Authors: Terry Hayes
The Saracen also knew that one small group in any community – newborn babies – would be precluded from being given the so-called legitimate drug, but he didn’t care. With ten thousand vectors unleashed and smallpox being an airborne pathogen, transmitted like the common cold, the only way for babies and anyone else to avoid infection would be to stop breathing.
With the one thousand glass vials completed, and confident he could go faster, he clocked off on
that first night and made his way home brimming with hope and wild excitement. Dawn was just
breaking but instead of falling into bed in his tiny rented apartment he started a ritual which he would follow for the next week.
He turned on the TV and watched the Weather Channel.
In the early hours of the morning, it carried a comprehensive update on the weather situation in the continental United States. To the Saracen’s great joy, he saw that an unseasonal cold front was forming slowly in the north of Canada and was forecast to move across the United States. All the channel’s experts were predicting that an unusually cold fall was coming early.
The seemingly innocuous development guaranteed that the impending attack would be, if it were at
all possible, even more devastating. All airborne viruses – not just smallpox – were far more contagious in cold conditions, and most experts estimate that such conditions accelerate their transmission by at least 30 per cent. The reasons are straightforward – people cough and sneeze more, they take the bus instead of walking, they eat inside restaurants and not at sidewalk cafés. As the temperature drops, populations unwittingly wind themselves more closely together and provide a far
better environment for the transfer of viral material.
Several days later, by the time he had finished processing the last of the ten thousand vials, the Saracen saw that the cold front was growing stronger and more widespread.
He moved the plastic-sealed packages into the warehouse proper, placed them in the right shipping
bays for their intended destinations and checked one last time that all of their dispatch documents were in order.
In twenty-four hours, several trucks, part of the endless convoy which regularly passed through Chyron’s European manufacturing plant, would pick up the packages and convey them the ninety miles through the town of Mannheim, past the huge US military base at Darmstadt and on to Frankfurt
airport.
The flights to America would take about ten hours, the packages would then be transported to the
company’s regional freight centres and – about twelve hours later – be loaded on to trucks and delivered to doctors’ offices throughout the United States.
Alone in the cavernous warehouse with only his thoughts and God for company, the Saracen was
certain that in forty-eight hours the storm – both literally and figuratively – would hit the Republic.
Chapter Four
THE INTERIOR OF the arms dealer ’s private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs.
The walls were lined with a purple crushed velvet, the captain’s chairs were upholstered in a deep-red brocade, complete with monograms, and all the fittings were in gold plate that was so highly polished it looked like brass.
But the plane was capable of flying very high – where the turbulence was less and the air thinner –
which meant that, in the hands of the two US Air Force pilots, we would make it to Jeddah in record
time. The craft also had one other advantage – at the back of the cabin was a door which led into a
bedroom with a full-size bed, and a bathroom decorated in a combo of chrome, mirror and leopardskin.
I managed to ignore the decor and, after showering, I changed my clothes and lay down on the bed.
I have no idea how long I slept but at some stage I woke up and lifted the blind and was surprised to see that night had fallen and we were flying beneath an endless field of stars.
I turned over and, in the solitude of flight, got to thinking about the huge effort I had made to escape the secret life, what it had been like in Paris for those few wonderful months when I was reaching for normal and how I wished that I had found somebody who loved me as much as I wanted
to love them. I would have liked children too but given the circumstances – being swept back into the covert world, even now chasing shadows down dark alleys – the way things had worked out was probably for the best. Maybe later, when the mission was finally done, I thought dreamily …
It was with that thought in mind, somewhere between heaven and the desert, that I must have fallen
back to sleep and, once more, seemingly out of nowhere, I saw the vision of myself on the old yacht, sailing across the endless sea, heading into the dying of the light.
In the midst of it I heard a distant voice I didn’t recognize, but then I realized: it wasn’t God, it was the pilot on the PA announcing that we were landing in fifteen minutes.
I swung my legs off the bed and sat in silence for a moment. The vision of death had troubled me
even more than before. It was more vivid and more insistent, as if it were drawing closer.
Chapter Five
A HIGH-LEVEL DELEGATION wearing immaculate white thobes and the characteristic red chequered headdress – two of which were braided in gold, indicating that the wearers were members of the Saudi royal family – met me on the asphalt at Jeddah.
They waited at the bottom of the steps – a dozen of them, whipped by the strong desert wind – with
at least forty more guys with assault weapons standing near a fleet of black Cadillac Escalades.
