Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  “I’ll have to talk to London,” she said. “We’d need to screen them. An interview, background checks. And if we found anything remotely questionable there’d be no way —”

  “This week.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. No promises.” She looked at her watch. “You look tired. That’s probably enough for today. I’d like us to stay in touch, Jonas, if you don’t have any objections to that idea.” She reached across and stroked his hair. Her smile was filled with sadness. “You poor boy. Shall I tell you about your mother? I went to see her before I came out here. She’s lost the two men in her life all at once. It’s not easy for her. She made me tea and showed me pictures of you as a bairn.”

  He couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. His mother had come to London to see him before he left. He remembered packing his bag while she stood anxiously in the doorway trying to persuade him not to go. She only half believed his story that it was a routine work trip. She was crying. Shirts, socks, trousers. Sweaters. He knew the Beirut winters could be cold and wet. He found it difficult to listen to her and focus properly on what he was doing at the same time. He knew that he had forgotten something. She told him she didn’t know if she was angry or sad. She told him that she didn’t want to lose him as well. Part of the problem was that he didn’t know what he might need, or how long he would be away for. He went through his cupboards. Hiking boots? A guidebook? A torch? His father would need clothes to wear once he was released. Jonas took a suit from the wardrobe and folded it into his suitcase, and when he turned round to ask his mother a question she was no longer there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1

  On Tuesday night it wasn’t there, on Wednesday morning it was: a piece of red string tied around the lamp post at the end of his street. Jonas had barely walked for five minutes in the direction of the lighthouse before he was forced to turn away by the team that aggressively followed his every step. They were not making the slightest effort to remain hidden from view. It was a tactic he had never come across in his career. In the intelligence world secrecy was prized above all else, even success. An unsuccessful intelligence operation was not one that failed to achieve its goals, since it was accepted that this would happen on a regular basis, but one that revealed itself to the opposition. And yet deliberately revealing itself was what the team seemed to be doing. He felt at a huge disadvantage. He had learned in recent weeks it was possible to lose surveillance that wanted to remain covert – they had to rotate personnel, they had to keep a certain distance. But he had no idea how to lose a team that behaved like this.

  He struck out for a different part of Beirut. The man following him was stocky, dark-haired, in his thirties. He looked Mediterranean. He kept a distance of between fifteen and twenty paces as long as Jonas remained clearly visible. When they entered a busier neighbourhood a second man of a similar profile came forward and together they narrowed the gap to around ten paces. They were not content to watch from the opposite side of the street but would step into traffic the moment that Jonas showed signs of crossing the road, so as to prevent him building up even the smallest advantage. After thirty minutes the individual in the lead position was replaced. They made cursory attempts to avoid third-party interest by pretending to check their phones or look in shop windows when forced to stop or slow. The first time Jonas flagged down a taxi they called forward their own vehicle, a black Honda SUV with three aerials and a broken front-left indicator, but when he tried the same tactic an hour later, this time using Beirut’s one-way road system to prevent the Honda getting into position, a dark green scooter appeared from nowhere to pick up the man who had been on foot.

  It wasn’t until early evening that he spoke to one of them. By that point, he calculated, they had spent over five hours and forty minutes walking through six different neighbourhoods, and he had seen nine of them closely enough that he would remember their faces. At no point in the twelve or so miles had they come close to losing control of him. Jonas turned abruptly to enter a restaurant in the Hamra district. The man in the lead position, further back than he should have been and sensing that something had just happened, rushed forwards. Jonas stood off to one side and watched the man hurry around the room, looking at each of the diners in turn, until the young waitress approached him to ask a question in Arabic that he didn’t answer. When she suggested in English he might like a table by the window he just shook his head at her, as though by remaining silent he had successfully concealed his origins.

  Jonas stepped into the man’s path as he headed for the door. “Who sent you?” he asked. “Do you work for Harvey or Meredith? Remind her that we had an agreement —”

  The man pushed past him with such force that although he had been braced for it Jonas was spun around and lost his footing. The marble floor was cold and smelled of lemons. The room had gone quiet. For a moment, staring at the floor, he thought about leading the team towards Raza, but he knew that none of this would make any sense to him, that more than anything Raza would want to know why a full surveillance team had been deployed against the unimportant son of a hostage no one cared about, and everything would begin to unravel. A replacement was waiting on the pavement outside. Jonas smiled at him and he nodded back; they continued onwards.

  In the end he just ran for it. Concluding that the scooter was the team’s greatest asset, he walked from Hamra down into the central Solidere district, where soldiers stood guard around a network of pedestrianized streets filled with shops and restaurants and offices. He knew the area well from previous night-time walks. This might give him a slight advantage, but only until the team realized their vehicles were useless, at which point he expected them to close in around him on foot. And so he started running as soon as he had turned the first corner, and he was able to make it round the next corner seconds before the man behind him realized what was happening. There was a shout and the sound of footsteps. He turned left and right and left, trying to put as much distance as he could between them, and ran down some steps and behind another building until he arrived, breathing heavily, at a row of bars that had spilled their drinkers into the warm evening air. It was starting to get dark. He wiped the sweat from his face. He tried to control his breathing. He went into the third bar and pushed his way through to a set of double glass doors at the back that opened on to a small, busy terrace where he stepped into the flower bed, ignoring the cries of the waiter, to pull himself up and over the wall and into a narrow side street.

