The Kill List (5 page)

“How does he prevent tracing back down the line of diversions?”

“By creating a proxy server to create a false Internet protocol. The IP is like your home address with zip code. Then into the proxy server he has introduced a malware or botnet to bounce his sermon all over the world.”

“Translate.”

The man from the NSA sighed. He spent his entire life talking cyberjargon with colleagues who knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Malware. ‘Mal,’ as in bad or evil. A virus. ‘Bot,’ short for robot, something that does your bidding without asking questions or revealing who it is working for.”

The Tracker thought it over.

“So the mighty NSA is really defeated?”

The government’s computer ace was not flattered, but he nodded.

“We will, of course, keep trying.”

“There’s a clock ticking. I may have to try some place else.”

“Be my guest.”

“Let me ask this. Control your natural chagrin. Just supposing you were the Preacher. Who would you absolutely not want on your tail? Who would worry the crap out of you?”

“Someone better than me.”

“Is there any such someone?”

The NSA man sighed.

“Probably. Somewhere out there. I would guess from the new generation. Sooner or later, the veterans are overtaken by some beardless kid in every walk of life.”

“Do you know any beardless kids? Any specific beardless kid?”

“Look, I’ve never even met him. But I heard at a recent seminar and trade fair of a youngster right here in Virginia. My informant said he was not at the trade fair because he lives with his parents and never leaves their home. Never, not ever. He’s peculiar. In this world he’s a bundle of nerves, hardly talks. But he flies like a fighter ace when he enters his own world.”

“Which is?”

“Cyberspace.”

“You have a name? Even an address?”

“I figured you might ask.” He took a slip of paper from a pocket and passed it over. Then he rose. “Don’t blame me if he’s no use. It was only a rumor, in-trade gossip among us weirdos.”

When he had gone, the Tracker settled for the muffins and coffee and left. In the parking lot he glanced at the paper. Roger Kendrick. And an address in Centerville, Virginia, one of myriad small satellite towns that had sprung up in the past two decades and then exploded with commuters since 9/11.

• • •

A
ll trackers, all detectives, whatever and wherever the hunt, whoever the quarry, need one break. Just one. Kit Carson was going to be lucky. He was going to get two.

One would come from a strange teenage boy too frightened to leave the attic bedroom of his parents’ backstreet house in Centerville, and the other from an old Afghan peasant whose rheumatism was forcing him to lay down his rifle and come in from the mountains.

A
bout the only unconventional or audacious thing Lt. Col. Musharraf Ali Shah of the Pakistan regular army had ever done was marry. It was not the fact of marriage but the girl he wed.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-five and single, he had been briefly posted to the Siachen Glacier, a bleak and wild zone in the far north of his country where the border abutted Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India. Later, from 1984 to 1999, there would be a low-level but festering border war in the Siachen, but back then it was just cold and bleak, a hardship posting.

The then-lieutenant Ali Shah was a Punjabi, like the majority of Pakistanis, and presumed, as did his parents, that he would make a “good” marriage, possibly to the daughter of a senior officer, which would help his career, or a rich merchant, which would help his bank balance.

He would have been lucky to do either, for he was not an exciting man. He was one of those obeyers of orders to the letter, conventional, orthodox, with the imagination of a
chapati
. But in those jagged mountains, he met and fell in love with a local girl of startling beauty named Soraya. Without the permission or blessing of his family, he married.

Her own family was pleased, thinking a union with a regular army officer would bring elevation in the great cities of the plain. Perhaps a large house in Rawalpindi or even Islamabad. Alas, Musharraf Ali Shah was one of life’s plodders, and, over thirty years, he would plod up the rankings to finish as lieutenant colonel, clearly going no higher. A boy was born in 1980, to be named Zulfiqar.

Lieutenant Ali Shah was in the Armored Infantry, getting his commission at twenty-two in 1976. After his first tour on the Siachen, he returned with his heavily pregnant wife and was promoted to captain. He was allocated a very modest house on the officers’ patch in Rawalpindi, the military concentration a few miles from the capital of Islamabad.

There were to be no more behavior shocks. Like all officers in the Pakistani army, fresh postings came up every two or three years and were divided into “hard” and “soft.” A posting to a city like Rawalpindi, Lahore or Karachi counts as soft and is “with family.” Being sent to the garrison of Multan, Kharian, Peshawar in the throat of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan or the Taliban-infested Swat Valley counted as hard and are for unaccompanied officers only. Through all these postings, the boy Zulfiqar went to school.

Every Pakistani garrison town has schools for the offspring of officers, but they come in three levels. At the bottom come the government schools, then the army public schools and, for those with family funds, the elite private schools. The Ali Shahs had no money outside the very modest salary, and Zulfiqar went to army schools. They have the reputation of being well run, employing many officers’ wives as teachers, and they are free.

