4

In a world of code names to hide real identities, the Tracker had given his new helper the pseudonym Ariel. It amused him to choose the sprite from Shakespeare’s Tempest, who could fly invisibly through space and get up to whatever mischief he wanted.

But if Roger Kendrick struggled on planet Earth, he was nothing like that when he sat before the treasure trove of intoxicating equipment the U.S. taxpayers had provided him. As the man from Fort Meade had said, he became a fighter ace, now at the controls of the best interceptor money could buy.

He spent two days studying the construction the Preacher had built to mask his IP address and thus his location. He also watched the sermons and became convinced of one thing at the outset. The computer genius was not the masked man who preached religious hatred. There was another somewhere, his real opponent, the enemy ace flying against him; skilled, elusive, capable of spotting any mistake he might make and then shutting him out.

Had Ariel but known it, his cyberenemy was Ibrahim Samir, British, born of Iraqi parentage, schooled at UMIST—the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Kendrick thought of him as the Troll.

It was he who had invented the proxy server to create the false IP address behind which he could hide his master’s real location. But once, at the beginning of the sermon campaign, there had been a real IP, and once he had that, Ariel could place the source anywhere on the face of the Earth.

He also perceived very quickly that there was a fan base. Enthusiastic disciples were able to post messages for the Preacher. He determined to join it.

He realized the Troll would never be deceived unless Ariel’s alter ego was detail perfect. Ariel created a young American called Fahad, son of two Jordanian immigrants, born and raised in the Washington area. But first he studied.

He used the background of the long-dead terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who had headed al-Qaeda in Iraq until wiped out by Special Forces and a fighter strike. A copious biography was online. He came from the Jordanian village of Zarqa. Ariel created two parents who came from the same village, lived down the same street. If questioned, he could describe it from online information.

He re-created himself, born to his parents two years after they arrived in the USA. He could describe the school he went to, though now supposedly he’d been removed because of panic attacks.

And he studied Islam from online international courses, the mosque he and his parents attended and the name of its resident imam. Then he applied to join the Preacher’s fan base. There were questions—not from the Troll personally but from another disciple in California. He answered them. There were days of delay. And then he was accepted. All the while he kept his own virus, his malware, hidden but ready for use.

•   •   •

There were four Taliban fighters in the brick office in the village outside Ghazni, the capital of the Afghan province of the same name. They sat, as they preferred, not on chairs but on the floor.

Their robes and cloaks were wrapped around them, for although it had just turned into the month of May, there was still a chill wind off the mountains, and the brick government building had no heating.

Also seated were three government officials from Kabul and the two farangi officers from NATO. The mountain men were not smiling. They never did. The only time they had seen farangi (foreign, white) soldiers had been in the sights of a Kalashnikov. But that was a life they had come to the village to abandon.

There is in Afghanistan a little-known program called simply Reintegration. It is a joint venture by the Kabul government and NATO, run on the ground by a British major general named David Hook.

The avant-garde thinking among the best brains has long been that Taliban body count alone will never win. As fast as Anglo-American commanders congratulate themselves that one hundred, or two or three hundred, Taliban fighters have been taken out, more just seem to appear.

Some come from the Afghan peasantry, as they always have. Some among these volunteer because relatives—and, in that society, an extended family may number three hundred—have been killed by a misdirected missile, a wrong-target fighter strike or careless artillery; others because they are ordered to fight by their tribal elders. But they are young men, little more than boys.

Also young are the students from Pakistan, arriving in droves from the religious madrassah schools, where for years they study nothing but the Koran and listen to the extremist imams until they are groomed to fight and die.

But the Taliban army is like no other. Its units are extremely local to the area that bred them. And the reverence to the veteran commanders is total. Take out the veterans, reconvert the clan chiefs, bring in the tribal heads, and an entire county-sized area can simply abandon the fighting.

For years, British and American Special Forces have been disguising as mountain men, slipping through the hills to assassinate the middle- and upper-ranking Talib leaders, reckoning that the small fry are not really the problem.

