#15. WADI INSURANCE, FIRST CIRCLE, AMMAN, JORDAN
Wednesday June 24, 14.57
A MONTH had passed, one whole month of exhausting, demanding, pain-inducing physical, mental and emotional elation. Fitter, stronger, healthier and more confident than he had ever been before, Ali returned to Amman in the same black Toyota Hilux that had delivered him, on Sunday May 24, to a secret camp in the Wadi Rum desert. From that moment at five a.m., when the driver had burst into his room with a shout of ''Get up and get dressed! You're going for a ride!'' and the first nose-bloodying, thigh-deadening combat failure in the gym, he had experienced a relentless routine of swimming, diving, running, boxing, taekwondo and obstacle courses starting at six every morning. He had stripped down, reassembled and fired a variety of guns. He had ridden horses and camels and driven cars, motorbikes, trucks and quads. He had climbed up mountains and abseiled down cliffs. He had broken through firewalls and hacked into websites, uploaded Trojans and wiped out viruses. He had studied English and French. He had covered First Aid and Morse Code. He had trekked across the desert and navigated by star-light, map and compass.
For the first time in his life, Ali had had his own room. It was simple, a roughly finished concrete floor, a wooden locker, a wash-stand, a rather basic shower and toilet and an iron bed with a hard mattress, a scratchy white sheet and a thin pillow thin, but it had been his. The fat cook, Ghazar, had provided him with a daily diet of chicken, salad, fuul, brown rice and mint tea. The soldiers in the camp had treated him with wary respect. The instructors had treated him harshly but fairly. He had survived, and it had almost been fun, but now he was reporting, as instructed, for the start of Operation Flashlight. He was nervous and his throat felt scratchy.
Wadi Insurance was advertised by a discreet brass plaque on a narrow, dirty, dark green door next to the Diplomat Café and opposite the Standard Chartered Bank by the First Circle roundabout at the top of Shaaban Street. Ali, dressed in Manchester United shirt, blue jeans and blue denim jacket, stood on the pavement and wondered whether to knock, ring the bell or just go in. The scratched Perspex face of his Spiderman watch said he was two minutes early. Ants of apprehension crawled through his stomach. Come on, he told himself. You've just finished five weeks training in the desert with the Jordanian commandoes. If you can't overcome a door, you won't be much good against the bad guys. He gulped, put his hand on the handle and opened the door. A little bell tinkled.
The reception area beyond was dingy and dull. The floor was covered in cracked, fading yellow lino. There were four rather sickly, dust-caked potted plants and a chipped, cheap coffee table over which a selection of creased, faded women's magazines were strewn haphazardly. Two tatty armchairs lurked by a radiator. Facing the entrance was a stout wooden desk with an old computer, an empty wire basket, a large desk diary, an ancient black telephone and a tinny-looking intercom. Behind the desk sat a bored-looking young woman. She was in her twenties, quite pretty, pale-skinned, olive-eyed, her finely shaped lips pursed slightly with concentration as she applied pink polish to her long, elegantly manicured fingernails. Her fashionably discreet rust and cream headscarf complemented a dark brown polo-neck sweater which hugged her firm, pert shape in a most pleasing manner. A fake-pearl necklace hung round the collar. Indifferently noting Ali was a mere boy, she returned to her nail-painting.
Ali cleared his throat. ''Eh'lan,'' he said, wondering if 'hi' was too informal. ''My name is Amin, Ali Amin. I have an appointment for three o' clock.''
''Really?'' The woman sounded sceptical. ''What about?''
''I have come to talk about insuring my collection of Pokémon cards.'' Ali repeated what his driver had told him to say. ''The Pikachu is particularly valuable.''
The woman stopped painting her nails and stared at him for a moment, then, with an almost imperceptible shake of the head, stretched out a long, languid hand, pressed a button on an intercom and said ''Your three o' clock is here, sir. Something about Pikachu cards.''
The squawked reply was indecipherable.
