"The Afghan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forsyth Frederick)

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.”