Parallel with the night hunters is the Reintegration Program that seeks to “turn” veterans, to take the olive branch held out by the Kabul government. That day in the hamlet of Qala-e-Zal, General Hook and his Australian assistant, Captain Chris Hawkins, were representing the Force Reintegration Cell. The four wizened Talib chiefs, crouching along the wall, had been coaxed out of the mountains to return to village life.

As with all fishing, there has to be bait. A “reintegrater” has to attend a course in de-indoctrination. In exchange, there is a free house, a flock of sheep to enable a resumption of farming, an amnesty and the Afghani equivalent of a hundred dollars a week. The purpose of the meeting that bright but crisp May day was to attempt to persuade the veterans that the religious propaganda they had all received for years was, in fact, false.

As Pashto speakers they could not read the Koran and, like all non-Arab terrorists, had been converted because of what they had been told by Jihadi instructors, many pretending to be imams or mullahs while being nothing of the sort. So a Pashtun mullah or maulvi was in attendance to explain to the veterans how they had been deceived; how the Koran was, in reality, a book of peace with only a few “kill” passages, which the terrorists deliberately used out of context.

And there was a television set in the corner, an object of fascination to the mountain men. It was not screening live TV but a DVD from a player linked to it. The speaker on the screen was using English, but the mullah had a pause button, enabling him to halt the flow, explain what the preacher had said and then reveal how, according to the Holy Koran, it was all rubbish.

One of the four squatting on the floor was Mahmud Gul, who had been a senior commander as far back as 9/11. He was not yet fifty, but thirteen years in the mountains had aged him; the face beneath the black turban was wrinkled like a walnut, the hands gnarled and aching from incipient arthritis.

He had been indoctrinated as a young man not against the British and Americans, who he knew had helped free his people from the Russians. He knew little of bin Laden and his Arabs, and what he did know he did not like. He had heard of what had happened in downtown Manhattan all those years ago and he did not approve of it. He had joined the Taliban to fight against the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance.

But the Americans did not understand the law of pashtunwali, the sacred rule between host and guest that absolutely forbade Mullah Omar to hand his al-Qaeda guests over to their tender mercies. So they had invaded Mahmud Gul’s country. He had fought them for that, and he was still fighting them. Until now.

Mahmud Gul felt old and tired. He had seen many men die. He had put some out of their misery with his own gun when the wounds were so bad that they could live, in pain, for only a few more hours or days.

He had killed British and American boys but could not recall how many. His old bones ached and his hands were turning into claws. The shattered hip of many years ago never gave him peace through the long mountain winters. Half his family was dead, and he had not seen his grandchildren except during hurried night visits, before dawn drove him back to the caves.

He wanted out. Thirteen years was enough. Summer was coming. He wanted to sit in the warmth and play with the children. He wanted his daughters to bring him food, as it should be in old age. He had decided to take the government offer of amnesty, a house, sheep, an allowance, even if it meant listening to a fool of a mullah and a masked speaker on television.

As the TV was switched off and the mullah droned on, Mahmud Gul uttered something under his breath in Pashto. Chris Hawkins was sitting next to him and he, too, had a command of the language, but not the Ghazni rural dialect. He thought he had heard correctly but could not be sure. When the lecture was over and the mullah had scurried back to his car and his bodyguards, tea was taken. Strong, black, and the farangi officers had brought sugar, which was good.

Captain Hawkins slid down beside Mahmud Gul and they sipped in companionable silence. Then the Australian asked: “What did you say when the lecture finished?”

Mahmud Gul repeated the phrase. Spoken slowly and not under his breath, it meant only one thing. He had said: “I know that voice.”

Chris Hawkins had two more days to spend in Ghazni and one more reintegration meeting to attend elsewhere. Then back to Kabul. He had a friend at the British embassy who he was pretty certain was there with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. He thought he might mention it.

•   •   •

Ariel was right in his assessment of the Troll. The Iraqi from Manchester was possessed of an overweening arrogance. In cyberspace, he was the best and he knew it. Everything in that world to which he put his hand had the stamp of perfection. He insisted on it. It was his hallmark.

