I Am Pilgrim
So what was its meaning, a death certificate from so long ago? It took only a moment to see the answer, and it was worse than anything I could have imagined. I felt my stomach knot and, I have to admit, for a few terrible heartbeats I felt like giving up.
But I knew that one of the hallmarks of every successful mission – perhaps of life itself – was a determination never to retreat, never to surrender. What was that verse of Whisperer’s? ‘To go to your God like a soldier.’
There were a hundred pairs of eyes focused on my back, and I turned to face them. ‘He’s not dead,’ I said, with total conviction. ‘It’s impossible, he has a six-year-old son – we’ve seen the DNA.’
I saw the alarm spread through their ranks – was I claiming that Saudi intelligence had made a mistake or was incompetent? What a fool I was. In my distraction and despair, I had forgotten the importance of flattery and good manners. I grabbed the oars and rowed back fast.
‘Of course, it takes an organization with the skill and experience of the Mabahith – to say nothing of its exalted leadership – to see things that we never could.’ It was so saccharine it could have induced diabetes, but it did the trick: everybody relaxed, smiling and nodding.
I indicated the document. ‘I believe that in the last weeks of the conflict Zakaria al-Nassouri bought his own death certificate – either in the backstreets of Kabul or by bribing an Afghan official to issue it.’
‘Why?’ the director asked.
‘Because he had been a muj. He knew that people like us would always be dogging him. Maybe even then he was planning to fight a far bigger war.
‘Once his old identity was dead, he took a new one. It wasn’t hard. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran – the whole region was in chaos, corruption everywhere.’
I paused, face to face with my failure. ‘I think somehow he acquired a new passport.’
The director stared. ‘You understand?’ he said. ‘That means we don’t know his name, his nationality, what flag he’s travelling under—’
‘You’re right – nothing,’ I said, trying to hide the devastation I was feeling.
‘But somewhere,’ I continued, ‘somebody in the Arab world has heard about a man of the right age, an ex-muj, an exile, whose father was executed in Saudi. How many of them could there be? We have to find that thread.’
The director thought about it and I imagined the seconds ticking away on his million-dollar watch. ‘If there’s anything, it wouldn’t be in the computerized files,’ he said at last, thinking out loud. ‘We would have already run across it. Maybe in the paper files … there could be something, a long time back.’
He spoke harshly in Arabic, issuing orders. By the flurry of urgent activity, I guessed that they were being told to call in reinforcements, to drag in more analysts and researchers, to summon men long since retired who might remember something. Dozens of the more senior agents scrambled to their feet, grabbed their laptops and cigarettes and headed for the elevators.
The director pointed at them. ‘That’s the main search party – they will start going through the paper files. I’ve got another two hundred men on the way, but I can promise it won’t be fast. There’s an apartment upstairs – why don’t you get some rest?’
I thanked him, but I knew I couldn’t. I looked at my watch: it was six hours until I had to make a call to the two men waiting in the Oval Office. I turned to the window and stared out at the star-strewn night. Somewhere out there was a desert so vast they called it the Sea of Emptiness and I thought again of the Saracen.
T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – knew something about that part of the world and the nature of men. He said that the dreamers of the day were dangerous people – they tried to live their dreams to make them come true. Zakaria al-Nassouri’s day-dream was to destroy us all. Mine was to catch him. I wondered which one of us would wake in the morning and find that their nightmare had begun.
Chapter Seven
THE CORRIDORS RAN for miles. On either side, twenty-feet-high motorized storage racks stood like monoliths – enter a reference number, a name or any other data on a control panel, and the racks moved silently to reveal the relevant archive boxes. It was like standing inside a computer hard drive.
There were eighteen identical floors, all filled with paper archives: the raw data of decade after decade of surveillance, betrayal and suspicion. Hidden far beneath the Mabahith’s regional headquarters, linked together by a central atrium, the complex was overrun by men searching the storage racks and hauling out archive boxes. The director had been as good as his word and had pulled in every agent and analyst he could find.
I had made my way down from the conference room and taken a seat beside several of the senior agents at a command post suspended out over the atrium. I watched as teams of men on every floor unbundled yellowing paper files and searched through mountains of data looking for any reference – any mention at all – of a man whose father had been executed in Saudi Arabia all those years ago.
Three hours of watching them plough through files in Arabic, three hours in a windowless vault with guys who didn’t touch alcohol but smoked thirty a day, three hours of counting every minute, and I was as close to desperate as I ever wanted to be. Naturally, when one of my neighbours said that the first squad was heading out to interview people who might be able to contribute something to the lost narrative, I grabbed my jacket to join them.
The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day. We gathered up eight more of their colleagues on the way and rolled in a convoy of four black SUVs with so much makhfee on the windows it was like travelling in permanent midnight. I’m certain, though, it fulfilled its real purpose admirably: no ordinary civilian who saw them passing could have failed to be afraid.
