The Kill List (19 page)

“Am I hearing correctly or has something very weird happened?” he asked.

“Listen a while longer,” said the Tracker, and hung up.

On the screen, the uncomprehending Tony Suárez carried on.

“I have read the Revisions now a score of times in English translation, which I recommend to you all who speak and read no Arabic and to those who do in the original tongue.

“For it is clear to me now that what our brothers the al-Gama’a say is true. The governmental system known as democracy is perfectly compatible with True Islam, and it is hatred and lust for blood that is alien to every word ever spoken by the Prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace.

“Those who now claim to be the True Believers and who call for mass murder, cruelty, torture and the death of thousands are in truth like the Kharijite rebels who fought against the Prophet’s Companions.

“We must now consider all Jihadists and Salafists like those Kharijites, and we who worship only the one true Allah and His blessed prophet Muhammad must destroy the heretics who have led His people astray these many years.

“And we True Believers must surely destroy these advocates of hatred and violence as the Companions once destroyed the Kharijites long ago.

“But now is my time come to declare who I really am. I was born Zulfiqar Ali Shah, in Islamabad, and raised as a good Muslim. But I fell and became Abu Azzam, a killer of men, women and children.”

The phone rang again.

“Who the hell is this?” yelled Gray Fox.

“Hear him out,” said the Tracker. “It’s almost over.”

“So, before the world, and especially before you, my brothers and sisters in Allah, I pronounce my
tawba
, my true repentance, for all that I have done and said in a false cause. And I declare my complete
bara’a
, my disavowal, of all that I said and preached against the true teachings of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“For I showed no mercy and no compassion, and must now beg you to show me that mercy, that compassion, which the Holy Koran teaches us may be extended to the sinner who truly repents his former sinful ways. May Allah bless you and be with you all.”

The screen faded. The phone rang again. In fact, phones were ringing right across the
umma
, the world community of Islam, many of them to give vent to screams of rage.

“Tracker, what the hell have you done?” asked Gray Fox.

“I hope I have just destroyed him,” said the Tracker.

He recalled what the wise old scholar at al-Azhar University had told him years ago when he was a student in Cairo: “The merchants of hatred have four levels of loathing. You may think you Christians are at the top level. Wrong, for you are also believers in the one true God and thus, with the Jews, also People of the Book.

“Above you come the atheists and idolaters, who have no god but only carved idols. That is why the Mujahideen of Afghanistan hated the communists more than you. They are atheists.

“But above even them, for the fanatics, come the moderate Muslims, who do not follow them, and that is why they seek to topple every Western-friendly Muslim government by exploding bombs in their marketplaces and killing fellow Muslims who have done no harm.

“But highest of all, a dog among the unforgivables, is the apostate, the one who abandons or denounces Jihadism, then recants and returns to the faith of his fathers. For him, forgiveness is out of the question and only death awaits.”

And then he poured the tea and prayed.

• • •

M
r. Abdi sat alone in his suite, a bedroom and office, in the fort behind Garacad, his knuckles white on the tabletop. The two-foot walls were soundproof but not the doors, and he could hear the sounds of the whipping down the corridor. He wondered which wretched servant had incurred the displeasure of his host.

There was no disguising the crack as the instrument of torture, probably a semirigid camel crop, rose and fell, nor did the rough timber doors mask the shrill screams following each lash.

Ali Abdi was not a brutal man, and although he was aware of the distress of the mariners imprisoned in their anchored vessels out under the sun and would not be hurried if extra money could be extracted by delaying, he saw no reason for maltreatment—even of Somali servants. He was beginning to regret ever agreeing to negotiate for this pirate commander. The man was a brute.

He went ashen white when, in a pause in the flogging, the victim pleaded for mercy. He was speaking in Swedish.

• • •

T
he reaction of the Preacher to the broadcast worldwide of the devastating words of Tony Suárez was almost hysterical.

As he had not given a sermon online for three weeks, he was not watching the Jihadist post when it broadcast. He was alerted by one of his Pakistani bodyguards who spoke a smattering of English. He heard the end of it in stunned disbelief, then replayed it from the start.

He sat in front of his desktop computer and watched in horror. It was phoney—of course it was phony—but it was convincing. The likeness was uncanny, the beard, the face, the dress, the backcloth, even the eyes—he was looking at his own doppelgänger. And his voice.

