Chapter Fourteen

THE SARACEN ARRIVED at the Syrian border just before lunchtime, getting off the bus from Beirut with a leather medical bag in one hand, a nondescript suitcase in the other and a remarkable plan in mind.

It was five years since he had graduated, with honours, as a doctor, and those were the missing years, the hungry years. It took me a long time to piece together his movements during that period, but one thing was beyond doubt – by the time he fronted the Syrian immigration officer he had solved the riddle which had occupied all his waking moments. He knew how to attack America.

As a doctor who claimed to be on his way to work in the sprawling refugee camps, he had his Lebanese passport stamped without any difficulty. Skirting the taxi drivers and assorted hustlers, he turned left in the trash-strewn parking lot and found a public bus that would take him into Damascus.

At the city’s main bus depot he checked his two bags at the stored- luggage counter, exited a side entrance and started to walk. He was determined to leave as little evidence as possible of his movements and, for that reason, he wouldn’t even take a cab.

For over an hour he made his way down dusty roads and through increasingly grim neighbourhoods – Damascus is home to almost two million people, five hundred thousand of whom are impoverished Palestinian refugees.

At last, at the intersection of two freeways, he found what he was looking for. Beneath the elevated roads was a no man’s land, a petrified forest of concrete pylons blackened by diesel fumes. The area was decorated by coloured lights, limp flags and quotes from the Qur’an which attested to the proprietors’ love of honesty. They were used-car lots.

Here, at the bottom of the automotive food chain, the Saracen chose an ancient Nissan Sunny. While the salesman praised the skill of a man who could see past the rust and find the diamond on the lot, the Saracen paid in cash. He added an extra five Syrian pounds in order to dispense with the transfer papers, and headed off into the dusk. The car burnt more oil than gas but the Saracen didn’t care – transport was only the vehicle’s secondary purpose. The primary one was accommodation. He knew that even in cheap hotels people remembered too much, and he spent three hours driving the city before he found a secluded area at the back of a supermarket parking lot and took up residence.

Over the weeks that followed he assembled the material he needed for the task ahead and let his personal hygiene go to hell. He started wearing clothes that were increasingly grimy and, while this might have offended his own standards, he had little choice – his plan depended on him being a perfect version of a homeless man. Finally, after one long surveillance trip to the battlefield, he was ready.

On the outskirts of Damascus, a four-storey glass and concrete building stood almost alone. The sign out front said THE SYRIAN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED MEDICINE, but its exact purpose was unclear – nobody could remember the last time the country’s leaders sought medical treatment anywhere except in the private clinics of London or Paris.

Because Western intelligence was worried that the building was being used for nuclear or biological research, one of eight US satellites which patrolled the Middle East kept the institute under constant surveillance. It photographed faces through windows, recorded all deliveries and monitored the chemical signature of emissions but, unfortunately, didn’t take any photos of the immediate surroundings. As a result, there have never been any images of the homeless man who, according to a later report by the Syrian secret police, arrived in bits and pieces.

Early one Friday evening a security guard, passing through a garden at the end of the building, saw that an old tarp had been strung between two palms, colonizing under its shade a stand-pipe used to water the plants. A few days later a tiny cooking ring, a salvaged gas bottle and a battered cool-box also took up residence. But still the scores of people who walked by on their way from the parking lot to the front of the institute hadn’t actually seen the homesteader – not even after a well-worn copy of the Qur’an in an antique binding and two threadbare blankets appeared.

By then it was too late to do anything about it – Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar and by far its most sacred, had started. The holy book on the blanket acted as a mute reminder to everyone that beggars, travellers and the poor have to be provided for under Islam. What True Believer would have a homeless man removed during Ramadan?

It was only then, protected by his religion, that the Saracen appeared, abandoning the Nissan in the supermarket parking lot, emerging on foot out of the dry scrub, settling in under the tarp as if he already belonged, which I’m sure was his plan. Bearded and ragged, wearing the anonymous long tunic and headdress of the countless thousands of Palestinian refugees, he cracked open the stand-pipe for some drinking water and started reading the Qur’an.

At the ordained times he filled his saucepan, performed the washing that precedes the five daily prayers and pointed his mat at what was either Mecca or the security guards’ toilet, depending, I suppose, on your view of the world.

Nobody complained about his presence, and he was over the first hurdle. The next morning he started work – washing the windows of parked cars, sweeping up trash and generally acting as guardian of al-Abah Parking Lot Number Three. Like most refugees, he never asked for money but he did place a saucer on the walkway – just in case someone felt a sudden urge to fulfil their charitable obligations.

By any measure, it was brilliant. Several weeks later, after the mutilated body of one of the institute’s most senior officers was found, the police and Syrian spooks flooded the surrounding buildings, finally targeting the homeless man and trying to build a photofit. Everybody they spoke to was in agreement: five foot eleven, say, about one-eighty, heavily bearded and then – well, pretty much nothing.

