Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  ‘That’s them. They are my prison guards, in a kind of way. Without looking up or making a fuss, I need you to make a phone call in a minute. I want you to call a police officer. Write down his number. Tell him to meet me in one hour.’

  ‘Where?’

  Zeke told her the rendezvous.

  ‘That’s kind of a crazy place to meet,’ she said. ‘No one goes there anymore.’

  ‘Let’s just say I’m a crazy old man.’

  Zeke whiled away the next fifty minutes making a microscopic search of the shelves, eventually buying a second-hand poetry book, then thanked Ardita for her help and walked over to Franco.

  ‘All set, boss?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ replied Zeke.

  ‘Get the book about the general of the dead you were looking for?’

  ‘No, but I got an old book of poems, first published in 1927. Poets of the Romantic Revival by Geoffrey H. Crump.’

  Franco shot him a look as if he was talking gibberish, but Zeke carried on talking, seemingly oblivious of his protection officer’s response.

  ‘I have got no idea how it ended up here, but it’s one of my favourites. I lost my original copy years back, so today hasn’t been a waste of time.’

  Franco smiled blankly and led the way out of the shop. The vehicles hadn’t made much progress, so they headed off down a wide boulevard called Bajram Curri to meet them. They hadn’t got far when Zeke, at the centre of the triangle of escorts, stopped dead. To their right was an abandoned alien spaceship – or that was what it seemed – a low-slung pyramid, originally constructed in marble to commemorate the memory of Hoxha for evermore. But now his tomb was a memorial to a pharaoh everyone hated. The marble slabs had been stolen, the front entrance boarded up in a flimsy and half-hearted manner, the whole thing, close-up, coated in spirals of graffiti.

  ‘Hoxha’s mausoleum. This I must see.’ He skipped towards the triangle and darted ahead. Franco, Miller and Nahui followed on behind, the strangeness of the building distracting them from the fact that the package was going off-track. For an old man well past his sixtieth birthday, Zeke moved surprisingly fast. The others did not want to be seen to chase him. He was, after all, a grown man. So they half walked, half trotted. But at that very moment, the Suburban, followed by the Humvee, zoomed towards them down the pedestrian path. The operatives looked behind them and clocked Philippe at the wheel, gesturing frantically that they should abort what they were doing and return to the vehicles. But that fresh distraction lost them three, four seconds. They turned to see Zeke sprinting to the pyramid. As he came up to the building, a stout wooden board swung inwards and then the pharaoh’s tomb swallowed him up.

  The muscle raced up to the board, which banged shut in their faces. Miller smashed into it, but it didn’t budge. Then all three took turns to bash in the board using a series of karate kicks. On the ninth kick, the board’s edge splintered open. They slipped inside and found themselves in a dark cavern, pools of water underfoot, a few random cones of daylight penetrating the gloom, tunnelling down where the roof slates had fallen in. Nahui produced a flashlight and its beam punched into the darkness. Nothing.

  ‘Maybe we could track him through his phone?’ suggested Miller. At that moment, something started to trill. Nahui trained his light on where the sound was coming from and illuminated Zeke’s budget cell phone on the ground.

  ‘Nope, we won’t be tracking him by his mobile phone,’ he said.

  Zeke Chandler, of the CIA, had vanished off the face of the earth.

  BEIRUT, LEBANON

  The plane landed at Beirut–Rafic Hariri sometime after dawn, the sky smoking, the air smelling of jet-engine kerosene and the heat to come. There are a handful of airports around the world named after victims of assassination – JFK, John Lennon – but, in terms of overkill, Beirut gets the palm. Joe knew his bombs, and he knew that the one that did for Hariri in 2005 was a big one, 2,000 lbs of TNT, leaving a crater in the road. The word was that the people who gained most from the bang were the Syrian secret police. So, not nice people.

  Joe pushed through the taxi drivers thronging outside Arrivals until he found one with just an averagely dishonest manner, who agreed to take him direct to the Syrian embassy. Beirut was five thousand years old, they said, but it looked as though it had been built the decade before yesterday by a man with a concrete fetish. The defining feature was block after block, stacked up the slope from the Mediterranean like a ziggurat. That, and the heat. By nine o’clock in the morning, the sun had become a big fat psycho punching the earth and every living thing on its surface into submission. The fronds of the palm trees were a sickly grey; anything else that should have been green – pasture, lawns, little patches of grass – was dying or already dead.

