Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  James Wolff grew up in the Middle East and now lives in London. He has worked for the British government for the past ten years. Beside the Syrian Sea is his first novel.

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  © James Wolff, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral right of James Wolff has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eBook ISBN 978–1–908524–99-7

  Typeset by Tetragon

  by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For my mother and father, with love and gratitude.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  PROLOGUE

  SECRET

  FROM: PK3Y

  MSG REF: B97–4/68

  SUBJECT: Possible kidnap of British national

  STRAP 1 CONTROLLED ITEM. FOIA EXEMPT.

  1.Meeting early this morning with a jittery ARTISAN. Headlines below. Full contact report to follow separately, along with draft CX.

  2.The Syrian authorities are investigating the disappearance of a British national from his hotel in Damascus yesterday evening. The individual is reported to be Rev. Samuel WORTH, PDOB Edinburgh 4-9-1939, passport 936485118. Initial traces suggest a family connection that will have to be handled with sensitivity.

  3.According to ARTISAN, the hotel manager called the police at approx. 2130 when a colleague reported him missing. CCTV wasn’t working but the doorman says WORTH left on his own and under no apparent duress at approx. 1800 after asking for directions to a restaurant in the old city. There are no reports of him returning.

  4.Eyewitnesses in the restaurant describe him eating alone but leaving with a local man described by the waiter as a beggar. Reported time of departure varies from 1930 to 2045. No consistent description of the beggar. There were three checkpoints in the immediate vicinity and several foot patrols but none reported contact with a foreign national. The only physical evidence is a crumpled tourist map from WORTH’s hotel that was found in an alleyway several hundred metres from the restaurant and some stains on the ground that may or may not be blood.

  5.The investigation was taken over by Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI) within hours. They have already arrested the waiter, hotel manager and doorman.

  6.ARTISAN was quick to explain that since the Ministry of Interior (MoI) has no oversight of SMI his access to the investigation will be severely limited from this point onwards. He has offered to re-establish social contact with colleagues in SMI but this will take time. We have praised ARTISAN for his initiative but requested he sit tight for now. We know you will be coming under pressure for intelligence on WORTH but given likelihood he is already in Raqqa, limited rescue options and ARTISAN’s history of getting distracted we strongly suggest he remains focussed on existing MoI tasking.

  7.We await your prompt response. Separately pls address shortfall in funds as raised in B97-4/66.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jonas couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so ill-prepared. He had never been inside the bar before, and wouldn’t have been able to answer basic questions about the layout, exits, cameras and customer profile. He didn’t know which group controlled this part of Beirut or how they would react if it all went wrong. His target was probably drunk. From his position he could see the open doorway clearly enough, but the women at the bar inside were impatient for customers, and at least one of them had seen him loitering across the street. Theirs is the oldest profession, he thought – they are the better watchers, their livelihood more honestly linked to their ability to observe and manipulate. Spies are the second oldest and the second best. At least that was how he felt.

  He had decided to allow the priest enough time for one drink. The woman in the doorway waved at him and he turned away to light a cigarette. He felt weighed down by grief, by the gentle rain that had soaked into his clothes, by simple tiredness. His dark beard was long and unkempt and the stress of the previous months had left him looking older than his thirty-five years. Somehow he brought his mind back to the task ahead. To tell the priest who he was and what he wanted, to deal with his confusion and anger, to identify what might motivate him to help. Jonas had never done anything like this before. As an analyst it was his job to come to terms with the rogues’ gallery of assumptions, vendettas, half-truths and bald lies that constituted the majority of the intelligence that crossed his desk and make it useful – to elevate it to something approaching fact. But he had never been operational, and his temperament had kept him away from much of what went on around him. He remembered an agent handler talking about ways of keeping the door open to a second meeting even if the initial pitch went disastrously. This struck him as fantastical. His plan would either work tonight or it would go wrong: there would be no second chances.

  The interior was smaller and darker than he had expected. A poorly stocked bar stretched along the right side; a few tables were pushed up against the opposite wall. The woman who had waved at him took his arm and led him to the bar. She pushed her breast against him.

  “You going to buy me drink?”

  She had begun her pitch without hesitation. As an aspiring practitioner, Jonas admired her directness. He saw the priest sitting alone further down the bar. He looked sad, somehow, his soft, grey, hunched shape a thickening of the gloom. At the end of the room two women danced with a fat man. The women, swaying on their high heels, knew not to risk too much movement – it looked as though they were slowly trying to escape from a set of elaborate foot restraints.

  “You want to go to room?”

  He put a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, took his drink and walked down to join the priest.

  “Father Tobias, this is a surprise. Do you mind if I join you?”

