by John Sweeney
‘They seek him here; they seek him ther—’
‘Well, Rashid is the Syrian Pimpernel. Believe me, Joe, Rashid is a hero. He saves lives on the operating table. He saves lives by keeping the power on. He saves lives by getting people out of there.’
There was something compelling about the ferocity of Daria’s defence of Rashid that got through to Joe, cynical as he liked to pretend to be.
‘When Rashid returns here – he is a calm man, but when he comes back from Raqqa, his hands tremble – he then has to deal with Mansour, the palace, the torturers, all of them. He likes to listen to me play; he says the music of my harp soothes him.’
‘You’re his lover?’
‘No.’ She smiled at the thought of it – not altogether disagreeable by her reaction. ‘He loves another. She is a good woman for him. Wild, crazy even, but she believes in him totally. They are deeply in love. Now that Adnan is in trouble, things will be bad for Rashid if he is in Raqqa.’
‘Because the money tap has been switched off at the source?’
She nodded.
‘So, officially,’ said Joe, ‘Zarif is at war with ISIS. And behind the scenes he lets Syria’s oil billionaire Adnan Qureshi pay them off, to keep the lights on. The two blood enemies – the government and the most fanatical group of all the rebels – behind the scenes, in the dark, they do business together. That’s a deal you keep hidden. But why would the regime want to screw up a deal that gets them oil and gas they wouldn’t otherwise have?’
‘The word is that the regime, or people in it, are still paying off ISIS. They just cut Adnan out. He looks rich but he isn’t, or isn’t as rich as he used to be.’
Her eyes focused on her drink. This time she considered it and took a careful sip, as if it was a new trick she’d just mastered. ‘Adnan Qureshi throwing the party,’ she continued, ‘it was a big thing in this time of war. Maybe a show of wealth, maybe some kind of play, to show to the regime that he was still strong, carefree, still in control. Some people close to Zarif thought he was too greedy, that they could run the oil and gas just as well, that it was time someone taught Adnan a lesson in humility.’
‘OK, that makes some kind of sense. But why Mansour?’
‘Adnan has many enemies here, but Mansour is the most powerful of them all. He suspects . . .’
‘Mansour suspects what?’
She leant even closer to Joe, so her lips were an inch from his ear. ‘He suspects that Adnan is the treasurer of the FSA.’
‘The Free Syrian Army?’
She leant away from Joe, then, very subtly, tilted her head up and down.
‘Is he?’
She repeated her action.
‘Christ,’ Joe blurted out.
In the distance, a pock-pock of gunfire broke through the stillness of the night.
Joe downed his Bushmills in one and reached for her vodka bottle. He poured himself a big one and drank it.
‘So now Adnan is out of the game, too,’ Joe said. ‘So no one knows about the oil deal.’ She nodded, then touched her throat with her fingers.
‘Well, just you and me left,’ Joe added. ‘No one important, anyway.’
Again, a slight tilt of her head.
‘Zarif is across all this detail?’ Joe asked.
‘Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know. He’s both the leader of his gang, the Alawites, and its prisoner. Behind him are Hezbollah, the generals from Iran and now the Russians as well. Zarif’s problem is he doesn’t have enough people to hold Syria. The Alawites and the Shia and maybe some Christians – although there are not many of them left these days – are loyal to him. But three-quarters of the country is Sunni. He has to kill and torture to hold power. If he doesn’t do what the gang around him want him to do, he won’t live very long. Maybe he doesn’t know what his men like Mansour do. No human being worthy of the name would want to know.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Because I . . . Because I am Adnan Qureshi’s woman and Ukrainian – worse, the worst kind of Ukrainian these days, a Russian Ukrainian. So I am expendable. When Mansour finds me, I don’t think it will be very nice for me.’
‘Then get out.’
‘Maybe I should. Mansour is pitiless.’
‘Get out of Syria.’
‘I can’t. I am the last hope for what Adnan is trying to build, a Syria without Zarif and ISIS. He needs someone like me here. Adnan is extraordinarily resourceful. He plans for every eventuality.’
