by Henry Porter
Samson looked at Nyman, who had got up and was studying the wall of photographs. ‘Fine,’ he murmured, and hung up.
‘I must say you do bear a striking resemblance to your father,’ Nyman said without turning to him. ‘It could so easily be you in these early photographs. But you’re taller and his nose is straight, while yours looks like it was recently broken. But you both wear a suit well.’ He straightened. ‘I do enjoy a wall of photos like this – tells you so much. More people should do it, though I suppose it’s only a family like yours, which has been through the mill – losing and gaining so much – that needs to keep the past in front of them in this way. It’s rather moving.’ He gave Samson what seemed a genuine smile, then dug in his inside pocket and withdrew a card. ‘I’ll see you at this address in . . . shall we say an hour? And thank you for agreeing to come.’
When Nyman had left, Samson rang Macy Harp back. ‘He has no idea about the Hisami job, right?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Because it would be in keeping with their MO to use our search for Aysel Hisami for their own ends.’
‘They don’t know about her or her brother. When he asked me what you were doing I prattled on about artefacts, but watch him. He has a good nose and he doesn’t miss anything. We don’t need them finding out about Denis. He is very, very keen that nothing gets out, as you know.’
Samson recalled the slight, dapper figure of the billionaire Denis Hisami and remembered noting, as he spoke about his sister, the huge intelligence in the man’s eyes.
‘What about this thing Nyman wants me to do? Did he tell you about it?’
‘Not much. It might be up your street, and it could be important. See what he’s got to say. It’s up to you, of course. The main thing is that we haven’t got anything on at the moment. And won’t have for a few weeks.’
*
The boy moved from the shadow of the huge port building to the dock where the ship would berth. He was anxious about showing himself, because just as he had been boarding the ship for Athens without a ticket two nights before, the police spotted him and took him back to the compound in the camp for unaccompanied minors.
The boy ignored the families that were gathered in little groups on the edge of the quay and moved quickly, with his head down, to the orderly line of young men waiting for the water bottles that were being handed out from the back of a truck about twenty metres away. He was looking for someone to help carry out the plan he’d formed two nights before. He had a particular image – a teenager, slight in build and from Iraq or Syria. In other words, someone who could pass as his older brother.
He walked along the line of young men, smiling as he went. It was amazing to him how alike they were. They all wore jeans and trainers and, because a sharp wind was blowing from the harbour’s mouth – the very same wind that had capsized his raft two weeks ago – they’d put on hats and as many jackets as they could get. Some were wrapped in the blankets given out at the camps to every individual with a note: Winter is coming. Keep this blanket with you at all times. It is a gift. The boy had left his blanket at the camp. He knew he would be able to steal someone else’s when he needed one.
He talked to several youths in the line, sounding them out gently about their plans. This was hard, because he felt so young and several of them made it clear they didn’t want him around. One told him to get lost. Eventually he came across one kid of about sixteen, in a hat with earflaps, who brightened when he introduced himself. He was Syrian and alone in the world, his family having been wiped out by a government airstrike eighteen months before, a horror he’d witnessed and spoke about in the first minutes of their conversation. His name was Hakim and he had the strange habit of looking at the ground with his mouth hanging open when he listened. He definitely wasn’t stupid though, he just seemed keen to oblige, and as they spoke he offered the boy half an apple and then a sweet. The boy gave his real name – Naji. He knew he had found his mark and began to describe his predicament, which was simply that he was deemed too young to travel by himself and was therefore unable to acquire a ticket for the Blue Star to Piraeus, even though he had the money for the fare. All he needed to do was get to the Greek mainland, and to pay anyone who would help him.
Hakim looked at him from beneath the peak of his hat. ‘How much?’
Naji suggested thirty euros.
‘I’ll think about it for forty.’
‘Thirty-five.’
Hakim nodded and they shook hands and bumped fists. ‘Tell me your idea,’ said Hakim.
‘When we’ve got the water bottles we’ll go over there and I’ll show you.’
They practised for a long time. First Naji walked ahead of Hakim with Hakim’s hand on his shoulder; then they swapped so Hakim was leading, but that didn’t work much better. Naji asked Hakim to play the part so he could watch, but no matter how much direction Naji gave him, Hakim was a very poor actor and he kept dissolving into giggles. He said he hadn’t laughed like that for a long time. Naji found himself getting very stern. At length he gave up on him and said he would play the main part himself. They went through what Hakim would say several times and he more or less had it right by the time the huge ship reversed into the dock and trucks began to unload containers from the stern.
Two gangways were lowered to the quay on the left of the vehicle ramp and lines hurriedly formed, families on the left and single travellers on the right. The queues snaked for a hundred metres across the dark quayside. But there was a hold-up and they couldn’t start boarding. A container had toppled over during the crossing and it had to be lifted by a squat, mobile crane with four-wheel steering, something that fascinated Naji, who was drawn to all machinery. If he hadn’t been so worried about getting on the boat he’d have left the line to watch the operation on the vehicle deck.