  The traffic was gloopy and the taxi driver ended up using a crazy but time-saving detour, or so he assured Joe by tapping at his watch, threading through the city’s twin alternate universes. In West Beirut, men wore big beards and women wore black bin bags, so to speak. The Iranian embassy bristled with menace, watched over by a giant mural of an old guy with a beard sucking on a wasp. That would be Ayatollah Khomeini. In East Beirut, women wore miniskirts and men drank beer. Both sides, people sucked at hubble-bubble pipes and when they had a point to make, they jabbed a hand in the air, thumb high. Across the whole city, a host of people lingered on park benches and dead grass, loss in their eyes. They would be some of the million or so refugees from Syria, next door.

  The taxi had to pull up two blocks away from the Syrian embassy thanks to cubes of concrete scattered on the road, as if someone had knocked over a giant sugar bowl. The cubes were there to prevent suicide truck bombs. Hanging around were a selection of heavies in green military fatigues and mirrored shades, toting sub-machine guns in a loving kind of way and giving anyone who lingered the thousand-mile stare. Beyond the heavies was a forest of razor wire, and beyond that was the embassy, which, once, had been a villa in the French style. It exuded a grandeur gone to pot, blended with fear.

  By the time Joe had got to the front door, he was oozing with sweat. A heavy on the door patted him down, then he went through two metal detectors and finally he was shown a door marked Visa Section in English. Inside was a big ceiling fan that had lost the will to cool, and a small, fussy man with a light-brown slick of hair pasted over his skull and yellowing skin, who sat behind a desk too big for him. He wore a mustard suit likewise too big for him and sported General Jaruzelski sunglasses, shrouding his eyes. He scowled up at Joe nervously, and when Joe gave him his best East Cork smile he got back to wrestling with the nest of papers littering his desk. Above him, on the wall, were faded photographs of the two Zarifs, the Father and the Son. Joe looked around for Zarif the Holy Ghost but it must have been his day off. To the side was the Syrian regime’s flag: three bands, of red, white and black, with two green stars on the white. The flag badly needed a dry-clean, like its government.

  The waiting room wasn’t that busy, boasting more chairs than occupants. In one corner was a biggish Middle Eastern man who seemed to be sobbing quietly to himself; waiting eagerly in the front row was a hefty man who was gargling Russian into a phone. The Russian gave the impression of being connected, but he wasn’t that connected because, if he was, he wouldn’t be murdering time in the visa section. The connected don’t do the slow lane. But it was the third person in the room who held Joe’s attention. In jeans, a psychedelic Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, riotously out of keeping with the embassy decor and decorum, was Humfrey DeCrecy – Hollywood screenwriter, libertine, screwball.

  Joe sat down next to him and hissed in his ear: ‘What are you doing here?’

  Humfrey affected ignorance of Joe’s presence, so Joe hissed again. Humfrey did a double-take and said, far too loudly for the hushed amour propre of the visa section, ‘Paddy-dude! Surf’s up?’

  The clerk was fastidiously lifting one very important piece of paper from one very important pile and moving it to another equally important p
ile. He didn’t look up; what he was doing was too important for that. But, mid-movement, he froze.

  ‘Sssh!’ Joe whispered to Humfrey.

  ‘Such a small world, eh, Paddy-dude?’

  Joe gripped his left wrist, hard.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Ow! You’re hurting me, you big Irish brute.’ His accent had morphed into soft-voiced posh girl, the captain of lacrosse at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. He looked sharply at Joe, and then his free hand subtly indicated the clerk at his desk, his shifting paper still frozen in mid-air. It wasn’t that difficult to decode the gesture: Humfrey would stalemate Joe, screw up his chance of getting a visa, unless Joe went along with his play. Defeated, Joe let go of his wrist.

  ‘Listen, Paddy,’ he whispered sufficiently quietly that the clerk unfroze and returned to shuffling his papers, ‘I loved that woman and I let her down. I’m going to help you find her.’

