by John Sweeney
‘That boy, the one they talked about executing. I know they often play games, stage mock executions. They have done this to me, time and again. What happened to him?’
Timur hesitated and then said, ‘He was beheaded.’
There was a long silence, disturbed only by the faintest of trembling underfoot: bombs falling in the far distance. Eventually, he heard her sigh and say, ‘I shall pray for you.’
‘And I will remember you and pray for you, Beth.’ In that place, at that time, the very utterance of her name had the intimacy of a love poem.
‘You were quoting Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.’
‘I was. Something from my past, before . . .’
‘Before ISIS?’
‘Yes.’
Suddenly, they were both aware of a sound, a creak, a third presence.
‘A rat?’ she asked tentatively.
The door of the strongroom swung open to reveal the shadow of a slight figure cast against the wall. Timur had thought the door closed but, in his distraction over the execution, he had not shut it securely. The shadow grew bigger on the wall. Beth pulled her veil over her head, her fingers working quickly to hide any trace of her blonde hair from view.
‘What’s that you’re saying, Master?’ Haroun, cold-eyed as always, emerged into the light. The boy spotted a flash of movement and turned to the cage in which Beth was covering up the last strands of her hair – but not fast enough. The boy’s face lit up with a smile of the purest sadism.
‘The woman has been pleasing you, Master?’
Before his talent as a bomb-maker had led to his current occupation, Timur had been a fearless fighter, especially during the jihad against the Russians in his native Chechnya. But when he considered the boy who, only an hour or two before had faced the near-certainty of execution, something within him felt afraid.
‘No,’ Timur said.
‘I am so sorry, I was mistaken,’ said Haroun.
The cold eyes, as black as anthracite, examined Timur.
‘What is it, Haroun?’
‘I have a confession, Master.’
‘What is that, Haroun?’
‘It is about my grandfather. When the Caliph passed our shop in his car, he spat twice on the ground. He was not just disrespectful of the Caliph in that one moment, sir. There have been other times.’ His voice lowered an octave: ‘He . . .’
‘Go on,’ said Timur.
‘I suspect that he might be an agent for the Jew-Crusaders.’
In Raqqa – in any city, town, village or hole in the ground held by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham – such an allegation, of itself, was tantamount to a death sentence. Haroun stared up at his master, presenting an indelible image of childish purity and innocence, though Timur knew, now, that he was anything but.
‘I think you must be mistaken, little Haroun. I know your grandfather to be a good and pious man and to be a true and devoted servant of the Caliph. He must have had a cough.’
‘Very well, Master.’ Timur waited for Haroun to leave but instead those cold eyes flickered this way and that, taking in the details of strongroom: the woman now masked behind her niqab in the cage; the door of Timur’s safe open, and its specially constructed wooden shelves, pigeonholes for his precious detonators; on his desk a laptop with a dongle so that he could connect to the Internet – he was one of a tiny number of senior officers in the Caliphate who had authority to communicate with the world, so that he could know the latest prices for explosives; a long shelf of books, his battered Quran, books on Islamic law and jurisprudence in Arabic, and several technical volumes in English on chemistry and explosives. But none of those held Haroun’s attention for long.
In the safe were stacks of hundred-dollar bills, six unusually delicate detonators and a paperback, on its front cover a picture of a woman with dark-red hair, exposed for all to see, in a dark-green dress with naked arms, holding high a crown of gold. In ISIS-land, ownership of such a book was an act of wilful pornography, punishable by death.
Timur followed Haroun’s eyes and, despite himself, answered the unspoken question: ‘It’s a book about a bad king.’
Haroun tilted his head a trifle, made to leave, then turned back and asked, ‘And the name of this king?’
‘Macbeth,’ said Timur.
‘Is the bad king like our Caliph?’ And the look of shock on Timur’s face made the boy’s eyes glitter with amusement. From not far off, footsteps could be heard.
Timur closed the safe and turned the key in the lock. As he was doing so, Hadeed entered the room followed by three members of the Hisbah, the ISIS religious police – young, long-bearded, dressed in white blousons and trousers cut off at the calves and black waistcoats. The Iraqi man nodded towards the cage where Beth was being held and said, ‘Take her out to the car.’