‘Including being kicked in the head at his own party? Watching the one man crazy enough to stand up to his torturer being shot dead in front of his friends?’
‘No, not that. But he would have planned for detention. So, I am waiting for his people to contact me, waiting for his connections to work.’
‘From inside Mansour’s fingernail palace?’ Joe’s words were freighted with such incredulity that she jolted as if he’d slapped her. A single tear welled up in her eye and slowly ran down her cheek. She stared at the carpet, not wiping it away. After a silence, Joe felt he had no choice but to continue.
‘I’m sorry, but if Mansour can gun down an American citizen at a party in cold blood, in front of dozens of people, then I don’t think you’re being realistic. Where are you going to hide while you wait for Adnan’s connections to deliver?’
‘He still has some powerful friends in this city.’ There was something mad, but madly impressive, about her belief in Qureshi. ‘Here, you cannot move at night. The Mukhabarat own the darkness. In the morning, I can go somewhere, hide . . .’
She turned her head towards the pillows.
‘So?’ Joe asked.
‘I’m going to bed. First, I shall take my clothes off. You can watch, if you like. Adnan used to like that.’
The thought of watching the lover of Mansour’s prisoner undress unsettled him. Joe walked to the bathroom, had begun brushing his teeth when he saw her in the mirror, leaning against the doorframe behind him.
‘Adnan liked watching me undress. But I liked it too. It made me feel alive.’
Her right hand reached up and untied the halter-neck, and she was half-naked when the marble of the hotel bathroom wobbled beneath their feet and the windows shook and only then came a great and deafening BOOM!
The hotel’s power failed and they were cast into darkness. Joe tripped over to the window and pulled the curtain aside and then the dirty grey drape. Through the darkness, he could just make out a thicker darkness billowing towards him. Below, a car reversed at speed, its headlights catching people running this way and that, like ants who have had their nest poked by a stick – all of this manic activity happening to the soundtrack of car alarms bleep-bleeping. Growing up in Belfast in the Troubles as a small boy, Joe knew his explosions. That, and his later occupation.
‘Car bomb,’ Joe said. ‘Big one – three hundred pounds of explosives, maybe more. Enough to make a crater a man deep.’
Daria edged past him and stood right by the window, staring out into the darkness, still half-naked. A ball of flame burnt a hole through the black smoke and its light tinged her with a red glow, as if she were on fire.
‘Qureshi’s villa lies in that direction, near Straight Street,’ said Daria.
‘So, another message from Mansour?’
‘I think it might be, da.’
The fireball started to diminish, the red glow darkening to a crimson full of dread. He took a step towards her and kissed her on the nape of her neck, again and again. Neither of them had much of a future, it seemed. Very well then, let the present rule. Through the window they watched red tracer bullets loop across the sky. ‘Fantasia’, they call it, like the Disney film of old. Well, not quite . . .
In the morning, she’d gone.
The sun had long risen and Joe was lying on the bed, looking up at the smoke-stained ceiling of the hotel room, savouring Daria’s smell, remembering Humfrey’s extraordinary, foolish courage, and wondering, dispassionately, whether he would
ever get out of Syria, when the whole room shook, but this time less violently than before. Another bomb, a big one, too, but this explosion was three, four miles away. He went to the window and to the east saw a pall of smoke climb up, blocking the risen sun. In the sky above him, pigeons ricocheted this way and that, bouncing off walls he could not see.
Joe took a shower, rubbed some wake-up-ness into his eyes and returned to the window. Something was wrong. The cloud of smoke hadn’t faded. Rather, a dark shadow was enveloping the whole landscape, diminishing the power of the sun. On the street, people had somewhere to get to and walked on. This, then, was how life was, in the centre of Damascus. The war was happening, no question, but for much of the time it was signalled by noises off-stage. People had a spasm of panic, then calm would return and, as best they could, they got on with the next hour of their lives. What you were left with was the slight but nevertheless very real threat of the next big bang killing you and, running along beneath that risk, not blaringly obvious but unremitting, a sense of fear in your gut that what might happen next would be worse, worse than before.
