The Afghan

CHAPTER 1

If the young Talib bodyguard had known that making the cell phone call would kill him, he would not have done it. But he did not know, so he did, and it did.

On the seventh of July 2005, four suicide bombers let off their haversack bombs in Central London. They killed fifty-two commuters and injured about seven hundred, at least one hundred crippled for life. Three of the four were British born and raised but of Pakistani immigrant parentage. The fourth was a Jamaican by birth, British by naturalization, and had converted to Islam. He and one other were still teenagers; the third was twenty-two and the group leader thirty. All had been radicalized, or brainwashed, into extreme fanaticism, not abroad but right in the heart of England after attending extremist mosques and listening to similar preachers. Within twenty-four hours of the explosion, they had been identified and traced to various residences in and around the northern city of Leeds; indeed, all had spoken with varying strengths of Yorkshire accent. The leader was a special-needs teacher called Mohammad Siddique Khan. During the scouring of their homes and possessions, the police discovered a small treasure trove that they chose not to reveal. There were four receipts showing that one of the senior two had bought cell phones of the buy-use-and-throw variety, tri-band versions usable almost anywhere in the world, and each containing a prepaid SIM card worth about twenty pounds sterling. The phones had all been bought for cash and all were missing. But the police traced their numbers and “red-flagged” them all in case they ever came on stream. It was also discovered that Siddique Khan and his closest intimate in the group, a young Punjabi called Shehzad Tanweer, had visited Pakistan the previous November and spent three months there. No trace was found of whom they had seen, but weeks after the explosions the Arab TV station Al Jazeera broadcast a defiant video made by Siddique Khan as he planned his death, and it was clear this video had been made during that visit to Islamabad. It was not until late 2006 that it also became clear that one of the bombers took one of the “lily-white” untraceable cell phones with him and presented it to his Al Qaeda organizer/instructor. (The British police had already established that none of the bombers had the technical skill to create the bombs themselves without instruction and help.)

Whoever this AQ higher-up was, he seems to have passed on the gift as a token of respect to a member of the elite inner committee grouped around the person of Osama bin Laden in his invisible hideaway in the bleak mountains of South Waziristan that run along the Pakistani/Afghan border west of Peshawar. It would have been given for emergency purposes only, because all AQ operatives are extremely wary of cell phones, but the donor could not have known at the time that the British fanatic would be stupid enough to leave the receipt lying around his desk in Leeds.

There are four divisions to bin Laden’s inner committee. They deal with operations, financing, propaganda and doctrine. Each branch has a chieftain, and only bin Laden and his coleader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, outrank them. By September 2006, the chief organizer of finance for the entire terror group was al-Zawahiri’s fellow Egyptian, Tewfik al-Qur.

For reasons which became plain later, he was under deep disguise in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on September 15, not departing on an extensive and dangerous tour outside the mount redoubt but returning from one. He was waiting for the arrival of the guide who would take him back into the Waziri peaks and into the presence of the Sheikh himself.

To protect him in his brief stay in Peshawar, he had been assigned four local zealots belonging to the Taliban movement. As befits men who originate in the northwestern mountains, the chain of fierce tribal districts that runs along this ungovernable frontier, they were technically Pakistanis but tribally Waziris. They spoke Pashto rather than Urdu, and their loyalties were to the Pashtun people, of whom the Waziris are a subbranch. All were raised from the gutter in a madrassah, or Koranic boarding school, of extreme orientation, adhering to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the harshest and most intolerant of all. They had no knowledge of, or skill in, anything other than reciting the Koran, and were thus, like teeming millions of madrassah-raised youths, virtually unemployable. But, given a task to do by their clan chief, they would die for it. That September, they had been charged with protecting the middle-aged Egyptian, who spoke Nilotic Arabic but had enough Pashto to get by. One of the four youths was Abdelahi, and his pride and joy was his cell phone. Unfortunately, its battery was flat because he had forgotten to recharge it.

It was after the midday hour. Too dangerous to emerge to go to the local mosque for prayers; al-Qur had said his orisons along with his bodyguards in their top-floor apartment. Then he had eaten sparingly and retired for a short rest. Abdelahi’s brother lived several hundred miles to the west in the equally fundamentalist city of Quetta, and their mother had been ill. He wished to inquire after her, so he tried to get through on his cell phone. Whatever he wished to say would be unremarkable, just part of the trillions of words of “chatter” that pass through the ether of all five continents every day. But his phone would not work. One of his companions pointed out the absence of black bars in the battery window and explained about charging. Then Abdelahi saw the spare phone lying on the Egyptian’s attache case in the sitting room. It was fully charged. Seeing no harm, he dialed his brother’s number and heard the rhythmic ringing tone far away in Quetta. And in an underground rabbit warren of connecting rooms in Islamabad that constitute the listening department of Pakistan ’s Counter-Terrorism Center, a small red light began to pulse.

Many who live in it regard Hampshire as England ’s prettiest county. On its south coast, facing the waters of the Channel, it includes the huge maritime port of Southampton and the naval dockyard of Portsmouth. Its administrative center is the historic city of Winchester, dominated by its cathedral, almost a thousand years old.

At the very heart of the county, away from all the motorways and even the main roads, lies the quiet valley of the River Meon, a gentle chalk stream along whose banks lie villages and townlets that go back to the Saxons. One single A-class road runs through from south to north, but the rest of the valley is a network of winding lanes edged with overhanging trees, hedges and meadows. This is farm country the way it used to be, with few fields larger than ten acres, and even fewer farms larger than five hundred. Most of the farmhouses are of ancient beam, brick and tile, and some of these are served by clusters of barns of great size, antiquity and beauty.

The man who perched at the apex of one such barn had a panorama of the Meon Valley and a bird’s-eye view of his nearest village, Meonstoke, barely a mile away. At the time, several zones to the east, that Abdelahi made the last phone call of his life, the roof climber wiped some sweat off his forehead and resumed his task of carefully removing the clay peg tiles that had been placed there hundreds of years earlier.

He should have had a team of expert roofers, and they should have clad the whole barn in scaffolding. It would have been faster and safer to do the job that way, but much more expensive. And that was the problem. The man with the claw hammer was an ex-soldier, retired after his twenty-five-year career, and he had used up most of his bounty to buy his dream: a place in the country to call home at last. Hence the barn with ten acres, and a track to the nearest lane and then to the village.

But soldiers are not always shrewd with money, and the conversion of the medieval barn into a country house and a snug home had produced estimates from professional companies that specialize in such conversions that took his breath away. Hence the decision that, whatever time it took, to do it himself. The spot was idyllic enough. In his mind’s eye he could see the roof restored to its former leakproof glory, with nine-tenths of the original and unbroken tiles retained and the other ten percent bought from a yard selling the artifacts of old demolished buildings. The rafters of the hammer beam roof were still sound as the day they were hacked from the oak tree, but the cross-batons would have to come off, to be replaced over good, modern roofing felt. He could imagine the sitting room, kitchen, study and hall he would make far below him where dust now smothered the last old hay bales. He knew he would need professionals for the electrics and the plumbing, but he had already signed on at Southampton Technical College for night courses in bricklaying, plastering, carpentry and glazing.

One day, there would be a flagstone patio and a kitchen garden; the track would be a graveled drive, and sheep would graze the old orchard. Each night, camping in the paddock as nature favored him with a balmy late-summer heat wave, he went over the figures and reckoned that with patience and a lot of hard work he could just survive on his modest budget.

He was forty-four, olive-skinned, black-haired and -eyed, lean and very hard of physique. And he had had enough. Enough of deserts and jungles, enough of malaria and leeches, enough of freezing cold and shivering nights, enough of garbage food and pain-racked limbs. He would get a job locally, find a Labrador or a couple of Jack Russells and maybe even a woman to share his life. The man on the roof removed another dozen tiles, kept the ten whole ones, threw down the fragments of the broken ones, and in Islamabad the red light pulsed.

