Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  None of which meant there was nothing they could do. Civil servants might be panicking at the limited range of options open to the government, he thought, but spies would be in their element. In situations like this they would calmly gather intelligence, identify an opening and throw a handful of deniable sand into the machinery. They would slow things down and make them difficult. They would rely on human weakness, on people’s inability to stay the course, on their need for an eye specialist they couldn’t otherwise afford.

  Jonas took off his shoes and his socks and his father’s pullover with the oil stain and the patches at each elbow. The touch of the sun on his bare skin was startling. Several people stopped at a distance to watch the peculiar man with the pale lean body getting undressed.

  “What in hell’s name are you doing, Jonas?”

  “Going for a swim.” He smiled at Naseby. “Come with me. There are no microphones out there.”

  “Are you mad? It’ll be freezing! You don’t have trunks on! And this isn’t a public beach!”

  “There are people swimming —”

  “They’re street kids, Jonas. They’ll swim anywhere!”

  He unbuckled his belt and took off his trousers. Dressed only in his underwear, he walked to the railings and stood above the glittering sea. He was tired of it all – of himself as much as of Naseby’s efforts to control him, of the guilt he carried for deceiving Tobias and the anxiety about his father that stained every hour of every day. The water was ten feet below him. The children swimming there saw him and began to wave, encouraging him to jump.

  “Jonas, we need to talk,” Naseby called out. “It can’t go on like this. We have to —”

  He jumped.

  The water was cold and he felt the breath rushing out of him. He had the sudden, curious sensation that he had sloughed off a skin, that he had been cleansed in a way that went beyond the simple effect of the water on his body, the froth of bubbles around him like a hard coating of dust that had cracked upon impact and crumbled into the sea. His descent continued. All around him was dark but he wasn’t afraid. He saw himself as a child, swimming in the sea with his father and mother, and then as a young man, his head bent as though in prayer. It had not been a difficult transition to make, from churches to libraries – the atmosphere of boredom and solemnity, the deep hush. He remembered his university supervisor explaining the rules on the first day. Bold statements are bound by their very nature to be wrong. Prevailing opinion is not overturned in one fell swoop; rather it is coaxed, one inch at a time, in a new direction. A good paper should contain only a handful of novel sentences. He lived alone in a studio flat in Cambridge, cycled to his part-time job in a bookshop, spent his free hours and weekends researching the Suez crisis or the League of Nations. He would sometimes stop for a drink at a quiet pub with a fireplace and original wood beams near the station. He puzzled over whether he was in fact going out with a pretty German student writing her PhD on ice-mass distribution and post-glacial rebound until she settled the matter for him by getting engaged to her supervisor. Not once did it occur to him that his life had become subject to the same constraints as his academic work, that his conversation was footnoted and cross-referenced, his character edited of anything that might raise eyebrows, his body dust-wrapped.

  He rose to the surface and gasped for air. The sun was warm on his face and around him was the sound of children laughing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  Jonas hadn’t been at all shocked by Naseby’s suggestion that the Americans had bugged his apartment. In fact he thought it was likely they had, and possible that the British and maybe even Hezbollah had installed eavesdropping devices of their own. He wondered whether technicians in this field had certain locations they favoured, whether they had stumbled across each other’s handiwork while lifting a floorboard or unscrewing a light bulb. It seemed an implausible notion. But his visual memory was good enough that he had spotted, coming back from a walk early one Monday morning, a pile of books that had been moved slightly to the left, and after visiting an internet cafe on Tuesday to see whether Tobias had sent him a message he noticed a new, thin film of dust across a coffee table, as though something high above it had been disturbed. On Wednesday it was a lingering smell in the toilet.

