by James Wolff
“Tobias is your father,” he said.
“Of course he is. Who did you think he was?”
They watched two helicopters pass high above them in the direction of the Syrian border.
“I… I didn’t know —”
“We do not have time for this now.” Maryam stood above him like his handler, her arms folded, waiting for him to keep his promise. “They will be waiting. You must go.”
His route took him further along the dried-up riverbed. When he climbed its stony banks he dropped to his hands and knees to avoid being seen against the horizon. It was difficult to keep to a natural walking pace. As long as any soldier who spotted him was tired and bored and counting down the minutes to the end of his shift, he thought, he might just pass for a Syrian refugee, or a Bedouin farmer looking for his goats, except that no farmer would keep a dog that limped. He smoked a cigarette or two and found himself worrying that his father would be able to smell them on him. He struck out across a flat expanse dotted with bare, gnarled trees. For a brief moment, he caught sight of Maryam walking far behind him. Every few hundred metres he stopped to listen for the sound of vehicles or aircraft or voices. Four miles, he estimated. Eighty-three minutes. And then he was in sight of the two stone buildings. He dialled the number.
“Yeah, I already got you.” That London voice again. As though they were arranging to meet in Ladbroke Grove or Whitechapel. “Stay put. Here they come, ready or not.”
It was another few minutes before they appeared. From a door in the furthest of the two buildings, the newer one with the corrugated tin roof. Small, not more than a dozen feet across. Tobias first, his grey clerical shirt buttoned at the neck and spotted with sweat where it was tight across his belly but otherwise upright, his face unmarked. Then his father. Small shuffling steps but no limp, no visible bruises, no bandages, no blood. A couple of clergymen walking to church on an unexpectedly beautiful Sunday morning, their clothes clean and neat, leaning into each other to exchange reflections on a sermon or a prayer. In no particular hurry, certainly.
A cluster of old bullet holes had punched through the wall facing Jonas and he could see something moving inside.
With each step they took towards him he saw more clearly what had happened. The story of the last forty-eight hours patterned into waves of dried salty sweat on Tobias’s shirt, on his father’s trousers, like the scum left on a beach after the sea retreats. A sudden departure, long hours in the back of a truck. Their clothes were marked with oil and grease and blood. Tobias didn’t have his glasses. Grey bandages covered the stubs of two fingers on his right hand. His father was shaking uncontrollably. The dog started barking.
Jonas took a bottle of water from his rucksack. Tobias held it to his father’s lips and then had a drink himself. “Are they really letting us go?” he asked. He seemed doubtful.
“Yes. We haven’t got much time.” Jonas wrapped the keffiyeh around his father’s head. “This’ll keep the sun off.” He took what food he had left and pushed it into Tobias’s pockets. “You won’t need this but just in case. It’s important that you listen. You’ve got to keep walking that way.” He pointed in the direction of a small hill less than seven hundred metres away where Maryam was waiting out of sight. “I know it’s difficult but you mustn’t stop. Keep going.”
“Jonas?” said his father.
“Yes?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to take you home.”
“Home?”
“You’ve got to keep walking. Tobias will help you. There’s no time to talk now, you’ve got to set off. Aim for that tree on its own over there, then fix that hilltop in your sights and walk as straight as the ground lets you until you get to a pile of large rocks and the ground starts to dip. There’s someone waiting for you there – a woman called Maryam. She’ll get you to safety.”
“Maryam?” said Tobias. He blinked repeatedly. “You brought her here?” He sounded dismayed.
“Jonas?” his father asked.
“Yes?”
“You’ll show us the way, won’t you?”
“I’ll catch you up in no time. I’ve just got a couple of things to do here first. I’ve got to give something to the man in that building. You mustn’t wait for me, though. I may take a different route and meet you at the road. In case you don’t see me. Just keep on walking.”
“Jonas?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful. He’s got a gun.”
