I Am Pilgrim (76 page)

He laughed. ‘Pretty much whatever we want.’ Nearly all his team found it funny too. ‘In this case,’

he continued, ‘it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.’ Suddenly, he wasn’t laughing and nor were his agents – that was his family we were talking about.

‘Executions are carried out in public, is that right?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘He was beheaded down the road, in the parking area outside the mosque.’

I hung my head – God, what a mess. A public beheading would be enough to radicalize anyone – no

wonder the son grew up to be a terrorist. ‘How old was Zakaria al-Nassouri?’

Again he consulted some files. ‘Fourteen.’

I sighed. ‘Is there any evidence he witnessed the execution?’ The whole thing was such a train wreck, I figured anything was possible.

‘Nobody was sure, but there was a photo taken in the square which several agents at the time believed was probably him. As a result, it was placed in the family’s file.’ He took an old photo out of a folder and passed it over.

It was in black and white, shot from a high angle by what was obviously a surveillance camera. It

showed a teenager, tall and gangly, buffeted by a searing desert wind in the almost empty square.

All the body language – the total desolation in the way that the boy was standing – spoke so clearly of pain and loss that I had little doubt it was him. A cop was approaching, his bamboo cane raised, trying to drive him off, and it meant that the boy’s back was half turned to the camera, his face averted. Even then, holding a photo of him, I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t realize it, but it was a bad omen.

I put the photo in the plastic sleeve, and the director moved on. ‘Records from the immigration department show that, shortly after her husband was executed, the mother took the three children to

live in Bahrain.

‘I doubt that she had much choice – as a result of her husband’s crime, she would have been an outcast among her family and friends. Good riddance,’ he said, with a shrug.

‘But, given their history, we continued to take an interest in them – at least for the first few years.

Bahrain is a friendly neighbour and, on our behalf, it watched them.’

He reached across to another folder, causing the sleeve of his thobe to ride up and expose a gold

and sapphire Rolex which probably cost more than most people earned in a lifetime, and took a

number of sheets out of the folder. They were field reports from agents who were doing the watching, I guessed.

‘She took a job,’ the director said, scanning through them, ‘and gave up wearing the veil. What does that tell you?’ He looked at his men. ‘Not much of a mother or a Muslim, eh?’ All the men murmured in agreement.

You never know, maybe her husband being decapitated had something to do with her getting a job, I

thought. Carter was right about them, but what was the alternative? Right now, we needed them.

‘The boy joined a small mosque – very conservative and anti-Western – on the outskirts of Manama, the capital. Around the time of his sixteenth birthday, they helped pay for him to fly to Pakistan—’

I caught my breath. Sixteen was just a kid, but I did a quick calculation, working out which year we were talking about. ‘He went into Afghanistan?’ I asked. ‘You’re telling me he was a
muj
?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Some people said he was a hero, that he brought down three Hind helicopter

gunships.’

Suddenly I understood why he had travelled to the Hindu Kush to test his virus, where he had found

the explosives to booby-trap the village, how he had managed to escape the Australians down long-

forgotten trails. And I thought of another Saudi who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets – he was also a fundamentalist, a man who had hated the royal family with a passion and had ended up attacking America. Osama bin Laden.

‘So he was in Afghanistan – what then?’ I asked.

‘We only have one more document,’ he replied, picking up the thin folio fastened with the red ribbon. He opened it and took out an impressive-looking form written in Arabic and stamped with an

official seal.

‘We found this in the paper archives. It was sent to us about fourteen years ago by the Afghan government.’ He handed it to me. ‘It’s a death certificate.

‘As I said, there has been a mistake – he was killed two weeks before the war ended.’

I stared at him, not even looking at the document, robbed of speech.

‘You see, you’re chasing the wrong man,’ he said. ‘Zakaria al-Nassouri is dead.’

Chapter Six

I WATCHED A crescent moon rise above the Red Sea, I saw the minarets of the city mosque standing like silent guardians, I felt the desert crowding in and I imagined I could hear the pumps sucking out ten million barrels a day from beneath its sand.

With the death certificate still in my hand, I had risen to my feet and walked to a window in silence

– I needed a minute to compose myself, to think. By an exercise of iron will I forced myself to work it through. Zakaria al-Nassouri wasn’t dead – I was certain Leyla Cumali had been speaking to her brother on the phone. I had heard his voice on the recordings and I had met his son. DNA doesn’t lie.

So what was its meaning, a death certificate from so long ago? It took only a moment to see the answer, and it was worse than anything I could have imagined. I felt my stomach knot and, I have to

admit, for a few terrible heartbeats I felt like giving up.

But I knew that one of the hallmarks of every successful mission – perhaps of life itself – was a determination never to retreat, never to surrender. What was that verse of Whisperer ’s? ‘To go to your God like a soldier.’

There were a hundred pairs of eyes focused on my back, and I turned to face them. ‘He’s not dead,’

I said, with total conviction. ‘It’s impossible, he has a six-year-old son – we’ve seen the DNA.’

I saw the alarm spread through their ranks – was I claiming that Saudi intelligence had made a mistake or was incompetent? What a fool I was. In my distraction and despair, I had forgotten the importance of flattery and good manners. I grabbed the oars and rowed back fast.

‘Of course, it takes an organization with the skill and experience of the Mabahith – to say nothing

of its exalted leadership – to see things that we never could.’ It was so saccharine it could have induced diabetes, but it did the trick: everybody relaxed, smiling and nodding.

