Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  “He was wearing a tennis uniform when I met him.”

  “Everything white, clean shoes, racket in a case? He doesn’t like getting dirty.”

  “I will talk to anyone who can help me,” Maryam said.

  “That’s most definitely not Richard. If anything, he —”

  “I want to talk about the visas.”

  “Yes, your British visa,” Jonas said. “There is a temporary —”

  “Not just for me. I want my mother to travel also.”

  “But everything is ready.” Jonas patted his jacket pocket as though he had brought her a passport and ticket. “I’ve booked you on to a flight leaving at midday tomorrow.”

  “I will not leave without my mother.”

  “I talked about this with Tobias. If she has trouble walking it’s going to be impossible —”

  “Can you imagine what it is like to live in Syria today? To be a Christian in Syria? Please you must try. If you leave your house you will be stopped by men with guns who will say that you must choose between becoming a Muslim, paying a tax or being killed immediately. So nobody leaves their house. This means they cannot work and so there is no money for food, fuel, clean water. Everything which has value has been taken. My mother is sick. She needs doctors, she needs medicine, she needs to live in a house with heating and electricity. What about your parents, Mr Jones? Will you abandon your mother and father if you know they are living in these conditions?” She stopped and turned towards him. A uniformed guard watched them from the doorway of a fashion boutique across the road. “I know this is not what you agreed with Tobias. I don’t have any money to give you but maybe there is another way.” He had forgotten that she was still carrying the rose until she lifted it to her face. “Maybe there is something else I can do for you,” she said hesitantly. One of the petals fell to the ground. In his confusion and embarrassment Jonas bent to pick it up, as though she had dropped a coin or an earring. He didn’t know what to do with it. “This is the first time that somebody gives me a flower,” she said.

  The yellow against her skin made Jonas think of butter, of buttercups. It occurred to him that he was in a position to help her after all. If he called Naseby and told him that the price for stepping back from the edge, giving up on his father and going home was that Maryam and her mother should be given safe passage to the UK, Naseby would agree to his terms. There would be some grumbling, but the political pressure from No. 10 and the US to resolve the matter quietly would be overwhelming. Nobody would care about two extra refugees. It made him feel a little less of a fraud that he had this power, that there was an element of their relationship that was as she imagined it.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Maryam blinked away the single tear that suddenly appeared in the corner of her eye and took a half-step backwards. “If you want, I will…I will be your girlfriend.”

  How had Tobias described him, Jonas wondered, that she had thought it necessary to make such an offer? What had happened to her in Syria that she was desperate enough to make such a suggestion? He repeated to himself that he was not responsible for her situation, that the worst that would happen to Maryam was that she would suffer disappointment, that his father was in a far worse position. It was essential that he resist the temptation to see the situation as complex. It might appear so, like a chessboard halfway through a game, but in fact all the squares were either one thing or another, and each piece had adhered strictly to its own law in its pursuit of the king, walled in by pawns, defended by castles. He let the petal fall to the ground.

  The mobile phone in her pocket began to ring.

  “It is Richard,” she said. “He is waiting for me at the embassy. What should I tell him?”

  He considered the options. That she didn’t need Richard any more? That Jonas was going to help her instead? Neither of those would work.

  “I tell you what,” he said, the answer suddenly becoming clear, “why don’t I speak to him? We need to discuss a couple of things anyway.”

  She handed him the phone.

  “Richard, old boy.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Put her on the line, please,” Naseby said. “This has got nothing to do with you, Jonas.”

  “Fine, fine. Listen, thanks again for stepping in while I was away. I owe you one. Maryam was just telling me how kind you’ve been.”

  “What the hell are you playing at? Why did she come looking for you at the embassy? Did you tell her you’re still in the game?”

  “That sounds reasonable,” said Jonas. “Let’s sit down in the office tomorrow morning and work through the details, shall we? I’ll be in around nine. By the way, I had a quick five minutes with the ambassador today. He wants you to stand in for him at that meeting on tax reform this weekend and wondered whether you could catch a flight tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Listen, wait – Jonas, don’t do anything stupid. You can’t go dragging innocent people into this scheme of yours. It’s just not right.”

  “What do you mean, get rid of this phone? The one I’m speaking on? What’s wrong with it?”

  “You stupid prick, Jonas. I’m the only person left on your side. I’m the only one telling London that you’ll come round, that you’re just overwrought, that there’s no way you’ll do anything reckless.”

  “Okay, I’ll change it for another one. Listen, I’d better run. Please thank Valerie again for the meal on Sunday. Her cottage pie is the best. Let’s try to squeeze in a game of tennis when you’re back from Brussels. What’s that? Yes, of course I’ll say goodbye to her for you.”

