by Henry Porter
‘You’ll need treatment for that. Is that why you’ve come to Europe?’
The Libyan didn’t respond.
‘Or did you have to leave because you were ripping off the caliphate with your drug deals? That’s what we heard, Mohammed.’ Al Kufra shrugged. Samson guessed he was not only suffering from TB, but was also in the first stages of withdrawal and desperately needed one of his pills. He wasn’t going to get that any time soon. ‘So they are behind you on the rail line?’ Samson said.
‘Maybe.’
‘How many in the group?’
‘Seven with the boy.’
Samson turned to Vuk and told him to direct Simeon and Lupcho to check the rail line below them. Just then he got a text from O’Neill on his own phone: Boss says check out DealistXB app on the bastard’s Samsung. It will interest you.
He went to a rock in the shade, noticing that while the sun was still hot there was a cold breeze blowing down from the mountains. He found the DealistXB hidden in another app and opened it.
Nine
Early that morning, the door to the washrooms had been unlocked and an old woman carrying a bucket and mop had shooed him out. He went round to the front of the service station, where there were already several trucks parked. Men with big stomachs were gathered around a coffee machine in the café. Naji waited for them and then used the coins he’d earned in Gevgelija to buy coffee, which he thought would make him look grown up. He didn’t like it much, but it was better when he added a lot of sugar. No one took any notice of him, least of all Zoran, who looked exhausted and was in a poor mood. Naji thought it wasn’t the right moment to ask him if he could pay money to send a text to his family. He wondered about asking one of the drivers for a ride to Serbia but he had no idea how to approach them and guessed that they wouldn’t understand his English anyway.
He went outside and propped himself on a post to eat the roll Zoran had given him the night before. The sky was clear except for wisps of cloud trailing from the peaks of the high mountains in the west. He felt good, but had no idea what his next move should be. Maybe he should start busking with his flute, but the truck drivers didn’t look as if they would like flute music, so he decided to wait. He was staring at the view when Zoran barked at him on the PA system and told him to come inside quickly.
Everyone was gathered around the TV screen mounted on the wall, looking up at pictures of a truck that had crashed into a stream in Serbia. The cabin had been wrenched forward and almost torn off, so that you could see the entire engine. There were gashes along the side of the cargo hold and the doors at the back were open. Emergency workers crawled over the wreckage, attaching chains from a crane to the chassis and widening the holes in the side. There were a few bodies, roughly covered up, on the bank of the stream; also sitting there, with their heads in their hands, were one or two passengers who had got out alive. The camera focused on the shocked faces of the survivors then panned up to the broken crash barrier where the truck had left the highway and careered down into the stream.
Zoran put his hand on Naji’s shoulder and pointed to the logo on one of the doors and on the side of the truck – a cockerel wearing a crown. He explained to his customers in the Macedonian language what this meant, then to Naji in English, although by that time it was unnecessary. From their expressions, Naji knew the truck was the one that had left the service station with his friends late in the afternoon the previous day. Falling asleep behind the building had probably saved him – the spirit that watched over him had not deserted him after all.
Zoran translated the report in short bursts. The crash happened at night . . . Serbian police said that so far ten people were known to have died . . . truck was carrying migrants . . . driver and his mate dead . . . conditions good . . . truck left highway for no apparent reason . . . no other vehicles were involved . . . driver may have been using mobile phone . . . many hours before the truck was spotted . . . not known how many people were trapped . . . cries are coming from within the vehicle . . . rescuers can hear children inside.
Naji searched the screen for any faces he recognised and prayed with all his heart that Lashkar, who had taught him to skim stones and told him all about his love for a girl on Kos, had somehow managed to escape injury and death. If Naji hadn’t fallen asleep while his clothes dried he would have been in that truck and might very well have been killed. It turned out that his guardian angel had protected him, but this somehow seemed to him at the expense of the three Afghans who had been so good to him. He was too shaken to make any sense of it. He heard his father’s voice in his head: if those men had died, their deaths, as well as your survival, were God’s will, and that was all there was to say about it.
