Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  She stood up and smoothed her severe grey bob into place. She appeared older, somehow – he wondered if it was the absence of make-up or the tired wobble in her voice. The desk in front of her was empty apart from a laptop, a coffee cup, two mobile phones and a notebook, arranged with geometric precision. She was dressed in black jeans and a black silk shirt, and as she came around the desk to shake his hand he saw that she was wearing a pair of black and white striped slippers.

  “Oh no, you’ve caught me,” she said. “These aren’t meant for public display. You’re not going to judge me, though, are you? I came away from our last meeting with the distinct impression that you’re not one for unnecessary etiquette. Flip-flops, wasn’t it? Well, there’s no way I’m wearing heels after midnight.” Her good nature broke through whatever layers of fatigue, stress and frustration had settled since their last meeting with a laugh that was sudden and musical. “That makes me sound a little like Cinderella, doesn’t it?”

  He had come straight to the embassy after finding the note under his door and was still in the clothes he had worn to meet Raza: old jeans, a pullover beneath a dark shirt. The hotel receptionist had tried to stop him checking out, complaining that he would get into trouble with the manager if he didn’t have a photocopy of Jonas’s long-awaited, much-discussed passport, supposedly stuck in a DHL depot somewhere between Lebanon and Australia, but when Jonas paid in cash for the rest of the week by way of an apology the matter seemed to become less urgent.

  “They’re a present from my grandson,” she was saying. “He’s determined to wean me off the colour black. These are as far as I’ll go – I’ve made that very clear to him. He’s unaware yet just how rare it is for anyone to force me into a compromise, but having said that, here I am talking to someone who has managed to pull off the same feat. You’re in a very exclusive club of two, Jonas, alongside a nine-year-old boy called Tommy who collects spiders and wants to play for Rangers when he’s old enough.”

  3

  “Let’s make a start,” said Meredith. She was seated behind the desk and held her hands folded in front of her throat as though she was praying. “Firstly, our deal. We located Maryam Khoury and her mother in a hotel on the other side of Beirut three days ago. They have been issued with UK visas. It wasn’t straightforward, but we managed to persuade the Home Office that the case was a compelling one, given the circumstances.”

  “Really? I would have expected her to contact me if that had happened. Can you prove she is in the UK?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you show me copies of the paperwork?”

  “I am no longer in the business of trying to prove anything to you, Jonas; it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you believe me or not. However, if you had been listening properly you would have heard that I didn’t say she is in the UK – I said she and her mother had been issued with UK visas. Her mother flew into London two days ago, but Maryam herself has refused to leave Beirut. She says she won’t go without Tobias Hoffman.” She sat back in her chair and studied Jonas. “She phones the switchboard every day in case we’ve been trying to get hold of her. Sometimes she waits on the street outside and gives her number to embassy staff on their lunch break in case they hear anything. We’ve had to ask security to move her along several times. We tried to explain that there’s nothing we can do, that she should contact the Swiss authorities, but she wouldn’t accept this. She became very emotional, quite understandably. It’s an awful, awful trick you played on her, Jonas.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Did you really expect her to contact you? She knows that you lied to both her and Tobias. We had to tell her.”

  He hung his head not out of any sense of regret or guilt but for Meredith’s benefit, because he wanted her to believe she was capable of manipulating him. It was not that he didn’t feel anything. He knew better than anyone that what he had done was wrong. But he had finally assimilated the rules of the game and was applying them to his situation as ruthlessly as in other circumstances he might apply Alekhine’s Defence or the Danish Gambit. That any piece could be sacrificed in the interests of victory, that any sacrificed piece could return to the board through promotion. Maryam might have been sidelined, but as long as the game was live she remained in play.

  “Jonas?” said Meredith. “Are you all right? Let’s move on, shall we?” She had an agenda to keep to but smiled to soften the impact of her words. “I am simply informing you that I have honoured our agreement, something that you have not yet decided you are willing to do.”

  He hadn’t honoured their agreement, Meredith was right about that: he had continued to negotiate for his father’s release. But did she know that to be the case? There was a world of difference between her knowing it as a fact because GCHQ had shown her transcripts of his emails to the kidnappers and her assessing it as a likelihood because a surveillance team had seen him meet with Raza. There was the possibility, too, that she knew very little other than that Jonas was behaving oddly and so had decided to throw out an accusation to see how he would react. He wouldn’t waste much time on that theory; it paid to assume the worst when weighing up your opponent, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the agencies’ collective ability to sift the facts and accurately assess the situation. After all, that was what the machinery was built to do. Intelligence work was all about fragments and whispers, which is to say that it was all about assessment. At its best it was capable not just of picking up the pieces after something terrible had happened, whether a bomb or a betrayal, but of preventing it in the first place.

  The one thing Jonas could be confident Meredith knew for certain was that whatever deal he was negotiating had not yet been concluded. Any sale of stolen intelligence would cause a flurry of activity – phones dropped, agents executed, bugs torn out – that simply hadn’t happened yet.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “I told you how many documents I took. Is this because I ran from your surveillance team?”