The delay turned out to be really useful because another big ship was due in the port and would need the dock. Once the rogue container was out of the way the crew were anxious to load the new cargo and the two thousand-odd refugees waiting on the quay as quickly as possible. Police and soldiers walked along the lines urging people to keep moving forward and told them not to rest their possessions on the ground every time the line stopped.
What had inspired him two nights before was a similar urgency. He’d watched a couple of young men, one of whom was blind and was being led by the other. Just before the police seized Naji, he saw the pair reach the top of the gangway and keep going without anyone inspecting their tickets. Naji thought the blind man might have had something else wrong with him because he was very slow to react when the other man spoke to him, and he guessed this helped smooth their way onto the boat
It was now past 1 a.m. and the ship was an hour late leaving the port. The soldiers were herding the last few dozen migrants up the gangway. Among them were Naji and Hakim. As they waited on the gangway, shivering in the cold, just a few paces from the ticket inspection, Naji poured most of the contents of his water bottle down the front of his jeans, creating an impressive dark stain. He let the bottle fall into the sea then, with one arm clamped on Hakim’s shoulder, strained forward with his eyes roaming sightlessly in their sockets. He may have overdone things a bit by dribbling and twitching but it certainly had the desired effect on the man collecting the tickets, who looked away with embarrassment. Right on cue, Hakim went through the charade of looking for and finding his ticket, which he produced with a flourish. Then they set about looking for Naji’s non-existent ticket, but this was delayed by the discovery of the young man’s little accident. People behind them began to complain. A police officer called up from the dockside to ask what the problem was. For one moment it looked like both of them were going to be thrown off the ferry, but the inspector relented when Naji’s twitches seemed to indicate that he was building up to some kind of seizure, and he waved them through.
Once they were up on the highest deck, watching the
port retreat, it took them a good hour to stop congratulating themselves and reliving the moment when Naji was struck with the shakes. They were laughing so much that Naji quite forgot to hand over the thirty-five euros and Hakim was forced to remind him gently about the money.
*
It took Samson twenty minutes to walk to the address – a stuccoed town house tucked in the streets behind the run of clubs in Pall Mall. He remembered it well from his first interview with SIS twelve years before, an interview that he hadn’t sought and certainly had not expected to pass. The place was used for discreet meetings and lunches with people who did not necessarily want to be seen going into the SIS headquarters on the Thames. Samson was surprised that it hadn’t been sold off to save money.
Sitting with Nyman around the table were three other people, two of whom he recognised: Sonia Fell, a very sharp Balkans specialist of his generation, whom Samson liked but did not trust – far too ambitious – and Chris Okiri, an Anglo-Ghanaian from counter-intelligence, whom he rated very highly. Another man, compact and efficient-looking, got up and introduced himself as Jamie O’Neill.
Nyman was in a hurry. ‘The Official Secrets Act which you signed all those years ago obviously still pertains, Mr Samson.’
Samson nodded. ‘Of course. And you can call me Paul.’
Nyman took no notice. ‘Would you take us through it, Sonia?’
Sonia Fell tapped once at her keyboard and a photograph of a large number of grey sacks appeared on a TV screen on the wall. ‘These are body bags,’ she said quietly. ‘Unusual for Syria. They contain the 150-odd victims of a massacre in a town named Hajar Saqat, about fifty miles west of the Iraq–Syria border, in territory then held by IS. Most of the victims were Christian men, but we believe there were some women among them. Satellite imagery tells us that it took place on or just after the ninth of September last year.’
Another image appeared – four pickup trucks moving in a dust trail across the desert. ‘We think these are the killers leaving the village. The vehicle with the black mark painted on the bonnet is associated with other incidents. The party dispersed in the late afternoon and it wasn’t possible to follow these vehicles by satellite, but we were able to draw some inferences from cell phone usage at the site and match those phones with other atrocities and actions.
‘Usually phones are changed or dumped, but two of these phones were kept long enough for us to really make a study of them. When the individuals using them changed phones we were able to continue to monitor those men and plot their travels – we had very accurate voice signatures. About three weeks ago we lost them. The voices went off air, so to speak. The last we heard from these individuals was within an hour of each other on the Turkey–Syria border. We concluded that the phones were thrown away or destroyed as the men left Syria – just about here.’ She brought up a map with a circle marked on the border, south of a Turkish town named Harran. Refugee camps were also marked on the map, all of which Samson knew well.
‘You’re assuming they crossed over,’ said Samson, ‘but they might just as easily have dumped their phones and stayed on the Syrian side of the border. Anything could have happened. They could have been killed.’
‘That’s where Tim McLennan’s information comes in,’ said Nyman. ‘You probably remember McLennan. He’s been in the Athens embassy for the last year. He has come across an interesting story. Chris, take over, would you?’
Okiri, who had been distractedly unscrewing and screwing up the top of a water bottle, moved forward in his chair, suddenly very engaged. ‘The trio connected with the Hajar Saqat massacre were observed by a witness to those events in a refugee camp in Turkey two weeks ago – we don’t know which one. That same witness claims to have seen at least two of these individuals more recently in one of the camps in Lesbos. That means they are already in Europe and may be planning an attack. Trouble is we don’t have any idea of their identities and we don’t have photographs – none of the usual boasts and posts on social media. In fact, there’s nothing except the intelligence of this witness, which was brought to Tim McLennan’s notice by a contact of his in the NIS, the Greek security service. The head of NIS doubted its value.’
