Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

Two language laboratories had had a go at trying to trace the voice to a point of origin. There is one at Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the vast National Security Agency. These are the listeners who can pluck any snatch of conversation by cell phone, landline, faxed letter, e-mail or radio out of space anywhere in the world. But they also do translations from a thousand languages and dialects and they do code breaking.

The other belongs to the Army, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. They had both come up with much the same. The nearest guess was a Pakistani born into a cultured and educated family. There were clipped word endings in the Preacher’s tone that smacked of the colonial British. But there was a problem.

Unlike Awlaki, who spoke barefaced, staring into the camera, the newcomer never revealed his face. He wore a traditional Arab shamagh but pulled the trailing end up across the face and tucked it in at the other side. Only the blazing eyes could be seen. The fabric, said the file, might distort the voice, making derivation even more of a guess. The computer code-named Echelon, the identifier of accents worldwide, refused to be categoric on a source of that voice.

Tracker issued the usual all-stations, all-services appeal for even a sliver of information. This appeal would go to twenty overseas intelligence services involved in the fight against Jihadism. Starting with the British. Especially the Brits. They once ran Pakistan and still had good contacts there. Their Secret Intelligence Service was big in Islamabad and hand in glove with the even bigger CIA machine. They would all get his message.

His second move was to summon up the entire library of the Preacher’s online sermons on the Jihadi website. There would be hours and hours of listening to the sermons the Preacher had been pumping into cyberspace for nearly two years.

The Preacher’s message was simple, which could have been why it was so successful in achieving radical conversions to the cause of his own ultra-Jihadism. To be a good Muslim, he told the camera, one had to truly and deeply love Allah, may His name be praised, and His prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace. Mere words alone were not enough. The True Believer would feel an impulse to turn his love into action.

That action could only be to punish those who made war on Allah and His people, the worldwide Muslim umma . And chief among these were the Great Satan, the U.S., and the Little Satan, the United Kingdom. Punishment for what they had done, and were daily doing, was their decreed portion, and bringing that punishment a divine charge.

The Preacher called upon his viewers and listeners to avoid confiding in others, even those who professed to think alike. For even at the mosque there would be traitors prepared to denounce the True Believer for the kuffar ’s (the unbeliever’s) gold.

So the True Believer should convert to True Islam in the privacy of his own mind and confide in no one. He should pray alone and listen only to the Preacher who would show the True Way. That way would involve each convert striking one blow against the infidel.

He warned against the devising of complicated plots involving many strange chemicals and many accomplices, for someone would notice the buying or storing of the components of a bomb, or one of the conspirators would betray. The prisons of the infidel were peopled by brothers who had been overheard, watched, spied upon or betrayed by those they thought they could trust.

The message of the Preacher was as simple as it was deadly. Each True Believer should identify one notable kuffar in the society in which he found himself and send him to hell, while he himself, blessed by Allah, would die fulfilled in the certain knowledge that he was going to paradise eternal.

It was an extension of Awlaki’s “Just do it” philosophy, but better put, more persuasive. His recipe for ultra-simplicity made it easier to decide and act in isolation. And it was clear from the rising number of out-of-nowhere killings in both target countries that even if his message resounded with only a fraction of one percent of young Muslims, that was still an army of thousands.

The Tracker checked for responses from every U.S. agency and their British equivalents, but no one had ever heard reference to any Preacher in the Muslim lands. The title had been given him by the West, for lack of anything else to call him. But clearly he had come from somewhere, lived somewhere, broadcast from somewhere and had a name.

The answers, he came to believe, were in cyberspace. But there were computer experts of near-genius level up at Fort Meade who had been defeated. Whoever was sending the sermons out into cyberspace was keeping them untraceable and untrackable by causing them to appear to emanate from origin after origin, but then to whizz round and round the world, settling on a hundred possible source locations — but all of them false.

The Tracker refused to bring anyone, however security cleared, to his hideaway in the forest. The secrecy fetish that motivated the entire unit had gotten to him. He also disliked going to other offices within the Washington sprawl, if he could avoid it. He preferred to be seen only by the person he wanted to talk to. He knew he was getting a reputation for being unconventional, but he preferred roadhouses. Faceless and anonymous, both cafeteria and customers. He met the cyberace from Fort Meade at such a roadhouse on the Baltimore road.

Both men sat and stirred their undrinkable coffee. They knew each other from previous investigations. The man the Tracker sat with was reputed to be the best computer detective in the National Security Agency, which is no small reputation.

“So why can’t you find him?” asked the Tracker.

The man from the NSA scowled at his coffee and shook his head as the waitress hovered expectantly, carafe poised for a refill. She drifted away. Anyone glancing into the booth would have seen two middle-aged men, one fit and muscled, the other with the pallor of offices without windows and running to fat.

“Because he’s freaking clever,” he said at last. He hated to be eluded.

“Tell me,” said the Tracker. “Layman’s language, if you can.”

“He probably records his sermons on a digital camcorder or laptop PC. Nothing weird about that. He transmits on a website called Hejira . That was the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.”

The Tracker kept a straight face. He did not need explanations about Islam.

“Can you trace Hejira ?”

“No need. It’s just a vehicle. He bought it from an obscure little company in Delhi that is now out of business. When he has a new sermon to transmit worldwide, he sends it on Hejira , but he keeps the exact geolocation secret by causing it to emanate from origin after origin, whizzing round and round the world, bouncing it off a hundred other computers whose owners are certainly completely ignorant of the role they are playing. Eventually, the sermon could have come from anywhere.”

“How does he prevent tracing back down the line of diversions?”

“By creating a proxy server to create a false Internet protocol. The IP is like your home address with zip code. Then into the proxy server he has introduced a malware or botnet to bounce his sermon all over the world.”

“Translate.”

The man from the NSA sighed. He spent his entire life talking cyberjargon with colleagues who knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Malware. ‘Mal,’ as in bad or evil. A virus. ‘Bot,’ short for robot, something that does your bidding without asking questions or revealing who it is working for.”

The Tracker thought it over.

“So the mighty NSA is really defeated?”