by John Sweeney
‘She hacked his private passwords. She’s sure.’
‘Can I meet her? Will she see me?’
‘Two weeks ago, a court in LA gave custody of her boy to Franklyn in perpetuity. She thinks the Agency helped him win. So do I. She hates the CIA.’
‘I’d still like to meet her. But my influence at Langley is shot to pieces, Joe. I’m here because the Director told me to lie low for six months, to sit it out until the election is over. I need something, some piece of information that will get me back in the game.’
‘There’s this,’ said Joe. He took an airmail letter from the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘Postmarked Berlin,’ noted Zeke. ‘It’s in Russian. Sent to a guy called Alf, on Blossom Drive . . .’
‘He walks my dog.’
Zeke read on in silence, then, entirely out of character, said the same word three times. The word was ‘wow!’
Zeke laid the letter on the bed and looked at Joe and smiled his gap-toothed smile. ‘This letter gives the precise coordinates of a secret stash of several hundred kilograms of sarin gas, imported by the North Koreans to a specially constructed tunnel at Palmyra, now taken over by ISIS. This letter was written by someone who is a friend of a man called Timur. Who’s Timur, Joe?’
‘You could say that he was my brother-in-law.’
‘You trust him – you trust this letter?’
‘Totally.’
Zeke dipped below his bed, pulled out a smartphone and fired it up and punched in a number. The moment the call was answered, Zeke spoke: ‘This is Ezekiel Chandler, former deputy director of the CIA, currently on extended leave. I’m seeking crash clearance into the Rome embassy citadel for a conference call with Director Rinder . . .’ He cupped his hand over the phone and asked Joe: ‘Can you give me a ride to Rome?’
‘Yeah,’ said Joe.
‘How long?’
‘The roads are terrible. Three hours.’
‘Make it two.’ He returned to the phone conversation proper: ‘In two and a half hours. Code indigo, repeat code indigo, subject Syria nerve gas cache. Chandler, out.’ He ended the call. ‘You got a sports car, something nice?’
Joe shook his head. ‘Moto Guzzi V7 Stone. Fastest machine in Italy.’
‘I hate motorbikes,’ said Zeke.
‘Ain’t that a pity,’ said Joe.
The sarin warehouse near Palmyra was vaporised six hours later.
The moment confirmation came, Zeke got a text from Rinder: Welcome back, Zeke. Ur still not popular but with intel like this I don’t care. U have been missed.
Zeke showed the text to Joe and smiled his gap-toothed smile.
‘Good,’ said Joe. ‘Now I’d like you to write a special letter on official CIA notepaper.’
‘To whom?’ asked Zeke.
‘A judge,’ said Joe. ‘But write it in invisible ink.’
And that is exactly what Zeke proceeded to do.
ALEPPO, SYRIA
Sieges are never vacuum-sealed. If you’re rich or mad or lucky enough, there’s always a way in and a way out. You can travel economy down a sewer or first-class in a secret-police limousine with smoked-glass windows. It’s never easy but it’s never 100 per cent impossible.
Joe had been smuggled into East Aleppo the night before, down a ‘hot’ road at terrifying speed by two gunmen and a boy who spoke bad English. Their car radio had a tape which played The Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’ very loudly again and again, but not loud enough to tune out the sound of the tracer fire ahead, behind and at them. They made it somehow, untouched.
It cost Joe twenty thousand dollars, and as sphincter-clenching rides go it had been worth every cent. Part of him wondered how he might market ‘The Thrill of Aleppo Experience’ to Disney. Nah, they wouldn’t be interested. The boy smuggler, a spotty teenager whose attempt at a beard was frankly comic, had sworn to him on his mother’s life that they would stay with Joe until he was safely delivered to his destination, the M10 underground hospital towards the centre of what was besieged Free Aleppo. But they’d dumped him as soon as they got to the rebel side in the darkest hour of all, the hour before dawn. Joe had bunked down on a mattress lying on a sea of dust, underneath an overhanging ledge of concrete and strands of steel wire that creaked, unpleasantly, during the night. He woke up at dawn, cold and alone in the most dangerous place on earth.
