Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  They were seated in a small, windowless, book-lined office. Jonas blinked several times, pressed the bloody towel to his nose and looked around. Framed medical certificates on the walls awarded to Raza Yazbik by the Paris Descartes University. A photograph of a young woman holding two small boys dressed in tiny suits. Shelves crammed with books by Peter Kropotkin, Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky and Albert Camus, with titles such as Combat Medic Field Reference, On Violence, Survival in Auschwitz, Guerrilla Warfare and The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War. An artillery shell in the corner with Hebrew writing on the side.

  Raza watched him taking it all in. “I am curious, why did you refuse to come when I telephoned you?” he asked.

  “Because my eye is fine.” Jonas’s voice was muffled by the towel pressed against his nose. “At least, it was fine until your men attacked me again.”

  “What else?”

  “Because of your reputation, I suppose. Because of what happened the last time I was here.” Jonas touched the scar above his eye. “How is the other man?”

  “It is very kind of you to enquire. He has a broken nose. I treated him after you had left. He has been disciplined. He behaved very badly, hitting you for revenge, purely because he was upset. This is not how we do things.”

  “You don’t believe in revenge?”

  “Not against someone with their arms pinned to their sides.”

  “How the hell do you think your men got me here?” Jonas asked. He was surprised by the anger in his voice.

  “But this is not about revenge. Precisely the opposite, in fact. I wish to present you with an opportunity. First of all, though, permit me to examine you.”

  He angled the lamp towards Jonas, rolled his wheelchair around the desk and gently pulled the towel away from his face.

  “Your nose is broken. I’ll give you some painkillers before you go.” He tutted. “I am forming the impression that you are not one for doctors. You are fortunate, though – no sign of infection around the eye. You really should have had stitches.”

  “I didn’t want to spend my holiday in a hospital waiting room.”

  “You have decided it is a holiday, have you? Does this mean you will go home soon?”

  “I think so. I’ve seen almost everything I wanted to see, apart from the Beqaa Valley. But I’ve made it up to the cedars, finally, and there’s an exhibition of Phoenician artefacts at the National Museum that —”

  “Please forgive me, Jonas. This is my fault entirely.” His tone was light and matter-of-fact as though they were discussing something of no consequence. “I did not mean that you should tell me about the touristic activities in which you have been so energetically engaged. I know about the museums, I know about your day trip to the mountains. Let us place all of this to one side. I do not wish to put you in the position of lying. It will begin our conversation on the wrong note. You see, I know very well that you are not a tourist. In fact, this is exactly why I have asked to see you.”

  Raza directed Jonas’s right hand to the bloody towel pressed against his nose and drew his left hand to rest on the arm of the wheelchair. His fingers sought out Jonas’s pulse. “I have sent them to get some ice,” he said.

  So he would be accused of spying after all. The case against him was weak: that he had wandered into Hezbollah-controlled territory without a plausible reason for being there, that he hadn’t been able to provide satisfactory answers to Raza’s questions, that he had been observed with a known British intelligence officer. Mistakes, all of them. But what did it mean to catch a spy? A slip-up while using an alias, stolen documents, a confession. Being caught on an eavesdropping device dropping cover to pitch a recruitment target. A camera with photographs of sensitive locations or a piece of everyday equipment modified in some inexplicable way. He remembered the CIA man paraded on Russian TV by the FSB with a bag of cash, two wigs and three pairs of sunglasses. Jonas’s only real vulnerability was his contact with Naseby, and he had concocted a story involving a distant aunt, a failed marriage and a coincidental meeting on the streets of Beirut to explain that away.

  “Jonas, I know who your father is,” said Raza quietly. “I know he was taken prisoner by Daesh last year.” There was a vulnerability about the way Raza sat so close to him. He hadn’t expected this. His anger returned, and he wondered how much harm he could do before the other men burst through the door. “You can see that it is out of the question for me to accept that you are here to look at ruins,” he heard.

  Jonas looked everywhere except at Raza. He hadn’t expected this. He wanted to remember everything, he wanted time to think. War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003–2007. The initials RY stamped on the old-fashioned doctor’s briefcase. À la recherche du temps perdu, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. A child’s drawing in crayon of a man riding a horse through a forest. A bloodstained piece of cotton wool in the bin. A pair of wooden crutches —

  “Jonas?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have the same surname. You —”

  “It’s common enough.”

  “It says in newspaper articles that he has one child, a son in his mid-thirties.”

  “There are thousands of people who match that description.”

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s retired.”

  “Don’t be evasive. From what?”

  “Teaching.”

  “You had a photograph in your wallet the last time you were here.”

