Chapter Twenty-two

THE SARACEN WALKED for hours, guided only by the wan starlight. After leaving the dump, he cut across the scrub and followed the canal until he finally found a rickety wooden structure which passed as a bridge.

He crossed it and trudged for miles along the reeds before seeing what he needed: the rusting chassis of an old four-wheel drive half submerged in the rank and muddy water.

He filled the plastic containers with the syringe, Tlass’s wallet and other effects, weighed them down with pebbles and threw them into the middle of the canal.

It was with terrible regret that he raised the pistol and drew his arm back – the weapon had been with him longer than any of his other possessions except his father’s Qur’an, but it was the one thing that tied him inextricably to Tlass’s murder and he felt he had no other option. He threw the gun well and it landed in the water next to the rusting chassis. If they came down the canal, dragging a metal detector through the water, they would just think it was part of the vehicle.

Quickening his pace now, he turned towards the distant glow of lights that indicated Damascus.

Four hours later, footsore and filthy, he handed over the cardboard ticket at the luggage counter of the bus depot and retrieved his suitcase and medical bag. He undid the coded lock-strap securing the suitcase, took out a slim roll of bills, paid for the storage and gave an attendant one pound for the use of a small wash cubicle.

It was two hours until the first bus left for the Lebanese border and on from there to Beirut, and he used the time to trim his beard and to shower until his flesh was almost scrubbed raw. From out of the suitcase he put on his cheap Western suit, shirt and tie and placed two of the stolen glass vials, their identifying labels pulled off, in his medical bag, hidden in plain sight among other bottles and medicines. By the time he emerged carrying his passport and luggage, he looked exactly like what he would claim to be if anyone questioned him: a devout Lebanese doctor who, having worked in the refugee camps, was now on his way home.

He had put the filthy clothes that had helped create his Palestinian legend into a plastic bag and, as he walked to the rattletrap bus, he threw it in a large charity bin. The only other stop he made was to drop the trash from a meal he had bought of pitta bread, fruit and tea into a garbage bucket and, though it would have seemed entirely innocuous to any onlooker, it was significant.

Shortly after 4 a. m. he took his seat at the back of the bus – almost exactly an hour before Tlass’s two sons, long delayed by having to search in ever-widening circles but attracted by the sound of wild dogs fighting, found the body of their father.

Despite the ungodly hour and the fact that it was one of Islam’s most important holidays, their membership of the secret police meant they knew exactly who to call. The news was conveyed to the highest circles of government and very soon the airwaves were full of phone conversations and text messages on supposedly secure communications networks.

Echelon sucked them all up.

Echelon never tires, never sleeps. It patrols the vast emptiness of space without needing air or food or comfort, it works as a silent thief at the world’s fibre-optic hubs and it commands countless radomes – the clusters of giant golf balls – on military bases across the globe. In total, it listens to every electronic communication on earth, a vast satellite and computer network so secret that its existence has never been acknowledged by the five English-speaking nations which established it during the Cold War.

The billions of bytes of data it collects every nanosecond are downloaded to a collection of super-computers at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where highly classified software utilizes key words, patterns of phrases and even – by several secret accounts – speech recognition, to pull out any fragment worthy of further investigation.

And there were plenty of fragments in Damascus that night. Echelon listened as one of Tlass’s sons, grief-stricken, phoned his sister and told her there would be the mother-of-all crackdowns on the dissidents and enemies-of-the-state likely to have been responsible. ‘Allah help them and their families, ’ he said.

The US intelligence analysts, assessing the intercepts, came to a similar conclusion – Tlass was a man with such a reputation for cruelty there must have been a long line of people only too happy to have fed him to the dogs. A revenge killing in a failed Arab state is of little interest to US security, so the event was quickly dismissed.

That was a terrible mistake – and so was the fact that Syrian state security, contending with the early hour and the holiday weekend, didn’t close the border immediately.