by John Sweeney
‘Joe, this is a private conversation,’ said Zeke. ‘If such a thing exists in this world anymore.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’
Joe smiled. It was beyond wonderful to be in safe hands again – and with Zeke, he couldn’t have felt safer – and to breathe free air, to observe the dance of light made by the leaves of the cedar tree filtering the reddening sun. Back in the tomb, Joe had given up all hope of rescue. He had accepted that he would die, forgotten, deep beneath the surface of the earth.
‘Joe, listen up. I’ve got to be in Langley in no time. So that you know, I’m back in the game, but not at the centre. Not so long ago, in Albania, I got shot—’
‘You OK, Zeke?’ asked Joe, alarmed.
‘Fit as a fiddle.’
Joe considered that and pulled a sceptical face. The old man looked tired, pale.
Zeke laughed gently and continued: ‘To get you out of Zarif’s fingernail palace, I did a trade. Zarif got some of the fruit of one trillion dollars’ worth of Uncle Sam’s investment in rockets and satellite imaging, and I got one Irishman.’
Joe looked Zeke squarely in the eye and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘That’s worth a dollar. For the rest of the trillion, I’d be grateful for any useful information you picked up back there.’ Zeke paused and studied Joe shrewdly. ‘Did you come across a fat Russian in an electric wheelchair with a squeaky voice, name of Grozhov?’
‘I did. They started using a blowtorch on me. Then his phone rang. He took the call. He was talking in Russian, but I heard him say “Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin”, then he mentioned the White House and another word, “Kompromat”.’
‘Repeat what he said, word for word,’ said Zeke.
‘I can’t because it was in Russian. I can clearly recall he named those four states and talked about the White House and Kompromat. What’s that Zeke?’
‘Kompromat is Russian short-form for “compromising material”. We’d call it blackmail.’ Zeke wiped his lips with the back of his hand and stared into space for a long time. Then the focus in his eyes returned and he asked Joe to tell his story from A to Z.
Joe started not at the beginning, but with Timur’s information about the drums of sarin hidden in the tunnel somewhere near Palmyra.
‘How much sarin?’ asked Zeke.
‘He wouldn’t tell me. A lot.’
Zeke’s expression gave way to a frown.
‘Where, exactly?’
‘Again, he wouldn’t tell me, in case they tortured it out of me. He asked for my address in Hollywood. I gave him the address of my dog minder.’
‘Good.’
‘He said he was going to write me a letter.’
Zeke smiled to himself. ‘That’s kind of smart. And very typical of the ISIS mindset. Whatever else this guy is, Timur is genuine, of that I have no doubt. Against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Cuba, Congo, when we got a lead about something like this, we would deploy our intelligence firepower, send in agents, sweep radio traffic, phone calls – what the young people these days call data mining. Against ISIS, nothing doing. They write letters and post them. If they can’t post them, they give them to a guy on a motorbike. If they can’t find a guy on a motorbike, they walk all the way to the letterbox. To folks in the NSA, that’s kind of cheating. To old-timers like me, well, it’s just smart.’
Only then did Joe start at the beginning, the drive to Fort Hargood and meeting Dr Dominic Franklyn. Zeke interrupted him almost immediately: ‘I don’t know the man, but it’s on file that Franklyn’s helped the Agency out in the past, I do believe.’
Joe absorbed that and continued, explaining Franklyn’s request for him to find Jameela.
‘She walked out on him, took the boy with her to Syria and defected to ISIS?’ asked Zeke.
‘That’s what Franklyn said. I met no one who told me different.’
‘Uh-huh. Carry on.’
But Joe couldn’t, because at that moment they were interrupted by a fleshy, red-faced man in a dirty cream suit walking heavily towards them, followed by eight grunts, carrying sub-machine pistols. Zeke’s grunts looked meaner, but the old man held out his palm, flat, gesturing that his men take no action.
‘Mr Crone, what a pleasant surprise,’ said Zeke, grinning his moronic, gap-toothed smile. Joe knew him well enough to realise that that was his equivalent of a cobra puffing up its hood.