''I'm Hala,'' the woman introduced herself, ''Hala Ghaboury. Nice to meet you.'' Her smile brightened up the whole room. ''I won't shake hands…'' She waved the still-wet fingernails.
Ali was relieved. He felt uncomfortable shaking hands with women.
''We thought you were a myth,'' she said, ''Like the salawa you're named after. Something people talk about but rarely see.'' She indicated a solid blue door to her right. ''Through there,'' she said.
Ali entered a gloomy hallway which was lit by a bare, fly-spotted light-bulb dangling from a balding flex. The floor was tiled in dull, unvarnished red, the walls were painted a dull dark blue, the doorway to the left was marked TOILET, the doorway facing him was marked JANITOR. To the right was a staircase. The treads were covered with a thin, threadbare carpet which had once been blue. The chunky wooden banister was dusty. Shrugging, Ali moved slowly up the stairs towards another solid blue door.
The salawa was a type of wild dog, or wolf, that lived in the deserts of Egypt. It had a legendary reputation, being mythical, hard to spot and difficult to catch... that was why he had adopted it as his code-name: Ali Salawa, 'the scary wolf'. He put his hand on the round brass knob, took another deep breath and entered a new world.
The passage beyond was brilliantly lit with long fluorescent strip-lights. The floor was covered in white lino. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything seemed to be crystal and silver, grey and white, and the place seemed spotlessly, almost antiseptically clean. He realised that the panes of glass were office partitions, for behind each one were shirt-sleeved men and head-scarfed women poring over papers, tapping keyboards, scrutinizing screens, listening to headphones, scribbling notes. The passage was a hive of silent activity. Ali could only hear the soft buzz of the lighting and the gentle purr of the air conditioning. There were no names or notices on any of the doors.
But now Colonel Ibrahim, powerful frame bursting through his dark brown suit, was striding purposefully down the passage, hand outstretched in a greeting.
''Welcome, Ali, to the Special Operations Section of the Joint Arab Intelligence Service.''
''Why is it so quiet?'' asked Ali.
''Soundproof glass,'' said the Colonel. ''You completed training with flying colours, I believe. Congratulations. From a taekwondo beginner to brown belt in a month is impressive.''
''Thanks,'' said Ali, adding in a burst of childish pride, ''I can also swim five kilometres, abseil and drive a car now.''
Colonel Ibrahim ushered him into a stark, functional, pathologically neat, white-walled briefing room. There was nothing on the desk except a beige-coloured folder, a blotter with a matching pen and pencil lined up on the right and a spiral-bound notebook. A filing cabinet occupied one corner of the room. The desk-chair was high-backed, comfortable and finished in shiny black leather. Hanging behind it was a round wall-clock. There were two other chairs, steel-framed, also in black leather.
''So,'' said the Colonel, taking the desk-chair and gesturing for Ali to take one of the others, ''You leave tonight on the midnight bus, arriving at the Western Bus Station in Damascus at four forty-five in the morning. You will be met by an agent named Hamza Madani. You will be wearing a green sweater and blue Adidas trackies. You will tell him it is cloudy tonight. He will tell you that you would have seen the moon over Damascus had you been earlier. You will reply that you have heard it is a beautiful sight unless there's a sandstorm to which he will reply it is better in winter. That is your recognition code. Hamza Madani will take you to a safe-house and together you will plan the day-to-day detail of the operation. The code-name is Flashlight.'' He pushed the folder across the desk. ''This contains everything you need to know.''
