He couldn’t understand this.
He carried on reading.
The messages stopped suddenly at 9.14 a.m., Eastern Time. At the exact time that the FBI went to investigate the first address they had traced. According to NSA’s log, someone had phoned the FBI headquarters in Quantico from a small house on the outskirts of the Everglades in Florida, with a chilling message that the USA was heading for a fall.
An old man with poor eyesight and terrible hearing lived in the house. His telephone wasn’t even connected. It lay covered in dust in the cellar, but his subscription was still live as his son in Miami paid all his father’s regular bills. Obviously without checking what they were for. Presumably he hadn’t visited the old man in years.
The messages had stopped at exactly the same time.
And none had been received since.
The report finished by saying that work was ongoing to analyse the voices and the language used, but nothing of any value to the investigation could be said yet about the recordings of the threats or the sixty or so emails with similar content. The voices were scrambled and distorted, so expectations were not high. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that all the callers were men. For obvious reasons it was more difficult to establish the sex of the originators of the electronic messages.
End of report.
Warren was hungry.
He went to the minibar, took out a bar of chocolate and opened a bottle of Coke. Neither of them tasted any good, but did help to increase his blood sugar. The slight headache that he got when he didn’t have enough sleep disappeared.
He went back to bed. The thick document fell to the floor. According to instructions, it was to be destroyed immediately. But that could wait. He picked up the thinner file and held it at arm’s length for a few seconds. Then he lowered his arm on to the duvet.
The slim report was a masterpiece.
The problem was that no one seemed to be particularly interested in reading it, and even less so in responding to it.
Warren knew it almost off by heart, even though he had only read through the paper twice. The report had been prepared by the BSC Unit at home in DC and he had contributed as much as he could from this godforsaken place they called Norway.
Warren longed to go home. He closed his eyes.
He had started to feel old more and more frequently. Not just older, but old. He was tired and had bitten off more than he could chew with this new job. He wanted to go back to Quantico, to Virginia, to his family. To Kathleen, who had put up with him and his countless, deeply hurtful infidelities over the years. To his grown-up children, who had all settled near their childhood home. To his own house and garden. He wanted to go home, and felt a great pressure under his ribs that did not disappear even though he swallowed several times.
The thin report was a profile.
As always, they had started their work by analysing the actions and events. The BSC Unit worked along timelines and in depth, putting the events in context, analysing the causes and effects and studying the costs and complexity. Every detail in the sequence of events was set against alternative solutions, because that was the only way in which they could come close to capturing the motives and attitudes of the people who were behind the kidnapping of Madam President.
The picture that slowly emerged over the twenty pages worried Warren and his loyal colleagues in the BSC Unit just as much as the thick report scared the life out of the rest of the FBI.
They thought they would establish the profile of an organisation. A group of people, a terrorist cell. Possibly a small unit, an army fighting a holy war against Satan’s bulwark, the US.
Instead they saw the profile of a man.
One man.
Obviously he could not be acting alone. Everything that had happened since the BSC Unit saw the first vague signs of the Trojan Horse more than six weeks ago indicated that a disconcerting number of people were involved.
The problem was that they didn’t seem to belong together. In any way. Instead of developing a more detailed description of a terrorist organisation, the BSC Unit had outlined a single individual who used people the way that others used tools, and showed the same lack of loyalty or other human emotion to his helpers that anyone else would to a toolbox.
Nothing was done to look after or help the various actors afterwards. Once they had played their role, done their bit, there was no protection. Gerhard Skroder had been thrown to the wolves, as had the Pakistani cleaner and all the rest of the pieces in this complex jigsaw puzzle.
Which must mean that they didn’t know who they were working for.
Warren yawned, shook his head briskly and opened his eyes wide to force back the tears. His hand, which was still holding the report, felt heavy as lead. He pulled himself together, lifted it up and caste his eyes over the front page.
The title was modestly placed at the top of the page in the same font size as the rest of the document, only it was in bold: The Guilty. A profile of the abductor.
Warren wasn’t sure whether he liked the name they had chosen. On the other hand, it was neutral, with no ethnic or national connotations. Again he tried to make himself more comfortable, and then started to read:
As usual, their starting point was the key event.
The actual kidnapping of the President gave the BSC Unit strong characteristics in terms of the perpetrator’s profile. Ever since he had been woken in his flat in Washington DC at some ungodly hour by an emotional agent who told him that the President had apparently been kidnapped in Norway, Warren Scifford had been thoroughly perplexed. On the flight to Europe, he had constantly been expecting, and in some absurd way hoping, that he would arrive to be told that Madam President had been found dead.
He had already dismissed the possibility that she would be found alive.
The key question was: why kidnapping? Why not kill Helen Bentley instead? By all accounts, it was far easier to carry out an assassination, and therefore far less risky. Being the commander-in-chief of the US was definitely a high-risk job, due to the simple fact that it was impossible to fully protect any individual from sudden fatal attacks by other people, unless that individual was kept in isolation.
The kidnapping had to have a purpose, its own value. And this had to be something to do with what could be gained by keeping the US in suspense, rather than letting the American people gather in shared shock and grief over their murdered president.
The obvious effect of the disappearance was that the country was now more vulnerable to attack.
Just the thought made Warren’s skin crawl.
He turned to the next page before taking a swig of Coke. He still had a feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t define, and wondered for a moment whether he should order some food to see if that would help. The clock on his mobile phone showed three minutes to six, so he abandoned that idea. Breakfast would be served in an hour.
The use of Secret Service agent Jeffrey Hunter was as genius as it was simple. Even though it might in theory be possible to kidnap the President without the help of an insider, he could imagine no way in which it would be possible to carry it out in practice. The fact that the Guilty had an apparatus in the States that could abduct an autistic boy, twice, in order to frighten a professional security agent into cooperation was one of the elements that made the profile increasingly clear. And even more overwhelming.
The phone rang.
The sound gave Warren such a surprise that the Coke bottle that was wedged between his thighs fell over. He cursed, managed to catch the bottle of sticky dark fluid and grabbed the phone.
‘Hello,’ he grunted, drying his free hand on the duvet cover.
‘Warren?’ a distant voice said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Colin.’
‘Oh, hi, Colin. You sound very far away.’
