by John Sweeney
That had been Joe’s lesson in chemical weapons warfare, North Korea-style.
Timur’s narrative gained renewed energy: ‘To show the excellence of the sarin, they first executed four prisoners. Then they were going to gas three prisoners, a woman called Beth – she spoke English – a North Korean called Zhang, and myself.’
‘What had you done to upset them?’
‘I cannot tell you. If I reveal what I did, it might endanger the lives of some innocent people who deserve a chance to live in peace.’
‘So you were about to be gassed?’
‘At the last minute, Zhang said something in Russian, which I speak, naturally. The Caliph had thought Zhang only spoke Korean and so was of no use to ISIS, but the fact that I could communicate with him spared him and I. Beth went to her death, handcuffed, in a cage, singing “Amazing Grace”. It was the most beautiful, the bravest song I’ve ever heard.’
‘She was American?’
‘Yes. She came to Syria to help fight polio, but she was kidnapped and ended up a concubine of the Caliph. She never lost her humanity.’
‘You couldn’t have saved her.’
‘I wish that were true. In fact, there was a moment, perhaps, when I could have freed her. I did not. And for this mistake I shall never forgive myself.’
They sat, thinking about what it must be like to go to your death, handcuffed, crouched in a cage, waiting for the nerve gas.
After a time, Joe broke the silence: ‘How many barrels of sarin were there?’
‘If I tell you this, someone may torture you for this information. So, as your friend, I shall not tell you.’
‘And the location?’
‘The same difficulty applies.’
Joe heard him shift a little, arranging his bones so that they were less uncomfortable.
‘How did you end up here?’
‘The Hisbah are like policemen everywhere. Some are dutiful, some tick the boxes, some are – how do you say it? – bent. I had stashed a lot of money in various places. I found a Hisbah who was greedy and wanted to get out of ISIS and he helped me escape.’
‘And that cost?’
‘Seventy thousand dollars, in two packets, the second to be released given safe delivery in Damascus. By this time I had been blinded for my crimes, and it’s amazing how easy it is for a man with no eyes to pass through checkpoints. The corrupt Hisbah man did not betray me but got me directly to my destination, a Western hotel in the very centre of Damascus where the OPCW – the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – was based. I made it and got an appointment to see the mission secretary, a Turk called Mehmet. We met in a private meeting room at the hotel, just the two of us. I told him everything I knew, how ISIS had discovered a secret tunnel not so far from Palmyra, where stainless-steel vessels containing sarin were hidden. I told him that that the sarin had been supplied by the North Koreans to the Zarif regime, and that now that Palmyra had been overrun by ISIS, the Caliphate planned to use them to make nerve-gas suicide bombs. He wrote everything I said down, asking me questions about this and that. After listening for two, three hours, Mehmet apologised to me and said he needed to make a quick phone call. He was gone ten, fifteen minutes. I began to get nervous, to suspect that something was not right. I had been blinded so could not move without help. On reflection, I should have acted on my impulses, but I did not.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Suddenly the door to the hotel conference room opened and in walked some men. They were Zarif’s Mukhabarat. The Turk had betrayed me.’
In the unnatural quiet, the sound of an elevator descending.
‘Zarif’s intelligence people greeted you with open arms?’
‘They did, in a manner of speaking. It was as if this news about the chemical weapons – their chemicals, before Palmyra fell to ISIS – was not so welcome. But I have more bad news for you, Joe. Had I been willing, ISIS could make these chemical suicide bombs within one month, maybe two. It will take longer, but they need this Zhang, the North Korean I saved. He can help them. They will find someone who speaks Russian or even Korean.’
‘Timur, you’ve got to tell me where the sarin is. Give me the coordinates.’
‘This information is deadly. I will not.’
‘Please, there’s more than just our lives at stake.’
They sat in silence, listening to time creak by.
‘Timur, you said earlier that nothing down here is recorded.’
‘Joe that is true. I also told you of my conjecture, that it is strikingly unusual that you have ended up here and you have not, thus far, been tortured by our hosts. But my conjecture is not a fact, not a guarantee. And this information, the precise location of the sarin – if you know it, you will die.’
