Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  Joe fell silent for a moment to give Timur’s argument some thought. Then something else occurred to him: ‘Another question I should have asked earlier . . . Are we safe to talk here?’

  ‘I think so,’ Timur said. ‘I don’t know if Katya told you, but I have some technical abilities . . .’

  ‘She said you were a genius at radios, computers.’

  ‘She was always kind about me, my sister. I have a genuine gift for anything involving numbers, for mathematics, for engineering. I hacked Zarif’s computers, read the minds of our enemies. I became, for a time, useful to the head of one of ISIS’s intelligence arms. The Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sits at the centre like an octopus hiding in a sea cave, wafting his tentacles in the currents to sniff out what is happening. He is a deeply intelligent and sensitive man, and a psychopath, both at the same time. This combination he has, of subtlety and savagery, is extraordinary. He speaks so softly you can barely hear him. This is a problem for some of our bravest fighters because they have been deafened by enemy bombs. With this soft voice, he can order a man to be burnt alive. For a time I enjoyed his blessing. And then I began to understand his true nature, and the true nature of ISIS, and he and his men turned against me. It felt like the sun dying—’

  The air pressure in the tomb changed suddenly, causing an intense pain in Joe’s ears. ‘Sweet Jesus, my ears!’ Joe cried out.

  ‘Yes, the barometric atmosphere here is no friend of the prisoner. It was an accident, a consequence of poor design, not deliberate, I understand. Zarif’s Mukhabarat blunders more often than everyone in Syria realises. We hate the changes in air pressure. The air is not good, too thick with carbon dioxide. This makes it stuffy, gives you headaches, bad dreams sometimes, and if they do not open the door for days, hallucinations. Bad for the prisoners but bad also for the guards. As a result, they have a real problem keeping people. I hacked into the main server for the Mukhabarat. Like any bureaucracy, they groan and grumble all the time: the air pressure here, the lack of money to do things, not enough staff. The regime’s single biggest challenge is that Zarif can truly rely upon only a tenth of the Syrian population and even his people, the Alawites, don’t love him. But to answer your question, there is no recording equipment in the cells in this place. If there had been, I would have read the transcripts. We are safe to talk but, Joe, remember the use of particular words or phrases that can become habit-forming, that can become dangerous.’

  ‘So you ended up ISIS’s intelligence chief?’

  ‘No, never that. I was one of the Caliph’s technicians. My task was not to spy but something else.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘Making bombs.’

  ‘I did that too, once.’

  ‘This is a joke, no?’

  ‘This is the truth. I was a bomb-maker for the Irish Republican Army. And then one day I realised that I was brainwashed to kill people who – I might not like them, I might not agree with them, how they ruled the north of my country, but they weren’t intrinsically bad. Stupid, wrong sometimes, but not bad, like Zarif, like al-Baghdadi. It – my moment of awakening – happened in a terrorist training camp in North Korea. I realised that the North Koreans were brainwashed into believing their rulers were gods. And if they were brainwashed, then so was I. From then on killing people on the orders of my IRA masters seemed senseless to me. So I made no more bombs, only duds.’

  ‘So we are two bomb-makers in prison, but we don’t have a single detonator between us.’ Joe could hear the smile in his voice, the savouring of irony.

  ‘Tell me, how come you ended up here?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Promyvaniye mozgov in Russian, ghasil damagh in Arabic.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Joe, you have already used the word: brainwashing. The Russians brainwashed me into hating them. They killed my father, then my mother, then my two older sisters were burnt to a crisp. I hated them so much I joined the jihad. My brainwashing was not immediate or instant, but slow. After our two older sisters were killed, Katya and I were taken in by a Russian woman, our Auntie Natasha, the one who saw the pantomime in London. She was a good woman. But goodness was not the essential quality for surviving in Chechnya then. Our aunt was killed, Katya became a whore for the Russians and I became a killer and a fanatic. It seemed the logical, necessary thing to do.’

  ‘How did they brainwash you?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I did it to myself, but that’s not the whole truth. You need two things to become brainwashed – the first that a wrong has been done to you. I was fourteen and tortured – everyone I loved had been killed, apart from my sister who became a whore.’