Death was an ever-present possibility, but the cries of the muezzins calling the living to prayer sounded out across the doomed city as they had done for thirteen centuries. He got up, washed his face in a basin of stagnant water and started picking his way, slowly, on foot, away from the front line from whence he’d come. He didn’t know where M10 was, but he surmised that it was in the least dangerous place in eastern Aleppo. All he had to do was stay alive and figure out where that might be.
Aleppo was, they said, the oldest inhabited settlement on earth. At first light, Joe realised that the destruction was off the scale. He’d seen nothing like it in his entire life. The nearest, most approximate thing was black-and-white pictures in school history books of Berlin in 1945, where no building taller than one storey stood for block after block after block. But this was in the twenty-first century and in colour. To the west stood the citadel, controlled by Zarif. Here in the east was this city of the dead, a stink-hole necropolis of pancaked apartment blocks, shell-blasted streets, and vast craters filled by foul-smelling sumps in which a quarter of a million people struggled to survive, a day at a time. The craters were the work of Russian bunker-buster bombs, originally designed to take out NATO missile silos, not poorly built residential districts. Aleppo had been scourged by a plague of bombs, bullets and shells, and yet people still smiled at him, the big pale stranger. Kids still played in the streets, leapfrogging shell-holes, playing peek-a-boo in soot-black ruins. He’d brought a backpack with him, in it ten energy bars and three big bottles of water and a small flask of Irish whiskey. The letter he carried in his inside jacket pocket.
Zoba’s men had been giving Free Aleppo a very hard time. The people who held the eastern half of Syria’s biggest city were with neither Zarif nor ISIS. They had their problems, they had their issues, but they were trying to find a path between tyranny and fanaticism. The punishment for their effrontery was a siege as brutal as anything from the Middle Ages. Instead of trebuchets flinging rocks and dead horses, they were on the wrong end, much of the time, of cluster bombs – a bomb inside a bomb inside a bomb.
The big bomb was unleashed from the Russian air force jet a mile above the ancient city named in Macbeth and Hamlet. A few hundred metres up, the primary bomb, the size of a large garbage bin, burst apart and thirty or forty bomblets, the size of large grapefruits, would spin out. On contact with the ground, the bomblets themselves burst, blasting ball bearings the size of big peas in a wide area. The American grunts who had watched them being used in Vietnam called them ‘firecrackers’ on account of the noise they made when they exploded, but folk down on the ground got little warning.
So when the cluster bomb fell on the kids playing out on the street – it being a fine day and quiet, up to that moment – they had no idea that their lives would be broken for ever. Seven kids in all from three families were messing about in the yard squared off by their apartment blocks. The oldest boy received a ball bearing moving at around nine hundred miles per hour directly in his left eye, killing him instantly; the next oldest boy got a ball bearing in the back of his skull, which bored through his brain and came to a stop behind his nose; a girl suffered one laterally through her left lung and heart, killing her; another girl survived intact; another boy, the youngest, also survived, intact; a boy in a stripy T-shirt was hit in the spine, paralysing him; the seventh victim was a teenager who lost his lower jaw.
Joe had been watching them play and wondering, to himself, whether he might dare to engage them in English, to ask them where the M10 hospital was. But his caution was the thing that saved his life. Had he gone forward, he would have been d
ead. As he considered what to do behind a thickness of wall, watching them play through a shell-hole, the firecrackers descended from the sky. The moment the cluster bombs did their work, he ran to the kids. He had some knowledge of first aid from his time as a special needs teacher in London. Theoretically he knew how to fix a broken leg, to tie a tourniquet; in practice, he knew how to put a plaster on a cut, make a cup of tea and, if it was serious, to call an ambulance. The un-merry hell in front of him now was beyond his capacity, was probably beyond the capacity of any normal human being without five years’ medical training. He could hear their parents and loved ones come running, but he was the first on the scene.
