He explained how refugees found their way to the coast. If they came by bus, they were met by smugglers who pressed them into making an immediate decision about crossing to Greece. The smugglers provided boats and some basic guidance on steering. They insisted the journey was safe, even if they didn’t issue life vests.
“They have it worse on the North African side. If you make it to the boat, the smugglers take you out on the open sea, and leave you there to die. One of the men I met said the captain of the boat kicked his son into the sea. He was picked up by the Coast Guard and sent back to Libya, where he tried another route. Usually, by that point they’ve taken all your money. They feed off your desperation.”
Rachel thought this over. “What happens when you get to somewhere like Basmane?”
“You make contact with the smugglers. First you go to the money-changers, then you go to an insurance office where you deposit your payment in cash. At night, you head to a park for further instructions from the smugglers. Everyone is waiting for a call. With any luck, your handler is a Syrian trying to save up funds to get his own family across.”
Rachel could picture the type. Enterprising young hustlers who moved the machinery along, the last ones to leave because it was more important to move their families to safety.
She remembered Dania and Ahmed Fakhri, and their claim to have flown from Lebanon. But what if they’d lied and come through Turkey? Had Sami stayed behind in order to ensure their safe passage? Had he tried to desert his bosses and ended up dead? She asked Ali if he’d heard of the Fakhris. He stumbled over a young man in his path. There was a rapid exchange in Arabic, which ended with Ali’s apology. It was followed by the same question. Ali held up a flyer and asked the young man if he knew where Israa had gone.
His shoulders sagging, he turned back to Rachel. “It’s beginning to seem hopeless. This deal with Turkey—if it’s finalized, no one else gets through. I don’t know if I should bring Aya back to Izmir to try and find some work. But who could I leave her with? What kind of future would we have?” He crumpled the flyer in his hand. “Or maybe we should move on and pray that Israa finds us.”
Rachel didn’t know how to advise him. As a police officer, she believed the law should be obeyed. No one country could resettle refugees. By that standard, even Canada’s contribution was minimal. There had to be a better solution than choosing between someone like Ali with Aya in his care, or someone like the youth they’d left in the alley. She remembered Suha Obeidi, the paralegal at Sanctuary Syria. Suha had said Sami al-Nuri stood little chance of being accepted on his merits; he needed a family connection that the Fakhris had refused to establish.
Despite leads from Canada, Turkey, and Greece, Rachel was no closer to untangling the truth.
“Where’s Aya?” she asked suddenly, following the progress of a little girl across the alley. She had dark hair and eyes that stood out in contrast to her magenta sweater. She was clutching colored pencils in one hand and packs of tissues in the other, a fanny-pack around her tiny waist. Her sunny smile and confident manner stood her in good stead. Strangers were willing to indulge her in the sale of her various goods.
Her throat constricting in pain, Rachel gave the girl a twenty-euro note for a pack of tissues, refusing to take her change. The little girl danced away. She called to her father, who was watching for her at a stoplight. He led her into a park surrounded by tall, dark trees.
Rachel felt a surge of embarrassment when Ali looked at her.
“I told you,” he said. “There are good people, too.”
She made a dismissive gesture. She’d tried to salve her conscience by giving the little girl money, but she would have felt worse not doing it. “I needed tissues. It wasn’t charity, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking you are kind to have noticed her. Kind like Miss Audrey to be helping me look for Israa.”
“Do you think we’ll find Audrey and Israa together?” If the boy knew something, his answer to this question would tell her what it was.
“No.” He shook his head, causing his curls to bounce. “They’re not together.”
Before she could ask him how he knew this, Khattak and Roux rejoined them. Khattak was holding a life vest he’d just purchased.
“We bearded the lion in his den,” he told Rachel. He explained he’d bought the vest from one of the Turkish vendors. Ali nodded as if he knew what Khattak meant.
“The life jackets weren’t for me and Aya. Audrey wasn’t taking people across, she didn’t want to get her NGO kicked out of Greece. It’s just that I told her what was happening at sea. The day I crossed, for example.”
