Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  “You’re taking what I said literally.” Her smile widened as though he had said something funny. “I’m characterizing what has happened as a conversation. You taking the documents tells us something. It’s a form of communication. It says, I am angry because you are not doing enough, or I think you can do more with the resources at your disposal. Both of those are legitimate reactions to your father’s situation. Desmond coming round to see you at your flat, putting to one side what he said to you and the way that he said it, that was our first attempt at a reply.” She leaned towards him. “We were trying to say: we are worried about you, we want to know what is happening, we want you to understand the seriousness of what you may be thinking of doing.”

  “We know where you live. We can reach out and touch you whenever we choose.”

  She sat back in her chair. “I am not suggesting it was a well-scripted reply. It was rushed, it was muddled, it must have been upsetting to hear. My point is that we are in the middle of a conversation, not that we have been conducting it particularly well. On either side.”

  Jonas felt a little giddy. The glass Maryam had thrown had left him with a large purple bruise just below his hairline and a headache that wouldn’t go away. Halfway through his second sleepless night he had gone to an all-night pharmacy and been sold a packet of pills by the teenager on duty that had left him feeling theatrically light-headed, unfocused, half asleep all the time rather than asleep half the time. His heart raced when he climbed the steps to his flat. The persistent drone of the doorbell that morning had worked its way into his dreams in the form of a dentist’s drill, then as a scooter being driven away at speed and finally as a quiz-show buzzer that he kept on pressing even though he didn’t know the answer to any of the questions he was being asked.

  “That’s a very modern way of looking at it,” he said. “The thief steals in order to communicate something to his victim.” He felt dangerously talkative – he would have to be careful. “That might be the case with a crime of passion like assault or murder. But maybe the thief just wants what he’s stolen. Maybe he had hoped it would never even be missed.”

  “If the thief and his victim are strangers, perhaps. But one friend stealing from another? A child from his parents? An employee from his employer? Perhaps we can agree that there’s more than one motive at work. I’m a great believer in complexity, Jonas. Complexity and mystery. It’s the old-fashioned churchgoer in me. I’ve come to the conclusion rather late in life that if something looks simple, it’s because you can’t see all of it.” She beamed at him. “What do you think?”

  He looked for the buzzer. Another question he couldn’t answer. He tried asking one himself.

  “What exactly is your role in all this?”

  “We’ve wandered a little off track already, haven’t we? That’s probably my fault. Why don’t I tell you how I see our conversation unfolding today? I am going to do two things for you and in return, Jonas, I want you to do two things for me.” He tried to shift in his chair and discovered it was bolted to the floor. “Number one: I will give you as much of an update as I can on your father, his current situation and our rapidly evolving plans on what we might do to help him. I won’t give you any fabricated intelligence reports, any news articles dressed up as CX, any weather forecasts. I won’t pull any punches. Number two: you will tell me exactly how many documents you took. At this stage I don’t want to know where they are or whether anyone has seen them. Number three: you will press pause on any discussions you are conducting with third parties concerning the documents. Number four: we will agree on one reasonable thing that we can do for you. It might be money, it might be a plane ticket and a comfortable hotel so that your mother can come out here. It won’t be a desk in the embassy or your old job back. It won’t be immunity from prosecution. We both know those are out of the question. Now, what do you think about all that?”

  “It’s an ambitious agenda,” conceded Jonas.

  “We’d better get started, then.”

  2

  Raza’s blurry photograph had failed to capture the spirit of twinkling amusement that lay just beneath the surface of her character. Jonas might have thought it was something she was doing for his benefit if she hadn’t clearly been so concerned to keep it in check herself. Her hands, whenever he said something that pleased her, would flit towards him like a pair of swallows, and her smile would broaden until it triggered a sudden frown, cast forth like a spring-loaded net to keep her native exuberance under control, and she would look serious for a minute or two at the very least. It might have been sympathy that she was trying to express. His appearance had the potential to confuse the issue at hand. It was not just that he looked like a victim (the purple of one bruise, the yellow of another), but that it would be easy to conclude from the evidence on show – the unwashed, mustard-coloured T-shirt, the pair of beltless suit trousers cinched at the waist, flip-flops – that he was failing spectacularly to cope. The truth, however, was that he felt more himself than he had for a long time.

  She was talking about his father.

  “We are presented with an unexpected opportunity. A window that may or may not open just the tiniest wee crack, but wide enough for us to slip through. I’m not going to give you much more detail than that, Jonas, because of the situation we are in, but I will say that we believe your father is being kept in one place and that he may be moved to another place in the next week or so. The place he is in now is one that we cannot get to. The place he will be moved to is one that we believe we can get to. This is the good news. The bad news is that he is being moved because he is very unwell. It’s quite possible he won’t survive the move, and it’s more than possible he won’t survive any rescue attempt we make. These things tend to be fairly…chaotic. Lots of noise, more than a few flash-bangs.” She clapped three times to illustrate her point. He noticed that she wore a digital watch, that she wasn’t wearing any jewellery on her hands, that her nails were painted black, as though they had been trapped in a door. “There’s no way of doing this kind of operation gently, and it’d be unfair to ask the soldiers to try to find one. Now, I would normally ask if you had any questions, but since I won’t be able to answer them, shall we move straight on to number two?”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jonas asked.