  ‘I don’t need your help,’ Joe said. ‘Nor do I want it.’

  ‘I’m coming with you. The alternative is that I screw you up here and every other step of the way. You do understand that I’m serious about this.’

  His accent morphed again, this time into Ozarks hick. ‘Tell me you get me and do that now, boy.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘Good Paddy-dude.’ He was back to being La-La Land Humfrey now. ‘You go first, then I follow.’

  The visa clerk said his name was Mr Aziz, and he asked Joe the nature of his intended business in Syria and did he have a sponsor for his visit?

  ‘I’m an art curator and I’m going to Damascus to pick up something, not of great monetary worth, but of poignant sentimental value, for a client who is now based in America. I plan to be in Damascus for a week, shorter if possible.’ Joe handed Mr Aziz a fake business card he had had run up in LA, declaring Mr Joseph Tiplady to be a freelance art curator, and a fake letter from a fake business address in the dead centre of Damascus. Joe liked his cover story because it suggested that he could be a slightly crooked art dealer on the make, but no one the regime would worry about.

  Mr Aziz twitched a little behind his big dark glasses and said, ‘What is the object you’re taking out of Damascus? Not something precious from our antiquity, I trust?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Aziz. It’s a watercolour, done in the 1890s, a family portrait. It could have been couriered, but my client prefers that I retrieve the painting myself and bring it back to the States in person.’

  ‘I see.’

  Joe was pretty certain Mr Aziz didn’t buy his cock and bull story, but nor was he that fussed about it to argue the toss. Joe filled in lots of forms and Mr Aziz took his passport and told Joe he could pick it up the next morning. He didn’t mention the war that had killed half a million people and nor did Joe. That’s diplomacy for you.

  Joe returned to his seat to listen to Humfrey negotiating the chicanes of Syrian bureaucracy – and how good, or bad, his backstory might be.

  ‘Nature of business?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘I’m a fancy-goods salesman,’ said Humfrey, po-faced.

  ‘Fancy goods?’

  ‘Well, lingerie’s my main line. Got to keep the morale of the troops up, you know.’

  ‘Have you a sponsor in the Gulf?’

  ‘Here.’ He handed over his passport, in it a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

  The clerk took the passport and placed it in his lap, palmed the dollars and magicked a visa stamp out of the drawer in one sweet fluid movement, exhibiting the most energy he had displayed the whole day. He returned the passport and made to usher both men out.

  ‘It’s all right, Paddy.’ Humfrey smiled indulgently. ‘I’ll wait for you to get your visa in the morning.’

  Joe ignored him and marched off, as fast as he could walk, and after turning back on himself a couple of times he felt pretty sure he’d lost him. By the time Joe had done that it was midday, and he was overheating and then some. He stumbled into a small Orthodox chapel, sunken into the ground, below pavement level. Joe had to crouch to get through the entrance, but once inside he gloried in the cool of the ancients. The chapel was gloomy, the only light coming from a handful of opaque barred windows and a small metal frame at the side of the altar bearing three rows of votive candles. The air in the chapel was still, holding a suggestion of incense. Joe slipped a few Lebanese pounds into a box, picked up a taper and lit a candle. The flame fluttered, then caught hold and began to burn firmly, and Joe knelt on a pew, crossing himself like the good altar boy he had once been, and said a prayer to the memory of his dead love, Katya, and a prayer for Roxy, locked up in the prison state. A heavily bearded Jesus with melancholy black eyes looked down at him from a gold-framed icon. Joe remembered a line he’d read in a newspaper: the journalist had said that in packed churches, he knew he was an atheist; in empty ones, he sometimes felt the presence of God.

  Joe knelt there for some time. Nothing happened but he did no one wrong.

  Seeking a low profile, Joe checked into a small, family-run hotel a few yards from the old Green Line, a long squiggle on the street map which divided Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut in the civil war that had started in the seventies and trickled to a stop in 1990.

  Joe dived into the shower and stuck it on cold, then dried himself off and had a snooze.

  When he woke up, the sun was low in the sky. Time to do some work. Joe watched the footage of Jameela in the suicide vest again. Something about it troubled him – on top of the obvious, that here was a beautiful woman and a young boy showing their intent to kill themselves and others, oh so messily.