He not only recorded the sermons of the Preacher but he alone sent them out into the world, to be watched on who knew how many screens. And he managed the growing fan base. He vetted aspirant members with intense checking before he would accept a comment or deign to reply. But he still did not notice the mild virus that slipped into his program from a dark little attic in Centerville, Virginia. As designed, it began to have its effect a week later.

Ariel’s malware simply caused the Troll’s website to slow down, periodically and only marginally. But the effect was to cause small pauses in the transmission of the picture as the Preacher spoke. But the Troll noticed at once the tiny aberration from perfection that the pauses made in his work. It was not acceptable. It irritated and finally enraged him.

He tried to correct it, but the flaw remained. He concluded that if website 1 had developed a flaw, he would have to create website 2 and move to it. Which he did. Then he had to transfer the fan base to the new website.

Before he had invented his proxy server to create a false Internet protocol address, he had a real one, the IP that would serve as a sort of mailing address. To move the entire fan base from website 1 to 2, he had to pass back through the true IP. It only took a hundredth of a second, maybe less.

Yet in the move across, the original IP was exposed for that nanosecond. Then it was gone. But Ariel had been waiting for that minuscule window. The IP address gave him a country, but it also had an owner—France Télécom.

If the NASA supercomputers were going to prove no impediment to Gary MacKinnon, the database of France Télécom was not going to hold up Ariel for long. Within a day, he was inside the FT database, unseen and unsuspected. Like a good burglar, he was back out without leaving a trace. He now had a latitude and a longitude—a city.

But he had a message for Col. Jackson. He knew better than send him the news by e-mail. People listen in to that sort of thing.

•   •   •

The Australian captain was right on two counts. The chance remark of the Taliban veteran was indeed worth mentioning, and his friend was indeed part of the large and active SIS unit inside the British embassy. And the tip was acted on without delay. It went by secure encryption to London and thence to TOSA.

For one thing, Britain had also had three deliberate murders encouraged by the faceless and nameless Preacher. For another, an all-points request to friendly agencies had already been disseminated. Given that the Preacher was strongly suspected of being originally from Pakistan, the British SIS stations in Islamabad and neighboring Kabul were particularly alert.

Within twenty-four hours, a J-SOC Grumman Gulfstream 500 with one passenger aboard had lifted off from Andrews field on the outskirts of Washington. It refueled at USAF base Fairford in Gloucestershire, UK, and again at the large U.S. base at Doha, Qatar. Its third stop was at the base still retained by the USA on the enormous sprawl of Bagram, north of Kabul.

The Tracker chose not to go into Kabul. He did not need to and his transport was safer under guard at Bagram than at Kabul International. But his needs had been sent on ahead of him. If there were any financial restraints on the Reintegration Program, they did not apply to J-SOC. The power of the dollar kicked in. Capt. Hawkins was brought by helicopter to Bagram. Refueled, the same chopper brought them and a close-in protection unit drawn from a Rangers company to Qala-e-Zal.

It was midday when they landed outside the impoverished hamlet, and the spring sun was warm. They found Mahmud Gul doing what he had wanted to do for so long: sitting in the sun playing with his grandchildren.

At the sight of the roaring Black Hawk overhead and the soldiers who poured from it when it had landed on the communal threshing floor, the women rushed inside. Doors and shutters slammed. Silent, stony-faced men stood in the only street the hamlet boasted and watched the farangi walk into their home.

The Tracker ordered the Rangers to stay with the machine. With just Capt. Hawkins beside him as introducer and translator, he walked down the street, nodding from side to side and uttering the traditional “Salaam” greeting. A few grudging Salaams came back. The Australian knew where Mahmud Gul lived. The veteran was sitting outside. Several children scattered in alarm. Just one, a three-year-old girl, more curious than afraid, clung to her grandfather’s cloak and stared up with huge saucer eyes. The two white men sat cross-legged in front of the veteran warrior and offered greetings. They were returned.

The Afghan glanced up and down the street. The soldiers were out of sight.

“You are not afraid?” asked Mahmud Gul.

“I believe I have come to visit a man of peace,” said the Tracker. Hawkins translated into Pashto. The older man nodded and called something up the street.

