Chapter Sixty-six

I WORKED THROUGH other files, hoping to find another mention of her or more photos, but there was nothing – just the one reference by the visiting banker and a poor-quality image from the surveillance camera.

In the fading afternoon I kept returning to it and, even though I took a long march through the attic of my memory, I couldn’t recall anybody as attractive as Ms Kohl. On a professional level, I kept trying to match a voice to the image and thinking about gardenias …

When the computer beeped, telling me that I had mail, I figured it had to be Battleboi and I turned fast to the laptop – only to be disappointed. It was more spam and it had also gone to the junk folder.

Where the hell was the Samurai? I asked myself in frustration, marking the crap messages for deletion. I saw they were for some prize-winning scam and hit the button to consign them to oblivion. Nothing happened – they were still there. I hit the button again, with the same result, and realized what a fool I had been. The messages, disguised as spam, were from Battleboi.

When I had first met him and we were sitting in Old Japan expunging Scott Murdoch’s academic record, he had told me that he had recently designed a particularly nasty virus that looked identical to the countless spam messages circulating in cyberspace. It was so obvious that even the most primitive filter would recognize it and send it to the junk-mail folder. When the unsuspecting owner – thinking that the filter had done its job – tried to delete the message, he would inadvertently activate it. Immediately, it would download a virus, a spyware Trojan or any other program Battleboi deemed necessary – for instance, a key-stroke logger to record credit-card information.

Having been busted by the Feds, he had never got the chance to deploy his new spam bomb, until now, and I knew that I had already downloaded the information he had discovered about Leyla al-Nassouri-Cumali. All I had to do was find it.

I opened the first of the spam messages and was delighted to read that I was the lucky winner of an online sweepstake. In order to claim my winnings of $24, 796, 321. 81 it was only necessary for me to send an email and they would reply with an authorization code and a list of instructions. The other spam emails were reminders, urging me not to delay and risk missing out on my windfall.

I tried clicking on the payout button without the authorization, but nothing happened. I figured that what I was really looking for was an encryption code which would unlock a hidden file, and I was starting to wonder if Battleboi was going to send it in a separate mail when I realized I already had it.

I copied the numerals of my winnings, deleted the commas and dot, entered it as the authorization code and hit payout. It sure did.

A document opened and I saw a picture of Leyla Cumali, aged about sixteen, taken from a driver’s licence. Underneath it was a list of everything Battleboi had found out up to that point and, glancing through it, I saw that he had – exactly as I had hoped – certainly coloured outside the lines.

He said that he figured – as Cumali was a cop – that she had to be educated and, as a result, he had decided to try to track her through her schooling. The strategy gave him one huge advantage: it greatly reduced the number of people he was investigating. Shocking as it was, over 45 per cent of Arab women couldn’t read or write.

He took six Arab nations and started searching middle and high schools. He found only one Leyla al-Nassouri of the right age – in an online archive from a school in Bahrain where she had won an essay competition in English.

He lost her for a while but discovered that, in the Arabic language, Leyla means ‘born at night’, and he started trawling through blogs and social networking sites using several dozen variations of that. Under the name Midnight he unearthed a woman who had posted several items on a local blog about scuba diving in Bahrain.

He managed to access their database and learned that Midnight was the online handle of Leyla al-Nassouri, and it gave him an email address which she had been using back then. Figuring that she was over seventeen, and armed with her name and the email address, he tried to get into the Bahrain Department of Motor Vehicles in the hope that he could locate the details of a driver’s licence. It took him over four hours of brute-force hacking, but he finally broke into their network and found her application. It provided the photo and also her date and place of birth.

She had been born in Saudi Arabia.

Battleboi said that she faded away and he could find nothing more on her, not until two years later, when he located a photo and a precis of her academic career at a law college in Istanbul.

‘That’s all I have at the moment, ’ he wrote.

I closed the pages and sat in quiet thought. I saw her again – approaching the phone box, speaking to a terrorist in the Hindu Kush, the most wanted man in the world – an Arab woman who got an education, went scuba diving, learned to drive and travelled far away to attend college.

Battleboi had done a great job, but things were no clearer. Leyla Cumali might have been born in Saudi, but it still didn’t make any sense.