  Joe was reflecting on the video, trying to tease out what Jameela might be up to, when there was a knock at the door. Not the ordinary, polite tap-tap-tap you get in hotels, but a theatrical drum roll. It could only be Humfrey.

  Joe could have closed his computer and left Humfrey out of it completely, but for some reason he didn’t. He opened the door, led Humfrey to the computer and pressed play, and it was his turn to see the video ending with the suicide vest selfie. Humfrey watched the footage in silence, scratched his curly locks, pressed play and watched it again. The video ended on the two of them, Jammy and Ham, facing the camera, mute, in their suicide vests, surrounded by seven warriors of the Islamic State.

  ‘That’s not her.’

  ‘It’s someone else?’ Joe asked, puzzled.

  ‘No, it’s Jammy all right, but it’s not her. She’s not that kind of person. When I knew her she was alive and wild and crazy but she was good. She was a fine human being. That’s her boy, right?’

  Joe nodded.

  ‘The Jammy I know, she was a bit crazy. But a suicide bomber? I don’t think so.’

  ‘For sure?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain. But I swear that she would never, ever, kill a child of her own or make him kill himself. There’s something screwy about this.’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Good question. I don’t know. Let’s go for a walk, find an Irish pub, do some Riverdance.’ And he jiggled his legs up and down to illustrate the art form, if art form it be.

  They did go for a walk. The air carried a whiff of burnt rubbish and diesel fumes. The sun sank into the sea to the west, lighting the city a gloomy, darkening pink, then the colour of blood. At the end of the street, the prospect of the Med was made unlovely by a flyover choked with traffic; the deafening sound of car horns bleep-bleeping.

  ‘By the way,’ Joe said, ‘a flight to Beirut, a trip to Damascus, that costs money. You said you were broke.’

  ‘I was, very.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Got myself some development money, Paddy-dude, development money.’

  ‘Development money?’

  ‘Breaking news: Hollywood has just heard there’s a war on in Syria. Big money wants a Syria movie. Listen, Paddy-dude, it’s Hollywood, it’s just for show. They don’t give a damn about the hajis chopping each other’s heads off. They’re really only in
terested in hottie teen archers saving fantasy worlds and cutie-pie robots tidying up the moon and saving Matt Damon from bad space aliens, but right now a Syrian movie tells the world the money’s got a heart. It’s a big fat lie but I’m happy to help them out, and, more to the point, help you find Jammy.’

  Joe had a sense that this – going to Syria with the flakiest La-La Land fruitcake he’d ever met – was never going to be a good idea, but Humfrey was company and had money now and balls, and it was hard not to like the guy, infuriating as he was.

  Around the corner stood the remains of a Roman temple of extraordinary beauty; they turned another corner and came face to face with a minaret of ethereal simplicity, one slim finger pointing to the reddening sky. Joe wondered about the men who had built this house of God so many centuries ago, when his ancestors were paddling about in peat bogs. Humfrey angled his long neck sideways at the minaret like the velociraptor in the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park and said, ‘The concrete’s wrong.’

  ‘Explain to me the notion of right and wrong concrete.’

  ‘We’re not at home to Mr Grumpy, Paddy-dude. Jammy’s suicide video is spliced, yeah? You can easily see that it’s been put together using four separate clips. One, the downed minaret. Two, the city block morphing into dust. Three, the roundabout decorated with severed heads. Four, the selfie video of her, the kid and ISIS. You assume, don’t you, that all four clips come from Syria?’

  ‘Yeah. Where are you going with this?’

  ‘Wait up. This here’ – Humfrey pointed to the slender minaret – ‘is the local build. Lebanon and Syria are states not even a century old, having been carved out of the old Ottoman Empire by the British and the French. This is the Levant, in Arabic al-Sham. The mosques in Beirut are the same as the ones in Damascus. The downed mosque in Jammy’s video is all wrong. The concrete is different – greyer, coarser, newer – the minaret so much fatter. She’s faking it. For some weird reason, Jammy’s making out that Syria, the most screwed-up place on earth, is more screwed up than it really is. And that’s odd.’