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“Are you alone?” came the lightly accented response.
“Yes. We… We were attacked. By smugglers. Ahmet was shot.Nijaz brought me to about half a kilometer from here and then went back to help him.”
The man lit another cigarette, working his old-fashioned lighter with a deft, one-handed motion. Despite the glare, Rapp could see the reason for the man’s dexterity. He was missing his left arm. A souvenir from Syria’s civil unrest.
“Get in the back.”
Rapp did as he was told and waited until they were underway to ask how long the journey would be. He got no response beyond a cloud of cigarette smoke. Clearly the man didn’t feel the deference toward Damian Losa’s representative that the smugglers had. It wasn’t surprising. In war, exhaustion eventually supplanted fear. The result was an entrenched indifference that was almost impossible to overcome.
The sun was up when they reached the rubble that had once been a suburb of Idlib. Midmorning temperatures were already over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, making the rolled-down windows a mixed blessing. The breeze helped with the heat, but the dust it carried permeated everything.
Idlib was at one time the epicenter of the resistance, but had now devolved into a hornet’s nest of criminals, jihadists, and rebels. Electricity was intermittent at best, and many people lived in bombed-out buildings exposed to the elements. Rapp leaned closer to the window, the scent of pulverized concrete becoming overwhelming as he studied a group of dirty children climbing on the burned carcass of a pickup. Above them, a number of balconies hung precariously, threatening to collapse and end their lives almost before they’d started.
His driver reached for the pack of cigarettes on the dash and shook it with the same frustration as he had the first three times. Finally, he found the fortitude to admit that it was empty and threw it out the window. The wind caught it and sent it swirling down a side street made impassable by debris.
With nothing left to smoke, the man finally broke his hours of silence.
“Have you been here before?”
“No.”
Technically a lie, but it was hard to equate what he saw with what he’d experienced prior to the war.
When the government lost control, the country had fractured with a speed and violence that had surprised even him. Part of the reason, of course, was that power vacuums tended to be filled by the worst possible actors. ISIS, Hezbollah, and myriad other terrorist organizations flooded in from neighboring countries or formed organically from the local population. They came and went, shifted alliances, dissolved and re-formed, always unleashing the violence and suffering that was their specialty. Now that the government was regaining control, many of those men were dead or imprisoned, leaving families trapped in overcrowded refugee camps. And then there were the bigger players—primarily Russia, but also Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Even the US had dipped its toe in the waters with the hope of keeping ISIS from becoming a regional power again.
“We wanted freedom,” his driver said. “To live in a country that serves a purpose greater than to quench one man’s thirst for power. It was something worth fighting for and so we did. We fought for the right to control our futures like you do in Canada.”
“But your president fought back,” Rapp said.
“Yes. He fought back. There was no amount of misery he wouldn’t inflict to keep his privilege. But it wasn’t enough. He was losing. And then the Russians came. They said everyone who was against the government was ISIS and used this as an excuse to murder us. And the world believed it and looked the other way.”
In truth, the world hadn’t believed it. Certainly not the intelligence agencies. This man’s problem wasn’t ignorance. It was indifference. Sure, the refugee crisis was more far-reaching than anyone had predicted but, beyond that, Syria wasn’t a country worth getting bogged down in.
“More than five hundred thousand of us are dead. Half of my countrymen have been driven from their homes and ninety percent of us live in poverty,” he continued as he steered around a downed chopper covered in anti-government graffiti. “I was an English teacher. Now I’m a criminal to feed my wife and children. And even with everything I’ve done, my family barely has enough. When I die—when they finally kill me—what will happen to them?”
Rapp met his eye in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The building they finally arrived at wasn’t what Rapp anticipated. Instead of a remote safe house, it was in the middle of town, an imposing white stone structure that mixed Arab and modern architecture. The east side of the roof had some damage that looked like it had happened sometime ago, but a more extensive collapse to the west looked fresh. The flow of rubble had snapped off one of the four palm trees in the courtyard and come to a stop at the iron fence surrounding the grounds. There was a sign outside, but it was so faded that Rapp could barely make out what was left of the Arabic script.
The Idlib Museum.
His driver stopped in front and pointed to the gate. Rapp grabbed his pack and stepped out into the sun, looking around him at the light pedestrian and vehicle traffic. No one seemed particularly interested in his arrival, focusing instead on going about the business of surviving Syria’s new reality.
The exception was the man opening the gate and waving him over. He looked to be in his late fifties, with a gray-streaked beard and an expanding waistline that suggested prosperity in a region where food was hard to come by. His clothes told a similar story. A bit threadbare now, but in their heyday, they would have been stylish and of high quality.
“Please follow me,” he said in a nearly native British accent.
Rapp did, entering the gloom of the building and stopping almost immediately when the man took a seat in a ticket booth.
“One thousand Syrian pounds, please.”
Rapp’s brow furrowed a moment but, to be fair, the entry price was printed clearly on the window. Arguing the point seemed counterproductive, particularly in light of the man who had just appeared at the other end of the reception area. He was dressed all in black, with a scarf wound around his head that left only his eyes visible. The AK-47 wasn’t yet pointed in Rapp’s direction, but it didn’t seem like it would take much to change that.
“Do you take euros?”
“Of course. One.”
A five was the smallest thing Rapp had and he handed it over.