Timur unlocked the cage and Beth stepped out, and as she brushed past him she whispered, ‘God be with you.’ The Hisbah dragged her out of the room, Timur looking down at his feet, the child Haroun grinning at some inner amusement.
The Iraqi sensed something untoward and looked at the master bomb-maker.
‘What did she say?’ Hadeed asked Timur.
‘Nothing,’ said Timur.
Timur and the woman had a secret between them. Hadeed, the intelligence officer, could smell it. He had risen from a home so poor it had been little more than a mud hut on the outskirts of Tikrit, by means of a mixture of ferocious loyalty to his distant kinsman, Saddam, and a gift, an intuition, for discovering people’s silent terrors and then calibrating the exact amount of cruelty to get them to talk. In the Amn he had risen to become the chief inquisitor for the whole of northern Iraq. When the Americans invaded, they had ranked him on their set of cards of Saddam’s most trusted lieutenants as the five of clubs, a lowly designation that had insulted him. He’d slipped away into the desert, faked his own death and ended up in Damascus. Zarif’s Mukhabarat had kept him in prison but not duly uncomfortably so, and had waited for their moment. When the Arab Spring was at its height and the days of the Zarif regime looked numbered, they released him and hundreds of other undesirables and he joined ISIS. He wasn’t remotely religious – far from it, he craved whisky and Cuban cigars, like in the happy times under Saddam – but he did seek vengeance against the Americans for what they had done to his country and for having destroyed his own place in it. For the moment, he would serve the Caliphate, not out of piety but out of something, to him, purer: hatred.
Hadeed knew that, eventually, he could dig out the secret from Timur and the woman, but that it would take time. She was an American pagan harlot, nothing better than a slave. She had first pleased then infuriated his master and now the Caliph wanted her out of the way. He’d grown sick of her. She knew too much to be kept alive but the Caliph hadn’t quite made up his mind that she had to be executed. Timur had extraordinary gifts and had been a dutiful, pious and sometimes brilliant servant of the Caliphate, but lately Hadeed had detected in him something new – what? An absence of zeal, perhaps, a lack of belief in their holy mission.
Haroun was sitting at Timur’s feet, smiling in that unsettling way he had. Hadeed reflected that he was a strange one – a man-child, years older in manner and tone than his age and innocent looks would suggest. It had seemed pretty clear to Hadeed that Haroun had been the culprit, the saboteur, but he admired the way the little terrier had foisted the blame onto the big oaf.
The Iraqi put all of this to one side. Timur, the gifted engineer, was needed for a supremely important task.
Hadeed ordered Haroun out of the strongroom and cuffed him about the ears as he ducked out of the way. Then he turned his head a trifle, gesturing to the retreating boy.
‘Smart, that one,’ said Hadeed. ‘I’m glad he didn’t die today. He may prove useful to us elsewhere.’
‘Oh,’ said Timur blankly. His eyes did not look at Hadeed but were focused on the ground beneath him, an intimation of
fake humility that riled the former brigadier.
‘Berlin. London. Washington. No one in the West would suspect such a small boy.’
Timur remained still, his head down, his eyes on a square of concrete just in front of his feet, saying nothing.
‘Timur, I am not just here to take the woman off your hands. We need your engineer’s brain.’
‘Why is that, Hadeed?’
‘Our men have found something hidden in a tunnel.’
‘What something?’
‘Something left by Zarif’s men in a great hurry.’
‘What could it be?’
‘Chemicals, Timur, chemicals.’ And Hadeed smiled thinly, as if someone had told a joke but not a funny one.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
In the freezing canteen, dinner had been served, watched over by the two fat gods, the big one with the Doris Day teeth and the little one, the bad Elvis impersonator. Their breaths ballooned in the frozen air and their stomachs rumbled as the two cooks, the fatter, jollier one and the sad, pitifully thin beauty, both with the regime-ordained pudding-bowl haircuts, ladled out the only serious meal of the day: kimchi, rotting cabbage in brine, and sometimes, if the six of them were lucky, gristle with claws still attached. They ate it because they were so hungry, more hungry than they had ever been in their lives. Their teacher, Mr Chong, a sadistic sociopath, liked to call the meat ‘chicken’, but one of the guards who had a smattering of humanity said different. Joe asked the not-so-inhuman guard what food they were eating. He grunted towards a murder of crows. So that was their chicken.