  It had been taken at Halloween. Jonas was eight years old. His parents had tried to talk him down from his insistence that he should dress up as Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula or best of all Freddy Krueger, because it trivialized evil, it turned it into entertainment. Even at that age Jonas was serious. He didn’t make friends easily. He felt sympathy with the view that some things should not be laughed at. But he had studied the life-sized cardboard figure in the local video shop and picked out a striped pullover, borrowed a cowboy hat and fashioned five metal blades from card wrapped in aluminium foil, and to him this argument was more compelling than anything his parents might say. They settled on a compromise, finally, and Jonas’s father brought a white robe down from upstairs. His mother pinned the bottom so he wouldn’t trip on it. They told him he looked like a scary ghost and he told them through his tears that he looked like his father on a Sunday morning.

  He was laughing by the time the photograph was taken. His mother is holding him in her arms. Although his father is not in the picture Jonas can tell that he is there because their eyes are turned towards him, because he is the reason for their laughter, because their love for him is so apparent. His father is not there but he is everywhere, which is how Jonas used to think of God, which is how he hopes he will think of people when they are dead.

  “Your father was a priest,” Raza said quietly. “This was his robe.” His fingers were intelligent, expert. They understood without hesitation factors such as bones, pressure and temperature. “Jonas, I do not accuse you of doing something wrong. You did what any normal person would do. You came to Beirut to feel that you are doing something, because the alternative is to sit in London and observe inaction from a government that will condemn with empty words the kidnapping of your father but take not one single step towards freeing him. You came to Beirut to be closer to your father. You came to Beirut to put pressure on the embassy and show them that there are real people suffering as a result of their failures.

  “But they do not want you here, do they? You are already beginning to learn this. You can see their impatience, their frustration, their boredom with the whole thing. It is becoming more difficult to contact them on the telephone. They are busy with other matters or they are unable to meet with you. When you do speak with them they give you the same answers as the last time. They are unable even to pretend that they are making progress.

  “The truth is that your government is indifferent to the peo
ple who elected them. They serve the elite and the interests of corporations and banks. You are a meaningless irritation and your father has already been forgotten. But we can help you. We are on the side of people like you. We are sending our young men to die in the war against Daesh, we are not standing by to watch. We are the resistance.” He let go of Jonas’s hand and sat back in his wheelchair. “We also have access to information in Syria that may be of interest to you,” he added.

  Had he come to Beirut to be closer to his father? If that was his plan, it had been a failure. He had never felt further from him. He struggled at times to remember the simple things: what his voice sounded like, how tall he was. Sometimes he thought it would have been easier if his father had died, if there had been a nothingness, a slow oblivion. Instead he was being held in a context so powerful that it had come to contaminate Jonas’s memories. He couldn’t remember his father’s smell, but things he had never even seen, such as the thin mattress his father slept on or the bucket of human waste in the corner of his cell, were as vivid to Jonas as his own surroundings. In his dreams he would see his father bruised and beaten at the family table, he would see him standing in the pulpit wearing an orange jumpsuit.

  “Jonas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recognize any of these people?”

  Raza reached across his desk and picked up a file. He placed it on his lap and handed a colour photograph to Jonas. It had been taken at a distance but clearly showed Naseby and a woman of around the same age entering a hotel.

  “What are you asking me?”

  “Tell me who you recognize.”

  “This man is Desmond Naseby.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “He’s a diplomat with the Foreign Office. He’s come here from London to work on my father’s kidnapping.”

  “Would it surprise you to learn that he is a senior MI6 officer? We were merely welcoming him to Beirut the other day – you can imagine my surprise when they told me you were in the car with him. He has served in Riyadh, Washington, Damascus and Cairo. Married with three children. An Arabist, currently second in command of their Middle Eastern section. OBE in 1994. You will understand it is impossible that someone of his rank comes to Beirut solely in order to assist you. What about this man?”

  The photograph was of a short, athletic-looking Chinese man in his mid-forties with closely-cropped hair. He was getting out of the back of a black SUV with diplomatic plates. Jonas remembered seeing him on a payphone across the street from an internet cafe he had visited.

  “He looks familiar, but I don’t know why,” he said.

  “Have you spoken to anyone from the US embassy here?”

  “A man called Harvey.”

  “Harvey Deng. Ex-military, veteran of Iraq, single, now a case officer posted to the CIA station. What about this woman?”

  Jonas had never seen her before. At first glance she looked English. The picture was out of focus. Grey bob, glasses, dark clothing. He shook his head.

  “You may not have had the opportunity yet; she arrived only two nights ago. Her diplomatic passport is ten years old and very nearly full, so we can conclude that she is not junior. She went directly to the British embassy, even though it was close to midnight. Mr Desmond Naseby was still inside.”

  Raza took the photographs from Jonas and replaced them in the file.

  “I will come to the point,” he said. “The British send out the deputy head of their Middle East division. He claims to be here to assist you, but this is merely what we call in our line of work his cover. He sees you every few days and at other times he engages in his true mission, whatever that is.

  “At precisely the same time we observe a dramatic increase in activity in the CIA station. Cars coming and going, additional personnel arriving, everyone is working longer hours. And then from nowhere a second senior British officer arrives and goes directly to the embassy to meet with Mr Naseby, even though it is the middle of the night. Isn’t it obvious? Something is happening – something big. And if something is happening on this scale in Lebanon it will affect us, one way or another.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jonas said. “Why have you brought me here? What has any of this got to do with me?”