  ‘Katya wasn’t—’

  ‘A whore is better than a killer. What I became was worse than what Katya did, but I don’t want to bend reality. It’s too distorted already.’

  ‘And the second condition?’

  ‘Someone to brainwash you, who is themselves brainwashed, who believes in the brainwashing totally and absolutely. First I became a Chechen jihadi, then a follower of Osama bin Laden, working for al-Qaeda, then I joined Islamic State, ISIS. I was brainwashed into hating everyone. I became, I thought, a warrior for Islam. They cut me off from the world I knew. They controlled more and more of my life. The words I could use, the vocabulary, how I saw the world, how I thought, all of that was reduced, restricted, throttled. I followed the Prophet, I venerated the Quran, the Hadiths, but simply repeating them doesn’t make you a better Muslim. I lost my capacity to reflect, to calculate, to calibrate whether what I was being told made sense, whether I was truly honouring the Prophet or something else. After a time, the brainwashing turned me into a robot. I obeyed my masters and only them. But there was a strange joy in this submission. The surrender of self to the cause, the greater good, to God – that is joyful. I abandoned responsibility for my actions and I submitted. The US Marine Corps, the Jesuits, they do something similar, I believe?’

  ‘And the Rah,’ Joe whispered, almost under his breath.

  ‘To make a bomb, that is one thing,’ Timur continued. ‘In Iraq, then Syria, I ran a production line. Soon I was in charge of the biggest bomb factory for the whole Caliphate. My bombs were not ordinary bombs. I had a team of one hundred boys. When they were not at the ISIS madrasahs, they worked for me below ground making suicide vests. I don’t know how many people have died because of me. Hundreds, maybe thousands . . .’

  ‘When did you wake up?’

  ‘It took a long time, a very long time. I had learnt to unlearn. To un-think. Logic, experience, facts, I took only what was useful for the cause; the other evidence in front of me I ignored. My un-thinking began among the Russians on their torture train. In Chechnya they kept a secret-police train in a siding, where they would electrocute us, half-choke us to death, leave us shackled, naked – minus twenty degrees outside. It was there that I welcomed the idea of jihad; I submitted to it. And yet I also knew that my Russian aunt Natasha was a good woman, she had cared for Katya and I, and the things she loved when she went to London, the things she taught us about as the Russian bombs fell – the pantomime, Tommy Cooper, Top of the Pops – I knew they were good things. She saw Macbeth at the Old Vic. I have her copy of the play – or I used to. I loved this play. And yet when I was with ISIS, the ISIS part of my mind hated her and her “paganism”. You unlearn doubts, you block out those moments when you remember something before the brainwashing took control. But the whole time I was a fanatic, a part of me – a dim, shadowy, suppressed part of me – knew that what I was doing was wrong, some species of lie.’

  ‘What changed?’

  ‘The Internet. Access to the Internet was extremely difficult for most of us fighters in ISIS – first in Iraq, then in Syria. But when I became not just the principal bomb-maker but also the main suicide vest manufacturer, I had to source supplies, I had to have good Internet. I also had – I gave myself – a wider brief. I wanted to understand what Rome was doing to defeat us.’

  ‘Rome?’ />
  ‘Rome is our word for the Crusader enemy.’

  ‘It sounds so medieval.’

  ‘It isn’t. ISIS is of our time. Their ideology – or their narrow interpretation of the words of the Prophet – harks back to the seventh century, but they use the very latest American weapons technology captured from the Iraqi army: Abrams tanks, M16s and M4 rifles, night sights. They use the Internet. They use your humanity against you. To understand Rome, I went online obsessively. I am an obsessive man. It was, if you like, my university. In the process of trying to understand you – the West, the Western mind – to defeat you, I forgot my unlearning. I began to learn. Of course, I wasn’t aware of this as it was happening. To begin with, I just wanted to understand how the American military studied ISIS, how it thought about us. They said we were a death cult, that we were brainwashed. So what is a “cult”? What is “brainwashing”? I read many papers on this, written at Quantico, the US Marine headquarters, written by American military psychiatrists, and finally I came across Dr Robert Lifton. Do you know of his work?’

