The Afghan (3 page)

The building and street had become a chaos of shouting and running figures. Using his mobile phone the colonel called up the fifty uniformed soldiers 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 neighbour 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. Still no one 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 cellphone.

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 cellphones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbours – 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 disk and peel away the surface 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 for 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 high-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 favour of seeing the laptop safely back to your HQ?’

Fortunately Abdul Razak possessed a wry humour. In his work it was a saving grace. In the covert world only humour 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 soldiers, the SIS man was brought back to his Land Cruiser. The technology he needed was already in the back 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 Headquarters at Cheltenham, deep in the Cotswold hills of England.

O’Dowd knew how to work it, but he was still hazy about the sheer magic (to a layman) of cyber-technology. Within a few seconds, across thousands of miles of space, Cheltenham had acquired the entire contents of the Toshiba’s hard disk. It had gutted the laptop as efficiently as a spider drains the juices of 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 mid-afternoon 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 cyber-crime. As the planet rolled on into another day and another night, the 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, before even accompanying Colonel Razak on the raid. The senior SIS man had informed his ‘cousin’ the CIA Station Chief. Both men were waiting avidly for news. In Peshawar there would be no sleeping.

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 US 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 had been guarding.

The telltale cellphone 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 who had been 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 counter-terrorist agencies collaborating in the struggle against Islamist terror groups, the CTC of Pakistan has a huge gallery of photos of suspects.

It means nothing that Pakistan is a long way from Egypt. 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 travelling and for this he had clearly changed his appearance. And yet this one face – that of a man who could pass unnoticed in a bank’s boardroom in the West, but who was 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.

Razak 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 they had made. The body on the slab was none other than Tewfik al-Qur, the senior banker of Al-Qaeda himself.

In mid-morning a Pakistani army helicopter came to take it all away. The prisoners, shackled and hooded, went. Two dead bodies and the boxes of evidence recovered from the apartment. Thanks were profuse but Peshawar is an outstation; the centre 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 what was going on, was 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 the 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 of Defense and State. One of the two professionals is chairman of the National Security Committee, Steve Hadley, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security and the nineteen agencies. But the other is the 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 upwards 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 analyses everything. But so impenetrable is some of the stuff overheard, recorded, downloaded, translated and studied that it also uses an ‘out of house’ committee 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 nine 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 in 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 contacts 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 US authorities would have given their eye teeth 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 at Fort Meade that the train of revelation finally hit the buffer. Seventy-three documents had been downloaded from the Toshiba recovered in the apartment at Peshawar. Some were just 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 air base 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 the 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 NSA’s preoccupation with Arabic had been increasing steadily during 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 Center 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 certain of catching every meaning and nuance.