Chapter Ten

ON A PRIVATE jet at full throttle, it takes about two hours to fly from Jeddah to the Gaza Strip, a slice of abject misery wedged between Israel and Egypt, home to one and a half million stateless Arabs and at least twenty groups identified by the State Department as terrorist organizations.

Beirut Station had arranged for the arms dealer’s red and kitsch Gulfstream to be replaced by a CIA-owned Lear jet that was decorated in three shades of beige. At least it didn’t give me a migraine. While that might have been an advantage, the downside was that there were no beds, something which turned out to be significant. I was forced to sit up and, with nothing more than endless miles of oil derricks to look out on, my thoughts were my only company.

I have to say they were miserable companions. I don’t think I’m a vain man but I do have a liberal dose of professional pride. Sitting in a plane at thirty thousand feet, there was no place to hide, especially not from the truth. I had met Zakaria al-Nassouri head-on, and he had defeated me.

Maybe I never really had a chance – he was too good, too smart, too far ahead ever to be caught. This was the person who had carried quicklime into the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Quicklime on the back of packhorses – for five hundred miles, through some of the most inhospitable land on earth! He had planned every step, every detail.

Certainly a man capable of that would have anticipated the day when somebody in my business would try to find him. Like a fugitive in fresh snow, he had swept the ground behind him. He bought a death certificate over fourteen years ago, and followed that up with a fake passport. As I said, maybe he was too far ahead to ever be caught.

And yet, as far as I could see, there was nothing we could have done differently. Of the ten people who knew the secret, the eight government officials had not only maintained their silence but acted with admirable speed. Without being boastful, the other two members of the group – Whisperer and myself – were among the best in the world, armed with all the resources and technology the most powerful country on earth could provide. We were apex predators and, like all apex predators, we were hard-wired to hunt …

I stopped to correct myself. Not every apex predator hunts. I could think of at least one that didn’t. A shark hunts, but a crocodile lies silently in the reeds and waits for its prey to come to him.

At that moment, I realized what our mistake had been – we had been hunting him when we should have been trapping him. We never had a chance, not in a straight-line pursuit: his lead was far too great. But in a trap, a head start wouldn’t have mattered.

Was there still time? Perhaps we had a card left to play, one more roll of the dice, a final round left in the chamber. Somehow we had to draw him out of the shadows and make him come to the waterhole.

I stared out of the window for what felt like a lifetime. I didn’t see the clouds or the oil rigs, but I came to believe that we had a chance. I based it on one thing only, a lesson I had learned a long time ago in a banker’s office in Geneva: love wasn’t weak, love was strong.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and scrambled to my feet. I hadn’t realized that clear-air turbulence was rocking the small jet, sending it pitching and yawing, but I had no time to worry about it. I headed towards the front of the cabin, nearly hit the roof as we took a sudden dive, grabbed hold of a seat back and half crawled, half rocketed, to where a CIA secure phone was located in a small closet.

I grabbed the handset and made a call.