  The tone of his voice was eager, hopeful. Joe let him down gently.

  ‘This man is a genius,’ Timur continued. ‘An American military psychiatrist. He treated GIs captured and brainwashed by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War. He wrote a book about it, Thought Reform. An American journalist took the ideas behind it and came up with a novel, The Manchurian Candidate. It became a film with Frank Sinatra. The singer of “My Way”.’

  ‘I know who Frank Sinatra is.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. Again, in a world without light, that smile in his voice shone through. ‘Brainwashing has happened down the ages. The Inquisition, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, Stalin’s Great Terror, what Koestler wrote about in Darkness at Noon – all brainwashing without being defined as such. But the term was first coined by Chinese victims of Mao’s regime: “wash brain”, they called it. To supply a musical analogy, ISIS brainwashing is just a new cover of an old song.’

  ‘So how did you un-brainwash?’

  ‘In Raqqa I came across Lifton’s book online, and slowly I began to realise that I was truly brainwashed. Emotionally, my eyes were opened by three separate evils. The first, a mass killing. One day we, in ISIS, captured a big patrol of the Syrian army, fifty-five men in all. That night we worked hard, watched over by the Caliph, and we beheaded all fifty-five, so their heads could be placed on a roundabout in Raqqa the next morning. What is this Caliphate if, at the heart of our citadel, is a roundabout full of severed heads? When you kill so many people in the same place, the ground seeps with blood. I could not sleep, could not function properly afterwards. I decided that to save Islamic State we needed to get rid of the Caliph. I got in touch with my sister to suggest that I had information on “Picasso”. No one in the West seemed to be interested, so I did nothing, and then Katya was killed.’

  He fell silent for a time.

  ‘The second event was a single killing. In Raqqa, these days, one death is barely noticed. But this one mattered to me.’

  ‘Who died?’

  ‘An innocent boy called Abdul. He died in the place of another boy, Haroun.’

  ‘Haroun was a good boy?’

  ‘No, on the contrary. He was to be executed, but he managed to blame Abdul and I went along with it, knowing that it was a lie. I watched the beheading of an innocent boy and I will never forget this, my crime of omission. I had become a monster. Why? Because of “wash brain”.’

  ‘Timur, you were a servant of the Caliph. He’s responsible, not you.’

  ‘But I went along with him. In the old, pre-brainwashed part of my mind I knew the Caliph was cruel, that he had a taste for killing, as a pleasure in itself. The two parts of my mind would fight each other in the middle of the night. I went on the Internet to clear my brain, to try to banish these heresies. There, I read the official story about Mao in Yan’an in the wilderness years – how after the Long March he held himself apart from the other Chinese Communists, that he was reserved, theoretical, quiet, just like the Caliph, that he gave his life over to contemplation of how to achieve power, how to better the lives of the masses. Then I read in an unofficial book about Mao, The Unknown Story, that Mao was a liar, that the Long March was a lie, that famous battles were in reality a fiction, that Mao, rather than heroically walking the whole way was carried in a litter like the landlords of old and, most damning of all, that far from spending time in contemplation, that “Mao liked killing”. This hit a chord with me. The Caliph, in his dealings with the people, affects a modesty, a piety. But I have seen him close up, I know him better. I have seen a dark, dark side to him. Like Mao, the Caliph enjoys killing. So while manufacturing suicide vests, I began to ask myself a great yet terrible question: am I a servant of Allah or of a death cult?’

  ‘And the answer?’

  ‘Lifton set out three tests for a cult: one, it has a messianic leader. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has charisma; he tells people he is directly related to the Prophet. He’s messianic, no question. Two: a cult brainwashes. How could I stand by and watch them execute an innocent boy, unless I was brainwashed? Three: it does harm. ISIS does a lot of harm. It is a cult of death.’

  ‘What made you get out?’

  The air pressure curled itself up into a ball and banged itself against Joe’s inner ears, causing him to gasp out loud. Timur paused. Joe held his nose and blew, his ears popping.