The dog followed them for the first twenty metres and then turned back to look at Jonas. They had shaved a patch at the back of Tobias’s head and burned his skin with a hot instrument – it might have been a cross, it was hard to tell. He thought he saw his father try to turn around but Tobias kept him moving in a straight line. At the tree they didn’t pause, just changed direction and headed towards the hill. At their pace it might take them fifteen minutes to reach Maryam. With his back still to the building, Jonas scrolled through the call log on his phone, pressed dial and put it back in his pocket. He walked towards the door and stepped inside.
A blinding light bulb, a dirt floor. The door swung shut behind him. Stepping to one side, shielding his eyes, he could just about see the outline of a person in the far corner. From the ground up: blue trainers, skinny jeans. A white T-shirt with a picture of a beach and the words “Surf Hawaii” in bright pink letters. He took another step to the side, his hands open to show he wasn’t carrying anything. The bulb hanging low like a microphone into a boxing ring. Wispy beard, thin face. Long curly black hair, round wire-framed glasses. Mid-twenties at the most. He saw Jonas looking at his T-shirt.
“In case I get caught,” he said in a reedy voice. “It might buy me a minute or two. Time to get this out.” He pulled a large handgun from the back of his waistband. “Have you got the stuff?”
“It’s in my rucksack. Can I…?”
He waved the gun indifferently. Jonas found the USB stick and threw it to him.
“Passwords, yeah? No problem. We’ll get them off you later.”
“You’re very trusting.”
“Yeah, well. None of this was my idea.”
“We can call it a day if you want.”
“Now that you’re here. Sit down against that wall. Throw your bag into the middle.”
The dark dead weight of the gun swung loosely from his left hand like a pendulum. He looked familiar, Jonas thought. Files held on British nationals in Syria would have crossed his desk at some point. Photographs, biographical data, source reports with gossip from people who had known him.
“I’m glad someone senior decided this was worth the effort.”
“Oh man, did they love your email. Went down a storm.” He tucked the gun into his waistband and knelt down to open Jonas’s rucksack. “What was it, in the battle that is coming, everything will depend on intelligence, I will open the secret world before you like a book. They ate it up. But what’s that book going to say at the end of the day, that’s my question. This one’s a rat, that one’s a rat. Change up your emails. Don’t trust the internet. None of that’s going to make a real difference. We’re not some little poxy group like them Irish fellas can be infiltrated and shut down. We’re not hiding in the mountains like goat herders. We’re a state. You know where we are. You want us, come and get us.”
The light glinted off his round glasses. He took out the extra clothes Jonas had brought, shook them loose to check that nothing was hidden inside and threw them into a corner. It had been five or six minutes since Tobias and his father had set off. They would struggle to maintain that pace for long – at some point they would need to rest. Another fifteen minutes, no more than that, and they would be there.
“I suppose you’re right,” Jonas said. “The game has changed.”
“Game’s changed, your tactics haven’t. That’s what I’m saying.” His voice was calm and unemotional. He looked through the textbook on Greek and Roman temples and the Howard Carter biography, wi
ped their covers clean with the edge of his T-shirt and placed them carefully behind him. “Nothing surprising in that. Fall of the USSR, 9/11, the Arab Spring. Behind the curve, that’s where you lot are every single time. You talk about tactics as though they’re some big secret. Harass Muslims, stop brothers and sisters when they travel, follow them round, stick bugs in their bedrooms, take pictures of them at juma’a prayers. Am I right? It’s so low-level, it’s just got nothing to do with us any more. You should be embarrassed. Like using blowdarts against an elephant. That stuff works against criminals, maybe, if they’re dumb. It works against benefit cheats, people who put out their bins a day early. Yeah, that’s it – that’s your level. End of the day everyone should know their level. Fathers for Justice, people who wrap flags around chimneys. We’re not some group. We’re a nation.”
He had almost finished searching the rucksack. Tobias and his father would be out of sight by now but still a few minutes from Maryam, unless she had come to meet them.
“Those blowdarts have stopped plenty of attacks,” Jonas said.