“He is telling the village there is no danger,” whispered Hawkins.

With pauses only for translation, the Tracker reminded Mahmud Gul of the session with the Reintegration team after Friday prayers the previous week. The Afghan’s dark brown eyes remained unblinking on his face. At last he nodded.

“Many years ago, but it was the same voice.”

“But on the television he was speaking in English. You do not understand English. How could you know?”

Mahmud Gul shrugged.

“It was the way he spoke,” he said, as if no other consideration need apply. With Mozart, they called it perfect pitch—the ability to record and recall sounds exactly as they were. Mahmud Gul might be an illiterate peasant, but if his conviction turned out to be right, he also had that kind of ear.

“Please tell me how it came about.”

The old man paused, and his gaze fell to the bundled package the American had carried down the street.

“It is time for gifts,” whispered the Australian.

“Forgive me,” said the Tracker, jerking loose the binding. He spread out what he had brought. Two buffalo robes, from a Native American memorabilia store, backed with warm fleece.

“Long ago the people of my country used to hunt the buffalo for his meat and his fur. This is the warmest hide known to man. In the winter, wrap one round you. Sleep with one beneath you and one above. You will never be cold again.”

Mahmud Gul’s walnut face slowly cracked into a smile, the first Capt. Hawkins had ever seen on him. There were only four teeth left, but they did their best to create a broad grin. He ran his fingers through the thick pelt. The jewel box of the Queen of Sheba could not have brought him more pleasure. So he told his story.

“It was in the fight against the Americans just after the invasion against the government of Mullah Omar. There were Tajiks and Uzbeks pouring out of their enclave in the northeast. We could have coped with them, but they had Americans with them, and the farangi were directing the airplanes that came from the sky with bombs and rockets. The American soldiers could speak to the airplanes and tell them where we were, so the bombs seldom missed. It was very bad.

“North of Bagram, retreating down the Salang Valley, I was caught in the open. An American warplane fired at me many times. I hid behind rocks, but when he had gone, I saw I had taken a bullet in the hip. My men carried me to Kabul. There I was put in a truck and taken farther south.

“We passed through Kandahar and crossed the border at Spin Boldak into Pakistan. They were our friends and gave us shelter. We came to Quetta. That was the first time a doctor saw me and I had attention to the hip.

“In the spring I had started to walk again. I was young and strong in those days, and the broken bones healed well. But there was much pain, and I had a stick under my armpit. In the spring I was invited to join the Quetta Shura and sit in the council with the mullah.

“In the spring also a delegation came from Islamabad to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar. There were two generals, but they spoke no Pashto, only Urdu. But one of the officers had brought his son, just a boy of nineteen. He spoke fluent Pashto, with the accent of the high Siachen area. He translated for the Punjabi generals. They told us that they would have to pretend to work with the Americans, but that they would never abandon us and let our Talib movement be destroyed. And so it has been.

“And I talked with the boy from Islamabad. The one who spoke on the white screen. Behind the mask. That was him. By the way, he had amber eyes.”

The Tracker thanked him and left. He walked back down the street to the threshing floor. The men stood or sat in silence and stared. The women peered through the cracks in the shutters. The children hid behind their fathers and uncles. But no one molested him.

The Rangers were in an outward-facing circle. They ushered both officers into the Black Hawk and clambered aboard. The chopper lifted off, sending dust and chaff in all directions, and they flew back to Bagram. There are reasonably comfortable officers’ quarters there, with good chow but no alcohol. The Tracker had need of only one thing—ten hours’ sleep. While he slept, his message went through to the CIA station in the Kabul embassy.

•   •   •

Before leaving the States, the Tracker had been advised that the CIA, despite any interdepartmental rivalry, was onside to give him the fullest cooperation. He needed this for two reasons.

One was that the Agency had huge establishments in Kabul and Islamabad, a capital where any visiting American was likely to be under the closest secret police surveillance. The other was that back at Langley the Agency had a superb facility for the creation of false documents for use abroad.

