‘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.
Chapter Seven
THE CORRIDORS RAN for miles. On either side, twenty-feet-high motorized storage racks stood like monoliths – enter a reference number, a name or any other data on a control panel, and the racks moved silently to reveal the relevant archive boxes. It was like standing inside a computer hard drive.
There were eighteen identical floors, all filled with paper archives: the raw data of decade after decade of surveillance, betrayal and suspicion. Hidden far beneath the Mabahith’s regional headquarters, linked together by a central atrium, the complex was overrun by men searching the storage racks and hauling out archive boxes. The director had been as good as his word and had pulled in every agent and analyst he could find.
I had made my way down from the conference room and taken a seat beside several of the senior agents at a command post suspended out over the atrium. I watched as teams of men on every floor unbundled yellowing paper files and searched through mountains of data looking for any reference – any mention at all – of a man whose father had been executed in Saudi Arabia all those years ago.
Three hours of watching them plough through files in Arabic, three hours in a windowless vault with guys who didn’t touch alcohol but smoked thirty a day, three hours of counting every minute, and I was as close to desperate as I ever wanted to be. Naturally, when one of my neighbours said that the first squad was heading out to interview people who might be able to contribute something to the lost narrative, I grabbed my jacket to join them.
The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day. We gathered up eight more of their colleagues on the way and rolled in a convoy of four black SUVs with so much makhfee on the windows it was like travelling in permanent midnight. I’m certain, though, it fulfilled its real purpose admirably: no ordinary civilian who saw them passing could have failed to be afraid.
For mile after mile we criss-crossed the sprawling city – four and a half million souls marooned in the middle of the desert, seemingly half of them employed by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company – and interviewed people about a family which had long since vanished. We sat in the majlis – the formal sitting rooms – of poor houses way out in the suburbs and questioned men whose hands were trembling, we saw dark-eyed kids watching from shadowy doorways and glimpsed veiled women in floor-length burqas hurrying away at our approach. We visited an elderly man called Sa’id bin Abdullah bin Mabrouk al-Bishi – he was the state executioner who had beheaded al-Nassouri’s father – in the hope that in his last moments the condemned man had said something about the career and future he had wanted for his son. After that we drove to a modest villa close enough to the water to smell the salt and, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I took a photo of it on my cellphone. It was al-Nassouri’s childhood home and we questioned the man who had moved in after the family had fled in case he had heard something in the following years.