Joe felt no great hunger, but the human desire for stability, for routine, is strong, so it was down to the restaurant on the mezzanine floor for breakfast. It wasn’t so busy: a few Syrians, the Russian wheeler-dealers he’d seen in the lobby and a score of officials in white uniforms with those letters, OPCW, printed on their uniforms. They kept themselves to themselves.
He headed off to an empty alcove by a window and listened out for more bombs, but everything was quiet. Outside, on the streets close to the hotel, Damascus seemed astonishingly normal. Too much traffic, too many concrete boxes for buildings, people hurrying this way and that, struggling with their work-life balance.
Yogurt, olives, stuffed aubergines: a banquet of a kind, while not so far away from him people were starving. He ordered tea, but nothing happened. He got up and tracked down the lone waiter, a grey-faced little man. The waiter apologised, wandered off, came back with a teapot and poured much of the hot water onto Joe’s saucer and the breakfast table around his cup because his hands were shaking so much. After a time, he stared down at the puddle of hot water he’d created, unseeing.
His right eye twitched, once, twice.
Joe thanked him for the tea and he left. For the waiter, whatever he and his family had been through in the night, the war wasn’t just a question of noises off.
Joe went downstairs and checked out the hotel lobby. A thin scattering of people, the water fountain still not trickling, an edge of nervous tension every time the revolving doors cycled into life. His eyes searched the room then settled, for a moment, on two men in cheap black suits sitting on a sofa by the hotel entrance.
He had company.
RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA
Two miles away, maybe three, a stick of barrel bombs fell on the city; the President’s gifts to his unloving, unloved people. Deep below the surface, Timur al-Shishani was attuned to the particular vibration pattern of the barrel bombs, how the rock beneath his feet turned to jelly, wobbled, then returned to solidity so suddenly he could believe he had imagined the whole thing, were it not for a blessing of dust from the ceiling falling gently onto his desk. He looked across at the blue-eyed woman in the cage: she was asleep, or feigning it. The dust caught in his throat and he was seized by a coughing fit that somehow morphed into tears. Sitting with his back to the door of his strongroom, he wiped his eyes with his hands, then examined them. They were red-raw, from where he’d used the coarse wire brush to scrub them free of Abdul’s blood. He’d forced himself to clean up the blood. Now he went to the little sink in the corner of the strongroom and washed his hands yet again.
‘A little water clears us of this deed.’
Timur said it out loud, in English, and his slight frame was racked with tears of remorse, tears of shame, that he had done nothing to oppose the taking of an innocent life. He closed and opened his eyes, wiped the dust from his desk with a cloth, opened a drawer and retrieved the sturdy key for the antique, Parisian-built, walk-in safe that dominated his office. In the safe, he kept the dollars the Amn had given to him so he could buy explosives, ball bearings and detonators; that, and a few private possessions. He turned the key and the heavy door creaked open – he needed to oil it one of these days – and again the memory of what he had just done towered over him like a shadow on a cave wall. He’d watched the taking of an innocent life as if it were the swatting of a fly. The victim had been Abdul, a simple boy who had been guilty of being inarticulate; nothing more.
‘It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.’
Again, Timur said the phrase out loud, in English. Haroun had been the culprit, not Abdul. Of that, Timur had no doubt. So why had he gone along with Haroun’s wicked pretence? A growing and yet necessarily secret detestation of his own function, his presence in Raqqa, his whole existence; a self-doubt so colossal that it had led to a moral inertia so locked in, so cemented, that he himself had watched the taking of an innocent child’s life to protect a guilty one. Timur pinched his nose, the better to bring himself back from the depth of his remorse. Haroun was an orphan, but so had been Abdul; orphans were ten-a-penny in the bomb factory. Haroun’s father and mother and three sisters had been killed by a Zarif bomb – but he, his grandfather and his older brother, Farzin, had all survived. Haroun had more family than most.
