by John Sweeney
Joe looked back at the pushchair. They could never get it through the hole. The women seemed to read his mind. The old lady took out the baby and comforted it, while the blonde woman emptied the pushchair, draping blankets, clothes and shawls over the old lady. The pushchair was dismantled, and Joe got down on his belly and pulled it through the hole under the fence. Eventually the whole family had crawled under, muddy but undefeated. The bike was the most difficult to manoeuvre, but with Mustafa pushing and Joe pulling, it was done. Then they all scurried away from the fence to another road, this time on the Turkish side. Joe lifted the boy onto the bike, and Mustafa and the whole family beamed at him.
‘Shukran’ – thank you – said Mustafa.
They were out of Syria.
Together, they started walking slowly west, as an edge of light rippled behind them.
Sunrise: the rain had stopped, leaving streaks of mist lying in the bottom of the valley, turning from pink to gold. In the far distance, they could still make out the sounds of war, the rumble of artillery, but the longer they walked, the fainter it became. By mid-morning they entered a small town. There was a mosque and a square dominated by a statue of Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, and also a small bureau de change and a kebab shop, the signature beehive of lamb gently roasting in the window. The sight of it made Joe’s tummy rumble.
Next door to the kebab shop was an Internet café. Joe had buckets of money sitting in a bank in Hollywood, but no passport, no ID papers. Mustafa had a Syrian passport, but only a few hundred dollars.
After a lot of sign language, Mustafa and Joe had a deal. Joe borrowed a few Turkish lira from Mustafa, went into the Internet café and wired him five thousand dollars. Then they waited. After a time, Mustafa popped in to the bureau de change and returned with a thick wad of dollars, which he handed to Joe.
Joe walked into the kebab shop and ordered ten kebabs.
‘My ancestors half-starved,’ said Joe. ‘I’m not going to make the same mistake, if I can help it, and nor are my friends.’
Mustafa may not have grasped the exact meaning, but the family ate with the hunger of wolves. After Joe had devoured three kebabs himself, he palmed one thousand dollars to the grandmother – suspecting that Mustafa would never accept that kind of money from him. He walked out of the kebab shop, turned to wave goodbye and began hurrying to the nearby taxi rank.
A few seconds later Mustafa came out of the shop, waving the dollars Joe had given to the grandmother, and started hobbling towards him. Laughing, Joe waved and got in the first taxi at the rank. ‘Istanbul,’ he said, and the taxi sped by Mustafa and his family.
It was the first good deed Joe had done for what seemed like a very, very long time, and the taxi driver, eyeing his new fare through the rear-view mirror, was surprised to see the big man crying his eyes out.
When he got to Istanbul, Joe spent some cash on clean clothes and a fancy hotel. The sheets felt as though they were woven from silk. The moment his head touched the pillow, he fell into a profound sleep. He dreamt of a stranger in black carrying a posy of orange and red flowers, who was chasing him through a cemetery back home in Cork. In the dream, Joe slipped on the marble-smooth surface of a grave and fell, and the man caught up with him and offered him the flowers but at that very moment they turned into a blowtorch.
Joe jerked bolt upright, his neck locked in tension, his body drenched in sweat, the madness of his nightmare still with him. He closed his eyes and absorbed the soft hum of air conditioning, the noise of traffic and the sound of a dog barking on the street outside. He opened his eyes and took in the red diode lights of the hotel’s digital alarm clock: 03:10. He lifted the sheets off him and walked to the door, naked, and flung it open to make absolutely sure that this was no prison – to the astonishment of a hen party returning from a bachelorette night on the town. They cackled at seeing a naked man; he shut the door instantly, stammering an apology, locked it behind him and slid down with his back against it, coming to a rest in a crouch, sobbing his heart out. Physically, he’d lost almost two stone in weight but, despite everything he had been through, he wasn’t in terrible shape; mentally, he was broken. But he had a job to do, and that was the only thing that gave shape and meaning to his life, so he determined to get on with it.