  The only explanation he could think of for multiple break-ins, with the accompanying risk that a neighbour would call the police or Jonas would return early and disturb them, was that it had taken several visits to complete a full technical installation, which seemed unlikely given the size of the place, or that it was a different team – from a different organization – each time. It was also possible that they were looking for something rather than installing a device. He couldn’t imagine that a search would take more than five minutes. He had taken down and burned the sprawling chart that covered his bedroom wall on the same day that Hezbollah had stopped him, and aside from his clothes, a handful of books and a family photograph he didn’t have any personal possessions.

  This may have contributed to his ambivalence about being spied upon. He certainly didn’t feel that he had any sort of privacy that could be violated. Indeed, he was surprised at odd moments to find that the interest in him was a welcome thing, that it acted as an antidote to his acute loneliness, as though a kind of warmth was generated by those people who had gathered around invisibly to follow him on the streets, collect details for their psychological profiles and listen to him sleep, as anxious as new parents, waiting to hear what his first word would be.

  Jonas knew what he was up to; he would find it impossible to criticize anyone who had concluded that he should be watched closely. His former colleagues in London would have been told in general terms of the seriousness of his case, advised to delete his number from their phones and instructed to notify the vetting department if he tried to make contact. He couldn’t blame them; it was difficult to go against the prevailing culture in a community that was closed to outside influence. It wouldn’t be long before his story, suitably embellished, was being circulated widely as a vaccine against a violent, transatlantic bout of disobedience rumoured to be doing the rounds. He remembered other such stories he had heard. The surveillance officer caught moonlighting for a security company. The promising young graduate who got so drunk during an official dinner in Washington that she threw up on the table. There were still plenty of people around who remembered Michael Bettaney, the member of staff who delivered a file to the KGB London resident in 1983 revealing the secret intelligence that had led to the expulsion of several Russian spies.

  The saddest story of all, Jonas had always thought, was that of an audio transcriber who fell in love during the Troubles with an Irish cigarette smuggler whose telephone line she was monitoring. Over the course of a year, during which she listened to his calls every day and was turned down twice for promotion, she found herself charmed by his turn of phrase, sympathetic to his experience of a sexless marriage, moved by the account of his teenage nephew being beaten up by a British soldier and incensed by the authorities’ unwarranted seizure of his two Transit vans. She engineered their meeting on the night ferry from Liverpool to Belfast. She smoked his brand of cigarettes and wore a dress of emerald green, his favourite colour. He couldn’t remember meeting someone so completely on his wavelength. Their affair didn’t last long, and neither did her career. She was caught when she burst into tears after hearing him on the phone to another woman just three weeks later.

  2

  Jonas returned to his apartment one evening to find seven missed calls and four voicemail messages on his phone. They were all from Maryam, the Syrian woman he had promised to help. The last message, already two hours old, was the most alarming: “I have been calling you all day, Mr Jonas.” She made it sound like Mr Jones. “I need to speak with you. Tobias Hoffman gave me your telephone number but perhaps it is not working, I do not know. Can you call me? Are you at the embassy? I am using a public phone, I will be waiting here at each hour exactly.” Sh
e read out a local landline number. He called her back immediately, even though it was only 5.40, but no one answered. There was no answer at six either, or at five past or ten past. At 6.20 he spoke to a Filipino maid expecting a call from her daughter in Manila and at 6.33 to a man who shouted at him in Arabic. At 6.50, Jonas’s phone rang. A Lebanese mobile number showed on the screen.

  “Everything is settled,” Maryam said. Her voice was strained and she sounded tired. “The man said I do not need to speak with you and that he —”

  “Which man?” Jonas asked.

  “The man who is helping me. He gave me a mobile telephone and money for a hotel. I must meet him again at the embassy in thirty minutes. You left the country, this is what he told me.”

  “My flight was cancelled. What was this man’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Desmond?”

  “No.”

  Jonas remembered the coffee cups in Naseby’s car. “Richard?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “With red hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we meet now? If I ask you to, Maryam, can you come to meet me right now?”

