Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  Jonas often thought about the hour he had spent with his father the day before he flew to Damascus. In the six months since he had last been home, his father had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. Each time Jonas saw him he seemed to have aged. He was sure that hadn’t been the case when he was in his sixties. Everything is supposed to slow down when you get to that age, he thought, except, it turns out, ageing itself, which speeds up, as though spotting the finish line. On that day he had grown impatient with his father’s slow pace of packing. He liked to refer to the list he had drawn up as a young man and kept taped to the inside of his diary. Shaving kit, wash bag, comb, radio. Jonas felt obliged to dispense second-hand security advice as he sat and watched his father pack. Don’t allow yourself to be separated from the rest of the group or your minders. Hang the “do not disturb” sign in Arabic rather than English so people passing your room don’t realize there is a foreigner staying there. Make sure you have walked the route to the nearest stairwell. Jonas told him about a colleague, somewhere in Africa, who had evaded a group of gunmen searching his hotel by making up the room so that it looked unoccupied and hiding in the wardrobe. His father placed a pencil tick beside each item as it went into his old brown suitcase: pyjamas, underpants, vests, handkerchiefs. They argued about something unimportant, as they always did, and Jonas left early.

  Don’t allow yourself to be separated from the rest of the group. Jonas had in mind when he said this that someone might invite his father to a meeting on his own or try to get him into a different vehicle. He certainly didn’t imagine that his father would come down from his hotel room one evening wearing blue trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt, ask the concierge to mark a good local restaurant on a street map and set off towards the old city on foot. It had proved difficult to establish the events of the evening beyond that. Intelligence channels had yielded nothing: there was no functioning liaison relationship with the Syrians. He only knew what his father had been wearing that day because his suitcase had been returned to the UK via the embassy. Jonas had gone through its contents, checking them off against the list taped to the inside of the diary. Suspicion was voiced in some quarters that the Syrian government had allowed it to happen, or even that they had facilitated it in some way, to elicit international condemnation of the more extreme opposition groups. Good PR, Naseby would have said. Jonas didn’t know if this was true. In any case, it would have been pointless to blame the Syrian government. He had tried to blame his father for being reckless, but found that he couldn’t do that either. He could only feel admiration for the spirit of adventure, undiminished by age, that had led a father to ignore a son’s advice, leave the confines of his hotel and wander out into a warm Damascus evening. He wasn’t seen for seven days after that. Then one morning he appeared in a grainy online photograph wearing a blindfold and with his hands tied behind his back. They had dressed him in an orange jumpsuit that hung pitifully off his stooped, thin frame. He looked older than ever, Jonas thought.

  A demand for ten million dollars was made within a week. In the statement posted on YouTube, the kidnappers described Jonas’s father as an official representative of the Church in the UK and claimed he had been in Damascus to offer its support for the Assad regime. In justifying the sum, they said that the Church had billions of pounds invested in hedge funds, oil companies and UK government bonds, making it complicit in atrocities carried out against Muslims around the world. “Its leader lives in a palace,” said their spokesman in a London accent.

  Most species alter very little over the course of their history except for rare periods of rapid and significant evolutionary change – a process called punctuated equilibrium. Jonas felt this term could be applied equally well to his personal and professional decline. He sat calmly through at least a dozen meetings on the operational strategy, meetings he had only been invited to attend as a courtesy, before, in the same week, drinking six pints of beer and throwing up in a Hyde Park flower bed, smoking his first cigarette, forgetting to get off at his Tube stop on three separate occasions and refusing to leave the director general’s outer office until he had been allowed to present him with a list of fourteen missed opportunities and strategic errors. In his ordered world it was what passed for extreme behaviour.

  He was struck for the first time by how much time and energy a large organization could use up maintaining itself, informing itself, having arguments with itself, ensuring its different parts were joined up, as though his father’s disappearance was a vast dot-to-dot that could be solved by connecting every conceivable part of the intelligence world by email, telegram or secure telephone. He did not exempt himself from this judgement. He had played his part, over the course of eight years and almost six hundred cautiously worded reports, in spinning the wheels of the intelligence cycle, like one of those exercise bikes that goes nowhere. It was difficult to put a finger on any one thing he had done to make a difference. Outcomes, they called them these days. He had never recruited a disillusioned terrorist, he had never planted an eavesdropping device in a Belfast tenement. What had he done, then, on any given day? Printed armfuls of raw intelligence, mostly, in the form of liaison reports, agent debriefs, intercepted communications, satellite imagery and surveillance logs, turned his back on the unimaginable chaos of an open-plan office and retreated to a tiny room off the back stairwell where the cleaners stored their carts at the end of a working day. He would dust off the chair, turn it to face the reinforced window and read at his own pace, without the distraction of other people and the way they made him feel. He was away from his desk so much that he would have got a reputation for being lazy if he hadn’t been able to recall at will file references, dates, names, addresses and telephone numbers, if he hadn’t been able to see those connections that other people missed between a website visited six months ago and an item of clothing worn by an unidentified male pictured in a CCTV still. Instead he got a reputation for being either aloof or shy, depending on who you asked, for refusing invitations to the pub, for stammering when asked to speak before an audience of more than five people, for wearing suits and ties when others wore jeans. Unlike now, he thought, when nothing fit him properly any more, when he selected his outfit each morning from a dirty pile of clothes in the corner of the bedroom.