Zoran seemed to understand what was going on in his head. He told him that he could stay in the café as long as he wanted that day, but he had to find a way of continuing his journey – otherwise the police would find him and arrest him. Naji asked if he could use his phone to send a text to say that he was all right. His family might see the news and worry that he was in the truck, which was stretching things a bit because this news was very unlikely to reach Turkey. Zoran wouldn’t accept Naji’s offer of money and handed him the phone. But then he had to show Naji how to change from Cyrillic language to Arabic before Naji sent his usual, slightly formal text: Honoured father and mother, beloved sisters. I hope you are well. I am safe and happy and well. I am making progress with my journey and send you my greeting and love. Naji. He changed the language back to Macedonian Cyrillic and handed it back.
Naji sat down and the truck drivers returned to their coffee and sandwiches. Zoran busied himself with the till, studying a receipt with his big, black-framed glasses on the end of his nose. Without looking up, he said. ‘That musical instrument in your pack – what is it, my friend?’
‘It is the Arabian flute – the ney,’ Naji replied. ‘For five thousand years it is played by my people.’ He lifted it from the pack, unwrapped it and demonstrated how different effects could be achieved by obliquely blowing across the mouthpiece. He told him that the ney played in the countryside, often by shepherds, was usually higher pitched than the instruments used in religious music. This flute had belonged to his great-grandfather, who was a farmer. ‘My father, he gave me this flute because he is without the gift for music,’ he told Zoran.
‘Maybe you should play for us,’ said Zoran, adding hastily, ‘but not in here. Perhaps people would like it out there.’
He went outside, wiped down the instrument with his clean cloth, worked his lips and began to blow softly into the mouthpiece. He began with a very slow tune that had many long notes and pauses, which he’d learned from a Sufi recording, long before the war, when IS had come to his village and told people what they could and couldn’t play. He felt that the tune fit somehow with the morning light and the cold mountain air, and as he played he thought of Lashkar and his lost love. And that made him think of Hayat and the red ribbon she had given him so solemnly in the park.
As the truck drivers came out, they stopped and watched and nodded with appreciation, and one or two handed him some small change. Zoran asked him to move away from the door so as not to be in the way. He took up a position at the edge of the shade near the car park and played for forty-five minutes without pause, collecting in the process much loose change and many more smiles and compliments than he had either in Athens or Gevgelija. Naji knew he was playing well, improvising in ways that he never had before.
There was one man who watched him for a long time, standing close to him and smiling and flipping the fob on his key ring. He was large and wore a suit, an open collar, sunglasses and his hair slicked back. He looked rich to Naji: he was driving a new Opel Zafira. Eventually he raised his sunglasses and spoke to Naji, but not in a language Naji understood. There was something greedy in his eyes that reminded Naji of the man who tried to do things to him in the alley when he was buying a life jacket.
Naji had elbowed him in the stomach and smashed his glasses before running off with the life jacket, which turned out to be a dud.
The man kept talking, trying a combination of English and German. ‘Möchtest du gehen in Serbia? You go in Serbia? Zwei Stunden – two hours in mein auto.’
When he got no response, he smiled and went inside the service station. He reappeared a few minutes later with two cans of Coke, one of which he placed beside Naji, then he went to his car and leaned against the driver’s door, smoking and drinking from the can.
All the pumps were occupied with vehicles, so Naji didn’t see the pickup roll into the far side of the service area until too late. Two men lounged in the back. With a start, he immediately recognised Ibrahim and Usaim. At the same moment they recognised him and jumped up and hammered on the roof, but Al-munajil was already looking in Naji’s direction. The pickup stopped. Ibrahim turned round to speak to Al-munajil through the passenger window. They were deciding what to do. Then Ibrahim leapt down from the back and started walking to Naji with his arms open, as though he was overwhelmed with joy.
Naji’s mind froze. He lowered the flute and just stood staring at the killer as he walked towards him.
‘And look who we’ve got here – Naji, my long-lost little cousin!’