When he woke, the deputy head of station had flown up from Kabul to confer, as requested. The Tracker had a list of requirements, of which the intelligence officer took careful note. Details would be encrypted and sent to Langley that day, he was assured. When the papers requested were available, a courier would bring them personally from the U.S.

When the CIA man had returned to Kabul, flying by helicopter from the U.S. compound at Bagram to the grounds of the embassy, the Tracker took his waiting J-SOC executive jet and flew to the large American base at Qatar on the Persian Gulf. As far as official records would show, no one called Carson had even been in the country.

The same applied in Qatar. He could while away the three days it would cost to prepare the new papers he needed inside the perimeter of an American base. On landing at the base outside Doha, he dismissed the Grumman to return to the States. From inside the base he ordered the purchase of two air tickets.

One was on a cheap local airline for the short hop down the coast to Dubai and was in the name of Mr. Christopher Carson. The other, from a different travel agency based in a five-star hotel, was for a business-class ticket from Dubai to Washington via London on British Airways. It was in the name of the fictional John Smith. When he received the message he was waiting for, he flew to Dubai International.

On landing, he made his way straight to the transit hall, where the truly vast duty-free shopping mall was thronged with thousands of passengers enjoying the biggest airline hub in the Middle East. Without needing to disturb the transit desk, he walked into the club-class lounge.

The courier from Langley was waiting at the agreed-upon entrance to the men’s room and the murmured recognition signals were exchanged. Very old-fashioned, a hundred-year-old procedure, but it still works. They found a quiet corner and two secluded armchairs.

Both men had carry-on baggage only. They were not identical, but that did not matter. The courier had arrived bearing a genuine U.S. passport in the name of John Smith to match the America-bound ticket. He would obtain a boarding pass from the BA desk on the floor below. John Smith, having arrived by Emirates, would depart for home after a remarkably short stopover, but by a different airline and no one the wiser.

They also swapped bags. What the Tracker gave the courier was irrelevant. What he received was a wheelie, containing shirts, suits, toiletries, shoes and any short-stay-traveler’s paraphernalia. Scattered among the clothing and airport-purchased thriller novels were various bills, receipts and letters, confirming the owner was Mr. Daniel Priest.

He handed over to the courier every scrap of paperwork he had in the name of Carson. That would also return unseen to the States. What he got in return was a wallet of documents the Agency had spent three days preparing.

There was a passport in the name of Mr. Daniel Priest, a senior staffer with the Washington Post. It bore a valid visa from the Pakistani consulate in Washington, securing Mr. Priest entry into Pakistan. The securing of this visa would mean that the Pakistani police were aware of his coming and would be waiting. Journalists are of extreme interest to sensitive regimes.

There was a letter from the publisher of the Post, confirming that Mr. Priest was preparing a major series of articles on “Islamabad—the making of a successful modern city.” And there was a return ticket via London.

There were credit cards, a driver’s license, the usual paperwork and plastic cards to be found in the wallet of a law-abiding American citizen and senior executive, plus a confirmation that a room awaited him at the Serena Hotel, Islamabad, and that the hotel car would be waiting for him.

The Tracker knew better than to emerge from the customs hall at Islamabad International into the seething, surging chaos outside and then allow himself to be hustled into any old taxi.

The courier also handed over the stub of his boarding pass from Washington to Dubai and the unused onward ticket from Dubai to “Slammy,” as Islamabad is known in the Special Forces fraternity.

A thorough search of his room, virtually a certainty, would reveal only that Mr. Dan Priest was a legitimate foreign correspondent from Washington with a valid visa and a logical reason for being in Pakistan; further, that he intended to stay a few days and then fly home.

With the exchange of identities and “legends” completed, both men descended separately to different airline desks below to secure boarding passes for their onward flights.

It was nearly midnight, but the Tracker’s EK612 flight took off at three twenty-five a.m. He killed the time back in the lounge but was still at the departure gate with an hour to spare, then held back to size up his fellow passengers. He knew that if there were a breeze, he should stay upwind of most of them.

As he suspected, the economy-class passengers were overwhelmingly Pakistani laborers, returning after their statutory two years’ virtual forced labor on building sites. It is customary for the construction-trade gang masters to confiscate the laborer’s passport on arrival and return it only after the two-year contract is done.

