Payback (12 page)

‘For the Palestinian bombers who attack Israeli targets – and they’re the most common – the funds come mainly from the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia. Saddam
Hussein created a fund as well, but obviously he’s no longer making payments.’

‘But why do they – the
shuhada
I mean – do it?’ Baxter asked.

‘That’s a simple question with a complex answer,’ Stevenson replied. ‘Most of the analytical work has been done in Israel, so doesn’t apply here, but there the
shahid
is acting, as he sees it, to rid his legitimate homeland of its Jewish invaders. That’s the general reason for the attack, but most
shuhada
also have a second, more
specific, reason for carrying out their mission, usually involving something like a desire to exact revenge for the death of a close friend. In the case of the Palestinians, there’s also the
feeling that the suicide bomb is the only viable weapon they possess. And this is a weapon that’s extremely difficult to detect or counter. There’s also fear and the moral
element.’

‘And that means what, exactly?’ Hutchings demanded.

‘Fear, because almost anyone, anywhere, at any time, could turn out to be a
shahid
. Fear that the man standing next to you at the railway station, or at the bus stop or in the
elevator or in the queue at the shop, could have a belt of TNT wrapped around his waist, and might choose this very moment to pull the trigger. Can you imagine the constant strain of living like
that, day after day? For the planners in Hamas and Hezbollah, striking fear into the hearts of the Jewish population is just as important as the deaths caused by the attacks.’

Stevenson took a sip of water, then continued. ‘And in a sense the
shuhada
manage to seize the moral high ground as well. Their victims are to some extent of secondary importance,
what you might almost call collateral damage, but the
shuhada
themselves are making the ultimate sacrifice, being forced to take their own lives because of the immoral acts of their
perceived enemies. A suicide bomber achieves a kind of nobility simply because of his own sacrifice.’

‘We don’t need to get too deep into this aspect, David,’ John Westwood interrupted.

‘Agreed, sir. Well,’ Stevenson went on, ‘this kind of attack is very common in the present political climate, though Damascus is a somewhat unusual target. The Syrians are
still puzzled by Assad’s claim to be acting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, because in that country the organization is virtually extinct. But they found reading material in
Assad’s rooms that had clearly been inspired by the Brotherhood, so they’ve concluded that the motive he claimed was probably genuine.’

Again he paused to ensure he had their full attention. ‘You’re here because of two unique aspects of this particular attack. To go back a step, the Palestinian suicide bombers are
normally sent out by dispatchers who brief them carefully on their target, the route they must take, and how to initiate the detonation. The dispatchers will also make a videotape featuring the
shahid
, to release after the bombing. Frequently they can be heard acting as prompters, or asking questions to produce the answers they want the rest of the world to hear. Sometimes they
themselves will even feature on the video, masked and anonymous of course, and interview the
shahid
. On Assad’s tape, there are no such prompts, no questions, no hint of an interview.
He just reads out a short speech, obviously memorized.’

‘So?’ Hutchings asked.

‘We got a first-generation copy of the tape from Al-Jazeera, and our techies here have been analysing it. They were looking for the usual stuff – clues to identify where it was made,
extraneous sounds and so on – but nothing showed up until right at the very end of the tape, in the last second and a half, to be exact, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

‘The technicians also deduced that Assad wasn’t wearing a microphone, or speaking into one somewhere out of shot. They believe that the mike being used was the one built into the
video camera itself, which is important for two reasons. First, it suggests this was an amateur or at least a low-budget operation, because the professional dispatchers usually supply either a
clip-on mike or one on a stand in front of the
shahid
. They want the bomber’s message to be clearly heard and understood.

‘The second point is an extraneous sound they detected. Just before the video ends there’s a very faint noise on the soundtrack. Before enhancement, it sounds like a cough. Once the
techies had cleaned the tape and amplified it, they realized it was actually a single word, spoken very quietly. The word is “good”, and the voice that’s speaking it is an adult
male – most likely American, but just possibly Canadian.’

British Airways Flight BA107

Paul Richter sat in only moderate discomfort in the economy section of the Boeing 777, contemplating the remainder of the seven-hour direct flight to Dubai without any
particular degree of enthusiasm.

He didn’t know quite what to make of Salah Khatid’s information. He had no doubt that the Arab was accurately reporting what he’d heard, but there was frankly too little data
to go on for him to do anything about it. He would just have to keep his eyes open. But there had been something he could do about Holden’s alleged premonitions. Richter had spent the
previous afternoon reading through half a dozen files he’d requested from the Registry. And what he’d read in them had, frankly, surprised him.

Three of the files were unclassified, and had originated from the American Defense Intelligence Agency. They dated from the seventies and weren’t directly relevant to his tasking, but
still provided some useful background information. The first was DST-1810S-387–75 entitled ‘Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research’; the second was
ST-CS-01–169–72, ‘Controlled Offensive Behavior’; and the third DST-1810S-074–76, ‘Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation (Radiowaves and Microwaves)
– Eurasian Communist Countries’.

He’d also read three files classified ‘Secret’ that had originated at Vauxhall Cross. All dealt with an American remote-viewing project primarily based at Fort Meade in
Maryland, at first called Star Gate, then Center Lane and finally Sun Streak, before being shut down. The author of the file suggested that the ‘shutdown’ had been more cosmetic than
real, designed to divert government and media attention away from the programme while its research continued in a covert environment, supported by ‘black’ funding. The project had
possessed an operational wing, known as Grill Flame, which had been used by American intelligence for active espionage against the then Soviet Union.

Richter had read it all thoroughly, and it had sounded like science fiction – and bad science fiction at that. What surprised him most was how much money the Americans had poured into the
project over the years. They’d actually
admitted
to spending in excess of twenty million dollars, which suggested that the actual budget had probably been a hell of a lot higher.

