Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  Jonas would have a few uninterrupted minutes in which to work. It didn’t take long to get the bottom screw out, and the top screw succumbed after several minutes to pressure from a blade he managed to remove from the potato peeler. The window, sealed shut by years of accreted cooking fat, opened with an audible pop, like the lid of a jar. A strong wind rushed about the kitchen. It seemed more likely that Harvey would feel the draught than hear any noise, especially with the sounds of splashing and shouting coming from the bathroom, and so Jonas jumped down to wedge tea towels into the gap beneath the door. He waited for a period of light-headedness to pass. He had to hold his rucksack in outstretched hands and send them out first, and it was only after some wriggling that he was able to fit his torso through the window. It was a sheer drop through the darkness to the road below. The wind was blowing fiercely, whipping at the edge of a tarpaulin on the roof of the building next door. Twisting at the waist so that he was sitting with his legs still inside, he threw the rucksack up and over the lip of the hotel roof and braced himself in case he had misjudged the distance and it came straight back down on top of him. The wind slowly unwrapped the tea towel from his hand and carried it away. He didn’t know what to do next. He began to pull his left leg out to see whether he could stand on the ledge and reach up to the roof but then he slipped and it was only his right leg, still inside the kitchen, that hinged suddenly at the knee to find a grip against the wall and stop him from falling. He was tiring rapidly. His leg started to cramp.

  Someone whistled. A solitary Syrian construction worker was smoking a cigarette and looking up at him from the roof of the neighbouring building, no more than twenty metres away. He smiled and waved. Jonas waved back and pointed to the top of the hotel, and the construction worker just nodded, as if that was an entirely natural place to want to be at this time of the morning, as though Jonas’s was the most obvious way of getting there. He picked his way through the gloom between stacks of concrete blocks and disappeared from sight down a half-built stairwell. Jonas thought he might return with the foreman. But he emerged with a long wooden ladder that looked far too big for one person to lift, carried it effortlessly over to the edge of the roof, stood it upright and pushed it out into the void between the two buildings in full confidence that it was long enough to reach the opposite side. Only then did he pause to take the cigarette out of his mouth. A bundle of wires had been strung between the two buildings; Jonas wondered whether the ladder had been used for just this purpose before, whether the hotel was providing the Syrian labourers with their electricity and cable television. Suddenly the man’s hand was dangling above him like a rope with a knot in the end. And once Jonas was safely on the roof the man gave him a cigarette and dressed his wound with a strip of cloth he tore from his shirt, and Jonas didn’t even try to pretend that the tears of gratitude streaming down his face were anything to do with the pain in his hand or the bruises on his body or the cold wind that hurried down towards the sea.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The three black SUVs with diplomatic plates ignored the lukewarm protestations of the solitary security guard, roused abruptly from the comfort of his plastic chair, and parked directly outside the hotel entrance. Meredith climbed out of the first vehicle. In total seven people streamed into the lobby and across to the bank of lifts. Outside it was turning light and the wind had dropped. The building next to the hotel was open at its front to the elements like a doll’s house, and from where he stood across the road Jonas was able to trace the route he had just taken past sleeping workers, around cement mixers and bags of concrete and down half-built stairwells to the street below. He had to get out of the area quickly. It would be unforgivable to have gone to such lengths to get off the eleventh floor only to stand around in plain sight as a series of American and British heads appeared at the kitchen window to see for themselves how he might have escaped, where he might be hiding, whether he was still in the area.

  He checked again that he had switched Naseby’s phone off and removed the battery. For what he had in mind he would need a certain kind of location – one with multiple exits, one that was somewhere along the route Meredith would expect him to be taking out of the city. He considered the airport road heading south out of Beirut and remembered signs for a 24-hour shopping mall and cinema complex. That might work. He pulled his cap down low, took a side street away from the hotel and caught the first taxi he saw.

  The mall was open and he found five internet terminals in a cafe on the second floor. The manager was asleep on a dirty mattress at the back of the room. There was a payphone on the wall outside. Despite the early hour, Raza answered on the second ring.

  “It’s me,” said Jonas.

  “This number is strictly for emergencies only. Leave a written message in the other place.”

  “Wait, wait – this is an emergency. I wouldn’t have called unless it was urgent.”

  Raza was quiet for a moment. “Where are you?” he asked.

  Jonas told him the name of the mall.

  “And this is one of the payphones on the second floor? Opposite the cigarette kiosk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hang up, walk around for five minutes and then go up to the third floor. There is a payphone at the furthest end next to a shop with video games in the window. Wait there.”

  “But this —”

  The line went dead.

  A huge banner advertising an action film was draped across the outside of the third-floor windows, cutting off what little daylight there was. Most of the shops were empty or boarded up. A warm breeze squeezed through smashed windowpanes and sifted through the rubbish – newspapers, food wrappers, cigarette stubs, dead leaves – that collected in corners and along edges. It was easy to find the phone because it was already ringing.

