First-13

After my release from prison, the lure of instant respect and easy riches as part of a criminal firm wasn’t the only temptation I had to resist. One day a representative from an African government asked me to take out the leader of the opposition, a gig for which I’d probably have been paid around £100,000. It would have been a pretty straightforward job, given that I’d have had the support of the government in question, but I didn’t need to think about it for long. I’m not an assassin.

Although more conventional private security work soon started coming in, I did still receive the occasional unusual and intriguing offer. In March 2013 I took a call from a well-connected associate, a former Marine named Iain. My instructions were to be at a Middle Eastern restaurant on the Old Brompton Road at 11 a.m. sharp. The staff were just opening up when I arrived to find Iain already waiting at an outside table, along with a dark-haired guy in an expensive-looking camel-hair coat.

He replied in an accent that was a mix of well-spoken English and Arabic. He was perhaps Saudi Arabian or Iraqi. ‘Thank you for coming. I’ve heard some good things about you.’

After the waiter had arrived with a plate of sweet pastries and an elaborate silver pot, from which he poured us each a strong black coffee into a glass cup, the man opened a leather satchel and took out an A4 envelope.

‘I work as a correspondent for a certain family, organising this and that,’ he explained vaguely. ‘I have a job that I need carrying out expertly, discreetly and with the kind of efficiency’ – he paused and looked at me and then Iain as he said the word – ‘that men of your calibre and experience specialise in.’

The correspondent pulled a small sheaf of documents from the envelope. His fingernails were perfectly manicured, the backs of his hands appeared waxed and, around his wrist, he wore a thin, bejewelled bracelet.

He showed me a school photo. The girl looked mixed-race, with dark bobbed hair and large hazelnut eyes. She was smiling happily and openly at the camera.

‘Someone’s got her?’ I said, pulling the picture towards me. ‘Where is she?’

‘To the best of our knowledge she’s currently in Jordan. Her father is a powerful man, from Jordan himself, and has recently divorced my employer, Khalida’s mother. There was a court case here in London. Custody was awarded to the mother. Unfortunately, shortly following the verdict, the father, whose name is Abdul Gulbuddin, took Khalida on a holiday to Jordan to visit relatives and failed to return. He has been gone for five months. In that time we have received no contact from him or anyone else in Abdul’s extended family. My employer has now run out of patience.’

‘And, more than that, it is also a cultural issue. In that part of the world a man’s wants and wills always take precedence over a woman’s. If the man wants the child, the man gets the child. If the woman cries about it, then so what? She is only a woman.’

He took the papers from my hand and turned them over. On the back, written in navy blue ink from a fountain pen, was a Middle Eastern name and a string of numbers.

‘This is the phone number of a friend who works for the Mukhabarat,’ he said, pointing to one of them.

‘That’s right,’ the correspondent nodded. ‘Our friend is high up. She might be able to help you with some local information.’

I glanced at Iain. He didn’t look like he was confident at all. But then neither was I.

‘I hope that you can find Khalida,’ he said. ‘Please take my word for it, my employer is profoundly distressed by all that has happened. As a father yourself, I’m sure you can imagine. She needs you to succeed, very desperately. You are her final hope.’

As soon as I got home I called the number the correspondent had given us for the agent at the Mukhabarat. At first she was apologetic.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you with this,’ she said. ‘At least not actively.’

‘What about contacts?’ I asked. ‘Addresses? Ideas of where she might be?’

‘I can give you a couple of addresses, yes. Gulbuddin’s father and his brother.’

‘And if you can’t persuade them to give the girl up, or at least tell you Abdul’s whereabouts, I also have something else. The personal cell phone number of Nagid Hajjar, the head of Jordan’s Public Security Directorate – the national police.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘He will not know where or how you got this number. It will be a signal to him, if you call him on it, that you are connected. But please, don’t tell him it was from us.’

Three days later, Iain and I pulled up in a taxi outside a large white house in a dusty suburb. The sun was pale yellow, the sky was pale yellow and the streets were covered in a layer of pale yellow sand. We were a short drive out of the twisted, choked and manic ancient centre of Amman, Jordan’s capital, where we’d landed hours earlier. Iain paid the driver, who glanced back at us silently and nervously. I wasn’t surprised he was uncomfortable. In his rear-view mirror I glimpsed our reflection. We’d deliberately gone for the thuggish look: sleeves rolled up, hair gelled back, muscles protruding. As I waited for all six foot five of Iain to unfold itself out of the cab, I felt a narrow trail of sweat slowly finding its way over the tattoo on my neck of the Grim Reaper with a glinting sickle. We’d need some luck, discipline and rigorous planning to pull this off, but I was determined we’d get Khalida back for her poor mother.