The boy matriculated at fifteen and passed on to army college, taking engineering on his father’s orders. This was the skill that would grant automatic employment and/or a commission in the army. That was in 1996. The parents began to notice a change in their son in his third year.

The now-major Ali Shah, of course, was a Muslim, practicing but not passionately devout. It would have been unthinkable not to attend mosque every Friday or join in the ritual prayers as and when required. But that was all. He habitually dressed in uniform for prestige reasons, but if he had to dress in mufti, it would be the national dress for males: the leg-tight trousers and long, front-buttoned jacket that altogether make up the
shalwar kameez
.

He noticed his son began to grow a straggly beard and wear the fretted skullcap of the devout. He prostrated himself the required five times a day and snapped his disapproval when he saw his father taking a whisky, the tipple of the officer corps, and stormed out of the room. His parents thought the devotions and intense religiosity were a passing phase.

He began to steep himself in written works about Kashmir, the disputed border territory that has poisoned relations between Pakistan and India since 1947. He began to veer toward the violent extremism of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group later responsible for the Mumbai massacre.

His father tried to console himself with the thought that his son would graduate in a year and either enter the army or find a good job as a qualified engineer, a talent always sought after in Pakistan. But in the summer of 2000, he flunked his finals, a disaster his father put down to abandoning his studies and poring over the Koran; that and learning Arabic, the only permitted language in which the Koran may be studied.

This event marked the first of a series of blazing quarrels between the son and his father. Maj. Ali Shah pulled such strings as he was able to in order to plead that his son had been unwell and deserved a chance to take the finals again. Then came 9/11.

Like virtually the entire world in possession of a television set, the family watched in horror as the airliners slammed into the Twin Towers. Except their son Zulfiqar. He rejoiced, he noisily jubilated, as the TV station repeated the spectacle over and over again. That was when his parents realized that along with extreme religious devotion, a constant reading of the original Jihadist propagandists Sayyid Qutb and his disciple Azzam, and a loathing of India, their son had developed a hatred of America and the West.

That winter the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and within six weeks the Northern Alliance, with enormous U.S. Special Forces help and American air power, had toppled the Taliban government. While the Taliban’s guest Osama bin Laden fled over the Pakistan border in one direction, the Taliban’s one-eyed and bizarre leader Mullah Omar fled into the Pakistani province of Balochistan and settled with his high council, the Shura, in the city of Quetta.

For Pakistan this was a long way from an academic problem. The Pakistani army and indeed all the armed forces are effectively ruled by the Inter-Services Intelligence branch, simply known as the ISI. Everyone in uniform in Pakistan walks in awe of the ISI. And the ISI had created the Taliban in the first place.

More, an unusually large percentage of ISI officers were of the extremist wing of Islam and were not going to abandon their creation, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda guests, to become loyal to the U.S., though they would have to pretend to. Thus began the running sore that has bedeviled U.S.-Pakistan relations ever since. Not only did the senior ranks of the ISI know that bin Laden was in that walled compound in Abbottabad; they built it for him.

In the early spring of 2002, a high-ranking ISI delegation went to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura. They would normally not have deigned to invite the humble Maj. Ali Shah to accompany them but for one thing. The two senior ISI generals spoke no Pashto; the mullah and his Pashtun followers spoke no Urdu. Maj. Ali Shah spoke no Pashto either, but he had a son who did.

The major’s wife was a Pathan from the wild mountains of the north. Her native tongue was Pashto. Her son was fluent in both tongues. He accompanied the delegation, intoxicated by the honor. When he returned to Islamabad, he had the last of the furious rows with his ultra-conventional father who stood ramrod-backed, staring out of the window, as his son stormed out. The parents never saw him again.

• • •

T
he figure that confronted Mr. Kendrick Sr. when he answered his front door was dressed in uniform. Not full dress, but neatly pressed camouflage, with unit flashes, rank tabs and decorations. He could discern that his visitor was a colonel in the Marines. He was impressed.

That was the idea. Working at TOSA, the Tracker hardly ever wore full kit because it drew attention, and in his new environment that was something he avoided at all costs. But Mr. Jimmy Kendrick was a janitor for a local school. He tended the central heating system and swept corridors. He was not accustomed to Marine colonels on the doorstep. He had to be overawed.

“Mr. Kendrick?”

“Yes.”

“Colonel Jackson. Is Roger at home?” James Jackson was one of his frequent aliases.

Of course he was at home. He never left home. Jimmy Kendrick’s only son was a grievous disappointment to him. Suffering from acute agoraphobia, the boy was terrified of leaving the familiar embrace of his attic hidey-hole and his mother’s company.

“Sure. He’s upstairs.”

“Could I have a word with him? Please?”

