by John Sweeney
‘And in the meantime?’
‘We hold the line. We defend America, we defend democracy, we defend the Constitution.’
‘That’s fine and dandy,’ said Joe. ‘I’m going to get drunk and—’
His phone rang. Joe listened attentively for a while and then said pithily, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and hung up.
‘Who was that?’ asked Zeke.
‘The next President of the United States.’
‘Why would Jerrard Drobb want to spend his time picking a fight with a crazy Irishman?’
‘He lost some money to a conman who holed up in Venezuela. I faked his death and now, it seems, Drobb’s found out and he’s not best pleased with me.’
‘So when I fake a death it’s the end of the world,’ mused Zeke, ‘but when you fake a death, it’s just one of those things?’
Joe suppressed a smile. ‘I’m going for a drink,’ he continued, ‘and then I’m going to sleep for a month.’
‘A week. When I got you out of that prison in Damascus, you said thank you, and it was kind of left in the air that you owed me one.’
‘What?’
‘That you owed me one. The Agency would like you to return to somewhere you’ve been, to do something that might help us understand if – or rather how – our democracy has been attacked.’
‘And where’s that, Zeke?’
‘Pyongyang.’
Joe stared at Zeke for a long time. ‘Why the hurry?’
‘Because Jerrard Drobb takes office in a month’s time. Leave it a month and the new man in the White House may not want to know the answer to our question.’
‘I need a drink,’ Joe said finally.
He left Zeke standing there and walked off in the direction of the nearest bar. It wasn’t a yes, but nor was it a no.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Road, like its predecessor Cold, is a work of fiction inspired by stories I’ve covered as a reporter. I have just made a short film for BBC Newsnight about the nerve agent attack on Khan Sheikhoun, which killed maybe one hundred people, maybe more. To make the film, we had to look at images and video of the dead and the soon-to-die. These following scenes are burnt into my mind’s eye: seven dead boys lying in a room, one with his fingers grotesquely locked in the air in a frozen spasm; a dead man on the bed of a truck, his beard flecked white with foam; a video of a man lying in a pool of water, shivering and incapable, as he struggled, helplessly, to breathe. The regime blamed the rebels for some kind of own goal. This is not likely. The scenes in Road in which people die of a nerve agent in Syria are grim. I made them up. But in Khan Sheikhoun cruel fact outdid my fiction.
Journalists, by and large, have not been able to go to the heart of the war in Syria lest they be weaponised against their own cultures by so-called Islamic State. But we can read books. I recommend Andrew Hoskins’s Empire of Fear: Inside the Islamic State and Hunting Season: The Execution of James Foley by James Harkin; also Graeme Wood’s magisterial article ‘What Is The Islamic State?’ in The Atlantic, March 2015.
Aside from the Newsnight piece on Khan Sheikhoun, I’ve made a number of films for the BBC that I’ve drawn on for Road: in 2015, a Panorama documentary about Europe’s refugee crisis called ‘The Long Road’, a short film for Newsnight – ‘Finding Azam’ – and a second Panorama, ‘Paris Terror Attacks’. In 2016, I made three short films for Newsnight about Russian and Syrian regime bombing of the M10 hospital in Aleppo. I went to Syria several times before the war, but the nearest I got to the war zone was sitting in the office of London surgeon Dr David Nott filming him conduct the rebuilding of a jaw in Aleppo via Skype and WhatsApp. If you want to know more about the amazing Dr Nott, here’s a link to his foundation: http://davidnottfoundation.com/.
North Korea raised its ugly head in Road, supplying chemical weapons to the regime. The North Koreans have been caught, twice, trying to ship chemical suits to Syria. The evidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people is damning. If you want to know more, you might care to take a look at my non-fiction book, North Korea Undercover, which also tells something of the backstory of the IRA man who really did go to North Korea to learn how to kill the British back in the eighties, and realised that they, the North Koreans, and he, as an IRA man, had been brainwashed.
Road is dedicated to two people and the surgeons of what was, once, Free Aleppo. The real Agim Neza was our tour guide in Albania in 1990 when a group of journalists pretending not to be journalists invaded Albania. Agim was witty, dry and civilised then and throughout his life, which ended tragically too soon in the summer of 2016. It’s been a pleasure to base the character of a good Albanian cop on the real Agim. The late Marie Colvin was, so her family believe, specifically targeted by the Syrian regime. Marie was a brilliant journalist whose life was a mirror that glittered as it showed truth to power. The third dedication is to the doctors of Free Aleppo when it existed, and specifically the doctors who worked in the M10 hospital as it was bombed repeatedly by the regime and the Russian air force. Bombing hospitals is against the rules of war. To do so repeatedly is a war crime.
For the name of my main character I must thank the family of Joe Tiplady, a wonderful Londoner who died of a heart attack when he was far too young. For getting me to write this series, thanks to my agent Humfrey Hunter and my publisher Jane Snelgrove. For putting up with me, thanks, foolish as this seems, to my dog Bertie and, not foolishly at all, my family.
John Sweeney
London, April 2017
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Sweeney is a writer and journalist who, while working for the BBC, has challenged both Donald Trump over his association with a Russian-born gangster – Trump walked out on him – and Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Sweeney became a YouTube sensation in 2007, when, while filming ‘Scientology and Me’ for Panorama, he lost his temper with Tommy Davis, a senior member of the Church of Scientology. As a reporter, first for the Observer and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and been undercover to a number of tyrannies, including Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe. He has helped free seven people falsely convicted of killing their babies, starting with Sally Clark and Angela Cannings. Over the course of his career, John has won an Emmy, two Royal Television Society Awards, a Sony Gold Award, a What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year Award, an Amnesty International Award and the Paul Foot Award. Sweeney’s first novel, Elephant Moon, was published to much acclaim in 2012. His hobby is annoying the Church of Scientology.