Tired beyond all understanding by the day’s exertions on the pretend battlefield, practising the killing of hyena-faced American and British bastards by rote, eating dinner was not the end of the day. Lessons continued through to nine o’clock at night as they sat on hard chairs, trying to stay conscious. Mr Chong took them through the theory and practice of Jucheism or Kimilsungism, the philosophy of the state religion. Even now, Joe could hear his dry voice intone:
‘The Leader is the supreme brain of a living body, the Party is the nerve of that living body, and the masses are only endowed with life when they offer their absolute loyalty.’
Joe had hated every word of it. But not all the lessons were a sickening tribute to tyranny, not every moment was a waste of time. Mr Chong had also told them how to stay strong under torture and how to evade capture. And embers of memory from that last lesson fired up in Joe’s brain as the two goons by the hotel entrance noted that he was gawking at them.
Mr Chong would have failed him on the spot. ‘Never let the enemy know that you are conscious of them,’ was one of his favourite sayings. Had he seen Joe oh-so-obviously clock the Mukhabarat goons in the hotel in Damascus, he would have had him spend the whole day in the pit, a shiveringly cold open-air dungeon of mind and body. It was Mr Chong threatening to send Donnelly, their brigade commander, to the pit – effectively, for him, a sentence of death – that had forced Joe to act that day in the way that he did, to kill Chong. But all of that was a long time ago, and Joe had become a different human being. Or so he liked to tell himself.
The goons, as one, as if by remote control, stood up and began to make a move towards Joe. One was immoderately tall, pimply, more of a youth than a man, with a smudge of a moustache running along his upper lip and a bulge showing through his jacket. He either boasted a heart too big for his ribcage or he was packing heat. He made to go for his gun but the other guy gestured for him to put it away. Killing Humfrey in a private residence was one thing but the government had to keep up a bit of an appearance, and having a shoot-out in the fanciest hotel in Damascus would not look too good. Besides, Joe had a sense that killing him outright, immediately, was off the table. Mansour had wanted to talk to him. He wanted information. And that being the case, his minions needed to serve Joe up to Mansour alive, not dead. Knowing – or rather suspecting – that gave Joe a slight edge.
The second goon was no advertisement for the regime. In late middle age, he was short but had a thick, powerful torso, an oiled quiff of black hair that was so dark Joe suspected that it was dyed, and a face that was somehow blistered or bubbled with acne. The disfigurement made you want to feel sorry for him, to rise up against cheap and petty prejudice, but there was something about his posture, the way he carried himself, an innate and irredeemable violence about him, that let you understand he would never, ever let you. Nature had insulted him, and his whole existence was directed at making sure that no one else would ever repeat that mistake.
The non-trickling fountain and the stagnant, be-weeded pond it fed stood roughly midway between Joe and them. The youth headed for the north side, Mr Hideous the south.
Joe had picked up quite a few tricks in North Korea. One of them was simple: when cornered, and capture was unacceptable, go mad. He ran straight into the pond, seventeen stone of Irishman plunging in with all the grace of an elephant seal. It was deeper than it looked, soaking his suit trousers. He almost tripped up but staggered on and out, dripping water and leaving a trail of pond weed through the lobby; running, heading for two swing doors the staff came in and out of. Behind him there were shouts in Arabic, fast and vitriolic, but he cannoned through the doors. In front of him was a narrow passageway leading straight ahead. He zipped along it and pivoted hard, running up a set of stairs. Above him, the staff-entrance door clattered open; his pursuers were only three or four seconds behind.
