* * *
It was late at night, the sun would soon be up. Styrk and Veslemøy were looking into flights to Oslo. Sadiq sat in his new hotel, in a room provided by PST, looking at the telephone that lay charging. It made a ticking sound for each new message coming from Styrk.
He did not pick it up.
What a mess. Mehmut would be coming to the Antakya Huyuk in the morning as arranged. Should he call and tell him he had changed his hotel, that PST and the Turkish security authorities had taken over running things inside Turkey? No, best not complicate matters. If he told Mehmut, he would relay the news to Osman and he might call the whole thing off. He would just not turn up, not answer the phone, lie low.
Sadiq had been caught unawares. Losing control was not something he had considered. He had believed he could handle it all, get all the help offered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from the embassy, from PST, from the Turkish authorities, and still call the shots. He had thought he could let Styrk or Veslemøy, who also paid all his bills, film while he, in effect, was the director. Now all of a sudden it was a police operation.
He lay in bed thinking about Osman on the other side, about the driver who was going to pick up the girls in Raqqa, get them in the vehicle, and drive them out. The secret operation had to be kept under wraps. The driver might face arrest when they made it to the border. The last thing Osman—a smuggler of weapons, ammunition, people, anything—wanted was to come to the attention of the Turkish police. Should he let him know? Or just let the driver be taken by the Turks?
He would have to see how it panned out.
He lay thinking about something he was constantly trying to put to the back of his mind: When the vehicle made it to Raqqa, how were they going to get the girls in?
The driver had asked Osman the same thing. The note from their father was not going to be of much use if they did not want to go home.
Osman had just replied, “Figure it out.”
He switched on the TV, zapped to the al-Jazeera news channel. Aleppo. Civilians, children among them, lay dead after a rocket strike. The reporter said something about Raqqa being hit, but there were no pictures. Maybe the girls were killed before they got out?
He watched the footage of the war taking place just over the border. Syrians dying.
We want to help Muslims, his daughters had written. But there was only death in their wake.
Sadiq had told PST that it was now a matter of days. The policemen had passed the message on to the Norwegian embassy in Ankara. The following day the two PST men met with Sadiq for an update on how the rescue operation in Syria was proceeding. Were the girls en route?
Osman was impossible to reach. The day was spent waiting.
The PST men were in regular contact with their superiors back home, who in turn were in touch with the Turks. The embassy in Ankara had dispatched two employees to help in Hatay. Being mindful of the girls’ attitudes toward interaction with men, they had taken care that one of them was a woman. Then, was homesickness the reason the girls wanted to leave, or were there others? The embassy had taken security precautions in that respect, but what was most important was to try to attend to the girls’ needs; the diplomats had seen to it that an ambulance would be standing by just in case. After all, there was no way of knowing what state the girls would be in.
Sadiq had been very clear about the girls’ wish to flee the Islamic State. Their situation was desperate. Now, the diplomats and the police were waiting. The paperwork was ready. Sadiq had signed papers saying he accepted the fine the girls would incur for illegally crossing the border. It was a formality, as the money would come from the embassy budget. He had also put his name to travel documents for Leila, who was under eighteen. The consular section had organized these documents, so-called laissez-passer, so that the girls could fly from Hatay to Oslo, and would not be arrested by the Turks.
Like the diplomats and the policemen, Sadiq sat around, got to his feet, sat down in a different chair, shifted position in his seat. He went out to smoke. His smartphone lay on the table. Nothing demands more attention than a telephone that is silent.
After much toing and froing, Styrk and Veslemøy had booked tickets on the earliest flight on Sunday morning; it was exactly a week since they had left Oslo. When they came down to the reception counter at dawn to check out, they were informed that Sadiq had left the hotel. They assumed he was arrested and settled his bill.
On Monday morning, back in Oslo, Styrk went to PST headquarters. Sadiq was not responding to his texts. Was he being held in custody? Had they taken his phone from him? Was he under arrest? The film director was fuming about missing the opportunity to get footage of the girls crossing the border, furious that PST would be the ones waiting to meet them, not him and Veslemøy.
At PST headquarters he was met with a wall of silence.
Nobody told him that PST had traveled to Hatay at Sadiq’s request, that they had been cooperating on this for a long time, and that Sadiq had kept the film crew in the dark.
* * *
“Is he going to call soon?” Nils asked.
“About time he got in touch, isn’t it?” Bjørn asked.
“I never know when Osman will ring,” Sadiq answered.
“Has he called?” they asked a little later. Sometimes one of them would go out and come back in again to hear if
