizza restaurant each time. Standard practice in such situations was to name the diplomats so that they were forced to leave the country. Things were different for the people doing the actual spying, though – they were rarely seen again. Raza had looked at Jonas’s passport. He knew he didn’t have diplomatic status, which meant that there wouldn’t be too much fuss if he fell victim to a traffic accident or a violent street robbery.
Before Naseby had time to brake, a fourth scooter appeared directly behind them. After that everything happened within a matter of seconds. The ones at each side carried passengers on their pillion seats. With their hands they seemed to be pointing at the chassis of Naseby’s car. There was the sound of smashing glass on one side and then the other. Naseby swerved and knocked into the pair on the right, who wobbled and steadied themselves before accelerating away, at which point the scooter on the left crossed over the central reservation and raced off in the opposite direction. In the wing mirror Jonas watched the third scooter turn and disappear into the oncoming traffic. That just left the man who had hit him, who waited patiently to see that his colleagues had made their escape before waving to Jonas and Naseby and peeling off down a side street.
They pulled in next to the wide pavement that separated them from the sea. Two elderly ladies in matching purple velour tracksuits marched past, their arms pumping.
“Christ almighty,” said Naseby. He was breathing hard. “Are you all right?”
They got out to see the extent of the damage. Shattered glass from both rear windows covered the back seat and a single yellow stripe had been spray-painted all the way down each side of the car.
“Well, that’s a first,” he said. “Hooligans. Teenagers, no doubt. The car will need to be repainted, not that you’ll have to worry about that. Are you sure you’re all right?”
To Jonas it looked like the same yellow that formed the backdrop of Hezbollah’s flag.
“Syrians, probably; they’ve flooded into this country since the war started. You must be shocked. I’m used to this kind of thing – someone tried to run me off the road in Baku in ’86. Listen, I’ll get a car to come and pick us up. We’ll head to the embassy, have a proper chat in the safe speech room about next steps. Maybe even have a drink to calm your nerves. Pick out a desk, discuss
a particular project we’d really like you to help us with, agree on a salary. How does that sound? There’s all sorts of perks you get for being overseas, Jonas – flights, entertainment allowances, private healthcare. We’ll get you out of that dingy flat for starters. And you can have that eye looked at by the best doctors in the city. The last thing you want to do is take any chances with your eyesight.”
“I’m not going to the embassy,” said Jonas.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of rendition or his passport being seized under the Royal Prerogative. The embassy was not sovereign British territory; other than being inviolable by the host country, it didn’t enjoy any special status in law. He wasn’t afraid of arrest either. The British government was in the peculiar position of suspecting that he was about to cause great harm to national security but having no proof of wrongdoing. The way things stood they couldn’t detain him, and it would be both highly embarrassing and legally impossible to ask the Lebanese to arrest him without providing any evidence of a crime. As for being killed or kidnapped, that was the stuff of movies.