The Afghan (6 page)

‘Maybe they have someone right inside Al-Qaeda,’ Martin suggested.

‘Doubt it,’ said the older man. ‘Anyone that high up would have given us the location of the leadership by now and we’d have taken them down with smart bombs.’

‘Well, maybe they could slip someone inside Al-Qaeda to find out and report back.’

Again the older man shook his head, this time with total conviction.

‘Come on, Terry, we both know that’s impossible. A native-born Arab would quite possibly be turned and work against us. As for a non-Arab, forget it. We both know all Arabs come from extended families, clans, tribes. One enquiry of the family or clan and the impostor would be exposed.

‘So he would have to be CV-perfect. Add to that he would have to look the part, speak the part and, most important, pray the part. One syllable wrong in all those prayers and the fanatics would spot it. They recite five times a day and never miss a beat.’

‘True,’ said Martin, knowing his case was hopeless but enjoying the fantasy. ‘But one could learn the Koranic passages and invent an untraceable family.’

‘Forget it, Terry. No Westerner can pass for an Arab among Arabs.’

‘My brother can,’ said Dr Martin. In seconds, if he could have bitten off his own tongue, he would have. But it was all right. Dr Jolley grunted, dropped the subject and studied the early outskirts of Washington. Neither head in the front, beyond the glass, moved an inch. Martin let out a sigh of relief. Any mike in the car must be turned off.

He was wrong.

CHAPTER THREE

The Fort Meade report on the deliberations of the Koran Committee was ready by dawn of that Saturday and destroyed several planned weekends. One of those roused during the Saturday night at his home in Old Alexandria was Marek Gumienny, Deputy Director (Operations) at the CIA. He was bidden to report straight to his office without being told why.

The ‘why’ was on his desk when he got there. It was not even dawn over Washington but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince George’s County where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake.

Marek Gumienny’s office was one of the few on the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as Langley. It had recently been redubbed the Old Building to distinguish it from the mirror-image New Building that housed the expanding agency since 9/11.

In the hierarchy of the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence has traditionally been a political appointment but the real muscle are habitually the two Deputy Directors. Ops handles the actual intelligence-gathering while the DD (Intelligence) covers the collation and analysis of the incoming harvest to turn raw information into a meaningful picture.

Just below these two are the Directors of Counter-Intelligence (to keep the agency free from penetration and in-house traitors) and Counter-Terrorism (increasingly becoming the boiler room as the agency’s war swerved from the old USSR to the new threats out of the Middle East).

DDOs, since the start of the Cold War in about 1945, had always been Soviet experts with the Sov. Division and SE (Satellites and Eastern Europe), making the running for an ambitious career officer. Marek Gumienny was the first Arabist to be appointed DDO. As a young agent he had spent years in the Middle East, mastered two of its languages (Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran) and knew its culture.

Even in this twenty-four-hours-a-day building, pre-dawn on a Sunday is not an easy time to rustle up piping hot and aromatic black coffee, the way he liked it, so he brewed his own. While it perked Gumienny started on the package on his desk, which contained the slim, wax-sealed file.

He knew what to expect. Fort Meade may have handled the file-recovery, translation and analysis, but it was the CIA, in collaboration with the British and Pakistan’s CTC over in Peshawar, who had made the capture. The CIA’s stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had filed copious reports to keep their boss in the picture.

The file contained all the documents downloaded from the AQ financier’s computer, but the two letters, taking up three pages, were the stars. The DDO spoke fast and fluent street Arabic, but reading script is always harder so he repeatedly referred to the translations.

He read the report of the Koran Committee, prepared jointly by the two intelligence officers at the meeting, but it offered him no surprises. To him it was clear the references to Al-Isra, the magical journey of the Prophet through the night, could only be the code for some kind of important project.

That project now had to have a name in-house for the American intelligence community. It could not be Al-Isra; that alone would betray to others what they had found out. He checked with file-cryptography for a name to describe in future how he and all his colleagues would call the Al-Qaeda project, whatever it was.

Code names come out of a computer by a process known as random selection, the aim being to give nothing away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose Stingray, so Project Stingray it became.

The last sheet in the file had been added during Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the Director of National Intelligence. Clearly the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security Committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.

The final sheet was on the DNI’s personal headed paper. It said in capital letters:

There was a scrawled signature. There are nineteen primary intelligence-gathering and archive-storing agencies in the USA. The letter in Marek Gumienny’s hand gave him authority over them all. He ran his eye back to the top of the sheet. It was addressed to him personally. There was a tap on the door.

A young GS4 stood there with yet another delivery. General Schedule is simply a salary scale, a 4 means a very junior staffer. Gumienny gave the young man an encouraging smile; he had clearly never been this high up the building before. Gumienny held out his hand, signed the clipboard to confirm receipt and waited until he was alone again.

The new file was a courtesy from the colleagues at Fort Meade. It was a transcript of a conversation held by two of the Koran eggheads in the car on the way back to Washington. One of them was British. It was his last line that someone at Fort Meade had underlined with a brace of question marks in red ink.

During his time in the Middle East Marek Gumienny had had much to do with the British and, unlike some of his fellow countrymen who had been trying to cope with the hellhole of Iraq for three years, he was not too proud to admit the CIA’s closest allies in what Kipling once called the Great Game were a repository of much arcane knowledge of the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.