But that was nothing compared to the words; the formal recantation was a death sentence. It would take many weeks to persuade the faithful that they had been deceived by a clever fraud. From outside the study, his servants could hear him screaming at the figure on the screen, that the
tawba
was a lie, his recantation a foul untruth.

When the face of the faraway American actor faded, he sat, drained, for almost an hour. Then he made his mistake. Desperate to be believed by someone at least, he contacted his one true friend, his ally in London. By e-mail.

Cheltenham was listening, and Fort Meade. And a silent Marine colonel in an office in the U.S. embassy in London. And Gray Fox in Virginia, who had the Tracker’s request on his desk. The Preacher might be destroyed now, Tracker had told him. But it was not enough. He had too much blood on his hands. Now he had to be killed, and he had laid out several options. Gray Fox would take it to the commander of J-SOC, personally, and he was confident it would go for discussion and judgment right up to the Oval Office. He didn’t know what that judgment would be, however.

Within minutes of the e-mail out of Marka, the exact text and the precise location of each computer and the owner of each computer were proven genuine. The placing of the Preacher was completely beyond doubt, the complicity at every level of Mustafa Dardari the same.

Gray Fox was able to get back to the Tracker within twenty-four hours, on the secure line from TOSA to the embassy. The news was not good.

“I tried, Tracker, but the answer is no. There is a presidential veto on missiles on that compound. It’s partly the dense civilian population all around it and partly the presence of Opal inside it.”

“And the other proposal?”

“No to both. There will be no beach landing from the sea. Now that the al-Shabaab have reinfested Marka, we do not know how many there are or how well armed they are. The senior brass reckon he could slip away into that labyrinth of alleys and we’d lose him forever.

“And the same applies to a heli-borne drop on the roof, bin Laden style. Not the Rangers, not the SEALs, not even the Night Stalkers. It’s too far from Djibouti and Kenya, too public in Mogadishu. And there is the danger of a shoot-down. The words ‘Black Hawk Down’ still cause nightmares.

“Sorry, Tracker. A great job. You’ve identified him, located him, discredited him. But I guess it’s over. The bastard’s inside Marka and unlikely to come out, unless you can find one helluva bait. And there’s the problem of Opal. I guess you had better pack up and come home.”

“He’s not dead yet, Gray Fox. He has an ocean of blood on his hands. He may not preach anymore, but he is still a dangerous bastard. He could move west to Mali. Let me finish the job.”

There was silence on the line. Then Gray Fox came back.

“OK, Tracker. One more week. Then you pack your kit.”

As he replaced the phone, the Tracker realized he had miscalculated. In destroying the credibility of the Preacher throughout the entire world of Islamist fundamentalism, he had intended to force his target out of his bolt-hole and into the open. He wanted him on the run from his own people, devoid of cover, a refugee again. He had never intended his own superiors to call him off the chase.

He found himself facing a crisis of conscience. However he might vote as a citizen, as an officer and a U.S. Marine to boot, his commander in chief had his total loyalty. And that meant his obedience. Yet this he could not obey.

He had been given an assignment. It was not over. He had been tasked with a mission. It was not accomplished. And it had changed. It was now a personal vendetta. He owed a debt to a much-loved old man lying on a bed in an ICU ward in Virginia Beach and he intended to discharge it.

For the first time since cadet school, he contemplated resignation from the Corps. His career was saved a few days later by a dental technician he had never heard of.

• • •

A
l-Afrit retained his horror picture for two days, but when it suddenly flashed up on the screen in the operations center at Chauncey Reynolds, it caused stunned shock. Gareth Evans had been talking to Mr. Abdi. The issues, of course, were ransom money and timescale.

Abdi had come down from twenty-five million dollars to twenty million, but the time was dragging—for the Europeans. It had been a week, to the Somalis a chronological fleabite. Al-Afrit was demanding all the money and he wanted it now. Abdi had explained that the Swedish owner would not contemplate twenty million. Evans was privately of the view that they would finally settle at about five million.

Then al-Afrit took over and sent his picture. By chance, Reynolds was also in the office, and Harry Andersson, who had been advised to fly home and wait in Stockholm. The picture made the three men sick and silent.

The cadet was held facedown over a rough wooden table by a big Somali, who had his wrists. His ankles were apart, each lashed to a table leg. His trousers and undershorts were missing.