Many think that with a prepaid SIM card in a cell phone all future billing is canceled out. That is true for the purchaser and user but not for the service provider. Unless the phone is used only within the parameters of the transmitting area where it was bought, there is still a settling up to be accomplished, but between the cell phone companies, and their computers do it. As Abdelahi’s call was taken by his brother in Quetta, he began to use time on the radio mast situated just outside Peshawar. This belongs to Paktel. So the Paktel computer began to search for the original vendor of the cell phone in England with the intent of saying, electronically, “One of your customers is using my time and airspace, so you owe me.” But the Pakistani CTC had for years required both Paktel and its rival Mobitel to patch through every call sent or received by their networks to the CTC listening room. And, alerted by the British, the CTC had inserted British software into its eavesdropping computers, with an intercept program for certain numbers. One of these had suddenly gone active.

The young Pashto-speaking Pakistani Army sergeant monitoring the console hit a button and his superior officer came on the line. The officer listened for several seconds, then asked, “What is he saying?” The sergeant listened, and replied, “Something about the speaker’s mother. He seems to be speaking to his brother.”

“From where?”

Another check. “The Peshawar transmitter.”

There was no need to tell the sergeant any more. The entire call would automatically be recorded for later study. The immediate task was to locate the sender. The CTC major on duty that day had little doubt this would not be possible in one short phone call. Surely the fool would not spend long on the line?

From his desk high above the cellars, the major pressed three buttons, and by speed dial a phone trilled in the office of the CTC head of station in Peshawar. Years earlier, and certainly before the event now known as 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center, on 11 September 2001, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Department, always known as the ISI, had been deeply infiltrated by fundamentalist Muslims of the Pakistani Army. That was its problem, and the reason for its complete unreliability in the struggle against the Taliban and their guests, Al Qaeda.

But Pakistan ’s president General Musharraf had had little choice but to listen to the USA ’s strongly worded “advice” to clean house. Part of that program has been the steady transfer of extremist officers out of ISI and back to normal military duties; the other part had been the creation inside ISI of the elite Counter-Terrorism Center, staffed by a new breed of young officers who had no truck with Islamist terrorism, no matter how devout the terrorists might be. Colonel Abdul Razak, formerly a tank commander, was one. He commanded the CTC in Peshawar, and he took the call at half past two. He listened attentively to his colleague in the national capital, then asked, “How long?”

“About three minutes, so far.”

Colonel Razak had the good fortune to have an office just eight hundred yards from the Paktel mast, within the thousand-yard-or-less radius normally needed for his direction finder to work efficiently. With two technicians, he raced to the flat roof of the office block to start the D/F sweeps of the city that would seek to pin the source of the signal to a smaller and ever-smaller area. In Islamabad, the listening sergeant told his superior, “The conversation has finished.”

“Damn,” said the major. “Three minutes and forty-four seconds. Still, one could hardly have expected more.”

“But he doesn’t appear to have switched off,” said the sergeant. In a top-floor apartment in the Old Town of Peshawar, Abdelahi had made his second mistake. Hearing the Egyptian emerging from his private room, he had hastily ended his call to his brother and shoved the cell phone under a nearby cushion. But he forgot to turn it off. Half a mile away. Colonel Razak’s sweepers came closer and closer.

Both Britain ’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America ’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have big operations in Pakistan for obvious reasons. It is one of the principal war zones in the struggle against the present terrorism. Part of the strength of the Western alliance, right back to 1945, has been the ability of the two agencies to work together. There have been spats, especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they, too, had a whole rogues’ gallery of traitors working for Moscow, and the interagency sniping stopped. The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new Cold War, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was experiencing birth pangs. After 9/11, there was no more rivalry, and even the traditional horse trading ended. The rule became: If we have it, you guys had better share it. And vice versa. Contributions come into the common struggle from a patchwork quilt of other foreign agencies, but nothing matches the closeness of the Anglosphere information gatherers.

Colonel Razak knew both the heads of station in his own city. On personal terms, he was closer to the SIS man, Brian O’Dowd, and the rogue cell phone was originally a British discovery. So it was O’Dowd he rang with the news when he came down from the roof. At that moment, Mr. al-Qur went to the bathroom, and Abdelahi reached under the cushion for the cell phone to put it back on top of the attache case where he had found it. With a start of guilt, he realized it was still on, so he switched it off at once. He was thinking of battery wastage, not interception. Anyway, he was too late by eight seconds. The direction finder had done its job.

“What do you mean you’ve found it?” asked O’Dowd. His day had suddenly become Christmas and several birthdays rolled into one. “No question, Brian. The call came from a top-floor apartment of a five-story building in the Old Quarter. Two of my undercover people are slipping down there to have a look and work out the approaches.”

“When are you going in?”

“Just after dark. I’d like to make it three a.m., but the risk is too big. They might fly the coop…”

Colonel Razak had been to Camberley Staff College in England on a one-year, Commonwealth-sponsored course, and was proud of his command of idiom. “Can I come?”

“Would you like to?”

“Is the pope Catholic?” said the Irishman.

Razak laughed out loud. He enjoyed the banter. “As a believer in the one true God, I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.” He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no Western suits, either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass unnoticed. Or the robes and turbans of the mountain clans. And that also applied to O’Dowd. The British agent was there just before six, with his black-painted, black-windowed Toyota Land Cruiser. A British Land Rover might have been more patriotic, but the Toyota was the preferred vehicle of local fundamentalists and would pass unnoticed. He also brought a bottle of the single-malt whiskey known as Chivas Regal. It was Abdul Razak’s favorite tipple. He had once chided his Pakistani friend on his taste for the alcoholic tincture from Scotland. “I regard myself as a good Muslim, but not an obsessive one,” said Razak. “I do not touch pork, but see no harm in dancing, or a good cigar. To ban these is Taliban fanaticism, which I do not share. As for the grape, or even grain, wine was widely drunk during the first four caliphates, and if one day in paradise I am chided by a higher authority than you then I shall beg the all-merciful Allah for forgiveness. In the meantime, give me a top-up.” It was perhaps strange that a tank corps officer should have made such an excellent policeman, but such was Abdul Razak. He was thirty-six, married with two children and educated. He also embodied a capacity for lateral thought, for quiet subtlety and the tactics of the mongoose facing the cobra rather than the charging elephant. He wanted to take the apartment at the top of the block flats without a raging firefight, if he could. Hence his approach was quiet and stealthy.

Peshawar is a most ancient city, and no part older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans traveling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And, like any good bazaar, the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs-blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artifacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.

It is multiethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistani from nearby, contrasting with the Chitrali caps from farther north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.

In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days, the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia. The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse on a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in the summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants can catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.

He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on the roof, and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here, they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi, who bore the rammer.

When they were all lined up in the stairwell, the colonel nodded to the point man, who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inward, and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained above in case anyone tried to escape.

When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall later, it all seemed extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants got as well. The attack squad had no idea how many men would be inside or what they would find. It could have been a small army; it could have been a family sipping tea. They did not even know the layout of the apartment; architect’s plans may be filed in London or New York but not in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. All they knew was that a call had been made from a red-flagged cell phone. In fact, they found four young men watching TV. For two seconds, the attack group feared they might have raided a perfectly innocent household. Then they registered that all the young men were heavily bearded, all were mountain men, and one, the fastest to react, was reaching beneath his robes for a gun. His name was Abdelahi, and he died with four bullets from a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 in the chest. The other three were smothered and held down before they could fight. Colonel Razak had been very clear: He wanted them alive, if possible. The presence of the fifth man was announced by a crash in the bedroom. The Punjabi had dropped his rammer, but his shoulder was enough. The door came down, and two CTC hard men went in, followed by Colonel Razak. In the middle of the room, they found a middle-aged Arab, his eyes wide and round with fear or hatred. He stooped to try to gather up the laptop computer he had hurled to the terra-cotta tiles in an effort to destroy it.

