The Angel

Chapter Fifty-Five

Aqil and Yasin Malik waited in line at immigration. The queue was long and served by a bored woman in a single kiosk. She ushered travellers forward, took their papers, compared them to their photographs and, always satisfied, sent them inside with a desultory wave of her hand.

Yasin fidgeted next to him. ‘Come on,’ he said.

The flight had been straightforward. Aqil had been unable to read the magazine he had found in the departures lounge. He couldn’t concentrate on it, and the words wouldn’t go in. Instead, he gazed out of the window at the clouds below them as they flew over Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. They passed over the Black Sea and then over Turkey itself. Antalya was on the southern coast. After six hours, the jet started its descent. He watched as the landscape resolved into finer detail. He saw the terminal building, the buildings of the town spread across the coastline and, beyond, the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea. There were palm trees, the lush greens tempered by bright yellow sand dunes, white-capped waves rolling in to shore. It looked beautiful.

‘It’s taking forever,’ Yasin said. ‘We need to get going.’

He was nervous. He had been that way ever since they had set off. Aqil had believed that it was the prospect of being stopped before they could leave the country, but the more he observed his brother, the more he realised that it was something more fundamental than that. For all his brash certainty that this was the correct path for them to take, he still doubted his decision. He was worried about their family and what they would think. There was fear, too: a fear of the unknown, of the things that they might be asked to do when they reached the caliphate. They had seen the YouTube videos and read the literature about what they could expect. It was easy enough for him to pronounce Allah’s will from the security of their home. It was more difficult to find certainty when the prospect became less of an abstract idea and more of a likely reality.

They had a long day of travel ahead of them tomorrow. They would check into the five-star resort that they had booked with the travel agency in Manchester. It was important that they did that in order to minimise suspicion. It was more difficult to make passage through Turkey than it had been, and there was a suggestion that travellers who arrived on a package holiday and then did not arrive at their accommodation would be reported to the authorities. They would avoid that. ISIS had produced a glossy document that explained how best to make their way into Syria, and they were going to follow it to the letter.

‘Come on! Why can’t they open the other kiosks? This is ridiculous.’

It took another thirty minutes for them to pass through immigration. They had no luggage save their carry-on bags, and so they passed quickly through the arrivals hall.

The heat washed over them as soon as they stepped out of the air-conditioned arrivals hall.

Aqil stopped and tried to take it all in. It was a crazy, bustling place. Taxis bullied their way to the kerb as potential fares were shepherded by angry touts. Buses departed for the city. Families struggled with trolleys laden down with luggage. The air was full of the sound of arguments, crying children, the blare of car horns and the roar of jet engines. The sun pressed down on him, woozily hot, baking the asphalt. He was thirsty and hungry.

Yasin looked over the bedlam with bewilderment. ‘We need a taxi.’

Aqil’s attention was drawn to a blacked-out Mercedes Viano people carrier. It came out of a sealed-off area at the side of the main terminal building and nosed into the queue of traffic, the driver leaning on his horn as a taxi tried to cut in front of him. The taxi driver was persistent, and as the horn sounded again, the Viano nudged up against the car’s rear wing. Both vehicles stopped. The taxi driver — a broad-shouldered, deeply tanned man with shoulder-length hair and a prodigious moustache — flung his door open, walked around so that he blocked the Mercedes’ onward progress and then started to curse out the driver at the top of his lungs.

Aqil watched as two things happened at once. First, the driver of the Viano opened his door and went around to confront the driver of the taxi. He was big and mean looking, but the taxi driver did not back away. Rather than doing that, he spat at the man’s feet. It might have been a mistake. The other man drilled him with a sudden punch, knocking his head back and dropping him to the surface of the road.

Second, and simultaneously, the rear door on Aqil’s side of the Mercedes opened. He heard a shout from the cabin and then a flash of movement as a young, blonde girl stepped down onto the sill. He saw her, and behind her, a man and woman of dark complexion, a teenage boy — maybe the same age as the girl — and another, larger man wearing a dark suit. The girl was stopped as the woman wrapped her arms around her waist and started to haul her back. Aqil watched as the girl butted the back of her head into the woman’s face, hard enough to loosen her grip. She was just about to break free completely when the man in the dark suit reached out a hand and grabbed the girl by the top of her arm. Aqil saw the effort on her face as she tried to break his grip, but he was too strong. He yanked her back so that she bumped up against the seat and yanked again so that she fell onto it. The teenage boy reached for the handle and pulled the door until it slid closed again.

It had happened in a matter of seconds, and it was so incongruous that, once the door had closed, Aqil almost doubted that he had seen anything at all.

The driver, who had made his way back to the car, now revved the engine. A space had opened up into the outside lane that promised a faster route to the road away from the airport, and he released the brakes and surged into it.

‘You see that?’ Aqil asked his brother.

‘See what?’

‘The girl—’

‘Taxi!’ Yasin shouted, interrupting him. ‘Come on, it’s stopping. Hurry, Aqil.’

They wheeled their carry-on suitcases across the sidewalk. The taxi driver opened the trunk and put them inside.

‘Royal City Hotel, please,’ Yasin said.

The driver pulled into the queue, and they crawled out to the main road. Aqil distracted himself by going over their plan again. They would start early tomorrow morning. They would leave the hotel, take a taxi to the railway station and then a train to Iskenderun in eastern Turkey. The journey traced the coastline and passed towns with names that Aqil did not recognise: Alanya, Anamur, Icel, Ceyhan. From Iskenderun, they would take a taxi to Reyhanli. That would be where they crossed the border.

The short trip over the wire was known as the Gateway to Jihad. With a shiver of trepidation, Aqil couldn’t help but feel he was teetering on the edge of something momentous, something that would almost certainly change him forever. He felt his stomach dip, but then he realised the unexpected feeling he was experiencing wasn’t excitement. It was fear.