Chapter Six

I WATCHED A crescent moon rise above the Red Sea, I saw the minarets of the city mosque standing like silent guardians, I felt the desert crowding in and I imagined I could hear the pumps sucking out ten million barrels a day from beneath its sand.

With the death certificate still in my hand, I had risen to my feet and walked to a window in silence – I needed a minute to compose myself, to think. By an exercise of iron will I forced myself to work it through. Zakaria al-Nassouri wasn’t dead – I was certain Leyla Cumali had been speaking to her brother on the phone. I had heard his voice on the recordings and I had met his son. DNA doesn’t lie.

So what was its meaning, a death certificate from so long ago? It took only a moment to see the answer, and it was worse than anything I could have imagined. I felt my stomach knot and, I have to admit, for a few terrible heartbeats I felt like giving up.

But I knew that one of the hallmarks of every successful mission – perhaps of life itself – was a determination never to retreat, never to surrender. What was that verse of Whisperer’s? ‘To go to your God like a soldier. ’

There were a hundred pairs of eyes focused on my back, and I turned to face them. ‘He’s not dead, ’ I said, with total conviction. ‘It’s impossible, he has a six-year-old son – we’ve seen the DNA. ’

I saw the alarm spread through their ranks – was I claiming that Saudi intelligence had made a mistake or was incompetent? What a fool I was. In my distraction and despair, I had forgotten the importance of flattery and good manners. I grabbed the oars and rowed back fast.

‘Of course, it takes an organization with the skill and experience of the Mabahith – to say nothing of its exalted leadership – to see things that we never could. ’ It was so saccharine it could have induced diabetes, but it did the trick: everybody relaxed, smiling and nodding.

I indicated the document. ‘I believe that in the last weeks of the conflict Zakaria al-Nassouri bought his own death certificate – either in the backstreets of Kabul or by bribing an Afghan official to issue it. ’

‘Why? ’ the director asked.

‘Because he had been a muj. He knew that people like us would always be dogging him. Maybe even then he was planning to fight a far bigger war.

‘Once his old identity was dead, he took a new one. It wasn’t hard. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran – the whole region was in chaos, corruption everywhere. ’

I paused, face to face with my failure. ‘I think somehow he acquired a new passport. ’

The director stared. ‘You understand? ’ he said. ‘That means we don’t know his name, his nationality, what flag he’s travelling under—’

‘You’re right – nothing, ’ I said, trying to hide the devastation I was feeling.

‘But somewhere, ’ I continued, ‘somebody in the Arab world has heard about a man of the right age, an ex-muj, an exile, whose father was executed in Saudi. How many of them could there be? We have to find that thread. ’

The director thought about it and I imagined the seconds ticking away on his million-dollar watch. ‘If there’s anything, it wouldn’t be in the computerized files, ’ he said at last, thinking out loud. ‘We would have already run across it. Maybe in the paper files … there could be something, a long time back. ’

He spoke harshly in Arabic, issuing orders. By the flurry of urgent activity, I guessed that they were being told to call in reinforcements, to drag in more analysts and researchers, to summon men long since retired who might remember something. Dozens of the more senior agents scrambled to their feet, grabbed their laptops and cigarettes and headed for the elevators.

The director pointed at them. ‘That’s the main search party – they will start going through the paper files. I’ve got another two hundred men on the way, but I can promise it won’t be fast. There’s an apartment upstairs – why don’t you get some rest? ’

I thanked him, but I knew I couldn’t. I looked at my watch: it was six hours until I had to make a call to the two men waiting in the Oval Office. I turned to the window and stared out at the star-strewn night. Somewhere out there was a desert so vast they called it the Sea of Emptiness and I thought again of the Saracen.

T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – knew something about that part of the world and the nature of men. He said that the dreamers of the day were dangerous people – they tried to live their dreams to make them come true. Zakaria al-Nassouri’s day-dream was to destroy us all. Mine was to catch him. I wondered which one of us would wake in the morning and find that their nightmare had begun.