I Am Pilgrim(45)

Alone in the kitchen with him, they waited while he signed for its contents. Inside was a Lebanese passport in a false name – not some bad fake bought in the bazaar in Quetta but a genuine book with every detail properly registered, traded by a corrupt Lebanese Embassy employee in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, for ten thousand US, cash.

Equally importantly, it contained visas and permits that showed that the bearer had entered from India three years earlier in order to gain his high-school diploma from a respected international school. Tucked in the back was four thousand US dollars in well-used bills. There was no letter or explanation, there didn’t need to be: it was like a properly maintained AK-47, a gift from one warrior whose war had finished to another whose campaign had just begun.

With the spring melt starting, the Saracen started his long trek out of Afghanistan. As he walked the back roads, the signs of the war’s destruction were everywhere: towns laid to waste, devastated fields, bodies in ditches. But already families were planting the most lucrative of all cash crops – opium poppies. As he neared the Pakistani border he met the first of five million refugees returning to their homes, and from then on he swam against a rising tide of humanity.

At the border all semblance of control had collapsed and, unnoticed, he crossed out of Afghanistan late on a cloudless afternoon – a young man with a fake past, a false identity and a real passport. No wonder, when the time came, it took me so long to find him. As I said – he was a ghost.





Chapter Seven


THE SARACEN MADE it down to Karachi by the first blast of the monsoon. The huge city sprawls along the Arabian Sea, and he used a few of his dollars to buy sleeping space on the deck of an old freighter heading out to Dubai. From there, a dozen airlines fly directly to Beirut and, a week later, the passport fulfilled all its expensive promise when he passed unchallenged through Lebanese immigration.

Beirut was a disaster story in itself, half of it in ruins and most of its population wounded or exhausted. But that suited the Saracen – the country was recovering from fifteen years of civil war, and a rootless man had no trouble passing for a native in a city full of shattered lives.

He had always been a good student and, with six months’ hard work, helped by tutors he met at the city’s most radical and intellectual mosque, he easily passed the next sitting of the college entrance exam. Like most students, the high cost of tuition was a problem, but fortunately he found a State Department scholarship programme which was aimed at rebuilding the nation and fostering democracy. The staff at the US Embassy even helped him fill in the forms.

Flush with US aid money, the Saracen devoted the long days – interrupted only by prayer and simple meals – to the study of medicine; the nights to terror and revolution. He read all the big ones – Mao, Che, Lenin – and attended discussions and lectures by wild pan-Arab nationalists, Palestinian warmongers and several men who could best be described as Islamic cave dwellers. One of them, on a fund-raising visit, was forming an organization which translated as ‘the law’ or ‘the base’ – al-Qaeda in Arabic. The Saracen had heard of this tall sheikh, a fellow Saudi, while he was fighting in Afghanistan but, unlike everybody else in the mosque that day, he made no attempt to impress Osama bin Laden with fiery rhetoric – proof yet again that the quietest man in the room is usually the most dangerous.

It was at another of these discussion groups, this one so small it was held in a dingy room normally used by the university’s stamp club, that he encountered an idea that would change his life. Ours, too, I’m sad to say. Ironically – because the guest speaker was a woman – he almost didn’t attend. She gave her name as Amina Ebadi – although that was probably an alias – and she was a political organizer in the huge Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, home to over a hundred and forty thousand Palestinian refugees, one of the most deprived and radical square miles on earth.

The subject of her talk was the humanitarian crisis in the camp, and a grand total of ten people showed up. But she was so accustomed to swimming against the tide of international indifference it didn’t worry her – one day, somebody would hear her, and that person would change everything.

It was a brutally hot night and, in the midst of her address, she paused and took off her half-veil. ‘There are so few of us, I feel like I’m among family,’ she said, smiling. None of the tiny audience objected and, even if the Saracen had been inclined to do so, it took him long enough to recover from the sight of her face that the opportunity was lost.

With only her serious voice to go by, he had drawn up a mental picture of her that was completely at variance with her large eyes, expressive mouth and flawless skin. Her tightly pulled-back hair lent her a boyish quality and while, individually, her features were far too irregular to be considered attractive, when she smiled everything seemed to coalesce and nobody could have ever convinced the Saracen that she wasn’t beautiful.