by Henry Porter
Naji was breathing quickly and his heart was pounding. If he had been able to stop and think he’d have been aware of feeling something like surprise that adults could behave in this way. He would get that feeling when he saw something terrible in his homeland – the barrel bombs tumbling from the helicopter had seemed like something only a cruel child would do, not grown-ups. But it was the other way round – adults were the cruel ones. This man meant to hurt him, and he would take pleasure from it – he knew that. It was a pleasure he did not comprehend.
He wanted to get away – to grab his bag and stick from the car and run – but the man was still a danger and he obviously wasn’t going to allow Naji to escape. So Naji threatened him, slashing the air in front of the man’s face yet taking care not to allow him to grab hold of his arm. He stumbled, toppled backwards, clutched his leg and landed on his bottom. He yelled out again and writhed in agony and Naji thought he had hit his tailbone. The fury that had succeeded lust was now replaced by fear. He tried to get up but Naji told him in halting German, ‘Ich . . . werde . . . töten . . . dich,’ which meant, more or less, ‘I will kill you.’ His voice made a weird squeak and then went deep.
He put it down to his poor grasp of spoken German and went to grab his possessions through the open door of the car. As he grabbed hold of his bag, his eyes came to rest on the phone. Then he saw the fob, which was still in the ignition. He could either throw it away, or he could start the car and just drive off. He wouldn’t go far – just put some distance between him and his attacker. Of course, he had never been behind a wheel before, but he confidently supposed there was probably not much to it. At home, he’d seen countless idiots driving without any difficulty at all.
He brushed the man’s jacket from the roof, jumped behind the wheel and started the engine. He knew about pressing the clutch, which he did, and then he rammed the gearstick into first and let the clutch out. This caused the car to shoot forward and stall. The man was now on his feet, hobbling after him and screaming. Naji repeated the actions and managed to move off. He was going, but not in the direction he wanted. There seemed to be a lot to think about, what with turning and changing gear at the same time. He managed the gear, albeit changing from first straight into third, and found himself accelerating down the track towards a flat, stony floodplain. He ploughed across a ditch and a low earth bank and drove onto the hardened mud. Just for good measure, he changed up to fourth, but found that he had to drive faster than he wanted, so changed down, hardly touching the clutch. He congratulated himself on the smooth gear change. He was now having the best fun he’d had in months. He went round and round, whipping up a huge dust cloud and sounding the horn every time he missed one of the boulders in his path. The man was far away and couldn’t touch him, so Naji tried one or two manoeuvres he had seen on TV – going fast in a straight line and turning as sharply as possible. The first time he nearly rolled the car and ended up facing the direction he had come from; the car rocked gently from side to side and the engine roared because he’d neglected to take his foot off the accelerator. He also tried going as fast as he dared across the flats and braking suddenly, which made the car slide across the hardened mud. It was all too much, and he could have stayed there for the rest of the day, perfecting what he believed to be his natural skills as a driver.
He looked towards the stone building. There was no sign of the man. He turned the radio on to full volume, fiddled with the tuner and found a heavy metal number, and then writhed to the music in his seat for a bit. Naji wasn’t a kid who thought he was cool – in fact, he knew he definitely wasn’t cool – but right then he thought there was a chance that, if Hayat could see him, she might think he was.
He wondered what he should do. Going back to the highway was out of the question – he would be spotted and sooner or later arrested, and then they would want to know where he had got the car. He consulted the map and decided to take the minor road north and leave the car somewhere near two villages that lay close together on the river, about twelve kilometres away. He started off towards the building, negotiated the ditch and earth bank better than he had before and aimed up the bumpy track towards the road, revving the engine more than was perhaps necessary. He was so intent on steering that he didn’t see the man stagger from the shade of the bushes with a boulder in his hands, which he heaved into the path of his own car. It landed squarely in the middle of the windscreen, creating a bulge to the right of Naji’s head. Shattered windscreens were nothing new to a boy who had grown up in a civil war – he knew that all you had to do was punch through the glass and keep going, because the glass would never cut your hand. This he did, but he realised with horror that the passenger door was now open and the man was halfway into the car and desperately trying to lift his damaged leg. A snapshot of his crazed face and bloody hands imprinted itself on Naji’s brain before he accelerated away, causing the man to let go and fall onto the track with a single agonised bellow.
