The Gomorrah Gambit Read online

  His working theory is that it was the Islamists and their agents who tracked down Munira, hoping to clean up the appalling error of allowing her to escape with access details. After all, they must have men in Europe and a great deal of terrified respect for whoever is behind Gomorrah. Munira doesn’t seem to have been killed, which means they want information more than they wish to exact vengeance. What he needs to do is stay calm, think clearly and work through his options in order.

  He turns to his monitor and, surprised, registers the arrival of one last message from Anna and Odi.

  Thought you’d like to know: we found you thanks to this.

  Azi cautiously investigates the attachment, which turns out to be a cached social media profile: an internet archive record of a Friends Reunited page for Azi Bello that existed, briefly, in the early 2000s. There’s almost nothing on it. A uni freshers’ photo, a few lines about computer science, a bad joke, a contact email. Almost nothing—but just enough to lead a sufficiently dedicated, well-resourced investigator to the back garden of a terraced house where the man who created the profile still lived. A horribly easy mistake to make.

  The only problem is, Azi is certain he has never seen it before.

  Twenty-four

  Azi reads and rereads the information Odi and Anna have sent about how they found him: the social media profile he’s never seen before, the implications. It’s an expert stitch-up but, beyond that, the possibilities are boundless and bewildering.

  Are they trying to test or manipulate him? Did someone set him up, or want to send him a warning? Is the entire thing an elaborate ruse? Safe inside his virtual machines and a stack of proxies, he probes the cached page, but there’s no malicious code there. Just old, accurate information that nobody should ever have got hold of, let alone compiled into something so brilliantly compromising.

  For now, he needs to move on. He’s here and he’s free and Munira needs him. What matters is the future, not the past. Azi tries to gather his focus. But every avenue he investigates seems to have been bricked up—and there’s a nervous chill at the base of his spine that won’t stop tingling.

  In Berlin, the post-massacre cover-up operation must have been immensely well-resourced: it’s shrouded in absolute informational silence, and the warehouse’s location lacks both CCTV coverage and nearby residents whose social media might be trawled for news.

  Hunting for any recent hints of Sigma and Munira also proves fruitless, as do Azi’s explorations of some authentically unpleasant forums that might hold insights into Gomorrah. Azi even stalks Ad online—his old friend appears to have an enviably clean-living Californian lifestyle, although he wouldn’t put it past Ad to have fabricated the entire thing.

  Eventually, despondency and exhaustion drive him back to the squat just inside its curfew. Low voices speaking in many languages loop through the air, sharing God knows what horrors. The day has been an intensifying series of disappointments, and sleep doesn’t come easily.

  The next morning, Azi decides to follow much the same routine as on the previous day in the hope that it will bring better luck: sustenance in the form of porridge, caffeine in the form of tooth-clenchingly sweet coffee, comradeship in the form of a lecture on the art of digital discretion. As he descends towards the kitchen, however, he freezes. Someone is bellowing his old friend’s name across the bottom of the stairwell.

  “Adam. Adam Walker!”

  Azi is halfway through wondering whether he can hurl himself out of a window when he remembers who he’s pretending to be. He is Adam Walker. And his interlocutor is the redoubtable Dr. Eleni, half-hidden behind two immense plastic bags full of clothes.

  “Hello, Adam Walker! Kalimera, good morning, over here. Mr. Adam, at last! Are you making yourself useful? My goodness, you look different. Here, you can be useful to me—these are clothes for the little ones, upstairs. You will carry the bags, I will keep an eye on my more precious burden, here, and we will go together.”

  Azi affects even more bewilderment than he feels.

  “Er, sure. What’s that about a burden?”

  Bundling the bags into his grasp—they contain enough second-hand clothing to last a bevy of babies into adulthood—Dr. Eleni exhales theatrically and steps aside to reveal a small, staring boy, clinging to the back of her legs. She lifts him into her arms.

