Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

Since then — nothing. But nothing under that name. It was only when staring at the face in his office that another line occurred to him. He asked the CIA to recontact Javad with a simple query: Did any of their agents inside the various terror groups along the deadly frontier hear mention of a terrorist with amber eyes?

Meanwhile, he had another call to make with the same request he had vainly put to Langley.

He took an official car again but this time went in a civilian suit with shirt and tie. Since 9/11, the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue has also been heavily protected. The grandiose building stands next to the Naval Observatory, home of the Vice President and also heavily guarded.

Access to the embassy avoids the columned portico at the front and is achieved down a small street to one side. His car stopped at the hut beside the barrier pole, and he offered his pass through the car’s open window. There was a consultation by handheld phone. Whatever the reply, it was enough for the pole to be lifted and the car to roll into the small parking lot. Less important creatures park outside and enter on foot. Space is scarce.

The door was much less grand than the front entrance, for security reasons now hardly used and only then by the ambassador and American visitors of exalted rank. Once inside, Tracker turned to the glass-windowed booth and again offered his identity card. It mentioned a certain Col. James Jackson.

Another phone conference, then the invitation to take a seat. Within two minutes, the elevator door opened and a young man emerged, evidently a junior in the pecking order.

“Colonel Jackson?” There was no one else in the lobby. He, too, examined the ID card. “Please come with me, sir.”

It was, as Tracker knew it would be, the fifth floor, the defense attachés’ floor, the level the American cleaning staff never entered. Cleaning had to be done by the lowest, albeit British, forms of life.

On the fifth floor, the young man led Tracker down a corridor past several door plaques announcing the inhabitants, and finally to a door with no marking but with a card-swipe mechanism instead of a handle. He knocked and on the command from inside swiped the card, swung the door open and gestured Tracker to enter. He did not follow but quietly closed the door.

It was an elegant room, with bulletproof windows giving onto the avenue. It was an office but definitely not the “bubble,” which was where conferences only of cosmic clearance level took place. That room was in the center of the building, surrounded on all sides, including floor and ceiling, by a vacuum and without windows. The technique of beaming a ray onto window glass and reading the conversation inside from the vibrations had been used against the American embassy in Moscow during the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

The man coming around the corner of his desk, hand outstretched, was also in a suit with a striped tie that Tracker, after his years in London, presumed to be the hallmark of a rather good school. He was not quite expert enough to recognize the colors of Harrow.

“Colonel Jackson? Welcome. Our first meet, I think. Konrad Armitage. I took the liberty of ordering coffee. How do you take it?”

He could have asked one of the glamorous young secretaries employed on that floor to enter from the side door and serve it but chose to do so himself. Recently arrived from London, Konrad Armitage was the head of station for the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.

He knew perfectly well who his visitor was from his predecessor and welcomed the meeting. The awareness of common cause, common interest and common enemy was mutual.

“So, what can I do for you?”

“An odd request but brief. I could have sent it the usual way, but I figured we probably ought to meet one day anyway so I just cut to the chase.”

“Quite right. And the request?”

“Does your service have a contact or, better still, an asset buried down among the al-Shabaab in Somalia?”

“Wow. That’s an odd one, all right. Not my specialty. We have a desk, of course. I’ll have to ask. May I inquire: Is it the Preacher?”

Armitage was no clairvoyant. He knew who the Tracker was and what he did. Britain had just had its fourth murder committed by a young fanatic inspired by the online sermons of the Preacher, as opposed to America’s six, and both services knew how their governments wanted to put an end to this man.

“Could be,” said the Tracker.

“Well, excellent, then. As you know, we have a presence, as do your friends at Langley, inside Mogadishu, but if they have anyone out in the wild places, I’d be surprised if they haven’t proposed a joint operation. But I’ll have the request in the London office by morning.”

The reply took only two days, but it was the same as that from the CIA. And Armitage was right: If either country was running a source inside South Somalia, it would have been too valuable not to share — both the costs and the “product.”

The reply from Javad inside the ISI was much more helpful. One of those to whom he pretended to report back about his spying on the Americans was a contact in the notorious S Wing, which “covered,” in every sense, myriad groups dedicated to Jihadism and violence that inhabited the border strip from Kashmir to Quetta.

It would have been far too risky for Javad to have asked outright; it would have blown his cover and revealed his true employers. But part of his ISI job was to have authorized access to the Americans and to frequent their company. He pretended he had eavesdropped on a conversation between diplomats at a cocktail party. Out of curiosity, the S Wing officer consulted the archive database, and Javad, standing behind him, noted the file he accessed.

When he had shut down, the S Wing officer ordered that the Yankees be told there was no such trace. Later, by night, Javad reaccessed the database and punched up the file.

There was such a mention but years old. It came from an ISI spy in Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade of fanatics and killers. It mentioned a new arrival from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a fanatic for whom the raids against Kashmir had proved too tame. The young recruit spoke Arabic and Pashto, which was what had facilitated his acceptance into 313. The Brigade was composed mainly of Arabs and cooperated closely with the Pashto-speaking Haqqani clan. The report added that this was his usefulness, but he had yet to prove himself as a fighter. He had amber eyes, and styled himself Abu Azzam.

So that was why he had disappeared nine years ago. He had changed his terror group and changed his name.

The U.S.’s Counter-Terrorism Center has a vast database on Jihadist terror groups, and punching in Abu Azzam produced a cornucopia.

Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, there were seven great warlords who comprised the Mujahideen, applauded and supported by the West as “patriots,” “partisans” and “freedom fighters.” To them, and them alone, went the huge quantities of money and weapons channeled into the Afghan mountains to defeat the Russians. But the moment the last Soviet tank rolled back into Russia, two of them reverted to the vicious killers they had always been. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the other was Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Though a warlord and master of his native province of Paktia, Haqqani switched sides when the Taliban swept the warlords aside and came to power and he became commander of the Taliban forces.

After their defeat by the Americans and Northern Alliance, he moved again, crossing the border and setting himself up in Waziristan, inside the Pakistan border. Succeeded by his three sons, he created the Haqqani network; basically, the Pakistani Taliban.

This became a hub for terror strikes against American and NATO forces over the border and against the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, which became an ally of the U.S. He attracted to his network the remaining al-Qaeda forces not dead or in jail and any other Jihadist fanatic. One of these was Ilyas Kashmiri, who brought with him his 313 Brigade, part of the Shadow Army.