Chapter Five

A HIGH-LEVEL DELEGATION wearing immaculate white thobes and the characteristic red chequered headdress – two of which were braided in gold, indicating that the wearers were members of the Saudi royal family – met me on the asphalt at Jeddah.

They waited at the bottom of the steps – a dozen of them, whipped by the strong desert wind – with at least forty more guys with assault weapons standing near a fleet of black Cadillac Escalades.

The leader of the delegation – one of the men with the gold braid – stepped forward, shook my hand and introduced himself as the director of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police. In his late thirties, with a weak handshake and hooded eyes, he had about as much charisma as the Angel of Death.

He indicated the rest of the group. ‘These are all senior members of my organization. We flew up from Riyadh two hours ago, ’ he explained, pointing at an unmarked jumbo jet standing on the adjoining runway. I guessed they needed a plane that size to transport their fleet of armoured SUVs.

I smiled and lifted my hand in greeting to the team. I thought of asking why there were no women in the party, but I thought it might get us off on the wrong foot. Instead I thanked the director for his assistance. ‘I spoke to Dave McKinley as I was leaving Turkey – I guess he called you immediately. ’

The guy looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. ‘I never spoke to Whisperer – President Grosvenor called His Majesty the King personally. ’ Little wonder we had a 747 and a small army on hand.

I had only been to Saudi once, and that was years ago, but I remembered it well enough to know that manners were of critical importance, so I turned to the delegation.

‘It is a great honour for a member of US law enforcement to have the chance to work with the famous Mabahith, ’ I lied, yelling into the teeth of the wind. ‘All of us in my organization – and indeed in our entire intelligence community – hold your force in the highest regard. ’ These were the same guys Carter had described as garbage wrapped in skin. ‘As you probably know, we believe we are close to identifying the man who has been trying to buy a nuclear trigger. With the Mabahith’s legendary skill, knowledge and intelligence, I am sure we can quickly bring this mission to a successful conclusion. ’

They loved it. Everybody smiled and nodded, stepping forward to kiss me on the cheek and introduce themselves. With the formalities over, we headed for the Escalades and sped out of the airport towards a blaze of distant lights.

I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.

With no movie houses, music venues, bars, mixed-sex coffee shops or parties, there was little to do at night, and we drove down a highway that was almost deserted. But that didn’t stop the guys at the front using their flashing lights and, at a ton-up and with sirens screaming, we tore through the flat, featureless landscape.

We slowed only when we reached the Corniche and made a right. Through the window I saw the city’s main mosque, with a huge parking lot in front of it – an area I had once heard was sometimes used for a far darker purpose – and then we swung past the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and headed down a side street. We stopped at a security checkpoint that was manned by armed men who looked like correction officers from a maximum-security jail. They probably were. The Mabahith was one of the only security forces in the world which ran its own prison system, and you didn’t need a very big shovel to discover that the inmates were frequently tortured.

We approached a grim-looking building, pulled into an underground parking lot and travelled by elevator up to a huge conference room that was fitted out with work stations, overhead screens, video-conferencing facilities and glass-walled rooms full of hard drives and servers.

‘Welcome to the war room, ’ the director said.

There were another hundred men – agents and analysts, by the look of them – at their desks, and they stood as we entered. Their boss spoke to them in Arabic, introducing me, then turned: ‘Tell us what you need, ’ he said.

I told them that we were looking for a man, probably in his thirties, with the surname al-Nassouri. ‘Apart from that, we know nothing about him, ’ I said. ‘Except – he has a sister who was born here in Jeddah. ’

I told them her name was Leyla, gave them her date of birth and said that we believed she had moved with her family to Bahrain. The director nodded, gave his agents a series of instructions in Arabic and took them off the leash.

He escorted me to a chair next to his own at the central console, and I had the opportunity to witness a unique event. I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom, it’s a terrifying thing to behold.

The agents ordered up birth certificates, hospital admissions, passport and visa applications, archival lists of the membership of every mosque, school enrolments, academic records, confidential medical histories, Department of Motor Vehicles entries and, for all I knew, the records of every public toilet in the kingdom.

On and on it went – not just information about the target but about everybody of the same surname in order to vacuum up any family members. All of it was in Arabic, so I had no hope of monitoring their progress, but I watched in awe as the walls of hard drives spun and searched, men disappeared down into the bowels of the building and returned with old files of documents and a team of male typists seated behind the central console continually updated an executive summary to keep the director informed.

The team of analysts and agents ate at their desks, only pausing to grab a coffee or to yell requests across the cavernous space until, after three hours and with the room littered with print-outs and running sheets, one of the most senior investigators returned from the archives carrying a thin folio of official documents tied in red ribbon. He called to his boss politely in Arabic and, whatever it was that he said, caused everybody to stop and turn towards the director.

He took possession of the thin folio, looked at it from under his hooded eyes, demanded the latest version of his executive summary and turned to me.

‘We now have everything we need, Mr Wilson, ’ he said. ‘I have to admit I’m confused – I think there has been a serious mistake. ’

‘What sort of mistake? ’ I said, clamping down on the spike of fear, keeping myself calm.