After that, he’d read a fourth pink file, classified Top Secret and bearing a WNINTEL caveat, and that one had surprised him even more. Like the other three, it had been prepared by
analysts at SIS, and it detailed what little was known about ‘Black Box’, the Western code-name for a top-secret Russian psychic research unit located a few miles from St
Petersburg.

The details were sketchy, to say the least, and it looked to Richter as if the data contained in the file had been acquired from somebody who had visited or worked at the target establishment
only occasionally. HUMINT was usually the most accurate and reliable information source, but obviously more or less constant access was needed to produce comprehensive results. But even the
incomplete picture obtained by SIS showed that the Russians had been spending prodigious sums of money – the file suggested an
annual
budget greater than the total the Americans had
spent over a ten-year period – in wide-ranging investigations and experimentation in various fields of paranormal activity.

The other obvious difference was that the US effort had been primarily directed towards remote viewing – what might be termed psychic spying – while the Russian research seemed to
have been offensive. They had experimented with influencing at a distance, trying to get inside the minds of their enemies, studied various types of radiation to manipulate entire populations, and
ultimately investigated psychic assassinations. They’d tried methods intended to stop the hearts of their targets; to create blood clots to cause strokes; to rupture capillary vessels inside
the brain, and so induce severe depression that might lead to suicide.

Their most ambitious project had been nicknamed ‘Woodpecker’ by American intelligence analysts. Starting in 1976 and continuing until the collapse of the Soviet Union, seven huge
radio transmitters based near Kiev, and initially powered by the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, emitted a ten-Hertz pulse at frequencies of between 3.26MHz and 17.54MHz and
with an estimated peak power of around fourteen
million
watts. These signals were beamed directly at the populations of Western Europe, North America, Australia and the Middle East, and were
capable of penetrating virtually anything from reinforced concrete bunkers to the huge depth of water above a submerged submarine.

It was the world’s largest ever experiment in psychotronics, using ELF-modulated signals. The Russians had discovered that exposure to certain radiated frequencies could produce effects
ranging from depression to aggression. They’d also found that prolonged exposure to such signals could cause permanent changes in the brain, by physically altering the neural connections. An
American medical expert later estimated that ‘Woodpecker’ could have caused neurological changes in up to thirty per cent of the target populations.

If the American studies had sounded like science fiction, the Russian experimentation bordered on fantasy. But Richter couldn’t dismiss the money. Between them, the world’s only two
superpowers had spent an absolute
minimum
of a quarter of a billion dollars, over a ten-year period, on investigations into the kind of thing that even the most hysterical and irresponsible
elements of the British tabloid press routinely dismissed as nonsense.

Saratov, Russia

The police reached the dockside that afternoon and began questioning the workers.

Once he’d finished interrogating Borisov, Litvinoff had ordered checkpoints to be set up on all the roads between Kondal and Rostov, and telephone enquiries had been made to all trucking
companies in the area. The latter course of action produced results almost immediately, when a small transport company in Atkarsk reported that a truck they’d rented to someone called Nabov
had been found empty and apparently abandoned in a lorry park just a day later, with the keys still in the ignition.

The company manager assumed Nabov must have changed his mind, and simply had the lorry brought back to his yard. The vehicle was now being pored over by police and forensic scientists.

Luckily for Litvinoff, the company had taken mileage readings both before the truck was driven away, and again after it had been found. This at least told the FSB man exactly how far the vehicle
had travelled while still in Nabov’s custody. That provided him with the dimensions of a search area, which included Saratov, while the police and other FSB investigators, hastily called in
by Litvinoff to assist in what now amounted to a full-scale inquiry, tried to find whatever alternative form of transport the Americans had decided to use.

The river Volga was an obvious choice, particularly as Borisov claimed that the weapon was hidden inside a large and heavy crate. That meant either another truck or something else big enough to
handle it, like a barge or aircraft, for example.

Litvinoff knew that getting the crate onto an aircraft, or even a train, would have meant filling in a whole sheaf of forms, so he guessed that they’d either obtained another lorry, or
transferred the cargo to a barge.

It didn’t take the police long to discover that two men, non-Russians but speaking the language fluently, had driven to the port in a lorry. A large wooden crate had been transferred from
the back of the vehicle to the cargo hold of a barge waiting to depart for Volgograd.

‘Two men? You’re sure?’ Litvinoff asked the dock worker who had operated the forklift truck.

The man nodded. ‘I didn’t see inside the cab of the truck, but only two men got out,’ he insisted.

Litvinoff made a note to search the main road, and every side road too, between Kondal and Saratov. If only two men had been in the lorry when it arrived, it seemed likely that the pair of
Russian technicians had outlived their usefulness. They’d probably been killed by the Americans and their bodies dumped.

He would set the wheels in motion for a search, using the local police force, but for the moment finding the two technicians, whether dead or alive, was of secondary importance. Finding the
barge, and the crate it was carrying, was very much his first priority.

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Stevenson looked at the five men, stares of disbelief imprinted firmly on their faces.

‘American?’ Westwood echoed.

‘That’s what the techies reported, sir. They’re ninety per cent certain that when Assad made his videotape, there was an American behind the camera. They further deduced that
the American speaks, or at least understands, Arabic, because he says “good” immediately after Assad has finished speaking. The logical conclusion is that he was pleased with the
boy’s performance, and muttered “good” without thinking. His comment wouldn’t have been audible to anyone else, but the camera’s mike just managed to pick it up. A
camcorder’s microphone points forward to record whatever the camera is filming, so it’s not particularly sensitive to noises from behind, unless those sounds are loud or in the very
near vicinity. That suggests the American was probably the man filming Assad’s statement.’