“You’re not getting me.” He lifted out the binoculars and examined them from all sides. “It don’t matter. One little thing here or there don’t matter. You can kill me, you can kill everyone I know – it don’t matter. I take the bigger picture, I take the world-historical perspective.”
That’s it, Jonas thought. University of London, 2008. International Studies. Parents from the Gulf, youngest of five, one arrest for bicycle theft, no convictions. He wondered why they were still talking, when they would leave for the border.
“Right, let’s see what’s in your pockets.”
Jonas sat with his knees pulled up, the phone pressing into his stomach. He needed to keep it alive for as long as he could. “They taught you well at SOAS,” he said.
“Eh?”
“That world-historical stuff.”
“Yeah, whatever, nice one.”
“Didn’t they kick you out for something?” Jonas asked.
“We was obsessed with you guys them days.” He stood up and brushed the dirt away from his knees. “Thought you were everywhere. No one would use their phone, everyone walking in circles on their way home, brothers passing round Sheikh Awlaqi talks like we was secret agents. Hiding them in the library behind the books, texting Dewey numbers to the other brothers. A cleaner found one of the hotter ones. We forgot about the cameras everywhere. Kicked out for, what was it, radicalization.”
“You should write to them. An alumnus going on to bigger and better things.”
“Man, we was so excitable them days. Like kids. First time you read about Sykes–Picot and then you see some politician talking about respecting international borders. There’s no words for it. I’ve never been so excited in my life. Look, that man’s lying on TV! He’s actually being a real-life hypocrite! Get all the brothers here! In broad daylight! Oh my days! And he’s wearing a suit! Someone arrest him!”
“Do you think you’ll ever go back?”
“Come on, empty your pockets.”
“What’s that?”
“You heard me. Stop trying to buy time.” He took a knife from a pouch on his belt and opened the blade. “If you want to play games I’ll take a finger off right now for starters.”
“Wasn’t it drugs?”
“Eh?”
“The reason you were expelled.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe I’ve got it wrong. I’m sure I read something in a file about you getting caught trying to sell cannabis to freshers. Or was it that you were trying to pass off supermarket herbs as cannabis? Yes, that’s it. What are we talking – April 2010, somewhere around there? Quite an achievement to get caught doing that in this day and age, and at SOAS of all places. It’s clearly not for everyone – I’m not sure I could do it either. But I can definitely see how the whole radicalization story would go down better with your friends, given the strong position you take on hypocrisy, Hisham.”
“Man’s got a memory on him.” He held out his hand and waggled his fingers. “Come on.”
“Man’s got a memory on him? You never used to talk like that. I remember listening to some of your calls. Mama this, Mama that. You were younger then but still. Home counties, grade-A school student, first member of your family to go to university – I bet Mama was thrilled. Child of —”
“Pockets.”
“— a dentist and a teaching assistant but to hear you now you’d think you grew up on the roughest estate in the country.”
“Stop talking and empty your pockets.”
Jonas took out his passport.
“You came all the way to Raqqa but picked up a London accent, is that what happened, Hisham?”
“Give it here.”
“You don’t mind me calling you Hisham, do you? Some people want to leave all that stuff behind. You know: names, families. Who they used to be. Take on some kick-ass kunya. Abu Mujahid or Hamza al Britani or something like that.” Jonas threw his passport on the floor. Let him bend down and pick it out of the dirt. “What was it the brothers used to call you back in the day? Specsavers? Have I got that right? Were you a bit of a geek? It might have been behind your back. I’m sure it was affectionate, though. That’s how I recognized you, I think. All these years later and you’re wearing the same glasses. No Specsavers in Raqqa, is that it?”
“You having fun? We’ll have some fun later, don’t you worry.”