In the morning, Joe dialled the LA area number Veronica – Dr Franklyn’s attorney – had given him for a crash contact. She picked up on the second ring – it must be connected to her cell phone, Joe reasoned – and in the frostiest voice imaginable she told him that Jameela and Ham had left Syria. Joe told her that he’d heard that, too.
‘Where did you pick that up?’ she asked.
‘Damascus.’
‘How was it there?’
‘Grim.’
‘You will, of course, be properly remunerated.’
‘It was grimmer than anything money can make up for. But you don’t want to know the details, do you?’ asked Joe, testing her.
‘Not now. Time is pressing.’
She told him that Jameela and the boy were travelling without passports using the fake names of Maryam and Ham Khashoggi, but there had been a possible identification on the Greek island of Kos. And better for the hunt, but not good news, Ham had been involved in a car accident somewhere along the road, in northern Greece or Macedonia. They had gone to hospital in Belgrade where the doctors had X-rayed him and found that his jaw was broken. They had also become aware that something was wrong and the police were called, but due to a misunderstanding Jameela and Ham had managed to escape. They were now believed to be somewhere in northern Serbia, and were heading to Hungary and, from there, on to Austria, then Germany.
‘Find them. Arrangements will be easier to make in Serbia and Hungary, less so in Austria or Germany.’
‘Arrangements?’
‘Getting Ham back to the States without too much paperwork. We want to avoid unnecessary court cases. The fact that she took a severely injured child out of hospital speaks for itself. She is not just a terrorist but also dangerously mentally ill, of that there is no doubt.’
Joe had nothing to add to that. He explained that he had to pick up a fresh passport in Istanbul. Veronica, startled, said, ‘How on earth did you mislay your passport in the first place?’
‘I lost it in Damascus, but we’ve already agreed that you don’t want to know about that, haven’t we?’
The phone line crackled, and through the transatlantic static Joe became aware of another sound, a third party, breathing heavily.
‘Who’s this?’ asked Joe.
‘It’s Dominic here, phoning in from Luxembourg. Find them.’ And then the line went dead.
SERBIA–HUNGARY BORDER
Exhausted beyond all endurance, Jameela and Ham walked sleeper by sleeper along a never-ending single train track carved through the flat countryside where northern Serbia became southern Hungary. The border zone was featureless because all of this domain had been Habsburg land, part of the Holy Roman Empire, until men with absurd moustaches sat round a map table at Versailles and sketched imaginary lines where Hungary should stop and the then-new Yugoslavia should start.
The day was ending, the shadows lengthening, as Jameela and Ham, his jaw still wrapped in a bandage, trudged past a family huddled in the shade of a tree, past a mound of blankets thrown away by people too tired to carry any extra weight, however useful a blanket might be that very night, always heading north. They traipsed underneath a Cold War watchtower, its ironwork as rusty as its purpose. It had been erected in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Stalin broke with Tito and bemoaned to his diary: ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’
Beyond the shadow of the moribund watchtower, dozens of workmen were hurrying to build a new border fence. Not yet complete, it glinted like an array of sharp knives in the sunlight. In Hungarian, the phrase Welcome to Europe was written in razor wire. They walked through a narrow gap in the fence and they were in Hungary, but their sense of relief, that one
more country had been entered, was short-lived.
Ahead of them was chaos. Hundreds of refugees were roiling around, confronted by dozens of Hungarian riot police, some in black helmets but many in red berets, their faces grim, etched with – to put it most diplomatically – distaste that they were having to deal with so many Muslim refugees. The police were seeking to shepherd the refugees onto buses to take them to internment camps for a registration process far more bureaucratic and time-consuming than anything they had experienced further south. Warned by calls or text messages from relatives who had found themselves locked away in the Hungarian camps, a sliver of refugees ran back the way they had come, through the gap in the border fence, seeking another route, through Croatia and Slovakia, to go north, always north. But the majority of the refugees thrashed in restless stasis, fish captured in a net, knowing they were trapped, fearing that this could be the end.