  “Tell me what happened,” said Raza. “Try to avoid names.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Jonas. He took a deep breath. “I’ve found out what they’re doing here, the people you told me about, the ones in the pictures. It’s all to do with tunnels, Raza, it’s going to happen underground, they’ve been digging. There’s no time to waste – they’re going to do it today. They’ve been working on this for months and months and after today they’ll be gone and there’ll be no trace of anything left behind —”

  “Stop, please. Stop! You are not making any sense. Start again. This is the woman from your country and her colleague, correct?”

  “And the man from the other country.”

  “Of Chinese appearance? All right. You said they are doing something underground. What do you mean?” asked Raza.

  Jonas took another deep breath. “I’ve found out why they’ve come here, why there are so many of them. This secret project of theirs, it’s something technical, they’re running some kind of cables or wires – I don’t know exactly – under the Iranian embassy. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that aloud. But I think they’ve found a way to tap into the electrical system or the communications exchange or the servers that will let them listen in to all the phone calls and read all the emails coming in and going out.”

  It had been known as Operation Gold. A joint CIA and SIS plan, conceived in 1951 and completed in 1955, to dig a tunnel that would allow them to tap into the secret communications of the Soviet military headquarters just outside Berlin. Jonas had decided to go with a plot that had some sort of historical precedent. He had considered saying something more futuristic, something about computer malware or nano-drones, safe in the knowledge that in the field of technology you could get away with almost anything, that even the wildest of claims would be difficult to dismiss out of hand. After all, Hezbollah and its Iranian backers must be in a permanent state of paranoia that someone on the other side was developing tools and techniques they hadn’t even dreamed of yet – a tracking beacon the size of a mosquito, say, or a sensor capable of reading a person’s mood from their eye movements at a distance of a hundred feet. But given Raza’s age he would probably find it easier to g
rasp a threat he could understand, Jonas had decided, and so he went on talking breathlessly about tunnels and wires.

  “It’s taken them over a year to get to this point,” he explained.

  “Tell me how you learned this.”

  “It wasn’t easy. But I pieced it together by —”

  “Give me the individual pieces and I will assemble them —”

  “I was drinking with the red-haired Englishman last night. At his hotel.” Jonas didn’t know whether their movements had been observed by Raza’s men. “Exactly as you asked me to do. It didn’t take much to get him talking about the woman. I told you that he was bitter about something, didn’t I? Well, basically he’s done all the work for this big project and now she’s coming in at the eleventh hour to claim the credit. Apparently the only thing she’s thinking of is her own career and how to get the top job. That’s what he called it – the top job.”

  “Where were you before you went to his hotel?”

  “At the embassy.”

  “His room number, what is it?” asked Raza.

  “112 something. 1129, I think.”

  “What clothing was he wearing?”

  “White shirt and chinos.”

  “What were you drinking?”

  “Whisky.”

  “Which brand?”

  “God, I don’t know. Hang on, that’s it – Tullamore Dew. I’d never heard of it before. Have you heard of it?”

  “Continue.”

  “Right, okay, let me get this in the right order,” said Jonas. “When he was telling me how much work he’s done and how much credit he deserves, he says something like this, you won’t be able to find many people who know as much as I do about bricks. Yes, bricks. I didn’t know what he was talking about either. Then five minutes later he asks if I know what a clinker is, and of course I don’t, and then he starts listing these other things – sand-lime bricks, engineering bricks, fired-clay bricks, dry-pressed bricks – and he says that this one is easier to drill through than that one, but that other one retains moisture which can damage wires or cables, and this one crumbles in very hot weather but – and this is the key bit – there’s not much chance of the sun shining thirty feet under the sodding ground. You see? It’s a tunnel! What do you think?”

  “I am going to hang up. There is another telephone at the far end of the floor you are on. Do you have some money? Good. This time you will call me after two minutes. Write this number down.”

  The payphone was outside the toilets. On the wall someone had drawn a heart between two Arabic names. There was a smell of warm sewage and the sound of a broken cistern or a tap left running.

  “You were in the middle of educating me about bricks.” Raza sounded more amused than alarmed. “Please continue.”

  “Okay, so later on he’s talking about the way that everyone in his office thought this project wouldn’t work, and he said that he’s been telling them for months now they’ll need to hire seven or eight new linguists to deal with the amount of material they’ll have coming in but personnel has been saying it’s difficult to find them. And he says, how hard can it be, you can always retrain a couple of the Arabic-speakers, after all it’s practically the same alphabet. That’s Farsi, right? He’s talking about Farsi!”

  “Or Sorani or Urdu or Pashtu,” said Raza. “There are probably fifty million people in the world who speak Pashtu. But go on.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s happening today. He kept on saying he’d only have one more drink because today was match day. This is how he talks, Raza, it’s like an Englishman’s code. He can’t step on to centre court with a foggy head, too much whisky will affect his service game, that sort of thing. He’s being picked up at six by Harvey, the American. That’s – goodness, that’s right now. And he’s flying back to London tomorrow, along with everyone else. He calls them his ballboys and ballgirls.”