  “Fuck —”

  Jonas hung up.

  3

  It was later on that evening that Jonas opened the letter, once he had taken Maryam to a nondescript hotel on the other side of the city and replaced her mobile phone so that Naseby couldn’t contact her. It was written on the back of pages torn from a hymnal, and what Jonas had mistaken for an envelope was in fact a carefully folded page from an Arabic Bible. The handwriting was cramped and smudged in places.

  Dear Jonas,

  It is midnight and I am inside a church near Aleppo. It is safer for everyone that I stay here. It is very cold and there is no electricity. In any case, all the lights have been stolen, as well as the pews, the floor tiles, the water pipes, the doors and the curtain from the confessional booth. Broken glass is across the floor in many different colours like gemstones and rain is coming through a hole in the roof. It feels right for someone like me to stay in a place like this, in a church without windows or a roof. I do not know if this makes sense. This church is also in poor condition, this is what I am trying to say. This church is defrocked. My lights have all gone out.

  Can you tell that I have found a bottle of communion wine? I still know the priest’s tricks, the places they hide things. They can’t take that from me. A bottle of communion wine and a small piece of candle in the cupboard with the fuse box. I will allow myself one more drink and then I will stop. Please do not be angry with me. You could be my son, and yet always I feel your disapproval.

  You are impatient for news, I can see it. Enough of the drunken old fool. Put him in a church and he starts to preach a sermon.

  Two days ago I spoke with someone close to the church council and this morning he confirmed that he has passed them our message. He said they wish to speak with me and so early tomorrow morning I will go to meet with them. This is good news. This is very good news. I don’t know why I feel so scared. I have done this before. The car, the hood and the bumpy road. If there is an opportunity I will ask to see him, to pray with him. I will explain that people he has never met are making themselves thin and tired and sick worrying about him.

  The candle is almost finished. Forgive me, Jonas, I must be direct.

  I wish to make peace with you. Still I do not know what to think. Have you lied to me from the first day? Your story is such a strange one. It does not matter. I do not blame you for what happens next and you must not belie
ve that things could be different. My trust is in God, not in your codes or your helicopters. You must not believe that I am being saintly. More than most people you know that in my heart I am the worst kind of sinner. The truth is that I do not have any choice but to forgive you. When I was still a priest people would come to me each week with their sins, and because of the language that we use to speak of faith (confession, witness, testimony and so on) I would feel like a minor court official always deferring to a judge who, so the rumour goes, lets everyone off.

  All right, yes, you are right, I have finished the wine.

  You are a clever man, you will soon understand why Maryam is important to me. I do not need to pretend with you. I hope you are an honourable man. I don’t think I will be able to forgive you if you let her down.

  Tobias

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At least Jonas finally knew what time frame he was working towards. The email from the kidnappers, which had arrived at 6.42 that morning, read:

  We have recieved information that you want to negotiate on behalf of the british government for the release of a hostage. The price you must pay for his life is $10 million, not one penny less. This is not up for discussion. Thirty day’s or he is executed.

  The internet cafe was filling up. Jonas logged into a cloud storage website administered by a Geneva-based company and retrieved images he had scanned and saved before leaving the UK: his passport, driving licence and MI5 identity card. He had been required to return this last item before going on long-term leave. They were normally for use by operational officers who might need to prove their identity in exceptional circumstances but Jonas had been provided with one to allow him to gain entry to a heavily policed conference in Glasgow in early 2012. No one had asked to see it. He hadn’t even taken it out of his pocket. He typed a message into the body of the email, attached the three images and pressed Send. It was already 9.14 in the morning, and he didn’t want to waste any time.

  The message you have received states that I work for British intelligence and that I wish to negotiate with you in secret for the release of your hostage. This is all correct. I am also the son of your hostage. The British government and my employers do not know that I am in contact with you.

  In exchange for the safe return of my father I will give you hundreds of documents containing highly sensitive information about the West’s intelligence and military campaign against your new state – information I have stolen through my work in the most secret parts of government. The documents contain the names of Western spies in your ranks, details of communications methods you are currently using that are being monitored by GCHQ and the NSA, UK and US tactical and strategic military plans to deploy troops into territories you control, the identities of your operatives in the UK and Europe who are under close surveillance and much, much more. Please do not underestimate the value of this offer. The information I am willing to give you in exchange for my father’s life will set Western intelligence agencies back a generation. It will ensure that you are victorious.

  I am attaching three documents to confirm my name, nationality and employment in British intelligence. We do not have much time. Please write back immediately.

