Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something about teaching a dolphin to swim. Why are you —”

  “What is this new contusion on your face?”

  “What?”

  “The bruise. By your hairline.”

  “I slipped and hit my head.”

  “On what?”

  “On the edge of a table. Can I —”

  “Really? Poor Jonas. You seem very prone to accidents. Come closer, lean forward.” Raza took Jonas’s head in his cold hands and turned it towards the light. “You know that it is possible to obtain a lot of information from a simple contusion? The colour, for example. Typically it will go from red as the fresh blood leaks into the tissues, to blue and purple as the red blood cells break down, and then finally green and yellow as the chemicals biliverdin and bilirubin are released. So we can certainly tell how old it is from the appearance. Does this hurt? I would expect the edge of a table to have broken the skin, but there are no abrasions or lacerations.” He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he finally concluded, “I doubt this was caused by the edge of a table.”

  Instead of releasing his head Raza pulled it towards him and downwards so that Jonas was looking at the ridged metal floor. He could see Raza’s bare feet poking out from underneath the pink blanket. They were larger than he had expected, white and bony and stiffly whiskered like a pair of catfish in the watery gloom of the van. Raza spread his hands into Jonas’s hair and with gentle, persistent fingers began to work his way over the crown of the skull and down towards the base of his neck, tracing the landscape of bone and cartilage as though following the swirling contour lines on a globe.

  “What really happened?” he asked.

  It was pseudoscience, Jonas knew that, phrenology had no basis in fact, but part of him wanted it to be true, in the same way that he wanted every implausible article of faith to be true. His own experience had left him sympathetic to belief, like an athlete who cheered on a competitor attempting a leap they themselves hadn’t quite been able to make. He was aware of his failure every day. That’s the problem with having faith and losing it, he thought: you build the largest frame conceivable and then spend your entire life looking for a canvas high and wide enough to fill it.

  Raza pressed hard, as though he might succeed in breaking through to the truth on the other side. Jonas felt that he was being enlightened, clarified, in the way that a vague thought might be clarified by the pressure of argument. To his surprise, the thought taking shape in his head was that he no longer felt afraid.

  “Jonas?”

  He lifted his head and peered through the gloom into Raza’s face but saw no news there of his character, no news of his fate.

  “I had an argument with a woman,” he said. It was always possible they had witnessed the scene with Maryam. “She threw something at me.”

  “A woman? What is her name?”

  He shook his head.

  “What is her name, Jonas?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “There are ways to get this information from you.”

  “You can do what you want with me but I’m not telling you anything about her. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “You are not permitted to speak to me like this.”

  “I came here to exchange information about British officials for information about my father, that’s it.”

  Raza stared at him. “You wish to talk about something else? Are you sure? Then we shall talk about something else. But let us be clear that you have told me one lie today and I will not tolerate a second. Is that understood? This is not a game, Jonas, neither is it an ‘exchange’. You have already accepted our money and in return betrayed your country. Do not think that there is a way out for you.”

  He opened the doctor’s case by his side and took out a brown paper file. Gleaming instruments – scissors, tweezers, forceps, scalpels – were held tightly in their narrow pouches like knives and forks in a picnic hamper. He handed the file to Jonas. It contained thirteen black-and-white surveillance photographs. Three of the nine men pictured he had never laid eyes on before; the other six had followed him around for the best part of a day earlier that week. In the photographs they were speaking on their phones, buying food from roadside stalls, driving. There was useful information here. Jonas memorized the details of those vehicles and men that were new to him.

  “What do you notice about these pictures?” asked Raza.

  He could see where this was going. “That I’m in them?” he asked. In only four of them, to be accurate, but he imagined this was what Raza was getting at.

  “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  “Well, I’m confused rather than surprised,” said Jonas. “I remember seeing some of these men. I assumed they were yours.”

  “Why would I send men to follow you?”

  “They weren’t really following me. I don’t know. It was more like they were protecting me – they came very close at times. Who are they?”

  “Oh, British, American – a mixture. But this is not the question. The question is why they were following you.”

  The men outside had stopped talking. Scalpels and scissors glinted at Jonas from the open case.

  “I don’t know.”

  Better to act dumb than to come down on one side or the other, he thought. That talk about Meredith and Latin, this business with the photographs – Raza might have his suspicions, but he didn’t have proof of anything. If he had proof he would have produced it by now, or shot Jonas in the back of the head and dumped him outside the city.

  “You will have to do better than that,” said Raza. “There is something you are not telling me.”

  He could see the way it might go. A threat, followed by a slap. The men outside would be asked to deliver a beating. Perhaps a scalpel would come out of its tight pouch. He didn’t much care as long as he was allowed to walk away once it was done.

  “Jonas? Can you think of a single reason why British and American agents would be following the son of a hostage? Or is there more to this whole thing than you have told me?”

