The Friend

by Joakim Zander

  25 November

  Malmö

  They’re out on a bigger street now, the inner city to their left, a park to their right, a casino, an intersection. They’re driving at a normal speed, and Jacob was looking up, but now he pushes his head back against the seat again.

  How is it possible? he wants to scream.

  George, who is lying on top of him in the back seat, moves and sits up.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he screams in English to the driver.

  Jacob also sits up and meets Yassim’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. His face is as pale as a sheet, heavy bags beneath his eyes.

  But it’s him. It’s Yassim.

  ‘How…’ Jacob begins. ‘How… could you be here?’

  ‘The phone,’ he says. ‘Why do you think I gave it to you? So I could find you, of course.’ Yassim presses out a smile and turns to the left, back towards the city again.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ Jacob says. ‘When I left you I thought…’

  ‘I couldn’t very well leave you yet,’ Yassim says. He gives him an exhausted and stoic look. ‘We just met.’

  They’re back in the city centre again, between shops and department stores and parked cars. Yassim drives with what seems like practised calm through the streets. Jacob can see that he’s following a route on the car’s GPS. He’s planned this.

  Suddenly he stops and turns up towards a parking garage. He takes a ticket and a garage door opens to let them in. They drive in a spiral up and up until he turns off the ramp onto the third floor. It’s so quiet in here, so unbelievably quiet.

  ‘Come on,’ Yassim says.

  He parks near an exit to an enclosed pedestrian bridge, which leads into a department store called Hansacompagniet. Yassim goes first; he makes his way bent and jerkily, his left hand inside his black bomber jacket.

  They cross the bridge, pass by families having coffee, as if everything is normal. But the children press their faces against the large windows as sirens cut through regular traffic noise and drown out the quiet music streaming over the cafe’s speakers. Blue lights flash down on the street, police cars drive by at high speed down below.

  ‘Dad, look! So cool!’ Jacob hears a little girl say in a Skåne accent.

  Jacob turns around to look at her, a girl with long, dark hair, in jeans, a cap on her head, maybe six years old. She pulls her dad by the hand towards the window. Nothing unusual about the day in here. Just a family shopping together after school.

  ‘Hats on and hoods up,’ Yassim says.

  He leads them into the department store and down the escalators, past the shops and the people, out onto the street. The sirens shriek just a few blocks away, maybe not even that.

  ‘They’ll soon find the car,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’

  He turns left onto a side street by the department store and walks over to a dark-blue Japanese SUV. It’s a bit beaten up and seems to have at least ten years under its belt. The door is unlocked.

  ‘One of you has to drive,’ he says. ‘I’ve been driving for ten hours with one arm.’

  George hesitates for a moment, then he crawls into the driver’s seat. Yassim walks around the car and sits down in the passenger seat, and Jacob hesitantly gets into the back. Yassim bends down, fiddling with something under the steering wheel.

  ‘Hold down the clutch,’ he says to George.

  Then the engine starts running, and George calmly steers the car out onto the street. Behind them, the sirens are becoming ever more distant.

  ‘Lucky I had time to prep an extra car,’ Yassim says.

  ‘You stole this?’ Jacob asks.

  Yassim shrugs. ‘We can’t exactly use a car with Belgian licence plates. That would be a little too obvious.’

  Yassim turns to George now. ‘But who are you?’ he says.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing,’ George says. ‘But I think I already know.’

  They pass police cars as they make their way out of Malmö and up onto the highway to Helsingborg, but all the cars are headed in the opposite direction – no one is following them. They drive in silence at first, overcome by the moment, by the fact that they have actually escaped and that Yassim is here.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Jacob says at last. ‘I don’t understand anything.’

  He looks out through the window to the water stretched out under the grey afternoon sky. In front of them sit the port and cranes in what must be Landskrona.

  ‘First of all, I don’t even understand how you could be alive.’

  But Yassim doesn’t answer, and Jacob bends forward between the seats.

  ‘I think he fell asleep,’ George says, glancing back quickly at Jacob. ‘Sorry, buddy.’