  Jonas sat for thirty minutes waiting for a reply. He logged out, walked around the block four times, returned to the internet cafe and waited for a computer to become free. It had always been clear to him that paying the ransom was not a viable option, even if the kidnappers could have been persuaded to lower their demands. He could have sold all his possessions, his mother could have sold their home, they could have pooled their savings and whatever money they were able to borrow from relatives or the bank, and it wouldn’t have amounted to more than a fraction of the total sum demanded. The only parties able to play the ransom game were states, multinationals and insurance companies.

  There weren’t any other avenues he could explore. A successful approach to the Russians or the Chinese was harder than it looked, as any number of people had learned over the years, and in the early stages of cultivation and assessment of bona fides they would have limited each payment to a few thousand pounds to prevent him drawing attention to himself, raising his expectations of future reward and ruining his career as a potential double agent. Any significant sums would have been held in an overseas accrual account for years. Jonas remembered reading the file of an academic who had approached a Russian trade delegate in London looking for an introduction to someone interested in buying restricted-level research papers from a government-linked foreign-policy think tank. This had been met by a polite rebuff, followed by a cold call two weeks later from a political consultant in Prague who wanted to know whether the researcher would be interested in collaborating on a joint study into the tensions between NATO member states. He had been reading some of her work online, he said, and had been impressed by the rigour of her approach to rational choice theory and her openness to alternate readings of the data. It was how long everything took that put her off the idea in the end, she confided to a close friend, along with the frankly ridiculous request that prior to any payment she should send a sample of at least ten per cent of the material, that she should explore her access to other areas of interest to ensure a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship, that she should use phone boxes that smelled of wee. It was harder to betray your country than it looked, Jonas thought.

  In the end it was the Edward Snowden affair that made him realize he possessed something of great value to the kidnappers, a currency more sought-after than cash: information. Jonas broke the law for the first time in his life at 11.15 one Tuesday morning. It was nine days after his father’s disappearance, thirty-six days before he left the building for the last time.

  The first document was a JTAC assessment of the general threat posed by ISIS, filled with the vague language typical of papers distributed widely in Whitehall with the Top Secret classification so gratifying to its readership. From there he moved on to a collection of messages from a pan-European working group about routes used by foreign fighters on their way into Syria. In the middle phase, as he became bolder, he began to focus on GCHQ and NSA capabilities, particularly against different encryption systems. A contact in Defence Intelligence shared US satellite imagery of what were assessed to be the most important ISIS locations in Raqqa. He took surveillance logs, telephone transcripts, psychological profiles, source reports, covert photographs, strategy papers, email intercepts and an internal discussion forum thread about the ethics of drone technology that he had printed by mistake but decided to include because it added a little human colour to the collection, along with a blog about Islamic theology and a guide to the principles of personal protection.

  It had been surprisingly easy: he had natural access to all the information he took. Counterterrorism was characterized by the principle that whenever possible intelligence should be shared widely, both internally and externally, since it was accepted that no single team, agency or country could tackle the issue on its own. It was often said that there was no such thing as a local terrorism problem. It was also the case that everyone was terrified of not sharing something they should have shared, of the personal and professional burden of having known – and failed to pass on – something that could have prevented an attack. This meant that in gathering together his collection of documents Jonas was able to draw from a deep well of information: national and international, current and historic, speculative and corroborated, harmless and threat-to-life.

  He had avoided technical methods of copying and removing the documents. Instead he had chosen to print and hide them on his person when leaving the building. He imagined that somewhere in the basement details of his printing habits, along with those of every other member of staff, were being collected and analysed for anomalies, and so he began slowly and only picked up pace towards the end, once he had seen that no action was being taken against him. The downside to this was that he was restricted to taking hundreds rather than thousands of documents. He was also
limited by the capacity of the secret compartment he had created in the space between the lining and the leather exterior of an old briefcase bought on his lunch break from a charity shop near London Bridge, which could not take more than twenty-three pages before they became faintly discernible to anyone doing a fingertip search of the interior. He considered simply carrying the documents out of the building with no attempt at concealment, on the basis that searches were infrequent and the only explanation for a hidden document was that he was stealing it, whereas one left in plain view could be forgiven as absent-mindedness, especially given the pressure he was under. But this line of defence could only ever work once, and so he went with the covert option.

  At that point he didn’t know what he would do with the documents. He still had some faith the whole thing could be resolved through the involvement of local church networks in the Middle East, or the payment of a small ransom by the Church in the UK. He was able to justify the theft of the intelligence to himself because he had no intention of using it. It was a theoretical last resort, a barely plausible option whose real value was that it allowed him to imagine he was doing something practical to help his father.