through Burma to the border. Terence Granger, though old enough to avoid the Army, insisted on volunteering, and in 1945 died crossing the river Irrawaddy.
With a tiny widow’s pension from the company, Indira Granger went to the only place she could, back into her own culture. Two years later came more trouble:
India was being partitioned for independence. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Muslim Pakistan to the north; Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India to the south. Waves of refugees rolled north and south and violent fighting broke out. Fearing for her daughter’s safety, Mrs. Granger sent Susan to stay with her late husband’s younger brother, a very proper architect, in Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.
Susan Granger came at the age of seventeen to the land of her fathers, which she had never seen. She spent a year at a girls’ school, and three as a nurse at Farnham General Hospital. At twenty-one, the youngest age allowed, she applied as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and a skin of an English girl with a honey gold suntan.
BOAC put her on the London-Bombay route because of her fluent Hindi. The route then was long and slow: London-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-Bombay. No crew could make it all the way; the first crew change and stopover was at Basra, southern Iraq. There, at the country club in 1951, she met oil company accountant Nigel Martin. They married in 1952. There was a ten-year wait until the birth of the first son, Michael, and three more years to second son, Terry. But they were like chalk and cheese. Marek Gumienny stared at the photo in the file. Not a suntan but a naturally saturnine complexion, black hair and dark eyes. He realized the genes of the grandmother had jumped a generation to the grandson; he was nothing remotely like his brother, the academic, in Georgetown, whose pink face and ginger hair came from his father.
He recalled the objections of Dr. Ben Jolley Any infiltrator with a chance of getting away with it inside Al Qaeda would have to look the part and speak the part. Gumienny skipped through the rest of the boyhood. They had both gone in succession to the Anglo-Iraqi school, and learned also from their dad, or their nanny, the gentle plum Fatima from up-country, who would go back to the tribe with enough saved wages to find a proper young man for a husband.
There was a reference which could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin; the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdasha, racing about the lawn of the house in the Saadun suburb of Baghdad, and his father’s delighted guests laughing with pleasure and shouting. “But Nigel, he’s more like one of us.” More like one of us, thought Marek Gumienny, more like one of them. Two points down of Ben Jolley’s four; he looked the part and could pass for an Arab in Arabic. Surely, with intensive schooling, he could master the prayer rituals? The CIA man read a bit more. As Vice President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq in 1972. Nigel Martin had stuck it out three more years before bringing the whole family home in 1975. The boy Mike was thirteen, ready to go to senior school at Hailey-bury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and coffee. “He could do it, you know,” he said when he came back from the restroom. “With enough training and backup, he really could. Where is he now?” “Apart from two stints working for us when we borrowed him, he spent his military career between the Paras and the Special Forces. Retired last year after completing his twenty-five. And no, it wouldn’t work.” “Why not, Steve? He has it all.”
“Except the background. The parentage, the extended family, the birthplace. You don’t just walk into Al Qaeda except as a youthful volunteer for a suicide mission; a low-level lowlife, a gofer. Anyone who would have the trust to get near the gold-standard project in preparation would have to have years behind him. That’s the killer, Marek, and it remains the killer. Unless…” He drifted off into a reverie, then shook his head.
“Unless what?” asked the American.
“No, it’s not on the table,” said Hill.
“Indulge me.”
“I was thinking of a ringer. A man whose place he could take. A doppelganger. But that’s flawed, too. If the real object were still alive, ACMvould have him in their ranks. If he were dead, they’d know that, too. So, no dice.” “It’s a long file,” said Marek Gumienny. “Can I take it with me?”
“It’s a copy, of course. Eyes only?”
“You have my word, ol’ buddy My eyes only. And my personal safe. Or the incinerator.”
The DD Ops flew back to Langley, but a week later he phoned again. Steve Hill took the call at his desk in Vauxhall Cross.
“I think I should fly back,” the DDO said without preamble. Both men knew that by then the British prime minister in Downing Street had given his friend in the White House his word on total cooperation from the British side on tracking down Project Stingray.
“No problem, Marek. Do you have a breakthrough?” Privately, Steve Hill was intrigued. With modern technology, there is nothing that cannot be passed from CIA to SIS in complete secrecy, and in a matter of seconds. So why fly? “The ringer,” said Gumienny. “I think I have him. Ten years younger but looks older. Height and build. Same dark face. An AQ veteran.” “Sounds fine. But how come he’s not with the bad guys?”
“Because he’s with us. He’s in Guantanamo. Has been for five years.” “He’s an Arab?” Hill was surprised; he ought to have known about a high-ranking AQ Arab in Gitmo these past five years.
“No, he’s an Afghan. Name of Izmat Khan. I’m on my way.”
Terry Martin was still sleepless a week later. That stupid remark. Why could he not keep his mouth shut? Why did he have to brag about his brother? Supposing Ben Jolley had said something? Washington was one big, gossiping village, after all. Seven days after the remark in the back of the limousine, he rang his brother.
Mike Martin was lifting the last clutch of unbroken tiles off his precious roof. At last, he could start on the laying of the roofing felt and the batons to keep it down. Within a week, he could be waterproof. He heard the tinkling notes of “Lillibolero” from his mobile. It was in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging from a nail nearby. He inched across the dangerously frail rafters to reach it. The screen announced it was his brother in Washington. “Hi, Terry.”
“Mike, it’s me.” He still could not work out how people he was ringing knew already. “I’ve done something stupid, and I want to ask your pardon. About a week ago, I shot my mouth off.”
“Great. What did you say?”
“Never mind. Look, if ever you get a visitation from any men in suits-you know who I mean-you are to tell them to piss off. What I said was stupid. If anyone visits…”
From his eagle’s nest, Mike Martin could see the charcoal gray Jaguar nosing slowly up the track that led from the lane to the barn. “It’s okay, Bro,” he said gently. “I think they’re here.”
The TWO spymasters sat on folding camp chairs, and Mike Martin on the bole of a tree that was about to be chainsawed into bits for campfire timber. Martin listened to the “pitch” from the American, and cocked an eyebrow at Steve Hill. “Your call, Mike. Our government has pledged the White House total cooperation on whatever they want or need, but that stops short of pressuring anyone to go on a no-return mission.”
“And would this one fit that category?”
“We don’t think so,” Marek Gumienny interjected. “If we could even discover the name and whereabouts of one single AQ operative who would know what is going down here, wed pull you out and do the rest. Just listening to the scuttlebutt might do the trick…”
“But passing off… I don’t think I could pass for an Arab anymore. In Baghdad fifteen years ago, I made myself invisible by being a humble gardener living in a shack. There was no question of surviving an interrogation by the moukhabarat. This time, youd be looking at intensive questioning. Why would someone who has been in American hands for five years not have become a turncoat?” “Sure, we figure they would question you. But with luck the questioner would be a high-ranker brought in for the job. At which point, you break out and finger the man for us. We’ll be standing by, barely yards away.” “This,” said Martin, tapping the file about the man in the Guanta-namo cell, “is an Afghan. Ex-Taliban. That means Pashtun. I never got to be fluent in Pashto I’d be spotted by the first Afghan on the plot.” “There would be months of tutorials, Mike,” said Steve Hill. “No way you go until you feel you are ready. Not even then if you don’t think it will work. And you would be staying well away from Afghanistan. The
