No Place of Refuge

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  ‘How could I? If I ended up in detention, what would happen to Aya?’

  ‘Shukri knew the boy who was killed wasn’t Sami al-Nuri. She told us his name is Ali Maydani. She must know who you are, as well.’

  ‘She does, because she helped me register when we landed. But I’ve stayed out of sight since Ali was killed, so she doesn’t know about the mix-up.’

  Khattak cut in. ‘Then who identified the body in the morgue as yours?’

  The boy’s lips trembled. ‘I put my identification on the body. I have documents in Arabic that don’t have a photograph attached. And I took Ali’s papers for myself.’

  ‘But everyone here has been calling you Ali. And you’ve known at least some of them for some time… Commander Benemerito, Vincenzo. Perhaps Peter Conroy.’

  ‘Except for when we registered with Shukri, I told everyone I was Ali. I did it to keep him safe.’

  They had come to the edge of the stony beach that bled into a boardwalk with a ledge. Rachel set Aya down on the ledge and sat down beside her. Sami came to a halt, his throat working as he tried to tell them the rest. Khattak placed an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll handle it together.’ He held on to the boy, offering his protection.

  Sami struggled to continue.

  ‘You know the things I told you at Camp Apaydin? The reason we went there, the reason Audrey took us there?’

  Khattak nodded. Rachel could see from the resolve in his face that he’d already guessed the answer.

  ‘Ali was able to point out the defectors who shouldn’t have been offered refuge at the camp. They were torturers, murderers. They committed terrible crimes.’ He shuddered. ‘They committed those crimes against Ali. The Turkish authorities didn’t know. Or maybe they did, and were bribed to look the other way. Maybe the camp is guarded so people like me don’t ask questions.’

  ‘That explains the injuries on Ali’s body. Was he a protester? Is that why he was tortured?’

  Sami shook his head. ‘Worse, much worse,’ he whispered. ‘Ali was a member of the Syria Civil Defense in Aleppo. He was captured by Assad’s troops when he was wounded in a bombing. He was transferred into the hands of the Mukhabarat.’

  And when they looked at him, confused, he explained, ‘Ali was a White Helmet.’

  Shocked, Rachel found herself whispering as well, ‘The White Helmets? The ambulance service that rescues people from the bombs? Ali was just a boy.’

  Sami shrugged. ‘Maybe you can’t tell from the body at the morgue, but Ali was twenty-two. There are younger volunteers who work with the Civil Defense. We don’t have much choice, because we are all we have.’

  The blue-black tones of the night lent a poignancy to Sami’s words. Khattak cleared a constriction in his throat.

  ‘How did Ali escape the Mukhabarat? His body is covered in the signs of their work.’

  ‘He was transferred to Damascus because of his value as a prop. His family is well placed so they were able to arrange what they thought was his rescue by paying an enormous bribe. He was sent to Military Hospital 601.’

  Khattak’s head snapped up. He’d explained his findings to Rachel on their walk up to Kara Tepe, speaking with an unfeigned distress that told her more than he knew.

  ‘Military Hospital 601 is an extension of the detention system.’

  Sami’s hands balled into fists. A profound relief lit his eyes. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Finally, someone knows.’

  ‘It was in the boxes,’ Rachel explained. ‘The boxes Audrey took to Delft.’

  Khattak cut across her words, his own question urgent. ‘How could Ali have escaped from Hospital 601?’

  Sami crammed his fist into his mouth. He was on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Khattak eased his hand away, murmuring in an undertone. ‘Trust me,’ he said to the boy. ‘Tell me so I can help.’

  ‘I was an assistant at the hospital. I helped the military photographer photograph the bodies, and I delivered the bodies to the transfer vans for burial. Ali was nearly dead when he arrived at 601. Before they could do anything more to him, I took him to the loading bay. One of the drivers was my cousin. He let me ride in the van and dropped us both at my house. The transfers take place in the dark. I smuggled Ali into our house. Israa took over his care, and I went back to work. I needed to alter the records so no one would know. I deleted his photograph from hospital records.’