In the secret world, a disguise and life story that have been invented to hide someone’s real identity is called a legend. The ragged guardian of al-Abah Parking Lot Number Three – a Saudi Arabian, a graduate in medicine from Beirut University, a hero of the Afghan War – had created a legend as a Palestinian refugee so effective it had rendered him virtually invisible. For a professional to have done it would have been a great achievement; for an amateur without resources or training, it was remarkable.

A week after his arrival, the Saracen established the habit during the hottest part of the day of crouching with his Qur’an in a grove of palms near the building’s front door, taking advantage of a cool breeze from a faulty air-conditioning conduit. While people smiled at his ingenuity, the truth was he didn’t give a damn about the heat – he had lived in the outer ring of hell during blazing summers in Afghanistan, so fall in Damascus didn’t worry him. No, the area under the conduit allowed him to see, through a plate-glass wall, the exact security procedures which applied to everyone entering the building. Once he was convinced he understood them, he set about weighing – both figuratively and literally – the people who worked at the place.

The deputy director of the institute was always among the last to leave. In his fifties, his name was Bashar Tlass, a relative of one of Syria’s ruling elite, a former prominent member of the country’s secret police and – I’m sorry to say – an unmitigated piece of scum.

But neither his high position, his qualifications as a chemical engineer nor his love of the slow garrotte during his career with the secret police had any bearing on why he was chosen. It would have been a great surprise to everybody, Tlass included, that the reason he was killed was because he weighed one-hundred-and-eighty pounds – or at least as near as the doctor, sitting among the palm trees, could tell.

Having identified his target, all the Saracen had to do now was wait. Throughout the Muslim world, Ramadan’s thirty days of fasting, prayer and sexual abstinence end with an explosion of feasting, gifts and hospitality called Eid al-Fitr. The evening before the festival of Eid, almost everyone leaves work early to get ready for the ritual of dawn prayer, followed by a day of huge banquets.

Damascus was no different and, by 4 p. m., banks and offices were locked, shops were closed and the roads increasingly deserted. Tlass walked out the front door of the institute and heard the security guards at their console behind him activate the electronic locks. It meant the building was completely empty, and he knew – as did everyone else – that as soon as he was out of sight the guards would arm the rest of the system and quietly head home to make their own preparations for the festivities.

Years ago, the director had tried to get the guards to work over Eid but had run into so much opposition, including from the employees’ mosques, that everybody had immediately reverted to the prior practice of contrived ignorance. And anyway, nobody knew better than Tlass that the country was a police state – who would be foolish enough to try to break into a government building?

He got the answer to that question a few minutes later as he walked down a path between the gardens, heading for his car. The few surrounding buildings and parking lots were deserted, so he was mildly alarmed when he turned a corner and, momentarily enclosed by hedges and palms, heard a rustle of movement behind him. He swung round, then almost smiled as he realized it was just the stupid Palestinian, the man who kept insisting on washing the windshield of his SUV even though he had never dropped so much as a piastre into the tin saucer for his trouble.

Now the beggar thought he had him cornered, bowing all the time as he came closer, holding out his saucer for money, murmuring the traditional greeting ‘Eid Mubarak’. Tlass gave the greeting back, as tradition demanded, but that was all he was giving – he brushed the saucer aside and turned to continue down the path.

The Saracen’s arm exploded across the tiny distance between them and, in one blurred moment, it locked tight around Tlass’s neck, startling and choking him in equal measure.

The deputy director’s first thought, born out of fury, was that there was no way he was letting him have any money, the refugee would have to kill him to get it. The second was how could a beggar, living on nothing more than garbage, be so fucking strong?

Already Tlass was gasping for breath and, as he dredged up from memory the unarmed combat move to counteract a choke hold, desperately trying to implement it, he felt a searing pain rip into the base of his neck. Blinded by the swelling heat of it, he would have screamed if he could have found the air. He knew immediately it wasn’t a knife – that would have slashed his throat and sent the warmth of his own blood streaming down his chest. The thought had barely formulated itself when a ball of fire burst into the muscle of his neck and started bullying into his bloodstream.

The pain staggered him, but he knew now what it was. A syringe, with the plunger being driven down hard. Given the circumstances, it was an impressive piece of reasoning – entirely accurate too. Confused and terrified, Tlass knew he had to yell for help quickly, but whatever chemical was flooding his body suddenly meant the muscles of his mouth wouldn’t say the words that were screaming in his head.

The chemical flood hit his limbs – he realized with a wild rage that nothing could stop it now – and he saw his car keys fall from the jelly that used to be his hand. His attacker’s fingers flashed out and caught them in mid-air and it seemed to tell Tlass, more than any other thing, that he was in the hands of a master.