His buttocks had been caned to a bloody mess. His face, turned sideways against the timber, was clearly screaming.

The reaction of Evans and Reynolds was to realize they were dealing with a sadistic madman. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The reaction of Harry Andersson was more extreme. He uttered a cry close to a scream and rushed to the bathroom. The others heard the retching as he knelt with his head over the pan. When he returned, his face was ashen save for two red patches, one on each cheek.

“That boy is my son!” he shouted. “My son!” He grabbed Gareth Evans by the lapels and hauled him out of his chair until they were face-to-face, inches apart.

“You get my son back, Gareth Evans, you get him back. Pay the swine what they want. Anything, you hear? You tell them, I pay fifty million dollars for my boy, you tell them.”

He stormed out, leaving the two Britishers pale and shaken and the hideous picture still on the screen.

O
n the morning of his martyrdom, Tariq “Terry” Hussein rose long before dawn. Behind closed curtains, he purified his body according to the ancient rituals, seated himself in front of the bedsheet draped on the bedroom wall with the appropriate Koranic passages, switched on his camcorder and recorded his final words to the world. Then he logged on to the Jihadi channel and sent his message worldwide. Before the authorities noticed it, it would be far too late.

He drove through a lovely summer dawn to join the first of the morning’s commuters, some coming from Maryland into Virginia, some going the opposite way, and many heading into the District of Columbia. He was in no hurry, but he wanted to time himself right.

To park in the nearside lane of a major commuter traffic artery could not be sustained for long. To be too early would mean that blocked commuters behind the stalled car would hammer their horns and attract attention. A state police car could well be summoned by one of the circling helicopters. It would have trouble penetrating the logjam but would duly arrive with two armed officers onboard. That was what Hussein intended, but not prematurely.

To be too late could mean the targets he had in mind might have passed by and he could not wait long for the next one. Just after ten past seven, he arrived at Key Bridge.

There are eight arches to this Washington landmark: five span the Potomac River, separating Virginia from Georgetown in D.C., two more on the Washington side cross the C&O Canal and K Street, and the eighth, on the Virginia side, spans the George Washington Memorial Parkway, another constantly in use commuter route.

Hussein, on U.S. Route 29, approached the bridge, hugging the nearside lane of the six-lane highway. At the center point above the GW Memorial, he broke down. His compact slowed to a halt. At once, angry cars behind began to swerve past him. He got out, went to the rear and opened the trunk. From it, he took two red “broken down” triangles and placed them on the road.

He opened both doors on the passenger side to create a small box between the car and the parapet. Reaching in, he withdrew the rifle, fully loaded with forty rounds in two switchover magazines, leaned over the parapet and squinted through the scope sight at the columns of steel passing beneath. If anyone coming up behind him could see what a man between the two open doors was doing, either they did not believe what they were seeing or they were too busy wrestling with their steering wheels and craning over their shoulders to avoid being rammed as they pulled out.

At that hour, a quarter after seven, almost every tenth vehicle below the bridge is a commuter bus. The D.C. Metro service runs several of them, some colored blue, some orange. The orange ones are on the 23C route, which runs from the Rosslyn Metro station right through to Langley, Virginia, where it terminates at the gates of the huge complex known simply as the CIA, or the Agency.

The traffic below the bridge was not logjammed, but it was moving sedately, nose to tail. Tariq Hussein’s Internet research had told him which bus to look for and he had almost given up hope when he saw an orange roof in the distance. A helicopter wheeled and turned far out over the river. It would see the stalled vehicle in the middle of the bridge at any moment. He willed the orange bus to come closer.

The first four bullets, straight through the windshield, killed the driver. The coach swerved, hit a car alongside, stalled and stopped. There was a figure in a Metro service uniform slumped over the wheel quite dead. Reactions began.

Down below, the sideswiped car also stopped. The driver climbed out and began to harangue the bus that had hit him. Then he noticed the slumped driver, presumed a heart attack and produced his cell phone.

Horns behind the two stalled vehicles began to hoot. Some drivers also climbed out. One glanced upward, saw the figure on the parapet and yelled in alarm. The helicopter wheeled over Arlington and turned toward the Key Bridge. Hussein fired over and over again through the roof of the stationary bus. After twenty rounds, the firing pin met an empty chamber. He detached the magazine, reversed it and inserted the spare. Then he resumed firing.

