by Henry Porter
They decided to circle the mountain on its shaded side and drop down into the woods a few kilometres on, but first they had to cross a stretch of hard ground that was strewn with broken rock; their feet crushed the plants and filled the air with the aroma of herbs as they went. Ifkar wrapped a scarf around his head against the sun and Naji reversed his cap and tied one of his clean cloths around his neck. They were hungry but decided to save what food they had for the evening meal, hoping to get fresh supplies at a village a little to the west the following day. They would buy enough provisions for the next part of the journey, which would take them to the north-east corner of Macedonia and its border with Serbia. Ifkar thought they had a three- or four-day walk to the border, but Naji believed this was a little optimistic.
Ifkar began to open up about his life, just as Naji had the night before. He explained he had very little schooling because of his brutal uncle, who made him work in his various businesses – a food store, a garage and an upholstery repair shop. And when there was nothing else to do he was set to sweeping the yard and cleaning a shack where a mistreated donkey was kept. Anything he knew he’d taught himself.
‘Did you have a mother and father?’ Naji asked.
‘My mother died when I was seven and my father sent me to my uncle because he could not look after all his children. We were four. I was the eldest so I had to leave the home. I never saw my brothers and sister again.’
‘Why?’
Ifkar bent down to pick up a stone then straightened up with his armed raised; his eyes were focused on something in the scree in front of them. ‘My father took them to Germany four years ago,’ he said, ‘but he never arranged for me to join them, as he promised he would. My uncle hated me even more because of that and punished me and forced me to work even harder.’ As he finished the sentence, he threw the stone at a lizard that was sunning itself several metres away. The stone shattered against the rock, causing the lizard to leap vertically into the air. They both laughed.
‘You nearly hit it.’
‘I wasn’t aiming for it,’ said Ifkar. ‘I just wanted to make it jump.’
‘So, are you going to Germany to find your family?’
Ifkar’s sunny expression faded. ‘Before I ran away, my uncle he told me that my father wrote him to tell him he’d won a green card and was going to America. That’s where my family is now – in Chicago.’
‘But you can join them! You can go to the States and you can become an American citizen.’
Ifkar was shaking his head. ‘My father does not want me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It is simple – when he got the news about America, he did not come to fetch me. He knew where I was. He knew that my mother’s brother was a cruel man.’ Ifkar hung his head. Naji touched him on the arm and looked up into his face. The dog moved towards him and nuzzled Ifkar’s hand, which made him smile.
‘But you can go to America and find them,’ said Naji. ‘The authorities will tell you where they live in Chicago. How long ago did you leave your uncle’s place?’
‘Not sure exactly.’
‘How can you be not sure, Ifkar?’ said Naji, who was exact about such things.
‘Maybe two and half years ago, when I was about your age.’
‘Do you know how old you are?’
‘Not exactly – maybe seventeen soon.’
‘You don’t know your birth date?’
He shook his head.
‘Right, so in those two years your father probably tried to find you. He knows what happened to your people.’
‘He thinks I’m dead.’
Naji thought quickly. ‘When you stole that money from your uncle and ran away, what did you think your uncle would do?’
‘He would have asked my father for the money. He would treat it like my father’s debt.’
‘Right, so your father knows that you left the area where your uncle lived and he will know you’re still alive.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you escaped before IS came to your town and all those Yazidis were killed.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did your uncle have an address for him?’
‘I think so. But I don’t have it.’
‘If they are in America, Ifkar, you will find them. Your brothers and sister will be on Facebook.’
‘I don’t know Facebook. And I am not good at reading,’ he added quietly.
‘That’s not a problem,’ said Naji. ‘I can fix all that – I can teach you to read and then we’ll set you up an account for you and Moon.’
‘Are you on Facebook?’
‘I was once,’ Naji replied, ‘but in my country Facebook can get you into a lot of trouble.’
They stumbled on through the rocks and Ifkar pointed out many small wonders: some tiny, star-shaped flowers that were covered in spiders; pink and bright green mosses that grew beside the springs they encountered lower down the mountain; a vulture that was perched on the rocks above them, holding its wings out as if drying them. Everything seemed new and fresh to Naji and he felt perfectly at ease with Ifkar.
*
Samson had slept little and he felt lousy from too much red wine, which he’d drunk in the hope that it would knock him out for a few hours. He gulped some orange juice from a carton and looked up and down the valley, thinking that his mother was right and he needed to find something else to do. Suddenly his attention was drawn to a plume of smoke rising from the trees on the other side of the valley, about half a kilometre downstream – not far from where the migrants had been seen with their catch. He started the car and drove down to a spot directly across from the smoke. There was much less of it now, but occasionally he saw a hint of an orange glow among the dark trees above him. It was very hard to be certain, but he thought he spotted at least one figure sitting by the fire. He decided to take a closer look, but there was no suitable place to cross the river beneath the road. He would have to go downstream if he wanted to avoid getting soaked.
