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.
Chapter Eleven
WHISPERER ANSWERED ALMOST immediately, but his voice, even softer than usual, was so hoarse it sounded like acid running over gravel. There had been too much stress, too little sleep, too many disappointments for one man’s plate.
I told him the mistake we had made in trying to run the Saracen down and explained what I wanted to try – not the detail of it, just the broad strokes. Thankfully, he was so experienced, he didn’t need chalk on a board.
I said we had to delay the rendition of Cumali and convince the president to postpone his address to the nation. ‘I need time for it to work, Dave,’ I said.
He tried to laugh. ‘You’re asking me for the one thing we don’t have,’ he countered, and again I heard the years in his voice. ‘We can’t delay, I was speaking to him twenty minutes ago – it’s impossible.’
I pleaded my case, I begged him and, finally, when that got me nowhere, I told him in anger that he had better listen to me because I was the best agent of my generation and, fuck it, I was telling him we had a chance. He said nothing for a moment, and I could tell that the raw vanity of it, so out of character for me, had shocked him. He told me to wait.
So I clung on, both literally and metaphorically, pitching and plunging through the turbulence while he called the president on another phone. A few minutes later I heard his footsteps return across the wooden floor of his study.
‘I just spoke to Grosvenor,’ he reported. ‘He doesn’t think it’ll work, he doesn’t believe in it—’
‘Jesus!’ I interjected. ‘Did you explain our mistake?’
‘Sure I did,’ Whisperer replied tersely. ‘I said we’d ridden out like a posse and we should have been desperadoes waiting for a train. How was that – clear enough?’
‘And he still didn’t get it?’
‘You didn’t let me finish. He said he doesn’t believe in it – but he believes in you. You’ve got thirty-six hours.’
The relief flooded in. One more chance for salvation, one more chance for redemption. ‘Thanks,’ I said sheepishly.
‘Phone us, good or bad. If it starts falling apart, he wants to know immediately. He’s got the address to the nation written. He said no false hope, no letting wishing overwhelm logic. If it’s a turd, don’t try to polish it.’