He led the uniformed Marine upstairs. It was not a large house; just two rooms down, two up, and an aluminum ladder to a loft space. The father called up into the void.

“Roger, someone to see you. Come on down.”

There was a shuffling, and a face appeared in the aperture atop the ladder. It was a pale face, like that of a night creature accustomed to half-light; young, vulnerable, anxious. About eighteen or nineteen, nervous, with eyes that did not make eye contact. He seemed to be looking at the landing carpet between the two men below.

“Hello, Roger. I’m Jamie Jackson. I need your advice. Can we talk?”

The boy considered the request seriously. There appeared to be no curiosity, just acceptance of the strange visitor and request.

“OK,” he said. “Do you want to come up?”

“There’s no room up there.” The father spoke out of the side of his mouth. Then louder: “Come on down, son.” And to the Tracker: “You’d better talk in his bedroom. He doesn’t like to come down to the living room except when his mom’s here. She works at a grocery store checkout.”

Roger Kendrick came down the ladder and into his bedroom. He sat on the edge of the single bed, gazing at the floor. The Tracker took the upright chair. Aside from a small closet and chest of drawers, that was about it. His real life was in the roof space. Tracker glanced at the father, who shrugged.

“Asperger’s syndrome,” he said helplessly. It was clearly a condition that defeated him. Other men had sons who could date girls and train as car mechanics. The Tracker nodded at him. The meaning was clear.

“Betty will be back momentarily,” he said. “She’ll make some coffee.” Then he left.

The man from Fort Meade had used the word “peculiar,” but he had not specified how much and in what way. Before coming, the Tracker had researched both Asperger’s syndrome and agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.

Like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, both conditions varied in form from mild to severe. After several minutes talking in general terms with Roger Kendrick, there was no need to treat him like a child; no cause for baby talk.

The young man experienced extreme shyness in person-to-person terms, intensified by his fear of the world outside his home. But the Tracker suspected that if he could shift the conversation back to the teenager’s comfort zone—cyberspace—he would meet a quite different personality. He was right.

He recalled the case of the Scottish cyberhacker Gary MacKinnon. When the U.S. government wanted to put him on trial, London maintained he was too fragile to travel, let alone take jail. But he had invaded the inner sanctums of NASA and the Pentagon, slicing through some of the most complicated firewalls ever devised like a knife through butter.

“Roger, there’s a man out there, somewhere, hiding in cyberspace. He hates our country. He is called the Preacher. He gives sermons online, in English. He asks people to convert to his way of thinking and kill Americans. It’s my job to find him and stop him.

“But I cannot. Out there, he’s cleverer than me. He thinks he is the cleverest operator in cyberspace.”

He noticed the shuffling had stopped. For the first time, the teenager raised his eyes and made contact. He was contemplating a return to the only world a cruel Nature had ever destined him to inhabit. The Tracker opened a pouch and took out a memory stick.

“He transmits, Roger, but he keeps his Internet protocol address very secret, so nobody knows where he is. If we knew, we could get him to stop.”

The teenager toyed with the memory stick in his fingers.

“What I’m here for, Roger, is to ask if you would help us find him.”

“I could try,” said the teenager.

“Tell me, Roger, what equipment do you have up there?”

The teenager told him. It was not the worst on the market, but it was run-of-the-mill, store-bought stuff.

“If someone came and asked you, what would you really like? What would be your dream setup, Roger?”

He came alive. Enthusiasm flooded his face. He made eye contact again.

“I would really love a dual six-core processor system with thirty-two gigs of RAM, running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution version, six or higher.”

The Tracker did not need to take notes. The tiny microphone in his medal display was picking up everything. Just as well; he had not a clue what the lad was talking about. But the eggheads would.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and rose. “Have a look at the material. It may be you cannot crack it. But thanks for trying.”

Within two days, a van with three men and some very expensive cyberequipment arrived at the backstreet house in Centerville. They crawled around in the loft until they had installed it all. Then they left a very vulnerable nineteen-year-old, staring at a screen and believing he had been wafted to heaven. He watched a dozen of the sermons on the Jihadi website and began to tap.

• • •

T
he killer crouched low over his scooter and pretended to tinker with the engine as, down the road, the state senator left his house, tossed his golf clubs into the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. It was just after seven on a brilliant early-summer morning. He did not notice the man on the scooter behind him.

The killer did not need to stay close for he had made this run twice before, not dressed as now but in jeans and a hooded jacket, much less noticeable. He followed the senator’s car the five miles through Virginia Beach to the golf course. He watched the senator park, take his clubs and disappear into the clubhouse.

The killer cruised past the club entrance, turned left up Linkhorn Drive and disappeared into the woods. Two hundred yards up Linkhorn, he turned left again into Willow Drive. A single car came the other way but took no notice of him despite his garb.