The gates of Gulbuddin’s father’s house were twelve feet high, heavy and black, with gold initials worked into the ironwork. They were also unlocked. The building behind them was surprisingly modest, two storeys high with a flat roof. There was a white Toyota Hilux parked outside the garage and a security light flicked on as we approached, despite the fact it was still early in the afternoon. A single dove perched on a grubby window sill, eyeing us coolly.

Iain knocked loudly, ignoring the bell. Our luck was in. Within seconds the old man appeared, grey bearded, hawk-nosed and visibly shocked – it was obvious from our appearance we weren’t selling Girl Scout cookies.

‘We’re looking for your granddaughter, Khalida,’ I said. ‘She belongs back in the UK. We’ve been sent to fetch her home.’

‘And what are your names?’ he said. ‘Who sent you? What is your right to come here, knocking on my door?’

I gave him a piece of paper on which I’d written the number of the pay as you go mobile I’d bought downtown.

‘I want to reassure you that our main interest isn’t you, it’s the girl. We need to get her back with her mother, as per the court’s wishes.’

‘I don’t know where that girl is,’ he said. ‘I have not seen her for two years.’

Iain took a half a step forward. The old man pulled back into the shadows. Just as he was about to close the door, I shot my arm out and held it in place with my open hand.

‘Mr Gulbuddin, we know that isn’t true,’ I said. ‘So why don’t you have a think about it? Please call me. If you don’t, we will be back. We’re not leaving this country until we find her.’

He’d followed me into my room for a debrief and was sitting on the edge of my bed.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘You didn’t think he was just going to scoop her up out of her crib and hand her over, all wrapped in swaddling clothes?’

‘I didn’t think we’d be knocking on doors and asking politely,’ he said. ‘That’s not why we’ve been hired. We’re not little old ladies. They want force. Pressure.’

‘This isn’t some smash-and-grab raid,’ I said. ‘We can’t go in all guns blazing. We’ve got to wait.’

‘You don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Waiting is our best strategy right now. Waiting is force. Waiting is pressure. Waiting is a weapon.’

As frustrated as I was with Iain, I could also sympathise. The younger me would have simply smashed the fuck out of the grandfather, the grandmother and then the uncle. I’d have left them with no teeth and had them writing the address of Khalida’s father across their kitchen tiles in blood.

But then what would have happened? We’d have been arrested and tortured, and then we’d have vanished. They’d have found us, weeks later, in some ditch with a bullet in the backs of our heads. We didn’t have the cover of the armed forces behind us now, no flag of protection. There’d be no helicopter support for us, no airlifts out of tricky situations. We were on our own, in a stranger’s land, and that meant playing a smarter game.

I knew that if this mission was going to work, it would have to be a psychological one. It was about planting the seed and waiting for it to grow. We’d planted it now. That was why I’d wanted us to arrive with our thug faces forwards. The moment we left the old man’s house he’d have been straight on the phone to other members of the family. The fear and paranoia would already be spreading and growing, and the longer we allowed it to thicken and stretch, the greater its effect would be.

The power of intelligent waiting is something that’s hugely underappreciated in the wider world. When you want to get a result it’s human nature to want to steam in, to create action, to just get shit done. This is especially true for highly motivated, ambitious people. For them, waiting can feel too much like doing nothing. They begin to doubt themselves. The voice in their head says they’re simply being lazy or, even worse, being weak – and that ‘waiting’ is just an excuse for doing nothing.

As long as you’re doing it intelligently, this simply isn’t true. In order to make waiting work as a strategy, you need two things: a plan, and strength of character. If you’ve made a smart plan with a series of execution points that you need to methodically hit, and waiting is a tactical part of that plan, then you’re on. But having the spine to actually do it is just as crucial. You need to resist the voice that’s telling you you’re doing nothing, and the urge to pile in prematurely and force the issue.

