#21. BAB SHARKI, OLD CITY, DAMASCUS, SYRIA
Saturday July 11, 16:07
ALI TOOK a cheese sandwich and a mango juice from a hole-in-the-wall to a park outside the Four Seasons Hotel. Surely Talal's men had captured Hamza and taken him back to Dar El-Tawhid. They had stolen the lap-top and all the documents. Surely too they must have worked out that Ali had been spying on them. The question was what Talal would do next. Ali felt he had to get into the madrassa, find Hamza and get him out before he ended up next to Mokhtar feeding the jackals in the desert.
When he finished his snack, he went to a small store on Al-Amir Izzedin Street and bought a new set of headphones so he could listen to the police channel on the Walkman. In addition, the bugs he had planted round Talal's office might pick up something useful.
Singing quietly to himself, ''Do what you want, but you're never gonna break me, Sticks and stones are never gonna shake me, oh, oh, oh'', he hurried past the Japanese Embassy in Shukri Al-Assassi, past the majestic statue of Salah Al-Din outside the walls of the Old City, through Bab Al-Jabiya and into Medhat Pasha Souk and the Al-Hameediya Market. Here he could lose himself among dozens of silk shops and shoe shops, rug shops and shisha shops, stalls of pistachios, dates and raisins, even Bakdash's ice-cream parlour, famous for its pistachio-encrusted booza, but he wanted somewhere different, somewhere busy but out of sight, somewhere he could spend the rest of the day without attracting attention. Emerging between two Roman pillars into the sun-soaked paved square of the Forum, he headed for the Umayyad Mosque across the cobbles with his 'Pocketful of Sunshine' and went in. The marble floor of the rectangular courtyard was cool under his soles.
As he washed in the central ablutions fountain, he gazed up at the spectacular brown, green and gold depiction of Paradise rendered above the three-arched entrance. Lush trees, luxuriant fountains and beautifully ornamented buildings covered the entire end-wall, including the three gracefully pointed windows and the pediment, with its small, round, eye-like portals high above hustle and bustle, and swarmed almost up to base of the huge Dome of the Eagle itself. Ali understood why the historian El-Idrisy had called it a wonder of the Islamic world.
This fourth holiest site in World Islam, had been built in 634 on the site of a Christian church dedicated to John the Baptist, whose head was preserved in a large silver-plated, green-curtained shrine in the prayer hall. Completed in 715, it was where the prophet Jesus would apparently return to Earth at the End of Days, arriving via the Isa Minaret to confront the Antichrist here in this city. The great-grandson of the Prophet, peace be upon him, Ali Ibn Hussein, had preached here from the great white pulpit during the sixty day imprisonment here of the wives and children of the Shi'ites killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680. They had been made to walk from Iraq to Damascus then stand at the Bab-as-Sa'at Gate for seventy-two hours whilst the third Umayyad Caliph Yazid I had determined their fate. It seemed somehow fitting that a Shi'ite boy from Iraq was now in Damascus to confront the Devil of Talal Hafez.
He stopped to press his forehead in prayer against the tomb containing the head of John the Baptist then sat on a comfortable rug in a corner facing the door. The interior of the prayer hall was vast and cavernous but an interesting mix of pilgrims, tourists and locals milled around, their doctrinal differences subsumed in the greater unity of mutual worship.
He now felt safe enough to rip the new headphones from their plastic wrap, plug them into the Walkman and slip them over his ears. The police channel was now occupied with idle chatter about shift patterns, tea breaks and traffic reports. It was around half-past four in the afternoon and rush-hour was peaking.
93.7 FM brought the hiss, crackle and pop of static. There were no voices in the mosque. Surely they would be preparing for prayers by now.
He needed to see for himself, to get into Talal's office, into those drawers, find Hamza, find out what was happening… he itched to get on with it, but knew he had to wait for the cover of darkness. It was most frustrating. Moodily picking at the bandage on his hand, he listened to the police channel again.
At sunset, the Call to Prayer sounded loudly from the three ancient Umayyad minarets. Ali did not join the prayer. The silence from the Mohammed Bin-Rahman Mosque suggested Talal Hafez and friends had left and locked up. Getting into the office would therefore be easier but possibly whatever was in the desk would have gone too. The lack of noise also suggested that Hamza was not there after all and this troubled him even more. Was his friend already dead as Moussa Bashir had implied? He shuddered to think of Hamza in pain, of Talal's cruelty, of his own helplessness, sitting here in the mosque waiting for nightfall. Hugging his knees, he rocked a little, the gun in his waistband jabbing against the base of his spine, until it was properly dark when he collected his trainers and left the mosque.
First he ducked into the smelly public toilets just outside the gate where he locked himself in a cubicle, sat on the seat and prepared his equipment. Next he checked the magazine of the Sig-Sauer M11. It normally held fifteen nine-millimetre rounds. There were only three left. Never mind. He would just have to improvise. Then he switched the red and black cassettes in the Walkman then settled the glasses on his nose. Two knock-out darts, one in each stem. He twisted the cap of the Axe can to activate the tear-gas canister then slipped two tablets of gum into his mouth, grimacing again at the tooth-powder taste. Finally the phone. It was only small but he wanted to conceal it somewhere in case he was caught. He took the plastic headphone wrapper out of his pocket, laughed softly and, shaking his head, muttered ''I don't believe I'm doing this.''
When he had finished, he stuffed his light-coloured jacket behind the cistern, smoothed his thick hair and left the cubicle. In the garden outside Salah Al-Din's tomb, he rubbed handfuls of black dirt into his bare arms and face to darken them. Catching himself in a window, he looked ready. He was ready.