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.’
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.