  “This is my child, the smaller one. You have seen a child before? Nikasios, after his father’s father. Cypriots. This little man is helping mama at work, because big papakis forgot that this is what mama has done twice a week for the last month. I am visiting my ladies—upstairs, the ones who cannot easily come to see me.” With her free arm she makes a curving gesture that, eventually, Azi identifies as indicating pregnancy. “The boy has been eating off my ears.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Shouting, begging for sweets. As men do. Now he is quiet, which is why I will keep him close. You carry the bags, and all this will happen fast.” She points to the stairwell. “Come on, up, up! Viasou, let’s go!”

  Nikasios doesn’t stay quiet for long. Once the delivery is finished—Azi hovers outside the door of the family dormitory while an epically rapid Greek monologue echoes within—Eleni seems unfazed by the sight of her offspring hurtling down the stairs and into the packed kitchen. Taking up a bowl of porridge, she dispenses words of hygiene-related wisdom to those on cooking duty (“no meat, none, not in this heat; that is not hand-washing, that is giving your germs a shower”) while using her free arm to shepherd the little boy towards a bench.

  Azi queues for a shot of frothing coffee, then watches as Eleni sits down and Nikasios hurls himself onto the floor at her feet. Adjusting the now-filthy bandage circling his head, Azi tries for a casual tone.

  “Are you going to listen to my talk?”

  “One of us, perhaps. Or we may both become preoccupied by kaka. Who can tell?”

  The boy is clasping her legs and burbling joyously. Azi, who has very little first-hand experience of children, estimates his age at somewhere between one and four—pending further investigation. He offers what he hopes is a blameless smile in the child’s direction, and Nikasios dissolves into sobs. Without looking down, Eleni hefts the boy into her lap.

  “He loves people. This is just the nap he wishes he did not need. They fight sleep. Because life would be too easy if we did what is good for us! Does this sound familiar? Time for your pipila, my little golden one?”

  She produces a pacifier which, on the third attempt, Nikasios accepts and begins to suck while watching Azi with care, as if this unclean stranger might turn into somebody interesting. For once, Azi is lost for words. Gradually, the little boy’s eyes roll backwards in their sockets, flicker, then shut. Eleni looks up.

  “You have just witnessed a miracle. Thauma, a wonder! Do not for a moment think it is always like this. Perhaps your face has worked magic upon him. Your dressing, it is disgusting, let me have a look…You are due to speak? You should get on with it. His sleep cycle is thirty minutes.”

  Azi nods. There’s something about watching a small child fall asleep that requires no comment or reason. It takes him several minutes, and one more shot of coffee, to summon the weary hypervigilance his topic demands.

  Azi’s theme for today is surveillance, and how best to avoid it. Most demonstrators have been aware for some time that the police use devices with a variety of badass names—StingRay, Wolfpack, Gossamer, swamp boxes—to imitate the radio towers that mobile phones connect to in order to function. This allows them to hoover up the international mobile subscriber identities of every single phone user in the vicinity and then match these to other records, keeping everything in their secret surveillance data dungeons forever. This is why anonymous burner phones are a great idea.

  Unfortunately, spoofing mobile phone towers is now amateur hour when it comes to protests. What worries Azi is the stuff you can’t turn off: your face, the way you walk, the speed at which you type, the personal email account you checked just
once five years ago from a supposedly secure location. For most people, these vulnerabilities are their unknown unknowns: the things they don’t even know that they don’t know about. All of them can be redressed, but only as long as you’re prepared to take drastic measures. Hence his opening theme: how to stop machines from matching you to a recognizable pattern. He doesn’t get far.

  “Why is it that you wish us to tattoo our faces?”

  As one of the best English-speakers in the room, Eleni has assumed the honor of expressing incredulity to Azi on the behalf of every other sentient being present—a tone she has no trouble striking over the slump of her slumbering son. Azi tries to look pleased by the chance to explain himself.