  “We will help you with your father. And in return, you will spy on these people for us.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  “Jesus, finally. Today I’m hat in hand, Jonas – I need a favour. Your office has decided to send us that report we’ve been asking for. Paragraph three is the relevant bit, you have to wade through a long and frankly unnecessary build-up about how much we respect each other to get to the cum shot, which is this: security personnel conducted a comprehensive search upon his final departure from the building at 1642 on blah blah blah they discovered a concealed albeit empty compartment among his belongings. Fucking Brits. Why you can’t just speak normally. A concealed albeit empty compartment among his belongings. What, were you carrying a chest of drawers out of the building? Was the intelligence hidden in your top hat? The question is this, where was the compartment and what was its capacity? Are we talking matchbox or shoebox? Would it hide a camera or a laptop? What about a hard-drive tower? I’m not asking you to tell me, Jonas, I just want some help drafting our response. I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to make it look pretty. Paperwork is not my thing, and I want to make sure I get all the diplomatic niceties correct. To be absolutely honest with you, if it wasn’t that we needed to know the potential size of the intelligence stash you’re planning to sell Hezbollah in return for your father’s ransom I’d favour a little plain talking. The question I always come back to is this, what do we lose by saying exactly what we think? British intelligence is going to turn the faucet off? If it’s a faucet it’s one of those rusty ones in the yard that trickles like a kid pissing. So far I’ve got this: we are requesting urgent clarification about or on – I’m not sure which is correct – the size of the compartment and its location among his belongings. It’s impossible to write in this style and not sound a little prissy myself. A little prissy oneself. We also urgently request a list of the documents accessed by LEAKY PIPE in the period between his father’s kidnap and his final expulsion from the building. Capital letters, right? That’s how you guys do code names? We might have gone for something a little closer to the bone, something like WANDERING ORPHAN or MARKED MAN. But then we do go for more dramatic names. We called the war against the Taliban Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. You guys? Operation HERRICK. What does that even mean? What the fuck is a HERRICK? Is that a fish? We understand from our own recent experience the challenges and complexities involved in ascertaining the scale of an intelligence theft – I’m pleased with that sentence, that one’ll keep the diplomats happy – but cannot urge you strongly enough to divert more resources towards a rapid and comprehensive investigation of LEAKY PIPE’s treasonous activities. Our coverage indicates that he has not yet delivered the stolen intelligence in his possession to his Hezbollah contacts. As a result, we are exploring options around kinetic action with partners in the region as a tier-one priority. That’s clear enough, right? Do I need to spell it out that this is going to get messy any day now? There’s really no need for your employers to feel embarrassed about this, Jonas – there’s no need for them to bury their heads in the sand. We’ve been in the same sinking boat as you are now on many occasions: Aldrich Ames, David Henry Barnett, Robert Hanssen, Jonathan Pollard. It comes with the territory. Snowden’s a bit different, though. Some people in the agency will tell you that’s because he’s created a new category of threat, the human rights extremist, but I think that misses the point about Ed, it gives him too much credit, which is that he’s as mercenary as any of the others but wants to be paid in celebrity moments rather than in cash. Awards from minor European countries, fawning interviews, honorary degrees – that kind of thing. He wants to be told that he’s changed the world. Let’s get back to it. We have informed our Israeli counterpa
rts of LEAKY PIPE’s presence in Lebanon and provided them with his biographical details, address, pattern-of-life and known selectors, as well as an assessment of his likely intentions with regard to Hezbollah. They share our extreme level of concern. We are working on all channels to secure a commitment that they will consult Langley before pursuing any unilateral disruption strategies. We had to tell them, Jonas. Mossad and Shin Bet are on the front line when it comes to Hezbollah, and if you’re planning on putting a dent in their capabilities they have a right to know about it up front. I’m not trying to alarm you. We both know that nobody in London or Washington is going to agree to have you killed. That’s not the way the world works these days. The question is whether the Israelis are prepared to roll the dice and take the chance that you won’t sell Hezbollah something damaging. You know what they’re like when it comes to protecting their interests. I was in your shoes I’d avoid opening car doors, using cell phones, walking around in your apartment at night with the lights on. Not that any of that’ll slow them down. Looks like I haven’t got any choice with the last line of this thing. It’s part of the template, I don’t even know if you can delete it. We appreciate your Service’s assistance on this and other matters and look forward to working together to ensure the safety and prosperity of our two nations blah blah blah. Jesus, it’s like one of those automated announcements at stations that apologizes for your train running late. Ah, you can delete it. How about this instead? We would appreciate a more proactive and forceful approach from your Service but will deal with this ourselves if full cooperation is not forthcoming. Too punchy? Screw it. Turns out I didn’t need your help after all, you fucking retard. Send.”