Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  His plan to ask the Church of England to pay the ransom had seemed like a good idea up until the moment he had rehearsed what he would say. Then it seemed like a terrible idea. Then he thought: if I want to save my father, I am going to have to betray my country. It was his first street bump. It had been difficult to find the right person. The nearest thing he could find to a head of security was a brief mention on www.churchofengland.org of a paper submitted to the chief legal adviser to the General Synod entitled “Encryption Keys and Mortise Locks: The Challenges of Security in the 21st Century”, written by a Harold Turnbull, Human Resources Director (Security and Estates). His LinkedIn profile, created two weeks before the submission of his paper, revealed a plump, bald man in his late sixties with a passion for baking and gardening but not much more than that, as though the whole laborious exercise of creating a profile had proved too exhausting a cyber challenge to overcome.

  Jonas had called ahead to see if he was at work that day. He told the switchboard he was a reporter for the Church Times, and hung up when he heard Mr Turnbull introduce himself. It was drizzling and his newspaper was getting damp. He had stood for far too long in the same place. To pass the time he tried to decide which character from the Bible would make the best Human Resources Director (Security and Estates), whether it would be David, armed with his sling and five smooth stones, if the threat was a physical one, or Samson, who slayed an entire army with the jawbone of an ass. The Apostle Paul would be more of an interrogator, he decided, questioning staff who stumbled over the Nicene Creed or used too much incense or printed reams of documents at odd hours, and sending anyone without the right answers down the corridor to Ehud the left-handed, whose sword disappeared into the belly of the massively fat King Eglon and made his excrement leak on to the floor.

  He almost missed Mr Turnbull when he emerged just after midday in a brown suit that flapped around his wrists and ankles. There was a crust of dried toothpaste at the corner of his mouth. Mr Turnbull looked unsettled, he looked panicked. He looked as he must have looked just before abandoning his LinkedIn profile – overwhelmed, saddened by this new world and its complexities. He put his hand on Jonas’s shoulder and leaned in to speak with him. Jonas listened carefully (“This must be so awful for you and your mother, we are praying for you every day, I don’t think what you are proposing is the most sensible path to follow, in any case we are in step with the government on this extremely difficult issue”) and found himself nodding in agreement. It was a crazy idea. It was a crazy idea. But couldn’t Mr Turnbull see that it was the kidnappers who were forcing this craziness upon him, that any solution to the problem of a father being held hostage in Syria was always going to sound ridiculous, that following a sensible path was all well and good if you wanted to go to Great Smith Street in the borough of Westminster, but what if you wanted to go to Syria, what if you wanted to go to Raqqa, what if you wanted to go into the heart of the Islamic State?

  Of all people, Jonas thought, certainly more than his own employers, Mr Turnbull should have understood that being sensible has its limitations. After all, there were no sensible people in the Bible, at least not in the stories that everyone remembered – the ones about criminals, kings, prophets, murderers, hermits and saviours. Where would Mr Turnbull fit in? Where would Jonas himself fit in, with his pens neatly lined up, with his carefully ordered life? A nobody in the crowd, most likely, or a tax collector. The only person living boldly enough to deserve a place in the Bible was his father, he thought.

  During the period in which Jonas stole 287 documents his bag was searched just twice – on a cold and foggy January evening when he wasn’t carrying anything at all (but only because his printer had run out of ink), and then on his very last day, when he was escorted out of the building after being told by the director of personnel that he should take some time off. It was on this occasion that the security guards discovered the secret compartment in his briefcase. It was empty. He told them he had created it to frustrate thieves and muggers. There wasn’t much they could say to that.

  Late that night he removed all the documents from their hiding place in an envelope taped to the underside of his freezer drawer, scanned them one by one on to a laptop and burned the entire collection in his bath. It took him until dawn. He had turned to Snowden for advice on how to store the data securely. In the end he used a combination of TOR, manual encryption and an online cloud storage service that followed a “zero knowledge” policy of hosting and processing content without itself ever having access to the uploaded information. Jonas had previously been scornful of such companies. It had struck him as perverse, in a world where the threat of terrorism was real, to create an infrastructure that would not allow access to the information it hosted even if served with a warrant signed by a government minister. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that rhetoric about rights and freedom had become in part a marketing slogan used by profit-making companies rushing to exploit the alarm caused by the leaks. But all sides market themselves, he thought: the government generates fear of WMDs to sell a war, media companies generate fear of mass surveillance to sell newspapers. Everyone is to blame or no one is to blame. It all seemed hopelessly muddled – the public debate, his own position, Snowden’s motives. He remembered seeing the footage from the Hong Kong hotel room of the large red hood Snowden used to hide himself and his laptop from secret cameras, of his paranoia that the hotel’s fire alarm test was a ruse to get him out of his room – and this at a time when the US government hadn’t yet even realized he had gone anywhere or done anything. It was as though Snowden’s understanding of intelligence operations came largely from the films he had watched on the flight over. But Jonas had just hidden his own collection of stolen intelligence beneath a lasagne and some frozen peas, so he was hardly in a position to judge anyone. He listened to the sound of traffic on the street outside. Was that a bin lorry? Did they normally make a collection this early? Should he have worn a hood too? Did it have to be red?