‘I’ve got that.’
Silence.
‘Please.’
‘Very well. What is your address?’
‘You mean here? Hole in the ground, Syria.’
‘No. In the United States.’
For some reason Joe didn’t give his own address, but that of Alf, the old Navy vet who was looking after Reilly back in LA. The very articulation in the tomb of ‘1452 Blossom Drive, West Hollywood, California, USA’ sounded absurd. Timur repeated it, twice. Joe couldn’t stop himself from blurting out the question burning inside him: ‘What use is a postal address in here?’
‘It may take a while – weeks, months. But, God willing, you will get a letter.’
‘Why can’t you tell me now?’
‘No.’
‘Get an email sent?’
‘No. The United States Postal Service is so much more secure. Trust me, I used to be ISIS’s best hacker. If a letter can be sent, most likely I shall be dead when you get it. Katya said that you had a friend named after a Hebrew prophet who is in the CIA.’
‘Zeke?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Ezekiel?
‘Him. Ezekiel may find my letter interesting, about the chemicals, about other matters.’
‘Why are you doing this, Timur? What’s the point of telling me these puzzles, these half-facts?’
Timur laughed apologetically. ‘Joe, do not be so dismissive of my puzzles and half-facts. Inshallah, they may yet protect you. This hole in the ground they’ve put us in, it is deep but it is rotten. Zarif is rotten. ISIS is rotten. Before, I believed in ISIS. I believed even though my own intelligence – and, better, the wisdom of Dr Lifton – told me that I was in a cult. I believed even though I saw them sever the head of a young boy who was innocent. It was Beth who, in particular, woke me from my sleep. Before, I had thought that ISIS and Zarif were two big dogs in a pit, fighting for survival against many other dogs. After the chemicals, I realised that ISIS and Zarif were’ – he paused, trying to find the right words – ‘one dog, two heads. This knowledge, I wish to share with the world. And you, Irishman, are my only hope. So that is why I am not going to burden you with information, right now, at this instant, that may yet kill you. You must wait.’
‘The people you can’t talk about? Can you tell me something, anything, about them?’
‘Shh,’ he said. Clack-click, click-clack sounded in the corridor outside.
THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
The wind blew over the savage waters, waves sweeping along the length of the inflatable, now all but submerged. Jameela and Ham had fought hard to grip the transom at the stern, but their strength was ebbing away; soon they would have to let go and the waters would close above their heads. A huge wave rumbled towards them, spume flying from its top; at the same moment a fresh, enormously strong gust of wind came running down from the Peloponnese mountains, flipping the inflatable.
Suddenly, far from being whipped by the wind and the raging sea, Jameela and Ham were encased in a plastic tomb, the bottom of the inflatable grazing their heads. They couldn’t see but they could feel that there was just enough buoyancy for the boat to stand proud of the sea, so that they could breathe air and be protected from the stor
m. It was something of a respite, but again the smooth plastic afforded them no handholds, no traction. Jameela used her fingers and bare toes to search for something, anything, to grip on to. Eventually, she found what she was looking for. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t strong, just a coil of plastic connecting the input air valve to the boat. But she could wedge a finger in that and grip her toes against the transom, and hold Ham close to her, his mouth facing up.
Her fingers went to her neck, to check that her plastic purse with the money was still safe. It was gone. But that was not worth worrying about while their lives were in the balance.
‘One and one is two,’ said Ham.
His face was blue with cold.
‘And one and two is three,’ said Jameela.
He had – what? – another ten, twenty minutes of life left in him, if that.
‘And two and three is five.’
The Fibonacci sequence, his favourite game. Once he was gone, she thought, matter-of-factly, then she would go, too.
‘And three and five is eight.’
No point in life without him; no point at all.
‘And five and eight is thirteen.’
