He read the report of the Koran Committee, prepared jointly by the two intelligence officers at the meeting, but it offered him no surprises. To him it was clear the references to Al-Isra, the magical journey of the Prophet through the night, could only be the code for some kind of important project.
That project now had to have a name in-house for the American intelligence community. It could not be Al-Isra; that alone would betray to others what they had found out. He checked with file-cryptography for a name to describe in future how he and all his colleagues would call the Al-Qaeda project, whatever it was.
Code names come out of a computer by a process known as random selection, the aim being to give nothing away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose Stingray, so Project Stingray it became.
The last sheet in the file had been added during Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the Director of National Intelligence. Clearly the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security Committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.
The final sheet was on the DNI’s personal headed paper. It said in capital letters:
WHAT IS AL-ISRA?
IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL?
FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND WHERE.
TIMESCALE: NOW
RESTRAINTS: NONE
POWERS: ABSOLUTE
JOHN NEGROPONTE
There was a scrawled signature. There are nineteen primary intelligence-gathering and archive-storing agencies in the USA. The letter in Marek Gumienny’s hand gave him authority over them all. He ran his eye back to the top of the sheet. It was addressed to him personally. There was a tap on the door.
A young GS4 stood there with yet another delivery. General Schedule is simply a salary scale, a 4 means a very junior staffer. Gumienny gave the young man an encouraging smile; he had clearly never been this high up the building before. Gumienny held out his hand, signed the clipboard to confirm receipt and waited until he was alone again.
The new file was a courtesy from the colleagues at Fort Meade. It was a transcript of a conversation held by two of the Koran eggheads in the car on the way back to Washington. One of them was British. It was his last line that someone at Fort Meade had underlined with a brace of question marks in red ink.
During his time in the Middle East Marek Gumienny had had much to do with the British and, unlike some of his fellow countrymen who had been trying to cope with the hellhole of Iraq for three years, he was not too proud to admit the CIA’s closest allies in what Kipling once called the Great Game were a repository of much arcane knowledge of the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.
For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrators of the old empire, or as eccentric explorers, the British had been trudging over desert, mountain range and goat-pen in the zone that had now become the intelligence time bomb of the world. The British code-named the CIA ‘the Cousins’ or ‘the Company’; the Americans called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service ‘the Friends’ or ‘the Firm’. For Marek Gumienny one of those friends was a man he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times with when they were both field agents. Now he was pinned to a desk in Langley and Steve Hill had been pulled out of the field and elevated to Controller Middle East at the Firm’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters.
Gumienny decided a conference would do no harm and might yield some good. There was no security problem. The Brits, he knew, would have just about everything he had. They too had transmitted the guts of the laptop from Peshawar to their own listening and cryptography HQ at Cheltenham. They too would have printed out its contents. They too would have analysed the strange references to the Koran contained in the coded letters.
What Marek Gumienny had that was probably not with London was the bizarre remark by a British academic in the back of a car in the middle of Maryland. He punched up a number on the console on his desk. Central switchboards are fine up to a point, but modern technology has meant any senior executive can be connected faster by speed-dial on his personal satphone.
A number rang in a modest commuter house in Surrey, just outside London. Eight a.m. in Langley, one p.m. in London; the house was about to sit down to a roast beef lunch. A voice answered at the third ring. Steve Hill had enjoyed his golf and was about to enjoy his beef.
‘Hello?’
‘Steve? Marek.’
‘My dear chap, where are you? Over here by any chance?’
‘No, I’m at my desk. Can we go to secure?’
‘Sure. Give me two minutes . . .’ And in the background: ‘Darling, hold the roast.’ The phone went down.
At the next call the voice from England was slightly tinny but uninterceptable.
‘Am I to understand that something has hit the ventilation system close to your ear?’ asked Hill.
‘All over my nice clean shirt,’ admitted Gumienny. ‘I guess you have much the same stuff as I have out of Peshawar?’
‘I expect so. I finished reading it yesterday. I was wondering when you would call.’
‘I have something you may not have, Steve. We have a visiting professor over here from London. He made a chance remark Friday evening. I’ll cut to the chase. Do you know a man called Martin?’
‘Martin who?’
‘No, that’s his surname. His brother over here is called Dr Terry Martin. Does it ring a bell?’
Steve Hill had dropped all banter. He sat holding the phone and staring into space. Oh yes, he knew the Martin brother. Back in the first Gulf War of 1990/91 he had been one of the control team in Saudi Arabia when the academic’s brother had slipped into Baghdad and lived there as a humble gardener under the noses of Saddam’s secret police while transmitting back priceless intelligence from a source inside the dictator’s cabinet.
‘Could do,’ he conceded. ‘Why?’
‘I think we should talk,’ said the American. ‘Face to face. I could fly over. I have the Grumman.’
‘When do you want to come over?’
‘Tonight. I can sleep on the plane. Be in London for breakfast.’
‘OK. I’ll arrange it with Northolt.’