  It was early that same morning, while bin men were rattling lids and he was scanning documents, that Jonas learned for the first time of the existence of Father Tobias Hoffman. Or Father Tobias HOFFMAN, as it was rendered on the Cabinet Office letter. He hadn’t had time to read everything properly when selecting which documents to steal. In fact, he had only chosen that particular document because its title included the words “kidnapping” and “solutions” and its first sentence made a reference to “alternative strategies which might enable a hostage-release scenario”. He hadn’t got any further than that.

  The letter began by reaffirming the British government’s position that “a ransom payment of any kind made to a terrorist organization engaged in kidnapping would i) encourage future attempts to seize British nationals; ii) be used to fund the preparation or execution of terrorist attacks, possibly against British targets; iii) assist the terrorist organization in improving its general capabilities, such as the recruitment of additional members; and iv) provide them with a perceived ‘high status’ that follows from being seen to negotiate successfully with a legitimate government.” It moved on from this to explore the idea, described as a piece of “blue-sky thinking”, that certain individuals could be asked to act as “linchpins in the public debate within the region, galvanizing opinion and building momentum towards a hostage-release scenario that does not require the payment of a ransom.” It said something about the author’s belief that Tobias was a realistic candidate for this role and not just there to make up numbers that in the list of people given, which ranged from politicians to pop singers to sportsmen, Tobias came eleventh out of twelve, just ahead of an Egyptian poet Jonas happened to know had died ten months earlier after a long battle with lung cancer.

  The paragraph about Tobias was short, certainly shorter than the poet’s – possibly indicative of the fact that Tobias didn’t have a Wikipedia page that could be copied. It said that “HOFFMAN, a German-speaking Swiss national, joined the priesthood as a young man and
went on to have a high-profile career as a lecturer and writer in Oxford, Berlin and Rome. He turned his back on academia in 2005 at the age of forty-five and took over a small church located within the Apostolic Vicariate of Aleppo. The circumstances leading to his laicization two years later are unclear, but rumours persist about a complicated personal life and a problem with alcohol that he has struggled to control for much of his adult life. HOFFMAN remained involved in local church networks in Syria after his formal expulsion from the Catholic Church and since the start of the war in 2012 has participated with mixed success in the negotiations for at least three groups of hostages. Currently living in Beirut, his personal circumstances are likely to render him unsuitable for a public role in any campaign.”

  A computer terminal finally became free. He wondered whether his message had been clear, whether it had been too businesslike or patronizing. He worried that the line about ensuring they were victorious might sound sarcastic or even blasphemous. Jonas didn’t think the kidnappers knew that their hostage had a son in British intelligence as it would most likely have featured in the group’s public statements, and he suddenly realized that they might deprive his father of food and water, force him into stress positions or beat him as punishment for withholding such an important piece of information.

  There was an email waiting.

  OK, you need to send us those documents so we can see your genuine. Also youll need to take his place. This doesn’t change anything. Clocks ticking. Thirty days and he dies.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1

  “Good morning.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I am telephoning to arrange an urgent appointment to check that your eye is healing correctly.”

  Jonas had only answered because he thought it might be Maryam. He had taken to ignoring calls from numbers he didn’t recognize after Harvey had phoned him in the early hours of the last three nights, from a different number each time, to read aloud those parts of the US Espionage Act that dealt with the theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national security information and wilful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person, as well as a report by Amnesty International describing the US practice of incarcerating prisoners in long-term or indefinite solitary confinement.

  “Who is this?” Jonas repeated.

  “Your doctor. You came to my office for treatment after a certain…regrettable incident occurred.” Jonas heard the French accent, he remembered the smell of mint and garlic on Raza’s breath. “We talked about your plans here in Beirut.”

  “My eye is fine. It seems to be healing on its own.”

  “It is prudent to allow a professional to make that judgement. We are sometimes able to identify issues that the layman is not aware of. Headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia – there are many ways that a problem can manifest itself. A colleague of mine saw you by chance the other day. I don’t know if you recall the encounter. He said you looked most tired and stressed.”

  “The bruising has almost gone,” Jonas said. “There’ll be a small scar, but aside from that everything is fine. Really, there’s no need —”

  “I am not being clear. This is my fault entirely. The eye is a very delicate organ. There may be a subconjunctival haemorrhage or an orbital blowout fracture – we simply do not know at this stage. You wouldn’t want to lose your eyesight, would you? I am afraid that if you do not attend the appointment I cannot be held responsible for what follows. It may well be…life-changing, shall we say. Now, what time today would be convenient for you?”

  “I’ll call you if things get worse,” Jonas said. He hung up.

  He admired the simplicity of Raza’s code. It was so effective that even Jonas couldn’t have sworn at every moment in their brief conversation that they weren’t actually talking about his eye. He looked at it in the mirror. A red weal the size of a worm stretched from the middle of his eyebrow towards his ear. The phone call had at least cleared up the question of how persistent Raza would be, whether he could be ignored on a permanent basis.

