“Tomorrow will suit fine. A thousand dollars for your trouble. Keep the balance if you say yes. Give it back if you walk away.”
“And how do you know I will? Give it back?”
The Tracker rose to leave.
“Mr. Weller, I think we both know the rules. We have been round the block a few times.”
When he was gone, leaving a rendezvous and time well away from the embassy, Brian Weller went through the firebrick. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Five for outgoings; the Yank would provide the hideaway. He had two girls to educate, a wife to keep, food to put on the table and skills not really marketable at the vicarage tea party.
He made the rendezvous, brought a mate from the same commando unit and spent a week vetting the job. Then he said yes.
• • •
Ali Abdi screwed up his courage and went to see al-Afrit.
“Things are going well,” he reported. “We will secure a fine big ransom for the Malmö.”
Then he broached another subject.
“The blond boy. If he dies, it will complicate matters, create delays, reduce the ransom.”
He did not mention the prospect of European commandos storming ashore on a rescue mission, his personal nightmare. It might just provoke the man he faced.
“Why should he die?” growled the warlord.
Abdi shrugged.
“Who knows? Infection, blood poisoning.”
He got his way. There was a doctor in Garacad with at least the knowledge of basic first aid. The cadet’s welts were disinfected and bandaged. He was still being kept in the cellars, and there was nothing Abdi could or dared do about that.
• • •
That is deer-stalking country,” said the man at the sporting agency. “But the stags are coming into rut, so the close of season is not far off.”
The Tracker smiled. He was playing the harmless American tourist again.
“Aw, the stags are safe from me. No, I just want to write my book, and for that I need absolute peace and quiet. No phones, no roads, no callers, no interruptions. A nice cabin off the beaten track where I can write the Great American Novel.”
The land agent knew a bit about authors. Weird people. He tapped his keyboard again and stared at the screen.
“There is a small stalking lodge on our books,” he conceded. “Free until the shooting season starts again.”
He rose and went to a wall map. He checked the grid reference and then tapped a pristine section of the map that was unmarked by towns, villages or even roads. A few spidery tracks ran across it, in northern Caithness, the last county of Scotland before the wild Pentland Firth.
“I have some pictures.”
He led back to the computer screen and scrolled up a portfolio of pictures. It was a log cabin, all right, set in an endless sea of rolling heather, a huge glen framed by high hills; the sort of place where a city slicker, making a run for it with two Marines after him, might get five hundred yards before collapsing.
It had two bedrooms, a large main room, kitchen and shower room, a huge fireplace and a pile of logs.
“I surely think I have found my Shangri-la,” said the tourist/writer. “I have not had time to set up a checking account. Will cash dollars do?”
Cash dollars did very well. Exact directions and keys would be sent within days, but to Hamworthy.
• • •
Mustafa Dardari chose not to have a car or drive himself in London. The parking was an abiding nightmare he could well do without. In his part of Knightsbridge, cruising cabs were constant and convenient, if expensive. Not a problem. But for the smart evening out, a black-tie dinner, he used a limousine company; always the same firm and usually the same driver.
He had been dining with friends a mile from his home, and as he made his farewells, he used his mobile to call the driver to come to the portico, where double yellow lines forbade all parking day or night. Around the corner, the driver responded, switched on the engine and touched the accelerator. The car moved a yard before one of the rear tires settled on its rim.
An examination revealed some rogue had slipped a small square of plywood pierced by a needle-sharp steel nail under the tread while the driver dozed at the wheel. The driver rang his client and explained. He would change the tire, but it was a big, heavy limo and would take a while.
As Mr. Dardari stood under the portico with the other guests departing around him, a cab came around the corner, light on. He raised his hand. It swerved toward him. Luck. He climbed aboard and gave his address. And the cab did indeed set off in that direction.
Cabbies in London are required to activate the rear door locks as soon as the client is seated. It prevents passengers from “doing a runner” without paying, but it also stops them being molested by troublemakers trying to climb in beside them. But this fool seemed to have forgotten.
They were barely out of sight of the limousine driver, crouched over his jack, than the cab swerved to the curb, and a burly figure pulled open the door and climbed in. Dardari protested that this cab was taken. But the burly figure slammed the door behind him and said:
“That’s right, squire. By me.”
The Pakistani tycoon was enveloped in a bear hug by one arm while the other arm jammed a large pad soaked in chloroform over his mouth and nose. In twenty seconds, he had stopped struggling.
The transfer to the minivan was made a mile later, where the third ex-commando was at the wheel. The cab, borrowed from a mate who had taken up cabs for a living, was parked as promised with the keys under the seat.
Two of the men sat behind the driver with their dozing guest propped between them, until they were well clear of north London. Then he was tucked in a single bed behind the seats. Twice he tried to wake up but each time was eased back into slumber.
It was a long drive, but they did it in fourteen hours, guided by a GPS locator and a SatNav guide. It took some pushing and shoving to get the minivan up the last section of track, but they arrived at sundown, and Brian Weller made a phone call. There were no masts up there, but he had brought a sat phone.
