Behind the Sun: An suspenseful thriller set during the Syrian Revolution by Amelia Smith

Author:Amelia Smith [Smith, Amelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Before he left for work Sharif kissed his two daughters on the head, laid his hands on their backs one by one and watched them breathe in and out. It wasn’t often these days he saw them awake, which caused a certain level of friction between him and his wife, but if he was honest, he found his children easier to deal with when they were sleeping. There was a lot of noise in the daytime, and he found it hard to concentrate.

In the beginning he had found it relatively easy to maintain a healthy work life balance but as he had been put up for more and more promotions this became harder to manage. His home life suffered but when he looked back on the path he had taken to get to where he was today he felt an overwhelming sense of pride. At first he had joined the infantry, then found out that the State Security Branch in Aleppo 290 was recruiting from within the army so he submitted his request to join and was accepted. Sharif noticed with satisfaction how his own relations with the people around him had changed. They stood up for him when he entered the room, offered him their chairs and gave him extra large portions of food. They were keen to be respected by him. They were scared of him.

Sharif enjoyed the privileges that came with the job but he often told himself that what came first was the system. So he was serving the system and enjoying the rewards of that, rather than serving the system as a means to get straight to the reward.

That said Sharif believed there was no such thing as blind faith, whether that concerned religion, politics or work. A case in point is the way terrorists are dealt with. There needed to be a more personal way of getting to them, a more calculated way to make them suffer than the physical torture favoured by most of his colleagues. In fact, he thought the ease with which other officers roughed up the prisoners was proof to him that they were no good at their job. It wasn’t that he was against it. It’s just that he thought psychological torture was harder to bear in the long term.

One of the biggest crises of self-doubt for Sharif was when a prisoner dragged their heels on divulging information. He liked to think of himself as a well-oiled machine, able at any time to extract accurate information from the people who cheated the system. When it didn’t go well it made him angry.

When Yusuf had failed to live up to the standards he set for him Sharif had sent him to the black room. He had come back bruised. Perhaps bruised isn’t the right word, he was barely breathing. He hadn’t asked for that, what if he couldn’t speak. That was what he had been trying to explain, torture is not always the best way to get information out of people.

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