Rachel noted Khattak’s grim expression. She studied the logo on the life vest. The logo was misspelled, and suddenly she knew.
“The life jackets are fakes.”
Now, at last, Amélie Roux ventured to offer information. The little she told them made it clear that in fact, she knew a good deal more. “The factories are run by organized crime. They make money by selling knock-offs stuffed with foam. The vests are hydrophilic. They become a weight around the neck. They can cause serious injuries—not just drowning injuries, but also strangulation.”
Khattak’s head came up. “A peculiar injury to occur in a lifeboat,” he said with strange emphasis. He recounted what he’d learned in Toronto from Emily Banks.
“What are you saying?” The horror of it was too vast for Rachel to grasp. She tested the life vest in her hands. “They deliberately sell jackets that cause refugees to drown?”
“Real vests cost upward of a hundred and fifty euros. The knock-offs are as little as ten. People buy them for the illusion of safety—at least they’ll have something, they think.”
“My God.” A chill ran down Rachel’s spine. “You knew this?” she asked Ali.
He shrugged it off like it was nothing. “We crossed with vests like these. Our boat sank, we nearly drowned. If Eleni hadn’t found us, I wouldn’t be here now.”
He looked at their shocked faces and tried a smile.
“By far,” he said, “that wasn’t the worst part of our journey.”
* * *
He took them to Sinbad restaurant; it was popular with refugees because the food was tasty and not too expensive.
“This neighborhood is amazing,” he told them. “Kurds, Turks, Syrians. So many language barriers, yet here we all are. Many of these people have become my friends. They’ve done good things—they’ve helped us when they’re struggling themselves. As a refugee, you learn how people hate, but also about how they love. This neighborhood reminds me of before.”
Rachel was starving so she let Khattak ask the questions.
“Of your life in Damascus, you mean.”
Ali nodded, swallowing a bite of his kebab. “The most beautiful place on earth. I miss everything about it. The way it smells, the way it looks when the sun sets. The jasmine trees in our courtyards. The closeness of the old city walls.”
“I’m so sorry,” Khattak said.
Ali shrugged. “How we thought we could take on a regime that began by murdering the schoolchildren of Daraa—we were crazy to think there was hope. Look what’s happened to us now.” He snapped his fingers. “I never thought a Syrian could kill another Syrian, but that’s a mistake we all made.”
The revolution had begun in the city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border. Schoolboys had painted slogans against the regime—the children were arrested and tortured. When Daraa’s tight-knit community had demanded the boys’ release, the governorate had shunned them. Protests had broken out in Daraa, then across the country. As one young activist had said, “Daraa lit the spark. The children’s courage was contagious.”
Rachel ignored her meal, reflecting on Ali’s story—the Syrian border wasn’t out of reach, but the Syrian catastrophe seemed a world away. On this boisterous street, Turkish pop music blasted through the alleys, with families strolling through the parks, under the leafy cover of the palms. If she didn�
��t have so much to think about, she would have found it fascinating. The call to prayer sounded all at once, the music fading away.
Khattak looked over at Ali. “Shall we go to the local mosque?”
They excused themselves, Khattak with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the gesture of an older brother. Amélie Roux watched them go.
She turned to Rachel with a speculative look. “A handsome devil, that one.”
Rachel forbore to answer, focusing on her food.
Inspecteur Roux prodded her again. “So you two—is that something?”
Rachel swallowed hard. “I have a boyfriend,” she said weakly. She was thinking of Nate. Nate had kissed her, but he wasn’t her boyfriend—a word she wasn’t sure was grown-up enough to use. She felt that same little flutter of happiness as she contemplated whether that would change. When, not whether, a small voice insisted. She told herself to have a little faith.
Roux shrugged. “A lot of temptation to resist.”
Rachel changed the subject. “What did Inspector Khattak mean? When he said you bearded the lion in his den?”
Roux swept a hand in the direction of the shops. “We learned something from our tour of Basmane. Your friend Audrey visited nearly every store and sidewalk operator selling life jackets. She tracked down the main purveyor plagiarizing the Yamaha logo.”
