Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  I have done everything possible to reassure you that my offer is genuine. But I understand that you will still have some doubts. It is in your own interests to put these to one side. As we both know, your new state is going to be put under huge pressure in the near future. This will come from the combined armed forces of America, Britain and their allies in the region, as well as from Iran and Russia. It will be unlike anything you have experienced so far. We both also know that this does not mean you cannot win. As the Prophet Muhammad defeated an army three times larger at the Battle of Badr, you can defeat your enemies too. But you will have to be wise and brave and seize the opportunities that are given to you, opportunities like this one.

  Wise and brave? He thought about the teenager who had threatened to beat his father. Jonas had drafted and redrafted the message dozens of times in his head, but now that it was on the screen in front of him it looked insincere, the reference to Badr hopelessly clumsy. A pop-up ad with an image of two women kissing appeared.

  In the battle that is coming, everything will depend upon intelligence – upon information collected in secret. Your enemies are already trying to discover everything they can about you: where your weapons are stored, who your leaders are and where they sleep at night, how your fighters are trained, who is plotting attacks in European cities. This is intelligence. Without it the West will not know who or what or when to attack. They will not know how to direct their proxy militias or where to drop their smart bombs. They will be powerless.

  If you accept my offer, I will open up the intelligence world before you like a book so that you can see not only what your enemies already know but the ways that they operate and the techniques they use to steal your secrets and infiltrate your ranks.

  This is my final message. I will not be able to check this email account again. In exactly two days from now I will be as close as I can get to the town of Arsal near the border with Syria. I know that you have fighters there and are able to move people in and out of the area. I will be using Lebanese mobile number +961 3 118883. I will have with me the hundreds of stolen intelligence documents concerning your state and a video showing the execution of the British official. I will hand myself over to you, along with these documents and the video, in return for the release of my father and the Swiss priest. They must be alive and unharmed. This is my final message and my final offer.

  Jonas switched on Naseby’s phone. It took several interminable minutes to come to life. Every second mattered. He connected the phone to the laptop, found the photograph of Naseby’s passport and attached it to the email. Looking through the images of the body on the hotel carpet, he was struck by how unsuitable most of them were – in one Naseby was staring at the camera with open eyes, in another he seemed to be trying to lift himself on to an elbow. He settled on a picture that took in the torn curtain, the toppled chair, the smashed television screen and the bloody handprints across the wall. There wasn’t any time to crop the edges or play with exposure levels or filters. He pressed Send.

  Raza had mobilized his men quickly. From the window Jonas could see the same cream-coloured Mercedes that had once grabbed him off the street positioned directly outside the shopping-centre entrance. Seconds later the blue Ford Transit van from the underground car park pulled into place across the road. Everything looked quiet. He was wondering whether there had been any need to involve Raza after all, whether he would have been able to switch on Naseby’s phone, send the email and leave without being intercepted, when he heard a squeal of tyres and saw one of the black SUVs arrive at speed. Harvey got out of the driver’s seat and three men in dark jackets spilled out of the other doors. The blue van pulled up immediately behind them to block their exit.

  A car, one he hadn’t seen before, drove slowly past, the back-seat passenger turning to consider the improbable crowd gathering outside an empty mall at such an early hour.

  Jonas couldn’t hear anything through the glass, but words must have been exchanged because Harvey was lifting his hands in the middle of the men gathered around him as though trying to calm everyone down. But when one of Raza’s men tried to open the boot of the SUV to see what was inside everything started moving quickly and suddenly they were grappling and others tried to separate them and then punches were being thrown.

  The passenger in the back of the slowly passing car made no move to stop or intervene in the fight. He simply adjusted the pink blanket that covered his knees and examined the windows of the shopping centre, floor by floor, as though he expected to catch sight of Jonas there, or find the answer to the profound mystery of why Harvey had come to visit a top-secret tunnel in an official US embassy vehicle, in a screech of tyres.

  Jonas ran down the stairs to the basement and into screen 3. There was no one around. He threw himself against the fire exit and it clattered open. He had been running for several minutes before it occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was going. To the border, yes, but how? There was only one main road over Mount Lebanon to the Beqaa Valley and Syria. He had little doubt that Meredith and Harvey would be mobilizing all available assets to look for him, and it wouldn’t be long before Raza realized that Jonas had lied to him.

  What would they be looking for? A British national of medium height, slim build, dark hair and a beard. He didn’t have time to stop and change his clothes or his appearance – he had to leave Beirut while he still could. A man without luggage, a man in a hurry, a man on his own. That was the answer. He started looking for a payphone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1

  Jonas counted nine soldiers, seven handguns, four automatic rifles, two makeshift sentry boxes painted in the red and green of the Lebanese flag and one hundred and sixty-three sandbags. Three men in leather jackets sipped at small plastic cups in the back seat of a BMW parked beneath a tree. Something had happened to put the security forces on high alert. Something like an ISIS attack on Lebanese military positions along the border, perhaps, or an intelligence report of a vehicle carrying explosives. Or an urgent request from the British and American authorities for help detaining a fugitive. The text message from Harvey to Naseby might have clearly stated that London did not want the Lebanese authorities informed about Jonas, but there had to come a point when the risk of letting him run was greater than the embarrassment of announcing to the Lebanese – and therefore the world – that British intelligence had reverted to type and discovered a traitor in its midst. Ahead of him the soldiers waved through a red Toyota Land Cruiser and the queue rolled forward.