  ‘Why?’ Rachel asked, shocked by the risks the boy had taken. ‘Why save Ali instead of someone else?’

  ‘I was planning to leave Damascus within the next few days. And I thought – I thought I should take someone with me. It was a place of death – the stink of death was in every breath I took. I was sent to Ali’s hospital room and I saw – I saw…’

  ‘What did you see?’ Khattak asked gently. ‘Tell me. Get it out of your mind.’

  ‘He was lying on his bed with his eyes closed but he was holding up one finger.’ Sami showed them the gesture, raising his right index finger, the others tightly furled. ‘He was reciting the shahadah. I took that for a sign.’

  It was the fourth body Sami had taken to the hospital from Branch 215, the branch they called ‘the branch of death.’ Over the course of ten days, Sami had transported forty bodies from the prison whose inhumane conditions were merely a respite from torture. The prisoners lived in filthy surroundings, sometimes for months and years, subject to slow starvation, drinking from toilets, their clothes disintegrating in the heat, suffering from a range of diseases, the least of which was mental breakdown. If they survived the shabeh and the basat al-reeh, they were tortured by other means.

  He was down to his final death of the day, transporting the body from the hospital to the garage, the morgue too full to receive it. He waited while the forensic doctor assigned the body a number and wrote up his brief report. The body was photographed – this one bearing unspeakable deformities. When the photographer was finished, the doctor ordered Sami to wrap the body in plastic. He caught a glimpse of the cause of death: heart failure. Only two verdicts were recorded: heart or respiratory failure, neither an accurate reflection of the actual cause of death.

  The morgue was out of plastic sheeting because the week had been busier than usual. The prisoners who’d been transferred from Aleppo to Damascus were members of the Civil Defense. As far as Sami knew, no White Helmet had lived to speak of his heroism. He knew their commitment to the wounded was entrenched; he wished he was working with them.

  The guard he was partnered with gave him a blanket to cover the body. He wrote the name of the body on a card, along with the ID number the doctor had assigned. The card was tucked inside the prisoner’s underwear. Sami carried the body to the entrance of the garage for removal. The processing session was over. He looked at the man’s face – he always looked at the faces. And he tallied up the deaths for the week, his heart a stone in his chest. He knew he was less than human. He was so tired he didn’t care.

  His partner went for a cigarette break.

  Deciding in an instant to do it, Sami raced back to the morgue. The photographs were stored on the morgue’s computer. He hid in a doorway, waiting for the photographer to finish up his work. He had a minute, maybe two, before his partner returned. When the photographer left, he slipped into the morgue. He downloaded the week’s cache of information onto the drive in his pocket. Sweating with fear, he wedged the drive into the toe of his boot.

  By the time his partner returned, Sami was leaning against the outer wall. Basil dropped him off at night: it was the regime’s way of monitoring his actions. But Basil was too lazy to be vigilant. Most nights, he had a wife he was eager to get home to.

  Sami wanted to ask Basil’s wife if she knew how many bodies her husband’s hands had disposed of, but he’d have to ask the same question of himself.

/>   Basil was holding a blanket. ‘There’s another one. They don’t think he’ll make it, poor bastard.’

  He called all the dead ‘poor bastards.’

  Though Sami’s heart clenched in his chest, he nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

  Basil tossed him the blanket. ‘You go, I’m meeting friends.’

  Sami made a token protest. He knew it was his partner’s night to gamble. Basil was watching him. ‘You’ll get yourself home when you’re done?’

  ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

  There was nowhere he could go if he didn’t want to join the bodies in the morgue. He was conscious of the thumb drive in his shoe. He’d been expecting to go straight home, where he would have hidden the drive until the end of the next week’s shift. He had to be careful not to lose it. If anyone saw the photographs, they’d match the numbers on the bodies to his shift. Then he’d be sent to 215, if he wasn’t shot at first sight.

  Basil pointed him to a room. ‘There’s a jihadi in there. If he’s not already dead, it won’t be too long now.’