  He heard the wobble in his voice and regretted that he had turned out this way. Tobias turned to see who was speaking to him. The tape holding his glasses together at the bridge glittered weakly. He didn’t smile when he saw it was Jonas.

  “No one here calls me Father,” he said.

  “Being a priest must be one of those things it’s difficult to put to one side for an evening.” Unsure what to do, Jonas took the stool next to him. “It’s part of you – like an accent, like a preference for tea rather than coffee.”

  “Like a criminal record.”

  His speech was clear and his hand as he reached for the glass was steady. Even when drunk, Jonas had learned, Tobias spoke in the measured, unemotional rhythms of a theologian. The only change was that he slowed down to avoid slurring his words, which h
ad the effect of making his Swiss accent more pronounced. They had first met ten days earlier. Jonas had been trying to follow him for three straight evenings, and when Tobias had taken something from his pocket and dropped a folded envelope Jonas decided to act. He had concluded that on balance there were more downsides than upsides to following a drunkard. They might not be alert but they walked slowly, doubled back on themselves, attracted attention – the unpredictable tradecraft of the alcoholic, as challenging in its own way as that of any Russian spy. Jonas had picked up the envelope, read the contents and caught up with him to hand it back. They had gone for a drink at a nearby bar, where Jonas explained that he was a freelance journalist researching an article on Christian communities in Syria. If the priest had been struck by the coincidence, he hadn’t shown it.

  They had met several times over the following week. On the last occasion, Tobias had been drunk enough for Jonas to have no difficulty stealing his hotel room key. He hadn’t planned to do it, and he certainly had no experience of such things. Risk made him uncomfortable, whether it came in the form of a conversation with a pretty girl or a deviation from the precise route he walked to work each day. But he had heard the key clinking and slipped his hand into Tobias’s jacket pocket when he thought it would go unnoticed. Although he knew that the best deceptions were those that the target would never know had occurred, he accepted that in his situation he would have to compensate for his lack of resources somehow, and boldness seemed as good a way as any. Tobias would probably assume that he had lost it while drunk. Jonas felt a brief exhilaration at being liberated from the constraints of corporate risk, of reputational risk. He was on his own and had little to lose.

  “Do you mind if I join you for a drink?” he asked.

  “You have made a strange choice of bar if you wish to have a drink with another man,” said Tobias.

  “Or to drink on your own.”

  “Priests should spend more time in places like this. I am no better than anyone else here. At least these people make no pretence about what they are.”

  Jonas tried to focus on projecting the combination of authority and warmth he knew would be needed when the conversation moved into more challenging territory. In the dirty mirror above the bar he looked stiff, self-conscious. For some reason he had decided to wear a suit, hoping it might be discreetly redolent of influence, government, long corridors. He couldn’t understand how he might have imagined anything so crumpled and ill-fitting would be appropriate – Tobias was looking him over with the first sign of pleasure he had shown since Jonas had arrived. He wondered if this might work in his favour. He hadn’t yet worked out how to project warmth, but perhaps the only reasonable response to his dark suit, to his evident discomfort, to his lean, funereal intensity, to the parting that made him look less like someone following the fashion for neat hair than a Victorian gentleman – perhaps the only reasonable response was to smile.

  “In fact, this is the best kind of place to drink alone,” Tobias was saying. “The women never disturb me – they know what I am – and the men are only interested in the women. As long as the men do not find out my profession. It would make them uncomfortable.”

  Jonas had never seen him wearing a clerical collar. He wondered how the women in the bar would have identified Tobias as a priest and marvelled again at their ability to read people. Jonas saw a short, fleshy, middle-aged man with thinning grey hair and round tortoiseshell glasses. He saw a collar that was frayed, a habit of blinking emphatically when under pressure. A schoolteacher, perhaps, or a watchmaker – it fit with his heavy Swiss accent and his slow, precise way of speaking, but not with his hands, which were dirty and had begun to tremble. It was clear to Jonas that something was wrong, that this was not going to go the way he had hoped.

  “Why don’t I invent a different occupation for myself – in case someone asks me what I do?” Tobias said. It sounded as though he said inwent rather than invent. “This is your speciality, inwenting occupations. Perhaps I will also claim that I am a freelance journalist.”

  It was possible Tobias had simply told them he was a priest, Jonas thought. It was important to be sceptical of professional myths.