The leader of the delegation – one of the men with the gold braid – stepped forward, shook my hand and introduced himself as the director of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police. In his late thirties, with a weak handshake and hooded eyes, he had about as much charisma as the Angel of Death.
He indicated the rest of the group. ‘These are all senior members of my organization. We flew up
from Riyadh two hours ago,’ he explained, pointing at an unmarked jumbo jet standing on the adjoining runway. I guessed they needed a plane that size to transport their fleet of armoured SUVs.
I smiled and lifted my hand in greeting to the team. I thought of asking why there were no women
in the party, but I thought it might get us off on the wrong foot. Instead I thanked the director for his assistance. ‘I spoke to Dave McKinley as I was leaving Turkey – I guess he called you immediately.’
The guy looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. ‘I never spoke to Whisperer – President
Grosvenor called His Majesty the King personally.’ Little wonder we had a 747 and a small army on
hand.
I had only been to Saudi once, and that was years ago, but I remembered it well enough to know
that manners were of critical importance, so I turned to the delegation.
‘It is a great honour for a member of US law enforcement to have the chance to work with the famous Mabahith,’ I lied, yelling into the teeth of the wind. ‘All of us in my organization – and indeed in our entire intelligence community – hold your force in the highest regard.’ These were the same
guys Carter had described as garbage wrapped in skin. ‘As you probably know, we believe we are close to identifying the man who has been trying to buy a nuclear trigger. With the Mabahith’s legendary skill, knowledge and intelligence, I am sure we can quickly bring this mission to a successful conclusion.’
They loved it. Everybody smiled and nodded, stepping forward to kiss me on the cheek and introduce themselves. With the formalities over, we headed for the Escalades and sped out of the airport towards a blaze of distant lights.
I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to
recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.
With no movie houses, music venues, bars, mixed-sex coffee shops or parties, there was little to do
at night, and we drove down a highway that was almost deserted. But that didn’t stop the guys at the front using their flashing lights and, at a ton-up and with sirens screaming, we tore through the flat, featureless landscape.
We slowed only when we reached the Corniche and made a right. Through the window I saw the city’s main mosque, with a huge parking lot in front of it – an area I had once heard was sometimes
used for a far darker purpose – and then we swung past the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and headed
down a side street. We stopped at a security checkpoint that was manned by armed men who looked
like correction officers from a maximum-security jail. They probably were. The Mabahith was one of the only security forces in the world which ran its own prison system, and you didn’t need a very big shovel to discover that the inmates were frequently tortured.
We approached a grim-looking building, pulled into an underground parking lot and travelled by
elevator up to a huge conference room that was fitted out with work stations, overhead screens, video-conferencing facilities and glass-walled rooms full of hard drives and servers.
‘Welcome to the war room,’ the director said.
There were another hundred men – agents and analysts, by the look of them – at their desks, and
they stood as we entered. Their boss spoke to them in Arabic, introducing me, then turned: ‘Tell us
what you need,’ he said.
I told them that we were looking for a man, probably in his thirties, with the surname al-Nassouri.
‘Apart from that, we know nothing about him,’ I said. ‘Except – he has a sister who was born here in Jeddah.’
I told them her name was Leyla, gave them her date of birth and said that we believed she had moved with her family to Bahrain. The director nodded, gave his agents a series of instructions in Arabic and took them off the leash.
He escorted me to a chair next to his own at the central console, and I had the opportunity to witness a unique event. I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom, it’s a terrifying thing to behold.
The agents ordered up birth certificates, hospital admissions, passport and visa applications, archival lists of the membership of every mosque, school enrolments, academic records, confidential
medical histories, Department of Motor Vehicles entries and, for all I knew, the records of every public toilet in the kingdom.
On and on it went – not just information about the target but about everybody of the same surname
in order to vacuum up any family members. All of it was in Arabic, so I had no hope of monitoring
their progress, but I watched in awe as the walls of hard drives spun and searched, men disappeared
down into the bowels of the building and returned with old files of documents and a team of male typists seated behind the central console continually updated an executive summary to keep the director informed.
The team of analysts and agents ate at their desks, only pausing to grab a coffee or to yell requests across the cavernous space until, after three hours and with the room littered with print-outs and running sheets, one of the most senior investigators returned from the archives carrying a thin folio of official documents tied in red ribbon. He called to his boss politely in Arabic and, whatever it was that he said, caused everybody to stop and turn towards the director.
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?’