I indicated the document. ‘I believe that in the last weeks of the conflict Zakaria al-Nassouri bought his own death certificate – either in the backstreets of Kabul or by bribing an Afghan official to issue it.’

‘Why?’ the director asked.

‘Because he had been a muj. He knew that people like us would always be dogging him. Maybe even then he was planning to fight a far bigger war.

‘Once his old identity was dead, he took a new one. It wasn’t hard. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran – the whole region was in chaos, corruption everywhere.’

I paused, face to face with my failure. ‘I think somehow he acquired a new passport.’

The director stared. ‘You understand?’ he said. ‘That means we don’t know his name, his nationality, what flag he’s travelling under—’

‘You’re right – nothing,’ I said, trying to hide the devastation I was feeling.

‘But somewhere,’ I continued, ‘somebody in the Arab world has heard about a man of the right age,

an ex-
muj
, an exile, whose father was executed in Saudi. How many of them could there be? We have to find that thread.’

The director thought about it and I imagined the seconds ticking away on his million-dollar watch.

‘If there’s anything, it wouldn’t be in the computerized files,’ he said at last, thinking out loud. ‘We would have already run across it. Maybe in the paper files … there could be something, a long time

back.’

He spoke harshly in Arabic, issuing orders. By the flurry of urgent activity, I guessed that they were being told to call in reinforcements, to drag in more analysts and researchers, to summon men long

since retired who might remember something. Dozens of the more senior agents scrambled to their

feet, grabbed their laptops and cigarettes and headed for the elevators.

The director pointed at them. ‘That’s the main search party – they will start going through the paper files. I’ve got another two hundred men on the way, but I can promise it won’t be fast. There’s an apartment upstairs – why don’t you get some rest?’

I thanked him, but I knew I couldn’t. I looked at my watch: it was six hours until I had to make a call to the two men waiting in the Oval Office. I turned to the window and stared out at the star-strewn night. Somewhere out there was a desert so vast they called it the Sea of Emptiness and I thought again of the Saracen.

T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – knew something about that part of the world and the nature

of men. He said that the dreamers of the day were dangerous people – they tried to live their dreams to make them come true. Zakaria al-Nassouri’s day-dream was to destroy us all. Mine was to catch him. I wondered which one of us would wake in the morning and find that their nightmare had begun.

Chapter Seven

THE CORRIDORS RAN for miles. On either side, twenty-feet-high motorized storage racks stood like monoliths – enter a reference number, a name or any other data on a control panel, and the racks moved silently to reveal the relevant archive boxes. It was like standing inside a computer hard drive.

There were eighteen identical floors, all filled with paper archives: the raw data of decade after decade of surveillance, betrayal and suspicion. Hidden far beneath the Mabahith’s regional headquarters, linked together by a central atrium, the complex was overrun by men searching the storage racks and hauling out archive boxes. The director had been as good as his word and had pulled in every agent and analyst he could find.

I had made my way down from the conference room and taken a seat beside several of the senior

agents at a command post suspended out over the atrium. I watched as teams of men on every floor

unbundled yellowing paper files and searched through mountains of data looking for any reference –

any mention at all – of a man whose father had been executed in Saudi Arabia all those years ago.

Three hours of watching them plough through files in Arabic, three hours in a windowless vault with guys who didn’t touch alcohol but smoked thirty a day, three hours of counting every minute, and I was as close to desperate as I ever wanted to be. Naturally, when one of my neighbours said that the first squad was heading out to interview people who might be able to contribute something to the lost narrative, I grabbed my jacket to join them.

The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low

I figured they had to water him twice a day. We gathered up eight more of their colleagues on the way and rolled in a convoy of four black SUVs with so much
makhfee
on the windows it was like travelling in permanent midnight. I’m certain, though, it fulfilled its real purpose admirably: no ordinary civilian who saw them passing could have failed to be afraid.

For mile after mile we criss-crossed the sprawling city – four and a half million souls marooned in

the middle of the desert, seemingly half of them employed by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company – and interviewed people about a family which had long since vanished. We sat in the
majlis

– the formal sitting rooms – of poor houses way out in the suburbs and questioned men whose hands

were trembling, we saw dark-eyed kids watching from shadowy doorways and glimpsed veiled women in floor-length
burqas
hurrying away at our approach. We visited an elderly man called Sa’id bin Abdullah bin Mabrouk al-Bishi – he was the state executioner who had beheaded al-Nassouri’s father – in the hope that in his last moments the condemned man had said something about the career

and future he had wanted for his son. After that we drove to a modest villa close enough to the water to smell the salt and, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I took a photo of it on my cellphone. It was al-Nassouri’s childhood home and we questioned the man who had moved in after the family had

fled in case he had heard something in the following years.

Nobody knew anything.

Finally, we took a break, pulling into a roadside shack for coffee. We were sitting outside, listening to the idiot in his twenties go on about some chick he had met in Morocco, when a cellphone rang and I was asked to return immediately.

The team was gathered in an open-plan research area on one side of the atrium, the air filled with

cigarette smoke. The director stood at a table, an archive box in front of him, plenty more of them

piled on the floor. Spilling out of them were field reports, interviews with informers and records of hearsay and gossip.

The director said that they had accessed a box containing what had been thought to be worthless material concerning a number of conservative mosques in Bahrain.

‘There was one slim file which proved to be of interest,’ he said. ‘It dealt with a small mosque on

the outskirts of Manama, the capital.’ He looked at me to make sure I realized the significance of what he had said.

‘Zakaria al-Nassouri’s mosque?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral, battling a surge of hope.