Naji glanced left and right and back into the café, where Zoran was busy with customers.
‘My good friend Naji – your troubles are over. You may ride with us.’ Ibrahim was at his side and had slung an arm around Naji. ‘Now pick up your bag and come with your friends – your brothers.’ He was now steering Naji towards the pickup and Naji was walking and doing what he said simply from habits of past terror. That was how he had survived before – when they told him to do something, he obeyed. Ibrahim’s hand gripped his neck and Naji felt the pressure of his thumb and forefinger just under his ears.
‘And your brother Usaim wants to talk to you about his injuries. The big boulder in the forest – that was you, wasn’t, it, Naji?’
‘My stick – I need my stick,’ Naji said, suddenly twisting round. ‘It’s over there.’
‘You don’t need your stick now, Naji,’ said Ibrahim through clenched teeth. ‘You come with your brothers. You don’t have to walk any more.’
Naji wriggled free and ran back to his stick, which was leaning against a stack of gas cylinders. Ibrahim whipped round and went a few paces after him, but then stopped. He knew that he couldn’t very well drag Naji across the forecourt in front of the people filling their cars, so he just stood beckoning to him with a phony smile on his face. And that was what broke the spell. Naji understood that if he moved one step towards Ibrahim he would be dead by the end of the day. Ibrahim glanced at Al-munajil, who made an impatient gesture to tell him he should go back and get Naji, whatever the fuss. At that moment the pickup moved forward and started turning towards Naji.
It was obvious they were going to bundle him into the vehicle. There was only one way out for him. His hand folded round the handle of his knife in his pocket and he raised the stick with his other hand so that people could see he was in trouble and Al-munajil’s men meant him harm, and then he shot a desperate look in the direction of the man who had bought him a Coke and had been watching the proceedings with detached interest. He seemed to get the picture straight away. He straightened and jumped into the Opel, started the engine and moved forward to block the path of the pickup, which was easily done because he was much closer to Naji. As he arrived by Naji, he shouted and opened the passenger door from the inside. Naji hopped in.
The Opel sped out of the service station and onto the highway. The pickup made a wide arc around the petrol pumps and followed the Opel, unnoticed by the few people around, least of all Zoran, who was busy with the routines of running the service station.
*
The app on Al Kufra’s phone opened on a list of works of art, with thumbnail photos of Assyrian statues, amulets, decorated antique pottery and cuneiform tablets – in other words, a huge catalogue of the looted artworks that IS now sold through networks of dealers and brokers to the art markets in the West and the Gulf States. Samson had made it his business to understand the trade, because some of the individuals disposing of the artefacts for IS were also responsible for maximising the income from sex slaves. They were divisions of the same vast criminal enterprise and he suspected there would be an overlap somewhere. So he reverse-engineered the networks he found, passing messages back up the line to IS that an interested party would pay a lot for the release of a certain female doctor held in IS captivity. He didn’t have much success tracing Aysel Hisami with this, but other approaches had proved more hopeful and at times he thought he might just get her out.
He scrolled through the price list of artefacts, remembering how much art IS had wantonly destroyed before the US air attacks on its oil refineries and tankers forced it to think of replacing the revenue by selling ancient works from the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian cultures, all of which had sprung up at one time or other in ‘the land between the rivers’ – Mesopotamia.
He wondered why London had directed him to the app and began looking at the items for sale, clicking on the brief, almost comic descriptions of the works for sale. A 3000-year-old sculpture from the ancient city of Nimrud was labelled ‘Old head with no nose and big beard’. He clicked on the photograph of this piece and suddenly a photograph of a naked girl filled the screen – a very young girl, who was looking away from the camera and trying to cover her breasts and pubic area with her hands. She was no more than fifteen. Beneath the photo was a price – $120.
Behind each picture of a work of art there was a woman for sale. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, all photographed in more or less the same humiliating pose and almost all bearing the signs of mistreatment and even torture. One young woman had two black eyes and bandages on her wrists, evidence of an attempted suicide. Her price tag was just $70. Sometimes the price received by an auction or private sale was recorded. In this case it was just $64.