Then he realized there was no time, turned and ran for the window, which was wide-open. Colonel Razak screamed, “Grab him,” but the Pakistani missed. The Egyptian had been caught naked to the waist because of the heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. He did not even pause for the banister but went straight over and crashed on the cobbles forty feet below. Bystanders gathered round the body within seconds, but the AQ financier gurgled twice and died. The building and street had become a chaos of shouting and running figures. Using his mobile phone, the colonel called up the fifty uniformed solders he had positioned in the black-windowed vans four streets away. They came racing down the alley to restore order, if that is what even more chaos can be called. But they served their purpose; they sealed the apartment block. In time, Abdul Razak would want to interview every neighbor, and, above all, the landlord, the carpet seller at street level.

The corpse on the street was surrounded by the army and blanketed. A stretcher would appear. The dead man would be carried away to the morgue of Peshawar General Hospital. No one still had the faintest idea who he was. All that was clear was that he had preferred death to the tender attention of the Americans at Bagram Camp up in Afghanistan, where he would surely have been horse-traded by Islamabad with the CIA station chief in Pakistan. Colonel Razak turned back from the balcony. The three prisoners were handcuffed and hooded. There would have to be an armed escort to get them out of here; this was “fundo” territory. The tribal street would not be on his side. With the prisoners and the body gone, he would spend hours scouring the flat for every last clue about the man with the red-flagged cell phone. Brian O’Dowd had been asked to wait on the stairs during the raid. He was now in the bedroom holding the damaged Toshiba laptop. Both knew this would almost certainly be the crown jewel. All the passports, all the cell phones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbors-the lot would be taken to a safe place and wrung dry for anything they could yield. But first the laptop…

The dead Egyptian had been optimistic if he thought denting the frame of the Toshiba would destroy its golden harvest. Even seeking to erase the files within it would not work. There were wizards over in Britain and the USA who would painstakingly strip out the hard drive and peel away the subterfuge chatter to uncover every word the Toshiba had ever ingested. “Pity about whoever-he-was,” said the SIS agent. Razak grunted. The choice he had made was logical. Hang on for days and the man could have disappeared. Spend hours snooping around the building and his agents would have been spotted; the bird would still have flown. So he had gone in hard and fast, and with five extra seconds he would have had the mysterious suicide in handcuffs. He would prepare a statement for the public that an unknown criminal had died in a fall while resisting arrest. Until the corpse was identified. If he turned out to be an AQ higher-up, the Americans would insist on an all-singing, all-dancing press conference to claim the triumph. He still had no idea how high up Tewfik al-Qur had really been. “You’ll be pinned down here for a while,” said O’Dowd. “Can I do you the favor of seeing the laptop safely back to your HQ?”

Fortunately, Abdul Razak possessed a wry humor. In his work, it was a saving grace. In the covert world, only humor keeps a man sane. It was the word “safely” that he enjoyed.

“That would be most kind of you,” he said. “I’ll give you a four-man escort back to your vehicle. Just in case. When this is all over, we must share the immoral bottle you brought over this evening.”

Clutching the precious cargo to his chest, flanked fore and aft and on each side by Pakistani solders, the SIS man was brought back to his Land Cruiser. The technology he needed was already in the rear, and at the wheel, protecting machinery and vehicle, was his driver, a fiercely loyal Sikh. They drove to a spot outside Peshawar, where O’Dowd hooked up the Toshiba to his own bigger and more powerful Tecra; and the Tecra opened a line in cyberspace to the British government communication HQ in Cheltenham, deep in the Cotswold Hills of England.

O’Dowd knew how to work it, but he was still hazy about the sheer magic-at least to a layman-of cybertechnology. Within a few seconds, across thousands of miles of space, Cheltenham had acquired the entire image of the Toshiba’s hard drive. It had gutted the laptop as efficiently as a spider drains the juices from a captured fly.

The head of station drove the laptop to CTC headquarters and delivered it into safe hands. Before he reached the CTC office block Cheltenham had shared the treasure with America ’s National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was pitch-black in Peshawar, dusk in the Cotswolds and midafternoon in Maryland. It mattered not. Inside GCHQ and NSA, the sun never shines; there is no night and no day.

In both sprawling complexes of buildings set in rustic countryside, the listening goes on from pole to pole and all points between. The trillions of words spoken by the human race every day, in five hundred languages and more than a thousand dialects, are heard, culled, winnowed, sorted, rejected, retained and, if interesting, studied and traced. Even that is just the start. Both agencies encode and decrypt in hundreds of codes, and each has special divisions dedicated to file recovery and the unearthing of cybercrime. As the planet rolled through another day and another night, two agencies began to strip down the measures al-Qur thought had obliterated his private files. The experts found the limbo files and exposed the slack spaces.

The process has been compared to the work of a skilled restorer of paintings. With immense care, the outer layers of grime or later paint are eased off the original canvas to reveal the hidden work beneath. Mr. al-Qur’s Toshiba began to reveal document after document that he thought had been wiped away or overpainted.

Brian O’Dowd had of course alerted his own colleague and superior, the head of station in Islamabad, even before accompanying Colonel Razak on the raid. The senior SIS man had informed his “cousin,” the CIA station chief. Both men were avidly waiting for news. In Peshawar, there would be no sleep. Colonel Razak returned from the bazaar at midnight with his treasure trove in several bags. The three surviving bodyguards were lodged in cells in the basement of his own building. He would certainly not entrust them to the common jail. Escape or assisted suicide would be almost a formality. Islamabad now had their names and was no doubt haggling with the U.S. Embassy, which contained the CIA station. The colonel suspected they would end up in Bagram for months of interrogation, even though he suspected they did not even know the name of the man they were guarding.

The telltale cell phone from Leeds, England, had been found and identified. It was slowly becoming clear the foolish Abdelahi had only borrowed it without permission. He was on a slab in the morgue with four bullets in the chest but an untouched face. The man next door had a smashed head, but the city’s best facial surgeon was trying to put it back together. When he had done his best, a photo was taken. An hour later. Colonel Razak rang O’Dowd with ill-concealed excitement. Like all counterterrorist agencies collaborating on the struggle against Islamist terror groups, the CTC of Pakistan has a huge gallery of photos of suspects.

Simply because Pakistan is a long way from Morocco means nothing. AQ terrorists stem from at least forty nationalities and double that number of ethnic groups. And they travel. Razak had spent the night flashing his gallery of faces from his computer to a big plasma screen in his office, and he kept coming back to one face.

It was already plain from the captured passports-eleven of them, all forged and all of superb quality-that the Egyptian had been traveling, and for this he had clearly changed his appearance. And yet the face of the man who could pass unnoticed in a bank’s boardroom in the West, and who was yet consumed by hatred for everything and everyone not of his own twisted faith, seemed to have something in common with the shattered head on the marble slab. He caught O’Dowd over breakfast, which he was sharing with his American CIA colleague in Peshawar. Both men left their scrambled eggs and raced over to CTC headquarters. They too stared at the face and compared it with the photo from the morgue. If only it could be true… And both men had one priority: to tell Head Office about the stunning discovery, that the body on the slab was none other than Tewfik al-Qur, Al Qaeda’s senior banker himself. Midmorning, a Pakistani Army helicopter came to take it all away. The prisoners, shackled and hooded; two dead bodies; and the boxes of evidence recovered from the apartment. Thanks were profuse, but Peshawar is an outstation; the center of gravity was moving, and moving fast. In fact, it had already arrived in Maryland.