  “Wear and tear. How many documents did you take?”

  “Two hundred and eighty-seven.”

  The smile disappeared from her face. “Thousand?”

  “No. Two hundred and eighty-seven.”

  He didn’t mind telling her. It wouldn’t take her long to realize that in its own way two hundred and eighty-seven was just as dangerous a number as two hundred and eighty-seven thousand.

  “Well! That’s…” She sat back in her chair, tilted her head to one side and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “I’m at a loss for words, Jonas.” She laughed suddenly in a way that made him want to join in. “We had been bracing ourselves for a larger number. After Snowden.”

  He shrugged. “Americans tend to do things on a bigger scale.”

  “You’ve restored my faith in humanity,” she said. This time one of her hands made it all the way across the table to rest on his forearm. “That’s my strictly off-the-record reaction; I don’t think I’d get the Chief to put his initial to it.” Her grey eyes twinkled. “We had been working on the assumption that the secret compartment in your briefcase was for USBs, CDs, portable hard drives, all positively brimming over with gigabytes of our most precious data. But you’re telling me” – she gave Jonas her broadest smile yet – “that you smuggled pieces of paper out of the office, have I got that right? How wonderful! How absolutely wonderful!” She leaned back and clapped her hands. “I was sure that the age of such finesse and delicacy was behind us. Wiser heads tell me the future of intelligence work lies in harvesting data and putting the algorithms to work like threshers. We obtain data in bulk and people steal it from us in bulk. Snowden can’t have read the tin
iest fraction of what he stole, which is why so much of it was dinner menus and parking directions.” She sat back in her chair and frowned as she thought it through. “But you chose what to steal with care, didn’t you, Jonas? You selected which documents to take and which to leave behind, you considered the market and curated a collection that would meet its needs. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how big that collection is, does it? A dozen pieces of paper could set us back years.”

  3

  “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she was saying. “My career started in the golden age of espionage. In twenty years the business will be unrecognizable. There’ll be no cultivations demanding years of persistence and guile, no moonlit infiltrations by boat. Tradecraft will be about passwords and IP addresses. There won’t even be alias names. Instead we’ll pay our agents with bitcoins, email them equipment via their 3D printers, debrief them by encrypted text message. That’s if we even need agents any more. You only have to look at how criminals are evolving. Imagine…a robbery. A jewel robbery. You start with the preparation: reconnaissance, recruiting an insider, assembling the team, a dry run the week before. Think of how many factors conspire to make it a success or a failure: the traffic, the weather, how well the locksmith slept, whether the driver can hold his nerve. And then, assuming the whole thing goes off without a hitch, the massive police operation that begins immediately: the physical evidence, the cameras, the question of how to offload the jewels. Now compare all of that to the cybercriminal operating from the basement of his parents’ house, crossing time zones and jurisdictions at the click of a button, launching hundreds of raids every single day, at no cost and with next to no personal risk. That’s the direction we’re moving in. That’s the future of spying, Jonas. It’ll all be done online – by programmers, by teams of social engineers. If you want to know where someone’s been, ask their phone, ask their car, ask one of the six million cameras around the UK. If you want to know how long they’ve been away for, ask their fridge how full or empty it is, ask the central heating when it was last switched on. If you want to know their sexual preference, ask Google. They call it the internet of things. Show me a human agent who can deliver on that scale. Did you know half of all the vehicles stolen in London last year were broken into without the use of force? That’s computers. That’s the future right there.”

  It was over in a second, but Jonas fancied that he saw her make a fist and tilt her hand as though showing off her digital watch, as though to Meredith there was no better proof of the future.

  4

  “We’re making good progress. Thank you for bearing with me.” She smiled. “Number three. Negotiations to be put on hold.”

  Jonas could barely imagine she existed beyond the small interview room. He wondered whether she had grandchildren, a husband waiting at home, neighbours she greeted each morning on her way to the Whitehall department where she performed a vague set of administrative duties that were frankly too dull to talk about. There was only Raza’s blurred photograph to prove that she wasn’t a product of the chemicals acting upon his overheated brain.

  “You need to press pause for me,” she said.

  She had made the same request three times. Why was it so important? His agreement wouldn’t mean anything, and he knew that she knew it wouldn’t mean anything. She would have been trained to treat the word of someone she believed to be sincere with suspicion – the word of a traitor like Jonas would be less than worthless. The only way it might mean something was as a test of his good faith, and that was a test they could only adjudicate on if there was some form of independent corroboration – if they could expect to learn from another source whether or not he had kept his promise. British intelligence and their allies had agents inside Hezbollah, inside ISIS. Had Meredith recruited one of Raza’s men? Was there an agent close to the kidnappers? Is that why she didn’t want to know if anyone had seen the documents, because she already knew the answer? It was possible they were closer than he had expected.

