Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  2

  It was difficult to think of a reason to put off seeing Maryam. She called Jonas at least once a day to ask for news of her mother’s visa. Soon after their first meeting he had agreed, in the face of her repeated threats to inform Tobias that Jonas was not keeping to his side of the bargain, to help get her mother out of Aleppo. He couldn’t deploy any of his team, he said, citing a little-known prime ministerial injunction against diplomatic staff or their proxies crossing into Syrian territory, but he could access Treasury funds, and if she used the money to pay smugglers to bring her mother across the border that was her business entirely. It was his own fault for using the word Treasury – he had no choice but to agree to the sum of $1000 as though it made no difference to him whatsoever. In reality it left him with £243.62.

  The visa was a different matter. He could have promised her anything, since in reality none of it would come to pass. All he needed was to keep her from telling Tobias that he had refused one of her requests. But for a number of reasons he didn’t want to let Maryam down any more than was absolutely necessary. And so he had explained that the case he was putting to London on her mother’s behalf required that he spoke to a number of government departments to bring them on board before even thinking of making a start on a draft of the official telegram, that the Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary would eventually both need to approve the arrangement in writing, that the Foreign Secretary’s schedule – newspapers had published pictures of him that week taking part in a ceremonial dance in a former Johannesburg township – meant this could not be rushed. He tried to pre-empt her frequent outbursts by expressing his own frustration with a system that was needlessly archaic and labyrinthine and that presented so many obstacles to actually getting anything done, in the form of private secretaries, permanent secretaries and undersecretaries, all of whom turned out to have a view on the matter in hand.

  She began to insist on seeing him after a week of this. “Did Richard return from his visit to Brussels?” she would ask him each time he mentioned Whitehall. “You said he is a bureaucrat. Maybe he will be better than you at writing letters to the secretaries in London. Maybe we should ask him for help.”

  The truth was that he didn’t want her to stop calling him, and he was glad for the opportunity to see her again. The fact of his loneliness might have gone some way to explaining this. It was certainly the only plausible reason for the intense pleasure he had begun to take in the most fleeting instances of human contact, in his morning visit to the bakery and the words he tried to exchange on the stairwell with his elderly neighbour, to the point he suspected she had changed her routine to avoid his increasingly tiresome attentions. He even took some pleasure in Harvey’s calls, in the way he addressed Jonas by name and with such particularity, in the intimacy he had been surprised to discover lurking in the ungovernable space between a bully and his victim. The calls reminded Jonas of the time he had spent his pocket money phoning a sex line. He had listened thoughtfully to the obscene endearments being whispered at him. Although he knew they were wholly imaginary they seemed more real to him than anything he had heard before, anything he had ever seen or touched. For weeks he carried around memories of the things that woman had done to him.

  But loneliness could not explain everything about his wish to see Maryam again, and the argument he made to himself that the illusion of the visas should be maintained at all costs was a weak one now that he was in direct contact with his father’s kidnappers. There was little damage Maryam or Tobias could do at this point. She didn’t know enough to tell Naseby anything of importance, even if she did contact him again, and Jonas had already admitted to the kidnappers that he was acting on his own. Tobias and Maryam had each served their purpose and could be set to one side. But still Jonas checked for emails from Tobias every day, and he found himself thinking about Maryam at odd moments throughout the day. Things such as, I wonder what Maryam is doing right now, I wonder what it would feel like if Maryam was walking down this street at my side, I wonder if there is anything I can buy that would make Maryam smile again. Thoughts that carried more of a gravitational force than their bright, weightless appearance might have suggested. For the most part he skirted a frank admission of what would have been immediately apparent, if only he’d had someone to talk with, in order to avoid sharp-edged feelings of guilt and betrayal. It was only in the very early hours of morning, somewhere in the deniable space between sleep and wakefulness, that he was able to come anywhere near the idea that he had already betrayed Tobias so completely, so flagrantly, that a second betrayal could not add to his guilt in any meaningful way. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said aloud one of these mornings, to no one other than his invisible listeners, before rolling over and falling asleep with a sigh.

  It was the prospect of not seeing her again that made him prepare so thoroughly for their meeting at a cafe near the fairground. The last thing he wanted was for her to realize he had been lying all along. He combed his hair, put on a tie, attached a luggage tag to his new briefcase to suggest he’d recently flown in from somewhere and downloaded an app that would make his phone ring at a prearranged time, at which point he planned to apologize for the interruption and turn away to speak with Richard or the ambassador or one of the many secretaries in London who were working so hard on Maryam’s behalf.

  But Jonas was surprised to find that she was in no mood to discuss her mother. She hadn’t even sat down and she started firing questions at him.

  “What did you do to Tobias? Why did you make him go to Syria? Did you know that Daesh arrested a priest?”

  The cafe was across the road from the Corniche, and beyond it the sea. A huddle of old men talked fishing rods at the railing. Behind them a group of teenage boys slouched in folding chairs, their legs long and bent like those of a spider, waiting to see what passing girls they could trap. Where it touched his shoulder, Jonas could feel the window vibrating with the dance music from their car stereo.