‘Oh, and Steve, while I’m flying could you get out the full file on this man Martin? I’ll explain when I see you.’
West of London, on the road to Oxford, lies the Royal Air Force base of Northolt. For a couple of years after World War II it was actually London’s civil airport as Heathrow was hastily constructed. Then it relapsed into a role as a secondary airfield and finally a field for private and executive jets. But because it remains an RAF property, flights in and out can be fixed to take place in complete security without the usual formalities.
The CIA has its own very private airfield near Langley and a small fleet of executive jets. Marek Gumienny’s all-powerful piece of authority paper secured him the Grumman V, on which he slept in perfect comfort on the flight over. Steve Hill was at Northolt to meet him.
He took his guest not to the green and sandstone ziggurat at Vauxhall Cross on the south bank of the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge, home of the SIS, but to the much quieter Cliveden Hotel, formerly a private mansion, set inside its own estate not thirty miles from the airport. He had reserved a small conference suite with room service and privacy.
There he read the analysis of the American Koran Committee, which was remarkably similar to the analysis from Cheltenham, and the transcript of the conversation in the back of the car.
‘Damn fool,’ he muttered when he reached the end. ‘The other Arabist was right. It can’t be done. It’s not just the lingo, it’s all the other tests. No stranger, no foreigner could ever pass them.’
‘So, given my orders from the All-High, what would you suggest?’
‘Pick up an AQ insider and sweat it out of him,’ sai
d Hill.
‘Steve, if we had the faintest idea of the location of anyone that high in Al-Qaeda, we’d take them as a matter of course. We don’t have any such target in our sights as of now.’
‘Wait and watch. Someone will use the phrase again.’
‘My people have to presume that if Al-Isra is to be the next spectacular it will be the USA that is the target. Waiting for a miracle that may not happen will not pacify Washington. Besides, AQ must know by now we got the laptop. Chances are they will never use that phrase again, except person to person.’
‘Well,’ said Hill, ‘we could put it about in places they would hear it that we have it all and are closing in. They would discontinue, cut and run.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. But we’d never know. We’d still be in limbo, never knowing whether Project Stingray had been terminated or not. And if not? And if it works? Like my boss says: is it nuclear, biochemical, conventional? Where and when? Can your man Martin really pass for an Arab among Arabs? Is he really that good?’
‘He used to be,’ grunted Hill and passed over a file. ‘See for yourself.’
The file was an inch thick, in standard buff manila, and fronted simply with the words: ‘COLONEL MIKE MARTIN’.
The Martin boys’ maternal grandfather had been a tea-planter at Darjeeling, India, between the two world wars. While there he had done something almost unheard of. He had married an Indian girl.
The world of the British tea-planters was small, remote and snooty. Brides were brought out from England or found among the daughters of the officer class of the Raj. The boys had seen pictures of their grandfather, Terence Granger, tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth and gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger.
And there were pictures of Miss Indira Bohse, gentle, loving and very beautiful. When Terence Granger would not be dissuaded the tea company, rather than create an alternative scandal by firing him, hit on a solution. They posted the young couple to the wilds of Assam, up on the Burmese border.
If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride loved the life up there: a wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers. And there Susan was born in 1930. By 1943 war had rolled towards Assam, the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Terence Granger, though old enough to avoid the army, insisted on volunteering and in 1945 died crossing the River Irrawaddy.
With a tiny widow’s pension from the company, Indira Granger went the only place she could, back into her own culture. Two years later came more trouble; India was being partitioned for independence. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Muslim Pakistan to the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India to the south. Waves of refugees rolled north and south and violent fighting broke out.
Fearing for her daughter’s safety Mrs Granger sent Susan to stay with her late husband’s younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later the mother died in the rioting.
Susan Granger came at seventeen to the land of her fathers, which she had never seen. She spent a year at a girls’ school and three as a nurse at Farnham General Hospital. At twenty-one, the youngest age allowed, she applied to be a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and the skin of an English girl with a honey-gold suntan.
BOAC put her on the London–Bombay route because of her fluent Hindi. The route then was long and slow: London to Rome to Cairo to Basra to Bahrain to Karachi and finally Bombay. No crew could make it all the way; the first crew-change and stopover was at Basra, southern Iraq. There, at the country club in 1951, she met oil company accountant Nigel Martin. They married in 1952.
There was a ten-year wait until the birth of the first son, Mike, and three more years to second son Terry. But the two boys were like chalk and cheese.
Marek Gumienny stared at the photo in the file. Not a suntan but a naturally saturnine complexion, black hair and dark eyes. He realized the genes of the grandmother had jumped a geneation to the grandson; he was not even remotely like his brother the academic in Georgetown, whose pink face and ginger hair came from his father.
He recalled the objections of Dr Ben Jolley. Any infiltrator with a chance of getting away with it inside Al-Qaeda would have to look the part and speak the part. Gumienny skipped through the rest of the boyhood.