  Changing taxis every ten minutes, watching for any sign of the Honda with three aerials or the dark green moped or anyone looking hurried or frantic or lost, Jonas zigzagged his way towards the lighthouse. He didn’t have any time to waste. He covered the final few hundred metres on foot. Three Filipino maids stood talking in a huddle while the dogs they were supposed to be walking danced a maypole around them. Later on it was so quiet that he could hear the bubbling of a water pipe on a balcony high above him. A small Syrian girl aged around seven or eight came up silently, tapped him on the arm and asked for money. By then he had recovered Raza’s package from the base of the lighthouse, and the only thing he could find in his pocket to give her was a roll of six fifty-dollar bills, but he had to persuade her they were real, and even then she walked away as though holding something worthless in her tiny hand.

  2

  – Read this.

  – What is it?

  – Your statement.

  – What do you mean? My statement? What does it say?

  – Just read it.

  – Sorry, sorry. I’ll do my best. It’s difficult without my glasses. They were broken, you might not remember. And my eye has been —

  – Is it. Then hold the paper closer to your face.

  – Is the camera on?

  – All these questions. Don’t you worry about the camera, old man, I’m just sorting out lighting and stuff. First time’s a – what do you call it – a dress rehearsal. It’s a dress rehearsal. Just read the statement. />
  – As the representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, I call on the worldwide Church to cease its support of the brutal Assad regime and its oppression of Muslims. I was sent here to tell the Syrian puppets that the Church supports its crusade against Islam and against the – what’s this word? Indiscriminate? – indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim families, schools and hospitals. I now condemnify – you do know that’s not a word, don’t you? And this isn’t how you spell tyrannical. I’m sorry to be so fussy, but —

  – Man thinks he’s marking homework or something. If you want to change bits, change bits. Got to sound like you. That’s why we’re doing a dress rehearsal.

  – Can I ask…do you know if the medication I requested is available?

  – Requested. Huh.

  – It’s just that I’m finding it very hard to sleep at night. The headaches are getting worse, sometimes I can’t see because the pain is so fierce, and my breathing gets —

  – Doctors are busy with people whose skin was burned off by British bombs, with children who’ve got no arms or legs. And you’re talking about getting a good night’s sleep. Hurry up and read the statement, old man. The others will be here soon. I said I’d get you ready. Maybe one of these —

  – No, no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, no, no – there’s no need for —

  – Plenty more where that came from. Now get on with it.

  – I’ll read it, I will. I’m sorry to be such a bother. I’m not trying to be difficult, really I’m not. I’d be happy to write something that expresses my feelings on this subject, something about the illegal war in Iraq, something about the importance of good relations between religions, the things we can all learn from each other. This just sounds like propaganda. With the utmost respect to you and your colleagues, people in the West will just see a hostage reading something against his will and you’ll lose any support you might otherwise have gained. You’re British, you know what British people are like.

  – I’m British? You got that wrong. I burned my passport when I got here. Who gives a shit about British people anyway? It’s Muslims we’re speaking to. Muslims are not British, they’re not French, they’re not Chinese – they’re Muslims, simple as that. Anyway, you lot take hostages too. But you call them detainees. Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Belmarsh. Where do you think we got the orange jumpsuit thing from, eh? Now read the statement from the first word to the last word so we can see how it looks. Any more questions and you’ll be getting more than a slap, old man. Haven’t got all day.

  He pressed Pause.

  Someone had walked in. It was just after midnight. Jonas was seated at a terminal in the far corner of a half-empty internet cafe. A fluorescent tube flickered above his head. The streets were quiet and the only sounds he could hear were those of teenage boys at war: furious bursts of clicking and tapping, whispered gunfire, yelps of delight and disgust. In addition to three hundred dollars, Raza had left him a USB stick containing a single video file lasting eight minutes thirty-three seconds and a note asking him to write a report on his recent contact with British and American officials.

  The man walked back out on to the street. Jonas went back to the beginning and pressed Play. If he had been asked to describe the footage after the first viewing he would have commented on the bare light bulb and the black flag against the far wall that had slipped to reveal a crudely boarded-up window. He would have described the way the door had been reinforced with rough planks of wood. He would have said that the kidnapper came from London, that he was distracted by a task he was carrying out behind the camera.

  It was only on the second viewing that he saw the rest of it. His father’s left eye socket appeared to have been smashed and the damp purple flesh had swollen up like an airbag to close the eye itself. There was a coloured stripe under his white beard that was either a bruise or a burn. He held his arm at an odd angle. Jonas recognized the collar of a shirt he had given his father for Christmas three years earlier, the year that it had snowed, the year they had argued about something unimportant, the year Jonas had left early.

