sign up for Italian language courses. After this, Vigo made a point of coming over to them at least once a day. He would pull up a chair and sit with his hands folded across his Anderson and Sheppard suit to attend to detailed questions about the beliefs of the Wahabis or the transfer of gold through the Gulf States. His manner was that of a concerned PhD supervisor. The vibration of sophisticated menace Isis felt in the late night meeting with Spelling a week before had been replaced by an almost amiable focus.
Her misgivings about Vigo and the operation receded at equal pace mostly because of the pressure of work. Lyne was demanding and insisted that every avenue was investigated thoroughly. He nagged them constantly to remember the two central questions: what were the eleven planning and when were they going to move?
Lyne knew which buttons to push. When he wanted a favour out of the embassy in Riyadh he dashed off a cable and routed it through the State Department, marking it for the attention of several diplomats, even though he knew they couldn’t read it because of the special encryption used by RAPTOR. What mattered was that America’s spies knew their performance was being watched by the highest levels of government in Washington. On scrambled phone lines to CIA stations all over the Middle East, Lyne harried officers to make that last call. Late one night Herrick heard him organising funds to bribe an official in the Qatar immigration service. It was four in the morning in Qatar but he ordered the station chief round to the man’s house and told him to email copies of the passport applications to the Bunker by morning Middle Eastern time.
Herrick pushed the British embassy officials in a similar fashion, though most of the MI6 officers working undercover in British embassies already sensed the urgency of the situation, even if they did not know precisely what was going on.
It was Herrick’s conversation with Guy Laytham, the MI6 man in Oman, that produced a crucial breakthrough. Laytham remembered a reception early in the spring when a director of one of the country’s bigger banks had pointedly asked him about the funding of rebuilding programmes in Sarajevo. The question struck Laytham as odd because he hadn’t served in the Balkans and was unfamiliar with the levels of corruption. The banker said he was worried about a client’s money that was being sent to a Muslim charity he had not heard of, through the Central Bank of Bosnia CK. Could Laytham make inquiries about the bank and the charity? Thinking about the conversation later, Laytham realised that his contact was not asking him to check out the bank and charity; he was telling him that one or both were involved in something that would interest him.
Herrick hung up and arranged to speak to Dolph in Sarajevo. Dolph, no slouch when it came to Middle Eastern banking practices, said he welcomed the distraction since the RAPTOR team was tripping over itself in Bosnia. The local suspect was only a little more active than a pregnant sloth, he said.
Fifteen minutes later he came back to her.
‘How about sending a second donation from the same bank in Oman using the name of the original remitter, but with instructions that the money be picked up in cash at the bank in Sarajevo? I’ll see to it that we have someone inside the bank to tell us when the transfer comes through. Then we’ll simply watch who collects it.’
There was some prevarication at the British Embassy in Masqat, but eventually $5,000 of British taxpayers’ money was released and sent on its way by the bank in Oman. Twenty-four hours later, Dolph was on the line saying they had surveillance pictures of someone picking up the money. Dolph suggested that the look of surprise on the man’s face meant one thing: he had been the one to send the first donation from Masqat and was therefore the primary financier.
Photographs of the helper were sent back to Laytham. A bank official remembered the man from a year before when he had changed a very large sum of Saudi riyals into the local currency and US dollars. Records showed that the man’s name was Sa‘id al-Azm. He had produced a Saudi passport and an Omani driving licence when setting up two business accounts. The driving licence meant he had been resident in Oman for some time. A search was ordered of the country’s driver and vehicle licensing authority records. On the application form he gave his occupation as construction engineer and property developer. Further search of Oman’s corporation registry yielded the fact that al-Azm was from a well-known professional family in Jeddah with business connections all over the Gulf.
Late that night, as Lyne and Herrick ate a meal in the Bunker canteen with the rest of Lyne’s crew, Herrick suggested that al-Azm must have known suspect Four before they both ended up in Sarajevo.
‘You got a point. The Parana suspects knew each other in Rome.’