  “My surveillance team?” She gave a low chuckle. “Now you’re just being silly, Jonas. When have you ever heard of a surveillance team walking five paces behind their target? They weren’t following you, they were trying to keep you safe.” She sighed and shook her head. “I had real hopes that we’d established a level of trust in our last chat. There was no need for any of this, Jonas. No need to run, no need to subject yourself to bedbugs and cockroaches and whatever other beasties you encountered in that grotty hotel.”

  “Keep me safe from what?”

  “The Americans have informed us – after the fact, unfortunately – that they’ve invited the Israelis to the party. We felt there was a small possibility, given their track record, that they might try to intervene directly. We don’t have the capacity to monitor all their local personnel but we thought that at the very least we could put some sort of cordon around their likely target. You’ll appreciate the anxiety you’ve caused, Jonas. Nobody knows which documents you’ve got, which country owns the original intelligence, who you’re planning to sell it to. As a result we’ve had to brief this out fairly widely as a precautionary measure to all sorts of liaison services, although for the most part you shouldn’t let that bother you. After all, there’s little prospect of the Belgians or Norwegians dispatching a hit squad to track you down.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “But the Israelis —”

  There was a knock at the door and one of the young men hurried in with a notebook under his arm, waving a piece of paper.

  “You need to see this,” he said.

  Meredith read it in silence. Something isn’t right, Jonas thought. He was being bothered by a visual detail that had lodged in his eye like a speck of dust. He tried to blink it loose.

  “Paragraph three is the important bit,” the young man said.

  “Hush,” said Meredith.

  A plant was slowly dying on the windowsill. A tartan ribbon was tied to the handle of a small black suitcase behind the door. The
walls of the office had been painted in magnolia and hung with pictures of Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Windsor Castle. It was a world that had grown foreign to him, the pictures like propaganda advanced on behalf of Class and Order and Money, every bit as sinister as smiling peasants and successful factories. The bookshelf carried a Who’s Who, a 2010 cricket almanac, a collection of Flashman novels and a framed photograph of an Indian couple and their three children. Two flies took it in turns to throw themselves against the window. He felt his mind doing something similar as he tried to understand what was bothering him.

  The young man lowered his voice – pointlessly, since Jonas was barely a metre away – to whisper: “Bill wants to speak with you. He’s already phoned twice. The Cabinet Office have asked for —”

  “I’ll call him in ten minutes,” she said. “No more interruptions, please. Make sure everyone out there understands I mean that in the literal sense.”

  In his haste the young man banged his leg against the edge of the desk, spilling some of Meredith’s coffee, and as he reached to clean up the puddle the notebook under his arm dropped to the floor. It landed a few feet away from Jonas. He began to rise out of his seat to retrieve it. But the young man was taking no chances, even though it had fallen open at an empty page, and he kicked it away from Jonas and picked it up on his way to the door.

  “Didn’t I say you were making people anxious?”

  “Can we talk about my father?” asked Jonas.

  Meredith looked at her watch. “Goodness, it’s almost one o’clock,” she said. “No wonder you’re getting impatient. Let’s do just that, and then you can be on your way back to your hotel.”

  4

  “We are going to attempt to rescue your father in the next seventy-two hours,” she said in a voice that was flat and businesslike. “I am going to tell you two things only about the operation. Firstly, that the military assesses there is a twenty-five to thirty-five per cent chance of success. Success in this context means that no Special Forces personnel are killed and that the hostage is recovered. It does not necessarily mean that he survives, given his age and physical condition.” She cleared her throat and took a sip of what was left of her coffee. “Secondly, that the commanding officer on the ground has the final say as to whether this goes ahead or not. They will not deploy if they judge the risks to be unacceptable. I am saying this in case you decide to make further threats to release or sell information once the military operation begins.”

  Jonas listened carefully enough that he would remember everything afterwards, every word and inflection, but at a deeper level his mind was at work trying to identify what it was that had struck a false note. He tried to remember everything he had seen, in the same way that as a child he had remembered objects on a kitchen tray. Sandwich wrappers, maps of Syria, Naseby’s wet hair, aerial surveillance images, Meredith’s geometric desk, the notebook, the tartan ribbon —

  “If they succeed in rescuing the hostage,” she was saying, “he will be taken directly to a British military base in Cyprus. We know that he is very unwell. It is likely he will be in worse condition when he arrives. The question I have been asked to put to you is this: do you wish to be there when he arrives? We’re all flying first thing tomorrow morning. The entire team. Six hours from now.”

  One of the flies had given up, but the other one was still hurling itself against the window.

  “I’m surprised that you’re telling me any of this.”

  “You’re not the only one,” she said. “If it was up to me I wouldn’t have told you anything. This comes from higher up the food chain.” She smiled briskly. He could see her frustration not far beneath the surface and remembered Naseby’s warning. “There is one other thing I have been asked to raise,” she said. “There is an additional reason you may wish to consider being there, beside the fact that it is a chance to see your father, although personally I don’t think this will score very highly on your list of concerns. If your father is conscious, we will want to ask him questions about locations he has been held at, other hostages, and so on. Tobias Hoffman, for example. There will be a very brief window of opportunity for another rescue attempt. Now, do you think he will cooperate? If not, as his son and someone formerly engaged in this field, would you be willing to help us ask him those questions?”