  “Temporary tattoos. It’s for facial recognition. The police, government, their systems can get your faces from photographs, right?”

  “This is why people wear hoods, masks.”

  “But you can’t do that all the time. And they can take those off. Markings like this can stop a machine being able to recognize you. I’ve sketched a sample, here…” Azi brandishes a piece of paper that is not, he would admit, much of an advert for his craft skills “…and you can find better stuff online. The point is, it works. Mostly. So, look at me. You may have noticed my new look since arriving…shoes and clothes nothing like I wore before. Less hair. You’re trying to fool machines, so you need to change your outline, your proportions, the patterns made by everything you do.”

  Azi touches one hand self-consciously to his scalp. What matters, he tells himself, is that he doesn’t much resemble the man who left Berlin. The fact that almost every part of him either itches or seems afflicted by horrible stiffness, or both, is beside the point. Before he can continue, another interjection comes from the back of the room.

  “Do we believe that the future of action lies behind masks, that this is how we undermine the legitimacy of oppression? We are not ashamed. Politicians are corrupted, the government is corrupted! To educate the crowd, you cannot hide behind a mask. The icons of history, to make the people think, they did not hide their faces—”

  The speaker is a ferociously bearded young man wearing what look like hemp pajamas, and his tone suggests that he long ago confirmed the absolute correctness of his view. This is the trouble with addressing assemblies of anarchists, Azi thinks, let alone Greek anarchists—there’s no such thing as a proposition they won’t dispute. But before he can reply he is cut off by Eleni.

  “Be quiet, Kostas! We all know what you think, you have told us often enough. I do not hide my face, I am not a criminal. I am a doctor. But I have seen what happens, the way protest is treated. Perhaps we should let Mr. Walker tell us how to avoid trouble and stay safe. Otherwise, people are going to eat wood. That is a Greek expression—”

  Azi winces, trying to get things back on track.

  “I get it. People are going to get hurt. With wood.”

  As Azi has already gathered, Athenian anarchists come in many flavors—but all of them concur that sticks as well as flowers are needed to defend a revolution, to say nothing of motorcycle helmets, “borrowed” police batons and riot shields. Arrests and beatings are a weekly routine for those towards the militant end of the spectrum, where throwing rocks at officialdom is considered an eloquent mode of political expression. As for those who don’t agree, the trouble with self-organizing assemblies is that nobody speaks for everyone, and it’s hard to maintain the non-violent high ground when representatives of the state are bludgeoning you in the face. Backtracking, he attempts another approach.

  “Look, let’s think about masks as an idea. Please? Whether you want to avoid being recognized, or just avoid trouble, in either case you’re trying to conceal a pattern. But doing this means you need to understand what kind of patterns machines can spot. How you type, that’s a pattern. They can track it. But I can show you a plugin that evens out the rate at which you press keys. Devices…first, you need an operating system that doesn’t leave a trace. Something called Tails is a good start. I’ll put some of this on a wiki. Money…every time you touch it, you become part of a pattern—”

  “You don’t need to tell us that, we’re anarchists!”

  This, shouted by the bearded one from the back of the room, qualifies as a joke. As translations ripple through the thirty or so people now gathered, laughter follows. Azi, trying to ride the mood, keeps going.

  “Right, but you still need something for purchases, sometimes, and anonymous browsing and cryptocurrencies don’t keep you safe…unless you mix them up and know how to hide the nodes you access them through. Really, it’s all much easier if you just want to steal things and break them…”

  He sighs, contemplating a parallel world in which he has spent the last decade stealing stuff, cackling and buying Ferraris.

  “…but building systems, fixing faults, keeping people safe: it’s tough. A lot of the time, it sucks. The odds aren’t good, which is why, actually, assaults and constant stress are the only way to keep things safe. I’m getting off track, er…constant stress. Otherwise, they’ll get you. Somebody will. Whatever you think happens in the darkness, think again. It’s worse.”