  When Basil left, Sami crept into the room. A nurse in a mask nodded at him as she left the room. Sami looked over at the bed. The young man lying on it had a battered face. He didn’t look like a trained jihadi – he was weak, probably starved, he didn’t have an overgrown beard. He wasn’t hooked up to any of the monitors. He wasn’t being treated; he was being watched.

  When Sami made a careless sound, the young man’s eyes flickered open. He whispered something to Sami. Sami looked down at his hand. The prisoner’s finger was moving. He was praying, preparing for death. He was so small and slight, so certain of his fate, meeting it with more grace than Sami would ever possess.

  He made his decision in a heartbeat.

  He threw the blanket over the prisoner, carrying him out into the hallway. He passed the nurse, who seemed to be expecting it, and made for the garage. He was taking a terrible risk, but what was the point of going on if he didn’t? Everything hinged on his cousin showing up as the driver of the van. The prisoner would probably die either way.

  The risk was worth it to Sami.

  Khattak cradled the sobbing boy to his chest, looking at Rachel over his head. She’d missed the significance of Sami’s words, but he understood why a boy who believed he was at the end of his life would want to leave the world with the shahadah on his lips – testifying to the oneness of God, to Muhammad as His messenger. It was the submission of a believer.

  Torture was meant to rend the individual from himself, to divorce him from reality as he was stricken of every hope. In his darkest hour, Ali had clung to a cornerstone of his faith.

  The perverse degradation of the Muhammad stick touched Khattak’s thoughts again, firing his mind with outrage.

  How could You? rang the helpless echo of his thoughts. How could You let this happen?

  He held the boy until he was calm, then asked the question he’d picked out from the summary of Ali’s ordeal.

  ‘You were CIJA’s courier, weren’t you? That’s why you returned to the border, why you and Ali risked that visit to Camp Apaydin. Ali was the third passenger on that bus ride, not Aya. You were collecting documents smuggled out of Damascus. You asked Audrey to get them to The Hague.’

  Sami sank down on the ledge beside Rachel. Aya climbed into his lap and linked her arms around his neck, trying to console him.

  He gave Khattak a searching look. ‘Both of us were at risk. I might have been recognized as a defector from 601, though they couldn’t have known I smuggled out the photographs. Or that there were other defectors in Apaydin who had passed me physical records – orders from the CMC. And Ali might have been recognized as a member of the Civil Defense. We thought, between the two of us, his was the more dangerous identity, because military intelligence had had him for so long. So I took on his name, he took on mine, in case we were being followed.’

  ‘By a member of the Mukhabarat who slipped into the camp?’

  ‘We saw faces we recognized at Apaydin. They may have recognized us, too. We didn’t know who’d made it to the islands. If they knew we could identify them – they may have meant to kill Ali.’ His hand stroked over Aya’s curls. ‘Or I might have been the target, and Agent Bertin was in the way.’

  It seemed possible, even plausible, to Khattak.

  Two people murdered to protect the identity of someone who’d done much worse. He’d felt the creeping dread of Apaydin, the suspicion on all sides, though he knew the camp’s inhabitants were mainly those who’d refused to prosecute Assad’s war.

  He was left with the question of whether Audrey had witnessed the shooting; she might have been in hiding from someone at Apaydin. Which made him consider whether Agent Bertin was involved in the transmission of files to CIJA. War crimes and crimes against humanity fell under Interpol’s ambit.

  ‘Was Agent Bertin helping you? Was that her connection to Audrey?’

  ‘Audrey was helping me. I didn’t know anyone else.’ Sami’s young face looked anxious. Khattak decided to push him harder. ‘Did you see Audrey that night at the tent?’

  Sami twisted his hands together.

  ‘I can’t help you unless you tell me everything.’

  Aya spoke up in a soft, sweet voice. ‘Miss Audrey was there. She ran from the tent to the beach. We chased her.’

  Sami’s face went pale. ‘No, we didn’t,’ he said to Aya. ‘You weren’t with me.’

  Aya’s head bobbed. ‘Yes, I was. I followed you, you didn’t see me.’ Khattak pinned Sami with a razor-sharp glance. ‘So Audrey was there that night. Did you follow her to the beach?’