Below him there was chaos. Word had spread. Drivers were leaping out of their cars to crouch behind them. Two at least were shouting into their cell phones.

On the bridge, two women back down the line were screaming. The roof of the 23C service bus was being torn apart. The interior was becoming a charnel house of blood, bodies and hysterical humanity. Then the second magazine ran out.

It was not the rifleman in the helicopter who brought closure but an off-duty patrolman ten cars down the line on Route 29 behind the stalled car. He had his window open to let the cigarette smoke out lest his wife later detected the odor. He heard the shots and recognized the crack of a high-powered rifle. He got out, unholstered his service automatic and started running, not away from the shots but toward them.

The first Tariq Hussein knew of him was when the window of the open door beside him shattered. He turned, saw the running man and raised his rifle. It was empty. The running officer could not know that. At twenty feet, he stopped, crouched, took the double-handed position and emptied his magazine into the door and the man behind it.

It was later established that three rounds hit the gunman and they were enough. When the officer reached the car, the gunman was on the verge of the road, gasping feebly. He died thirty seconds later.

For most of that day, there was chaos on Route 29, closed as forensic teams took away the body, the gun and finally the car. But it was nothing as to what was happening on the GW Memorial Parkway beneath.

The interior of the Rosslyn-to-Langley commuter coach was a butcher’s shop. Later, figures released to the public told of seven dead, nine critically injured, with five major amputations and twenty flesh wounds, all inside the bus, there had simply been no cover from above.

At Langley, the shock among the thousands of staffers when the news came through was like a declaration of war—but from an enemy already dead.

The Virginia state police and the FBI wasted no time. The killer’s car was easily traced through the vehicle-licensing bureau. SWAT teams raided the house outside Fairfax. It was empty, but forensic teams, muffled in their overalls, stripped it to the plasterwork—and then to the foundations.

Within twenty-four hours, the net of interrogators had spread far and wide. Counterterrorism experts pored over the laptop and the diary. The death declaration was played to rooms of silent men and women in the FBI’s Hoover Building, with copies to the CIA.

Not everyone on the stricken bus worked for the Agency, since the bus served other stops. But most went to the end of the line—Langley/McLean.

Before sundown, the Director of the CIA exercised his prerogative and secured a private interview with the President in the Oval Office. Staffers in the corridors said he was still pale with anger.

• • •

I
t is very rare for spymasters in one country to have any regard for their opponents among the enemy, but it happens. During the Cold War, many in the West had a grudging regard for the man who ran East Germany’s spy service.

Markus “Misha” Wolf had a small budget and a big enemy—Germany and NATO. He did not even bother trying to traduce the cabinet ministers in the service of Bonn. He targeted those dowdy, scuttling, invisible mice in the offices of the high and mighty without whom no office can run: the confidential private secretaries to the ministers.

He studied their drab, spinsterly and often lonely private lives and targeted them with young, handsome lovers. These Romeos would start slow and patient, moving to warm embraces in chilly lives, promises of companionship for life in sunny places after retirement, and all just for a glance at those silly papers forever passing across the minister’s desk.

And they did, those Ingrids and Waltrauds. They passed over the copies of everything confidential and classified that were left unattended when the minister stalked out to his four-course lunch. It reached a point where the Bonn government was so penetrated that the NATO allies did not dare tell Bonn what day of the week it was because within a day the information would go to East Berlin and then Moscow.

Eventually, the police would come, the Romeo would vanish and the office mouse, shrunken and in tears, would appear fleetingly between two hulking cops. Then she would exchange a lonely little flat for a lonely little cell in prison.

He was a ruthless bastard, was Misha Wolf, but after the collapse of East Germany, he retired in obscurity, never charged with anything, and died in his bed of natural causes.

Forty years later, the British SIS would have loved to eavesdrop on what was said and done in the offices of Chauncey Reynolds, but Julian Reynolds regularly had his entire suite swept by a high-grade team of electronic wizards, some of them actually retired from government service.

So the Firm did not have state-of-the-art technology secreted in the private office of Gareth Evans that summer, but they did have Emily Bulstrode. She saw everything, read everything and heard everything, and no one noticed her with her tray of cups.