  And then, over the course of a few days and within a week of his thirty-fifth birthday, Jonas’s career effectively came to an end. On the Monday he approached the Church of England’s director of security on the street and offered to arrange for the clandestine payment of the ransom without the knowledge of the British government, and on the Tuesday he was called before MI5’s director of personnel and told that a situation could not be tolerated in which an employee was acting in direct contravention of government policy. He was not dismissed; he had been a loyal employee for eight years, and everyone he worked with felt genuine sympathy for his situation. Unpaid Special Leave, they called it.

  Jonas left the office for the last time carrying a few personal possessions in an old briefcase. He wandered around with no idea where he was until darkness fell. Through the dirty glass of the telephone box he could still see the Thames, and beyond it his old office, as he dialled from memory the eight Syrian mobile numbers used by the kidnappers in recent weeks. None of them were still in use. He would have offered them anything to get his father back, he would have offered them all the money in the world.

  There were reasons, certainly, for what Jonas had by that point already done, for what he would go on to do. That he couldn’t bear to see his mother suffer so terribly, that he wanted one last chance to make things right with his father. The Behavioural Science Unit consulted widely among academics and practitioners and concluded, months after it was all over, that Jonas had been suffering from PTSD, noting “the persistent and profound effect of violent imagery, coupled with complex and unexplored feelings of grief and anger, upon an individual lacking a strong and supportive social network and characterized by avoidant personality disorder”. J
onas himself felt differently, not that he ever read the unit’s report. Rational by nature and trained to attach importance to facts, he experienced the change within himself as a wildfire, as a puzzle with no edges, as a cracked plate, as an army of tiny flowers disrupting the placid streets of England.

  Naseby was still talking.

  “Frankly, Jonas, no one in HQ understands why you’re here. I get it, though. You might have been writing intelligence assessments for Whitehall for the last however many years, but beneath that placid surface beats the heart of a field man, an operator – like me. You can’t stand to be cooped up. Smell of the sea, bustle of the bazaars.”

  “Thwack of the tennis racket,” said Jonas.

  “Why not Turkey, though, eh? That’s what I can’t work out. Turkey’s where the freelance security chaps are based, where the jihadis come and go. But you’ve chosen to come here because you like hummus.”

  “I’m here as a private citizen. I’m not entitled to your secrets, you’re not entitled to mine.”

  Naseby looked unperturbed, as though this was all in a day’s work. Jonas had to do more. He threw the file into the air and watched the papers come loose mid-flight and settle on the floor, on the cottage pie, on the chessboard, surrendering the king in the process. He had never done anything so aggressive before. He felt mildly heroic. There’s another way of being, he suddenly realized; things can be different. “I’d be happy to look up the weather forecast for you, though, if that would help,” he added.

  The cockroach came to life and scurried away from Naseby’s shoe. He looked around him at the scattered papers, sighed and said, “Look, Jonas, no need to be a prick about it. I’ll be frank with you. There are two issues. Firstly, on the human level, whether you like it or not, people are worried about you. This isn’t London. Plenty of fish swimming in this sea and some of them have teeth. Secondly, everyone’s in a state because of that Snowden chap. It’s opened our eyes to how much damage one person can do with a USB stick. The only good thing to come out of it is that we’ve been able to take the moral high ground with the Americans for once. We don’t want to have to tell them about some cock-up of our own, do we now? They want reassurance back in London that we’re not looking at something similar here. You know, Snowden gets pissed off, runs to Hong Kong; you get pissed off, run to Beirut. You haven’t got a couple of Guardian journalists hidden away somewhere, have you?”

  “Is that what you were looking for in the kitchen cupboards?” Jonas asked.

  Naseby looked out the window. His approach was symptomatic of the confusion in certain parts of government as to how the issue of Jonas should be addressed. They would see his travel to Beirut as a disciplinary issue, certainly. They would expect him – still technically a Crown Servant – to obey orders and stop causing a fuss. But they would also be worried enough about his motives to see him as a target for intelligence collection. It was their job to imagine the worst. They would be trying to measure the scale of the damage that could be done by one person with the right access, and arguing amongst themselves whether that person might be Jonas. Cottage pie and a telling-off: they had decided to throw it all at Jonas and see what landed.

  “For your own sake,” Naseby said, “please do not underestimate the seriousness of this matter or the consequences that may follow. Let me spell it out for you. If you are here to exact revenge on the British government for refusing to pay your father’s ransom, be aware that a zero-tolerance approach to such behaviour has been authorized back in London. If you are here to try to get your father released through some unorthodox backchannel, be aware that you may obstruct other things going on and unwittingly make the situation worse. You have neither the training nor the experience for this. The best thing you can do, Jonas? Go back to London and exercise a little patience.”