  The words he’d held back now tumbled from Sami’s lips. ‘I saw her run from the tent. She took a different path down to the beach. Someone was chasing her – I couldn’t see who it was – it was just a shadow. When Audrey reached the road, there was a van waiting with its lights off. The person who was chasing her hit me on the head. I heard a cry, I heard the van drive away. When I got to the road, she was gone.’

  ‘Did you recognize the van? Could you see a license plate?’

  ‘It looked like a tourist van, it was white with big black windows.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything else about it?’

  The boy’s chest heaved with a sob. ‘I couldn’t see anything else. The van was old. It was dirty with mud from the road.’

  Rachel patted his shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone what you’d seen? The police have been looking for Audrey – this information could have helped them.’

  Khattak knew the answer, even if Rachel didn’t.

  Sami hadn’t known who to trust.

  37

  The Hague, the Netherlands

  Sehr’s feet were aching. She’d been to every address associated with a credit card purchase on the list Esa had given her, and she hadn’t turned up anything more than cafés, restaurants, and a whimsical antique store.

  She’d saved the address in The Hague for last because she thought it was most likely connected to the role Audrey had been playing as a courier for CIJA. On her first day in the Netherlands, Audrey had taken a train from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam to The Hague Central Station. Sehr mapped the location on her phone and drove herself to the station. She parked her car, strolling over to Hague Central to take a look around.

  The blue glass construction was a recently renovated paean to modernism – it loomed over the square like a butcher’s block edged in steel. The signage was clear inside, and directions to the numerous platforms were relatively easy to follow. Audrey had purchased a tram ticket from the station; Sehr spent a few minutes orienting herself until she found the track for Tram 1. She purchased a ticket for herself, boarded the tram, and a few minutes later, she exited at the World Forum, a gleaming convention center in the heart of the city that hosted regular trade fair business. She didn’t enter the buildin
g because she couldn’t see why Audrey would have come here. There was a directory in the middle of the giant outdoor park, close to a pond fronted by small green shrubs. She parsed it carefully. Audrey had made no other purchases that would narrow down her destination: there were several hotels, a museum, an opera center, the World Forum itself – and then, to one side, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

  She hadn’t forgotten the Drayton inquiry that Rachel and Esa had been embroiled in – but she couldn’t see how the tribunal would be relevant to Audrey’s disappearance. She was about to give up and find a bench so she could call Esa for clarification when from the corner of her vision she caught sight of three concrete buildings sheeted in glass, arranged like a series of blocks. From a distance, they seemed ominous and impressive. She was in the international zone – was it possible the buildings represented the United Nations? Flags lined the pathway that led to the first of the concrete blocks.

  Sehr checked the directory for further elucidation. She checked again to be sure.

  She followed the trail of flags, her pounding heart telling her she was on the right trail. She cast a glance over her shoulder, not certain why she was nervous. The day was bright and warm; the people around her were a mix of bureaucrats and tourists.

  Hastening her pace, she found herself in front of the complex and saw that the three blocks were attached to a central base. A royal blue flag with a circle of yellow stars looked familiar. More familiar was the sign bearing the building’s name.

  She’d discovered Europol’s headquarters.

  When she tried to obtain admission through the visitors’ entrance, she was told very pleasantly she required written permission that could be obtained through the website. She asked to speak to someone in authority, showing the gatekeeper her letters of introduction. Phone calls were made and quiet conferences were held between sober-faced, immaculately uniformed personnel.

  Sehr fidgeted with the strap of her computer bag, which had scorched a trail of fire down her shoulder. Her nervous fidgeting drew the staff’s attention. A man in his forties with white-blond hair directed her to place her bag and purse on the security belt. Her possessions were searched, her passport and driver’s license scrutinized, but she was treated with excessive courtesy. She walked through a security gate to be wanded by a woman who bore a passing resemblance to Audrey. After these rituals were completed, she was led to a windowless room, halfway down a corridor. She wished now that she’d texted Esa about her discoveries, or her present location. She could see her phone and laptop were not likely to be returned in time for her to do so.