  “I do not know what is the purpose of all this,” Tobias said. He waved his hand to show that he was referring to Jonas’s suit as well as his unexpected arrival. “I do not know which department you represent, but please understand that I have no interest in being a pawn in whatever version of the great game the British government is playing these days.” He picked up Jonas’s glass and placed it further down the bar as though moving a chess piece from one end of the board to the other. Pawn to queen’s knight 4, Jonas thought, given the size of the space between them, given the position of the napkin holder and the salt shaker, which he had already decided looked like a bishop in his white robes. “Please, though, before you leave, return my hotel key. They will charge me for it otherwise.”

  Jonas took it from his pocket and placed it on the bar. He had passed a maid in the hotel corridor when leaving the room. She must have assumed they were friends and asked Tobias if he knew someone matching Jonas’s description. It did not matter. He did not regret the situation he was in. He had come into the bar this evening to make his position clear. However this came to pass, he knew that he would have to deal with the priest’s anger. And he had learned valuable things from his search of the hotel room. That money would not be a factor, for one. Tobias had turned his hotel room into something resembling a monk’s cell. The television had been hidden away in the wardrobe, along with a half-empty bottle of gin whose label had been peeled off, and the paint on the walls was darker where pictures had been taken down. A simple wooden cross hung from a crudely hammered nail. Jonas thought that he might even have slept on the floor each night – the maid stubbornly gathering the blankets and remaking the bed each morning – because of the half-empty water glass and coaster placed carefully on the tiles, and next to it a small pile of books: Goethe, Bonhoeffer, an anthology of war poetry, a pocket New Testament. Those the maid would not touch.

  There was more. There were things that Jonas had discerned as possibilities from the room, things that came back to him now as he sat beside the priest at the bar. The importance of the woman in the black-and-white photograph, tucked between the pages of the New Testament. The small vase of flowers on the windowsill, picked from a garden rather than bought from a florist, too fresh for a hotel of that standard and at odds with the masculine sparseness of the room. Had they been left there as a gesture of kindness by the maid? Tobias was a compassionate man. Those he came into contact with each day recognized it. Jonas could make use of this.

  “I want to explain,” he said. He shifted on the stool and cleared his throat. Shyness is too mild a word for this, he thought, it fails to capture the physicality of panic, like being in a fight with yourself – the hurried breathing, the heat, a desire to run. “I understand that you feel tricked, Tobias. I would feel the same in your position. But the things I’ve done have been necessary because of the bigger picture. A man with your experience – I know you’re able to understand that there are more important things than your entirely reasonable sense of grievance.”

  Bigger picture, a man with your experience, entirely reasonable sense of grievance: Jonas heard himself capture perfectly the tone of a door-to-door salesman trying to talk a dissatisfied customer out of making a complaint.

  “How casually people like you intrude on the privacy of others,” said Tobias.

  “You remember that I went into your room but you forget that I saw what is in there.” He could hear himself speaking but didn’t know where this stuff was coming from, or whether it made any sense to Tobias. It barely made any sense to Jonas. He fumbled for the point he was trying to make. “What I mean is that your room is not that of someone who believes in privacy. It’s the room of someone used to living in a community where everything is shared. Some people put their faith in objects, in worldly things – things that c
an be searched. You’re not one of those people, Tobias.”

  “You are very quick to tell others what they should feel.” Wery quick, Jonas heard. “I should not feel tricked, I should not feel spied upon. As a priest I should be above such trivial concerns.” He blinked repeatedly. “Perhaps you forget where I am and what I am doing.”

  “What I’ve learned is that you’re not one of those people who walks past someone in need.” Use his name, Jonas reminded himself. Number four on the list of ten rapport-building tips distilled from a handful of self-help books he had bought at Heathrow just weeks earlier, along with “Maintain eye contact”, “Mirror body language” and “Tilt your head at an angle and smile as you listen”. He liked lists. They simplified the business of living. “This isn’t about politics, Tobias. This is about saving a life.”

  “So this has been a selection process, is that what you are saying? I have passed the interview and you are offering me the job? This is good news. Except that I did not apply and I think the job is reprehensible. Why do you look so surprised? What do you expect me to say when you have tricked me like this? Perhaps you forget that for most of us lying is considered a bad thing.”

  “The lie was necessary, Tobias,” Jonas said. “It allowed us to establish who you are, what you are. To establish whether you’re the right person to help us with something of huge importance.”

  “Us?”

  “I’m not here on my own.”

  He hadn’t planned to mention anyone else. He wondered if he had gone too far. Tobias turned around to take in the dozen or so other men in the room, seated at tables with women or standing at the bar. Dark patches of sweat showed through his shirt. The fat man was still dancing with two women at the back.

  “If you mean him,” Tobias said, “it doesn’t look like he is doing his job.”

  “You won’t be able to identify them. But they are here. And they’ll be with us when we leave. They are here to keep us safe, nothing more.”