‘You’re out of line, Zeke, way out of line.’ Crone’s accent was from the Deep South, and it was clear from the timbre of his voice that he did not like Zeke. ‘You vanish in Albania. You get shot up by some bandits. You call in the Sixth Cavalry. And then you sidetrack to Damascus to hand over gold-star intel to Zarif. You’re beyond the outer limits, Zeke. You needed executive approval for this fool’s errand and you had none. Rinder’s authorised me to take over the debrief, and these gentlemen here are to escort you back to Langley immediately. You’ve got an interview with the Inspector General the moment you step off the G-5.’
‘The Inspector General? Young Phil Lansing?’
Crone nodded, his natural frown intensifying a fraction.
‘It would be good to catch up with him,’ said Zeke nostalgically. ‘I gave him his first mission back in—’
‘We’re not here to indulge your appetite to wander down memory lane, Zeke. You handed over to the Syrians satellite images they should never have had. You did so without permission or authority, in return for a non-American citizen.’
‘Joe’s not a piece of meat, Jed.’ Zeke’s tone changed, his voice less hillbilly, more that of an acute intellect trying to explain complexity to someone less gifted. ‘He’s got intelligence of strategic interest to the United States and I believe that I am the intelligence officer best placed to receive and analyse it.’
‘You’re wasting air, Zeke. Here’s the order from Rinder.’ Crone flourished a sheet of paper with Director, CIA on the letterhead. Zeke read it, scratched his temples, returned it to Crone and went over to Joe.
‘Joe, there’s been a miscommunication. I need to go back to Langley, now. Mr Crone is going to take over the debrief. You’re in good hands.’ And he smiled his gap-toothed smile and Joe knew he didn’t mean a word of his last sentence.
Zeke stepped towards Joe and Joe hugged him. Joe didn’t want to add to the old man’s difficulties, but he couldn’t not say what he wanted to say: ‘Listen, Mr Crone, I trust Zeke like no other man on earth. More than my own brother. Can’t you tell Langley that I’d rather talk to him?’
‘No,’ said Crone. ‘That request does not fit with my orders.’
Zeke was already walking away as four of Crone’s men gathered round him – a protective cocoon, or a guard detail to the gallows.
‘Take care, Zeke,’ Joe cried out to the old man’s retreating back. Zeke stopped, turned round, and looked at him and said, ‘No, Joe, you got it wrong. You take care.’
Then Zeke turned again and walked up towards the embassy building and disappeared behind a wall.
With Zeke gone, Jed Crone came over and sat next to Joe.
‘They give you a hard time back there?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Joe said, as uncommunicative as could be.
‘You’re with friends now.’ Crone gestured to the embassy building. ‘Zeke overstretched himself. He did not have the authority to do what he did for you.’
Joe hunkered forward, leaning, saying nothing.
‘I heard you’re working for Dr Franklyn,’ Crone said.
Joe held his tongue.
‘Dr Franklyn has done some great service for our country. You get his kid back, it might help Zeke out. Langley might look less severely on his transgressions.’
‘You know a lot about me, Mr Crone.’
‘I’m an intelligence officer, Mr Tiplady. It’s what I do for a living.’
‘Jameela, she’s gone over to ISIS, no question?’
‘That’s the way it looks, yes. Mr Tiplady, here’s my advice: get Franklyn
’s kid back. That might just save Zeke from our version of the electric chair. Then stay out of Agency business. I gotta go. We’ll talk more in the morning.’
Crone’s four remaining grunts took Joe into the embassy. Joe had a nice room, with an en-suite bathroom and a small kitchen, the fridge fully stocked with all the good things in American life: coffee, Coke, Oreos. He tried the door. It was locked. He tried to open the balcony window to get some fresh air, which, after the tomb, he craved; worse, the denial of it made him tremble with anxiety. It, too, was locked. Conditions in the embassy lockdown were better than the tomb, but the basic principle – that he did not have access to fresh air, was not free to leave, was not in control of his own destiny – that was the same.