  “Maybe they know I’m talking to you. Maybe they’re worried I’m going to harm myself. Maybe they were practising on someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing before the real target turns up. Maybe they weren’t following me, maybe they were following your men, the ones who took these pictures. Maybe —”

  “All right, that’s —”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing, Raza. None of this makes any sense to me. I’m just trying to do what I can to help my father. All this other stuff – surveillance, MI6, CIA, you – I don’t know anything about it. If you want me to do something for you, tell me. You’ve given me the only real help I’ve got since I arrived and I’m grateful for that. But don’t show me pictures of people I’ve never met and expect me to tell you what they’re doing. I don’t know what I’m doing most days.”

  Raza was quiet.

  “Well,” he said finally. There was a knock on the side of the van. “We don’t have much time. Return to the embassy tomorrow. It will be easy to find a reason. Perhaps you wish to review the legal document you signed, perhaps you wish to make a statement to the media. And while you are there you will spend some time with Mr Desmond and Miss Meredith and see what information you can gather. Do you think you could do that for me, Jonas?”

  “What about my father?”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open. I will leave you a list of questions in the usual place.”

  “My father, Raza? Have you got any news about him?”

  “We must learn to be patient. It will take time. For now let us focus our attention on the things we can do, like teaching the British government there is a price for interfering in Lebanon. Your father will still be there next week.”

  They dropped him on a backstreet behind one of the main highways and he started walking in the direction of his hotel. It took fifty minutes to make sure he wasn’t being followed and fifteen mi
nutes to find a DVD shop with a handful of internet terminals at the back. The wall above him was covered with posters of Apocalypse Now, Eraserhead, From Russia with Love and The Blues Brothers.

  The latest email from the kidnappers had arrived at 11.42 that morning.

  You havent proved anything to us yet. Its not enough to send 3 documents. Even 50 wont prove anything if I’m honest. You either need to send us PROOF like the names of british spies over here NOW or you need to do something to show us that this is not a TRAP and you are willing to cross a line once and forever. Got it? Do something. Do an attack that we can see on the news or kill someone and send us proof. Then we’ll know your serious. Then we’ll talk time and place. Your fathers ok but you better hurry. We got the Swiss guy to. Its the first time anyone sent us a hostage so easy lol.

  Afterwards he couldn’t be sure how long he had walked for or in which direction. The thought of what he had done was intolerable. But when he got back to the hotel he found a note from Meredith pushed under his door that simply read “We’re getting him out”, and he knew that everything had changed all over again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1

  “I haven’t got time to see him right now,” said Meredith.

  Jonas could hear her voice through the closed door. It wasn’t the welcome he had expected. Naseby had left him standing just inside what appeared to be a makeshift operations centre on the second floor of the embassy. The room, no more than five metres across, was filled with enough workstations for at least a dozen people, although there were only half that number in there at that moment: three young men typing at computers; a woman in headphones dividing her attention between an Arabic dictionary and a laptop; another woman with bright red shoes talking into one of several secure telephones about the impact of weather patterns on aerial surveillance; and a young man holding aloft a crowded kitchen tray, dipping and curtsying to clear empty drinks from wherever they had been abandoned. Seven mugs, three Starbucks cups – all with the name Charlie written on the side – and five Coke cans. A lot of drinks for six people. Perhaps they had been left by the day shift, although this group looked as though they had been working straight for quite a while – uncombed hair, shirtsleeves, ties pulled askew, no make-up. Jonas had never seen any of them before. They had glanced his way when he appeared in the doorway with Naseby but otherwise ignored him. Three framed posters of cars in various stages of assembly suggested that the business attaché had been moved into temporary accommodation for the duration of Meredith’s stay.

  “He only wants to know what’s going on, I expect.” Even through the door it was easy to hear the impatience in Naseby’s voice. “Can’t blame a chap for that. You did send him that bloody note, for God’s sake, so it’s hardly —”

  Another phone started to ring. One of the young men muttered into it. Jonas heard a reference to “Cyprus” and “0400” and “emergency medical facilities…standby”. Sandwich wrappers and crisp packets spilled out of the rubbish bin. Meredith and Naseby’s voices had dropped to an unintelligible murmur – the ringing phone must have reminded them how easily sound carried through the closed door.

  Jonas stepped into the room. Large maps of Deir al Zour, Raqqa and the border region near Kobani covered the far wall. Nearer to him a collection of sixteen images taken by surveillance drones had been crowded on to a large cork noticeboard, each one stamped in the bottom right-hand corner with the time and date they were taken. He saw some of the more notorious ISIS locations – police stations, a court house, a former local government office – but also what looked like residential buildings and stretches of desert road that were new to him.

  He stepped closer. The woman discussing weather patterns on the phone clicked her fingers at him and shook her head vigorously, indicating that the pictures were off-limits, but he ignored her and turned back to examine them. They had all been taken in the last seven days. There was nothing to indicate why those particular stretches of desert road might have been chosen, Jonas thought, other than that they all appeared to focus on areas where the roads curved sharply, where vehicles might naturally be forced to slow down. Three of the images showed a low huddle of white buildings around a small courtyard. In two of the pictures the same vehicle – a dark-coloured pickup truck – was parked outside, and in the third a group of people were crossing the courtyard.

