by John Sweeney
Ramiz’s granddaughter, herself a woman in her forties, already silver-haired, meek to the point of offensiveness, showed them in, offered to make them coffee, withdrew. On the wall above the fireplace was a series of black-and-white photographs gone brown with age, of a much younger Ramiz, wiry, tall, curly-haired, authoritative in posture, standing with Enver Hoxha at the top of a hydroelectric dam; with Hoxha and Stalin – their fifth meeting – in 1951 in Moscow; with Hoxha and Mao in Beijing in 1956.
Zeke studied the details of the photographs while Agim watched him, fascinated, like a child would a magician, waiting to see how he might do his next trick. The old American had been right about the bus; arthritic as it was, it had been waved through nine out of twelve police checkpoints on the road between Tirana and Tropojë. The three times a police officer had bothered to board the bus, the smell of the huddled masses, their poverty, their hopelessness, had semaphored the pointlessness of the officer’s task; he’d looked down the aisle, seen what he had expected to see, and got off before working out that hidden in plain sight in the third row was the CIA deputy director of counterterrorism everybody was hunting for.
Zeke tapped the sepia photographs of Hoxha, Stalin and Mao and asked, ‘Great men?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Ramiz’s voice was a rasp, two dry sticks rubbing against each other.
‘They’re dead now, all of them. You can say how they really were.’
‘In Albania, we have a saying: “No forest without pigs.” Enver, Stalin, Mao, they were all pigs in their own forests. Mao was a pig, literally, a revolting human being, a pig in a silk dressing gown. Stalin was somehow worse. He smiled, was self-deprecating, told little jokes against himself, enquired about my health – and I was, to him, just a nobody. He’d studied for the priesthood and that smiling way he had, the physical expression of empathy, you felt it, you were warmed by it; in truth, he was a pitiless sociopath. I watched the people around him. They’d laugh at his jokes but their faces were green. People would disappear. Hoxha was different. Maybe not, he ended up the same, a snout with a crown. But to me, for me, to begin with, Hoxha had something – energy, authority, an intense self-belief, and a belief in Marxism–Leninism, that this new philosophy would make the world a much better place. He had passion. Over time, it – he – became more of a pig; paranoid, selfish, beyond stupid.’ He shrugged. ‘I served him willingly at the start; at the end, I served out of fear, lest he take the food from my mouth and give it to someone else.’
He fell silent; sap in the fire spat and crackled.
‘I’m with the American embassy . . .’ Zeke started.
‘The CIA?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you want to know about the facility they’ve built?’
‘Yes.’
‘One of my old students designed it. Made no sense to him. Nor me. There’s two nodes, ten miles apart. The first node is on the valley floor, set in the rock behind the turbine hall of one of my old hydroelectric power stations, something I built in the late sixties. The second node is all the way up one of the pipes, on top of a mountain.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Zeke.
‘Nor does anyone else. In a dirt-poor country, with precious little oil or gas, they’ve taken a hydroelectric pipe out of action and put a secret train inside it. Down the bottom is a fancy laboratory. Up the top of the pipe is a prison, drilled into the rock. The prisoners, shackled prisoners, are shunted in the little train between their prison at the top and the lab down below. The logic is, it keeps the prisoners up top “sterile”, away from the scientists in the lab until the scientists need them. And “sterile” from Albania. They cannot escape from the pipe. That was the deal with Tirana. Albania would host your facility so long as there was no possible chance of “contamination”. As always happens, the people who dream this stuff up have no regard for humanity – that we need to breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2. The original prison up top generated too much CO2. They had to build vents. The gossip is the prisoner—’
‘Grandfather,’ cut in the granddaughter, returning with a tray full of coffees, ‘you’ll bore these gentlemen with all your chat.’
