be like this. So you've got there without even experiencing it. Impressive, Javier.'
'We're talking now,' said Falcon, nodding at him. 'I'm happy. I can feel the old Yacoub.'
'The old Yacoub is long gone,' he said, and smoked.
'I don't think so,' said Falcon. 'But I've got to give the CNI some answers now. You knew it would come to this in the end. You can't lose MI5 five times over the last three months and not expect questions to be asked. You can't tell me that your son has been recruited to the GICM without giving any idea of his involvement. The intelligence agencies are looking at you and asking themselves: Who is Yacoub Diouri? What is his connection to that Turkish businessman from Denizli he met at the trade fair in Berlin? Has he been making contact with an active GICM cell in London that they've learnt about from the French? Who is the stranger living at his home in Rabat? And none of these questions has come about because I spoke to Pablo. It's happened because you've been behaving like a… maverick.'
'That is a perfect description of my situation,' said Yacoub. 'I'm in the goldfish bowl. Everybody is looking at me. I have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I am as suspicious to my 'friends' at the CNI as I am to my 'enemies' at the GICM. Are you surprised that I start to act alone, that I am not as transparent as you'd like?'
'You might be in the goldfish bowl, but you've still managed to hide,' said Falcon. 'Now I have to explain how an 'untrained' agent of mine can lose the professionals of MI5 five times over the last three months on their own turf – the first time barely a month after your recruitment. They know you've been trained. And I know it wasn't done by the CNI. So who did it? If we're going to get help for Abdullah, we have to rely on these people. It's the military wing of the GICM who are going to arrange a mission on which your son might well be killed, not MI5 or the CNI.'
The water rushed out of the taps. Yacoub's head rocked back against the wall. He smoked and stared at the sky beyond the high window for some time.
'Look at me,' he said. 'Look at what I have become.'
'What do you want me to say, Yacoub?' said Falcon. 'I'm sorry? I'm sorry that we went into this not knowing…'
'Nobody knows,' said Yacoub viciously. 'Do you think these professional recruiters tell their 'victims' what it's like? How many new agents do you think they'd get if they told them they'd be… vivisected, masterfully kept alive while all their structures are dismantled around them, until all that's left is a mind with blood running through it; seeing things, hearing things, remembering things, photographing things, reporting things.'
'I want to help you, Yacoub, but I can't if I don't know anything, if what you're telling me is only the partial truth.'
'And if I tell you, who will you tell? Who will they tell? There's no knowing where it will end. We'll become chess pieces in a three-dimensional game where the players are incapable of calculating the ramifications of each move until it's too late.'
'It's not just symbolic that I'm sitting here naked in your bathroom,' said Falcon. 'They wanted to wire me up. I told them it wouldn't be possible for me to talk to you if I knew they were listening in. With your precautions, we know they're not. This is between you and me. And I know I'm back with you. This is different to what it was like in Madrid. So let's talk. Let's get it out in the open and then decide who should be told what.'
Yacoub looked across at him. The dull light from the big grey outside turned one side of his head to pewter. His eyes shifted and glinted in the dark. Their scintillas of light were like needles into Falcon's mind. Are you the right stuff? they asked.
'The reason why the GICM accepted me so readily when I crossed to their side of the mosque was that they'd wanted to recruit me for the past nine months,' said Yacoub slowly. 'Despite my family history and connections to various 'movements' in the past, they had not made any approaches, because there was nothing in my behaviour to indicate that I was of their mentality. As I said before, they were nervous of that half that wasn't Moroccan, and still are. But the reason that I was taken in and elevated so rapidly that, for instance, I met their military high command within days of crossing the line, was that they'd been watching me for a long time. I had something that they wanted.'
'But you had no idea what they wanted or that they knew that you had something they desired?'
'No. I was naive. I thought it was my game,' said Yacoub, tapping his chest, then grunting a laugh. 'It was like going to meet your prospective wife in an arranged marriage, expecting the demure virgin and discovering someone terrifyingly experienced.'
'And when did you find this out?' asked Falcon.
'When I came back from Paris that time.'
'In June?'
'They were vetting me. We all thought it was to do with our mission and the four-wheel drives filled with explosives going to London, but it was nothing of the sort. They were making sure I was clean, that I didn't contact anybody and that nobody came anywhere near me.'
'So what did they ask you when you came back to Rabat?'
'Are you ready for this, Javier?'
'What do you mean?'
'Once you know it, you're a part of it, you can't unlearn it,' said Yacoub. 'You'll find yourself not just with knowledge, but holding things in your power, precious things, like people's lives. My life. Abdullah's life.'
'The reason I'm here is so that you don't have to go through this alone,' said Falcon. 'We went into this together, naive as we were, and I'm not going to desert you now. So tell me.'
'If I tell you, you'll be in my boat, and that means you won't be able to tell anybody; not your own people and certainly not the British or the Americans.'
'Let's hear what it is before we decide anything.'
'There's no 'we'll see' about it, Javier,' said Yacoub. 'I'm as good as dead if anything I tell you goes out of this room. You'll just have to live with the knowledge. And they'll interrogate you, pump you for everything you've got.'
'Spit it out,' said Falcon.
Yacoub ran his hands over his head, prepared himself.
'A short introduction,' he said. 'As you know, the primary design of the GICM was not international operations but to bring about a change in the Moroccan government.'
'They want Islamic rule with Sharia law,' said Falcon.
'Exactly. And the situation in Morocco is no less complicated than that other country which butts up against Europe's eastern border: Turkey. There is a complex battle between the religious and secular in both countries and terrorism is used on both sides. The situation is a little different in Morocco, because we have a monarchy of the Alawite dynasty, which can trace its ancestry back to the Prophet's son-in-law. We also had a king, Mohammed V, who identified himself with the nationalist struggle for independence back in the 1950s and was exiled for it. So the king had both religious lineage and political credibility, which meant that after independence he wasn't pushed to institute parliamentary government.
'He died early and his son, Hassan II, the hard man, took over in 1961. He didn't believe in democracy. Leaders of political parties were exiled. A whole apparatus of secret police, informers and terror was installed. His was a despotic regime, but it did maintain a secular order. Mohammed VI took over in 1999 and there has been a general relaxation: human rights, power and freedom for women, political pluralism. The fundamentalists don't like these reforms, but with the security system more or less dismantled, they saw opportunities.'
'To get themselves organized for political disruption.'
'That's right, but they needed help. They needed money,' said Yacoub. 'Nothing much seemed to be happening until 9/11, but even by then important connections had been made to the people who would eventually become known to the world as al-Qaeda. Extremely devout Moroccan Muslims have been going to the Middle East for centuries, ostensibly to receive an education, but since the 1980s they started getting fired up by what was happening in Afghanistan.'
'So there were already the right people around in Morocco by 2001, who could plug themselves into the al- Qaeda network.'
'The GICM was like a little start-up company looking for help from a larger corporation. But if you want to make yourself attractive, you have to be able to bring something to the table, which is why they involved themselves in international operations. But it didn't happen just like that,' said Yacoub, snapping his fingers. 'It's taken the GICM