  “You shouldn’t be looking at those!” the woman called out.

  Jonas leaned in further. Up close the photographs were blurred; it was only the number of legs that made it clear there were three people. From the waist upwards they merged into each other as though the man in the middle was being supported or restrained by his companions. He was either wearing a pale head covering of some description or had white hair. And it was impossible to ignore the fact that he was dressed in orange.

  The woman took hold of his arm and pulled him away from the noticeboard.

  “I told them you shouldn’t be allowed in here,” she said. She was short and overweight and her fair hair was thinning at the front. Jonas suddenly remembered seeing her at a conference on East Africa in Vauxhall Cross nineteen months earlier that had only been memorable because of a long-winded and frequently inaccurate presentation on the Shabaab given by the Americans. She had sat three rows in front of him, lifting the edge of her Afghan shawl to cover her mouth when she yawned, her long hair twisted into a bright coil that caught the auditorium lights as though glazed like a bun. “I know people who used to work with you. Your colleagues, your friends. Nobody understands this. No, what I mean is, everybody understands this, everybody has asked themselves what they would do if it was their father, their husband, their child. You know what it’s like in our line of work. It’s difficult, lying to everyone you meet, lying to friends and family. My children think I put stamps in people’s passports like the ones they make in school with old potatoes.” Tears came into her eyes at the mention of her children. “I’m only willing to do that because the job is important and the people I work with are like my family too, and when a person does what you’re doing, whatever that is, it feels as though someone has joined my family, had a good look around and said: no, this isn’t worth it. I’m not making any sense – I’ve been up since four this morning. But, I mean, stealing intelligence? Really? Do you know how much damage that will do? How many people will die? How many other sons will lose their fathers?”

  Jonas didn’t know what to say. Everyone was looking at him. “Who’s this in the picture?” he asked.

  “Are you serious?” The door to the office opened. “Do you really think you’ve come here for a briefing? Anything I tell you will probably end up with Hezbollah or ISIS or God knows where! The last thing —”

  “All right, that’s enough,” said Naseby. “End of round one.” His shirtsleeves had been rolled up to reveal a pair of freckled forearms and an expensive wristwatch. “There’s nothing here” – he nodded at the pictures – “that he’s not going to find out about from Meredith in the next five minutes anyway. Back to work, everyone.”

  He drew Jonas to one side.

  “Everyone’s a bit on edge,” he whispered. His hair had recently been dampened down with water and was drying stiffly in thick red shards that came to a point as though painted by an artist’s brush. “You can’t blame them for that. What is it, well after midnight? We’ve been cooped up in here for five days straight. A diet of takeaways and coffee is hardly good for the sanity, not to mention the tennis. Mens sana in corpore sano and all that.” He patted his stomach. As though spurred on to physical exercise by the mere mention of sport, he took aim with his foot at a nearby rubbish bin and looked surprised when its contents scattered all over the floor. More sandwich wrappers, all bought from the same shop, more coffee cups with the name Charlie written on the side. “We’ve royally pissed off the embassy staff with our comings and goings,” said Naseby. “They’ve even turfed some poor chap out of his office to make way for us. Like most embassies they’re
geared up for eight to three and then we come along, burning the midnight oil, having pizzas delivered at all hours, running our staff ragged. It’ll be ten times this size in London, mind you. They’ve taken over a whole floor there.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Jonas. “Is that my father in the photograph? Meredith’s note said that you’re getting him out.”

  “I’ll let her ladyship explain it to you.” He took Jonas by the elbow and led him towards the door in the corner of the room. He dropped his voice. “A health warning before you enter the lion’s den. She’s not in the sunniest of moods. This whole thing has spiralled out of control to such an extent that the odds of her making chief have lengthened considerably. Oh yes, didn’t you know? That’s what they were saying – first female C. But now, what with No. 10 breathing down her neck, questioning some of her operational calls…” He tightened his grip on Jonas’s arm. “I can speak a little more frankly now that this whole unfortunate episode is drawing to a close. It goes without saying that I disapprove of the way you’ve gone about things, Jonas. I’m not so much of a maverick that I’m in favour of theft, but the loyalty you’ve shown to your father and your willingness to think outside the box are admirable. One word of advice: get yourself a good lawyer. If I bump into you when we’re back in London I’ll slip you a couple of names – good chaps, know their way round the system. Truth is, faintest whiff of anything really secret is usually enough to guarantee any charges are kicked into the long grass. If your lawyer knows which cards to play and when, that is. Loopholes galore. Think of the potential embarrassment to the government. Think of the stories you could tell! Right, you ready? That way. She’s waiting for you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  2

  “Desmond told you I was in a bad mood, didn’t he?” asked Meredith. “Nonsense. I might be a wee bit exasperated with him, but I’m very happy to see you, Jonas. How are you? How are those bruises? You’re certainly looking better than you did the last time we met.”