Ali leafed through a collection of intelligence reports, newspaper clippings and Internet print-outs concerning the Syrian religious schools known as hawzahs which had expanded massively in the past two years from thirty with seven thousand students to one hundred and t
wenty-seven with twenty-one thousand students. These were state-run, state-financed and, to a limited extent, state-controlled but there were also thirty-two private schools, twelve Shi'ite and twenty Sunni, which were seemingly unregulated. Little was known about their sources of funding, the ten thousand students who attended them, the thousand or so teachers who taught in them or the five hundred foreigners, from Africa, Europe and Asia, of whom Syrian Immigration had lost track. The situation seemed amazingly loose. No system existed to monitor the curriculum or the ideologies and the syllabuses had never been scrutinised let alone approved by either the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Investigation had revealed that some of these places were teaching hard-line sectarian politics disguised as religion. The Sunni schools were preaching of the dangers of Iran and the heretical nature of Shi'ites and calling for the armed overthrow of the Alawite sub-sect of the ruling Assad regime whilst the Shi'ite schools were teaching that the Caliphs who had followed Ali, the grandson of the Prophet, peace be upon him, were self-serving traitors rather than 'rightly guided'.
A large colour photograph showed the exterior of a brown-stone mosque in the Old City. This was the hawzah identified by Syrian Intelligence as a possible bomb-school, Dar El-Tawhid, the House of Unity. It had thirty or so students, mostly homeless Iraqi and Palestinian boys aged between twelve and twenty-one. They attended Friday classes in sharia law and Qur'anic interpretation.
The snapshot of the imam, Talal Hafez, was not so good. It showed an enormous man with a long, bushy, coal-black beard and piercing black eyes. He was wearing traditional Arabic clothes, a long white galabeya and a round, white cap. He was frowning angrily and brandishing a steel hook in the air.
''Talal Hafez is forty-two,'' said Colonel Ibrahim. ''He is from Fallujah in Iraqi. He lost his left hand when an improvised explosive device he was planting blew up prematurely. He is not married and seems to hate women. He is wanted by the Americans for killing a soldier in a café.''
The third photograph showed a small, wiry man with a bald, egg-shaped head and a hooked, fleshy beak of a nose. He was wearing a pale blue open-necked shirt and slacks and was smiling the smile of a vulture. Ali felt queasy just looking at him.
''Moussa Bashir,'' said Colonel Ibrahim, ''Forty-seven, science teacher. He seems to be the one who recruits the students. He befriends the street-boys buying them drinks and ice-creams or giving them cigarettes and money. Some he takes swimming or to cafés. He is a predatory homosexual who may well be molesting the boys he recruits.''
Ali felt even queasier.
''These are the targets,'' said Colonel Ibrahim. ''Once you are in, find out what you can. Are they are planning terror attacks? If so, where and when? Have they trained any bombers? What are they teaching? Where does the money come from and how is it spent? Pass anything you learn on to Hamza Madani and he will send it on to the analysts for processing.''
He handed Ali an envelope containing an Iraqi passport, a Jordanian ID card, a Red Crescent document stating refugee status, an entry-visa for Syria, a bus ticket and a thousand Syrian pounds. ''Don't spend it all at once,'' he said dryly. ''You're supposed to be a refugee.''
''Who is Hamza Madani supposed to be?'' Ali pocketed the envelope.
''Your cousin, a heretic and unbeliever who may, or not, be abusing you,'' said the Colonel. ''Someone you can hate as much as you hate the Americans who killed your parents. You can't just walk up to the door and say I want to be a talib, they come to you. They recruit kids from the streets, particularly those who are either very religious, down on their luck or zealously anti-American. They hunt in parks and mosques offering hot meals and religious instruction. They may have a network of spotters who tip them off about likely recruits. These could be cops, park-keepers, shop-keepers, street cleaners, we aren't sure but it would be useful to know. You need to get yourself noticed then recruited. You will have one month and then we shall pull you out.''
''Right,'' said Ali. ''What about my sister?''
''We'll take care of it,'' said Colonel Ibrahim. ''Now we'll go see Dr Rashid.''
Who was a thin, wiry man in his early thirties. He had a wispy beard and an earnest expression behind owl-rimmed spectacles. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up to his elbows and the knot of his brown tie tugged down to the second button. He seemed harassed and impatient. Ali was not surprised. The lab was cluttered with circuit boards, tools, strands of wire, soldering irons and silicon chips.