He slept fitfully, waking up in the middle of the night from a nightmare in which he was locked in a cage, hands tied behind his back. Anointed with sweat, it took several long moments before he realised where he was: in safety, in a room at the American embassy in Beirut. And then he remembered what the Russian who stank of lavender, Grozhov, and Mansour had seemed most insistent to know – the extent of his knowledge about the nerve gas in Palmyra. Although Zeke had been taken out of the equation, he must tell the new team that is what the Russians and Zarif’s Mukhabarat were most worried about.
In the morning, he was taken to a debriefing room, windowless, antiseptic, somewhere in the bowels of the embassy. Two of Crone’s grunts stood behind Joe, chewing gum. He sat on a hard chair, facing an empty chair across the empty table.
Joe asked for coffee – milk, one sugar. One of the grunts, the most solicitous, obliged. Joe asked when the debrief would begin. The grunt told him soon. Three, four hours passed. Joe had no watch. Just before lunchtime, Joe spoke: ‘Inside Zarif’s prison, I met a man who had been an ISIS bomb-maker. He told me—’
‘Listen, sir,’ said the friendlier grunt, ‘we’re just the protection team. We don’t do the debrief.’
‘You need to tell someone high up that the Russians and Zarif’s people want to bury any mention of a tunnel full of sarin—’
‘Sir, are you deaf? You’re wasting air.’
‘Write what I’m saying down,’ urged Joe. ‘Write it down. Please.’
The grunt folded his arms; the other grunt examined the ceiling.
At lunchtime, Joe was escorted back to his room and told to take a rest. Again, the door was locked behind him. In the room was a Big Mac, going cold. He ate it gloomily.
Two hours later, the grunts took him back down to the debriefing room. This time Joe waited six, seven hours. No Crone. They took him back to his room, and in the morning the non-briefing cycle continued. The morning session, no show from Crone; lunch, a return to his room, a Big Mac going cold; the afternoon session, no show from Crone. On the third day, early, he was blindfolded and handcuffed, with plastic ties, not steel links, and taken into the embassy garden and told to wait.
Joe could hear the thwack-thwack of a helicopter landing and he was bundled on board. It lifted off and after an hour of flight, maybe less, it landed. He was manhandled, quite gently, and someone led him away from the landing zone, then he heard the chopper’s rotors kick in and from the wash of air and the ramp in engine noise he realised that the helicopter was taking off. Then a new sound hit him: the whoosh-whoosh of jet planes revving up to taxi.
It wasn’t hard to deduce that they were in an airbase and Joe assumed, obviously, that it was an American one, until he heard someone bark something in Russian and then somebody else reply in Russian and he began to worry. An hour’s helicopter ride, maybe less, from Beirut, to land in a spot where Russian was the language of choice? Uncle Sam had dropped him at a Russian airbase back in Syria.
Still blindfolded, he was hurried into a building, banging his head on a low ceiling, and through a series of doors until he sensed he was in a room that was not quite sound-proofed, but in which the roar of the jets seemed softer than before. His guards sat him down on a chair, and he felt a length of rope securing his arms and legs to the chair and another length of rope coming to rest gently around his neck, and then that started to tighten, just a tad, but enough to signal that he was by no stretch of the imagination in good hands. Grozhov couldn’t be far away.
And then the guards left him.
THE LONG ROAD
In the rainswept darkness, Jameela carried Ham, his jaw bleeding profusely, towards the lights at the edge of the field. She felt physically sick that her boy had been badly hurt, but her sense of remorse and panic was countered by the necessity of him getting urgent medical attention.
In a first-aid clinic, a medic dressed Ham’s wound and gave them both hot soup – their first hot drink, their first proper food, since lunchtime. The medic advised that they should go to hospital for an X-ray.
‘In Macedonia,’ said Jameela.
The medic pulled a face, but didn’t demur. Ham was stoic in pain, and his injury meant a big jump in their living conditions. From shivering underneath a soggy blanket out in the rain, they ended up in a palatial Médecins Sans Frontières tent with dry blankets, which was so wonderfully comfortable and safe that neither mother nor son wanted to stir. But stir they did. Ham was given some painkillers, a fresh smear of antiseptic cream and then they were back on the long road.