They had got to 144, with Jameela making several mistakes on the way and Ham not a single one, when the blast of a horn aroused her from a kind of stupor. Her mind was foggy and she didn’t get it, didn’t get where the noise was coming from, didn’t think what this might be. Then she looked up at the grey plastic ceiling and remembered that in the upturned prison they’d ended up in, the air pocket had no way of being freshly replenished with oxygen. She would be suffering from CO2 poisoning, as would Ham.
‘Eighty-nine and one hundred and forty-four is . . .’ Ham didn’t finish his arithmetic.
With a raw courage she didn’t know she had possessed until then, she gripped his pitiful excuse for a life jacket and said, ‘Come on Ham,’ then dragged him out from underneath the inflatable using the power of her legs to kick away from the transom. They surfaced, gasping, and he yelled, ‘Two hundred and thirty-three!’
The brilliance of the light and the darkness of the shade was astonishing. Her eyes, red-raw from the seawater, couldn’t make out what the wall of shade in front of her might be. Slowly they adjusted, and she realised that she was staring at a vessel of the Italian coastguard.
The sailors had been staring down at a scene of utmost melancholy: an upturned inflatable, the sea littered with corpses, when suddenly one of them shouted in Italian, ‘There’s a survivor!’
Without hesitation, he leapt into the sea, resurfaced, then speed-crawled over towards Jameela. She pushed Ham into her rescuer’s arms and then started to sink, fast. But the Italian, while holding on to Ham, gripped her by the hair and pulled her back, and she broke surface and gasped for air. Soon, two more men dive-bombed into the sea, and mother and boy were not just safe, but surrounded by a trio of laughing Italians, delighted that, in the midst of such sorrow, they had been able to save two human beings. This had been their very first morning’s watch on the station and it had been grim beyond the saying of it – more than seventy corpses floating in the sea – but the saving of two lives, well, that was something to tell Grandma.
The Italian captain was sitting on Jameela’s bunk, looking down at her holding her son in her arms. She had no idea how long she had slept, but the sea was no longer rocking and sunlight was streaming through an open porthole. Ham was still asleep, breathing sweetly.
‘Welcome to Europe,’ the captain said in heavily accented English, a slight smile playing on his lips. He was a big man, six-foot-two, heavy, bald, with stubble on his face, a broken nose. Behind him were the three sailors who had rescued them, all grinning from ear to ear. Then her eyes refocused on the captain and she realised that in his hands was something very incongruous, a wicker basket.
‘We see that you have nothing, no passport, no money. The crew are so sad to pick up the dead from the sea. This was our first day here. But today we helped to save you and your boy. So we have made a present.’ He handed her the basket: in it was a bottle of prosecco, a cured ham, some biscotti, a small jar of truffle jam, some hard cheese, a bottle of Frangelico, chocolates and, in an envelope she opened later, five hundred euros.
‘Thank you,’ she replied in English, and to his astonishment and to the giggling delight of the sailors present, she sat bolt upright and kissed the captain on the lips, the first and last female Syrian refugee ever to do so.
In the morning, Jameela and Ham woke up in their tent, inherited from a previous family of refugees, just outside the ancient stone fortress of Kos. Watched by gawking tourists from all around Europe, they left the camp, known as Little Syria, and set off on the short walk to the police station, past the harbour full of one-hundred-foot wooden yachts, their masts towering into the sky, the scene telling the story of decadent Europe and wretched Middle East in one simple image. It promised to be a fine day, the sun already strong, the storm a memory. Jameela looked across the silvery-blue waters of the channel – deceptively, sickeningly calm – to where the white houses of Bodrum stood; to the south, green wooded slopes ran down to the sea. Somewhere among those trees stood the abandoned church from where so many of them, now lost forever, had left for Kos only two nights before.
Jameela, wanting to adopt the lowest of profiles to fit in with her fellow refugees, dived into a clothes shop and bought a cheap, dark-brown headscarf, which she wrapped around her closely cropped hair. By the time they arrived at the police station, it was already thronged with several hundred refugees, some of whom had been waiting for permission to leave for two weeks or more. Seven out of ten were from Syria, smaller numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan; others were fleeing the paranoid and neurotic regime in Eritrea; and there were economic migrants from Pakistan, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Congo – all the places where poverty overwhelmed hope. Frustrated, depressed, fearful that their journey north had been stymied on just the second or third rung of the ladder, they were milling around, voices becoming angrier by the second. A thin line of Greek riot police, stone-faced, stood facing the crowd.