During that time, the laborers live in sub-basic hovels with minimal facilities, working hard in fearsome heat for minuscule wages, some of which they try to send back home. As they crowded to the door for boarding, he caught the first whiff of stale sweat flavored with a diet of constant curry. Mercifully, the economy class and business class were soon separated, and he relaxed into upholstered comfort up front with a complement of Gulf Arab and Pakistani businessmen.

The flight was just over three hours, and the Emirates Boeing 777-300 touched down on time at 0730 local. He watched from the porthole of the taxiing airliner the military C-130 Hercules and the presidential Boeing 737 drift past.

In the passport hall he was separated from the jostling throng of Pakistanis when he joined the queue for foreigners’ passports. The new document in the name of Daniel Priest, adorned only by a few European entry and exit stamps and the Pakistani visa, was meticulously examined page by page. The questions were perfunctory and polite, easily answered. He produced proof of his reservation at the Serena. The plainclothesmen stood well back and stared.

He took his wheelie and struggled through the clamoring, pushing, shoving mass of humanity in baggage claim, aware that this was of a Teutonic order compared to the chaos outside. Pakistan does not queue.

Outside the building, the sun was shining. Thousands seemed to have come, bringing entire families, to greet the returnees from the Gulf. Tracker scanned the crowd until he spotted the name Priest on a board held by a young man in the uniform of the Serena. He made contact and was escorted to the limousine, parked in the small VIP parking lot to the right of the terminal.

Since the airport sits within the sprawl of old Rawalpindi, the road, once clear of the airport hub, turns down the Islamabad Highway and into the capital. As the Serena, the only earthquake-proof hotel in Slammy, is on the outskirts of town, the Tracker was taken by surprise as the car swerved into a short dogleg; right, left, past a barrier that would be down for visitor cars but up for the hotel’s own limousine, up a short but steep ramp and to the main entrance.

At the reception desk, he was made welcome by name and escorted to his room. There was a letter waiting for him. It bore the U.S. embassy logo. He beamed and tipped the bellhop, pretending to be unaware the counterintelligence police had bugged the room and opened the letter. It was from the press attaché at the embassy, welcoming him to Pakistan and inviting him to dinner that evening at the attaché’s home. It was signed Gerry Byrne.

He asked the hotel switchboard operator to put him through to the embassy, asked for and was patched through to Gerry Byrne and exchanged the usual pleasantries. Yes, the flight had been fine, the hotel was fine, the room was fine, and he would be delighted to come for dinner.

Gerry Byrne was also delighted. He lived in town, in zone F-7, Street 43. It was complex, so he would send a car. It would be delightful. Just a small group of friends, some American, some Pakistani.

Both men knew that there was another party to the conversation who was probably more bored than delighted. He would be seated at a console in the basement of a cluster of adobe buildings set among lawns and fountains, looking more like a university or a general hospital than the headquarters of a secret police. But that is what the complex on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Street looks like—the home of the ISI.

The Tracker replaced the receiver. So far, so good, he thought. He showered, shaved and changed. It was late morning. He decided on an early lunch and a nap to catch up on the lost sleep of last night. Before lunch he ordered a long, cool beer in his room and signed the declaration to confirm he was not a Muslim. Pakistan is strictly Islamic and dry, but the Serena has a license, only for guests.

The car was there on the dot of seven, an unremarkable (for a reason) four-door sedan of Japanese manufacture. There would be thousands like it on the streets of Slammy. It would attract no attention. At the wheel was an embassy-employed Pakistani driver.

The driver knew the way—up Ataturk Avenue, across Jinnah Avenue, then left along Nazimuddin Road. The Tracker knew it, too, but only because it had all been in the brief the courier from Langley had given him at the Dubai airport. Just a precaution. He spotted the ISI tail within a block of the Serena and it faithfully followed the sedan past the apartment high-rises and up Marvi Road to Street 43. So, no surprises. The Tracker did not like surprises unless they were his.

