A few hours earlier, he had tuned in to a pro-Western Pakistani politician and his wife arguing on a phone in Lahore. Later, when the husband had returned to his home in a wealthy suburb, he had listened to them making love, too, thanks to a wire installed in the bedroom by the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. The ISI was unaware that its heavily encrypted surveillance frequencies had been breached, but Rashid didn’t concern himself about that. Just as he tried not to dwell on the pleasure he derived from such interceptions, known as ‘vinegar strokes’ among the nightshift analysts. He had feigned indifference when he handed in his transcript to the line manager, but it was a gift, and he hoped she would enjoy it later. Didn’t everyone at SIGINT City?
This, though, was different. The flashing light was an Echelon Level Five alert, triggered by a keyword integral to one of Fort Meade’s biggest-ever manhunts. Rashid’s able mind worked fast. Despite Echelon’s best efforts, it was impossible for the West to monitor more than a fraction of the world’s phone calls and emails in real time. Most of the daily ‘take’ was recorded and crunched later by NSA’s data miners, who drilled down through the traffic, searching for suspicious patterns. They worked out in Utah, where a vast data silo had been built in the desert. Rashid was one of a handful of Urdu analysts who worked in the now. He cast his net each day on the Af- Pak waters and waited.
Real-time analysts knew where to listen, but the odds of catching anyone were still stacked against them. As a result, Rashid was left alone. Anything he could bring to the table was a bonus. But if this latest intercept was what the flashing light suggested it was, he would be fêted, hailed as a hero. His work would suddenly be the centre of attention. A manager would study his previous reports, discover a pattern, the unnaturally high number of bedroom intercepts. Someone would sniff the vinegar.
The keyword and a set of coordinates in North Waziristan were triggering alarms all over the system. Rashid adjusted his headphones. He was listening to one half of a mobile-phone conversation in Urdu: the other person must have been speaking on an encrypted handset. COMINT would track it down later, unpick its rudimentary ciphers. The voiceprint-recognition software had already kicked in, analysing the speaker’s vocal cavities and articulator patterns: the interplay of lips, teeth, tongue. Rashid didn’t need a computer to tell him whose voice it was. The whole of Fort Meade knew it. It had been played over the building’s intercom in the months after the attempt on the President’s life. Photos of the would-be assassin were on every noticeboard, along with details of the bonus for any employee who helped bring about his capture.
In a few seconds, Rashid would have details of the mobile number’s provenance and history. Occasionally, this yielded something, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was a clean pay-as-you-go phone, bought over the counter in a backstreet booth in Karachi. Rashid’s supervisor arrived at his shoulder just as the screen started to blink.
‘You got something for me, Omar?’ she said, more in hope than expectation.
Rashid nodded at his computer, feeling his mouth go dry. Two lights were now flashing. The number had been used once before, in south India, days before the assassination attempt on the President in Delhi. It was the last time Salim Dhar had made a call on a mobile phone.
‘Sweet holy mother of Jesus, you’ve been fishing,’ the supervisor whispered, one hand on his shoulder. With the other, she picked up Rashid’s phone, still staring at his screen. ‘Get me James Spiro at Langley. Tell him it’s a real-time Level Five.’
4
Marchant had nearly lost the man several times in the network of narrow lanes off Djemaâ el Fna. He appeared to be heading south, walking fast down the rue de Bab Agnaou, occasionally looking behind him, but only at junctions, where he could pass off the glances as normal behaviour. The man knew what he was doing. Marchant kept as much distance as he dared between them, but he was on his own. In normal circumstances, a surveillance team of six would be moving through the streets with him, ahead of and behind the target like an invisible cocoon, covering every possibility. Marchant had no such luxury.
He kept one eye out for a taxi as the street widened. It was a less popular part of town for foreigners, and he needed to work harder to blend in. Instead of shoe shops selling yellow
The man had stopped outside what seemed to be a small carpet factory. Marchant hung back in the shadow of an empty doorway, fifty yards down the street. He could hear the sound of looms weaving, shuttles shooting. Bundles of wool hung from an upstairs window, the rich cupreous dyes drying in the low sun. A woman came to the factory entrance. She chatted briefly with the man, looking up and down the street as she spoke, and pressed a key into his hand.
Without hesitating, the man walked around the corner, started up an old motorised bike and drove off slowly, blue smoke belching from the two-stroke engine. For a moment, Marchant wondered if it would be easier to pursue him on foot, but he checked himself: like-for-like. Despite being in a hurry, the man had specifically chosen low-key transport. He was trying not to draw attention to himself, which suggested he was worried about being followed or watched.
Marchant crossed the road to a row of parked mopeds. Marrakech was overrun with Mobylettes and other Parisian-style motorised bikes, a legacy of when Morocco was a French protectorate. They weaved in and out of the tourists and shoppers in the souks, taking priority like the cows in the markets of old Delhi, which he used to visit on his ayah’s shoulders as a child.
He glanced at the selection. There was an old blue Motobecane 50V Mobylette, top speed 30 mph, and a couple of more modern Peugeot Vogues. The Mobylette was slower, but it would be easier to start, and the man was already out of sight, the noise of his engine fading fast. It also held a certain appeal for Marchant. For years, the Mobylette was made under licence in India. A few months before his father finished his second posting in Delhi, the family had presented Chandar, their cook, with one, to replace his old Hero bicycle. Chandar used to maintain it lovingly, showing Marchant, then eight years old, how to start it, both of them laughing as Chandar pedalled furiously in his chef’s whites until the engine coughed into life.
Marchant checked that the Mobylette’s wheel forks weren’t locked. Nothing he had done since his arrival in Marrakech had aroused any attention from the authorities. That was part of the deal, one of the conditions he had agreed with MI6 in return for being sent to Morocco and allowed to operate on his own. He hadn’t wanted back-up or support. It was, after all, a very personal quest: family business, as his father would have called it. Marcus Fielding, the professorial Chief of MI6, had agreed, knowing that if anyone could find Salim Dhar, it was Marchant. But Fielding had warned him: no drinking, no brawls, no break-ins, nothing illegal. He had caused enough trouble already in his short career.
Marchant had kept his side of the bargain. For three months, he had stayed off the sauce, savouring life outside Legoland, MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall. The CIA had prevented him from leaving Britain in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, but after a frustrating year, Fielding had finally prevailed, much to Marchant’s relief. London was no place for a field agent.
He had studied hard in Marrakech’s libraries, researching the history of the Berbers and taking the opportunity to reread the Koran. It had been required reading during his time at Fort Monckton, MI6’s training base on the end of the Gosport peninsula. But he read it now with renewed interest, searching for anything that might help him to understand Salim Dhar’s world.
In the cool of the early mornings, he had gone running through the deserted medina. The first run had been the hardest, not because his body was out of shape, but because of the memories it brought back: the London Marathon, Leila, their time together. He had returned after two miles, in need of a stiff drink, but he managed to keep his promise to Fielding. After two weeks, he no longer missed the Scotch. In a Muslim country, abstinence was easier than he had feared it would be. And he realised that he no longer missed Leila. It felt as if life was starting anew.
In the year following Leila’s death, he had been unable to go running. He had missed her every day, seen her face wherever he went in London. The coldness that had encased his heart since he arrived in Morocco had
