Some were sceptical about playing Secret Santa in a Muslim prison and, except for James, who thought it was a good idea, those who had converted to Islam didn’t want to join in. One of the Muslims who didn’t want to be involved allocated Secret Santas to the hostages. He whispered in Daniel’s ear that he should be Secret Santa for Steven and Daniel started thinking about how he could be pleasant towards him in the coming weeks.

The Christmas season also brought a new acquaintance. Daniel woke abruptly one night in early December when the door to the basement room opened and a new hostage came into the cell. It was a Russian called Sergei Gorbunov. He had a receding hairline and a bushy goatee beard on his chin and didn’t speak any English, but Marc, the Spaniard, could communicate a little with him in Russian.

Sergei told them that he was a Muslim and a scientist and that he had been on his way to an area of Aleppo with some important papers when he was captured. The others couldn’t figure out what he was really doing in Syria. He spoke incoherently and maybe he was a little crazy. But Sergei was good at being a prisoner. He settled in and quickly got into the rhythm. Apparently he had been imprisoned for several years in Russia, and Daniel thought that maybe there wasn’t a lot of difference between an ISIS prison in Syria and a Russian state prison. The everyday routines were probably much the same.

Sergei was also good at chess, even though he cheated and moved his knight in a non-regulation manner. But not everyone was enthusiastic about the Russian. Pierre didn’t like his energy and kept his distance. He thought that Sergei had come in with animalistic tendencies, where he attacked the weak and obeyed the strong. Most of all, Pierre’s aversion was the result of his own efforts to maintain a civilized level of behaviour, a little dignity in the midst of a world in which they were controlled by the Beatles.

· * ·

The hostages were dragged out of the cell one at a time. When it was Daniel’s turn, he was thrown on to the floor of a room in which one of the Brits sat behind a table. On the table were a small computer and a sub-machine gun. Daniel was on his knees and handcuffed, staring at the floor in front of him, while the hooded guard asked him his name and why he had come to Syria.

‘Would you like to go home? Who can pay for you?’ were the next questions.

‘My family doesn’t have any money, but they’ll do everything they can to pay a ransom,’ replied Daniel.

‘If nobody pays, we’ll shoot you,’ said the guard, getting up and sticking a pistol barrel into Daniel’s mouth.

‘Do you want to die now or will you tell us what possibilities there are?’

Daniel calmly gave him a signal with his hand that he wanted to say something and, when the barrel was removed from his mouth, he told them how much he was insured for and reeled off email addresses for Susanne, Kjeld and his sisters.

‘Have you heard of Guantánamo?’

Daniel nodded.

‘What can you tell us about the place?’

He tried to say as little as possible about the US detention camp in Cuba, where there was evidence of widespread torture. The Brits were rough, uncompromising and unpleasant.

‘I know they’re holding Muslim prisoners who have been treated very badly,’ said Daniel.

‘It’s your duty to know. You are part of the democracy that holds these people prisoner,’ said the guard, emphasizing every word as he continued to outline how Daniel was complicit in the mistreatment of Muslims in western democracies.

‘This is our response to how the West is treating our brothers.’

Daniel nodded again, knowing that the Beatles had previously subjected some of the hostages to a method of torture called waterboarding, which they had imported from Guantánamo. This involved putting a cloth over the prisoners’ faces and pouring gallons of water over them so that they felt as if they were drowning.

The guard punched Daniel hard in the torso and led him back to the cell. His ribs were aching, but he was surprised that he hadn’t reacted to having a pistol stuck in his mouth – as if he were indifferent to dying. Maybe his body had stopped feeling fear. Maybe he was just tired and had become immune to death threats.

The other hostages had also had email addresses demanded of them, which made the British and Americans happy. It was the first sign that contact might be made with their families. Until now, James had always been told that he would never be going home. Sergei was the only one who had no email address to give the Beatles. The prisoners talked a lot about what this demand for email addresses meant, while simultaneously getting involved in their Secret Santa roles.

Steven slept by Daniel’s feet and some evenings Daniel would wrap him up in the blanket like a sausage, from his shoulders all the way down his body and around his feet. When Steven got up, Daniel would wish him good morning, and every time Steven suggested a game of chess, he would volunteer to be his opponent. He consistently took part in Steven’s yoga classes three times a week and asked afterwards whether Steven would tell him about Israel and Palestine. The American was Jewish, something they never mentioned in front of the guards.

One day, beside his sleeping place, Daniel found a small boat shaped out of the wrapper from a packet of butter. In his universe, this gift from his Secret Santa symbolized freedom. The foil boat could drift wherever it wanted, depending on where Daniel’s thoughts led it. The Secret Santa game was creating a larger mental space in the cell.

The daily guards who brought them food mainly spoke French. They called themselves Abu Idriss and Abu Mohammed and they acted professionally by keeping a distance and addressing the prisoners with the formal vous instead of the informal tu when they took them out to the toilet and brought them food.

Pierre also recognized a third French guard, Abu Omar, whom he had met when he first arrived at the hospital in Aleppo. He had evidently moved with them to the Dungeon, as the hostages called the prison. Sometimes, when Abu Omar was on duty, the prisoners didn’t get any food, and the first time he came into the cell, his face wasn’t covered.

Maybe it was the presence of Pierre and the other Frenchmen that got Abu Omar hanging out with them in their cell. He really enjoyed talking about the French police, the former Yugoslavia and the so-called Roubaix gang – a terrorist cell whose members had been in Bosnia during the war in 1992 and who had robbed and attacked several places in France throughout the 1990s. A large-scale attack against a police building in Lille in 1996 had failed, however, when their home-made bomb had destroyed only the Peugeot they had parked outside.

While other people had their favourite actors, Abu Omar had his favourite major criminals, which Pierre interpreted to mean that he personally wanted to become a famous felon. Little did Pierre know, but Abu Omar would later fulfil his wish. His name was in fact Mehdi Nemmouche. He had Algerian roots and, in 2014, he was accused of killing four people in an attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. According to prosecutors, the twenty-nine-year-old French national from Roubaix admitted to carrying out the attack, which had been caught on the museum’s security cameras. On 24 May he ran into the museum, took a Kalashnikov out of his bag and shot and killed two Israeli tourists and a Frenchman, while a fourth victim, a Belgian employee of the museum, later died of his wounds. Mehdi Nemmouche managed to flee on foot and got as far as Marseille before being apprehended.

It was the first attack in Europe in which the perpetrator had a connection to ISIS.

Although Abu Omar probably beat the Syrian inmates in the prison – some of the hostages thought they heard it happening – it was still the British guards they feared the most. When the Beatles were in the room, no one knew what was going to happen.