  ‘The hard shell of my brainwashing,’ Timur continued, ‘began to crack from within. In a cult, they control information: how you think, the words you use to formulate ideas, thoughts. But they can’t control your memories; they do not have power over your previous life. I balanced the harshness of the Caliph, the beheading of Abdul, with my memory of the time before. I remembered the happy times in Grozny, before the war, when our family was together; and even when we were bombed with Auntie Natasha, she told us these amazing stories of her life in London, of the failing magician, of going to see the play Macbeth, of the London Underground – “the Tube”, they call it – a whole city under the street. There, your ears pop like they do in here.’

  ‘The Victoria Line. I knew this place reminded me of somewhere,’ Joe said, laughing out loud.

  ‘Shh. We don’t want them to think we’re laughing at them. But the final hammer blow was the chemicals. When ISIS took Palmyra, our fighters discovered a secret base, in a tunnel in the mountains nearby. They sent me there. In the tunnel there are hundreds of stainless-steel barrels with skulls and crossbones on them, and next to them a series of boxes – in them chemical suits, gas masks. The barrels are sarin, nerve gas, which Zarif’s men hid from the chemical weapons investigators. On the barrels was a script my brothers could not read.’

  ‘Korean,’ Joe said. ‘The North Koreans sent chemical suits to Zarif. No point doing that unless you’ve sent the chemicals, too.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I spent some time in North Korea. We saw things.’

  And then, in his mind, Joe was back there in the dark state, walking zombie-like through the woods, following his comrades, the air freezing, mist swirling on the surface of the lake behind them. Mr Chong led them into a hut, inside it nine chairs. That was a puzzle because there were only ever eight of them, at the maximum: six from the brigade in West Belfast and their senior instructor, Mr Chong, and the junior instructor, Mr Zhou. Beneath each chair were a gas mask and a chemical suit.

  Chong disappeared and reappeared with a prisoner, an old man, silver-haired, head bowed but something distinguished about him; he’d held power, of a sort, once. Chong arranged the ninth chair to face them, and handcuffed the man’s arms behind his back and sat him down on the chair. Chong and Zhou then locked the door and they both produced flashlights from their packs and left them on their chairs, pointing towards the prisoner, the play of light beams on him suggesting, a little, the 20th Century Fox logo. They did without the drum roll.

  Chong and Zhou tap
ed up the door and windows with black plastic and then they stripped down to their underwear and donned their suits, putting their masks on top of their heads, at the ready. The Irishmen sat on their chairs, wondering how the show would end. Chong stared at them, daring them to question his authority. Joe and his comrades stared back at him, as per usual, in numbed silence. Then Chong spoke: ‘Strip off your clothes, put on the suits and masks. You have five minutes. If you are lazy and slow, Irish, you die.’ He blew a whistle and then the game began.

  Joe would never forget the neurotic frenzy as the six of them, all brave warriors for the cause of Irish freedom, ripped off their clothes and donned the suits and masks. Faithful to the idiocy of the training programme, none of them had the wit to run out of the hut. In North Korea, there is nowhere for a foreigner to hide. The prisoner eyed them arrogantly at first, but when the full majesty of Chong’s sadism dawned on him, his eyes began to show panic.

  Five minutes up, Chong blew his whistle a second time, then the two instructors pulled down their masks so that they were clamped over their faces, checked each other’s so the seals were secure, and then Chong produced a canister. By the light of the two flashlights shining in the dark, Joe watched the instructor as he snapped the lid off the canister and pressed a red button. Perhaps Joe heard a hiss of gas; perhaps his mind suggested it. But there was no perhaps about what happened to the prisoner. The old man started to jerk, his legs and arms flapping dementedly, then snot, then blood bubbled from his mouth and nose. Then his face lost all colour and became a ghastly white. Slowly, his head collapsed awkwardly against his chest, and the dead object in front of them lost its balance and fell, chair and all, onto the floor. Chong and Zhou stood up and, without looking back at the prisoner, burst open the door. The others followed them, walking out of the hut around the edge of the lake in the suits for half an hour, sweating despite the cold, until they were confident that all remnants of the gas had gone.