It took me many years to learn this, and what impressed it upon me more than anything was my experience as a sniper. That lesson began with the first question my tutor asked of his rookie class of twenty or so, back at Lympstone Commando.

He went around the room, asking random lads, and the answers came quick and predictable: ‘One shot, one kill’; ‘Headshot’; ‘Thousand-metre shot’; ‘Killing from a distance.’ It was obvious from his expression that this was exactly what he was expecting to hear, and that we were wrong.

‘Wind speed,’ he said. ‘Elevation. Breathing. Positioning. Camouflage. Humidity. Barometric pressure. The rotation of the earth. And, most importantly, patience.’

Training as a sniper was a revelation to me. It is the closest that soldiering gets to a fine art. In order to shoot accurately over distances measured in kilometres, everything has to be perfect. Every calculation you make has to be complete and correct. It involves a huge amount of planning, preparation and brain power. And then it involves lots of waiting, often in the heat, wet or cold, sometimes for days. You need to have the patience to wait for the optimal moment and not go to the trigger a fraction of an instant before. Only once you’ve got all of that down can you take the shot. In a strange way, our mission in Jordan would also be a sniping game. It would be about careful planning and deadly patience.

The next two weeks were spent in our hotel rooms, waiting for the phone to ring. When it didn’t, and Iain could no longer be reasonably contained, I agreed that we’d pay the girl’s uncle a visit. His home turned out to be a huge ranch, an hour out of Amman. Despite the desert environment, he had luxurious lawns, serviced by sprinklers, on which were planted rows of perfect and massive palm trees, each heavy with coconuts. We drove our hire car slowly up the gravel drive and climbed the three steps up to the oversized front door.

After I’d pulled a steel handle to ring the bell, a Bangladeshi housekeeper answered, then went to fetch his master. Gulbuddin’s brother soon appeared, in a traditional dish-dash and red plastic flip-flops. He wore little round Gandhi glasses and had a thin, drawn face, but there was just something about him. Despite his diminutive size, I sensed this was a man who wasn’t easily intimidated.

‘I hope you can help,’ I said. ‘We’re an independent investigations team and we’re looking for your brother.’

‘I haven’t seen Abdul for years,’ he said. ‘Who are you, please? What is your business with Abdul?’

‘Bullshit,’ said Iain. ‘You know exactly where he is and exactly what we want.’

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a colour photocopy I’d made of Khalida’s picture.

‘You see this girl here? This is who we’re after. If we do not find this girl, we’re going to go through the whole of your fucking farm, every single floorboard, until we fucking find her. If you don’t tell me where she is, we will turn this place upside down. Here are my contact details. Give me a call.’

When we returned, two days later, the ranch looked abandoned. The shutters were down. The door was bolted. The car was gone. They had fled.

‘No, this is a good sign,’ I told him. ‘They’re shitting it. It’s working.’

Now that the fear was sinking in, it was time to add pressure from another direction. This next part of the plan would be a whole lot riskier. But as things stood, we had little choice. As Iain sat in a café on the corner of the bazaar, I stepped out into the street to place the call that could make or literally break us: the head of the feared Public Security Directorate.

‘What I can tell you is that I’m an independent investigation agent and I’ve come to recover a kidnapped girl who is being kept in your country.’

‘I know who you are,’ he said, eventually. ‘You have been making your presence felt in the city.’

‘We are not leaving Jordan until we have the girl Khalida,’ I replied. ‘The courts have awarded custody to her mother. We have been sent to enact this verdict. If you guys aren’t going to do anything to help this kidnapped girl, then I will make sure the international press are told the whole story, including your part in it. We will embarrass your country. We will embarrass you. We will let everyone know that we’ve had to come over here and do your job for you.’

With Hajjar promising to look into the case, I ended the call. It was another two days before the phone rang again.

‘Let’s say two hours. Noon. At the Public Security Directorate headquarters.’

This was a dangerous situation. We were strangers causing trouble in a nation not known for its adherence to human rights or legal niceties. Worse than that, we’d threatened the head of the dreaded Public Security Directorate. We’d made it personal. And now we were being beckoned into the belly of the whale. Hajjar had given us an address to go to, but what was actually at that address? Was it his office, or was it some kind of black site? We could easily be walking into a trap. As soon as I was off the phone, I called our contact at the Mukhabarat.

‘Well, the address is correct,’ she said. ‘That is where Hajjar’s office is.’

‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe. Bad things happen in police cells in Jordan. Sometimes people don’t leave them. You can only hope that your calling him on his cell has sent the right signal.’ This wasn’t the reassurance I’d been hoping for. But what else could we do?

It was when they started checking the individual hairs in my beard that I started getting nervous. ‘These guys are offended,’ I thought. ‘We’ve really pissed them off.’ We were standing in a back room being closely searched by two nameless goons in green military uniforms.

‘What are you carrying?’ they’d barked at us. ‘Weapons? Recording devices?’

They took our phones away, removed the batteries, had the insoles out of our shoes and our socks turned inside out. They ran their hands up and down our bodies, their sweaty fingertips feeling all the way around the insides of our collars. Finding nothing of interest, we were led down a rickety spiral staircase into the basement. In front of us was a narrow corridor, its floor tiles chipped and polished, the grouting in between them brown with grime. The ceiling above us had a dark crack running down it. On either side of us, rows and rows of cell doors. Immediately, I started weighing options for what to do next. I had to admit what options we had were limited. These guys had pistols and billy-clubs. We were carrying only rage, dread and fists.

Just as I was about to act, we reached the end of a corridor, and a door made not of prison iron but of fake veneer wood. One of the goons knocked. We were shown into an office. It was neat and smart, with filing cabinets, a small barred window, a detailed and worn paper map of the city and, on the wall in the middle of the room, the requisite framed photograph of King Abdullah II. Sitting among it all was a man in his late fifties, stubbing out a cigarette, with a moustache, grey-black stubble and an immaculate uniform. On his desk was a tea pot, three small mugs and a silver bowl full of white sugar lumps. He was an obviously well-respected individual, but this office had an eeriness about it. If you ever found yourself here, you were in the shit.

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice,’ said Hajjar, indicating that we should sit. As we pulled out the chairs, his eyes drifted over our tattooed arms. I’d hoped we were sending the message that we were capable individuals who were choosing to go down a diplomatic route, for now – but that we were not going home with our hands in our pockets.

I felt a surge of irritation at his now pretending he didn’t know what we were here for. I felt Iain, beside me, bristle. From the back of my jeans I took out the folded court documents. Hajjar began pouring tea.

‘We’re independent investigators who are here to enforce the judgement of the British courts,’ I said.

As I was talking be began pouring tea for me and Iain. I pushed the cups back towards him. There was every chance that if we drank it, we’d find ourselves waking up chained to a radiator.

Hajjar stood with a sigh and fetched two small bottles from a white mini-fridge in the corner. I made sure the seals opened with a crack before taking a swig.

‘Well, before I can assist you,’ Hajjar said, ‘I first need some information from you, Mr Daniel. Who sent you? Who are you working for? Is it the girl’s mother?’

‘Not the mother,’ I said. ‘Someone else.’ I lifted up the court documents. ‘Khalida Gulbuddin belongs in the UK. She’s a UK citizen. These court papers say so.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘We’re working very hard on this. Please, you must be assured that we have all hands on the case. A big team. This is being taken care of. A priority.’

‘Mr Hajjar,’ I said, leaning forwards, my elbows on his desk. ‘We’re here to help. We’re highly trained individuals and can be extremely useful to you. We want to be on your team, as members. We want to pitch in and assist you. I know exactly what needs to be done and I want to make sure that this is, as you say, a top priority. We aren’t going to leave this country until the girl is on a flight home. If you let us pitch in, we can get this solved quickly and be out of your hair.’

‘This is impossible, Mr Daniel. I don’t even know who you are. Two big Englishmen, hunting for a beautiful young girl in my country. You could be anyone, with any purpose. I have a responsibility for this girl. I must ensure her safety.’

‘When we find Khalida, we aren’t expecting you to hand her to us,’ I said. ‘We expect the mother to fly to Jordan and collect her.’

‘So all you have to offer us is promises, promises?’ said Iain. ‘It’s not fucking good enough.’

‘You can call me when you have news,’ I said. ‘You’ve got my number. It’s the one I phoned you on.’

‘I am trying to help you, Mr Daniel,’ he said, his voice low and menacing. ‘But you sit in my office and you duck and you dodge and you treat me as if I am a criminal.’ He sat still for a moment. ‘It is you, Mr Daniel, who has entered my country, no doubt dishonestly on a tourist visa, and is travelling up and down making threats to citizens of Jordan.’