  Maryam watched silently through the dirty car window. She had answered her mobile that morning on the second ring, despite the early hour, and listened quietly as Jonas explained what he was planning to do. He was surprised she hadn’t put the phone down immediately. They met outside a church near the National Museum. He tried to prepare some kind of defence, to find a way to explain why he had lied to her, why he had lied to Tobias. It didn’t matter. As soon as he saw her walking down the empty street towards him he knew that he was unimportant to her, that he was merely the latest in a long line of men who had lied to her, who had treated her cruelly – officials, militiamen, police, border guards. She wouldn’t make a scene. Whatever the details, whatever Meredith had said about Jonas acting on his own, he was a government man. You only had yourself to blame if you believed men from the government.

  They sat on the church steps and she made him tell her again, in detail this time, what he wanted to do. She looked thin and tired and fierce. Her dark hair was unwashed and there was dried blood on her hands where she had picked away the skin on her fingers. He told her about Meredith and her attempt to trick him into getting on a plane. He told her about Naseby and the smashed television and the bloody handprints on the wall, about Harvey and the ladder between the buildings. He told her about the 287 documents. He talked for a while about his father and how he wished things between them had been different. He described his original plan to get to the Beqaa Valley by taking a bus a
nd pretending to be an archaeology student, and he unpacked his rucksack to show her a textbook on Greek and Roman temples and a biography of Howard Carter that he had found in a second-hand bookshop near the lighthouse. At some point she must have decided that she had nothing to lose by believing him, that going was marginally preferable to staying behind. She raised an eyebrow when he described his meetings with Raza.

  “This is the most dangerous thing of all,” she said. “You are sure he is Hezbollah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know about me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “My name, how I look?”

  “He may know everything.”

  She took a red and white keffiyeh from her bag and wrapped it round his shoulders. “Wait here,” she said.

  When Maryam returned less than ten minutes later she was seated in the back of a rust-coloured Volvo she had flagged down, its boot tied open to allow space for three wooden crates filled with chickens. She came close to Jonas and whispered, “Say nothing,” before shouting at him in Arabic and roughly pushing him towards the car. The driver was an elderly Druze man, his black robe hiked up above his bare knees to allow him the freedom to operate the pedals. A small white knitted cap sat on top of his grey-bristled head. He looked back at Jonas and nodded sympathetically. His wife, sitting next to him, pulled her loose black headscarf across her face and muttered something under her breath.

  They climbed out of Beirut without incident, through Hazmiyeh and Aley, past signs for Souq Al Gharb, Deir Al Harf and Bsous, the road looping and winding through villages and towns. Jonas didn’t see the SUVs or any other vehicles with diplomatic plates. The car had to be coaxed up the steepest stretches. In his search for the best line, for the most efficient route up the mountain, the old man would swing them out into the path of oncoming traffic, somehow managing to avoid the cars that hurtled down past them towards Beirut. Jonas felt like a flag in a slalom race. Maryam occasionally broke her silence to shout at Jonas in Arabic, and twice she tried to slap him around the head. When the driver intervened to say something – from his tone, Jonas thought, he was suggesting she calm down – she shouted at him as well, and his wife joined in, as though telling him to mind his own business, since that was the last time he had anything to say on the subject. He settled deeper into his seat, stroked his moustache and concentrated instead on his vigorous driving.

  The checkpoint appeared before they had even begun their descent into the Beqaa Valley. Seven cars separated them from the soldiers. It seemed they were diverting one out of every three to four vehicles for further inspection. It made little sense to Jonas that they would be stopping traffic heading towards the Beqaa Valley and Syria, rather than traffic heading the other way. Was he right to assume the Lebanese authorities had not been told about him? He knew what factors Meredith would be considering. She would imagine the worst – that the news would leak immediately, to the Gulf States, to Yemen, to North Africa and down beyond the Sahel into Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya and all those countries with whom Britain had an important but fragile intelligence relationship. It could undo years of careful work, as those countries took a step back and stopped sharing their most valuable information with the British. Rumours of a leak could do almost as much damage as a leak itself.

  They moved forward and Maryam hit him again, her hardest blow yet. His head bounced off the window. She started shouting and wagging a finger in his face, punctuating her words by jabbing him in the ribs, and when he tried to protect himself it only seemed to make her more angry. Then there were tears in her eyes and she started to sob, her shoulders shaking. None of the three cars in front of them had been stopped. They rolled forward and the elderly couple wound down their windows to show the soldiers they had nothing to hide. Maryam was crying and wailing and shouting all at the same time, and she took hold of Jonas and feebly shook him. He could hear the sound of laughter through the open window, and then the faces of two grinning soldiers appeared at the glass, curious to see who was on the receiving end of such a tirade. Maryam cried and cried and the old man pumped expertly at the pedals like an organist and they crawled forward, waved on by the laughing soldiers, who had taken one look at Maryam and decided it wasn’t worth the bother. She cried for another minute or so, glanced out of the rear window to check that no one was coming after them, gave Jonas one last hard slap across his head and settled back into her seat. She was quiet for the rest of the journey.

