‘What do you mean?’
‘In Afghanistan – he must have had help for at least a short period. A man flying solo can’t grab three hostages.’
He was right, but it didn’t seem important and, anyway, the president was already moving on.
‘We’ll pick up the woman – what’s her name, Cumali? – as soon as possible. Is that the plan?’ he asked Whisperer.
‘Yeah. Pilgrim believes she’s in the dark – am I right?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘As Whisperer probably told you, Mr President, she has a way of contacting him, but I think it will be booby-trapped. She’ll misplace a letter, use a different word – it’ll warn him to run.’
‘You may be right,’ the president said. ‘He bought a damn death certificate, he’s smart enough – but we have to try.’
‘I’ll send a team in fast,’ Whisperer said. ‘We’ll get her out of Turkey, rendition her to Bright Light.’
Bright Light was the code name for Khun Yuam, the CIA secret prison I had visited up on the Thai–Burma border. The story was that once somebody disappeared into Bright Light, they didn’t emerge. It was strange – given the magnitude of the events which we were confronting – but I couldn’t help thinking about the little guy and what would happen to him. Back to an orphanage in either Gaza or Turkey, I figured. Wherever it was, there wouldn’t be much bowing and laughter.
‘At dawn, or near enough, I’ll issue an executive order,’ Grosvenor continued, ‘and close the borders. We’ll isolate the country the best we can – airports, land crossings, ports of entry, everything we can think of.’
It was obvious they were still heading down the human-vector track and, even if they were right about the method of dispersal, over half a million illegal aliens entered the country every year – a good indication that any attempt to secure the borders would be of little use. Like the old virologist had said: sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.
Even though I didn’t think their plan would work, I said nothing. I had no alternative, so it would have been churlish to tear it apart without having something better to offer. They were doing their best to keep the country afloat, that was all.
‘We don’t have to say it’s smallpox,’ Whisperer suggested. ‘We could claim it’s a highly virulent avian flu. As bad as it is, it’s not freighted with the same terror. Once you say “smallpox” and add “sledgehammer”, it’s gonna be like Mount Everest – it’ll make its own weather.’
‘No,’ Grosvenor replied – he had obviously thought of it too. ‘What happens when the truth gets out? Our only hope is the cooperation of the public – given the chance, Americans always rise to the occasion. Betray them and you’ve lost ’em. One vector, one trace, that’s all we need and we can track it backwards. I also plan to release the vaccine. I don’t know if it will do any good, but we have to try everything and use what we’ve got.’
‘Yes, Mr President,’ Whisperer said. ‘What about you, Pilgrim? Coming home?’
‘I’ll go to Gaza,’ I said.
It was Whisperer who recovered first. ‘An American alone in Gaza, without a legend? They’ll be lining up with bomb belts and baseball bats – you’ll be dead in a day.’
‘I’ve spoken to the Saudis – they’ve got some people on the ground who can help.’
‘That means the line will only be half as long.’
‘Al-Nassouri was there – it’s the only thread we’ve got.’
‘You don’t have to do it,’ the president said. ‘Not finding him is no reflection on you. On the contrary. When we first met, I asked Whisperer to stay behind – I told him you were the coolest sonofabitch I’d ever met. I didn’t realize you were also the best. You’ve done an outstanding job.’
‘Thank you,’ I said simply.
‘I won’t send you a presidential letter of commendation,’ he said, trying to lighten the tone. ‘You’ve already got one of those.’
‘And the golf balls,’ I replied.
They laughed, and it gave me a chance. ‘If I could ask one thing, Mr President?’ I said.
‘Go ahead,’ he replied.
‘There’s a hacker we pulled out of Leavenworth who did some great work. Would it be possible not to send him back?’
‘A pardon, you mean?’
‘If it could be done,’ I replied.
‘What about it, Whisperer? You know this guy?’
‘Yeah, excellent work – I’d support it.’
‘Okay – I’ll get his name from Whisperer and write the order.’
‘Thank you, Mr President’ was all I could say. I was thinking of Battleboi holding Rachel tight when he heard the news.
‘Good luck, Pilgrim,’ the president said, bringing the call to an end. ‘I hope we’ll see each other again in better circumstances.’ He didn’t sound very confident.
The line went dead, and I sat in the soundproofed silence, thinking that it would probably be the last moments of peace I would know for a long time. Maybe ever.
Gaza.
Whisperer was right – it was one of the deadliest places on earth. The only good thing about it was that there was nowhere to sail: at least there wouldn’t be any old boats with patched sails waiting for me.
Elsewhere maybe, but not in Gaza.
Chapter Nine
IT WAS GERMANY, so the trucks arrived right on time. It was just after 6 a.m., with a light rain falling, when they drove through the security gates at Chyron.
Just as the drivers had done a thousand times before, they swung past the glass-fronted administration building, ran down factory row and stopped at the loading bays in the rear. The warehouse guy – the tall Muslim whose name none of the drivers could quite remember – was already at the wheel of a forklift, waiting to help load the boxes of pharma for shipment to America. He didn’t say anything – he never talked much – but the drivers liked him: he worked fast and seemed a damn sight more intelligent than most of his colleagues.