He’d come across a lot of this kind of material in his search for Aysel Hisami, and had watched videos of slave markets, released for propaganda purposes by IS. On one occasion he had viewed the appalling films of fighters raping the captives, just in case he glimpsed her. He had acquired a profound loathing for the evil young men in these films. But never before had he encountered one of the individuals responsible for the entire apparatus. He looked across to Al Kufra and, suppressing a brief desire to beat the life out of him, got up and went over to him.
The Libyan was looking a lot worse and had acquired a tremor in his right hand.
‘How many of those pills are you taking every day – five or six?’
The Libyan shook his head. ‘Maybe four.’
‘And you need one right now?’
He nodded.
Samson examined him again. ‘You’ve got a really bad case of withdrawal there. It’s not just from these pills, is it?’
The Libyan shook his head vigorously then fell back against the tyre of the Land Cruiser. He was sweating profusely.
Samson picked up the backpack and started feeling the lining, never letting his eyes leave Al Kufra. He reached the wide waist belt that stabilised the pack when it was being worn and thought he felt something rustle beneath the material – silver foil – and further along there were some small packages. He retrieved some scorched foil, a plastic biro tube and five packages of the Golden Crescent’s finest heroin.
‘I get it,’ said Samson, glancing at Vuk, who looked down with contempt on Al Kufra. ‘You’re bringing the pills into Europe to trade for heroin. You’re addicted to speed – Captagon – but this is the major drug in your life.’ He stopped and sat down by the Libyan, so close that he could smell the man’s odour.
‘I need your help on two matters. If I think you are lying to me, I will destroy all these drugs immediately. If
you tell me the truth, I will maybe let you smoke some of this. Do you understand me?’
The Libyan nodded.
‘If there’s the slightest doubt in my mind, this stuff goes into the river.’
He nodded again.
‘Firstly, I want the truth about the boy. Did you kill him?’ He took hold of the Libyan’s chin. ‘Did you kill the boy?’
‘No.’ There was no flicker in the man’s eyes.
‘Okay,’ said Samson, moving away. ‘On your phone there are pictures of many naked women with price tags. You were offering them for sale, is that right, Mohammed?’
He exhaled deeply. He was shocked that Samson had found the pictures of the women so quickly. ‘They are the caliphate’s property. This is not me.’
‘Remember our deal,’ said Samson. ‘I need the truth, so don’t pretend this was nothing to do with you. You were the dealer, the broker – whatever you like to call it – and you arranged for these women to be sold into sex slavery. That’s right, isn’t it? When this phone is investigated further and we start to track down the history of your communications, there’ll be much to learn about you and your trade. You won’t be able to escape responsibility for your actions.’
The Libyan lifted his shoulders hopelessly. ‘I was doing what they told me.’
‘I think you’ll find that excuse has had its day in Europe,’ said Samson. ‘Now I’m going to show a picture of a woman. She was older than these young Yazidi and Christian women that you sold: she is in her mid-thirties. Her name was Dr Aysel Hisami. She was captured about a year ago, not far from Mosul. She was serving as a doctor in the front line of the Peshmerga forces. We know she was sold into slavery and we know she subsequently killed herself.’ He let that hang in the air.
‘Many women committed suicide,’ said Al Kufra. ‘It was a problem for us.’
Samson was known for his exceptionally calm disposition, inherited from a father who could sit without blanching at a card table knowing that he might lose everything on his hand, but it was all Samson could do not to take Vuk’s pistol and put a bullet in the Libyan’s head there and then. ‘Yes, a problem indeed,’ he said very quietly. ‘I have two pictures of Dr Hisami here and I want you to look at them very closely.’ He showed him the picture on his own phone, which was from the website of the UCLA medical school where the doctor had carried out her research. The Libyan nodded. ‘Don’t say anything yet. Just look at this one.’ He held out the phone again. It was the last known photograph of her. Dr Hisami was in battle fatigues and wore the red beret of the Peshmerga forces.