The day Harry Andersson screamed into the face of Gareth Evans, Mrs. Bulstrode bought her usual sandwich at the deli on the corner and went to her favorite telephone booth. She did not like those modern things that people kept in their pockets, always going off in conferences. She preferred to visit one of the few remaining red-painted, cast-iron kiosks where you put coins in a meter. She asked for a connection, spoke a few words and went back to her desk.

After work, she went on foot to St. James’s Park, sat on the assigned bench and fed the ducks some crusts she had saved from her sandwich as she waited for her contact. Back in the day, she mused, her beloved Charlie had been the man in Moscow who every day went to Gorki Park and picked up top secret microfilm from the Soviet traitor Oleg Penkovsky. These state secrets, relayed to the desk of President Kennedy, enabled him to outwit Nikita Khrushchev and get those damn rockets removed from Cuba in the autumn of 1962.

A young man approached and sat down beside her. The usual exchange of harmless chitchat assured true identity. She glanced at him and smiled. A youngster, she thought, probably a probationer, not even born when she used to slip through the Iron Curtain into East Germany for the Firm.

The young man pretended to read the
Evening Standard
. He took no notes because he had a recorder active but silent in his jacket pocket. Emily Bulstrode also had no notes; she had her two assets, a totally harmless air and a steel-trap memory.

So she told the probationer everything that had happened that morning in the law offices, detail by detail and word for word. Verbatim. Then she rose and walked to the station to catch her commuter train for her little house in Coulsdon. She sat alone, watching the southern suburbs drift by. Once she had dodged the dreadful Stasis; now she was seventy-five and made coffee for lawyers.

The young man from Vauxhall Cross went back in the dusk and filed his report. He noticed there was a flag attached, to the effect that the Chief had agreed that news concerning Somalia should be shared with the Cousins up at the U.S. embassy. He could not see what a brutal warlord in Garacad could have to do with a hunt for the Preacher, but a standing order is still a standing order, so he filed a copy for the CIA.

In his safe house half a mile from the embassy, the Tracker was almost finished packing when his BlackBerry throbbed discreetly. He looked at the message, scrolled down until the end, switched off and thought for a while. Then he unpacked. A benign deity had just given him his bait.

• • •

G
areth Evans called a conference with Mr. Ali Abdi the next morning. The Somali, when he came on, was subdued.

“Mr. Abdi, my friend, I have always taken you for a civilized man,” he began.

“I am, Mr. Evans, I am,” said the negotiator in Garacad. Evans could tell his voice was tight with distress. He believed it was probably genuine. Of course, one could never tell one hundred percent. After all, Abdi and al-Afrit were of the same tribe, the Habar Gidir, or Abdi, would not have been trusted as a negotiator.

Evans recalled the advice he had been given years before when he was in Customs and Excise and had been posted in the Horn of Africa. His tutor was an old, parchment-skinned colonial
wallah
with eyes yellowed by malaria. The Somali, he was told, had six priorities, which never varied.

At the top was Self. Then came Family, then Clan, then Tribe. At the bottom were Nation, then Religion. The last two were only invoked to fight the foreigner. Left to themselves, they would simply fight each other, constantly shifting alliances and loyalties according to perceived advantage and waging vendetta according to perceived grievance.

The last thing he told the young Gareth Evans before he blew his brains out when the Colonial Service threatened to retire him back to rainy England was: “You cannot purchase the loyalty of a Somali, but you can usually rent it.”

The idea at the back of Gareth Evans’s mind that late-summer morning in Mayfair was to see whether Ali Abdi’s loyalty to his fellow tribesman exceeded that of loyalty to himself.

“What has happened to one of the prisoners of your principal was disgraceful, unacceptable. It could derail our entire negotiation. And I must tell you I was so pleased before that that the matter was between you and me, because I believe we are both honorable men.”

“I believe so, too, Mr. Gareth.”

Evans could not know how secure the line was. He was not thinking of Fort Meade and Cheltenham—he knew that was a foregone conclusion—but whether any of the warlord’s servants, listening in, was fluent in English. Nevertheless, he had to gamble on Abdi understanding even a single word.

“Because, you see, my friend, I think we may have reached the point of Thuraya.”

There was a long pause. Evans’s gamble was that if any other less educated Somali was listening in, he would not know what that was but that Abdi would.