‘Right, maybe they attended the same Islamic college or worked together.’
‘Everything says Four’s got to be a Saudi, like al-Azm. We got pictures of both so why don’t we start with those and get the Wallflowers to trawl through the picture agencies?’
It took just a day for the hunch to pay off. Sa’id al-Azm’s professional life didn’t merit a published photograph, but in a brief newspaper description of his work as project manager for a sewage works in Oman, it was mentioned that he had played for the Saudi national under-eighteen soccer side. Pictures of the side were sent to the Bunker, but Four was nowhere to be seen. Lyne wasn’t about to give up.
‘Maybe he made the local side with al-Azm.’ A search of the newspaper libraries around the Gulf eventually produced pictures of the Jeddah touring team from 1984 and 1985. Al-Azm was seated in the front row holding the football. Standing in the back row was the man currently under observation in Sarajevo. His name was Abd al Aziz al Hafy. ‘The servant of the Almighty,’ said Lyne, translating the first part of the name. Then to anyone in earshot he announced, ‘We’ve ID’d another wood pussy. He’s in the cross hairs, brothers and sisters.’
A small celebration was held – champagne in throwaway cups and cheesecake bought from a patisserie near the US Embassy. Spelling and various American officials emailed their congratulations to Lyne. Vigo came over to them, made a courtly bow and said they were about to get a line into al-Azm’s phone.
‘With their usual lack of regard for our convenience,’ said Vigo, ‘it’s quite possible that the suspects are passing messages by word of mouth – Chinese whispers from person to person. But somewhere along the line, someone has got to make a telephone call.’
We know that, thought Herrick rather testily. The satisfaction she got from the identification of Four had not done much to reduce her unease about RAPTOR, which seemed to her to be displaying the classic growth of bureaucracy. When later someone wandered over to ask Nathan Lyne whether they should mount an operation to get DNA samples from the suspects, she shot a look of cold fury at the man. ‘Why the fuck would anyone want to know their DNA profiles? The only thing that matters is what these men are planning, not whether they drink cafe macchiato in the morning or have a predisposition to male pattern baldness.’
‘I agree with Isis,’ said Lyne, looking a little startled at her outburst. ‘I think that’s a really dumb idea.’
When the man had left, Lyne steered her away to a coffee machine. ‘Something eating you, Isis? Maybe you need to go get some daylight. I know I feel like a goddam earthworm down here.’
‘Yes, but that’s not what’s bothering me. This thing is too remote. We’re no nearer to knowing what they’re planning. We have no concept of their leadership, although that was what my people said they wanted when they told me about all this.’
‘Hey, the whole point is to watch these guys at work. We’re learning all the time. It’s a long process and it may go on a year or more. That’s what a good intelligence operation takes – sweat, frustration and hard labour. Who said it was going to be fun?’
‘All that’s true. But doesn’t it strike you that in this microscopic observation we’re missing some of the big things?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like what happened to Youssef Rahe, the MI6 agent who was found murdered in Lebanon. Like what happened to the twelfth man who got on the same flight as Rahe and is presumed to be responsible for his death. We don’t know that, yet no one has bothered to find out where he went or who he was. We just assume he was the hit man and that he’s disappeared into the sands of the Middle East. Why are we ignoring him?’
‘You got a point about Rahe,’ said Lyne. ‘But the rest of what you say challenges the policy, the whole purpose of RAPTOR. You signed up for it.’ ‘Well, someone needs to challenge it. Remember, these men are masters at flying under the radar. What we have here is a fantastically complicated radar system designed to detect everything but the obvious.’
Lyne shook his head sympathetically but didn’t agree. ‘What do you want, Isis? Arrest the suspects and lose the chance to learn who’s pulling their strings and how they receive money and instructions? What we’re doing here is gathering life-saving intelligence that’s going to be important for maybe the next five years. It’s a real opportunity you created. As Walter says, it’s your baby, Isis, for chrissake.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but we’re missing something. I know it, but I can’t tell you what it is.’ She didn’t like saying