An hour later he had climbed up to the campsite and found a fire that had been intentionally put out, as well as rather an ingeniously made windbreak in which boughs had been woven together. A closer search around the fire revealed fish bones and the rind from a salami sausage. In the carpet of pine needles and leaf mould that formed the forest floor there were impressions left by two people who had bedded down for the night. Maybe it was going too far to conclude that one was deeper than the other, but it did seem to Samson that Naji – if this was indeed him – had slept closest to the fire. The stones around the fire were still warm, but the fire had been well doused and all the heat had gone from the ashes. Further away he found signs of human defecation and dog shit.
It had to be them, and he was angry with himself for missing them, though he told himself that they would have scarpered the moment they heard him approaching through the undergrowth. There was no clue as to which way they had gone, although they would obviously still keep going north. If it had been his decision, he would have chosen the high ground to walk in the early morning sun, for he had noticed when he was by the car that the forested ridge led to the rolling slopes of the mountains, which would be as good a route north as any. If they had gone high, he could work out – more or less – where they would end up, and he could drive to that point without a lot of difficulty. Sooner or later, they would have to leave the wilderness for food and drinking water.
Back at the car, he smoked half a cigarette then raised the binoculars and planted his elbows on the roof to steady them. A sweep of the valley produced nothing, so he trained them to where the bare rock of the mountain began and the woods ended. Carefully he quartered the upper slopes. The binoculars skidded past something – a movement just below the skyline. He went back. A white animal was crossing a dark patch of rock. It was a large white dog, just as the German hikers had reported.
Now he saw two figures, some distance behind the bounding dog. The smaller of the two, so tiny in the vast landscape, was clad in exactly the same colours as Naji had been wearing in the service station CCTV – a black and red jacket, blue jeans and a red cap. The taller of the two was in green trousers and a yellowish shirt. A pale-coloured scarf around his head trailed in the breeze behind him.
‘Hello, Naji Touma,’ Samson murmured. ‘Now where are you off to?’
He watched for twenty minutes, until they disappeared behind the summit. Cursing to himself and feeling much in need of coffee, he pulled the map from the side pocket of his cargo pants. It was going to take some time for them to round the summit, and then it would be a lot harder for him to keep track of them, even from a new vantage point further up the road. He reckoned there were two possible routes down to the only village in the area, and he was sure they would take one of them. One thing he took from his observations of the morning was that Naji’s companion knew what he was doing – it was smart of him to walk in the shade of the mountain, for it would not be so exhausting and they would use less water. And judging by the way the campfire and windbreak were constructed, this young migrant knew how to look after himself in the wild. So, at least Naji wasn’t going to die of exposure, starvation or dehydration.
He got into the car and phoned Vuk. ‘I need that bloody number, Vuk,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘In traffic,’ growled Vuk, before a hacking cough robbed him of speech.
‘Are you in Skopje yet?’ Samson asked. ‘Have you arranged the handover of the money? I sent you all the numbers you needed.’
‘I get money now then I see bastard policeman in bar at eleven.’
‘Right, call me when you have the number and I’ll test it. It’s important that I do it and you don’t try it – okay? Then you’re going to pick up Anastasia at the airport.’
‘No – she miss plane. She come tomorrow, maybe later. She call me.’
‘That was efficient of her.’ He glanced at his own phone to see that he had a text from her. ‘Okay, so let me know when you have the number. I’ll make sure I stay in a place with network coverage. Any news about the other stuff?’
Vuk would know he was talking about the combined operation in Serbia and Bosnia. ‘They watch two houses,’ he said.
‘Have they got a positive ID using the CCTV images we retrieved from the service station? Do they know its them for sure?’
‘Same men, but they say nothing to me now.’
‘That’s to be expected, I guess. We’ll speak as soon as you have the number,’ he said, and hung up.
In reply to Anastasia’s text he said she mustn’t come if it was at all difficult, but it would be great to see her whenever she could make it. He was just sending the text when the encrypted phone in his lap vibrated with an incoming call.
‘Yes,’ he said to Sonia Fell without much enthusiasm. ‘How can I help?’
‘Look, he wants you to stop looking for Firefly, Paul. He understands why you’ve stuck with the case, but now he needs you to leave Macedonia and forget the whole business. That’s what he’s asked me to tell you.’
The ‘he’ was of course Nyman. ‘I don’t understand what possible objection he has against me looking for the boy. It has absolutely nothing to do with him – he made it clear he wasn’t interested in the boy.’
Fell picked up the edge in his voice. ‘The Macedonian authorities are going to deal with him – he stabbed a police officer.’
‘A police officer that was almost certainly going to assault him sexually.’
‘You have evidence for that? Look, respecting the Macedonian’s pursuit of criminals on their own soil is obviously the basis of our ability to operate here, as you must appreciate. He has told them that we will back off.’
‘Because he thinks he’s about to make the arrests?’
‘You know I can’t say anything.’
Samson held his temper. ‘So he got what he wanted – the boy was simply the means of tempting them into Europe. Is that right?’