  Eleni raises her eyebrows as if to say, try being a doctor for a day, chum. Azi risks a grin. Then a new voice sounds from the very back of the room.

  “Someone has been asking around—about a man like you. Tell us, what are you running from? What are you bringing into our home?”

  For a moment, Azi’s mouth hangs open. He closes it and, leaning against a nearby table for support, manages to croak out one syllable.

  “Who?”

  But the room has no answers. Before he can find out who spoke—before he can say another word—Nikasios’s full-throated wails turn the air into their echoes. Eleni stands to soothe her son, several simultaneous debates break out in the middle rows, and half a dozen people decide it’s time to get tea.

  Not knowing what else to do, Azi mutters inaudibly and slips onto the street as fast as he can.

  Twenty-five

  Once upon a time, Kabir learns from their talkative hotel manager over dinner on the evening of their arrival, foreigners wishing to come and fight for the Islamic Republic were welcomed with open arms on both sides of the border. It was a fine business. A dozen or so recruits would gather in the hotels on the Turkish side, equip themselves with weapons and black bandanas from obliging local entrepreneurs, then relax for a few days while the fixers did their thing.

  This more or less corresponds to Kabir and his cousin’s experience last November, and he had assumed things remained much the same. After a few days of waiting on the Turkish side, a discreet message arrived late at night indicating that fixers had finished their fixing. There followed a taxi ride to the border, a stroll around inconvenient landmines, then the comforts of another taxi and hotel ahead of official recruitment. The route was well-trodden, everyone either took their cut or kept tactfully silent—and safe passage in the opposite direction could be arranged through the same channels.

  Today, things are different. Recruits are still arriving, but the Turkish government has started to take a more active interest in regional peacekeeping—perhaps because the momentum from this summer’s campaigns has begun to alarm those in distant as well as nearby lands. Kabir is vaguely aware that opposition to the Islamic Republic may coalesce into something effective if the country stops ripping itself apart with civil war. With hundreds of thousands of people continuing to flee both the civil war’s chaos and the Republic’s mercy, it’s a less than auspicious time for him to become one among numberless refugees.

  What he needs is some well-connected people with a sincere interest in the information residing in his rear end. And this has suggested a plan to him. If Muhammed and Dr. Tal were to go ahead without him—and if something were to go wrong with their border crossing, meaning that neither of them ever returned—Kabir would be free to negotiate his own fate at his own pace. What’s more, he would be free to move his bowels without engaging
in the frankly horrific process of removal and reinsertion that occupied him soon after their arrival, and that on its own makes the entire betrayal seem worthwhile.

  Having finished his opening lament, the hotel manager is now regaling Kabir and his companions with praise for Muhammed’s fictional sister and her bravery, while discreetly suggesting that all things remain possible so long as enough cash is involved. Dr. Tal has no doubt the state will pay what is reasonable, or that helping in this holy task is preferable to the lingering death prone to be experienced by those lacking faith. The hotel manager, it turns out, couldn’t agree more.

  After an unpleasant cup of coffee—all the coffee in the Islamic Republic is bad, but this hotel seems to have pulled out all the stops in creating a simultaneously bland and acrid anti-flavor—they retire into three adjoining rooms with a fine view of a fading sunset above rooftops.

  The occasional gash of rubble among houses and the sounds of distant heavy vehicles are all that suggest they aren’t on holiday, but Kabir knows he has no margin for error in his machinations. His actions must be decisive and entirely convincing. The border town they’re in, Jarablus, is a vital supply line for the Republic, and the prison in the basement of its recruitment center is notorious even by local standards, where execution is considered preferable to incarceration. Fortunately, using his phone via a VPN on the Wi-Fi network, he should be able to conduct some discreet online research—once he has pretended to conspire for one last time with Muhammed in their shared bathroom. Unfortunately, Muhammed is both terrified and desperate for reassurances Kabir has no desire to give.

  “Brother, you are sure your information is good, what you have on USB? That we will be well met?”