But Zeke had heard enough to begin to put the pieces of the jigsaw together in his mind. He looked out of the window at the Toyota Yaris they had come in, a tiny car, two doors and a hatchback. Uncomfortable, yes, but the Agency would never imagine one of its own travelling around in something so tinny and unprepossessing. His adventure had been useful, no question, but now, having established some of the facts behind the black facility, his mind was turning to how best he could re-enter the world of the Agency; what was the most diplomatic way of him demonstrating the necessity for his vanishing act. He would need photographs of the pipeline; copies of the original design work for the train inside the pipe, the prison facility up high and the lab down below; testimony, witness statements from the guards. It was amazing that they had been able to keep such a facility secret from him for this long. It was, of course, a hi-tech, multibillion-dollar fingernail palace, hidden from proper scrutiny.
He had to return to Langley, the sooner the better, to hunt down who had signed off on this, how the black operation had been funded, who had lied to him. When he returned, he would raise merry hell.
The day was almost done, a miserable, forlorn sky becoming more grey by the minute. From within the Yaris a light flared. Behind the wheel, Jeton, one of Agim’s cousins, thickset, useful in a fight, taciturn, the best possible man for such work as they were doing, had struck a match to light a cigarette. Zeke had left the Church of the Latter-day Saints because he’d realised that its founder, Joseph Smith, had been a confidence trickster. But he’d been a Mormon for the greatest part of his life and he couldn’t abide cigarettes. He knew that the journey back to the mountain shack Agim had found for them as a temporary base would be torture. So be it. He turned back to Ramiz and started on his goodbyes. When on the run from the Agency, even for just a few days, it was never a good idea to stay in the same place for long.
After the rear lights of the Yaris had gone, Ramiz’s granddaughter phoned her sister; the two of them loved a chat. They’d had two visitors, she said: a youngish Albanian in a black leather jacket and a much older man who spoke Albanian beautifully, maybe an exile or perhaps, a remote possibility, a foreigner. They kept on asking Ramiz, she said, about ‘një trenit në një tub’ – some train in a pipe. Made no sense to her. She was worried that her grandfather might be going a little gaga.
To the west, some 4,800 miles away, a data vacuum sucked in the call, along with hundreds of thousands of others, and it flowed through a super-computer so powerful it could defeat every single chess grandmaster since Alekhine, playing them all at once. The machine locked on to that phrase – disa të trenit në një tub – translated it, red-flagged it, and an email pinged to an analyst who made the connection and raised it to those high up his management tree.
A telephone call from Langley to northern Albania followed, giving exact coordinates for the location of the phone call and the likely route the party they were interested in would be taking right now. Then the line went dead. The time between the phone call from Ramiz’s granddaughter to her sister, and the call giving the coordinates?
Three minutes.
The party in Albania punched in the Moscow number he had been given.
The phone rang for five seconds, ten, then it was picked up.
‘Grozhov.’
The caller spelt out the coordinates he had been given and the likely direction of travel.
Grozhov murmured that he had got it.
‘You’re going to do this thing?’
‘It will be my pleasure.’ Grozhov’s voice was high-pitched, almost like that of a eunuch. But there was no concealing the excitement in it.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
F at spit-spit-spitting from a frying pan, dangerously hot, but for the life of me I can’t turn the heat down because there are no control knobs on the h
ob. Qureshi told me to destroy the flash drive but it doesn’t burn, yet the fat is getting hotter and hotter. The pan begins to spit not fat but bullets, then blood, then Katya appears, naked, terrified, running away from me, crying, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t follow me,’ and then the pan turns into a door and someone starts to knock on it but I can’t open it because there is no door handle and the knocking gets more and more insisten—
The god of dark dreams is good at this particular piece of devilry, calling on you to do a simple task, yet denying you the means to make it happen, so your mind plods around the same circle of cement like the mad polar bear at Berlin Zoo.
Joe, wide awake now but drenched in his own sweat, struggled to remain calm as memories of the night before crowded in: the crazy party, Jameela and Ham hiding on the balcony, Qureshi telling him to get out of Syria, Humfrey running at Mansour, scimitar aloft, then Mansour’s gun snapping, the woman’s scream and his friend dropping to the ground, blood oozing from his chest. Sweet Christ, it was no nightmare, it was all too real.
