At the ordained times he filled his saucepan, performed the washing that precedes the five daily prayers and pointed his mat at what was either Mecca or the security guards’ toilet, depending, I suppose, on your view of the world.
Nobody complained about his presence, and he was over the first hurdle. The next morning he started work – washing the windows of parked cars, sweeping up trash and generally acting as guardian of al-Abah Parking Lot Number Three. Like most refugees, he never asked for money but he did place a saucer on the walkway – just in case someone felt a sudden urge to fulfil their charitable obligations.
By any measure, it was brilliant. Several weeks later, after the mutilated body of one of the institute’s most senior officers was found, the police and Syrian spooks flooded the surrounding buildings, finally targeting the homeless man and trying to build a photofit. Everybody they spoke to was in agreement: five foot eleven, say, about one-eighty, heavily bearded and then – well, pretty much nothing.
In the secret world, a disguise and life story that have been invented to hide someone’s real identity is called a legend. The ragged guardian of al-Abah Parking Lot Number Three – a Saudi Arabian, a graduate in medicine from Beirut University, a hero of the Afghan War – had created a legend as a Palestinian refugee so effective it had rendered him virtually invisible. For a professional to have done it would have been a great achievement; for an amateur without resources or training, it was remarkable.
A week after his arrival, the Saracen established the habit during the hottest part of the day of crouching with his Qur’an in a grove of palms near the building’s front door, taking advantage of a cool breeze from a faulty air-conditioning conduit. While people smiled at his ingenuity, the truth was he didn’t give a damn about the heat – he had lived in the outer ring of hell during blazing summers in Afghanistan, so fall in Damascus didn’t worry him. No, the area under the conduit allowed him to see, through a plate-glass wall, the exact security procedures which applied to everyone entering the building. Once he was convinced he understood them, he set about weighing – both figuratively and literally – the people who worked at the place.
The deputy director of the institute was always among the last to leave. In his fifties, his name was Bashar Tlass, a relative of one of Syria’s ruling elite, a former prominent member of the country’s secret police and – I’m sorry to say – an unmitigated piece of scum.
But neither his high position, his qualifications as a chemical engineer nor his love of the slow garrotte during his career with the secret police had any bearing on why he was chosen. It would have been a great surprise to everybody, Tlass included, that the reason he was killed was because he weighed one-hundred-and-eighty pounds – or at least as near as the doctor, sitting among the palm trees, could tell.
Having identified his target, all the Saracen had to do now was wait. Throughout the Muslim world, Ramadan’s thirty days of fasting, prayer and sexual abstinence end with an explosion of feasting, gifts and hospitality called Eid al-Fitr. The evening before the festival of Eid, almost everyone leaves work early to get ready for the ritual of dawn prayer, followed by a day of huge banquets.
Damascus was no different and, by 4 p.m., banks and offices were locked, shops were closed and the roads increasingly deserted. Tlass walked out the front door of the institute and heard the security guards at their console behind him activate the electronic locks. It meant the building was completely empty, and he knew – as did everyone else – that as soon as he was out of sight the guards would arm the rest of the system and quietly head home to make their own preparations for the festivities.
Years ago, the director had tried to get the guards to work over Eid but had run into so much opposition, including from the employees’ mosques, that everybody had immediately reverted to the prior practice of contrived ignorance. And anyway, nobody knew better than Tlass that the country was a police state – who would be foolish enough to try to break into a government building?
He got the answer to that question a few minutes later as he walked down a path between the gardens, heading for his car. The few surrounding buildings and parking lots were deserted, so he was mildly alarmed when he turned a corner and, momentarily enclosed by hedges and palms, heard a rustle of movement behind him. He swung round, then almost smiled as he realized it was just the stupid Palestinian, the man who kept insisting on washing the windshield of his SUV even though he had never dropped so much as a piastre into the tin saucer for his trouble.