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.