The Tracker called Ariel, but on his dedicated and secure line that not even Fort Meade or Cheltenham would be listening to. It was midafternoon in Centerville, Virginia.
“Ariel, you know that computer in London you gutted some time back? Could you now send e-mail messages that appear to be coming from it?”
“Of course, Colonel. I have its access right here.”
“And you don’t have to leave Virginia, right?”
Ariel was perplexed that anyone alive could be so naïve in the matters of cyberspace. With what he had at his fingertips, he could become Mustafa Dardari, transmitting from Pelham Crescent, London.
“And you recall the code based on fruit and vegetable prices that the user used to send in? Could you encrypt text in the same code?”
“Of course, sir. I broke it, I can re-create it.”
“Just the way it was? As if the old user was back at the computer keys?”
“Identical.”
“Great. I want you to send a message from the protocol in London to the receiver in Kismayo. Do you have pencil and paper?”
“Do I have what?”
“I know it’s old-fashioned, but I want to stick to secure phone, not e-mail, just in case.”
There was a pause while Ariel slithered down his ladder and returned with pieces of equipment he barely knew how to use. The Tracker dictated his message.
The message was encrypted in exactly the same code Dardari would have used, then it was sent. As everything from Dardari to Somalia was now taped, it was heard by Fort Meade and Cheltenham and decrypted again.
There were some raised eyebrows at both listening posts, but the orders were to eavesdrop but not interfere. According to standing orders, Fort Meade sent a copy to TOSA, which passed it on to the Tracker, who accepted it with a straight face.
In Kismayo it was not the Troll, now dead, who received it but his replacement, J
amma, the former secretary. He decoded it word by word, using the crib the Troll had left behind. But he was no expert, even if there had been a slip. But there was not. Even the required typos were in place.
Because it is cumbersome to send by e-mail in Urdu or Arabic, Dardari, the Troll and the Preacher had always used English. The new message was in English, which Jamma, a Somali, knew, but not with the same fluency. But he knew enough to know this was important and should be brought to the Preacher without delay.
He was one of the few who knew the Preacher’s apparent appearance on the Internet to recant all his teachings was phony because his master had made no broadcasts for over three weeks. But he knew that across the great Muslim diaspora in the West, most of the fan base was disgusted. He had seen the posted comments, hour after hour. But his own loyalty was undimmed. He would make the long and wearisome journey back to Marka with the message from London.
Just as Jamma was convinced he had been listening to Dardari, Fort Meade and Cheltenham were convinced the pickle tycoon was at his desk in London, assisting his friend in Somalia.
The real Dardari was staring miserably out at the driving, early-September rain, while behind him, in front of a roaring fire, three former Marine commandos were having a laughter-filled ramble down memory lane and all the fights they had been in. Curtains of gray cloud swept down across the glen and hurled water onto the roof.
In the blistering heat of Kismayo, the loyal Jamma filled the petrol tank of the pickup for that night’s long haul to Marka.
In London, Gareth Evans transferred the first million of Harry Andersson’s dollars to Abdi’s secret account in Grand Cayman and reckoned that in three more weeks he would have the Malmö, cargo and crew back on the high seas with a NATO destroyer escort.
In an embassy safe house in London, the Tracker wondered if his fish would bite. As dusk settled on Virginia, he called TOSA headquarters.
“Gray Fox, I think I may need the Grumman. Could you send it back to Northolt for me?” he said.
12
The Preacher sat in his study inside his compound in Marka and thought about his enemy. He was no fool, and he knew he had one out there somewhere. The phony sermon on his website that had effectively destroyed his reputation proved it.
For ten years, he had deliberately made himself the most elusive of the al-Qaeda terrorists. He had moved from safe house to safe house in the mountains of North and South Waziristan. He had changed name and appearance. He had forbidden any camera to come near him.
Unlike a dozen, at least, now all dead, he had never used a mobile phone, for, unlike some of them, he knew the full scope of the American ability to pluck the tiniest whisper out of cyberspace, track the source to a single hut and blow both building and occupants to dust.
With one single exception, which he now bitterly regretted, he had never e-mailed anyone from the house in which he resided. He had always had his sermons of hate transmitted miles away from his residence.
Yet someone had penetrated. The actor on the phony sermon was too like him. The man who looked like him and spoke like him had announced to the world his real name and the pseudonym he had used as an executioner in the Khorosan.
He did not know how or why or who had betrayed him, but he had to accept that his pursuer could well have penetrated the real identity protocol of his computer in Kismayo. He did not understand how it could have been done, for the Troll had assured him it was impossible. But the Troll was dead.
He knew about drones. He had read volumes printed in the Western press about them and what they could do. He could presume that, even then, there were details that had never been divulged, even to the technical publications. He had to presume he had been traced and that, far above his head, invisible, inaudible, a circling machine was watching his town and even his compound.
All this had led him to the conviction that he would have to sever all contacts with his present life and disappear again. Then Jamma arrived from Kismayo with a message from his friend Mustafa in London that changed everything. It concerned fifty million dollars. He summoned his former secretary, now the Troll’s replacement.