  “We need to talk about this, Jonas,” she said. “You’re not in a strong position.”

  “And yet you’ve flown all this way to see me.”

  “To give you a way out. After all, you’ve just admitted breaking the Official Secrets Act.”

  “There’s no case against me,” he said. “We both know that. It’s hard enough to convict people under the OSA when you catch them red-handed. There’s no physical evidence other than a compartment in an old briefcase, and it’d be difficult to use this interview as proof of anything – you haven’t told me who you are, you haven’t informed me of my rights.” He slipped his feet out of the flip-flops and was revived by the feel of the cold tiles against his skin. “Besides, let’s not forget that my father is a hostage. It would look bad.”

  “I’m an intelligence officer, not a police officer,” she said. “I’m not interested in evidence or prosecutions. I appreciate you telling me the number of documents you’ve taken, but what I really want you to do is to stop looking for a buyer.”

  “And in return?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Pay the ransom.”

  “You know we can’t. The government’s position is that it would be wrong —”

  “Wrong has nothing to do with it,” he said. That warming anger again, like a new friend. “Who in government even uses words like ‘wrong’ any more? Necessary and proportionate, that’s how we justify what we do. That’s why we distort intelligence for political purposes, that’s why we listen to the conversations of innocent people, that’s why we break into the hotel rooms of foreign diplomats doing nothing more than serving their country in the same way that we serve ours. Your argument is that the downside of paying ransoms, which is that it will lead to more kidnappings, is greater than the upside, which is that it results in hostages being freed. But that’s clearly not the case in this instance. If what you are accusing me of is true, the upside is that the government avoids a catastrophic leak of the most sensitive intelligence imaginable. The balance has changed.”

  “The government cannot pursue a private course of action that is completely at odds with its public position.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s SIS for, then? Look, use an intermediary. A wealthy businessman from the Gulf, a charitable foundation in Pakistan or Indonesia, the government of one of those European countries that isn’t so squeamish. There are countless options. It’ll be a little messy, but nothing compared to what will happen otherwise.”

  “Whitehall would have to agree, No. 10, the Foreign Office. It would mean going back on a long-held position. It’s just too…complex an idea.”

  “Maybe that’s the difference between us, Meredith. I’m a great believer in complexity. It’s the old-fashioned churchgoer in me.”

  “Listen, Jonas, the prime minister is not going to stand up in Parliament and lie, nor is he going to say that he has reversed the government’s position since time immemorial because he was put under pressure by a single individual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We have been discussing a possible rescue operation. This should be an easy decision for you to make. Press pause on negotiations and we will see what happens over the next few days. In the meantime,” she said, “make a reasonable request and we will grant it. Number four.”

  Press pause, press pause. The phrase must have been written into her script by the psychologists. She had said it so many times now that he could see her gleaming black fingernails tapping against the controls of an old stereo as she filled mixtapes with data about fridges and cars and central heating systems. He wondered if there might be something slightly hallucinogenic about the medication he had been given. He wiggled his toes on the cold floor. If his father was as ill as Meredith claimed, he would have expected the kidnappers to be rushing to trade him for Jonas. But he hadn’t heard anything from them since he had refused to send the entire collection of documents in advance of any exchange. It was possible his father was already dead. He
wondered how he would learn of it, whether Meredith or Naseby or Twitter would get there first. Harvey would take some pleasure in being the one to break the news, he expected.

  “There is something you can do,” Jonas said. He suddenly felt very tired. He fought the urge to lay his head on the table.

  “Good. What is it?”

  “Two British visas.”

  “That’s the second time today you’ve taken me by surprise,” she said. “Who are they for?”

  “A Syrian woman and her mother.”

  “Out of the question. We’re not going to do anything that might in any way enable or move forward this madcap plan of yours.”

  Jonas could feel the medication take a physical hold on him. Drowsiness billowed up behind his eyes as though his head was stuffed with the softest bed sheets imaginable.

  “They’re not involved,” he managed to say. In the silence of the interview room he could hear his eyelids clicking each time he blinked. “It’s got nothing to do with them.”

  “This woman is involved, though, isn’t she? Desmond has mentioned her. She’s linked to the Swiss priest in some capacity.”

  “She knows nothing about this,” he said. “She doesn’t know what I am doing, she doesn’t know about my father. She hasn’t consciously or unconsciously done anything to contribute to where we are today. They’re a Christian family – they won’t have links to ISIS or any of the other extremist groups. I don’t know what else to tell you.” He held the seat of his chair with extended arms to prevent himself slumping. “If you give me some time, I’ll pay you back for their flights and as many of their other costs as I can.”

  “Speaking personally, Jonas, I was hoping you’d ask us to bring your mother out here. I had a son around your age. He —”

  “This is not open to negotiation, Meredith,” he said. “I won’t talk to you after this if you don’t agree. There’ll be no deal on anything.”

  She was quiet for a while.