The consignment was a large one – it included everything from pallets of vaccines to crates of antibiotics, millions of doses of different drugs – but even so, the Saracen had it loaded into the back of the trucks in under five minutes. He had all the documentation ready too, and the drivers knew that with him there was no need to check – it was always correct.
They grabbed the paperwork, ran through the rain, scrambled into their cabs and were heading back towards the A5 freeway in record time.
Had they glanced in their rear-view mirrors, which none of them did, they would have seen that the Saracen didn’t move from the forklift: he sat in quiet contemplation and watched them until they were out of sight. He knew that the rain and the roadworks on the A5 – there were always roadworks on the ’5 – would slow them down, that was why he had hurried, but not so much that they wouldn’t make their designated flights.
At last he lowered his head, rested it on his forearms and floated in some place between prayer and exhaustion. It was over, it was out of his hands, and the relief was so overwhelming he felt tears sting the back of his eyes. The crushing responsibility of the last three years, the great burden of doing Allah’s work, had been lifted. The weapon was flying free and the fate of the mission, the welfare of nations, the survival of whatever innocence remained in the world, rested on a system of border controls which the Saracen believed was so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. But that was not within his control; he had done all he could: everything rested now in God’s hands.
With a growing sense of freedom, he raised his head and stepped out of the driver’s seat. He walked back inside the warehouse, went to his locker and cleaned it out. For the first and only time since he had started work at Chyron, he didn’t wait for his shift to end: instead, he slung his backpack over his shoulder, passed unnoticed through the security gates and, heart soaring, walked down the empty road in the drizzling rain.
He returned to his tiny apartment – nothing more than a bed, and a table
and a sink in a corner – threw out the food in the cupboards, packed his spare clothes in the backpack, put the keys on the table and slammed the door behind him. He made no attempt to pick up the wages that were owed to him, to get a refund on his rental deposit or farewell the men at the Wilhelmstrasse mosque who had been so generous to him. He left as mysteriously as he had arrived.
He headed fast through the waking town to the railway station, bought a ticket and, a few minutes later, the express train to Frankfurt came into view. There he would retrieve his luggage and medical kit from the long-term locker, go into a toilet stall and revert to the clothes and identity of a Lebanese doctor who had been visiting for a conference at the Messe.
For weeks, as his mission had moved closer to completion, he had increasingly thought about what he would do then. He had no desire to stay in Germany and no reason to return to Lebanon. Within days, he knew, a modern plague – the black pox was how he thought of it – would burst into the public consciousness. Its presence would start slow, like a match in straw, but it would rapidly become what scientists call a self-amplifying process – an explosion – and the whole barn would be on fire.
America – the great infidel – would be ground zero, the kill-rate astronomical. Deprived of its protector, Israel’s belly would be exposed and at last it would be left to the mercy of its near enemies. As economic activity fell off a cliff, the price of oil would collapse and the ruling Saudi elite – unable to buy off its own people any longer or fall back on the support of the United States – would invoke a fearful repression and, in doing so, sow the seeds of its own destruction.
In the short term, the world would close down and travel be rendered impossible as nations sought safety in quarantine and isolation. Some would be more successful than others and, though a billion people had died from smallpox in the hundred years before its eradication, nothing like it had ever happened in the modern world – not even Aids – and nobody could predict where the rivers of infection would flood and where they would turn.
As the dying time – as he called it – came closer, he had felt a growing certainty that, whatever happened, he wanted to be with his son. If they lost their lives, then that was Allah’s will and all he asked was to be with his child so that he could hold him and tell him that they had nothing to fear either in this world or the next. If it was God’s plan that they lived, then, as soon as was practical, he would take him to Afghanistan. Together they would walk along shaded river-banks, and perhaps he would show him the mountain slopes where he had brought down the fearsome Hind gunships. And as summer turned to autumn they would make their way through distant valleys to the fortress of Abdul Mohammad Khan. What better place to raise his son than among the devout and the brave? And when the time was right they would return to Saudi and laugh and grow old together in the land where the soul of his father was closest.
To be with his son? The thought had sustained him through everything in Karlsruhe. One night he had gone to an Internet café and searched the Web, and he had already found a rooming house suitable for a devout Muslim man in Milas.
Yes, he would re-emerge in Frankfurt as a doctor, take the train to the airport and board a plane. He was flying to Bodrum.
Chapter Ten
ON A PRIVATE jet at full throttle, it takes about two hours to fly from Jeddah to the Gaza Strip, a slice of abject misery wedged between Israel and Egypt, home to one and a half million stateless Arabs and at least twenty groups identified by the State Department as terrorist organizations.
Beirut Station had arranged for the arms dealer’s red and kitsch Gulfstream to be replaced by a CIA-owned Lear jet that was decorated in three shades of beige. At least it didn’t give me a migraine. While that might have been an advantage, the downside was that there were no beds, something which turned out to be significant. I was forced to sit up and, with nothing more than endless miles of oil derricks to look out on, my thoughts were my only company.