In the aftermath of the disaster now known simply as 9/11, one thing became clear, and no one seriously denied it. The evidence not simply that something was going on, but pretty much that what was going on had been there all the time. It was there as intelligence is almost always there; not in one beautiful, gift-wrapped package, but in dribs and drabs, scattered all over. Seven or eight of the USA ’s nineteen primary intel-gathering or law enforcement agencies had their bits. But they never talked to each other. Since 9/11, there has been a huge shake-up. There are now the six principals to whom everything has to be revealed at an early stage. Four are politicians: the president, vice president and the secretaries for defense and state. The two professionals are the National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley overseeing the Department of Homeland Security and the nineteen agencies-and, on top of the pile, the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte. The CIA is still the primary outside-the-USA intel-gathering body, but the director of central intelligence is no longer the lone ranger he used to be. Everyone reports upward, and the three watchwords are: collate, collate, collate. Among the giants, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade is still the biggest, in budget and personnel, and the most secret. It alone retains no links to the public or media. It works in darkness, but it listens to everything, decrypts everything, translates everything and analyzes everything. Yet so impenetrable is some of the stuff overheard, recorded, downloaded, translated and studied that it also uses “out-of-house” committees of experts. One of these is the Koran Committee.

As the treasure from Peshawar came in, electronically or physically, other agencies also went to work. Identification of the dead man was vital and the task went to the FBI. Within twenty-four hours, the Bureau reported it was certain. The man who went over the Peshawar balcony was indeed the principal finance gatherer for Al Qaeda, and one of the rare intimates of OBL himself. The connection had been through Ayman al-Zawahiri, his fellow Egyptian. It was he who had spotted and headhunted the fanatical banker. The State Department took the passports. There were a stunning eleven of them. Two had never been used but now showed entry and exit stamps all over Europe and the Middle East. To no one’s surprise, six of them were Belgian, all in different names and all completely genuine, except the details inside. For the global intelligence community, Belgium has long been the leaky bucket. Since 1990, a staggering nineteen thousand Belgian “blank” passports have been reported stolen-and that is according to the Belgian government itself. In fact, they were simply sold by civil servants on the take. Forty-five were from the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg, France, and twenty from the Belgian Embassy at The Hague, Holland. The two used by the Moroccan assassins of anti-Taliban resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud were from the latter. So was one of the six used by al-Qur. The other five were assumed to be from the still-missing 18,935.

The Federal Aviation Administration, using its contracts and huge leverage across the world of international aviation, checked out plane tickets and passenger lists. It was tiresome, but entry and exit stamps pretty much pinpointed the flights to be checked.

Slowly but surely, it began to come together. Tewfik al-Qur had seemingly been charged to raise large sums of untraceable money to make unexplained purchases. There was no evidence he had made any himself, so the only logical deduction was that he had put others in funds to make the purchases themselves. The U.S. authorities would have given their eyeteeth to learn precisely whom he had seen. These names, they guessed, would have rolled up an entire covert network across Europe and the Middle East. The one notable target country the Egyptian had not visited was the USA.

It was finally at Fort Meade that the trail of revelation hit the buffer. Seventy-three documents had been downloaded from the Toshiba recovered in the apartment at Peshawar. Some were mere airline timetables, and the flights listed on them that al-Qur had actually taken were now known. Some were public domain financial reports that had seemingly interested the financier so that he had noted them for later perusal. But they gave nothing away. Most were in English, some in French or German. It was known al-Qur spoke all three languages fluently, apart from his native Arabic. The captured bodyguards, up in Bagram Camp and singing happily, had revealed the man spoke halting Pashto, indicating he must have spent some time in Afghanistan, though the West had no trace of when or where.

It was the Arabic texts that caused the unease. Because Fort Meade is basically a vast Army base, it comes under the Department of Defense. The commanding officer of NSA is always a four-star general. It was in the office of this soldier that the chief of the Arabic Translation Department asked for an interview.

The absorption of NSA with Arabic had been increasing steadily over the nineties as Islamist terrorism, apart from the constant interest evoked by the Israel-Palestine situation, began to grow. It leapt to prominence with the attempt by Ramzi Yousef on the World Trade Towers with a truck bomb in 1993. But after 9/11, it became a question of: “Every single word in that language, we want to know” So the Arabic department is huge and involves thousands of translators, most of them Arabs by birth and education, with a smattering of non-Arab scholars.

Arabic is not just one language. Apart from the classical Arabic of the Koran and academia, it is spoken by half a billion people but in at least fifty different dialects and accents. If the speech is fast, accented, using local idiom and the quality is bad, it will usually need a translator from the same area as the speaker to be relied on to catch every meaning and nuance. More, it is often a flowery language, using much imagery, flattery, exaggeration, simile and metaphor. Add to that, it can be very elliptical, with meanings inferred rather than openly said. It is quite different from one-meaning-only English.

“We are down to two last documents,” said the head of Arabic translation. “They seem to be from different hands. We believe one may well be from Ayman al-Zawahiri himself and the other from al-Qur. The first seems to have the word patterns of al-Zawahiri as taken from his previous speeches and videos. Of course, with sound we could be positive to one hundred percent. “The reply seems to be from al-Qur, but we have no text on record of what he writes like in Arabic. As a banker, he mainly spoke and wrote in English. “But both documents have repeated references to the Koran and passages therein. They are invoking Allah’s blessing on something. Now, I have many scholars of Arabic, but the language and subtle meanings contained in the Koran are special. Written fourteen hundred years ago. I think we should call on the Koran Committee to take a look.”

The commanding general nodded.

“Okay, Professor, you got it.” He glanced up at his ADC. “Get hold of our Koran scholars, Harry. Fly them in. No delays, no excuses.”

CHAPTER 2

There were four men in the Koran Committee, three Americans and a British academic. All were professors, none were Arabs, but all had spent their lives steeped in the study of the Koran and its thousands of attendant scholarly commentaries.

One was resident at Columbia University, New York, and following the order from Fort Meade a military helicopter was dispatched to bring him to the NSA. Two were respectively with the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution, both in Washington. Army staff cars were detached to collect them. The fourth and youngest was Dr. Terry Martin, on secondment to Georgetown University, Washington, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Part of the University of London, SOAS manages to enjoy a worldwide reputation for Arabic scholarship.

In terms of the study of matters Arabic, the Englishman had had a head start. He had been born and raised in Iraq, the son of an accountant with a major oil company operating there. His father had deliberately not sent him to the Anglo-American school but to a private academy that schooled the sons of the elite of Iraqi society.

By the time he was ten, he could, linguistically at least, pass for an Arab boy among the others. Only his pink face and tufty ginger hair made plain that he could never completely pass for an Arab.

Born in 1965, he was in his eleventh year when Mr. Martin Senior decided to leave Iraq and return to the safety of the UK. The Ba’ath Party was back in power, but that power truly resided not with President Bakr but with his vice president, who was carrying out a ruthless pogrom of his political enemies, real and imagined.

The Martins had already lived through the tumultuous times since the balmy days of the fifties when the boy king Feisal was on the throne. They had seen the massacre of the young king and his pro-Western premier, Nuri Said, the equally gory murder on camera in the TV studio of his successor General Kassem, and the first arrival of the equally brutal Ba’ath Party. That in turn had been toppled, then returned to power in 1968. For seven years, Martin Senior watched the growing power of the psychotic Vice President Saddam Hussein and in 1975 decided it was time to leave.