The smiling boy had been so clever, so alert to and so interested in the chemistry of explosives, willing, eager to learn from Timur; that is, until his older brother had been called on to be a shaheed, to be a suicide bomber. Farzin had driven a truck bomb towards a Syrian army checkpoint, but the soldiers inside had shot at him and, regrettably, he swerved in the opposite direction, blowing up a mosque and a line of children queuing for water at the water pipe. A holy act had led to a most unholy consequence. From that moment on, Haroun had become cold, driven, pitilessly selfish. His elder brother had died in heroic fatuity; Haroun was resolved never to make such a mistake.
Making suicide bombs was a bleak occupation but, occasionally, the boys would generate some fun; the others never involved Haroun in this. They had grown to fear him. Only Haroun would have dared to sabotage the bomb-making process. And he had done so not out of hatred of ISIS, the organisation that had led to the death of his brother, but out of perversity. He wanted to wreck the bomb factory’s work simply because he could. Timur had suspected him for a long time. And now his trap had sprung, but Abdul, a dull-witted but fundamentally sweet-natured boy, had been beheaded in his stead.
Timur returned to his desk and sat down, his face lit up in a cone of light from a lamp, the rest of the strongroom in shadow. He became aware of a sensation of being observed. Instinctively, he swivelled in his chair to see the woman in black sitting upright, her head clearly turned to him.
‘Please may I have some water?’ she asked in English. The sound of a woman’s voice was unknown in the bomb factory and, stunned by it, Timur did not move. She repeated her request, her voice softer than before. Timur stood up, fetched her a bottle of water and walked quickly over to the cage where she was held. It wasn’t the standard ISIS cage for prisoners, so small that they had to crouch within, but a largish space where she could lie full length on the floor if she chose. He passed the bottle to her through the bars of the cage and she thanked him with a dip of the head, then unscrewed the bottle lid and automatically lifted up the veil, exposing her face, blue eyes and much of her blonde hair. She drank urgently, all the while watching him stare at her. Her thirst sated, her hand moved as if to bring her veil down, to blank out her femininity, but instead she pulled it back even further. Timur’s Adam’s apple bobbed twice but he said nothing; nor did he move from his position, just on the other side of the bars.
‘What is your name?’ she asked in English.
‘Timur,’ he said.
The blue eyes bored into him, intensely.
‘Free me, Timur. Let me go.’
‘I canno
t do such a thing,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘I cannot.’
Her right hand undid her abaya, revealing a white blouse buttoned to her neck. Her fingers went to the neck of her blouse and she unbuttoned the first button, then a second.
A bomb exploded not so far away. The dust fell slowly, specks coiling in the cone of light by Timur’s desk. When the tremors and the sound of the bomb had died away, the tension in the room grew. They both knew that for the Caliph’s concubine to expose her face and hair to another man, it was haram.
‘Let me go,’ she said, her fingers undoing the third button.
‘Please don’t do that,’ said Timur, turning his back on her.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Why can I not have power over my own body?’
‘Because if you do show me your body, the Caliph will have me castrated.’
She absorbed that and knew that he spoke the truth, and her hand moved away from the neck of her blouse. She started speaking, talking softly, as if to herself: ‘If you do not let me go, Timur, then I will surely be killed. If you will not free me, you must remember me. My name is Beth. Remember this. I am a Christian, a woman of the Book. Remember this. I am an aid worker, and three years ago I came to Syria to help children. I came here to prevent the spread of polio, so that innocent children would not end up crippled because of the stupid superstitions of the ignorant. I came to fight darkness with the light of medical science. I tried to do good. And look at me now. I have been sold as a slave in a sex market, sold to the highest bidder. I have been raped, time and again. And now here I am, locked in a cage in a children’s suicide-bomb factory. I am sure I am to be killed. If, when I die, I want my family – they live in Oregon, by the Pacific – to know that I love them very much. Remember this.’
‘If it is in my power and God is willing, then I shall tell your family this message.’