The house did not quite have the words “Government Issue” above the front door, but it might have. Pleasant, roomy enough, one of a dozen allocated to embassy staff living outside the compound. He was greeted by Gerry Byrne and his wife, Lynn, who led him through to a terrace in the back, where he was offered a drink.

It might all almost have been a suburban house in the U.S. save for a few details. Each house on Street 43 had seven-foot concrete walls around it, plus steel gates the same height. The gates had opened without any communication, as if someone had been watching from inside. The gateman was in a dark uniform, baseball-capped and with a sidearm. Just normal suburbia.

There was a Pakistani couple already there, a doctor and his wife. Others arrived. One other embassy car, which came inside the compound. Others parked on the street. A couple from an aid agency, able to explain the difficulty of persuading the religious zealots up in Bajaur to permit polio vaccination of local children. Tracker knew there was one man present he had come to see and one not yet arrived. The rest of the guests were cover, like the entire dinner.

The missing man came with his mother and father. The father was forthcoming and jovial. He had concessions in the mining of semiprecious stones in Pakistan, and even in Afghanistan, and was voluble in explaining the difficulties the present situation was causing his business.

The son was about thirty-five, content simply to say he was in the army, though he was in civilian clothes. Tracker had been briefed about him, too.

The other American diplomat was introduced as Stephen Dennis, the cultural attaché. It was a good cover because it would be perfectly natural both for the press attaché to offer a dinner for a star American journalist and for the cultural attaché to be invited along.

Tracker knew he was really the number two in the CIA station. The head of station was a “declared” intelligence officer, meaning that the CIA was perfectly open about who he was and what he did. In any embassy on tricky territory, the fun is working out who the “undeclareds” really are. The host government usually has a number of suspicions, some accurate, but can never be sure. It is the undeclareds who do the espionage, usually using local nationals who can be turned to do a new employer’s bidding.

It was a convivial dinner with wine and, later, drams of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which happens to be the tipple of choice of the entire officer corps, Islam or not. As the guests mingled over coffee, Steve Dennis nodded to the Tracker and drifted to the outside terrace. Tracker followed. The third to join them was the young Pakistani.

Within a few sentences, it became clear he was not only army but also ISI. Because of the westernized education his father had been able to give him, he had been singled out to penetrate British and American society in the city and report back on anything of use that he heard. In fact, the reverse had happened.

Steve Dennis had spotted him in days and done a reverse recruitment. Javad had become the CIA’s mole inside the ISI. It was to him that the Tracker’s request had been directed. He had quietly entered the archive department on a pretext and searched the records under the year 2002 and Mullah Omar.

“Whoever your source was, Mr. Priest,” he murmured on the terrace, “he has a good memory. There was indeed a covert visit in 2002 to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar. It was headed by then-one-star-general Shawqat, now commander of the entire army.”

“And the boy who spoke Pashto?”

“Indeed, though there is no mention of that. Simply that in the delegation was a Major Musharraf Ali Shah of the Armored Infantry. Among the seat allocations on the aircraft, and sharing a room with his father in Quetta, is a listing for a son, Zulfiqar.”

He produced a slip of paper and passed it over. It had an address in Islamabad.

“Any further reference to the boy?”

“A few. I checked again under his name and patronymic. It seems he went bad. There are references to him leaving home and going to the Tribal Areas to join Lashkar-e-Taiba. We have had several agents deep inside for many years. A young man of that name was reported to be among them, fanatically Jihadist, seeking action.

“He managed to get acceptance into the 313 Brigade.”

Tracker had heard of the 313, named after the warriors, just 313 in number, who stood with the Prophet against hundreds of foes.

“Then he disappeared again. Our sources reported rumors that he had gone to join the Haqqani clan, which would have been facilitated by his Pashto, which is all they speak. But where? Somewhere in the three Tribal Areas—North and South Waziristan or Bajaur. Then nothing, silence. No more Ali Shah.”

Others wanted to join them on the terrace. Tracker pocketed the slip of paper and thanked Javad. An hour later, his embassy car took him back to the Serena.

In his room he checked the three or four tiny telltales he had laid; human hairs stuck with saliva across drawers and the lock of his wheelie. They were gone. The room had been searched.