I have to say they were miserable companions. I don’t think I’m a vain man but I do have a liberal dose of professional pride. Sitting in a plane at thirty thousand feet, there was no place to hide, especially not from the truth. I had met Zakaria al-Nassouri head-on, and he had defeated me.
Maybe I never really had a chance – he was too good, too smart, too far ahead ever to be caught. This was the person who had carried quicklime into the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Quicklime on the back of packhorses – for five hundred miles, through some of the most inhospitable land on earth! He had planned every step, every detail.
Certainly a man capable of that would have anticipated the day when somebody in my business would try to find him. Like a fugitive in fresh snow, he had swept the ground behind him. He bought a death certificate over fourteen years ago, and followed that up with a fake passport. As I said, maybe he was too far ahead to ever be caught.
And yet, as far as I could see, there was nothing we could have done differently. Of the ten people who knew the secret, the eight government officials had not only maintained their silence but acted with admirable speed. Without being boastful, the other two members of the group – Whisperer and myself – were among the best in the world, armed with all the resources and technology the most powerful country on earth could provide. We were apex predators and, like all apex predators, we were hard-wired to hunt …
I stopped to correct myself. Not every apex predator hunts. I could think of at least one that didn’t. A shark hunts, but a crocodile lies silently in the reeds and waits for its prey to come to him.
At that moment, I realized what our mistake had been – we had been hunting him when we should have been trapping him. We never had a chance, not in a straight-line pursuit: his lead was far too great. But in a trap, a head start wouldn’t have mattered.
Was there still time? Perhaps we had a card left to play, one more roll of the dice, a final round left in the chamber. Somehow we had to draw him out of the shadows and make him come to the waterhole.
I stared out of the window for what felt like a lifetime. I didn’t see the clouds or the oil rigs, but I came to believe that we had a chance. I based it on one thing only, a lesson I had learned a long time ago in a banker’s office in Geneva: love wasn’t weak, love was strong.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and scrambled to my feet. I hadn’t realized that clear-air turbulence was rocking the small jet, sending it pitching and yawing, but I had no time to worry about it. I headed towards the front of the cabin, nearly hit the roof as we took a sudden dive, grabbed hold of a seat back and half crawled, half rocketed, to where a CIA secure phone was located in a small closet.
I grabbed the handset and made a call.
Chapter Eleven
WHISPERER ANSWERED ALMOST immediately, but his voice, even softer than usual, was so hoarse it sounded like acid running over gravel. There had been too much stress, too little sleep, too many disappointments for one man’s plate.
I told him the mistake we had made in trying to run the Saracen down and explained what I wanted to try – not the detail of it, just the broad strokes. Thankfully, he was so experienced, he didn’t need chalk on a board.
I said we had to delay the rendition of Cumali and convince the president to postpone his address to the nation. ‘I need time for it to work, Dave,’ I said.
He tried to laugh. ‘You’re asking me for the one thing we don’t have,’ he countered, and again I heard the years in his voice. ‘We can’t delay, I was speaking to him twenty minutes ago – it’s impossible.’
I pleaded my case, I begged him and, finally, when that got me nowhere, I told him in anger that he had better listen to me because I was the best agent of my generation and, fuck it, I was telling him we had a chance. He said nothing for a moment, and I could tell that the raw vanity of it, so out of character for me, had shocked him. He told me to wait.
So I clung on, both literally and metaphorically, pitching and plunging through the turbulence while he called the president on anot
her phone. A few minutes later I heard his footsteps return across the wooden floor of his study.
‘I just spoke to Grosvenor,’ he reported. ‘He doesn’t think it’ll work, he doesn’t believe in it—’
‘Jesus!’ I interjected. ‘Did you explain our mistake?’
‘Sure I did,’ Whisperer replied tersely. ‘I said we’d ridden out like a posse and we should have been desperadoes waiting for a train. How was that – clear enough?’
‘And he still didn’t get it?’
‘You didn’t let me finish. He said he doesn’t believe in it – but he believes in you. You’ve got thirty-six hours.’
The relief flooded in. One more chance for salvation, one more chance for redemption. ‘Thanks,’ I said sheepishly.
‘Phone us, good or bad. If it starts falling apart, he wants to know immediately. He’s got the address to the nation written. He said no false hope, no letting wishing overwhelm logic. If it’s a turd, don’t try to polish it.’
‘Okay,’ I replied.
‘You’ve got my number; here’s another one in case there’s a problem. It’s Grosvenor’s.’
As good as my memory was, I didn’t want to trust it so I pulled out my cellphone and entered it on speed-dial under 911. I was still keying it in as Whisperer plunged on.
‘Okay, so we’ve got thirty-six hours and we’ve got the outline of a plan. Now we work it. What’s the first step?’
‘A phone call,’ I replied. ‘We can’t make it ourselves – it has to sound like the real deal. What’s the highest-level asset we have inside Turkish intelligence?’
Given the country’s strategic importance, I knew that the CIA – like every other major intelligence agency – would have spent years cultivating turncoats inside MIT.
Whisperer said nothing – I was asking him to discuss one of our nation’s most closely held secrets.
‘Dave?’ I prompted him.
‘There’s somebody we could use,’ he said reluctantly.