“So the life jackets on Woman to Woman’s inventory…”
“Were ordered for the purpose of comparison. She had to make her case. She told the Coast Guard, who’d had similar suspicions. The Coast Guard confirmed the bodies in the water were wearing counterfeit jackets; they notified the Turkish police.” Sounding impressed, she continued, “Eventually, because of the police operation, two of the factories were shut down.” She grimaced. “It turned out the children of refugees were being employed to make the fakes.”
She rubbed the back of her neck, signaling the waiter she wanted another coffee.
“I shouldn’t say ‘employed,’” Roux went on. “In fact, these children were indentured. The police put an end to that.”
Rachel listened to this recital with growing suspicion. This was more than Khattak and Roux could have learned in their interviews with shop owners. It sounded like the kind of background available to an Interpol agent.
“You already knew this.” She gestured at the busy restaurant and the streets beyond. “So why didn’t you just tell us on the ferry? Or on Lesvos? You could have saved us a lot of time.”
Unperturbed by Rachel’s accusations, Roux leaned forward in her seat. “I wanted to see where your leads would take you. You might have found something I missed. After all, it was your partner who discovered the life vests at Souda.”
Rachel didn’t buy the explanation. Either Roux didn’t trust them, or this was Interpol’s version of a power play. Interpol was in charge—Roux’s job was to make sure it stayed that way.
Assessing Roux’s expression, she asked, “What else do you know about the factories? What exactly was Audrey’s role in uncovering this operation?” Her tone left no doubt that she knew Roux was holding back.
The sharp edge of Roux’s smile acknowledged Rachel’s suspicion. “You think your friend did all this on her own, putting herself at risk?”
“I know she put herself at risk.”
“So did my agent, Aude Bertin. Your friend was clever enough to contact us, so Aude was sent to investigate.”
Rachel considered this explanation. It didn’t take her long to find the gaps in it. Horns sounded from the street beyond the little park, but she kept her attention on Roux.
“You sent an Interpol agent to do the job of the Turkish police? I don’t think so, Inspecteur Roux.”
The other woman’s face closed up. Beneath the slash of emphatic black brows, her shrewd eyes studied Rachel. Rachel was being weighed. But whether as an adversary or a confidante, she couldn’t tell.
“Audrey’s tip-off was enough to lead us to something bigger. It’s not just the factories, there’s the whole operation, how it’s all connected—the smugglers, the Syrians who slip into their nets. She was tenacious, your friend. She wanted answers to dangerous questions.”
Rachel nodded to herself. Quietly, she said, “She would have been a thorn in the smugglers’ side. Doesn’t that suggest to you Audrey was taken? And she hasn’t run away.”
“Perhaps.” Roux lit a cigarette as she waited for her coffee. “There are other reasons she may have been taken. She comes from a wealthy family, her brother is well-known.”
“To you?” Rachel’s voice sharpened.
Roux smiled a smile she didn’t find in the least encouraging.
“Yes. He bought his sister a gun, after all. Why did he think she would need it? What was he expecting, I wonder?”
Rachel’s poker face was no good. She knew it telegraphed her fear. She took a moment to collect herself, to stop a defense of Nate from tripping off her tongue.
“You’ve just mentioned kidnappers,” she pointed out. She looked around the bustling square—ordinary families doing ordinary things, the absence of police. “This doesn’t seem like a place where someone could be kidnapped.”
Roux leaned over the table, blowing smoke in Rachel’s face. “I wasn’t thinking of Izmir. Audrey took a trip to the border with her Syrian friends in tow. The border areas are not as controlled as one might think. If Audrey went there, she was at risk.”
“Why would she take that risk?”
“Think it through for yourself, Rachel.” The older policewoman spoke kindly, as if she regarded Rachel as a protégée. But Rachel couldn’t think of an answer.
“Do you think it’s tied to these trips she took to Europe?”
Roux nodded, stubbing out her cigarette in her saucer. “The question you should be asking is this: What was Audrey looking for at the border?”