“Jamma, my brother, you are tired. It is a long journey. Rest, sleep, eat well. You will not be going back to Kismayo. It is abandoned. But there is another journey for you. Tomorrow, perhaps the next day.”
• • •
Gray Fox was puzzled. His voice on the secure line from TOSA headquarters to the Tracker’s operations room in the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square revealed it.
“Tracker, are you up to speed on the traffic between the helper in London and his pal in Marka?”
“Absolutely. Why?”
“The stuff he has been passing to the Preacher. He picked that up from a half-assed lawyer at a Belgravia dinner party.”
The Tracker thought over his reply. There is a subtle difference between lying and being what a former British cabinet secretary once described as “economical with the truth.”
“That’s what Dardari seems to be saying.”
“What do the Brits think?”
“They think,” said the Tracker quite truthfully, “that the bastard is sitting in his London town house, passing scuttlebutt to his friend in the south. By the by, are my requests still getting a no-no from upstairs?”
He wanted to get the subject away from the issue of Mustafa Dardari, messaging out of London, when he was staring at the rain in Caithness with three former commandos for company.
“Absolutely, Tracker. No missiles because of Agent Opal and no beach assaults. And no heli-borne attacks from our compound in Mogadishu. One shoulder-fired rocket into a hovering helicopter full of Delta boys and we have another Somali catastrophe. You’ll have to find another way.”
“Yes, boss,” said the Tracker as he put the phone down.
• • •
The Preacher was right about the uselessness of his Kismayo computer for secret transmissions, but he did not realize that his ally in London, his boyhood friend and secret supporter, had also been unmasked, and his encrypted messages, shielded inside the vegetable price code, had also been broken. So he broke security again and sent Dardari a request from Marka. It was intercepted and deciphered.
• • •
Colonel Jackson?”
“Yes, Ariel.”
“There’s some very weird stuff going between Marka and London.”
“You should know, Ariel. You’re sending it in Dardari’s name.”
“Yeah, but Marka has just replied. He is asking his friend to lend him a million dollars.”
He should have foreseen it. Certainly the budget could stand it. That sum was just a fraction of a single missile. But why waste tax dollars?
“Does he say how he wants it to be sent?”
“Something called Dahabshiil.”
Tracker nodded, alone in his London office. He knew about it. Cunning and safe and almost untraceable. Based on the centuries-old figure of the hundi man.
Terrorism costs money, a lot of money. Behind the bomb-planting dupes, often no more than children, are the controllers, usually mature men who have no intention of dying. Somewhere behind them are the ring chieftans, and behind them are the financiers, often leading lives of apparent respectability.
For antiterrorist agencies, the money sources for terrorism have proved a fertile field for tracing the paper trail from operating account back to its source. For money movement leaves a paper trail. But the hundi man does not. In the Middle East, the system goes back many centuries.
It started because back then moving wealth through a landscape teeming with bandits was too dangerous without a small army. So the hundi man takes the money in country A and authorizes his cousin to disburse the same amount, minus commission, to the beneficiary in country B. No money moved across borders, just coded phone call or e-mail.
Dahabshiil was founded in Burco, Somalia, in 1970, presently headquartered in Dubai. In Somali, it just means “gold smelter,” and mainl
y remits money earned by the hundreds of thousands of Somalis working abroad back to their families in the homeland. Many of the Somali diaspora are in Britain, accounting for a flourishing office in London.
“Could you break into Dardari’s banking system?” asked the Tracker.
“I don’t see why not, Colonel. Can you give me a day?”
Ariel went back to his glowing screen and into seventh heaven. He delved into the Pakistani tycoon’s investments and his means of purchasing them, which led him to the offshore accounts, of which the principal was in Grand Cayman. It was protected by complex and sophisticated firewalls. The teenager with Asperger’s syndrome in an attic in Virginia went through them in ten hours, transferred a million dollars to Dardari’s personal London account and departed without leaving a trace, except confirmation that Dardari himself had done it legitimately.
The transfer from a London bank to the London office of Dahabshiil was a formality, along with details of the beneficiary, as listed by the Preacher in the e-mail that Ariel had intercepted and decoded. The Somali money brokerage warned that such a sum in U.S. dollars inside Somalia would take up to three days to assemble. And, yes, they had a branch in Marka.
Fort Meade and Cheltenham intercepted and logged the communications to and from the London computer but had no information other than the presumption it was Dardari sending and receiving. And their brief was to eavesdrop but not interfere.
• • •
Jamma, I have a task for you of great delicacy. It can only be done by a Somali because it involves people who speak no other language.”
With all its sophistication, Western technology can rarely intercept the personal emissary. For ten years, Osama bin Laden, not living in a cave at all but in a series of safe houses, communicated with supporters worldwide without once using a cell phone or being eavesdropped upon. He used personal messengers. It was the last of these, al-Kuwaiti, who was unmasked, tracked across the world and who finally led the followers to a compound in the town of Abbottabad.
The Preacher stood Jamma in front of him and recited the message in Arabic. Jamma translated it in his head into Somali and kept repeating it until he was word-perfect. He took one Pakistani bodyguard with him and departed.