He took a swig from his water bottle. ‘But we do have something. We have a voice, and we have tied that voice to a phone used in the truck with the black square on the hood, as Sonia explained. The guy using this vehicle was the commander of the death squad. He speaks Arabic with a hint of Europe in his accent. The language experts say he has probably spent most of his life in Northern Europe – maybe Holland, Germany or Sweden – although he does speak good Arabic. This makes us think that the men under him are also of European origin, as that is the way these goons work. But there’s something else about his voice – he has a very rare speech impediment, which occurs in only one in every hundred thousand people. Someone at GCHQ noticed that he makes a strangulated sound every few sentences, at which point his voice drops to a whisper and words get lost.’
‘We had a speech therapist listen to the recordings,’ continued Okiri, ‘and she identified the condition as spasmodic dysphonia, which is caused by a spasm in the vocal cords and gives the voice that choked quality. This character – we call him Black Square because he used that vehicle a lot last year – has it bad. Sonia is going to play you a recording of one of the intercepts.’
They waited as she searched for the file on her desktop. ‘Here you go,’ she said brightly.
There was a man’s voice shouting a tirade in Arabic, punctuated by clicks and sudden whispers. Then, right at the end, came a snatch of what seemed like song, in which the same threats were repeated, but in quite a good singing voice.
‘Goodness, what’s that?’ asked Samson. ‘I mean the song.’
Okiri smiled. ‘As an Arabic speaker you will know that he is telling his associate that he is going to cut off his testicles and insert them in his rear end because of his failure to fill all the vehicles with gas. But you can only really hear that when he sings the line. The therapist says that singing is the only way he can make himself understood when the condition kicks in badly, and that it happens a lot when he is stressed and the vocal cords go into spasm.’
‘This is how Black Square was recognised in a refugee camp in Turkey,’ said Nyman, anxious to move proceedings along. ‘The witness who escaped the massacre at Hajar Saqat was in the camp a year later and heard the voice of the man he had seen slaughter his neighbours. He was able to put a face to the killer, who had been masked that day. The witness was able to identify two others as probably being in Hajar Saqat.’
‘So this witness knows what they look like,’ said Samson. ‘Presumably there’s some photographic record of these men. They have to be registered, fingerprinted and photographed if they are to be accepted as Syrian refugees, right? So it’s simply a matter of taking your witness through the photographs and circulating the faces.’
‘We don’t know which camp it is,’ said O’Neill.
‘The witness vanished before we could act on the report,’ said Nyman. ‘He’s on the road to Northern Europe. I am afraid we don’t even know the boy’s name.’
‘Boy? You said boy!’
‘Yes, the source of this intelligence is a boy of about twelve or thirteen. But I should stress that he’s exceptionally precocious – very bright and well able to look after himself, apparently. An exceptional individual, by all accounts.’ He stopped and peered at a paper in front of him, then looked up at Samson. ‘What we want you to do is find him.’
Before he’d finished, Samson was shaking his head. ‘Let me just get this right. You’re asking me to find a boy on any one of the four or five migrant routes into the EU, each of which is at least two thousand kilometres long and has many thousands of people on it? These routes change every day – you know that.’
‘I believe you’ll pick him up quite quickly,’ Nyman said. ‘We’ll circulate inf
ormation to the border guards, police and NGOs, telling them that this boy needs to be apprehended for his own safety. And then you can interview him.’
‘I’m just wondering why McLennan’s not doing this,’ said Samson. ‘It’s his information and he’s on the spot in Greece.’
‘McLennan’s wife is about to give birth,’ Nyman said. ‘Besides, have you seen McLennan recently? He’s put on a lot of weight – he couldn’t possibly do this. You’re perfect for the job. You speak Arabic. You are utterly familiar with this territory and the situation with refugees because of your recent assignments for Macy Harp.’
Samson held up a hand. ‘Can we just go back a bit? How do we even know the men have recognised this boy?’
Okiri gave Nyman a doubtful look, which he ignored. ‘It’s in the psychologist’s report,’ Nyman said. ‘The whole story comes from a woman who works in one of the camps in Lesbos as a psychologist and counsellor to the refugees. She didn’t believe the lad’s story at first but then she emailed the essence of what he’d told her to the man who ran the camp. She wrote in English because he is Swedish. He gave it to the police who passed it on to the NIS. She said the boy had tried to make a run for it because he knew these men had seen him in the camp in Lesbos. She suggests that they had pursued him from the camp in Turkey to the Turkish coast, and somehow located him on Lesbos.’
‘When did the boy go?’
‘Not exactly sure, but within the last thirty-six hours.’
‘Do we have the report?’
‘McLennan has not been able to get hold of it yet. That’s why you’re going to have to talk to this psychologist before you start looking for the boy. We’ve got you a seat on a plane. The CIA is flying some of their people to Cyprus – the plane leaves from Northolt at 5.30 a.m. tomorrow. They’ve agreed to drop you off at Mytilene on Lesbos. Of course, all this depends on whether you’d consider helping us out.’