Chapter Eleven

WHEN I ARRIVED at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade.

By the time I left, I still had faith in rock ’n’ roll, but little else. The old man with the translucent skin and impatient manner had convinced me that what he termed a ‘modern, intelligent enemy’ would never be caught by rounding up the usual suspects. Nor would there be any suicide vectors.

As I left his tree-lined drive and headed towards National airport, I realized that we were chasing a new kind of terrorist. I saw the future and I knew that the day of the fundamentalist and fanatic had passed. In their wake, a new generation was emerging and the man with the smallpox – highly educated and adept with technology – was probably the first. The cave-dwellers with their bomb belts and passenger planes converted into missiles looked like dial-up. This man was broadband. And say he was flying solo? If he had done it by himself, then that was an even more astonishing achievement.

Nobody likes to think they might have met their match, especially not an intelligence agent selected and trained to be the best on the battlefield, but that was my deeply held fear as I arrived at the airport. And I have to say, as the Saracen and I circled closer to one another in the weeks which lay ahead, I saw nothing to put that feeling back in its box. He would have been brilliant in any area he had chosen to pursue.

So it was in a sombre frame of mind that I dropped the rent-a-car, headed through security and boarded the plane to La Guardia in New York. From there I took a cab to JFK – I was a live agent now, arriving exactly like any genuine Manhattan-based federal agent – and made the flight to Istanbul with barely twenty minutes to spare.

For the next six hours I buried my head in the emails, photographs and case notes that formed the skeleton of Brodie Wilson’s life. Only when I had put flesh on the bone – giving names to my kids, assigning them birth dates which I would remember even under duress, listening to the God-awful music loaded on the MP3 player – did I close the computer and tilt the seat back.

I wasn’t going to sleep. I wanted to think about the one other thing which had been on my mind: what was in my file.