  It was getting dark when they met at the statue in the centre of Martyrs’ Square. Jonas wondered if he would be able to recognize her from the small black-and-white photograph he had seen in Tobias’s New Testament. Three couples were sitting on a long bench and an old man in a shabby suit was trying to sell them yellow roses from a plastic bag hanging from his bicycle handles. Jonas had worn his suit, too, thinking that it might confer some small measure of respectability on the wilder elements of his story, seeing as he didn’t have Naseby’s advantage of an actual embassy to bolster his version of things. He started to walk around the statue and the old man set off after him at speed. Jonas could hear bicycle wheels squeaking behind him.

  “Is one of you Mr Jones?” he heard someone ask.

  He hadn’t known what to expect of Tobias’s girlfriend, if that’s what she was. He noticed that she was dressed in jeans, that she was very pretty, that she was smoking a cigarette. Thinking she had spoken to him, the old man raced towards her, the back tyre of his bicycle hopping furiously between the uneven paving stones. He used both brakes to squeal to a stop. She kept her eyes fixed on Jonas as he approached.

  “When I asked him to describe you, he said that you wear a suit when you are trying to persuade a person to do something they don’t want to do.”

  Her voice was soft and he struggled to hear her above the sounds of traffic.

  “I can see why you thought it could be either of us,” Jonas said, looking at the flower-seller.

  “I was joking. I knew it was you. He said the suit doesn’t fit.”

  The old man stood with his plastic bag held open so they could see the full selection of roses. He looked from Jonas to Maryam. From a distance it might have seemed that the three of them were engaged in a conversation about his shopping. She was in her early thirties, he guessed. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face and her eyes were red as though she had been crying, although it was hard to be sure of anything in the lovely crumbling light of early evening.

  “I’m sorry for taking so long to call you back, and for the confusion over the embassy,” he said.

  “Confusion? There is no confusion. I only came to give you this.” She held out what looked like a white envelope wrapped in tape. “The other man, Richard, he is helping me. I have to meet him now.”

  There was something theatrical about the setting, he thought, about being watched through the gloom by an audience of lounging couples and impassive stone figures while an old man sold flowers in the aisle. This was an important moment. The audience could see it too: one of the young men untangled himself from his partner and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to give them his undivided attention. Jonas knew he was supposed to be playing the part of the capable, efficient diplomat, friendly but impartial, trained to smooth away the wrinkles of distress and confusion and hostility, but he didn’t know what to say, as though he had forgotten his lines, or the whole thing was in fact an improvisational workshop he had wandered into by mistake.

  “Wait,” Jonas said. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. His apprenticeship had come to an end; he had to find a way to take control of the things that were happening to him. “The man you met, Richard, he isn’t aware of the agreement I made with Tobias. He may have offered to help but he won’t be able to do anything for you, whatever he might have claimed. It’s important you understand this.”

  “He told me that you have some personal problems,” she said, nodding, as though Jonas had just confirmed this element of Naseby’s story.

  “I asked him to field anything urgent that came up because I was called away. But that was before I knew that you had arrived. I’m not going anywhere now.” His heart was racing. With a single phone call she could confirm Tobias’s suspicions that he had been lying. “We tend to say ‘personal problems’ to stop people asking questions. You know, a sick aunt or something like that.” She glanced at her watch and pulled her thin grey coat around her. “Look at it this way,” Jonas said quickly. “Tobias told you to speak to me. Tobias asked you to put this letter in my hands. Tobias told you that I would help you with visas and anything else you need. You know that I am the person he was talking about because of the description he gave you. He didn’t mention someone called Richard because he has never met him. Of course Richard said that he would help you, because it’s his job to be helpful. But he doesn’t understand the situation we are in. Once he realizes that, he won’t be able to help you. I owe Tobias for what he is doing for me, Maryam – I owe him, and I don’t want to see you waste your time.”