  The cockroach skittered across the silver foil covering the cottage pie and dropped through the hole in its corner. Neither of them moved.

  “I appreciate you coming round here to spell things out for me,” Jonas said, forcing himself to look Naseby in the eye. “But I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here until my father is released, or until you come up with a better strategy than waiting for the kidnappers to deradicalize themselves or for my father to die, whichever comes first. I know that you are worried about my loyalty. I don’t know what to say that might put your mind at ease. I’m not entirely sure your mind should be at ease, to be honest. All I can say for certain is that I’m here out of loyalty to my father. Loyalty to a country feels like one of those old myths used to control people that we’re slowly growing out of, like the class system.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get him out.”

  “They must pay well in your outfit if you’ve got ten million dollars squirrelled away.”

  “There are other ways.”

  “Other than paying the ransom? What – blow up an airliner for them? Knock off the British ambassador? Or are you planning to sell secrets to the Russians for a spot of cash? You’re living in a fantasy world, Jonas. Do you really think we’re going to stand by and let that happen? Have you completely lost your mind?”

  Naseby might have been surprised at how frequently Jonas considered this question. He thought about asking Naseby for his views on the subject; he would have appreciated being able to talk it over with someone. The loss of appetite, the insomnia, the sudden tears – none of it felt normal. The last thing Jonas had said to his father before he left without saying goodbye was that he should avoid at all costs telling anyone in Syria that his son worked for the British government. It troubled him more than he could express that the last words he had exchanged with his father had been selfish ones. He wondered whether the interrogations had been more arduous because he felt obliged to keep his son’s secret, whether they had beaten him to get at the truth after he stumbled over an answer. In the most recent video released by the kidnappers his father had been made to read aloud a statement condemning the British government. There were bruises on his face and he held his arm at an awkward angle. His hair was neat, though; Jonas had noticed that a comb was not among the items returned by the Syrian authorities.

  “You must be keeping your tennis partner waiting,” he said.

  Jonas smoked a cigarette on the balcony and watched Naseby stride down the road, throwing his keys into the air and catching them. There were empty parking places across from the building but Naseby had left his car around the corner. No need to expose your car unnecessarily to the enemy. By the time he was finishing his cigarette, though, Jonas saw Naseby’s red hair behind the wheel of a nondescript Audi without diplomatic plates that sped past his building. Undone by the one-way system, thought Jonas, and he waved.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Jonas wasn’t sure what technical resources SIS would be able to produce at short notice in Beirut, but he wasn’t taking any chances. It was only two days since Desmond Naseby had passed by to take a first look at him. Jonas was certain that he wouldn’t have been authorized to borrow any Lebanese surveillance teams, because of the political sensitivities involved in declaring to a Middle Eastern government – in particular one whose cabinet included members of Hezbollah – that a British intelligence officer was suspected of disobeying orders, and Naseby himself had suggested that the Americans hadn’t yet been briefed. He would therefore have had to argue the importance of the case with London and wait for a team to arrive from the UK.

  It was possible that anyone sent out might also be tasked to mount a covert search of his flat. He went through all his possessions for the third time to check he was not leaving anything behind that would be of genuine use to them. He had bought a USB stick and two mobile phones, and he put the empty packages in the rubbish bin, where he knew they would look, before pouring the uneaten cottage pie over the top so they were partially covered. The last thing he wanted was for it to appear they had been placed there deliberately.

  Within an
hour of leaving his flat Jonas had seen two people behaving in a manner consistent with surveillance – or rather, given that he had never received any tradecraft training, in a manner consistent with what he imagined to be surveillance. It worked in his favour that very few tourists came to Beirut, and he already knew by sight the handful of westerners living in the same part of the city as him. He couldn’t be sure, though, and it would take him most of the day – time he didn’t have – to lead them around for long enough to confirm his suspicions. But he had seen a fair-haired man wearing linen trousers and a blue jacket in a bookshop and then from the upper level of a shopping centre a taxi-ride away, and a middle-aged Indian woman had hesitated, briefly but self-consciously, after turning a corner to find Jonas buying cigarettes from a kiosk directly in front of her. There may have been others.

  As much as Naseby may have been concerned enough to order a surveillance team on to the streets, Jonas knew it would take more than a mildly alarmed telegram to London to generate the level of interest he required. It was always possible that Naseby was regarded as an idiot, his judgement questionable. He certainly hadn’t climbed very high to be ending his career as a roaming case officer, if that was what he was, rather than as a head of station in some European capital. His superiors in London would be weighing the situation up against other, genuine regional crises. Jonas had to ensure they possessed enough evidence to conclude that he posed a serious threat. And not just any kind of evidence. Jonas knew two things: that spies value information they have stolen more highly than that which they have been given, and that they like nothing more than the feeling that they are stealthily acquiring rare fragments that will add up not to a complete picture, for that would be vulgar, but enough of a picture to get at the truth of things. He would let Naseby steal a fragment for his masters.