''So you're Ali Salawa,'' said Dr Rashid. ''You don't look like a secret agent, I must say.''
''That's the point,'' said Ali, ''Blend in, be inconspicuous, indiscreet, you know?''
''Well,'' grunted the techie, ''Trying to develop field equipment for a child has not been easy, especially a child I don't know, but,'' he reached into a large cardboard box on the bench, ''I think I have come up with some useful items. Since yours is an information-gathering mission,'' he produced a scuffed Sony Walkman, ''We are providing you with a range of specially designed data-collection equipment.''
''I get gadgets?'' Ali grinned, ''Like James Bond? Cool.''
''Field equipment, Salawa, which, at all times, remains the property of the Jordanian Government,'' Dr Rashid said sternly. ''They are not boys' toys, whatever the movies may have shown you.'' He re-settled his glasses. ''This a multi-purpose recording device. As you can see, it looks like an ordinary Sony Walkman and it will, in fact, also play actual music cassettes.'' He allowed himself a little smile. ''You are a teenager, after all. I expect you will want your music.''
''But if you play Nancy or Britney Spears,'' said Colonel Ibrahim, ''It will self-destruct.''
''Really?'' Ali looked at the men dubiously.
''Puff of smoke,'' said the Colonel seriously.
''There are three settings,'' continued Dr Rashid, glaring at his boss. ''Tuner, Player and Recorder. The tuner has a Short Wave receiver. You can pick up virtually any SW broadcast including Citizens' Band, police, ambulance and air traffic control. Now recording can be done onto ordinary C90 cassettes available from any high street. The battery, however, is solar-charged and renews itself automatically every six hours. No hunting round kiosks for Duracells with this baby.''
He held up a sheet of football-stickers. ''Concealed within the badge of each footballer is a microscopic listening device, a bug, if you prefer.'' He indicated Cristiano Ronaldo. ''Peel away the Real Madrid logo and stick it on any surface. Activation is immediate and it will pick up any sound within a ten metre radius. I suggest you stick it somewhere inconspicuous, under a desk or a window sill, perhaps, or inside a lamp-shade, somewhere it won't be noticed or muffled. There are six altogether. To listen to the bugs, or record them, tune the receiver to 93.7 FM.''
Ali looked doubtfully at David Beckham. ''Do they stick to clothes?'' he asked.
''Of course,'' said Dr Rashid, ''But if your target removes his clothes, you'll lose it.''
''Although you might get a thrill if he's engaged in a bit of hanky-panky,'' added Colonel Ibrahim, ''All that heavy breathing, sweet nothings and kissy-kissy stuff. Enough to put a boy off his corn-flakes, eh?''
Ali laughed.
Dr Rashid, tutting disapproval, tapped the Walkman again. ''Listen carefully, Salawa. This machine doubles as an abseiling device. The headphones are attached to fifty meters of high-tensile wire which will bear a load of fifty kilograms and is custom-made for you.''
''So,'' said Colonel Ibrahim, ''Don't go gorging yourself on Syria's finest foods or you'll find yourself splatted on the road like a ladybug on a windshield.''
''The plug itself,'' Dr Rashid continued irritably, ''Is a diamond-tipped explosive spike that will embed itself like an anchor in concrete or a rock-face. The harness is concealed inside the skull-bar of the headphones. If you pull both ends away from each other simultaneously, you will see you get a metre of foam-covered wire, easily enough to go round your skinny waist. Now cassettes. This red one is a scrambler and jammer. Play it to
disrupt all mobile signals and radio broadcasts for a hundred metres. The black one is a self-destruct device. Put it in, press PLAY and run like hell. You'll have six seconds to get out of the blast-zone.''
''And these?'' Ali tapped Pink Floyd's Greatest Hits and The Best of the Beatles.
''We thought you might like something decent to listen to,'' said Colonel Ibrahim dryly, ''In the evenings when you're doing your homework.''