‘You know that’s wrong. He had already left the Middle East before we were fully aware of his significance. There’s no question of this being some kind of clever plot or manipulation. We have just moved on and adapted to the threat that Europe faces from these men. We must deal with the realities of life in the Balkans,’ she concluded.
‘Okay,’ he said, certain that he was not going to give up on the boy and also mildly annoyed that Fell had been deployed to deal with him.
‘Glad you see it that way,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be angry. You’ve done such a fine job on this and I know you have invested much in Firefly. And of course we’ve got to this point entirely because of you.’
‘Just one other thing,’ said Samson. ‘When did he agree formally with the Macedonians to leave the boy with them? Why?’
‘We only had a request from the Macedonian government in the last half an hour.’
‘That explains it.’ This time he didn’t bother to hide his feelings. Without waiting for Sonia’s reply, he hung up.
He guessed that London would not yet have heard of this new instruction about giving up on Naji, so he rang Okiri’s number on the encrypted phone. ‘Just wondering about the boy’s phone and whether there’s anything on it that I should know about. I still have it with me, since no one seemed to want to take it off me yesterday. Did Jamie O’Neill find much?’
‘You’ve still got the phone?’ said Okiri. ‘That’s weird. Sonia should have taken it from you. Did you hear from her yet? She said she was going to speak to you – don’t know what about.’
‘I’ll look forward to that, Chris. About Firefly’s phone, did Jamie O’Neill come up with anything? He told me there were some interesting things on it.’
‘Not sure about that. I’ll look for you.’ Okiri was silent as his fingers worked a keyboard. ‘Cheltenham say they need to look at the phone itself, so I guess you had better get it to us ASAP.’
‘Okay, so no chance of finding out what’s on it remotely?’
‘I guess not,’ said Okiri. ‘Is that all you wanted? I’ve got a lot on.’
Samson ended the call, then started the car, descended the rutted track to rejoin the road and began to move slowly north, watching the slopes of the mountains as he went. At first, he felt confident that he’d intercept the boy and his companion, but as he went he realised that they would have to go around three summits to avoid a series of precipitous cliffs before descending to the village. There was therefore a much greater area for him to search.
Eight hours later, watching from the deserted car park of a panorama above the village, he swung his binoculars from the storm clouds in the west and saw the flash of the white dog on a slope about a kilometre away. It was unmistakably the same dog as he had seen before, yet there was no sign of the boys. Soon after he spotted the animal, the mountains were swallowed up by mist and rain, but at least he knew their position and it seemed unlikely that they would continue to travel in the rain and gathering dark.
All day he had been phoning Vuk without success. The cell phone reception was patchy in the mountains so he’d used the satellite phone, but still got no response. He suspected Vuk had switched his phone off, or wasn’t answering because he hadn’t got the number from the policeman. He left another curt message before taking the road down to the village. He came across a store that doubled as a café and bar, where he was surprised to find a party in full swing. There must have been fifty people there. No table was available so he drank a beer at the bar and watched the proceedings, which included speeches and unaccompanied songs. The bartender, a young man with a neat beard who introduced himself as Andrej, explained in passable English that most of the party had been up the mountain to pay their respects to the head of the family, who had died a year before. He was Andrej’s uncle and it was tradition t
o visit the departed more or less on the anniversary, but never, for some reason, on the exact day of the death. The patch of ground where this ritual was held had been in the family since their Serb ancestors had come south into Macedonia three or four centuries before. Once respects had been paid, tradition also dictated that the party repair to the store, which had also belonged to the family for as long as anyone could remember, there to toast his memory with as much beer and quince brandy as they could drink, accompanied by cake and a mountain of cold lamb chops. People had come from all over, including a large middle-aged man who ran a repair shop in Milwaukee and a fitness-obsessed couple who’d made the trip from Germany and had run up the mountain for the ceremony. This had earned the disapproval of the older members of the party.
Samson didn’t bother to enquire if any of them had come across the two young migrants, because it was evident that the group had visited a different part of the mountains – and anyway, most of them were too far gone. But as the evening wore on, he mentioned to Andrej that he needed a place to stay for the night.
‘But why are you want to stay here? The city is only two hours away.’
‘I need to be in this area tomorrow morning.’
‘For the autumn colours?’ he asked, a bit sarcastically.
‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘I am trying to track two migrants, who are somewhere in those mountains – one of them is in great danger.’
Andrej looked away and lit a pipe – he evidently assumed Samson was some kind of policeman.
‘It’s important that I find him before others do,’ Samson added. ‘That’s why I need to be here at first light. I think they’ll come down to get food and water.’
‘There were two migrants here earlier. They bought food.’
‘Is that so? The ones I’m looking for have a white dog. One is about thirteen years old, the other one is older and much taller.’
‘No, the ones we served were grown men, well into their late twenties, and they did not have a dog with them.’ He added that he had no problem with migrants and these two were polite and had thanked him for the groceries they bought. One spoke Serbian well and had a very good vocabulary.