  “A British priest has been held hostage since last year,” he said. He stood and tried to pull out a chair for her, but she was in the way and wouldn’t move. “Is that who you mean? I haven’t heard anything to suggest —”

  “People are saying there is another one – a new one. This week.” Her arms were folded. “When did you hear a message from Tobias the last time?”

  “The letter you —”

  “The letter I gave you? What? This was the last time? But he wrote this more than ten days ago!”

  “The fact we haven’t heard from him doesn’t mean he’s in trouble,” Jonas said. He was standing next to her. He could see fine lines around her eyes and mouth that belonged to a happier person. At the table next to them four school students argued over a laptop. “I advised him not to send messages unless it was absolutely necessary. There are always rumours floating around. Most of the time they come to nothing. Please, Maryam, sit down and tell me what you’ve heard.”

  She remained standing and shook her head to repulse the advancing waiter. Her dark hair was tied back with a rubber band and she was wearing jeans and a loose blue shirt. She held a mobile phone clenched tightly in her right hand and with the fingers of her left hand she scratched violently at her thumb until blood showed.

  “The caretaker of Tobias’s church heard it from his neighbours; they have a nephew who is married to a woman from Raqqa. And I have a cousin who was forced to become a Muslim and join Daesh.” She closed her eyes as though she wanted to remember everything. “He tried to leave but they will not let him, he needs permission even to travel to the next town. He is not allowed to speak with his parents because they are Christian, but he hides a telephone from everyone around him. He told my uncle there is a foreign priest in the prison in Raqqa, he knows this because he saw him three days ago, he is not the very old one who was on the television before. It was the first priest he saw for a long time. He wanted to say something. He wanted to smile at him and ask for a blessing but he is afraid becau
se the other fighters will kill him if they know he is still a Christian.” She opened her eyes. “I told my uncle to find out where the priest is from.”

  This is real intelligence work, Jonas thought admiringly, this is the way to run a network: understand the sourcing chain, take into account motivation and access, task and re-task in search of greater clarity. “Has your cousin seen the other priest – the older one?” he asked.

  She waved away the question. “What are you doing to help Tobias?”

  “Even if it was Tobias that your cousin saw, and we can’t be sure that it was, it doesn’t mean that Daesh are holding him hostage. Remember that he has been there before. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “What is so important that he must go back there? What is he doing for you that no one else can do?”

  Jonas wasn’t sure he knew the answer to her question. He hadn’t heard from the kidnappers for four days. Everything had gone quiet after he had sent them three sample documents in response to their demand for the entire collection. He had tried to make sure that the samples were of high enough value that they would demonstrate he had access to intelligence of real interest and relevance, without giving away anything too important. But with each day that passed he found it harder to resist the conclusion he had somehow made an error of judgement.

  The first document, much of which Jonas hadn’t fully understood, had been a paper outlining the technical countermeasures being developed by the Five Eyes community to protect government websites from the ISIS cyberattack programme, which had taken down the US CENTCOM Twitter account. In what he imagined would be a useful conclusion, the paper identified those official websites its authors judged remained most vulnerable to attack, particularly of the “cross-site scripting” or “format string vulnerability” types. He added to this a GCHQ sigint report that contained verbatim transcripts of an ongoing email correspondence between one of the kidnappers and a Cyprus-based facilitator who was in the process of buying five specialist rifle scopes through a criminal associate. Jonas felt the final document should focus on something human, something that would appeal to the kidnappers on a personal level, and so he chose a surveillance report detailing the movements, on a given day, of a young man at least one of them had grown up with in London who had tried and failed to join them in Syria on a number of occasions, as he went between a gym, a bookmaker’s, a mosque, his girlfriend’s flat, a Poundland shop and the Camden High Street branch of Chicken Cottage. “I have hundreds and hundreds of documents similar to these but of much greater value,” Jonas wrote in the accompanying email. “Please seize this opportunity. Nothing will be the same after this.”

  “When will Tobias come back?” Maryam asked.

  “It’s very hard for me to make those decisions for him,” he said. “The thing to remember is that he has been there before and spoken to those people before. It’s a difficult position he is in, I accept that. But this was something he felt he could do.”

  “You keep on saying this. You think that if everything happens this time like it happened last time, Tobias will be fine. You think that because he went there and came back everything was all right. Do you know what happened to him? Do you know what they did? The guards wore masks. They gave him electric shocks all over his body and they hit him more than one hundred times with the generator belt from a truck. They put him in a position called the scorpion. One hand is pushed behind his back and the other hand over his shoulder and they put on handcuffs so he stays like this for a long time. Now tell me, do you still believe that he will be all right? Do you think he will survive that again?”

  Jonas sat down. If he turned one way he could see the old lighthouse; if he turned the other he could see the Ferris wheel. It looked as though they both belonged to the fairground, as though the lighthouse was a helter-skelter ride, nestled at the edge of the city.