“Don’t take it personally. My advice is to embrace that side of your character – put the gun away, smarten up your hair, take a desk job in a ministry. With your education you could go far. I’m not trying to wind you up. I’ve always been a bit of a geek too. At the end of the day, there’s no point trying to get away from it, from who we are – it’ll always be there, like a preference for tea or coffee, like a criminal record. This road to Damascus stuff is harder than it looks. Best case is you uncover something that had been kept hidden, but the idea that you can become a different person is pie in the sky. You know I’m right, don’t you? I saw you put those books to one side so you can read them later. You were probably thinking, would that be 930 to 939, History of Ancient World, or 940 to 949, History of Europe? Whatever it is, once you’ve studied them you’ll know exactly what Roman ruins you’re blowing up if you ever get as far as the Beqaa Valley.”
“That’s enough chatting.”
“It’s a joke, Hisham. Lighten up. We both know you’ll never get that far. In fact, you’ve probably got as much territory now as you’ll ever have.”
“We’ve only just got started.”
“Yeah, but it gets complicated from here on in. You try running a country.”
“We are running a country.”
“You’re running a patch of desert and a couple of towns. Don’t get ahead of yourself. I can understand why people like you come out here, I really can. You get teased, people call you names, you feel like an outsider in your own country, you don’t make enough money or get the job you want. Girls won’t look at you. Truth is, though, that’s how everyone feels. That’s certainly how I feel most of the time. You just get on with it. It takes a special ego to turn some very ordinary feelings into a justification for raping slave girls and torturing old men. End of the day everyone should know their level, you said. If you were in America right now you’d be shooting up some school. That’s your level. You’d be writing your manifesto on Facebook, having a final wank over some internet porn, putting on your black coat and the boots with the platform soles to give you a bit more height and heading off to take revenge on some science teacher who gave you a B or a girl —”
He swung the gun across Jonas’s face.
“You can’t imagine the things I’ve done.” He walked over to the far corner. “Sit still and keep quiet.”
Jonas turned to one side and threw up. Blood from his head dripped into the puddle of vomit. It was a new category of pain, he thought, being hit with the butt of a gun. He slumped aga
inst the wall, breathing heavily. The phone was warm in his pocket like something alive. There was a crackling noise and a burst of static followed by Arabic speech; Hisham reached behind him for a handheld radio. Jonas wondered what the hold-up was. He thought they’d be on their way to the border immediately but there seemed to be no rush, as though Hisham was waiting for something. Military vehicles in the area, possibly, or drones overhead. By now Maryam would be leading Tobias and his father to safety. He tried to stay calm, stay focused, he tried to control his breathing. Thirty-six bullet holes among all four walls. Target practice or gunfight. No pattern to the holes, no clusters around a single point. Beams of sunshine, like the world outside was a sieve leaking light. Strange that you can see light in a dark room but not the other way around. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. He lifted his hand to his head and it came away covered in blood. He pressed his eye against one of the bullet holes. Sand, stones, weeds. He remembered his father teaching him to skim stones on a pond, the best ones the size and shape of a communion wafer. Some stones were big enough for a strongman competition, others were small and sharp like the head of an arrow whizzing through the air towards the sheriff’s men, or like something a ninja would throw in the dead of night, landing in a squirt of blood.
He could hear a noise. On the other side of the room Hisham held the radio pressed to his ear. But Jonas could hear something else: a low hum, a crunching noise like tyres on a gravel driveway, voices. He rolled to the side and looked through a different bullet hole. Boots, the side of a jeep. The Lebanese flag. Hisham hadn’t even looked up. It was three steps across to where he stood, but his balance might be off. Two steps to the door. The low-hanging light bulb would separate them, it would blind Hisham when he tried to aim. Better than waiting for the soldiers to walk in. They wouldn’t know who to shoot. Hisham heard the noise and looked up.
Jonas lunged for the door, pulled it open and stumbled out into the daylight. Two soldiers were standing by the driver’s door, a third at the back of the jeep. He put his hands up and ran towards them, shouting and pointing behind him to the hut so they would be ready with their guns when Hisham emerged. Jonas tripped and fell. When he looked up, the soldiers were laughing. Hisham, standing in the open doorway with the books in his hand, was laughing too.