He assumed driving would be easier on the road, but quickly discovered there was much less margin for error. When he met another car coming from the opposite direction he panicked and grazed the Opel along its right-hand side, giving it one or two minor dents as well. Because of the shattered windscreen, the people in the oncoming car did not see him until they were level with him, and then he was aware of two female faces staring aghast in his direction. He was new to Europe but it didn’t take much to imagine what would happen next: they would find the man in the road; he’d tell them that he had been stabbed and his car had been stolen; and then the police would soon be looking for a migrant boy with a knife. He sped up but got caught behind a large orange earth-moving truck that was labouring up a short hill. He didn’t trust himself to overtake without either hitting the truck or going over the side. After half an hour he reached the first village on the map and decided that he would leave the car a little way after it and walk along the river to the next village, which was larger and might have somewhere to buy food and water. In the end, the spot for disposal was decided by an ancient tractor that came round the bend on Naji’s side of the road, the old man behind the wheel distracted by something in the back of his vehicle. Naji had no option but to cross the path of the tractor and careen towards a stand of dazzling yellow poplar trees that occupied a bend in the river. He braked, but this had no effect on the Opel’s momentum and he crashed through a stook of hay, clipped a pile of fencing posts and eventually came to a halt when the car rolled into the trunk of one of the poplars. He was unharmed but furious, as if it were his own car. He jumped out of the driver’s seat to yell in Arabic at the tractor driver, who continued on his way, apparently oblivious of the incident. He may not even have been aware of the Opel.
All this was watched by a young man with a large white dog, who rose from his place in the shade of the poplars. He had heard the burst of Arabic and, after checking there was no one with Naji, called out to him in the same language. He was tall and had a large open face that had something Asian or Mongolian about it. He was smoking and held an open can of Skopsko beer, which he offered Naji.
‘My name is Ifkar, and I am Yazidi,’ he said, surveying the wreck of the Opel with a grin. ‘You are a fucking Arab, right?’
‘Right,’ said Naji, grinning in return. He pulled his rucksack and stick from the car, snatched the man’s phone from its holder and straightened to introduce himself. ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ he asked, taking the can of beer.
‘Moon, that’s my name for her. She joined me a few weeks back in Bulgaria.’
‘She has a beautiful coat,’ said Naji.
‘That’s because I brush her every day and give her my best food. I took her from her owner, who was a very cruel man.’
Naji put his hand down tentatively and let the dog smell him.
‘She likes you,’ said Ifkar and, after a long pause in which he scrutinised Naji’s face with almost rude proximity, continued, ‘You know where we are?
I’ve been lost for weeks and I cannot ask anyone because no one understands me.’
Naji told him he knew exactly where they were, but he had to leave because the police would be looking for him and there were three other men on his tail and they were terrorists.
Ifkar was impressed. ‘Damn fuckermother,’ he said in English.
‘No,’ said Naji, ‘it’s motherfucker!’
Ifkar looked in awe at Naji. ‘Damn motherfucker!’
They covered the car with fallen boughs, a few fencing posts and armfuls of hay, and very soon they had left the picturesque spot and were following the river north, with Moon leading the way.
*
‘Firefly’s alive,’ said O’Neill. ‘His sister got a text from him this morning. Sonia is with the family. She saw the text and got the number of the phone he’s using. I’m sending you a location. Looks like a petrol station on the north roadway of the Alexander the Great Highway. Not far from you now. The phone’s still there.’
Samson pulled the map towards him across the restaurant table and beckoned Vuk, who was in the doorway talking to the owner.
‘Hold on,’ he said to O’Neill, and turned to Vuk. ‘Where are Lupcho and Simeon?’ Vuk put his glasses on and stabbed a finger at the map. They would take a while to get off the rail line – he and Vuk would reach the service area much sooner. They would send Aco on ahead.
‘Keep an eye on that phone,’ he said to O’Neill.
Aco reached the garage ten minutes before them, having found a gap in the barrier on the highway and crossed the median to the northbound roadway. He looked everywhere and reported that Naji was nowhere to be found. Samson checked with London – the phone was still at the same location.
When they arrived, Samson went in with Vuk, sat down with a coffee from the machine and dialled the number supplied by Sonia Fell in Turkey. He heard a phone vibrating behind the till, but no one answered it. He called again and eventually an attendant with a woeful expression snatched up the phone and answered with irritation. Samson rang off immediately, got up and walked over to the counter, whereupon he held up the image of Naji on his own phone. ‘This boy was here earlier – did you talk to him?’
The attendant was wary and said he wasn’t sure that he had seen the boy. There were a lot of migrants who thought they could walk the length of the highway. There were many such boys and they were all trouble, he said.
‘Zoran,’ said Samson, reading the nametag, ‘we know you allowed him to use your phone – the number I just rang – to send a text message at 7.45 a.m. this morning. It’s extremely important that we find him, for his own safety and the security of many others.’ He pushed a fifty-euro note towards him.
The man still looked doubtful, and wanted to know who they were.
‘We are trying to save this boy’s life,’ said Samson. ‘That’s all you need to know. We mean no harm to you.’ He paused and his eyes drifted to the people who could be seen on the CCTV monitors filling their cars. ‘We know that you were kind to him. You let him use your phone because his own phone was stolen yesterday. The kindness of strangers means a lot today. Was he on his own? How did he get here?’
Then the story came out of how Naji had fallen asleep and his friends had taken a ride with a smuggler, only to be involved in a deadly accident overnight. Some of his friends were in all probability dead. Vuk said he had heard something about it on the news. It was a terrible business.