  Jacob exhales. It’s no hurry, they have time. He hopes they have time.

  ‘That’s Yassim,’ he says.

  ‘No shit,’ George says. ‘He’s alive.’

  ‘I knew when I got the password,’ he says. ‘Who else would have sent it? Or I was hoping. But I never imagined he’d come after me. That he would search for me. Find me.’

  Jacob closes his eyes. It’s dark outside now, but when he opens his eyes, he sees Yassim staring at him from between the front seats. His eyes are so tired, his face so dirty and grimy, and a cut runs from his temple and down under his eye.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘We’re alive. Both of us.’ And then he smiles that smile that makes the whole galaxy stop, that makes the nights cease and time change direction, and Jacob leans forward between the seats and takes Yassim’s face between his hands, and pulls it closer and kisses him gently, trying not to cause him any pain.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asks when he finally pulls back.

  ‘Good question and surely not a moment too soon to find out,’ George mutters from behind the wheel. ‘I, for one, am all ears.’

  ‘Where should I even start?’ Yassim asks.

  ‘How about from the beginning,’ George says. ‘I’m wanted by the police because of you.’ He glances at Yassim. ‘Nice of you to save us in Malmö, but honestly, it’s pretty much your fault we landed in that situation to begin with.’

  ‘You told me I was carrying information about war crimes,’ Jacob says, leaning between the seats, ‘that I was smuggling it for you. But you lied.’

  Yassim nods calmly to Jacob. Outside, dark trees whiz by in the darkness – it almost feels like they’re driving through a tunnel.

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Yassim sighs. ‘But you surely knew that?’

  ‘I guess,’ Jacob says. ‘Still, I trusted you.’

  They sit in silence for a while. Just the sound of the engine and the wind against the car.

  ‘Do you know what Emni is?’ Yassim asks finally.

  Jacob shakes his head.

  ‘It’s the ISIS intelligence service, I guess you could say. They’re behind many terrorist attacks in Europe.’

  Jacob says nothing.

  ‘They were behind what happened in Paris. Or they developed the plan, coordinated it, local cells carried it out. The cells didn’t know anything until a week before. Then someone took a flight with a little chip.’

  Jacob just looks at him.

  ‘You,’ he says. ‘You were the one who came with the plan.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I didn’t carry the plan for Paris. That was someone else. If that had been my job, it never would have happened. I can promise you that. Just like the plan on the chip you carried is never going to happen.’

  ‘I’ve infiltrated Emni,’ Yassim says evenly. ‘I’ve been working with Russian intelligence for several years on it. Trying to make my way into the inner circles of ISIS, of Emni.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ George says, glancing sceptically at Yassim. ‘Are you saying you’re a Russian spy?’

  Yassim turns and looks at him calmly. ‘I’m from Syria,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit more complicated there, who’s a spy, who’s not. Everyone has their own agenda.’

  ‘And what is your
s?’ George asks, turning to stare straight into Yassim’s eyes. ‘What is your agenda, Yassim?’

  25 November

  Bergort

  The subway car emerges from the tunnel and into the autumn darkness between rusty fences, yellow grass and concrete. The suburbs. Klara looks out at the lit windows of the concrete buildings and realizes she’s never been here. She has never been to any of Stockholm’s suburbs, even this summer when she was directly involved in what was going on out here.

  When the train stops in Bergort, she exits onto a barren and windswept platform bathed in yellow electric light. She stops at one of the grey, graffitied pillars holding up the ceiling. There, behind layers of new graffiti and stickers, she sees it: a fist enclosed in a star. The riots of the summer have ended, but the symbol remains.

  It’s a quarter to eight, and she takes the stairs down from the platform, past the little grocery store where a few freezing kids are drinking Red Bulls and smoking, their puffy jackets buttoned all the way up and their hats pulled low. They look at her with interest as she walks by. She continues towards the small square, where she sees a pizzeria, an ICA supermarket, a pharmacy, a Middle Eastern food store. Otherwise, just grey concrete, brightly coloured balconies of corrugated metal, Somali flags in the windows, a forest of satellite dishes and kick bikes thrown into the bushes.