As it was, he did his wretchedly bad best. He took off his jacket and ripped his sweatshirt in two, and did his best to tie a tourniquet around the upper body of the girl with a hole the size of a tennis ball in her chest, only realising that by the time he’d completed his hopeless task, she had been dead the whole time. He stopped someone from moving the boy with the ball bearing in his spine, so he did some good. When the White Helmets arrived, he was so drenched in blood that they scooped him up, too, and he arrived in one of their make-believe ambulances at M10. He’d seen photographs of it on the Internet: a steel gate on the outside, a central courtyard within, and a long ramp leading down to the basement and the wards proper. Bloodied as he was, he was carrying the teenager with a shredded mess of blood where his mouth had been, once, down the ramp, when a sharp series of firecrackers behind him told him that the Russians had dropped yet more cluster bombs on Aleppo.
He stood, aghast, as a shiny steel ball the size of a grapefruit rolled between his legs and came to a stop. On the outside of the ball was written in Cyrillic: ShOAB-0.5M.
A big-framed Syrian doctor, who must have been, once, almost as hefty as Joe, shaggy-haired, handsome, tired beyond the point of exhaustion, with dark eyes on fire, greeted him with something wry and sardonic in Arabic.
Joe said nothing, but signalled helplessly he hadn’t understood a word and didn’t know what to do with this bleeding mess in his arms. The doctor said something in guttural Arabic, and three male nurses took the teenager from Joe and placed him on a stretcher; two attended to the injured boy, but the third returned and started dabbing the gore from Joe’s face. He winced in pain, and for the first time realised that he, too, had been hit, only a glancing slice of shrapnel to his cheekbone but deep enough.
The doctor tried something in Arabic to which Joe replied blankly. At the edge of his sight, a security guard, unarmed but handy, started to take interest in the scene.
‘You’re a lucky man. Sometimes the cluster bombs go off.’
Joe looked down at his feet where the cluster bomblet, in its second stage, glinted in the light malignantly.
‘Who are you?’ asked the doctor, this time in English.
‘My name is Joe Tiplady . . .’
‘You are the crazy Irishman,’ said the doctor. ‘Free Aleppo welcomes you, Mr Joe.’ He hugged him and then shouted out something in Arabic, and a nurse hurried into the ward and put up two X-rays above the beds of two of the children hit by cluster bombs. You could clearly see the hard-etched metal of the ball bearing against the ghostly grey of the spine in one; in the second, the ball was lodged up against the boy’s nose.
It took quite a few moments for Joe to realise that the nurse with the X-rays was the same woman whose son he had stolen. Jameela beamed at him as if he had passed some kind of test, frankly the only test of humanity worth passing.
‘First, we do our best with the patients, Joe,’ said Jameela, ‘then we talk.’
Joe nodded at the big doctor.
‘That’s Rashid,’ said Jameela.
‘Ah,’ said Joe.
Joe sat down and began to make sense of the hectic activity around him: there were far too many patients and nowhere enough doctors and nurses to cope. The floors of the hospital were slippery with blood; in the corner, Rashid and two other doctors were kneeling on the ground, bending over a patient’s head. Only after a while did he realise they were carrying out emergency brain surgery. He made himself busy picking up the medical detritus, wiping the blood from the floor with a dirty mop. He looked around for a bucket and a mop and found them, but, for the life of him, he could not locate a working tap. As he tried to coax some water from the last remaining tap in the hospital, a doctor with the name Abu Khaled taped on to his uniform told him, ‘There is no water, Mr Joe. They bombed the reservoir.’
After he had finished cleaning the floor, as best as he was able to with no water, Joe sat down and rested his head back against the wall. The last thing he could remember was watching Abu Khaled placing a smartphone close to where Rashid was operating on the boy with no jaw, and hearing, to his utter astonishment, a clear voice in English say, ‘I want you to make an incision, laterally, below the nipple . . .’
But he was so exhausted he fell asleep and missed the world’s first jaw-reconstruction surgery talked through via Skype from London.
Sometime in the middle of the night he was shooed awake and helped to stagger a short distance, and he found himself the next morning lying on a mattress under a sheet. After some time, Jameela came to him with a cup of sweet mint tea.
‘So, Joe, you are famous throughout the whole of Aleppo – well, this part of Aleppo anyway.’