Crossing the border from Greece into Macedonia – the first of the fragments of old Yugoslavia they had to pass through – was constipated. Everything was arranged for the convenience of the bureaucracy, not the refugees, which meant long lines of people in the heat, then registration, and only then air-conditioned tents constructed by the UN Refugee Agency, offering a bit of shelter and food. The medics inspected Ham’s jaw and recommended that he go to hospital in Belgrade.
Once through the system, Jameela and Ham were put on a train, which chuntered through the flattish countryside, speckled by cornfields, for three hours until it came to a stop in the middle of somewhere, nowhere, a few miles from the border with Serbia. Ahead of them was the same rigmarole, with border officials in slightly different uniforms, all over again.
The crossing into Serbia wasn’t much, just a walk down to a gate in a barbed-wire fence. But the refugees faced arrest and deportation back to Greece if they were not registered in Serbia, and to do that, Jameela and Ham had a long walk ahead of them – five miles, more, in the evening heat. The slim fingers of minarets dotted here and there amongst the cornfields were a reminder that not so long ago in human history, this land had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
To lessen the pain of the long walk to the Serbian registration centre, some taxi drivers ripped off the richer Syrians. Stories buzzed around that refugee families would pay one thousand euros for the fare all the way to Vienna, only to get dumped in the Serbian countryside, and if they complained – well, they hadn’t registered with the police. But it wasn’t all grim. Locals provided free coffee and water to those they could. The locals watched the refugees stumble along with some sympathy. Here, war and fleeing from war were in their bones – and not so long ago. The last fighting in this part of the world had been between Orthodox Serbs and Albanian Muslims in 1999.
The last mile or two was an endless, miserable, dispiriting trudge in the heat. The queue seemed without end. Ham, who hated the lack of precision as much as the press of people, howled his head off and, luckily, his cry was heard by a Serbian social worker. She examined the wound on Ham’s jaw, now going septic, and admonished Jameela, who bowed her head but whispered, ‘What could I do?’ Soon, the social worker was leading Ham and Jameela through a back entrance into the registration tent. First the number, then treatment. Registration was the same deal as in Greece and Macedonia: the refugees had seventy-two hours to get through Serbia and into Hungary. Any longer meant trouble.
A set of army medics efficiently dressed Ham’s jaw with antiseptic cream, but his wound was going puffy, and bruising was showing on his cheekbones, as if he’d been beaten up. The medics helped them, showing the way to where a series of coaches w
ere running the refugees, for a price, to Belgrade. Mother and son slumped in their seats and soon fell fast asleep. Their luck was holding, for a time.
The waiting room, the whole hospital, stank of a heavy-duty disinfectant that pricked Jameela’s exhausted eyes. The room was decorated in a functional style, with stolid furniture left over, Jameela suspected, from the days when the old Yugoslavia was Eastern Europe’s most prosperous – or least backward – nation state. That was before the war in 1991 when – galvanised by the local strong man, Slobodan Milošević – neighbour turned on neighbour.
She stood up and pulled back the heavy net curtains that obscured a view of the Belgrade railway station’s goods yard. She sat down and made a cursory examination of the reading matter: a scattering of Serbian popular magazines, full of short, breathless stories illustrated by badly taken, badly framed paparazzi photographs. She couldn’t read a word of them because they were in the Cyrillic alphabet, but from the look of them, nor did she want to. She hadn’t been this long apart from Ham since before the flight from California and she hated it.
Jameela stood bolt upright as soon as Dr Ludmila Jelić marched into the waiting room. The doctor swept a hand through her thick black hair, sighed and took off her glasses and let them hang from their chain on her matronly bosom, squinting at the patient’s mother. There were times when dealing with difficult cases, it was – how to put it – less disagreeable to be a little myopic. It put off the moment when she realised that people were crying.
‘Please sit down,’ said Dr Jelić in English.
Jameela did so and the doctor followed suit, sitting opposite her. In a subtle way, the age-old hierarchy between doctor and patient was established. ‘Is he OK?’ asked Jameela.
‘Yes. We’ve given him a series of injections, primarily antibiotics. He’s as good as can be expected.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The X-ray shows that his jaw is broken. It’s become badly infected and we will need to keep him here under observation for several days.’