  Raza was quiet. Jonas wondered whether he had hung up.

  “So you are telling me that a senior officer,” he finally said, “one whom they will no doubt assume is well known to us and our partners, is planning to visit the actual location of an underground tunnel they have constructed over many months and in complete secrecy to run underneath a heavily guarded embassy, this is what you are saying? Despite the strong possibility that this visit will be noticed and all their work will come to nothing? I want to understand you correctly, this is all.”

  Jonas heard the echo of footsteps and a squeaking noise. A man in grey overalls slowly came into view. He was using a mop handle to steer a shopping trolley loaded with cleaning materials across the floor.

  “I’m just telling you what I know.” Jonas’s experience of Middle Eastern intelligence agencies was that there was little downward delegation of responsibilities, that any decision of even potential significance was pushed upwards to the man in charge. “Perhaps he has to approve everything before they flick the switch. As the boss, I mean.”

  “Their people have not come within a mile of the area you are describing and they have not made any serious attempt to remain hidden from us. Instead they have followed you around.”

  “I’m just telling you what I know,” Jonas repeated. “Maybe everything else was a smokescreen. Maybe they’ve been pulling the wool over your eyes.”

  “You keep on saying you are telling me what you know, but you don’t really know very much, do you?” said Raza. “Your friend didn’t actually say anything about telephone calls or emails, this is correct?”

  “Not in those exact —”

  “He did not use those words.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “And he did not mention the embassy by name.”

  “Ah, I forgot this bit, when he had fallen asleep I looked round his rooms and found a map of Beirut that was folded so this part of the city was in the middle.”

  The cleaner steered the squeaking trolley past Jonas and into the toilets.

  “Allow me to guess,” said Raza. “Circles in red ink, arrows pointing to the embassy? X marks the spot? This is what you are going to tell me?”

  Jonas ignored the sarcasm. “No, nothing like that. But I looked through his wallet and all the receipts were from places near the embassy: the Starbucks where he buys his morning coffee, a place called Al Balad on Nejmeh Square where he eats lunch, that kind of thing.” Any details he could provide that matched what they might have seen for themselves would go a long way. “Except for two receipts from shops in this mall. It’s so close to the Iranian embassy I thought it must mean something. Maybe they’re using it as a base. Or maybe they’ve rented a shop here and that’s where they’re digging from, I don’t know. Maybe I have got a bit carried away, you’re right. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I thought if I came here I could keep a lookout and tell you if I see any of his team.”

  Raza was quiet. The cleaner emerged from the toilet and began mopping the floor just a few feet away. Jonas noticed that his overalls looked new, that the right buckle was twisted, that he hadn’t done anything about the running tap. He wondered whether he had pitched the plot at the wrong level. There were so many elements in his story that might lead Raza to sense something was wrong. That a senior professional like Naseby was capable of such breathtaking indiscretion, that sophisticated agencies like SIS and the CIA would adopt such old-fashioned and high-risk methods.

  “Are you still there?” Jonas asked.

  Raza was saying something he didn’t understand.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “I didn’t —”

  “Quiet.” He spoke again in Arabic to someone with him. His voice sounded distant as though he had lowered the phone. “Listen carefully. You will leave the shopping centre immediately. If they see you there you will be compromised and no longer of any value to us. We will not be able to help you with your father. Is this clear? Go to the basement level, enter the cinema and use the fire exit inside screen 3. There will be no staff on duty at this time of the morning. This exit will t
ake you into the parking area at the rear. The door is stiff and so you will need to push hard. Go now.”

  “Are you going to —”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  Jonas went down to the internet cafe on the floor below. The first computer he tried wouldn’t switch on, and as he worked his way down the line he realized that three of them didn’t have any cables and the other two were just screens with no hard drives attached. The manager was curled up in a ball, his head resting on a pair of trainers. A closed laptop with a dongle attached was next to him on the floor. It was already online; three different pornography websites were open. Jonas logged into the email account he used to communicate with the kidnappers and typed, as softly as he could,

  You told me to kill someone and send you the proof. Attached to this email are two photographs. The first one shows the diplomatic passport of a senior British spy and the second one shows his dead body. I have a video of his final few minutes. I will bring this with me and place it – and myself – in your hands along with the hundreds of intelligence documents I have stolen from the British government.

  The manager turned over and settled into a new position with a grunt. Jonas paused to allow him time to fall back into a deep sleep. He took Naseby’s phone out of his rucksack to check again that it was switched off. Meredith would have noticed right away that it was missing from the hotel and assumed Jonas had taken it, he had no doubt of that, or that a member of her team would have been instructed to stay on the line to Cheltenham and inform her the moment it reappeared on the mobile network. Once it was active it wouldn’t be long before they identified his exact location, and if they had already deployed all possible British and American assets widely across the city to look for him it might only be a matter of minutes after he switched it on before the first team showed up. Pressing each key as quietly as possible, Jonas continued.