His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. Martin Senior had obtained a good post with Burmah Oil in London, thanks to a kind word from a certain Denis Thatcher, whose wife, Margaret, had just become leader of the Conservative Party. All four of them-the father, Mrs. Martin, Mike and Terry-were back in the UK by Christmas.

Terry’s brilliant brain had already been noted. He walked through exams for boys two and even three years his senior as a knife through butter. It was presumed, as it turned out almost rightly, that a series of scholarships and bursaries would carry him through senior school and Oxford or Cambridge. But he wanted to continue with Arabic studies. While still at school, he had applied to the SOAS, attending the spring interview in 1983, joining as an undergraduate that same autumn, studying the history of the Middle East. He walked through a First-Class degree in three years, and then put in two more for his doctorate, specializing in the Koran and the first four caliphates. He took a sabbatical year to continue Koranic studies at the famed Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo and on his return was offered a lectureship at the young age of twenty-seven, a signal honor because when it comes to matters Arabic SOAS is one of the toughest schools in the world. He was promoted to a readership at the age of thirty-four, earmarked for a professorship by forty. He was forty-one the afternoon the NSA came seeking his advice, spending a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown because that same spring of 2006 his life had fallen apart.

The emissary from Fort Meade found him in a lecture hall, concluding a talk on the teachings of the Koran as relevant to the contemporary age. It was plain from the wings of the stage that his students liked him. The hall was packed. He made his lectures have the feeling of a long and civilized conversation among equals, seldom referring to notes, jacket off, pacing up and down, his short, plump body radiating enthusiasm to impart and share, to give serious attention to a point raised from the floor, never putting a student down for lack of knowledge, talking in layman’s language, keeping the body of the lecture short with plenty of time for student questions. He had reached that point when the spook from Fort Meade appeared in the wings. A red-plaid shirt from the fifth row raised a hand. “You said you disagreed with the use of the term ‘fundamentalist’ to refer to the philosophy of the terrorists. Why?”

Given the blizzard of publicity concerning matters Arabic, Islamic and Koranic that had swept across America since 9/11, every question session swerved quickly from theoretical scholarship to the onslaught on the West that had occupied so much of the previous ten years.

“Because it is a misnomer,” said the professor. “The very word implies ‘back to basics.’ But the planters of bombs in trains, buses and malls are not going back to the basics of Islam. They are writing their own new script, then arguing retroactively, seeking to find Koranic passages that justify their war.

“There are fundamentalists in all religions. Christian monks in a closed order, sworn to poverty, self-denial, chastity, obedience-these are fundamentalists. Ascetics exist in all religions, but they do not advocate indiscriminate mass murder of men, women and children. That is the key phrase. Judge all religions and all sects within those religions by that phrase and you will see that to wish to return to the basic teachings is not terrorism, for in no religion, including Islam, do the basic teachings advocate mass murder.” In the wings, the man from Fort Meade tried to attract Dr. Martin’s attention. The professor glanced sideways and noted the young man with the short-barbered hair, button-down shirt and dark suit. He had government written all over him. He tapped the watch on his wrist. Martin nodded.

“Then what would you call the terrorists of today? Jihadists?” It was an earnest young woman farther back. From her face, Dr. Martin judged her parents must have come from the Mideast: India, Pakistan, Iran perhaps. But she did not wear the hijab scarf over the head to indicate strict Muslim. “Even ‘jihad’ is the wrong word. Of course jihad exists, but it has rules. Either it is a personal struggle within oneself to become a better Muslim, but in that case it is completely nonaggressive. Or it means true holy war, armed struggle in the defense of Islam. That’s what the terrorists claim they are about. But they choose to airbrush the rules out of the text. “For one thing, true jihad can only be declared by a legitimate Koranic authority of proven and accepted repute. Bin Laden and his acolytes are notorious for their lack of scholarship. Even if the West had indeed attacked, hurt, damaged, humiliated and demeaned Islam and thus all Muslims, there are still rules, and the Koran is absolutely specific on these. “It is forbidden to attack and kill those who have offered no offense and done nothing to hurt you. It is forbidden to kill women and children. It is forbidden to take hostages, and it is forbidden to mistreat, torture or kill prisoners. The AQ terrorists and their followers do all four on a daily basis. And let us not forget that they have killed far more fellow Muslims than Christians or Jews.”

“Then what do you call their campaign?”

The man in the wings was becoming agitated. A full general had given him an order. He did not wish to be the last to report back. “I would term them ‘the New Jihadis,’ because they have invented an unholy war outside the laws of the holy Koran and thus of true Islam. True jihad is not savage, but what they practice is. Last question, I am afraid.” There was a gathering of books and notes. A hand shot up from the front.

Freckles, white T-shirt advertising a student rock group.

“All the bombers claim to be martyrs. How do they justify this?” “Badly,” said Dr. Martin, “because they have been duped, well educated though some of them are. It is perfectly feasible to die a shahid, or martyr, fighting for Islam in a truly declared jihad. But again there are rules and these are quite specific in the Koran. The warrior must not die by his own hand even though he has volunteered for a no-return mission. He must not know the time and place of his own death.

“Suicides do exactly that. Yet suicide is specifically forbidden. In his lifetime, Muhammad absolutely refused to bless the body of a suicide even though the man had ended his own life to avoid the crippling agony of disease. Those who commit mass murder of innocents and commit suicide are destined for hell, not paradise. The false preachers and imams who trick them down this road will join them there. And now I fear, we must rejoin the world of Georgetown and hamburgers. Thank you for your attention.”

They gave him a standing ovation, and, pink with embarrassment, he took his jacket and walked into the wings.

“Sorry to interrupt. Professor,” said the man from Fort Meade. “But the brass need the Koran Committee back at the fort. The car is outside.” “In a hurry?”

“Yesterday, sir. There’s a flap.”

“Any ideas?” asked Martin.

“No, sir.”

Of course. “Need to know.” The unshakable rule. If you do not need to know to do your job, they are not going to tell you. Martin’s curiosity would have to wait. The car was the usual dark sedan with telltale aerial on the roof. It needed to be in touch with base all the time. The driver was a corporal, but even though Fort Meade is an Army base the man was in plain clothes, not uniform. No need to advertise, either.

Dr. Martin climbed into the back while the driver held the door open. His escort took the front passenger’s seat, and they began to drive through the traffic out to the Baltimore highway.

Far to the east, the man converting his own barn into a retirement home stretched out by the campfire in the orchard. He was perfectly happy like that. If he could sleep in rocks and snowdrifts, he could certainly sleep on the soft grass beneath the apple trees.

Campfire fuel was absolutely no problem. He had enough rotten old planks to last a lifetime. His billycan sizzled above the red embers, and he prepared a welcome mug of steaming tea. Fancy drinks are fine in their way, but after a hard day’s work a soldier’s reward is a mug of piping tea. He had in fact taken the afternoon off from his lofty task up on the roof and walked into Meonstoke to visit the general store and buy provisions for the weekend.

It was clear everyone knew that he had bought the barn and was trying to restore it himself. That went down well. Rich Londoners with a checkbook to flash and a lust to play the squire were greeted with politeness up front but a shrug behind their back. But the dark-haired single man who lived in a tent in his own orchard while he did the manual work himself was, so ran the growing belief in the village, a good sort.

According to the postman, he seemed to receive little mail save a few official-looking, buff envelopes, and even these he asked to be delivered to the Buck’s Head public house to save the postman the haul up the long, muddy track-a gesture appreciated by the postman. The letters were addressed to “Colonel,” but he never mentioned that when he bought a drink at the bar or a newspaper or food at the store. Just smiled and was very polite. The local and growing appreciation of the man was tinged with curiosity. So many “incomers” were brash and forward. Who was he, and where had he come from, and why had he chosen to settle in Meonstoke?

That afternoon, on his ramble through the village, he had visited the ancient church of St. Andrew ’s, and met and fallen into conversation with the rector, Reverend Jim Foley.

The ex-soldier was beginning to think he would enjoy life where he had decided to settle. He could pedal his rugged mountain bike down to Droxford on the Southampton road to buy straight-from-the-garden food in the produce market. He could explore myriad lanes he could see from his roof and sample ale in the old beamed pubs they would reveal.

But in two days, he would attend Sunday matins at St. Andrew’s in the quiet gloom of the ancient stone and he would pray, as he often did. He would ask for forgiveness of the God in whom he devoutly believed for all the men he had killed and for the rest of their immortal souls. He would ask for eternal rest for all the comrades he had seen die beside him, he would give thanks that he had never killed women or children nor any who came in peace and he would pray that one day he too could expiate his sins and enter into the kingdom.

Then he would come back to the hillside and resume his labors. There were only another thousand tiles to go.

Vast AS is the National Security Agency complex of buildings, it is only a tiny fraction of Fort Meade, one of the largest military bases in the USA. Situated four miles east of the Interstate 95 and halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the base is home to around ten thousand military staff and twenty-five thousand civilian employees. It is a city in itself, and has all the habitual facilities of a small city. The “spook” part is tucked away in one corner, inside a rigidly guarded security zone that Dr. Martin had never visited before.

The sedan bearing him glided through the sprawling base with no let or hindrance until it came to the zone. At the main gate, passes were examined, and faces peered through the windows at the British academic as his escort vouched for him. Half a mile later, the car drew up at a side door of the huge main block, and Dr. Martin and his escort entered. There was a desk guarded by Army personnel. More checks, some phoning, thumbs placed on pads, iris recognition, final admission.

After what seemed like another marathon of corridors, they came to an anonymous door. The escort knocked and went in. Martin found himself at last among faces he knew, and recognized friends, colleagues and fellow members of the Koran Committee.

Like so many government service conference rooms, it was anonymous and functional. There were no windows, but air-conditioning kept the air fresh. A circular table and padded upright chairs. On one wall, a screen, presumably for displays and graphics, should it be needed. Side tables with coffee and trays of food for the insatiable American stomach.

The hosts were clearly two nonacademic intelligence officers who introduced themselves with give-nothing-away courtesy. One was the deputy director of the NSA, sent to attend by the general himself. The other was a senior officer from Homeland Security in Washington.

And there were the four academics, including Dr. Martin. They all knew each other. Before agreeing to be co-opted onto the no-name, no-publicity committee of experts steeped in one book and one religion, they’d known each other vicariously from their published works and personally from seminars, lectures and conferences. The world of such intense Koranic study is not large. Terry Martin greeted Drs. Ludwig Schramme from Columbia University, Ben Jolley from RAND, and “Harry” Harrison from Brookings, who certainly had a different first name but was always known as Harry. The oldest and therefore the presumed senior was Ben Jolley, a great bearded bear of a man who, promptly and despite pursed lips from the deputy director, drew out and lit up a fearsome briar pipe from which he drew happily, once it got going like an autumn bonfire. The Westinghouse extraction technology overhead did its best and almost succeeded, but was clearly going to need a complete servicing. The deputy director cut straight to the heart of the reason for the convocation of the scholars. He distributed copies of two documents, one file to each. There were the Arabic originals as teased out of the AQ financier’s laptop, and translations by the in-house Arabic division. The four men went straight to the Arabic versions and read in silence. Dr. Jolley puffed; the man from Homeland Security winced. The four finished more or less at the same time. Then they read the English translations to see what had been missed and why.

Jolley looked up at the two intelligence officers. “Well?”

“Well… what, Professor?”

“What,” asked the Arabist, “is the problem that has brought us all here?”

The deputy director leaned over and tapped a portion of the English translation.

“The problem is that. There. What does it mean? What are they talking about?” All four of them had spotted the Koranic reference in the Arabic text. They had no need of translation. Each had seen the phrase many times and studied its possible various meanings. But that had been in scholarly texts. This was in modern letters. Three references in one of the letters, a single reference in the other.

“Al-lsra? It must be a code of some kind. It refers to an episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.”

“Then forgive our ignorance,” said the man from Homeland. “What is al-lsra?”

“You explain, Terry,” said Dr. Jolley.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Terry Martin, “it refers to a revelation in the life of the prophet. To this day, scholars argue as to whether he experienced a genuinely divine miracle or whether it was simply an out-of-body experience. “Briefly, he was asleep one night, a year before his emigration from his birthplace of Mecca to Medina, when he had a dream. Or a hallucination. Or a divine miracle. For brevity, let me say dream and stick with it. “In his dream, he was transported from the depths of modern Saudi Arabia across deserts and mountains to the city of Jerusalem, then a city holy to only Christians and Jews.”

“Date? On our calendar?”

“Around 622 A.D.”

“Then what happened?”

“He found a tethered horse, a horse with wings. He was bidden to mount it. The horse flew up to heaven, and the prophet confronted Almighty God Himself, who instructed him in all the prayer rituals required of a true believer. These he memorized and later dictated to a scribe as what became an integral part of the 6666. These verses became and remain the basis of Islam.” The other three professors nodded in agreement.

“And they believe that?” asked the deputy director. “Let us not be too patronizing,” Harry Harrison interrupted sharply. “In the New Testament, we are told that Jesus Christ fasted in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights and then confronted and rebuffed the Devil himself. After that period alone with no food, a man would surely be hallucinating. But for Christian true believers, it is Holy Scripture, and not to be doubted.” “All right, my apologies. So al-Isra is the meeting with the archangel?” “No way” said Jolley. “Al-Isra is the journey itself. A magical journey. A divine journey, undertaken on the instructions of Allah Himself.” “It has been called,” Dr. Schramme cut in, “a journey through the darkness to great enlightenment…”

He was quoting from an ancient commentary. The other three knew it well and nodded.

“So what would a modern Muslim and a senior operative in Al Qaeda mean by it?” This was the first time the academics had been given an inkling as to the source of the documents. Not an intercept but a capture. “Was it fiercely guarded?” asked Harrison.

“Two men died trying to prevent us seeing it.”

“Ah, well, yes. Understandable.” Dr. Jolley was studying his pipe with great attention. The other three looked down. “I fear it can be nothing but a reference to some kind of project, some operation. And not a small one.”

“Something big?” asked the man from Homeland Security. “Gentlemen, devout Muslims-not to say fanatical ones-do not regard al-Isra lightly. For them, it was something that changed the world. If they have code-named something al-Isra, they intend that it should be huge.” “And no indication what it might be?”

Dr. Jolley looked round the table. His three colleagues shrugged. “Not a hint. Both the writers call down divine blessings on their project, but that is all. That said, 1 think I can speak for us all in suggesting you find out what it refers to. Whatever else, they would never give the title al-Isra to a mere satchel bomb, a devastated nightclub, a wrecked commuter bus.” No one had been taking notes. There was no need. Every word had been recorded.

This was, after all, the building known in the trade as “the Puzzle Palace.” Both professional intelligence officers would have the transcripts within an hour, and would spend the night preparing their joint report. That report would leave the building before dawn, sealed and couriered with armed guard, and it would go high. Very high. As high as it gets in the USA, which is the White House.