At the top of the stairs, you could go two ways: to the left, the wallpaper was grubby and old-fashioned; to the right, newly applied, executive. He ducked right, running some way before coming across a door, unlocked, which opened onto a room full of private cubicles, a little like at a swimming pool or health club, but on a central table were objects you would find in neither: bulletproof vests, gas masks, biochemical warfare suits, and military helmets in blue neatly laid out, each one labelled OPCW. He picked up the nearest suit and opened a cubicle, got in and locked it. Seconds later, two things happened, from the sound of things: the goons entered from the staff-door side, but Joe could tell from the louder shouts that the chemical weapons team had come in from the hotel side and were outraged to discover two Mukhabarat poking about in their changing room.
‘Get out, get out, get out!’ cried an American voice with an unmistakably New Jersey accent. ‘Or so help me God I’m going up to the Presidential Palace this minute and I will happily cancel this mission.’
A door slammed. Joe couldn’t see anything, but his guess was that the goons had backed off. Joe began to strip off his soaking-wet trousers and donned the OPCW suit. The cubicle next to him opened, then slammed shut, and he heard a second voice, speaking in English with a slight Spanish accent: ‘Hey, Marty? What’s on the menu today?’
‘We’ve asked to go to the site’ – it was the same New Jersey accent; the speaker had to be Marty – ‘for the twentieth time, where they deny using sarin. Mehmet has prepared all the paperwork.’
‘If Mehmet has prepared all the paperwork . . .’ said one voice.
‘Then we’re screwed,’ said another.
‘We have satellite intelligence,’ continued Marty, ‘that the site is safely in regime-controlled territory and has been for the last six months. The regime says, “You’re welcome.” We suit and boot up and get within five klicks of the site and someone, almost certainly the Mukhabarat, lets off a round of Kalashnikov fire. And then our hosts tell us – surprise, surprise – “We can’t guarantee your safety,” and we have to go back all the way we’ve come without doing diddly-squat, and another day in paradise is wasted.’
‘Is that a fact?’ said a French-accented voice.
‘No, Laurent, it’s a prediction.’
‘I bet you one bottle of St Emilion that your prediction will come true today.’
‘Listen, Laurent, you’re going to win the bet. But I like drinking St Emilion so I accept your wager.’
More doors opened and closed. A new voice, British English, asked, ‘
What’s Team Zarif saying about how many sites he’s got?’
‘Nineteen,’ said Marty.
‘And how many does our intel say he’s got?’
‘Forty-five,’ said Marty. ‘It’s like Albania in 2002, when they told us they had no chemical capability whatsoever and – oops! – they found sixteen tons of sarin and VX precursors in rusting hulks on the side of the mountain, and they’d forgotten about it all. Difference is, there’s a war going on and ISIS have a habit of rolling up and taking over territory, and – oops! – the government’s forgotten about that little ol’ chemical facility. So ISIS are gassing people with sarin, and we ask Zarif’s people where they got it from and they say, “We dunno, maybe they made it themselves.”’
‘Bullshit,’ said Laurent.
‘Marty? Where’s my suit? Marty, where’s my kit?’
‘Check your room, Teodor, maybe Supplies left it in your room.’
Joe moved his valuables – wallet, passport, flash drive, printouts of Jameela and Ham – out of his suit into a white OPCW holdall and pulled a gas mask over his face. The urge to rip it off again immediately was strong. Not so long ago, Reikhman, Katya’s psychotic ex, had placed a gas mask on Joe and tortured him. Joe’s fear of having his breathing constricted was real. But there was no way he was going to get out of the hotel unless he was disguised, and the gas mask was the only thing to hand.
Tentatively, he opened the cubicle door and stepped out.
‘You the new guy?’
Ten men and two women were in varying states of dress around the room. Joe was the only one wearing a gas mask.
‘Kazumi from Tokyo, right? You got in late last night?’
Joe nodded.
‘I’m Marty, the team leader.’ Marty turned out to be a big, thickset man with crew-cut ginger hair and a sardonic smile. ‘We don’t normally mask up in the hotel, Kazumi. It’s kind of taking the chemical weapons security protocol a little too far.’ Joe sensed a ripple of amusement in the ranks.