  She hunches slightly against the wind as she walks across the square. She’s almost there now. At the end. They put the puzzle together, she and George, and have reached what might be the truth.

  But she also knows that truth is only a small part of the story. That it’s fragile and easy to manipulate. The manipulation that got Gabi arrested, got Jacob to smuggle terrorist plans to Europe. It’s up to her now. And only her. She has to get the actual truth in order to break through everything else, so that the truth saves rather than destroys them.

  Bergort feels completely deserted tonight. The weather has kept most of the kids indoors, in front of their computers and PlayStations. She thinks of Gabi and George. Of Grandma. Of Grandpa in his coffin. And for the first time in as long as she can remember, she feels up to the task at hand.

  The buildings are lower near the edge of the small asphalt path that leads towards something that looks like a large square cage or enclosure. She can just make out one soccer goal and as she gets closer she sees the other one. Camp Nou.

  She stops and looks upward with a pounding heart, then slowly makes her way towards the fence. It takes a little while to find the entrance, but as soon as she does, she doesn’t hesitate, just bends down so as not to hit her head and takes a few steps onto the coarse plastic surface.

  The field is empty. She looks at the time on her phone. Just before eight. She turns around and listens, but all she hears is the wind whining through satellite dishes and rusty chicken wire. Slowly she walks into the darkness towards the centre of the field and touches the artificial grass with fingers stiff from the cold.

  Something rustles behind her and she freezes in place. Then she straightens and turns around. Someone has stepped through the opening in the fence. Not just one person, she realizes, but two.

  And neither of them is Gabriella.

  25 November

  Malmö

  Yassim turns to him again, and no matter how much Jacob wants to, he can’t resist the warmth in those eyes. It’s just like the garden in Beirut, like in that clinically cold apartment, or in the stairwell in Brussels.

  ‘I told you about the bombing,’ he says. ‘The one that wiped out my family.’

  ‘You said it was a drone strike,’ Jacob says. ‘That’s why you wanted to expose the US’s war crimes.’

  Yassim nods. ‘Yes, that’s what I said. That was my cover story, that I believed that. That I hated the Americans so much because they wiped out my family.’

  ‘But that was also a lie?’ Jacob says calmly.

  Yassim nods. ‘It’s not a lie that my family was murdered,’ he says. ‘But they weren’t murdered by the Americans. It was at the beginning of the war. Or before there even was a war, when it might, might still have been possible to save something. My father was powerful, a strong leader. He knew everyone important in Syria, and he invited them to my sister’s wedding, because that’s what you do, that’s how you broker peace. The only ones who didn’t come were the Islamists, Baghdadi Islamists. They didn’t want peace; they wanted what we have now, war and misery and hell. So they placed a bomb at my sister’s wedding to knock out their enemies. But the only thing they destroyed was my family.’

  He falls silent, stares quietly at Jacob. ‘You have to believe me,’ he says. ‘This is the truth.’

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ Jacob says. ‘Didn’t you trust me?’

  Yassim smiles crookedly. ‘I’ve been living under cover for five years, darling. I don’t trust anybody.’

  Then he pauses, puts a hand on Jacob’s knee.

  ‘I mean I didn’t trust anyone back then. We’d just met. In the beginning, the first year after the bomb, everyone thought the Americans were behind it. I mean this was in the Middle East; the Americans are behind a lot of shit. It was easy to believe that. I was already living in Beirut and working as a photographer. One evening at a bar in Gemmayzeh, a few months after the wedding, a Russian man offered me a few drinks. I thought he was coming onto me, and I was pretty self-destructive back then, open to anything really. But after we talked for a while, I realized he wasn’t just a diplomat, like he said. And that he knew exactly who I was.’

  ‘He was a spy?’ Jacob says.