Joe took a sip of the tea and eyed her suspiciously, knowing that he was about to be mocked. ‘And why is that, Jameela?’
‘Because you fight your way through the siege to help us, only to fall fast asleep the moment you get here. Even so, everyone is pleased to hear of the crazy sleeping Irishman.’
Joe laughed quietly to himself. Close – to him, terrifyingly close – a stick of bombs fell, shaking the earth. Jameela didn’t register them; she did not even adjust her gaze.
‘Joe, I want you to know that I have forgiven you for taking Ham,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen such terrible suffering here, with my own eyes, that in a funny way it makes me realise that what I have been through, bad as it is, is not the end of the world. Ham is still alive and, physically, he’s safe. So it’s OK.’
Joe said nothing, but fished out an envelope from his jacket. In it were two sheets of paper – one a general letter in Arabic explaining that he was in Syria on a humanitarian mission; the second was blank. He found a box of matches in his jacket, lit one, and held the heat of the flame close to the blank sheet, but not so close that it caught fire. Within an instant the sheet curled in the heat, but as it did so a man’s handwriting became clear. The letter read:
CONFIDENTIAL FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
To the Judge of the US Superior Court, Los Angeles, California. Your Honour, I am the Deputy Director of the CIA for Counter-Terrorism and it has come to my attention that in child custody proceedings in a lower court in LA it was asserted that one Jameela Abdiek was an active supporter of so-called Islamic State and therefore the aforesaid Jameela Abdiek would be wholly unsuited to care for her son, Hamal Abdiek-Franklyn. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jameela Abdiek is an enemy of ISIS and through her actions has given great service to the war against ISIS, including helping the CIA in a mission of great national security. Any evidence asserted to the contrary I know to be false and, if necessary, I will be willing to testify to this effect whensoever I am needed.
Yours truly,
Ezekiel Chandler, Deputy Director, CIA.
Joe felt Jameela’s dark eyes boring into him.
‘Jam,’ said Joe imploringly, ‘come back to the States with me and appeal the decision. This letter changes everything. This letter means you can get Ham back. Zeke’s a stubborn bastard, but once he’s convinced that something is true, no power on earth can make his change his mind. Get out, come home, look after your boy.’
‘I am not leaving Rashid.’
‘Yes you are, Jameela.’ The voice belonged to Rashid, who had emerged from behind a wall as if he were some kind of magician. ‘You’re going back to the United States with the
sleeping Irishman and you are going to get your son back, and then you are going to buy you and me a lovely condo with a pool overlooking the Pacific. And we will invite Joe over and he can fall asleep the moment he arrives, just as he did in Aleppo.’
‘No, Rashid, you need me.’
‘No, Jameela. The chances of anyone here surviving for much longer aren’t great. I’m staying. But you go back. Your boy needs you. Do that, Jameela. But before you leave, you need to do one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Marry me.’
Joe, as a rule, preferred funerals. This wedding, however, under siege, under Zoba’s bombs, was the best wedding he had or would ever attend, ever. They timed it perfectly so that it took place inside a Zoba-decreed ceasefire, all eight hours of it. Hell, Joe even managed to stay awake for much of it.
LOS ANGELES SUPERIOR COURT, CALIFORNIA
Joe and Zeke watched as the court custody officer returned Ham to Jameela. Mother and son held each other in their arms, cuddled, and then they went off to their car, got in and drove slowly out of the lot. Ham waved madly at the big Irishman and the little old man with the Abraham Lincoln beard standing next to him as they passed by. The two men waved back and Jameela tooted the horn, and then their car was swallowed up in the dragon’s tail of traffic on the Pacific Highway.
‘If this was an opera,’ said Joe, ‘a fat lady would come on and sing a song.’
‘It’s not an opera,’ said Zeke.
‘Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. Drobb won the states Grozhov spoke about in the fingernail palace back in Damascus, Zeke. He won the election.’
‘Some of us are greatly concerned about that, and we are asking our friends in the FBI to look into it.’
‘It?’
‘The possibility that the Kremlin fixed the whole thing.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because the Russians might have something on Drobb. You overheard Grozhov talk about Kompromat. They could be blackmailing him.’