  The old man, grown impatient, held the open plastic bag between them and shook it violently. A flurry of yellow petals fell to the ground. Jonas wondered how he could have mistaken their tone for that of lovers. He pulled out a few dollar bills to get rid of him, but the old man insisted on selecting the freshest rose from the bag and pressing it into Maryam’s hands.

  “Why don’t we all discuss this together?” she suggested. “You and Richard and me. Come with me to the embassy.”

  “Richard isn’t aware of my agreement with Tobias. It’s important it stays that way. This must sound strange, I know, but this is such a sensitive area that unfortunately it’s necessary. Did you say anything to Richard about why you were here?”

  “That I knew Tobias and that you had agreed to help me.”

  “Did you mention – do you know, in fact – what Tobias is doing for me in Syria?”

  “Something to do with a church council. He refused to say anything more. He promised me it was not dangerous.”

  “Give me ten minutes of your time,” Jonas said. “Walk with me a little.”

  “I agreed to meet Richard at seven o’clock.”

  “He’s always late. It’s what he’s known for in the office – always being at least half an hour late for everything. Believe it or not, he was even late for his own wedding. Valerie, his wife, I don’t know if he mentioned her, she’s what we call long-suffering.”

  “Ten minutes,” Maryam said.

  They walked away from the statue. He wondered how Tobias would react to a call from Maryam telling him that Jonas was not who he claimed to be. She would no doubt be angry with Tobias for having placed her in such a position, and in turn he would be furious with Jonas. There was no way he would continue with his efforts to contact the kidnappers. Putting to one side the question of Maryam not being given a visa, it was inconceivable that he would be prepared to put at risk his own safety and that of the people who were helping him inside Syria, to destroy any future possibility of negotiating for hostages, all to help out someone who had lied so consistently and whose motives remained so thoroughly opaque.

  “What did you think of Richard’s Arabic?” Jonas asked. They were walking in the direction of the central business district. Two soldiers stood waving a stea
dy stream of cars through a checkpoint. “He learned it here in Lebanon, you know, back in the 1970s. We shared an office for a while in London a few years ago and he would cover his computer screen with little pieces of coloured paper with Arabic words on, to help him memorize them. Or he would play the same Fayrouz song endlessly until he could sing it himself. I’ve always admired that side of his character.”

  “His phone plays a Fayrouz song when it rings,” she said.

  When they came to the road Maryam stepped directly into the flow of traffic and began to make her way, one lane at a time, to the other side.

  “I worked with him more recently on a project that required his Arabic skills.” He had to shout to make sure she could hear him against the roar of the traffic. “I was looking for someone who could help us tackle the problem of terrorist funding. You’ll know as well as I do how much financial support for Daesh comes from the Gulf and how important it is – if we want to protect communities like yours – that we cut off that flow of cash.” He looked across at her. She was walking half a pace in front of him with her arms folded and appeared uninterested in what he was saying. He tried to adopt Naseby’s easy manner. “I had zeroed in on a disgruntled, minor Saudi royal visiting Beirut to drink whisky and chase women. We were very close to the point where Abdullah would have agreed to measures that would have regulated money transfers above a certain amount from Saudi into Syria. I asked Richard to help me with the technical details because of his Arabic. He joined us late in the evening, took one look at our table – it was covered in bottles of whisky, bottles of wine, overflowing ashtrays, you name it – and marched right out again. He said afterwards it was too smoky for him. But I heard from other people that he had filed a complaint about the way I was handling things.” Jonas took out his cigarettes and offered one to her. She took it and they stopped while he fished for his lighter. “He’s a bureaucrat at heart, Maryam, that’s the problem.” The glow from the lighter flickered across her face. She wore a trace of lipstick and her eyes were a pale hazel colour. “I’m extremely fond of him but he’s just too cautious. Wants to do everything by the book. I have no doubt he will try to block your visa and cause problems for Tobias if he hears about this; that’s the only reason I’m reluctant to share any details with him. He’s fine to share an office with or for a game of tennis, but not for the rough and tumble of the real world.”