‘Well, they all left here yesterday afternoon, pleased that they were going all the way to Austria in the truck,’ said Zoran. ‘The police are coming tomorrow to interview me because they know the smuggler stopped here regularly. But what can I do? How could I know that the bastard would drive over the edge of the highway and kill sixteen people? What do you say to the migrants? How do you warn them that the smugglers are ruthless, bad people?’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ said Samson. ‘They’re desperate – they’ll do anything.’
Zoran nodded.
‘You have CCTV film of the smuggler?’ Samson asked casually.
‘Sure, the police will see it tomorrow.’
‘So what happened to the boy?’ Samson asked.
‘He was playing his pipe out there and then he just vanished.’ He clapped his hands. ‘One moment he was there; next he was gone. I don’t know what happened to him.’
‘Did he take a ride with someone?’
‘I didn’t see. It was our busy time and there were a lot of vehicles filling up and there were people in here watching the crash footage on TV. They wanted to know what happened. After all, they were travelling on the same highway.’ He paused to take a payment from a customer. ‘The boy created a little interest with his music. It was nice. He has some talent.’
Samson nodded. ‘Yes, the kid’s quite special.’
‘But maybe he stole some things from me – chocolate bars. I noticed some missing.’
‘I’m sorry about that. Maybe we can compensate you.’ He put another twenty-euro note on the counter. ‘So you allowed him to use your phone to send a text at seven forty-five. When did you notice that he was gone?’
He frowned and sat back to think. ‘I watched the seven thirty bulletin, which was when we saw the crash. He was playing his music for about an hour after that, so he had gone by nine at the latest.’
‘That’s very helpful – thank you. There may be something from the CCTV cameras outside that would be useful to us. I’d very much like to look for the relevant period.’
He started shaking his head before Samson had finished speaking. ‘I can’t do that – the company has a policy. Even the police have to get permission.’
‘Yes, but whereas the police are investigating a road accident that’s already happened, I and my friend here are trying to prevent many more deaths in the future, and the boy that you were so kind to is the key to the investigation.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m sorry – I should have told you. I’m Paul Samson and this is my associate Vuk Divjak, who is well connected in your country. And out there on the trail bike is our colleague Aco, but I don’t think you want to meet him because he a psychopath.’
‘Yes, but what is your job? Who are you with?’
‘I find missing people. In this case I’m helping organisations that are trying to prevent terrorist attacks.’
Zoran dragged his hands through his hair and peered over his round glasses. ‘And this boy who spent the night in the toilets is important?’
‘We think so, yes. He’s also likely to be killed if we don’t get to him soon.’
The man absorbed this information while he dealt with another customer. Samson looked around and saw that Zoran had a biography of John Lennon beside him. He wondered what it must be like for an educated, decent person like Zoran to spend his life selling fuel and filling the coffee machine. He had warmed to him.
‘Look, I know we’re taking up your time,’ he continued, ‘but I wouldn’t ask unless I thought this was vital. I really do need to look at the footage.’
‘If this is so important, why is Macedonia’s intelligence service not involved?’ Zoran asked.
‘Just three hours ago I was dealing with the Macedonian authorities about another individual. We are cooperating with your people but this just cannot wait, I’m afraid. I wonder if this would make any difference.’ He took five fifty-euro notes from his wallet and put them on the counter, bringing the total offered to Zoran to €320.
Zoran considered the fold of notes for a few seconds then swept them up, placed them in his shirt pocket and led Samson and Vuk into the back office. ‘I go off in an hour. You need to work fast,’ he said, closing the door behind him.
It was a digital system with an eight-channel recorder and a split-screen monitor. Most of the cameras faced the pumps to record the car registration numbers of
the customers. But one was angled along the front of the building, another covered the entrance to the washrooms and toilets at the side and a third watched the parking area.
They guessed rightly that Naji would be found on the camera that was trained on the front of the building, and quickly located him at eight twenty-two that morning, moving from the entrance to the northerly end of the building, where he could be seen playing the flute. Samson smiled, partly because he had found him so quickly, but also because there was something about the boy’s irrepressible spirit that he admired. By then, Naji would have known that his companions might very well be dead, but he’d picked himself up and started busking in the unpromising circumstances of the motorway service area in the early morning. It was undoubtedly him, but he was thinner and tanned from the sun, although his forehead was paler where it had been protected by the peak of his cap.
At first he attracted no attention whatsoever from the few customers at the station, but presently one or two began to stop and nod their heads and occasionally drop money into his cap. They fast-forwarded and saw a man in sunglasses paying close attention. It was clear that Naji didn’t like him, because he was refusing to acknowledge him, even though for some minutes he was the only person listening to his playing. The man went into the café, returned with a couple of cans then passed out of view. Samson made a note of the time – 08.35 – and flipped to a recording of the car park for the same period.