  2

  The beard first. He needed to change his appearance. Within minutes of their arrival in Chtaura, Maryam had led him into the backstreets and begged a few items of clothing from a charity working with refugees. Now she had gone to get them food, leaving him in a petrol station toilet with a pair of scissors. He took hold of a clump of hair. It was like pulling at a handful of grass; he expected a sod of brown turf to come away with it. He cut close, leaving about a week’s growth, like the old man who had driven them – any less than that would uncover the paler skin beneath his beard. He would leave a full moustache like the old man too. The dim yellow bathroom light flickered and the traffic on the road outside rattled at the thin door. Maryam was right. It was important that he look different from any pictures that had been circulated, but also that he look as Lebanese as possible, to put off any locals who might think to stop him heading in the direction of the border out of concern for his own safety. His hair sat over the plughole like a discarded toupee. Someone shouted through the door and pulled at the handle. As he cut his hair down he uncovered lumps and cuts and ridges that he had never seen before. He felt like an archaeologist, like Howard Carter, at work with his trowel and brush on the ruins of a face that had been taken by surprise, sacked and abandoned in a matter of months. New hollows, scars, grey hairs. Maybe Raza was on to something. Maybe it was possible to read a person’s face in the same way that an expert could read the facade of a building. There were, after all, things that you might know about Jonas if you saw him. That he had been sad for a while, that he was lonely. That something had gone wrong. That he had discovered a wildness inside himself and it felt like home.

  He undressed and put on the clothes Maryam had brought him: a dark grey sweater, a black jacket with a torn sleeve and a dirty pair of suit trousers that flapped around his ankles. He wrapped the keffiyeh around his neck and stepped outside.

  3

  TOP SECRET STRAP 2

  1253 Zulu

  Incoming call from 00961 3 118883 (rpt 00961 3 118883).

  Caller identified as LEAKY PIPE, hereafter LP.

  – LP greets unidentified female (UF). He comments on poor quality of telephone line. LP says maybe he should call later instead.

  – UF is agitated and confused. She asks what is happening.

  (Loud noises in background. Speech, music.)

  – UF says wait a minute, she will turn the television off.

  (Pause.)

  – UF asks who is speaking. LP identifies himself by first name. UF expresses surprise. (Sound of crying.) She asks where LP is and why he hasn’t called in such a long time. She says whenever the phone rings she hopes it will be him. She says that she tries to call him every day but it never connects. She says that she doesn’t know if she’s dialling the number incorrectly. She says that she called the telephone company but the young man who answered just laughed at her and said there was nothing he could do. She says she is talking too much because she is happy.

  – LP says that he is fine. He says he has been away with work but that everything is okay. He says he is sorry he hasn’t been in contact sooner. He says he wishes he was with her now.

  (Sounds of traffic, car horns. Foreign speech in background.)

  – UF tells him that he doesn’t need to pretend with her. She says that he shouldn’t lie to her “of all people”, she just wants to know that he is all right and on his way home. She says she doesn’t care what has happened, it doesn’t matter. She says she has made up a bed for him.

  (Pause
.)

  – UF asks if he is still there. She says she misses him.

  – LP states that he is fine. He says that he has lost a little weight but is in good health.

  (Pause.)

  – LP asks how the garden is.

  – UF says why are you asking me about that. She says that a woman called something beginning with M came to see her a few weeks ago. From the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall. It might have been Marjorie, she thinks, or possibly Mariella. An Edinburgh accent, dressed head to toe in black. UF says she (UF) burst into tears, it was very embarrassing, she thought the woman was in black because LP had died. She says she’s losing her marbles. She says the woman was “of great comfort” to her. She says the woman talked about losing her son in a car accident.

  – LP interrupts to say that he doesn’t have much credit on his phone and can’t talk for long. He doesn’t want UF to get cut off mid-sentence.

  – UF says that she can call him back. She asks for his number. She says that she doesn’t know where she has put the notepad she always keeps by the telephone, she’s forgetting all sorts of things these days. Like that woman’s name. She says she left her shopping bags at the bus stop yesterday, when she went back for them someone had taken out all the eggs and smashed them on the floor. She says why am I wittering on like an old woman. Meredith, that was her name. She says she was called Meredith. She says she is ready to take down his number.

  – LP says that it is a Lebanese mobile number. He says it is 00961 3 118883. He asks her to read it back to him. She says 00961 3 188833. He corrects her and gives the number again as 00961 3 118883. She reads it back to him correctly.

  (Inaudible foreign speech. Sound of traffic.)

  – UF says that there is one thing she wants to say now just in case the line is cut. She says she was looking through some old papers of LP’s father the other day, sorting things out. She says LP wouldn’t believe how complicated it is to get anything done when someone is in “that” position. She says the bank won’t allow her access to any of his money and so she is behind on the mortgage. She says she saw an advertisement on television and was thinking of borrowing money from the internet but Aunt Rachel has been helpful and things are a little better now.