For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrators of the old empire, or as eccentric explorers, the British had been trudging over desert, mountain range and goat-pen in the zone that had now become the intelligence time bomb of the world. The British code-named the CIA ‘the Cousins’ or ‘the Company’; the Americans called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service ‘the Friends’ or ‘the Firm’. For Marek Gumienny one of those friends was a man he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times with when they were both field agents. Now he was pinned to a desk in Langley and Steve Hill had been pulled out of the field and elevated to Controller Middle East at the Firm’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters.

Gumienny decided a conference would do no harm and might yield some good. There was no security problem. The Brits, he knew, would have just about everything he had. They too had transmitted the guts of the laptop from Peshawar to their own listening and cryptography HQ at Cheltenham. They too would have printed out its contents. They too would have analysed the strange references to the Koran contained in the coded letters.

What Marek Gumienny had that was probably not with London was the bizarre remark by a British academic in the back of a car in the middle of Maryland. He punched up a number on the console on his desk. Central switchboards are fine up to a point, but modern technology has meant any senior executive can be connected faster by speed-dial on his personal satphone.

A number rang in a modest commuter house in Surrey, just outside London. Eight a.m. in Langley, one p.m. in London; the house was about to sit down to a roast beef lunch. A voice answered at the third ring. Steve Hill had enjoyed his golf and was about to enjoy his beef.

‘Hello?’

‘Steve? Marek.’

‘My dear chap, where are you? Over here by any chance?’

‘No, I’m at my desk. Can we go to secure?’

‘Sure. Give me two minutes . . .’ And in the background: ‘Darling, hold the roast.’ The phone went down.

At the next call the voice from England was slightly tinny but uninterceptable.

‘Am I to understand that something has hit the ventilation system close to your ear?’ asked Hill.

‘All over my nice clean shirt,’ admitted Gumienny. ‘I guess you have much the same stuff as I have out of Peshawar?’

‘I expect so. I finished reading it yesterday. I was wondering when you would call.’

‘I have something you may not have, Steve. We have a visiting professor over here from London. He made a chance remark Friday evening. I’ll cut to the chase. Do you know a man called Martin?’

‘Martin who?’

‘No, that’s his surname. His brother over here is called Dr Terry Martin. Does it ring a bell?’

Steve Hill had dropped all banter. He sat holding the phone and staring into space. Oh yes, he knew the Martin brother. Back in the first Gulf War of 1990/91 he had been one of the control team in Saudi Arabia when the academic’s brother had slipped into Baghdad and lived there as a humble gardener under the noses of Saddam’s secret police while transmitting back priceless intelligence from a source inside the dictator’s cabinet.

‘Could do,’ he conceded. ‘Why?’

‘I think we should talk,’ said the American. ‘Face to face. I could fly over. I have the Grumman.’

‘When do you want to come over?’

‘Tonight. I can sleep on the plane. Be in London for breakfast.’

‘OK. I’ll arrange it with Northolt.’

‘Oh, and Steve, while I’m flying could you get out the full file on this man Martin? I’ll explain when I see you.’

West of London, on the road to Oxford, lies the Royal Air Force base of Northolt. For a couple of years after World War II it was actually London’s civil airport as Heathrow was hastily constructed. Then it relapsed into a role as a secondary airfield and finally a field for private and executive jets. But because it remains an RAF property, flights in and out can be fixed to take place in complete security without the usual formalities.

The CIA has its own very private airfield near Langley and a small fleet of executive jets. Marek Gumienny’s all-powerful piece of authority paper secured him the Grumman V, on which he slept in perfect comfort on the flight over. Steve Hill was at Northolt to meet him.

He took his guest not to the green and sandstone ziggurat at Vauxhall Cross on the south bank of the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge, home of the SIS, but to the much quieter Cliveden Hotel, formerly a private mansion, set inside its own estate not thirty miles from the airport. He had reserved a small conference suite with room service and privacy.

There he read the analysis of the American Koran Committee, which was remarkably similar to the analysis from Cheltenham, and the transcript of the conversation in the back of the car.

‘Damn fool,’ he muttered when he reached the end. ‘The other Arabist was right. It can’t be done. It’s not just the lingo, it’s all the other tests. No stranger, no foreigner could ever pass them.’

‘So, given my orders from the All-High, what would you suggest?’

‘Pick up an AQ insider and sweat it out of him,’ said Hill.

‘Steve, if we had the faintest idea of the location of anyone that high in Al-Qaeda, we’d take them as a matter of course. We don’t have any such target in our sights as of now.’

‘Wait and watch. Someone will use the phrase again.’

‘My people have to presume that if Al-Isra is to be the next spectacular it will be the USA that is the target. Waiting for a miracle that may not happen will not pacify Washington. Besides, AQ must know by now we got the laptop. Chances are they will never use that phrase again, except person to person.’

‘Well,’ said Hill, ‘we could put it about in places they would hear it that we have it all and are closing in. They would discontinue, cut and run.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. But we’d never know. We’d still be in limbo, never knowing whether Project Stingray had been terminated or not. And if not? And if it works? Like my boss says: is it nuclear, biochemical, conventional? Where and when? Can your man Martin really pass for an Arab among Arabs? Is he really that good?’

‘He used to be,’ grunted Hill and passed over a file. ‘See for yourself.’

The file was an inch thick, in standard buff manila, and fronted simply with the words: ‘
COLONEL MIKE MARTIN
’.

The Martin boys’ maternal grandfather had been a tea-planter at Darjeeling, India, between the two world wars. While there he had done something almost unheard of. He had married an Indian girl.

The world of the British tea-planters was small, remote and snooty. Brides were brought out from England or found among the daughters of the officer class of the Raj. The boys had seen pictures of their grandfather, Terence Granger, tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth and gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger.