The Chosen One

36

Clinton, Maryland, Friday March 24, 13.23

It was windy and noisy and the ideal place not to do an interview. But Nick du Caines’s source had insisted on it.

They were in a piece of scrubland, standing in front of a tall wire fence. To reach it he had had to pull off the freeway and into a rest-stop, park up, then walk through a thicket of nettles and overgrown weeds until he found what passed for a small clearing. The loud hum of traffic was constant.

They’d met here the first time, too. Not because Daniel Judd was particularly wary of meeting in a public place, but simply because this was his place of work and any time away from it he regarded as a waste.

Nick zipped up a leather jacket with an AC/DC emblem etched into the back, braced himself against the chill and took his place alongside Judd, who continued to stare straight ahead.

‘I’ve brought you a coffee,’ Nick said. ‘Probably stone cold by now, but it’s the thought that counts.’

‘Just put it on the ground. Between my feet. Thanks.’

Nick knew better than to interrupt Judd when he was working. On the other side of the wire fence, about two hundred yards away, a crew in overalls were fussing around two stationary aircraft. Another man was driving a small electric buggy. To anyone driving past, it would have looked like nothing more than a regular working day at the small private airport known as Washington Executive Airfield.

Judd raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, then mumbled a number into a tiny digital recorder: ‘N581GD.’ Without breaking his gaze, he reached for the long-lens SLR camera that hung on a second strap around his neck and took a good dozen pictures of one of the two planes, the motorwind whirring uninterruptedly.

Only then did he turn to Nick. ‘How you doing?’

‘Aren’t you going to have your coffee?’

‘You said it was stone cold.’

‘Didn’t do a brilliant sell on that one, did I?’

Judd said nothing. Du Caines was used to this treatment and had learned not to see it as unfriendly. The guy might have the social skills of a tree stump but Nick respected few people more.

Judd was an ‘airplane spotter’, one of these people who stood near runways watching planes take off and land and take off again. Such people were a variant of the trainspotters Nick and his friends had teased mercilessly back in school, anoraks who could get genuinely excited by pencilling a serial number into a notebook. But it turned out they were right to get excited – and, by God, Nick was glad they had. For it was these geeks – and geeks like them around the world – who had noticed the strange pattern of private jet flights that began in regular American airports but ended in the likes of Karachi, Amman or Damascus. They had put the pieces together and discovered the phenomenon of ‘extraordinary rendition’: the secret flights by which suspected terrorists were spirited away in the dead of night from the streets of Milan or Stockholm to Egypt or Jordan, nations whose intelligence agencies were ready to do whatever it took to ‘persuade’ these suspects to talk.

It was Judd and his pals who had noted down the number of a plane that had landed first in Shannon, Ireland then reappeared in Sweden before reaching its final destination in Amman. The spotters had then visited the Federal Aviation Administration’s website and clicked on the registry of aircraft licensed to US owners. There they could find not only a full archive of logs and flight plans for every registered aeroplane, but also the identity of the owners of each aircraft. All at the click of a mouse.

The plane that had touched down in Shannon en route to Amman had been the property of a small aviation company based in Massachusetts. A few clicks later and Judd had the names of the company’s executives. But these businessmen proved to be curiously shy. Instead of giving an address, each one had supplied only a post office box number. That piqued Judd’s interest, not least because these PO boxes were all in northern Virginia. Which just so happened to house, in Langley, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

After that, Judd had enough to be certain. Over a drink in Adams Morgan, seated in the dark at a corner table, he had provided the dates, flight plans and registration numbers that enabled Nick du Caines to reveal to the world the plane he and his Sunday newspaper called the ‘Guantánamo Bay Express’. He had won three awards for that one – and gave his ailing employers yet another stay of execution.

‘You got that look on your face, Nick.’

‘What look?’

‘The look that says you wanna cause trouble.’

‘Ah, that will be you looking in the mirror.’

Judd gave a flicker of a smile and went back to gazing at the airfield.

Nick decided not to plunge in straight away. ‘So what’s going on here? Anything?’

‘Might be. Too early to tell.’

‘Government?’

‘Like I say, Mr du Caines, too early to tell.’

‘Right you are. Back off. Understood.’

Another long silence. Judd raised the binoculars to his eyes. Still peering through them, he said, ‘You didn’t come out here into the middle of nowhere on a ball-freezing day to look at my pretty face, now did you?’

‘I did not.’

‘So, what is it you want to ask?’

‘That’s just it. I’m not sure.’

‘That’s not a good start.’

‘OK. New Orleans. What do you know about New Orleans?’

‘You can do better than that, Nick.’

‘Would you be able to see if a CIA team flew into New Orleans?’

‘This about that guy who was spilling the shit on the President?’

‘Christ, you don’t miss much, do you?’

‘Why else would a Brit journalist be interested in New Orleans?’

‘OK. Yes, it’s about that. I have reason to believe – or rather suspect – that Vic Forbes did not die entirely of natural causes.’

‘Looked pretty unnatural to me.’

‘Yes. Indeed. But I think he may have been helped, if you see what I mean.’

‘So why CIA?’

‘I can’t say.’

For the first time Judd turned away from his view through the chicken wire and looked Nick du Caines in the face. ‘I thought it was meant to be me who refused to tell you things.’

‘I know, I know. But this is one of those cases where I really can’t name a source.’

‘I didn’t ask you to name your source. I asked you why you thought it was the CIA.’

‘Because to answer that would risk revealing my source. And I can’t do that.’ When Judd said nothing, du Caines added, ‘I would do the same for you.’

‘So why do you think they used an airplane?’

‘The truth is, I have no reason to believe that at all. But you’re the only person I know who’s ever found out a thing about what the CIA gets up to so I’m starting with you.’

‘Fishing expedition.’

‘Total. I’m thinking that if by some chance they did use a plane, then that’s something we can find out. You can find out.’

‘You said, “they”.’

‘Sorry?’

‘“If by some chance they did use a plane.” Why they?’

Nick frowned as if he’d just been confronted with a tricky question in a pub quiz. ‘Yes, I did say that. I suppose I just assumed…All the CIA stuff I’ve read – Laos in the seventies, central America in the eighties, Afghanistan, Iraq – it’s always teams. Isn’t that how they do it? Same with the rendition thing. How many did they use for that job in Italy?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘And that was just to pick up one guy. And it wasn’t wet work. Which Forbes was.’

‘OK, I’ll look. But it’s a long shot.’

‘I know.’

‘Chances are, they drove there. Or flew separately, on commercial.’

‘But you’ll look? I owe you one, Dan.’

With that, Nick du Caines returned to the battered Nissan that served as his car: not old enough to be retro, just plain old.

But, like all those who see themselves as observers, eyeing the world through binoculars or an SLR lens, neither Judd nor du Caines imagined that, at that very moment, they were themselves being observed through a long lens.

The watchers being watched.