  It was not that Jonas was unwilling to meet him again. Any contact with Raza would send Naseby and Harvey into a tailspin, which was a good thing. But it might also derail his own plans, which were at that moment rounding a corner at speed, given the recent email exchange with the kidnappers.

  The problem was that he didn’t know what Raza wanted. If he genuinely thought Jonas was an agent for the British, why was he merely asking for a meeting, why was he making it plain in advance that he was interested in Jonas rather than grabbing him off the street like the German with the secret girlfriend? The problem, too, was that Jonas would not be allowed any control over their next meeting. Raza would choose the time and the place, Raza would ask the questions, Raza would decide whether he was allowed to walk away.

  In case it came upon him suddenly, as was the way things traditionally happened in Beirut, Jonas had done what he could to prepare. The day he had first met Raza, as well as burning the chart that covered his bedroom wall, he had piled up all his possessions – clothes, books, phone, passport, wallet – and gone through them as though he had been tasked with examining the personal belongings of a suspected terrorist whose property had been seized as evidence by the police. He listed all the journeys recorded in his passport, each item of wallet litter, every call and text on his phone, and slowly, painstakingly, began to construct a story that would explain the data. He made up a terminally ill friend in Kenya to justify three trips to Nairobi in late 2012 and a brief stint as a volunteer with an international charity to explain a week in Irbil just nine months earlier. He stored Maryam’s number in his phone under the name “pizza”, and over the coming days began to pad out his call log with the numbers of local takeaways (“spicy pizza”, “cheap pizza”, “chicken”). Every time he got in a taxi he would ask for the driver’s business card, call his number and store it under his first name. He bought an introduction to Arabic and a handful of guidebooks and filled them with handwritten notes. He went to the National Museum. He sat in a minibus full of Japanese tourists on a day trip to the cedars. It would not be enough to confuse a well-resourced intelligence agency, he knew that, but it might just slow down anyone briefly rummaging through his life for incriminating evidence. The only downside was that when his phone rang these days he could never be sure whether it was Maryam looking for an update on her mother’s visa, Harvey wanting to read him a description of what it felt like to be water-boarded or Ahmed the taxi driver asking whether he was still interested in that tour of the Beqaa Valley.

  He didn’t call Raza back. Perhaps that was a mistake, he thought, two days later, as the cream-coloured Mercedes turned a corner and nosed down the street behind him. By then it was too late. It was a quiet neighbourhood. Other than a group of children playing football in the distance there was no one Jonas could look to for help. He turned back and saw two men walking towards him. Ten metres ahead, the car eased on to the pavement. When the back door was opened fully it touched the wall of the building to Jonas’s left, blocking his path. Everyone was smiling at him. They showed him their empty hands, they held out their arms as though they were preparing for a hug. History was on their side. Ninety-six foreign hostages snatched off the streets of Beirut in ten years of civil war. They had done this before. They knew how it worked.

  So why did he decide to fight? Even afterwards he couldn’t have said. He had always walked away from confrontation. But surrounded by three large men with experience of violence he felt an anger that surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise them. He bent to pick up a rock and swung it upwards into the startled face of the one nearest to him. Blood spurted from his jaw. The best he could do was describe it as an anger towards men who believed they were entitled to take a person and do with him what they wished. It didn’t matter that they were the enemies of those men who had kidnapped his father. They were their enemies in the same way that politicians who shout at each other claim to be e
nemies but are indistinguishable to the rest of us.

  It didn’t last long. At first he tried to push past them and run, but when that didn’t work he pinned his back to the wall and threw futile punches into the armour of their leather jackets before adjusting upwards and swinging for their eyes, for their throats. They stood around, unsure what to do, until one of them decided to take matters into his own hands and headbutt Jonas somewhere between his right eye and the bridge of his nose.

  It was clear they hadn’t expected him to put up a fight. The driver got out to open the car boot but the others shouted at him and he closed it. They pushed him flat on the floor. After a heated discussion, the two in the back seat took their shoes off and held them on their laps so that it was only their socks that made contact with his back and legs. It took a few minutes for them to find something – an oily rag from the glove compartment – to mop up the blood streaming from his nose. Even then he continued to struggle until one of them finally reached down to show him a handgun, in the same way that a distracted parent might absent-mindedly dangle keys in front of a restless baby.

  From then onwards he was quiet. He could smell fuel, feet, smoke. In the square foot of car floor beneath the driver’s seat there were three Pall Mall cigarette butts, twenty-seven pistachio half-shells, four unopened pistachios, seventeen splintered sunflower seeds and a chocolate-bar wrapper. They drove for forty-six minutes and made thirty-three turns, nineteen to the left and fourteen to the right. The driver only used his indicator for six of them; Jonas guessed that these were busy crossroads where traffic policemen were stationed. Two turns before they stopped, someone slipped a hood over his head and everything went black.

  2

  “I can only apologize for the unpleasant way your day has been interrupted.” Raza was seated in his wheelchair behind a desk, wearing a grey collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck. He shouted angrily in Arabic at the driver standing behind Jonas in the doorway, as though the whole thing had been his idea, as though Raza had been taken aback to learn that Jonas was being brought to him. “This is not how I had hoped we would meet again.”