For mile after mile we criss-crossed the sprawling city – four and a half million souls marooned in the middle of the desert, seemingly half of them employed by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company – and interviewed people about a family which had long since vanished. We sat in the majlis – the formal sitting rooms – of poor houses way out in the suburbs and questioned men whose hands were trembling, we saw dark-eyed kids watching from shadowy doorways and glimpsed veiled women in floor-length burqas hurrying away at our approach. We visited an elderly man called Sa’id bin Abdullah bin Mabrouk al-Bishi – he was the state executioner who had beheaded al-Nassouri’s father – in the hope that in his last moments the condemned man had said something about the career and future he had wanted for his son. After that we drove to a modest villa close enough to the water to smell the salt and, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I took a photo of it on my cellphone. It was al-Nassouri’s childhood home and we questioned the man who had moved in after the family had fled in case he had heard something in the following years.
Nobody knew anything.
Finally, we took a break, pulling into a roadside shack for coffee. We were sitting outside, listening to the idiot in his twenties go on about some chick he had met in Morocco, when a cellphone rang and I was asked to return immediately.
The team was gathered in an open-plan research area on one side of the atrium, the air filled with cigarette smoke. The director stood at a table, an archive box in front of him, plenty more of them piled on the floor. Spilling out of them were field reports, interviews with informers and records of hearsay and gossip.
The director said that they had accessed a box containing what had been thought to be worthless material concerning a number of conservative mosques in Bahrain.
‘There was one slim file which proved to be of interest,’ he said. ‘It dealt with a small mosque on the outskirts of Manama, the capital.’ He looked at me to make sure I realized the significance of what he had said.
‘Zakaria al-Nassouri’s mosque?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral, battling a surge of hope.
He nodded. ‘The file contained the usu
al empty analysis and a few incomplete logs of membership, but buried among it was this …’ He held up a three-page document in Arabic.
‘About five years ago a low-level field agent interviewed a Saudi aid worker who had delivered food and medicine to the refugees in the Gaza Strip. While he was unloading trucks at a dilapidated hospital, he heard about a man who had been brought in earlier in the evening after an Israeli rocket attack.
‘When his work was done he went up to see the wounded man to find out if there was anything he could do to help. The man, with shrapnel wounds near his spine, was going in and out of delirium, and the aid worker ended up sitting with him through the night.’
The director paused, looking at the document, checking his facts. ‘It appeared the wounded man was a doctor and, at one stage, semi-delirious, he mentioned he used to be a member of the mosque in Manama. That was how the report ended up in this particular file.
‘Everybody assumed he was a Bahraini. But he couldn’t have been because, much later on, again in his delirium, he said his father had been publicly beheaded—’
I sat forward so quickly I was lucky not to fall off the chair. ‘Bahrain doesn’t do that,’ I said.
‘Exactly – only one country does.’
‘Saudi,’ I replied.
‘Yes. It appears the man had been travelling in a car with his Palestinian wife and child when it was rocketed – whether the vehicle was targeted or if it was collateral damage, nobody knows.
‘The woman died, but not immediately. In his rambling account, he said that he was holding her and she made him promise – promise before God – that he would protect their child. The little boy had survived with minor injuries—’
‘Praise be unto Allah,’ the whole room said in Arabic.
‘But the mother knew,’ the director continued, ‘that for him the tragedy was doubly great. Not only had he lost her but he also suffered—’
‘From Down’s syndrome,’ I said with sudden certainty.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s definitely him – al-Nassouri,’ I said, getting to my feet, having to work off the flood of nervous energy. ‘It’s his son – I know the boy. Where did the hospital send the child – to an orphanage?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Run by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade – I’ve seen the receipts.’ At last I understood why Leyla Cumali hadn’t sent the money to Unicef.
‘What else?’ I asked, probably more harshly than manners dictated, but we were on a roll and nobody noticed.
‘The dead woman’s name was Amina Ebadi – at least that was one name she used: many of the Palestinian activists use aliases or noms de guerre. We’ve done a search on her, but can’t find anything.’
‘Yes, but what about him – what about the doctor?’ I asked, my voice crackling with intensity. ‘Did the aid worker get the name he was using?’
‘That was a strange thing – the doctor was in terrible shape but, when the aid worker returned the following night, he’d discharged himself. Probably scared about what he might have said when he was rambling—’
‘His name, Director? Did he get a name?’
‘No.’
I stared at him. ‘There’s nothing?! Nothing more?’
He nodded. ‘We’ve been through everything. The original report wasn’t followed up. It didn’t seem to have any significance—’
‘Until now,’ I said bitterly. I tilted my head back and tried to breathe. The news seemed to have sucked the air – and the energy – out of the room. The agents and the director kept watching me, but I tried to think.