The knocking continued. Joe checked his watch. Three o’clock in the morning, the traditional time for a visit from the secret police. Clearly, Mansour had brought forward his appointment. Last night his men had escorted Joe back to the hotel through the silent, dark streets but left him in the lobby. The bad news was that Joe hadn’t followed Qureshi’s advice, and he still had the flash drive with the video of Jameela and Ham on him. It was in his suit pocket. There had been no sensible place to dump it. Joe had made up his mind to lose it first thing in the morning. They’d taken Qureshi, killed Humfrey and now they were coming for him.
The knocking continued while Joe pulled on his shorts. He considered brushing his teeth but that felt like he was pushing his luck too far. When he finally got round to opening the door, the person on the other side of it was not the party he had been expecting.
‘Daria?’
She was dressed as before, in her full-length gown with the naked back, black high heels, her long blonde hair tightly braided down her back; Joe was naked apart from his shorts. The clash in their different styles of dress was unusual but, after all, there was a war on.
‘Do you normally take this long to open your door?’ she asked.
‘I was expecting someone completely different,’ said Joe. The surreality of the line unmanned him. Joe found himself smirking. That sense of the dread to come, that must have been getting to him.
The harpist studied Joe, half-amused, half-contemptuous.
‘You’re a hard man to find. The hotel has got you down in another room entirely. May I come in, Irishman?’
‘Of course, I was forgetting my manners. Drink?’
She nodded. Joe found his precious bottle of Bushmills and went hunting in the bathroom for tooth mugs or whatever. To celebrate his happy mistake – that it had been Daria, not Mansour at the door – he poured her and then himself a generous portion of Ireland’s greatest export.
‘Peace?’ she suggested as a toast.
‘I’d rather drink to Humf. Did you hear what happened?’
‘I did, yes. That’s why I am here. Or mainly why I am here.’
They toasted Humfrey and sat in silence. Joe thought about the day he had first met him, in that tacky showbiz bar in Hollywood, how he had been both incredibly irritating and a force of nature, how he’d put on the front of being a callous, self-interested sybarite – which was true, but not the whole truth – and that he also gave time and money to the leper colony in India, that he had wanted to do his best to help find Jameela, that his life had been snuffed out in an act of heroism, that he and he alone could not stand the sight of a man being tortured in front of all of them. Humfrey had had a sister back in Arkansas. Joe promised himself he would track her down and tell her the grim news, when he left Syria. If he left Syria . . .
‘I am sorry about your friend,’ Daria said, breaking into Joe’s reverie.
‘Mad as a hatbox of frogs.’ Joe shook his head. ‘But an original.’
‘And brave. I didn’t see it, but people were talking about him running towards Mansour with a scimitar . . .’
‘Brave and crazy,’ he said. He poured two more drinks and she knocked hers back as if she didn’t have long to live.
‘If you sink my whiskey this fast,’ Joe told her, ‘we won’t have anything left to drink.’ She produced a slinky black handbag he hadn’t noticed before and, with a magician’s flourish, extracted from it a litre bottle of vodka.
‘Ochen horosho,’ he said, Russian for ‘not bad, not bad at all’, or something like that. She sat on the bed, prim and proper, very much the professional musician, and twisted open the screw cap of her bottle of vodka and poured a small bucket of the stuff into her tooth mug. Placing the bottle fastidiously on the floor, she drank her drink and studied Joe, still working on his second slug of Bushmills.
‘Mansour’s men, they’re looking for me. I can’t go home. Can I stay here the night?’
‘What about Qureshi?’ he asked.
‘He’s still a guest of Mansour.’
Joe shuddered, then said, ‘They know I’m here in the hotel. There’s some mistake with my hotel room number but they’ll find me, and you, in the morning.’
‘I have no choice. Just one night.’
‘Well, of course,’ Joe said in a slightly strangulated fashion, and sat down on a hard chair facing her. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘So what, Irishman?’