Rachel picked up on this thread. “We haven’t explained Sami al-Nuri. Surely he’s the missing link.”
Roux shrugged. She gazed in the direction of the mosque, impatient for Khattak’s return.
Rachel studied her air of distraction; she was beginning to suspect it was an act. Roux wasn’t interested in Khattak. She was interested in what he might know, or what else he might uncover. Her eyes flicked back to Rachel with an undercurrent of warning. Rachel’s mouth went dry.
Roux knew more than she was telling them.
Or she wasn’t what she seemed.
29
Çorakkapi Mosque
Izmir, Turkey
The urge to tell Esa the truth was pressing against Ali’s thoughts. Esa was a man of faith; he’d shepherded Ali to the mosque, finding them a place on the prayer rugs without seeming to feel out of place. The Çorakkapi mosque was lovely and elegant in the manner of Turkish mosques, but on a quieter scale, with a miniature five-domed façade and a simple, emerald green carpet. The mosque had opened its doors to refugees. Ali’s little company had slept in its courtyard for weeks.
After he made his supplication, Esa turned to Ali. “I prayed for Israa and for you all.”
He wasn’t looking for thanks. He was reminding Ali he wasn’t alone, that the ummah hadn’t abandoned the Syrian nation.
Ali had done the same, praying for the ummah in Iraq, in Palestine, in Burma and South Sudan—wherever he knew there was suffering. Once he’d come to know the boys at Moria, he prayed for the people of Afghanistan. Nor was his compassion restricted to those who shared his beliefs. Syria was a multiethnic, multifaith society; an Armenian family had been his family’s closest neighbors. The bombs had fallen on them both.
Whether you were against Assad or against the jihadis who’d usurped the revolution, one way or another, you ended up on a list.
He thought maybe he could trust Esa, because Esa hadn’t asked him to explain his affiliations, or to account for the war. He treated Ali as a friend, not as a boy boxed in by his past, defined by a history in which he’d had no part.
He was ready to talk to Esa. Especially wh
en Esa added, “I also prayed for Audrey. Did you know I’ve known her all her life?”
Esa hadn’t said this to win his confidence. It was something he wanted to share in case it helped Ali to know. Ali wanted to trust him, but the last time he’d been in this mosque, it was Sami who’d been at his side. Sami had warned him they couldn’t trust anyone—the imam, the smugglers, the Turkish guards, the Syrians at the checkpoints. The one person Sami had trusted was him. They were bound together now by a bond that couldn’t be severed.
Sami wasn’t from Damascus. He’d been sent to Damascus by Military Intelligence in Aleppo. He didn’t explain his situation further. His description of his work served as explanation enough.
Sami had nightmares, calling out the names of his friends. His small, close group had lived together in Aleppo. He was a paramedic with the Aleppo Civil Defense. For two years, he’d lived at a factory in disuse, a station protected by a wall. The station was at risk of mortar fire, exposed to frequent bombardment. Sami’s group had survived the season of massacres, to find it followed by another.
Their truck was riddled with bullet holes, the windshield splintered like a web. Any day it would give, but otherwise the truck was sturdy enough to cope with the massive craters on the road. Sami had been to more impact sites than he could count. His work had centered on search and rescue. When the bombing of Aleppo was reinforced by Russian jets, the group’s priorities had changed. The Civil Defense was the only active group to rescue survivors from the blast zone. Sami’s team had learned to be wary of the double-tap: the site bombed again after rescuers arrived. They’d lost two team members before they’d adapted. From the sound of aircraft they’d learned to identify, they could forecast the scale of the attack.
Barrel bombs were taking out the city’s apartment blocks. The station had been hit by mortar shells, but it had been spared the thousand-pound bombs packed with shrapnel. When the collapse of their station house had come, the team had been out on a rescue. Sami’s home had fallen behind regime lines—they couldn’t take shelter there. His brother Shahoud had suggested they establish their new base inside an abandoned school. More experienced in the war’s barbarities, Sami had warned against it. “Schools are a target. They’ve almost gotten them all.”
A Dangerous Crossing--A Novel Page 21