I knew more about Zakaria al-Nassouri than any covert agent had a right to. I knew he was born and raised in Jeddah, that he had stood in anguish in the square where his father was beheaded and that his mother had taken him to live in exile in Bahrain. I knew the name of the mosque he had joined in Manama and that his fellow worshippers had arranged for him to go to Afghanistan and fight the Soviets. At the end of the war he had bought a death certificate, somehow acquired a new passport and vanished into the trackless Arab world. He had studied medicine, graduated as a doctor, met a woman who sometimes used the name Amina Ebadi and married her. Together they had worked on the undocumented and lawless frontier – the refugee camps of Gaza: a hell on earth if ever there was one. I now knew that the married couple were travelling with their young child when they were hit by an Israeli rocket, killing the mother and injuring the doctor. The little boy was taken to an orphanage and the doctor must have asked his sister Leyla to reach out and save him. Full of hatred, without family responsibilities, using his knowledge as a doctor, enabled by the vast haemorrhaging of information on the Internet, he had set about synthesizing smallpox. He had returned to Afghanistan to test it, and we heard him on the phone, worried about his beloved child, the only link he had left to his dead wife.
And after that? After that, the music stopped and there was nothing. Who was he now? What name was he using? And – more importantly – where was he? ‘A way in,’ I said softly. ‘Somehow you push forward and find a way back in.’
Nobody knew if I was talking to myself or offering a suggestion to everyone. I probably didn’t know either.
‘That’s all we have on the man,’ the director said, sweeping his hand across the floors of motorized files. ‘There’s no name, no identity and no trace. Not here, anyway.’
He was right, and the silence hung in space. Through the haze of smoke, I looked at the men. There was no way back in for any of us, hope was gone, and I knew …
We had lost him.
I forced myself not to show my despair and stood a little straighter. Bill had always told me there was no excuse for bad manners, and I owed the Saudi men something.
‘You’ve done more than anybody could have asked,’ I said. ‘It was a thankless task, but you did it with talent and good grace and I thank you wholeheartedly.’
It was probably the first time they had heard genuine praise instead of empty flattery, and I could see on their faces the pride it brought them.
‘Jazak Allahu Khayran,’ I said finally, butchering the pronunciation but using one of the only Arabic phrases I recalled from my earlier visit. It was the traditional way of offering thanks: ‘May God reward you with blessings.’
‘Waiyyaki,’ they all said, smiling kindly at my effort and offering the time-honoured response: ‘And with you.’
It was the signal everybody needed, and they got to their feet and started packing everything up. I remained where I was, standing alone, desperately trying to find another way forward, a route, a path. A miracle.
I journeyed through the catalogue of my professional memory, I let my mind wander down every unconventional alley, but I came up empty.
I had identified the Saracen, but I didn’t know him; I had located him, but I couldn’t find him; he was somebody, and he was nobody. That was the truth, and nothing in the world was going to change it.
I looked at my watch.
Chapter Eight
IT WAS THE worst phone call I have ever had to make. Nobody was angry, nobody shouted or made accusations, but the sense of failure and fear was overwhelming.
After I had said goodbye to the director of the Mabahith, one of the black SUVs took me the short distance across town to the high-security compound that housed the US consulate. Carter from Beirut Station had called ahead and alerted them to my presence, so I had little delay in getting through the anti-suicide barriers and guardhouses.
Once I was inside, the young duty officer assumed I needed a bed for the night and started to show me towards a guest apartment, but I stopped him halfway to the elevator and told him I needed a telephone in the building’s Tempest zone – an area specially engineered to prevent any electronic eavesdropping. The Mabahith and I might have ended on good terms, but that didn’t mean I trusted them.
The duty officer hesitated, probably wondering who I was exactly, then started activating the electronic
locks on blast-proof doors, leading me deep into the heart of the building. We passed through an internal security checkpoint, which told me we were entering the area occupied by the CIA, before arriving at a small room with only a desk and a telephone. The blandest place you have ever seen, distinguished only by its complete lack of sound.
I closed the door, activated the electronic lock, picked up the phone and asked the operator for the Oval Office.
The phone was answered immediately and I heard the president’s voice. It was clear he was exhausted, but it was equally obvious that his spirits were buoyed by the expectation of good news. I had told them I would have the Saracen’s full name, date of birth and probably a photo. I had found them too, I just hadn’t anticipated they would be useless.
Whisperer announced that he was on the line as well, and I think he guessed from my downbeat greeting that a disaster was heading down the pike. Like any good case officer he had learned to judge every nuance of a joe’s behaviour. ‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice tightening.
I told it to them hard and cold and straight, like one of those accident reports you read in the daily news. I said that, despite all our efforts and the great promise of a few hours ago, we had nothing to work with. Nothing at all.
There was a terrible silence.
‘One minute we were cock of the walk, next a feather duster,’ Whisperer said finally. ‘It’s a bust—’
‘Busted flat and out of time,’ the president added, the exhaustion, stripped of its veneer of hope, coming through loud and clear.
‘What about the others?’ I asked. ‘Everybody who’s looking for the nuclear trigger. Anything from them?’
‘A hundred thousand people and nothing,’ Grosvenor replied.
‘I figure we never had a chance. I think we ran into the perfect storm—’ Whisperer started to say.
‘A cleanskin flying solo,’ I said.
‘A cleanskin, yes. But not totally solo – no,’ he replied.