‘Give me some answers.’
‘If I can. If my words don’t hurt people I care about.’
Joe chewed that over and nodded his head. Maybe he was beginning to decode Syria. Maybe it was too late for that.
‘Let’s start with Jameela. Your eyes almost popped out of their sockets when I showed you her photograph. You know very well who Jameela is. So, where is she?’
She shook her head. ‘Next question.’
‘Come on. You’ve got to give me something.’
‘Next question. If you don’t want me to stay, I can go.’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘Then next question.’
Joe’s eyes dipped in submission. ‘OK. Next question: why was it necessary for this sadist Mansour to beat the shit out of Qureshi and shoot Humfrey dead? Why do so in front of so many people? OK, he’s the secret police. But aren’t they supposed to kill in secret? Why turn killing into performance art?’
She poured herself another big drink but this time she didn’t touch it. Instead, she stared at her mug in silence for a time, then took off her high heels and rubbed her ankles. Only then did she begin to speak: ‘Mansour meant to humiliate Adnan, to show to everyone that he was finished. Humfrey was an accident. When he came to him with that sword high in the air, Mansour couldn’t do anything but kill him.’
‘Why was Mansour out to finish Adnan?’
‘At the party you said that philanthropy was what rich people do instead of paying taxes, and I replied that Adnan paid taxes, no question. Think about my answer, Irishman.’
‘I’m missing something here. You’ve got to help me.’
‘Adnan is an oil man, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Joe said, as he finished the Bushmills in the mug and poured the last glug from his bottle.
‘Syria’s oil and gas,’ she said. ‘They’re in the east of the country.’
‘Wh . . . That’s ISIS land.’
‘Da,’ she said, and her eyes swept the hotel room, a signal that they were entering dangerous territory.
‘He pays taxes to ISIS?’
‘Da.’
‘So he’s in bed with ISIS?’
‘Not of his own choosing.’
‘But he’s an ISIS sympathiser?’
‘Not at all.’
‘How does it work?’
Still sitting on the bed, she leant towards Joe and explained the deal.
Adnan Qureshi’s men ran the gas and oil refineries in eastern Syria. The regime got electricity and a third of th
e gas and oil; ISIS got two-thirds. Officially, Qureshi paid ISIS fifty thousand dollars a month to leave his refineries and pipelines un-sabotaged and his engineers un-dead.
‘And what’s the unofficial monthly number?’
‘One million US.’
‘Who delivers the money?’
‘Qureshi has someone – Rashid. He is a surgeon, and because he is a surgeon he can cross the line, again and again. He saves lives in Damascus, he saves lives in Raqqa. Once Rashid told me that a dozen ISIS men came into his operating theatre because he was trying to save one of their commanders. If the commander died, they were going to shoot him and all the other doctors and nurses. Rashid ordered them to leave. He told them that it was his job to save lives and he didn’t need the encouragement offered by their bullets. They left and the commander didn’t die. So, even in Raqqa, he is respected. He is an extraordinary man, perhaps the bravest man I’ve ever met. Once a month he goes to Raqqa, saves lives, operates on ISIS fighters, children, anyone, pays tribute to the Caliph, hands over the dollars, talks to Adnan’s engineers who are trapped there, who fix the pipework, who maintain Adnan’s refineries. He negotiates with the Caliph in person. Every trip, he brings in medicines. If he can, he brings people out. Not big numbers, but he does his best in the worst of all places. ISIS make a great claim to be pious but they are corrupt beyond any imagining. Rashid pays them big dollars and buys lives.’
‘Presumably Rashid gets well rewarded for playing the good shepherd?’
‘Shut up, Irishman. No one in their right mind would dare to do what he does at all. Without him playing go-between, there would be no electricity in the whole of northern Syria. Without electricity, people in the hospitals would die. Without him, more people would be locked up there. During the French Revolution, there was the Scarlet Pimpernel, yes, saving people from the guillotine?’