  ‘Gregorij Korolov is his name,’ Yassim continues. ‘That first evening, he invited me to his apartment in one of those new buildings just above Cornichen, not far from my apartment. Then he opened a bottle of vodka. Such a fucking cliché.’

  A slight smile and a glance out at the trees that stream by like water.

  ‘He showed me pictures from the wedding, from some satellite or drone, and I could see how a waiter at the wedding brought in some boxes. Gregorij said they were full of explosives. He showed me documents and a video of interviews with infiltrators they had in Baghdadi’s circle, who described the plan. Gregorij even had calculations that proved the bomb couldn’t have come from the air, had to have been placed under the buffet table at the party. There was no doubt. The Islamists were behind it. And he asked me if I wanted revenge.’

  ‘But why you?’ George asks, looking sceptically at Yassim. ‘You didn’t have any connections with them?’

  ‘That wasn’t hard to explain – they were expanding at that point, in need of good people. And I think I understood that I would be seen as valuable. I lived in Beirut and might be called westernized, had been in the United States, was a photographer. More or less openly homosexual, something I had to tone down with the Islamists. Although they knew, and that was one of the reasons they wanted me. It made me less suspicious, if you know what I mean? Why would a gay guy be working for ISIS? Gregorij had other infiltrators in Baghdadi’s outer circle. There were people who could vouch for me and pave my way. I started as a courier for small stuff, driving cars, carrying small items and messages between Tripoli and Aleppo. Slowly I worked my way up and in. They started to trust me and in the end I became a courier for Emni. And through it all I reported to Gregorij. Often, I didn’t know what was in the messages I was sending. But I could tell who they were sent between, and where their leaders were located. My work yielded results. The Russians were able to map out the leadership, how they communicated, and I got closer to the core of the terror machine itself. But then Paris started to be planned, and this plan we’re in the middle of right now.’

  ‘Did you know about Paris?’ Jacob whispers. ‘Did you know it was going to happen?’

  It’s as if the air in the car is suddenly too heavy to breathe, there is so much hanging in that question.

  ‘I knew something was going to happen in Paris that week,’ Yassim says. ‘I knew who was planning it and who was carrying the information
. I even knew who would be receiving the information in Brussels, because that’s where they met the courier.’

  ‘But why didn’t you say anything?’ Jacob asks. ‘Why did you let it happen?’

  Yassim stares at him intensely. ‘I told all of that to Gregorij,’ he says. ‘And I told him it was something on a whole new level. Several independent cells. Concurrent attacks. I told him everything, and I can prove it. I recorded all our meetings with that phone and saved them.’

  ‘Then why did it happen?’ George interrupts. ‘If they knew everything except the exact date? Why didn’t they grab the courier or his contact in Brussels? This story doesn’t really feel like it adds—’

  Yassim turns to George, with cold indifference in his eyes, and George’s eyes return to the dark road in front of him.

  ‘Because the Russians let it happen,’ he says slowly. ‘Because the Russians benefit from the instability that resulted from a terrorist attack in central Paris. The Russians fight ISIS in Syria because they’re allied with Assad. But it also serves their purposes to have ISIS seen as a threat in Europe. Nothing is black and white, no matter how hard you try to make it. You can play for both teams at the same time. But I have no excuse. I should have known better, and I’ll have to live with the fact that I trusted Gregorij and the Russians. The people who died in Paris, died because of my naivety.’

  The car is silent again. What Yassim has told them is too big for the limited space inside this car, and Jacob wants to open a window just to burst the intensity of this bubble.

  ‘Are they really that fucking cold?’ George says. ‘They let Paris happen when they could have prevented it?’

  Yassim shrugs. ‘I think they’re desperate,’ he says. ‘Or maybe not desperate, but they see themselves as under attack from the West, as if the West distrusts everything they do. Like a cold war I guess. Just somewhat less intense.’

  ‘So what Myriam said was true,’ Jacob says quietly. ‘She thought you were a terrorist. The only thing she didn’t know was that you were working for the Russians. Why didn’t you tell her about this new attack? I could have just given the information to her. Why did I have to smuggle it?’