‘The name of the man you are looking for is Zakaria al-Nassouri, ’ he said, handing me a copy of an Arabic birth certificate.

I took it and looked at it for a moment. All I could think of was: what a long, long journey it had been to get to that piece of paper. All my life, in a way.

‘The woman you mentioned, ’ he continued, ‘Leyla al-Nassouri, had one sister and a brother. This brother – Zakaria – was born five years before her, also here in Jeddah.

‘Their father was a zoologist at the Red Sea Marine Biology Department. Apparently, he specialized in the study of …’ He had trouble with the Latin but took a stab at it anyway: ‘Amphiprion ocellaris. ’

Dozens of other men in the room laughed – whatever the hell that was.

‘Clownfish, ’ I said quietly, realization dawning. I slipped the birth certificate into a plastic sleeve and put it next to my cellphone. ‘In English, they’re called clownfish. I think the man I’m looking for took it as some sort of code name, probably to log on to an Internet forum. ’

The director just nodded and continued. ‘According to the archives, my predecessors in the Mabahith knew the father well. Twenty-five years ago, he was executed. ’

It shocked me. ‘Executed? ’ I said. ‘For what? ’

The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. ‘The usual – corruption on earth. ’

‘I’m sorry but what exactly does “corruption on earth” mean? ’

He laughed. ‘Pretty much whatever we want. ’ Nearly all his team found it funny too. ‘In this case, ’ he continued, ‘it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal. ’ Suddenly, he wasn’t laughing and nor were his agents – that was his family we were talking about.

‘Executions are carried out in public, is that right? ’ I asked.

‘Yes, ’ he replied. ‘He was beheaded down the road, in the parking area outside the mosque. ’

I hung my head – God, what a mess. A public beheading would be enough to radicalize anyone – no wonder the son grew up to be a terrorist. ‘How old was Zakaria al-Nassouri? ’

Again he consulted some files. ‘Fourteen. ’

I sighed. ‘Is there any evidence he witnessed the execution? ’ The whole thing was such a train wreck, I figured anything was possible.

‘Nobody was sure, but there was a photo taken in the square which several agents at the time believed was probably him. As a result, it was placed in the family’s file. ’ He took an old photo out of a folder and passed it over.

It was in black and white, shot from a high angle by what was obviously a surveillance camera. It showed a teenager, tall and gangly, buffeted by a searing desert wind in the almost empty square.

All the body language – the total desolation in the way that the boy was standing – spoke so clearly of pain and loss that I had little doubt it was him. A cop was approaching, his bamboo cane raised, trying to drive him off, and it meant that the boy’s back was half turned to the camera, his face averted. Even then, holding a photo of him, I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t realize it, but it was a bad omen.

I put the photo in the plastic sleeve, and the director moved on. ‘Records from the immigration department show that, shortly after her husband was executed, the mother took the three children to live in Bahrain.

‘I doubt that she had much choice – as a result of her husband’s crime, she would have been an outcast among her family and friends. Good riddance, ’ he said, with a shrug.

‘But, given their history, we continued to take an interest in them – at least for the first few years. Bahrain is a friendly neighbour and, on our behalf, it watched them. ’

He reached across to another folder, causing the sleeve of his thobe to ride up and expose a gold and sapphire Rolex which probably cost more than most people earned in a lifetime, and took a number of sheets out of the folder. They were field reports from agents who were doing the watching, I guessed.

‘She took a job, ’ the director said, scanning through them, ‘and gave up wearing the veil. What does that tell you? ’ He looked at his men. ‘Not much of a mother or a Muslim, eh? ’ All the men murmured in agreement.

You never know, maybe her husband being decapitated had something to do with her getting a job, I thought. Carter was right about them, but what was the alternative? Right now, we needed them.

‘The boy joined a small mosque – very conservative and anti-Western – on the outskirts of Manama, the capital. Around the time of his sixteenth birthday, they helped pay for him to fly to Pakistan—’

I caught my breath. Sixteen was just a kid, but I did a quick calculation, working out which year we were talking about. ‘He went into Afghanistan? ’ I asked. ‘You’re telling me he was a muj? ’

‘Yes, ’ he answered. ‘Some people said he was a hero, that he brought down three Hind helicopter gunships. ’

Suddenly I understood why he had travelled to the Hindu Kush to test his virus, where he had found the explosives to booby-trap the village, how he had managed to escape the Australians down long-forgotten trails. And I thought of another Saudi who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets – he was also a fundamentalist, a man who had hated the royal family with a passion and had ended up attacking America. Osama bin Laden.

‘So he was in Afghanistan – what then? ’ I asked.

‘We only have one more document, ’ he replied, picking up the thin folio fastened with the red ribbon. He opened it and took out an impressive-looking form written in Arabic and stamped with an official seal.

‘We found this in the paper archives. It was sent to us about fourteen years ago by the Afghan government. ’ He handed it to me. ‘It’s a death certificate.

‘As I said, there has been a mistake – he was killed two weeks before the war ended. ’

I stared at him, not even looking at the document, robbed of speech.

‘You see, you’re chasing the wrong man, ’ he said. ‘Zakaria al-Nassouri is dead. ’