  “We don’t know that this is what’s happening, Maryam,” he said. “We have your cousin, someone under an enormous amount of pressure, who has seen someone he thinks is a priest in a Daesh prison. Was this person wearing a priest’s collar? Was he being held for an hour or a day or a week? Was he being mistreated? Is he still there? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.” It didn’t cross his mind any more to ask himself whether he believed his own words. Whatever moral equation he had been trying to balance had long since collapsed, leaving him with a jumble of elements but nothing to connect them, no plus or minus or equals. “What I can tell you is that I wouldn’t have asked Tobias to go and he wouldn’t have said yes if we didn’t both believe that it was important enough to justify the risks.”

  “Tobias will always say yes if you ask him for help. He is not the right person to say if he can do this again.” Maryam took a step towards Jonas. The blood on her finger had marked her jeans. There were tears in her eyes and she was shouting. “You know this. This is how you work. You find people who are in a difficult position, you make them say yes and then you tell yourself that they are doing it freely. Does Tobias look like a healthy person? Does he look like a person who sleeps properly, does he look like a person who is happy? Does he look like a person who is strong enough to go to the worst place on the earth and make a deal with murderers and torturers and rapists and slave traders? Do you think it will be a problem when he vomits because he hasn’t had a drink, that he won’t be able to think clearly because his head is hurting all the time and he can’t sleep? Do you think it will be a problem if they smell alcohol when he sweats?”

  My father is going to die, he wanted to tell her. The world is not allowed to proceed as normal. “This is how intelligence works,” he said quietly. “The targets are damaged, we send damaged people after them.”

  “What kind of person are you? Why don’t you go there?”

  “I am going there.”

  Tears flooded her eyes. Everyone in the cafe was looking at them. He watched her pick up a glass and then pause, uncertain as to what she should do next. He nodded imperceptibly as though giving her permission. The least he could do was accept unflinchingly whatever pain she wanted him to experience. She flung the glass at him. It caught the side of his head and spun off to skitter across the neighbouring table, cracking the screen of the children’s laptop on the way.

  As she walked out, Jonas’s phone began to ring. The thought that there would be no one at the other end made him feel very alone.

  3

  There was an art to the practice of the dead letter box. Raza had chosen the location carefully. Although it was dark, Jonas knew that he was walking in the right direction because he could see the old lighthouse ahead of him, rising above the buildings that surrounded it. Its white stripes floated like smoke rings into the late evening gloom. Somewhere behind him a car engine started.

  The road narrowed. Other than a Filipino maid walking two small dogs there was no one around. He had received instructions in a typed note pushed under his door that morning. “From now on this is how we will communicate with each other. Memorize the map.” A detailed pencil sketch of the neighbourhood was on the back of the piece of paper, along with a new mobile number and the instruction that it should only be used in emergencies. “Make sure to visit other places before and afterwards. Near the bottom of the lighthouse is a wall with a circle of green paint. Pull out the stone that is three to the left of this. There is a metal lamp post at the end of your road. Someone will tie a piece of red string around it each time we put something there for you. Check at least once each day. If you have left something for us, place a piece of chewing gum on the same lamp post at head height. There is something there now. Go tonight.”

  The headlights of a turning car strafed the trees and the buildings and allowed him to pick out, even at this distance, a momentary burst of green near the base of the lighthouse. He thought about a cover story. Taking photographs, treasure hunt for a friend, for a child, for the child of a friend. Geocaching. Historian, amateur archaeologist. A cat trotted parallel to him on a wa
ll, its head upright and its back arched as though performing dressage. Jonas knelt to tie his shoelaces. The stone came out easily. As he walked away he pushed the bundle into his pocket. No one shouted at him, no one came running after him. No one shot at him.

  He didn’t look until he was inside his apartment. It was hard to make the bills lie flat. Two hundred dollars in twenties. “We are getting something for you,” the note read. “Proof that your father is still alive. Look for the signal.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1

  Jonas recognized her immediately from the photographs he had been shown by Raza. In person she looked a little greyer, a little older, in her mid-sixties at least, as though she had aged in the few days since the picture had been taken. The door to the embassy interview room clicked shut behind him. On the wall was a notice reminding applicants that any false statements would result in their visa being denied.

  “We’ve not met before, have we?” she asked in a soft Edinburgh accent. Her hair was cut in a severe bob and she was wearing a black roll-neck sweater. “Not properly, anyway. The odds are we’ve passed each other in a corridor once or twice. My name is Meredith. I hope you won’t mind if I dispense with formalities and call you Jonas. I’m afraid we’ve been a little incoherent on our side. Lacking clarity, generating more heat than light. That’s why I’m here. To slow the conversation down, give everyone a chance to say what’s on their mind, allow us both to draw breath.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners like cigarette paper when she smiled. “How does that sound to you?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” said Jonas. A camera watched him from a small black dome in the corner of the ceiling. “Before he turned up at my door this morning I hadn’t seen Desmond Naseby for over a week. There’s a CIA man called Harvey who sometimes phones in the middle of the night to threaten me, but I wouldn’t call it a conversation.”