Jameela and Ham walked closer to the edge of the crowd, and from their position on a low rise of ground they were able to see a group of refugees getting on a bus. The driver closed the doors, unaware that his action had caused a family group to be split up. A woman in a black abaya pressed her face against the inside of the glass door of the bus, a still image of horror and despair every bit as powerful as Edvard Munch’s The Scream – worse because it was real. The driver and the police did not yield, the door did not open, but an infant, the mother’s child, was carried over the heads of the knot of people next to the vehicle. A man wrenched open a window on the bus, stiff from lack of use, and the infant was delivered to her mother; then the bus drove off.
That night, Jameela and Ham found themselves in a green-tented camp, surrounded by a razor-wire fence. Beyond the fence was a sterile zone, and beyond that a second razor-wire fence, and beyond that the Hungarian army, toting sub-machine guns. They were the first true soldiers the people had seen since Syria. Jameela felt like she was trapped inside some dreadful category mistake. The people were running from a war, but here they were treated like toxins, like war-bearing bacteria.
Around two o’clock in the morning, someone outside yelled ‘Allahu Akbar!’ in mock-Arabic, a second man howled like a wolf, a third roared with malicious laughter and then a shot was fired. In the stillness of the night, the sound of the gunshot echoed and re-echoed amongst the hills, setting the farmyard dogs barking. Inside the camp, in the darkness, you could eat the fear with a fork. Ham grabbed Jameela’s hand and she said, ‘Don’t worry baby, it’s going to be OK’ and then he said, ‘One and one is two and two and one is three,’ and out of desperation she said, ‘One hundred and forty-four,’ and to her immense joy she heard him laugh out loud.
In the morning, things seemed less bad. The food was strange, a curious kind of soup, but the bread was fresh and the water was plentiful. Some of the people giving the food out wore armbands saying Hungarian Red Cross and seemed to go out of their way to be pleasant to the refugees, as if to say, The razor wire and the guns, these are not the only expressions in our language, these are not the only things Hungarians have to say.
Around eleven o’clock in the morning, Ham was sitting out in the sun, examining the grass and shrubs inside the camp to see if he could find any Fibonacci sequences, when Jameela heard a strange buzzing noise. She looked up into the sky and saw a white plastic object, not that much bigger than a tea tray, hanging in the sky only twenty feet above their heads, bearing a simple black video camera, its lens unblinking. Without thinking, she ran to pick up Ham, solid as he was, and half-running, half-stumbling, pushed him back into the deep shade of the tent.
The drone buzzed off, to return to its master, parked two miles away by the side of some woods. It landed and he inserted a cable into the camera and downloaded his catch onto his computer. Then he uploaded the images he had of Jameela and Ham and ran the feed at high speed against the face recognition program, and within two seconds it pinged: the image of the boy’s face, absorbed in examining the leaf of a fern, was a poor match, not clear, not definitive, but the image of his mother, looking directly into camera as she hurried to hide him from the drone, that was nigh on perfect. She’d cut her hair.
For the Hungarian authorities, Jameela had prepared Ham, had made him swear that, if asked, he would say his name was Ham Khashoggi and Jameela was Maryam Khashoggi. In the end, when the Hungarian registration process was carried out, it wasn’t that painful: a few simple lies and then their papers, such as they were, were stamped with the Hungarian state coat of arms. Ham examined the stamp carefully and said, ‘The crown’s wonky,’ which it was.
Their paperwork was completed, but they were not free to leave. The Hungarian government had a point to make, that it did not want or welcome Muslim refugees or refugees who happened to be Muslim, and the more everyone understood that, the better. So the process was made far longer than it needed to be. In the end, they were released on the seventh day of their enforced captivity. Summer was over and autumn had arrived with a jolt: instead of the bright, garish sunlight they were used to in Syria, and before that California, they were wrapped in a cocoon of fog. You could barely see your hand in front of your face.
