said.
“All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.” He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no Western suits, either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass unnoticed. Or the robes and turbans of the mountain clans. And that also applied to O’Dowd. The British agent was there just before six, with his black- painted, black-windowed Toyota Land Cruiser. A British Land Rover might have been more patriotic, but the Toyota was the preferred vehicle of local fundamentalists and would pass unnoticed. He also brought a bottle of the single-malt whiskey known as Chivas Regal. It was Abdul Razak’s favorite tipple. He had once chided his Pakistani friend on his taste for the alcoholic tincture from Scotland. “I regard myself as a good Muslim, but not an obsessive one,” said Razak. “I do not touch pork, but see no harm in dancing, or a good cigar. To ban these is Taliban fanaticism, which I do not share. As for the grape, or even grain, wine was widely drunk during the first four caliphates, and if one day in paradise I am chided by a higher authority than you then I shall beg the all-merciful Allah for forgiveness. In the meantime, give me a top-up.” It was perhaps strange that a tank corps officer should have made such an excellent policeman, but such was Abdul Razak. He was thirty-six, married with two children and educated. He also embodied a capacity for lateral thought, for quiet subtlety and the tactics of the mongoose facing the cobra rather than the charging elephant. He wanted to take the apartment at the top of the block flats without a raging firefight, if he could. Hence his approach was quiet and stealthy.
Peshawar is a most ancient city, and no part older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans traveling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And, like any good bazaar, the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs-blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artifacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.
It is multiethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistani from nearby, contrasting with the Chitrali caps from farther north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.
In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days, the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia. The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse on a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in the summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants can catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.
He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on the roof, and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here, they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi, who bore the rammer.
When they were all lined up in the stairwell, the colonel nodded to the point man, who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inward, and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained above in case anyone tried to escape.
When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall later, it all seemed extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants got as well. The attack squad had no idea how many men would be inside or what they would find. It could have been a small army; it could have been a family sipping tea. They did not even know the layout of the apartment; architect’s plans may be filed in London or New York but not in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. All they knew was that a call had been made from a red-flagged cell phone. In fact, they found four young men watching TV. For two seconds, the attack group feared they might have raided a perfectly innocent household. Then they registered that all the young men were heavily bearded, all were mountain men, and one, the fastest to react, was reaching beneath his robes for a gun. His name was Abdelahi, and he died with four bullets from a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 in the chest. The other three were smothered and held down before they could fight. Colonel Razak had been very clear: He wanted them alive, if possible. The presence of the fifth man was announced by a crash in the bedroom. The Punjabi had dropped his rammer, but his shoulder was enough. The door came down, and two CTC hard men went in, followed by Colonel Razak. In the middle of the room, they found a middle-aged Arab, his eyes wide and round with fear or hatred. He stooped to try to gather up the laptop computer he had hurled to the terra-cotta tiles in an effort to destroy it.
Then he realized there was no time, turned and ran for the window, which was wide-open. Colonel Razak screamed, “Grab him,” but the Pakistani missed. The Egyptian had been caught naked to the waist because of the heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. He did not even pause for the banister but went straight over and crashed on the cobbles forty feet below. Bystanders gathered round the body within seconds, but the AQ financier gurgled twice and died. The building and street had become a chaos of shouting and running figures. Using his mobile phone, the colonel called up the fifty uniformed solders he had positioned in the black-windowed vans four streets away. They came racing down the alley to restore order, if that is what even more chaos can be called. But they served their purpose; they sealed the apartment block. In time, Abdul Razak would want to interview every neighbor, and, above all, the landlord, the carpet seller at street level.
The corpse on the street was surrounded by the army and blanketed. A stretcher would appear. The dead man would be carried away to the morgue of Peshawar General Hospital. No one still had the faintest idea who he was. All that was clear was that he had preferred death to the tender attention of the Americans at Bagram Camp up in Afghanistan, where he would surely have been horse-traded by Islamabad with the CIA station chief in Pakistan. Colonel Razak turned back from the balcony. The three prisoners were handcuffed and hooded. There would have to be an armed escort to get them out of here; this was “fundo” territory. The tribal street would not be on his side. With the prisoners and the body gone, he would spend hours scouring the flat for every last clue about the man with the red-flagged cell phone. Brian O’Dowd had been asked to wait on the stairs during the raid. He was now in the bedroom holding the damaged Toshiba laptop. Both knew this would almost certainly be the crown jewel. All the passports, all the cell phones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbors-the lot would be taken to a safe place and wrung dry for anything they could yield. But first the laptop…
The dead Egyptian had been optimistic if he thought denting the frame of the Toshiba would destroy its golden harvest. Even seeking to erase the files within it would not work. There were wizards over in Britain and the USA who would painstakingly strip out the hard drive and peel away the subterfuge chatter to uncover every word the Toshiba had ever ingested. “Pity about whoever-he-was,” said the SIS agent. Razak grunted. The choice he had made was logical. Hang on for days and the man could have disappeared. Spend hours snooping around the building and his agents would have been spotted; the bird would still have flown. So he had gone in hard and fast, and with five extra seconds he would have had the mysterious suicide in handcuffs. He would prepare a statement for the public that an unknown criminal had died in a fall while resisting arrest. Until the corpse was identified. If he turned out to be an AQ higher-up, the Americans would insist on an all-singing, all-dancing press conference to claim the triumph. He still had no idea how high up Tewfik al-Qur had really been. “You’ll be pinned down here for a while,” said O’Dowd. “Can I do you the favor of seeing the laptop safely back to your HQ?”
Fortunately, Abdul Razak possessed a wry humor. In his work, it was a saving grace. In the covert world, only humor keeps a man sane. It was the word “safely” that he enjoyed.
“That would be most kind of you,” he said. “I’ll give you a four-man escort back to your vehicle. Just in case. When this is all over, we must share the immoral bottle you brought over this evening.”
Clutching the precious cargo to his chest, flanked fore and aft and on each side by Pakistani solders, the SIS man was brought back to his Land Cruiser. The technology he needed was already in the rear, and at the wheel, protecting machinery and vehicle, was his driver, a fiercely loyal Sikh. They drove to a spot outside Peshawar, where O’Dowd hooked up the Toshiba to his own bigger and more powerful Tecra; and the Tecra opened a line in cyberspace to the British government communication HQ in Cheltenham, deep in the Cotswold Hills of England.
O’Dowd knew how to work it, but he was still hazy about the sheer magic-at least to a layman-of cybertechnology. Within a few seconds, across thousands of miles of space, Cheltenham had acquired the entire image of the Toshiba’s hard drive. It had gutted the laptop as efficiently as a spider drains the juices from a captured fly.
The head of station drove the laptop to CTC headquarters and delivered it into safe hands. Before he reached