Terry Martin shared a limousine with Ben Jolley on the ride back to Washington. It was bigger than the sedan in which he had come, with a partition between front and rear compartments. Through the glass, they could see the backs of two heads: the driver and their youthful escorting officer. The gruff old American thoughtfully kept his pipe in his pocket and stared out at the passing scenery, a sea of the russet and gold of autumn leaves. The younger Britisher stared the other way and also lapsed into reverie. In all his life, he had only really loved four people, and he had lost three of them in the past ten months. At the start of the year, his parents, who had had their two sons in their thirties and were both over seventy, had died almost together. Prostate cancer had taken his father, and his mother had simply been too brokenhearted to want to go on. She wrote a moving letter to each of her sons, took a bottle of sleeping pills in a piping hot bath, fell asleep and, in her own words, “went to join Daddy.”

Terry Martin was devastated but survived by leaning on two strong men, the only two he loved more than himself. One was his partner of fourteen years, the tall, handsome stockbroker with whom he shared his life. And then, one wild March night, there had been the drunken driver, going crazily fast, and the crunch of metal hitting a human body, and that body on a slab, and the awful funeral, with Gordon’s parents stiffly disapproving of his open tears. He had seriously contemplated ending his own by-now-miserable life, but his elder brother, Mike, seemed to sense his thoughts, moved in with him for a week and talked him through the crisis.

Hed hero-worshipped his brother since they were boys in Iraq, and through their years at the British public school at Haileybury, outside the market town of Hertford.

Mike had always been everything he was not. Dark to his fair, lean to his plump, hard to his soft, fast to his slow, brave to his frightened. Sitting in the limousine, gliding through Maryland, he let his thoughts return to that final rugby match against Tonbridge, with which Mike had ended his five years at Haileybury.

When the two teams came off the field, Terry had been standing by the roped passageway, grinning. Mike had reached out and ruffled his hair. “Well,” he said, “we did it, Bro.”

Terry had been seized by gut-wrenching fear when the moment had come to tell his brother that he now knew he was gay. The older man, by then an officer in the Paras and just back from combat in the Falklands, had thought about it for a moment, cracked his mocking grin and handed back the final line given by Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

From that moment, Terry’s hero worship of his elder brother knew no limits.

In Maryland, the sun set. In the same time zone, it was setting over Cuba, and on the southwestern peninsula known as Guanta-namo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell, a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever to let his watchfulness slip.

The man who prayed had been in the jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually “Gitmo,” short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in the black eyes above the black beard so he was beaten the more. But he never broke.

In the “stick and carrot” days when inmates were encouraged to denounce their fellows in exchange for favors, he’d remained silent and earned no better treatment. Seeing this, others had denounced him in exchange for concessions, but as the denunciations were complete inventions he had neither confirmed nor denied them.

In the room full of files kept by the interrogator as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him. He had civilly answered questions put to him years earlier by one of the interrogators who had decided on a humane approach. That was how a passable record of his life existed at all.

But the problem was still the same. None of the interrogators had ever understood a word of his native language and had always relied on the interpreters, or “’terps,” who accompanied them everywhere. But the ‘terps had an agenda, too. They also received favors for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.

After four years, the man at prayer was dubbed “noncooperative,” which simply meant unbreakable. In 2004, he had been transferred across the gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down, permanent-isolation unit. Here, the cells were smaller, with white walls, and exercise was allowed only at night. For a year, the man had not seen the sun.

No family clamored for him, no government sought news of him, no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees round him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.

“Goddamn Arab,” said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.

“He’s not Arab,” he said. “He’s an Afghan.”

“So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?”

It was Ben Jolley out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.

“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” Terry Martin replied. “Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.” “No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this al-Isra operation.”

“But how?”

“Well, I’ve been around spooks for a long time. Been advising as best I can on matters of the Mideast since the Six-Day War. They have a lot of ways: sources on the inside, turned agents, eavesdropping, file recovery, overflying; and the computers help a lot, cross-referencing data in minutes that used to take weeks. I guess they’ll figure it out and stop it somehow. Don’t forget we have come one hell of a long way since Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in ‘sixty, or the U2 took those photos of the Cuban missiles in ‘sixty-two. Guess before you were born, right?”

He chuckled chestily at his own antiquity as Terry Martin nodded.

“Maybe they have someone right inside Al Qaeda,” he suggested. “Doubt it,” said the older man. “Anyone that high up would have given us the location of the leadership by now, and we’d have taken them down with smart bombs.”

“Well, maybe they could slip someone inside Al Qaeda to find out and report back.”

Again, the older man shook his head, this time with total conviction. “Come on, Terry, we both know that’s impossible. A native-born Arab would quite possibly be turned and work against us. As for a non-Arab, forget it. We both know all Arabs come from extended families, clans, tribes. One inquiry of the family or clan and the impostor would be exposed. “So he would have to be CV perfect. Add to that, he would have to look the part, speak the part and, most important, play the part. One syllable wrong in all those prayers and the fanatics would hear it. They recite five times a day, and never miss a beat.”

“True,” said Martin, knowing his case was hopeless but enjoying the fantasy.

“But one could learn the Koranic passages, and invent an untraceable family.”

“Forget it, Terry. No Westerner can pass for an Arab among Arabs.” “My brother can,” said Dr. Martin. In seconds, if he could have bitten off his own tongue he would have. But it was all right. Dr. Jol-ley grunted, dropped the subject and studied the outskirts of Washington. Neither head in the front, beyond the glass, moved an inch. He let out a sigh of relief. Any mike in the car must be turned off.

He was wrong.

CHAPTER 3

The Fort Meade report on the deliberations of the Koran Committee was ready by dawn that Saturday and destroyed several planned weekends. One of those roused Saturday night at his home in Old Alexandria was Marek Gumienny, deputy director of operations at the CIA. He was bidden to report straight to his office without being told why.

The “why” was on his desk when he got there. It was not even dawn over Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince George ’s County, where the Patux-ent River flows down to join the Chesapeake.

Marek Gumienny’s office was one of the few on the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as “ Langley.” It had recently been redubbed “the Old Building,” to distinguish it from the mirror-image New Building that housed the expanding agency since 9/11.

In the hierarchy of the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence has traditionally been a political appointment, but the real muscle is habitually the two deputy directors. Ops handles the actual intelligence gathering, while the DD Intelligence covers the collation and analysis of the incoming harvest to turn raw information into a meaningful picture. Just below these two are Counter-intelligence (to keep the agency free from penetration and in-house traitors) and Counter-Terrorism (increasingly becoming the boiler room as the agency’s war swerved from the old USSR to the new threats out of the Mideast).

DDOs, back to the start of the Cold War around 1945, had always been Soviet experts with the Soviet Division and SE (Satellites and East Europe) making the running for an ambitious career officer. Marek Gumienny was the first Arabist to be appointed DDO. As a young agent, he had spent years in the Middle East, mastered two of its languages (Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran) and knew its culture.

Even in this twenty-four-hour-a-day building, predawn on a Saturday is not an easy time to rustle up piping hot, aromatic black coffee the way he liked it, so he brewed his own. While it perked, Gumienny started on the package on his desk containing the slim, wax-sealed file.

He knew what to expect. Fort Meade may have handled the file recovery, translation and analysis, but it was CIA in collaboration with the British and Pakistan ’s CTC over in Peshawar who had made the capture. CIA’s stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had filed copious reports simply to keep their boss in the picture.

The file contained all the documents downloaded from the AQ financier’s computer, but the two letters-taking up three pages-were the stars. The DDO spoke fast and fluent street Arabic, but reading script is always harder so he repeatedly referred to the translations.

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 the 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 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-headed paper. It said in capital letters:

WHAT IS AL-ISRA

IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL? FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND

WHERE. TIME SCALE: 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 GS15 stood there with yet another delivery. General Service is simply a salary scale; a “15” means a very junior staffer. Gu-mienny 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 that the CIAs closest allies, in what Kipling once called “the Great Game,” were a repository of much arcane knowledge about the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.