Dr Rashid picked up a green toothbrush. ''This contains a Sandisk Ultra Backup 64 gigabyte flash-drive in the handle. Just twist, slide out and plug it into a USB port. The download speed is lightning-fast, around half a second per gig.'' He clicked the toothbrush together again. ''The handle's waterproof so you can also use it to clean your teeth.''
He waggled a spray-can. ''We've also supplied you with some smelly stuff. Axe Dark Temptation may surround you in a cloud of chocolate-scented delight and, if you're lucky, a horde of admiring girls but this canister does more. Twist the top to the right and you'll get that scent but twist ninety degrees to the left until it clicks and you'll get a very different kind of scent, tear-gas, in fact. A squirt of that in someone's face will disorientate and dismay in equal measure. Twist one hundred and eighty degrees to the left to activate the smoke-bomb. Once it clicks, you have five seconds to escape, then PFFFF!'' He mimed an explosion with his fingers.
''Right,'' said Ali.
''Be careful with these Chiclets,'' Dr Rashid indicated a green packet. ''Each tablet contains an explosive charge. You activate it by chewing. There are five tablets altogether. When you take it out of your mouth, the air will react with a chemical in the gum. Press it into the lock you want to blow and stand back. Again, five seconds.''
''Will it double-up as gum?'' asked Ali.
''Only if you want to blow your head off,'' said Colonel Ibrahim wryly.
''It will.'' Dr Rashid glared at the Colonel. ''But I don't think it will taste so good. It will blow locks, safes, that kind of fairly small-scale thing. Now...'' He slapped Ali's hand. ''Leave the gum alone and listen. These spectacles. They are ordinary round-rimmed glasses like those worn by millions of short-sighted kids across the world. These, however, contain a miniature camera in the bridge. It will take up to ten pictures by squeezing the right-side hinge.''
''Impressive,'' said Ali.
''You'll notice that the ear-pieces are straight rather than curved. That is because each arm is equipped with a curare-tipped dart. Curare is a paralysing chemical. It will knock someone out for an hour or so. There are only two and you cannot re-arm it so don't waste them showing off to the girls. I know what you spies are like.''
''Disarming?'' Ali suggested. ''What does this do?'' He tapped a Nokia 1100 mobile phone. ''Signal-jammer? Smoke-bomb? X-ray machine? Pepper-spray?''
''It's a 'phone,'' remarked Colonel Ibrahim. ''You use it to call people.''
''It also has a signal-jamming function,'' snapped Dr Rashid. ''Some bombs are set off by phones. Just dial double hash. Here, finally, is a bomb-detector.'' He strapped a cheap Timex watch on a silver-plated bracelet onto Ali's thin left wrist. ''Push the button in, if it ticks, there's a bomb. The louder it ticks, the closer the bomb. Pull the button out, you get two metres of steel wire. Don't ask me what it's for. I'm sure you'll find a use. Turn the button clockwise and you get a bug-detector. Again, the ticking sound will guide you to the source. Honestly, I sometimes think my genius is wasted on this department.''
''And if I turn it anti-clockwise?'' said Ali tentatively.
''It changes the date,'' Dr Rashid said flatly. ''See? I can joke too.''
That, thought Ali, was a matter of opinion.
''Remember,'' Colonel Ibrahim said, ''Get in, find the information and get out. Financial records, email and phone communications, anything to connect the school with Hands across the Sands and suicide-bombing. No risks, just photograph and bug. Report everything to your handler and we will do the rest.'' Colonel Ibrahim stood up. ''If you need us to pull you out, text 'Salawa is going to earth' to 1-1-1-1 or go to our office in Central Damascus – Wadi Insurance. It's somewhere near Martyr's Square, I believe. Ahmed Ahmed is the branch manager. Hamza will give you the address. Ask to insure your Pokémon cards and we will come and get you.''
''Good luck, Salawa,'' said Dr Rashid. ''Come back alive.''
''I'll do my best.'' Ali pocketed the gadgets. Now, at last, he felt like a spy.