Outside the station was a long wooden board covered in sheaves of paper, and on each sheaf was a typewritten list of names written in English, in no alphabetical order. Every morning, around ten o’clock but never exactly at that time – sometimes later, sometimes earlier, sometimes not at all – a Greek police officer would stick up a fresh list of people who had been given the authorisation to leave Kos and take the ferry to the mainland. The result was that every head of every family crowded around the police station, every morning, to see if they were lucky or not.
The refugees were given three days’ grace to leave Greece after they got their authorisation to leave Kos. If they did not succeed in those seventy-two hours, they could either claim for asylum – something none of them wanted to do in the poorest country in the European Union – or face deportation. The sense of jeopardy – that they might be sent back to where they came from or blocked in Greece, never to be allowed to go north – consumed them. They were locked within a desperate stasis, and the key to unlock the stasis was held by people with no true understanding of what they were running from. People with passports, people who could prove their Syrian identity, were fast-tracked. With no passports and no papers, Jameela and Ham were very much in the slow lane.
On the seventh day, Jameela’s false name, Maryam Khashoggi, came up, and they were on the move. With some of the euros the Italians had given her, she bought two ferry tickets, one adult and one child, to Piraeus. The wind came up and a fresh storm raged, but the ferry was the size of a block of flats and she and Ham slept through it.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
Conditioned to behave like one of Pavlov’s dogs, lest Mr Click-Clack cosh him on the base of his spine again, Joe scrabbled over to his side of the cell and lay there, belly down, his hands clasped together behind his back, his heart racing. The door opened and the brilliance of the lights from the corridor burnt into his eyes. Mr Cli
ck-Clack fixed a pair of handcuffs on Joe’s wrists and chains on his ankles, then dragged him upright. As Joe shuffled out of the cell, he took a glance at Timur. He was a slight man, like Katya, less than five foot six inches, pitifully thin in his grey prison garb, his ginger hair cut short, his beard no more than a week’s stubble, his eye sockets empty, his feet a sodden mess of blood and bone.
Mr Click-Clack locked the cell door and placed a black bag over his head. He then led Joe along, the ankle chains forcing him to take three steps for every one of his jailer’s. At the end of the corridor, they paused while he selected a new key from his belt. This turned in the lock, the door opened and then slammed shut behind them, and they hurried along the new corridor before coming to a halt at a second door. He opened and closed that, and then they were in a bigger space. Something pinged, doors opened and the guard shoved Joe forwards. Looking down at his feet, Joe could just make out the floor of an elevator. He heard the doors close and felt it move up, not that fast, so Joe could count the floors: seven in all. At the top, Joe was led along a corridor, smoother under his bare feet than before, and into a room, its flooring some kind of white linoleum. Looking down, he could make out reflected light on the lino. Not electric light but the real thing: daylight. Joe half-shuddered with relief, that the known world was not all dark.
In the distance, car doors slammed shut and an engine revved, then its sound grew weaker. Mr Click-Clack sat him down on a hard, wooden chair.
And then they waited.
After a time, the door opened behind Joe. There was the sound of a man walking in and then something else, something strange, a different sound – rubber wheels, a high-pitched whine . . . an electric wheelchair. It came to a stop with a click. One of the new arrivals smelt – no, stank – of lavender.
‘Mr Tiplady, tell us, please’ – Mansour’s voice, suave, elegant – ‘pray tell us, what do you know about a consignment of nerve gas in Palmyra?’
The question caught Joe quite cold. He had been expecting to be taken to task for being found, concussed and bruised, in Ghouta, for running out of the big hotel in Damascus in a suit belonging to chemical weapons inspectors, for being some kind of associate of Qureshi. But never had he anticipated that they would start with a question about the Palmyra sarin. Not knowing what to say, Joe gave no answer.
