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.