They had both gone in succession to the Anglo-Iraqi school and learned also from their dada, or nanny, the gentle plump Fatima from up country, who would go back to the tribe once she had saved enough wages to find a proper young man for a husband.
There was a reference that could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin: the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdash, racing about the lawn of the house in Saadun suburb, Baghdad, and his father’s delighted Iraqi guests laughing with pleasure and shouting, ‘But, Nigel, he’s more like one of us.’
More like one of us, thought Marek Gumienny, more like one of them. Two points down of Ben Jolley’s four: he looked the part and could pass for an Arab in Arabic. Surely with intensive schooling he could master the prayer rituals?
The CIA man read a bit more. Vice-President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq Petroleum in 1972. Nigel Martin had stuck it out three more years before bringing the whole family home in 1975. The boy Mike was thirteen, ready to go to senior school at Haileybury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and a coffee.
‘He could do it, you know,’ he said when he came back from the toilet. ‘With enough training and back-up he really could. Where is he now?’
‘Apart from two stints working for us when we borrowed him, he spent his military career between the Paras and the Special Forces. Retired last year after completing his twenty-five. And no, it wouldn’t work.’
‘Why not, Steve? He has it all.’
‘Except the background. The parentage, the extended family, the birthplace. You don’t just walk into Al-Qaeda except as a youthful volunteer for a suicide mission; a low-level low-life; a gopher. Anyone who would have the trust to get near the gold-standard project in preparation would have to have years behind him. That’s the killer, Marek, and it remains the killer. Unless . . .’
He drifted off into a reverie, then shook his head.
‘Unless what?’ asked the American.
‘No, it’s not on the table,’ said Hill.
‘Indulge me.’
‘I was thinking of a ringer. A man whose place he could take. A doppelgänger. But that’s flawed too. If the real object were still alive, AQ would have him in their ranks. If he were dead, they’d know that too. So no dice.’
‘It’s a long file,’ said Marek Gumienny. ‘Can I take it with me?’
‘It’s a copy, of course. Eyes only?’
‘You have my word, ole buddy. My eyes only. And my personal safe. Or the incinerator.’
The DD Ops flew back to Langley but a few days later he phoned again. Steve Hill took the call at his desk in Vauxhall Cross.
‘I think I should fly back,’ the DDO said without preamble. Both men knew that by then the British Prime Minister in Downing Street had given his friend in the White House his word on total cooperation from the British side on tracking down Project Stingray.
‘No problem, Marek. Do you have a breakthrough?’ Privately Steve Hill was intrigued. With modern technology there is nothing that cannot be passed from the CIA to the SIS in complete secrecy and a matter of seconds. So why fly?
‘The ringer,’ said Gumienny. ‘I think I have him. Ten years younger but looks older. Height and build. Same dark face. An AQ veteran.’
‘Sounds fine. But how come he’s not with the bad guys?’
‘Because he’s with us. He’s in Guantanamo. Has been for five years.’
‘He’s an Arab?’ Hill was surprised; he ought to have known about a high-ranking AQ Arab in Gitmo these past five years.
‘No, he’s an Afgha
n. Name of Izmat Khan. I’m on my way.’
Terry Martin was still sleepless a week after his meeting at Fort Meade. That stupid remark. Why could he not keep his mouth shut? Why did he have to brag about his brother? Supposing Ben Jolley had said something? Washington was one big, gossiping village, after all. Seven days after the remark in the back of the limousine he rang his brother.
Mike Martin was lifting the last clutch of unbroken tiles off his precious roof. At last he could start on the laying of the roofing felt and the battens to keep it down. Within a week he could be waterproof. He heard the tinkling of Lillibulero from his mobile phone. It was in the pocket of his jerkin which was hanging from a nail nearby. He inched across the now dangerously frail rafters to reach it. The screen said it was his brother in Washington.
‘Hi, Terry.’
‘Mike, it’s me.’ He could still not work out how people he was ringing already knew who he was. ‘I’ve done something stupid and I want to ask your pardon. About a week ago I shot my mouth off.’
‘Great. What did you say?’
‘Never mind. Look, if ever you get a visitation from any men in suits – you know who I mean – you are to tell them to piss off. What I said was stupid. If anyone visits—’
From his eagle’s nest Mike Martin could see the charcoal-grey Jaguar nosing slowly up the track that led from the lane to the barn.
‘It’s OK, bro,’ he said gently, ‘I think they’re here.’
The two spymasters sat on folding camp chairs and Mike Martin on the bole of a tree that was about to be chainsawed into bits for camp-fire timber. Martin listened to the ‘pitch’ from the American and cocked an eyebrow at Steve Hill.
‘Your call, Mike. Our government has pledged the White House total cooperation on whatever they want or need, but that stops short of pressuring anyone to go on a no-return mission.’
‘And would this one fit that category?’
‘We don’t think so,’ Marek Gumienny interjected. ‘If we could even discover the name and whereabouts of one single AQ operative who would know what is going down here, we’d pull you out and do the rest. Just listening to the scuttlebutt might do the trick.’