  “Why wouldn’t he cooperate?”

  “Not everybody does. It might be that they have formed a bond with their captors, or that they are too distressed, or perhaps they realize the information will lead to military strikes, civilian casualties, that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t think he’ll withhold anything from you.”

  “I agree, it’s fairly unlikely. Most people are willing to cooperate.”

  “I’ll be honest, Meredith, I find it difficult to trust you.”

  “I quite understand. I’d feel the same in your position.”

  “If he survives, I’ll see him back in the UK.”

  “Correct.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense for me to go there until I can be sure —”

  “That wretched fly, I don’t know how they get in here. All the windows are supposed to be sealed.” She pushed back in her chair, took off her slipper and hit the reinforced glass repeatedly until the buzzing stopped. “Are we finished here, Jonas?” she asked. “I told them this was a waste of time. I told them you’d say no.”

  Jonas suddenly realized what had been bothering him.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1

  It was decided that Jonas should spend the remaining few hours before the early-morning Cyprus flight at Naseby’s hotel. The stars were out and the city was sleeping. Naseby was being overly solicitous, opening doors and carrying Jonas’s bag as though worried that something as trivial as having to endure the wrong temperature in the car or listen to a Fayrouz song he didn’t like might cause Jonas to change his mind and decide not to fly with them after all. Meredith changed into a pair of black plimsolls and came down to the embassy forecourt to see him off. She gave him a quick hug before stepping back into the shadows. The car slipped noiselessly past the guards and the barriers and out into the street. Jonas turned back and saw her waving, small and delicate and practically invisible beneath her grey bob. It might have reminded him of leaving home, of saying goodbye to a loved one, if only he didn’t suspect that she had just lied to him on such an extravagant scale.

  It started to rain. Naseby had clearly decided – or been advised – that the wrong kind of conversation was as perilous as the wrong kind of music, and he was quiet as they drove through the empty streets. He put on a pair of driving gloves at a red light. Once or twice he smiled to himself or pulled a face as though working hard to suppress his garrulous nature. Jonas was grateful for the silence. He closed his eyes and saw the cork noticeboard, crowded with sixteen aerial surveillance images, as clearly as if he was standing in front of it. He allowed himself a minute to take it all in. The police station. The winding desert roads, the pickup truck. The man in orange. He let his mind come slowly to the thing that had bothered him, which was times and dates, which was pinholes.

  An old Mercedes swung noisily into the lane behind them, too close for Jonas to read the number plate. The street lamps distorted everything; it took several seconds for him to be sure it wasn’t the same light blue colour as the vehicle that had carried him to the meeting with Raza. He closed his eyes again.

  According to the timestamps in the corner of each image, they had been taken over the past week, which was approximately how long Naseby said they had been running an operations room in the embassy. So why was a picture from 11 May partially covered by one from 6 May? Why did a picture taken on a Monday obscure the bottom third of one taken two days later? He would have expected to see the earlier picture go up first and the later one pinned on top of it, rather than the other way round. And why was a picture taken just eight hours before
Jonas stepped into the embassy almost hidden from view by two earlier pictures? This hadn’t just happened once or twice. There was no logic to any of it, and the fact that none of the pictures had multiple pinholes in them meant that they probably hadn’t been taken down and then put up again in some sort of thematic pattern he wasn’t able to detect.

  He knew not to read too much into this. On its own it didn’t amount to anything more than an observation that the pictures had most likely all been put up at the same time, rather than over the course of the week, and on the same day that Jonas had received a note from Meredith inviting him to come in. There were possible explanations. That until yesterday morning they had been spread out across a desk, for instance, at which point someone had decided it would free up valuable working space to put them on a wall instead. Or that it had taken time to process and analyse the images in London, where the expertise was, and they had only been sent out that day, as a single batch, to the team in Beirut. But it was a loose thread, and once he started pulling on it he found other threads, that laid together made something fine and delicate like a cobweb that you might just be persuaded was actually there if you came at it from the right angle and the light was favourable.

  In the course of his career Jonas had spent plenty of time in rooms filled with people who had worked continuously over any number of days. There was something discernible about those rooms: a weary restlessness, a smell of body odour and coffee. There was usually an indication that discipline had broken down at some point, whether a cricket bat and ball, an obscene drawing stuck to the back of someone’s chair or a handful of sweets thrown across the room and left to gather dust on the floor until the day that the operation ended and the cleaners were allowed back in. There would be teabags and banana skins and plastic cutlery in the rubbish bins, and someone would have left a Tupperware container or a pair of trainers under their desk, and there would be mugs with mould in and food wrappers from lots of different places, not just one place, because after five days straight everyone would be bored stiff of eating sandwiches from the cafe just around the corner.