man will strike against. There can hardly be a courier column beating a trail through the mountains to the cave. I don't see the tracks used by wild goats being tramped flat by men with messages in their minds or taped between the cheeks of their arses. Every satellite the Agency can launch has lenses aimed at that trifling mountain range. There are operations in the detailed stages of planning on every continent of our earth. If Osama did top-down, he would need a highway for the couriers and the cameras would find them, heavy bombs would fall on the cliff face, wherever it is, and seal the mouth of the cave, leaving him to death by suffocation. I said he was the icon you have made, no more than that. An inspiration, an example, but not a decision-taker. You have created that inspiration and that example, and you pay for it in the dedication it has created for the new men.'
A flashed glance. Gaunt looked at the face of his watch. In his mind was the time of the evening's last train to London.
'The new men want only from Osama that inspiration and example – not just for themselves but, more importantly, for their foot-soldiers. They need those who will wear the martyr's belts, those who yearn for entry to Paradise. The new men are already hardened and they have learned from the stupidities of the first generation of Osama's supporters. Your co-ordinator, Freddie, will use a telephone of any sort only with extreme caution. He will not carry a laptop with plans, localities, biographies stored in the hard disk. Lessons have been learned. The new men are more careful, therefore more deadly.. . Must you leave, so soon?'
Gaunt pushed back his chair, and stood. He asked his first question since the professor had launched his monologue. 'The new man, where is his weakness?'
The last chip was swallowed, and a belch stifled with the dregs of the Chardonnay. 'He is human.
However much he attempts to suppress weakness it must, in time, manifest itself. I suggest you quarter the field of arrogance. A man who lives such a life will have supreme self-confidence. If confidence tips to arrogance you have weakness – whether you identify the arrogance and can exploit it, well, that is your profession. I venture the suggestion that you consult with colleagues in Cairo – that pleasant face has, to me, the mark of Egyptian nationality, merely a suggestion and humbly given… A thought to travel with, Freddie.
You like to call it the War on Terror, but your mentality is still that of a policeman: gathering evidence to arrest, convict, imprison. Too ponderous, too cumber-some, and he will skip round you. Victory in war comes from the destruction of your enemy. Eradicate from your mind the due process of law – kill him.'
Gaunt strode away. At the far distant double doors of the canteen he turned to wave a final farewell, but the professor was bent over his plate, working a finger round it. Gaunt ran down corridors and out into the night, and hurried to the car park where his taxi waited. He had learned, from his long journey north, that he had cause to be afraid of the havoc a new man, bred in hate, could achieve. He saw the face that smiled from passport photographs but could not travel into the depths of those eyes.
Nothing had altered. Everything was as he remembered it when he had been Sami, student of mechanical engineering, lover of Else Borchardt, friend of heroes.
He had taken the S-Bahn on from Wilhelmsburg, route S31, which terminated at Neugraben, as far as the stop for Harburg Rathaus. He had walked past the Rathaus, through the shopping area and past the new building that housed the social club for Muslim men who were far from their ethnic homes. He had paused outside the police station where posters requested information on missing women and required help in murder investigations. He had noted one that showed photographs of three men he did not know who were identified as hunted terrorists. When he had been here
– with Muhammad, Said and Ramzi – he had walked past the police station every day, and officers coming to their cars had ignored him, had never second-glanced any of them.
Another narrow street to cross, and he reached Marienstrasse. Still he would be within the view of any officer or detective who stood in the police station and looked out through its wide plate-glass windows.
It was as if he came back to where – carrying the name of Sami – he had been born again. The cafe was on the corner. He had drunk coffee there with Muhammad, who had flown into the north tower, and with Ziad, whose aircraft had crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania, and with Marwan who had piloted the jet-liner against the south tower, and with Said, who was the logistics man and provided passports and money, and with Ramzi. All were dead or in the hands of the Americans, except Said who was hunted in the mountains of Pakistan. When he had had the name Sami, all of them had drunk coffee with him in the cafe on the corner, and there they had talked about the nothingness of football, about their courses at the college in Harburg, and then they had gone up the street where the women had cooked for them.
He walked that pavement. The darkness fell around him but he moved sharply between the light pools thrown down on him.
It was as if he made a pilgrim's journey.
Being there strengthened him.
On the opposite side of the street was number fifty-four. Curtains were not drawn to mask the ground-floor room. He saw two young men in the room of the age to be students as he had been, but they had blond hair and one was crouched over a computer screen. The other stood in the centre of the room, as if without purpose, and smoked a cigarette.
Else had been there with him. When she had talked love to him and had promised that she would embrace Islam, when she had gone to the tutorials for women at the al-Quds mosque and had given up the T-shirt of Guevara for a headscarf, she had been in that room with him. Of course, the plan for the taking of aircraft had not been spoken of in his presence or in hers, but he had been in that room when wills were witnessed and he had seen the tickets for the flights to the United States. He went on up Marienstrasse's gentle incline. The laughter of that room rang in him, and he seemed to regain the sense of brotherhood.
Before he had known Else Borchardt and had lived in her apartment in the tower block at Wilhelmsburg, he had slept on the floor of number fifty-four, and he had known he was with great men, with the finest.
He thought it fuelled his courage, being here.
Out in the back kitchen of the apartment, standing with his back to the window that overlooked the yard, Heydar had told the student, Sami, in a voice pitched so low that he had strained to hear him, that he should be a Warrior of jihad and glory in his work. He had been dismissed from that kitchen, sent away. Five years before, without hugged farewells but with a ticket for Sana'a in the Yemen, he had gone out through that door, on to the pavement and had walked away. He had gone back to Wilhelmsburg, had slept part of the night with the woman he loved and had not woken her, had left her. He had heard it said that Heydar Zammar, with the pebble glasses, the uncut beard and the voice of icy quietness, was now in a Syrian gaol and would have been tortured but had not broken. If he had, the name of Sami, sleeper of al-Qaeda, would have been on the Internet images of the Americans' most-wanted fugitives.
He remembered all of them. He must be worthy of them.
He passed the cafe halfway up Marienstrasse, which they did not use, then saw the window on the street beside him of the shop where shoes could be repaired – Marwan had been there with his most comfortable pair for new heels and the room at number fifty-four had cascaded with laughter that he had the shoes repaired and did not buy new ones. He would have worn those shoes, with the new heels from that shop, when he had taken the aircraft against the south tower.
The pilgrimage was done. The smallest doubt was lost. He thought himself ready to resume his journey to a destination where foot-soldiers slept, and waited for him.
He had no knowledge of the codename by which others, so few of them, identified him.
He lived in a students' hall of residence in the east of the capital city and it was a five-minute walk for him to go from his bedsit room to the minor college under the administrative umbrella of the University of London. He was enrolled to study advanced computer sciences, and if he finished his course with a half-respectable degree he would be qualified for work in any of the myriad departments of the civil service where statistics were analysed. I f… He was twenty years old, now approaching the end of his second year. His parents and extended family lived in the West Midlands, were originally from the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. His father drove a taxi in Dudley, one of his brothers was unemployed and another was a waiter in a curry house. To his father, mother and brothers, and to a network of aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins, he was an object of pride for having won a place to gain a university qualification.
His father's one complaint concerning his son was the lapsing of his devotion to the faith.
As an eighteen-year-old living at home he had regularly attended the local mosque. In London he did not. It was the one blot on his father's enjoyment of his son's success. Instead of going to a mosque, their student son –