  – This focus ain’t right. Do you know how these things work? All these buttons. No, just keep sitting there. Read the statement again without those mistakes but do it louder this time. Can’t hear a thing, your voice is so quiet.

  – I’m sorry, I really am. You’ve gone to all this trouble to set everything up. But I can’t say these things about the Church. Can we change a few more words? Please don’t look at me like that. I just don’t want to play a part in making people think that their Christian neighbours are the enemy, that there’s some sort of crusade against Muslims. Things are already bad enough. Do you think that sounds ridiculous? You’re laughing. I just don’t want to make anything worse. We only came to show our solidarity with Christian communities caught in a terrible position, that’s all.

  – I’m laughing because it’s funny how naive you are. Let me ask you this. What about Muslim communities caught in a terrible position? Did you come to show solidarity with them? Did you come to ask Assad to stop dropping barrel bombs on civilian neighbourhoods? No, wait – you guys let him get away with murder. Literally. Nobody bombs him. Cameron makes some half-arsed attempt then says oh well. Truth is, Assad’s helping you fight us. You two is on the same side. You came here to say well done old chap, keep it up, go easy on the Christians but keep on sticking it to the Muslims. No, no, wait, listen, tell me this: if there’s no crusade, how do you explain George W. Bush and Tony Blair praying together before sending their armies into Iraq? How do you explain the Tea Party? How do you explain four thousand Jews staying home on 9/11? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to kill you. Know who said that? Malcolm X. Point is, racism is everywhere, Islamophobia is everywhere. You’re like a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water.

  – I, I…I don’t know what to say. The last side in the world that I am on is Assad’s side. And I’m not on the side of the British government either, I’m really not. I would rather Blair had never been prime minister and I think Bush should be locked up. I don’t want the British and Americans to be fighting you, I don’t want Assad to be fighting you, I don’t want you to be fighting the world. None of this is any good, none of it is any damned good. Didn’t you see all those people marching through London against the war in Iraq? We tried to stop this. We tried, we really tried, but, you know, it, it —

  – It fell on unpopular ears.

  – Exactly. That’s exactly what happened.

  – This is boring. Listening to you, it’s like listening to the news or something. The brothers’ll be here soon and you’re still talking.

  – I’m sorry. I don’t get the opportunity to talk to many people these days. I suppose I am going on a bit.

  – Thing is, at the end of the day you’re always going to think life in England is fine because it works for you. There it is. You’re like the people on the TV or, I don’t know, the banks. Life’s different for people like me. Getting stared at because you’ve got a beard, because you wear these clothes, getting stopped at airports by the feds asking you questions about where you pray, where you travelling to, what do you think of terrorism young man, would you be prepared to talk to us about your friends and what they’re playing at.

  – They’ve got jobs to do just like everyone else.

  – Why are you defending them? You forgot where you’re at, old man?

  – I don’t know. They get criticized from all sides, don’t you think? It’s hard to imagine… Shall we go back to the statement? Shall I tell you which bits I agree with? The bit about the bombing of homes and schools and hospitals being utterly wrong. The bit about the Assad government being reprehensible. The bit —

  – The bit where it says we’re going to cut your head off if we don’t get our money? It’ll be over so quick, scrawny old man like you, maybe we’ll get one of the kids to do it, like cutting the neck of a chicken. Little spurt of blood like a chicken. Don’t…si
t down, sit down, stay in the chair. Don’t throw your marbles out of the pram, man of your age. Have some dignity. It’s hard to take you seriously. Piss stains on your trousers. You sniffle like a baby when you’re falling asleep, kneeling on the floor talking to yourself. Truth is, I don’t care about you or what you say one bit. You’re nothing to me or my people. Talk till you’re blue in the face and it’s not going to change nothing. Let’s get on with this. All that talk of chicken’s made me hungry. I want to go and eat.

  Where had Raza got this from? The Syrians, most likely, either from an agent of theirs inside ISIS or from some kind of technical coverage. His fingers crackled against the computer screen. His father was close enough to touch. The camera had been positioned to take in his torso, his bruised face, the black flag behind him. It was as though he was speaking to Jonas, especially when he looked directly at the camera, as though Jonas was the one responsible for his distress, as though Jonas was the one making him cry. He wanted to say something. He didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry that I’ve been such a poor son, I’m sorry that I’ve let you down. He was no better than the armchair warriors around him, fiercely brandishing their joysticks and consoles. He played games like they did – he stepped into flower beds, he jumped over walls. He watched events on a screen and pretended he had some control over what would happen next.

  – I don’t know why we’re still talking. Wipe your eyes and read the statement or things are going to get pretty bad for you. That’s the truth.

  – I don’t see how they can get much worse.

  – They can get worse. Some of the brothers here. I mean, they’re expert at that stuff. Can you hear a car? Is that… Maybe they got held up somewhere. Listen, if you read it your family will know you’re okay, they’ll keep looking for ways to get you home. It’s in your interest. If there’s no statement after a while people think you’re dead and that’s it. Game over. Might as well finish it now.