Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

For ten years, he had deliberately made himself the most elusive of the al-Qaeda terrorists. He had moved from safe house to safe house in the mountains of North and South Waziristan. He had changed name and appearance. He had forbidden any camera to come near him.

Unlike a dozen, at least, now all dead, he had never used a mobile phone, for, unlike some of them, he knew the full scope of the American ability to pluck the tiniest whisper out of cyberspace, track the source to a single hut and blow both building and occupants to dust.

With one single exception, which he now bitterly regretted, he had never e-mailed anyone from the house in which he resided. He had always had his sermons of hate transmitted miles away from his residence.

Yet someone had penetrated. The actor on the phony sermon was too like him. The man who looked like him and spoke like him had announced to the world his real name and the pseudonym he had used as an executioner in the Khorosan.

He did not know how or why or who had betrayed him, but he had to accept that his pursuer could well have penetrated the real identity protocol of his computer in Kismayo. He did not understand how it could have been done, for the Troll had assured him it was impossible. But the Troll was dead.

He knew about drones. He had read volumes printed in the Western press about them and what they could do. He could presume that, even then, there were details that had never been divulged, even to the technical publications. He had to presume he had been traced and that, far above his head, invisible, inaudible, a circling machine was watching his town and even his compound.

All this had led him to the conviction that he would have to sever all contacts with his present life and disappear again. Then Jamma arrived from Kismayo with a message from his friend Mustafa in London that changed everything. It concerned fifty million dollars. He summoned his former secretary, now the Troll’s replacement.

“Jamma, my brother, you are tired. It is a long journey. Rest, sleep, eat well. You will not be going back to Kismayo. It is abandoned. But there is another journey for you. Tomorrow, perhaps the next day.”

Gray Fox was puzzled. His voice on the secure line from TOSA headquarters to the Tracker’s operations room in the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square revealed it.

“Tracker, are you up to speed on the traffic between the helper in London and his pal in Marka?”

“Absolutely. Why?”

“The stuff he has been passing to the Preacher. He picked that up from a half-assed lawyer at a Belgravia dinner party.”

The Tracker thought over his reply. There is a subtle difference between lying and being what a former British cabinet secretary once described as “economical with the truth.”

“That’s what Dardari seems to be saying.”

“What do the Brits think?”

“They think,” said the Tracker quite truthfully, “that the bastard is sitting in his London town house, passing scuttlebutt to his friend in the south. By the by, are my requests still getting a no-no from upstairs?”

He wanted to get the subject away from the issue of Mustafa Dardari, messaging out of London, when he was staring at the rain in Caithness with three former commandos for company.

“Absolutely, Tracker. No missiles because of Agent Opal and no beach assaults. And no heli-borne attacks from our compound in Mogadishu. One shoulder-fired rocket into a hovering helicopter full of Delta boys and we have another Somali catastrophe. You’ll have to find another way.”

“Yes, boss,” said the Tracker as he put the phone down.

The Preacher was right about the uselessness of his Kismayo computer for secret transmissions, but he did not realize that his ally in London, his boyhood friend and secret supporter, had also been unmasked, and his encrypted messages, shielded inside the vegetable price code, had also been broken. So he broke security again and sent Dardari a request from Marka. It was intercepted and deciphered.

Colonel Jackson?”

“Yes, Ariel.”

“There’s some very weird stuff going between Marka and London.”

“You should know, Ariel. You’re sending it in Dardari’s name.”

“Yeah, but Marka has just replied. He is asking his friend to lend him a million dollars.”

He should have foreseen it. Certainly the budget could stand it. That sum was just a fraction of a single missile. But why waste tax dollars?

“Does he say how he wants it to be sent?”

“Something called Dahabshiil.”

Tracker nodded, alone in his London office. He knew about it. Cunning and safe and almost untraceable. Based on the centuries-old figure of the hundi man.

Terrorism costs money, a lot of money. Behind the bomb-planting dupes, often no more than children, are the controllers, usually mature men who have no intention of dying. Somewhere behind them are the ring chieftans, and behind them are the financiers, often leading lives of apparent respectability.

For antiterrorist agencies, the money sources for terrorism have proved a fertile field for tracing the paper trail from operating account back to its source. For money movement leaves a paper trail. But the hundi man does not. In the Middle East, the system goes back many centuries.

It started because back then moving wealth through a landscape teeming with bandits was too dangerous without a small army. So the hundi man takes the money in country A and authorizes his cousin to disburse the same amount, minus commission, to the beneficiary in country B. No money moved across borders, just coded phone call or e-mail.

Dahabshiil was founded in Burco, Somalia, in 1970, presently headquartered in Dubai. In Somali, it just means “gold smelter,” and mainly remits money earned by the hundreds of thousands of Somalis working abroad back to their families in the homeland. Many of the Somali diaspora are in Britain, accounting for a flourishing office in London.

“Could you break into Dardari’s banking system?” asked the Tracker.

“I don’t see why not, Colonel. Can you give me a day?”

Ariel went back to his glowing screen and into seventh heaven. He delved into the Pakistani tycoon’s investments and his means of purchasing them, which led him to the offshore accounts, of which the principal was in Grand Cayman. It was protected by complex and sophisticated firewalls. The teenager with Asperger’s syndrome in an attic in Virginia went through them in ten hours, transferred a million dollars to Dardari’s personal London account and departed without leaving a trace, except confirmation that Dardari himself had done it legitimately.

The transfer from a London bank to the London office of Dahabshiil was a formality, along with details of the beneficiary, as listed by the Preacher in the e-mail that Ariel had intercepted and decoded. The Somali money brokerage warned that such a sum in U.S. dollars inside Somalia would take up to three days to assemble. And, yes, they had a branch in Marka.

Fort Meade and Cheltenham intercepted and logged the communications to and from the London computer but had no information other than the presumption it was Dardari sending and receiving. And their brief was to eavesdrop but not interfere.

Jamma, I have a task for you of great delicacy. It can only be done by a Somali because it involves people who speak no other language.”

With all its sophistication, Western technology can rarely intercept the personal emissary. For ten years, Osama bin Laden, not living in a cave at all but in a series of safe houses, communicated with supporters worldwide without once using a cell phone or being eavesdropped upon. He used personal messengers. It was the last of these, al-Kuwaiti, who was unmasked, tracked across the world and who finally led the followers to a compound in the town of Abbottabad.