For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrations 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,” and the American called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service “the Friends” or “the Firm.” For Marek Gumienny, one of those friends was a man with whom he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times 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 in Cheltenham. They, too, would have gutted the laptop and printed out its contents. They, too, would have analyzed 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 that any senior executive can be connected faster by speed dial on his personal satellite telephone. 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 about to sit down to a roast beef lunch. A voice answered on the third ring. Steve Hill had enjoyed his golf and was about to enjoy his beef.

“Hallo?”

“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.

With 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 be,” 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.”

“Okay. 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 to a secondary airfield, and finally to 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, aboard 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, 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,” said Hill. “Steve, if we had the faintest idea of the location of anyone that high in Al Qaeda, wed 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, standard buff manila, labeled simply with a name:

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-mustached, 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 toward 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 to 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, in Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.

Susan Granger came at the age of 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 as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and a 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-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-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, Michael, and three more years to second son, Terry. But they 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 generation to the grandson; he was nothing 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 dad, or their nanny, the gentle plum Fatima from up-country, who would go back to the tribe with enough saved wages to find a proper young man for a husband.

There was a reference which could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin; the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdasha, racing about the lawn of the house in the Saadun suburb of Baghdad, and his father’s delighted 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. As Vice President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq 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 Hailey-bury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and coffee. “He could do it, you know,” he said when he came back from the restroom. “With enough training and backup, 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 lowlife, a gofer. 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 doppelganger. But that’s flawed, too. If the real object were still alive, ACMvould 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, ol’ buddy My eyes only. And my personal safe. Or the incinerator.”

The DD Ops flew back to Langley, but a week 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 CIA to SIS in complete secrecy, and in 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 Afghan. Name of Izmat Khan. I’m on my way.”

Terry Martin was still sleepless a week later. 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 batons to keep it down. Within a week, he could be waterproof. He heard the tinkling notes of “Lillibolero” from his mobile. It was in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging from a nail nearby. He inched across the dangerously frail rafters to reach it. The screen announced it was his brother in Washington. “Hi, Terry.”

“Mike, it’s me.” He still could not work out how people he was ringing knew already. “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 gray Jaguar nosing slowly up the track that led from the lane to the barn. “It’s okay, 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 campfire 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, wed pull you out and do the rest. Just listening to the scuttlebutt might do the trick…”

“But passing off… I don’t think I could pass for an Arab anymore. In Baghdad fifteen years ago, I made myself invisible by being a humble gardener living in a shack. There was no question of surviving an interrogation by the moukhabarat. This time, youd be looking at intensive questioning. Why would someone who has been in American hands for five years not have become a turncoat?” “Sure, we figure they would question you. But with luck the questioner would be a high-ranker brought in for the job. At which point, you break out and finger the man for us. We’ll be standing by, barely yards away.” “This,” said Martin, tapping the file about the man in the Guanta-namo cell, “is an Afghan. Ex-Taliban. That means Pashtun. I never got to be fluent in Pashto I’d be spotted by the first Afghan on the plot.” “There would be months of tutorials, Mike,” said Steve Hill. “No way you go until you feel you are ready. Not even then if you don’t think it will work. And you would be staying well away from Afghanistan. The good news about Afghan fundos is that they hardly ever appear outside their own manor.” “Do you think you could talk poor Arabic with the accent of a Pashtun of limited education?”

Mike Martin nodded. “Possibly. And if the towelheads bring in an Afghan, who really knew this guy?”

There was silence from the other two men. If that happened, everyone round the fire knew it would be the end.

As the two spymasters stared at their feet rather than explain what would happen to an agent unmasked at the heart of Al Qaeda, Martin flipped open the file on his lap. What he saw caused him to freeze.

The face was five years older, lined by suffering, and ten years more than his calendar age. But it was still the boy from the mountains, the near corpse at Qala-i-Jangi.

“I know this man,” he said quietly. “His name is Izmat Khan.”

The American stared at him openmouthed.

“How the hell can you know him? He’s been cooped up at Gitmo since he was captured five years ago.”

“I know, but many years before that we fought the Russians in the Tora Bora.” The men from London and Washington recalled the Martin file. Of course, that year in Afghanistan helping the muj in their struggle against Soviet occupation. It was a long shot, but not unfeasible that the men had met. For ten minutes, they asked him about Izmat Khan, to see what else he could add. Martin handed the file back.

“What is he like now, Izmat Khan? How has he changed in five years with your people at Camp Delta?”

The American from Langley shrugged. “He’s tough, Mike. Very, very hard. He arrived with a bad head wound and double concussion. Injured during capture. At first, our medics thought he was maybe… well… a bit simple. Backward. Turned out he was just totally disoriented. The concussion, and the journey. This was early December 2001, just after 9/11. Treatment was… how shall I put it?… not gentle. Then it seemed nature took its course, and he recovered enough for questioning.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“Not very much. Just his resume. Resisted all third degree, and all offers. Just stares at us, and what the grunts see in those black eyes is not brotherly love. That is why he is in lockdown. But, from others, we understand he has passable Arabic, learned inside Afghanistan, and before that from years in a madrassah rote-learning the Koran. And two British-born AQ volunteers who were in there with him, and have now been released, say he now has some halting English that they taught him.”

Martin glanced sharply at Steve Hill. “They’d have to be picked up and kept in quarantine,” he said.

Hill nodded. “Of course. It can be arranged.”

Marek Gumienny rose and wandered round the barn while Martin studied the file. He stared into the fire, and deep in the embers saw a bleak and bare hillside far away. Two men, a cluster of rocks and the Soviet Hind helicopter gunship swinging to the attack. A whisper from the turbaned boy: “Are we going to die, Angleez?” Gumienny came back, squatted on the ground and poked the fire. The image went up in a cloud of sparks.

“Quite a project you have taken on here, Mike. Id have thought this was a job for a crew of professionals. You doing it all yourself?” “As much as I can. For the first time in twenty-five years, I have the time.”

“But not the dough, eh?”

Martin shrugged. “There are scores of security companies out there, if I want a job. Iraq alone has spawned more professional bodyguards than one can count, and still more are wanted. They make more in a week working for your guys in the Sunni Triangle than they made in half a year as soldiers.” “But that would mean back to the dust, the sand, the danger, the too-early death. Didn’t you retire from that?”

“And what are you offering? A vacation with AQ in the Florida Keys?” Marek Gumienny had the grace to laugh. “Americans are accused of many things, Mike, but not often of being ungenerous to those who have helped them. I am thinking of a consultancy at, say two hundred thousand dollars a year for five years. Paid abroad; no need to disturb the tax man. No need actually to show up for work. No need to go into harm’s way ever again.” Mike Martin’s thoughts flitted to a scene in his all-time-favorite film. T E. Lawrence has offered Auda abu Tayi money to join him in the attack on Aqaba. He recalled the great reply: Auda will not ride to Aqaba for the British gold, he will ride to Aqaba because it pleases him. He stood up. “Steve, I want my home shrouded in tarpaulins from top to bottom. When I come back, I want it just the way I left it.”

The controller Middle East nodded. “Done,” he said.

“I’ll get my kit. There’s not much of it. Enough to fill the boot, no more.” And so the Western strike-back against Project Stingray was agreed upon under apple trees in a Hampshire orchard. Two days later, by random selection, a computer dubbed it “Operation Crowbar.”

If challenged, Mike Martin would never have been able to defend himself. But in all the briefings he later gave them about the Afghan who had once been his friend, there was one detail he kept to himself. Perhaps he thought that “need to know” was a two-way street. Perhaps he thought the detail too unimportant. It had to do with a muttered conversation in the shadows of a cave hospital run by Arabs in a place called Jaji.