I glanced at Iain. He looked away. I fumbled in my pocket, pulled out my key card and read from it.

‘The Kempinski.’ I looked up at him. ‘There’s only one Kempinski in the city, right? The one near the Bird Garden.’

‘In Abdul Hamid Shouman Street,’ he nodded, his eyes flicking down to the card for himself, presumably to check I wasn’t lying. ‘It’s a wonderful place,’ he said, happy now. ‘Very fine breakfast at The Kempinski.’

‘You have my number,’ I said. ‘If you’re not happy with something, make sure you call me. Please be reassured that we’re on your side. But, Mr Hajjar, you should also understand that if we have to take things into our own hands, we will.’

‘We will be in touch with good news very soon, Mr Daniel,’ he said. ‘One week. Less.’

We were led out of the police station by the goons, hailed a cab and instructed it to take us to The Kempinski. Five minutes later, we ordered him to change course for the bazaar. We suspected they’d be trailing us and, sure enough, moments after we’d paid the driver and emerged onto the street, we became aware that we were being followed. Of course, what Hajjar and his men didn’t know was that we were counter-surveillance trained and so we soon shook them off.

Once clear, we picked up some Turkish delight to nibble on and headed back up to The Kempinski. It was the best hotel in town and checking in there was the first thing we did on arrival in Jordan. But Hajjar was unaware that we’d checked out ten minutes later, told the receptionist the key cards were still in the room, pocketed them, then found a little backstreet place to use as a base. I’d anticipated the whole game, with the keycard at the police station, and it had worked like a dream. And, just as we suspected, they had people watching the hotel. We whiled away a pleasant afternoon in a cafe about two hundred metres away, eating baklava while surveilling our surveillance.

But despite Hajjar’s promises, a week later we’d still heard nothing. I called him at noon, seven days to the minute following our meeting.

‘Mr Daniel, we thought you’d left the country,’ he said, clearly surprised we’d managed to entirely evade his team.

‘You said a week,’ I said. ‘Nothing has happened. So we’re going to come to your office and insert ourselves as part of the investigation team. We’ll see you in forty-five minutes.’

‘We’re still working hard,’ he said. ‘But we need two more days. Just two more.’

‘I’ll give you three,’ I said. ‘But I’m worried. You tell me a week and I hear nothing, and I have to call you for news. Something’s telling me you’re not taking this seriously and the job isn’t being done. But I’m personally taking this very seriously. I’m letting you know that if there isn’t some good news in three days, we’re taking things into our own hands. We’re visiting families.’

Iain was not happy that we had yet more waiting to do. But this time it paid off. Three days later, Hajjar called to say that they had the girl. He refused to let us anywhere near her, insisting that his team hand her over to her mother, who had to fly in. The official reason was safety concerns for the girl, but I suspected it was about saving face. They wanted it to look like they’d done all the work, and deny our existence. That was fine by me. What wasn’t fine, and what I didn’t find out until we were back in the UK and Khalida’s mother phoned to express her thanks, was that she’d been taken into a building at the perimeter of the airport and slapped about.

‘But it’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m here. I’m alive. I have my daughter. Speaking honestly, I didn’t think you’d get anywhere, apart from maybe in serious difficulty. Do you mind my asking, how did you do it?’

‘How did we do it?’ I said. ‘Would you believe me if I said it was mostly a case of waiting?’

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

Waiting is a weapon. It’s human nature to want to steam straight in, especially for highly motivated people. It takes a stronger, smarter person to have the courage to wait. If it’s done as part of an overall plan, waiting can be a deadly and vastly underappreciated tool.

Shame hurts. By threatening to expose Hajjar to the world as a corrupt or, even worse, an incompetent operator, I squeezed directly on the thing that was most important to him – his reputation. This applies to most people, especially if they’re in any sort of position of power. If you publicly shame someone, you rip out their spine, their heart and their balls. That’s a hurt that’s often greater than any physical pain.

Wins are rarely clean. Life is complex, people are dangerous, and real fights usually cause damage to both sides. I was furious when I discovered that Khalida’s mother had been assaulted, but I also knew that there was nothing I could have done about it.

THE POWER OF INTELLIGENT WAITING