Along with the other refugees from the camp, they were loaded onto a special bus provided by the authorities. They were taken not to the Austrian border but to a point on a map someone in the interior ministry in Budapest had designated as the offload point, two miles’ trudge from the frontier. They walked in silence through apple groves and oak trees, the fog thinning on the hilltops, but still deep in the valleys. The road went downhill, quite steeply, and they found themselves wrapped in murk. Ham, in his beloved Batman T-shirt and jeans, skipped ahead, enjoying the freedom to run that the camp had denied him for too long.
‘The border’s only three hundred metres away,’ one of the refugees said in Arabic, encouraging them all onwards.
Jameela hurried into the fog, calling out Ham’s name, again and again, but answer came there none.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
The sunlight outside never punctured the citadel within. Antiseptic light beamed down on white floors, grey walls, grey rooms that were lined with grey filing cabinets because, as the Agency feared being hacked, more and more of its vast treasure-hoard of secrets was being transferred back onto paper, to be archived in cardboard folders in locked stainless-steel cabinets. In the twenty-first century, the most advanced intelligence-gathering machine the world had ever known was hurrying back to the time before digitalism.
Zeke had been at the Agency so long that his personal file, all thirty-two separate volumes of it, was wheeled in on a trolley. The three-strong committee called together to adjudicate on his fate were grim-faced. But it took quite a while for the files to be offloaded from the trolley onto the desk in front of them, testimony in paper and ink to Zeke’s service to the organisation.
Paperwork duly in place, the assault began. Phil Lansing, the Agency’s Inspector General, began to cite paragraph 12, subsection C, reminding intelligence officers of the necessity to be mindful of the Agency’s broad goals and not just to be concerned ‘with the narrow confine—’
‘. . . of the specific operation in hand.’
Zeke completed the subsection for him from memory. The two other executives, sitting either side of Lansing, registered surprise. Zeke smiled his idiot smile and explained: ‘If you’re going to throw the book at me, be it noted that I wrote the aforesaid. Or at least updated it, some seventeen years ago. If you’d all care to check page three of the hard copy of the Guidance for Intelligence Officers manual, you’ll see the evidence for my assertion. No pressure, gentlemen.’
‘Mr Chandl—’
‘Call me Zeke, Phil.’
‘The protocol of this personnel inquiry into your actions and inactions vis-à-vis the integrity of this Agency requires that I use your surname, Mr Chandler.’
‘I didn’t write that rule,’ said Zeke, mildly affronted.
‘No, you did not.’
The case against him proc
eeded. Sure, he’d taken a risk leaving his security detail in Tirana, but he had begun to suspect that they were there to stop him from investigating the possibility of a CIA black ops facility in northern Albania. Him being an intelligence officer and all, it had seemed the right thing to do at the time.
‘This foolish adventure’ was how Lansing termed it.
‘We must agree to disagree—’ chipped in Zeke.
‘This caused a great deal of anxiety to your colleagues. You were seriously injured and it was only the prompt medevac by Agency personnel that—’
‘Yadda yadda . . .’
‘Excuse m—’
‘Some shrapnel pierced my lung. A shepherd fixed me up. I was right as rain by the time you folks wandered b—’
‘The second error is of a far graver magnitude to the Agency. You traded satellite images with the Zarif regime for a non-American subject.’
‘A man called Joe Tiplady,’ replied Zeke. ‘It was not just morally the right thing to do, it may yet deliver significant HUMINT on Syria at a time when the Agency’s technology-driven obsession with SIGINT is delivering precious little product. The catch from the Agency’s HUMINT trawl against ISIS is pitiful. ISIS, leastways some of the people in ISIS, are smart. Sure, German intelligence has done well by picking up a flash drive containing the résumés of thousands of recruits, but they’re low-level grunts. The Agency’s SIGINT penetration of ISIS’s high-level command – for example, anyone who has physical proximity to the Caliph – is negligible, de nada. So a HUMINT operation which might yet bear fruit is worth a few snaps from space. Or maybe I’m wrong about that. Got any others?’