The Kill List Read online

“Been a long time,” he said.

  “I know you don’t want to leave the Corps,” said Gray Fox, “but I need you. By the by, inside this building we use only first names. For the rest, Lt. Col. Carson has ceased to exist. For the entire world outside this complex, you are simply the Tracker.”

  • • •

  Over the years the Tracker was alone or instrumental in tracing half a dozen of his country’s most wanted enemies. Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani Taliban, dispatched by a drone strike in a farmhouse, South Waziristan, 2009; Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda founder, financier of 9/11, taken out by another drone strike in Pakistan 2010.

  It was he, with others, who first identified al-Kuwaiti as bin Laden’s personal emissary. Spy drones tracked his last long drive across Pakistan until, amazingly, he turned not toward the mountains but the other way, to identify a compound in Abbottabad.

  There was the Yemeni/American Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached online in English. He was found because he invited fellow American Samir Khan, editor of the Jihadist magazine Inspire, to join him in northern Yemen. And al-Quso, traced to his home in South Yemen. Another drone launched a Hellfire missile through the bedroom window as he slept.

  The buds were coming on the trees this April when Gray Fox came in with a Presidential Finding brought from the Oval Office by courier that morning.

  “Another online orator, Tracker. But weird. No name, no face. Totally elusive. He’s all yours. Anything you want, just ask for it. The PF covers every requirement.” He limped out.

  There was a file, but it was slim. The man had gone on air with his first online sermon two years earlier, shortly after the first cyberpreacher had died with five companions by the side of a track in North Yemen, September 30, 2011. While Awlaki, who had been born and raised in New Mexico, had a distinct American accent, the Preacher sounded more British.

  Two language laboratories had had a go at trying to trace the voice to a point of origin. There is one at Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the vast National Security Agency. These are the listeners who can pluck any snatch of conversation by cell phone, landline, faxed letter, e-mail or radio out of space anywhere in the world. But they also do translations from a thousand languages and dialects and they do code breaking.

  The other belongs to the Army, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. They had both come up with much the same. The nearest guess was a Pakistani born into a cultured and educated family. There were clipped word endings in the Preacher’s tone that smacked of the colonial British. But there was a problem.

  Unlike Awlaki, who spoke barefaced, staring into the camera, the newcomer never revealed his face. He wore a traditional Arab shamagh but pulled the trailing end up across the face and tucked it in at the other side. Only the blazing eyes could be seen. The fabric, said the file, might distort the voice, making derivation even more of a guess. The computer code-named Echelon, the identifier of accents worldwide, refused to be categoric on a source of that voice.

  Tracker issued the usual all-stations, all-services appeal for even a sliver of information. This appeal would go to twenty overseas intelligence services involved in the fight against Jihadism. Starting with the British. Especially the Brits. They once ran Pakistan and still had good contacts there. Their Secret Intelligence Service was big in Islamabad and hand in glove with the even bigger CIA machine. They would all get his message.

  His second move was to summon up the entire library of the Preacher’s online sermons on the Jihadi website. There would be hours and hours of listening to the sermons the Preacher had been pumping into cyberspace for nearly two years.

  The Preacher’s message was simple, which could have been why it was so successful in achieving radical conversions to the cause of his own ultra-Jihadism. To be a good Muslim, he told the camera, one had to truly and deeply love Allah, may His name be praised, and His prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace. Mere words alone were not enough. The True Believer would feel an impulse to turn his love into action.

  That action could only be to punish those who made war on Allah and His people, the worldwide Muslim umma. And chief among these were the Great Satan, the U.S., and the Little Satan, the United Kingdom. Punishment for what they had done, and were daily doing, was their decreed portion, and bringing that punishment a divine charge.

  The Preacher called upon his viewers and listeners to avoid confiding in others, even those who professed to think alike. For even at the mosque there would be traitors prepared to denounce the True Believer for the kuffar’s (the unbeliever’s) gold.

  So the True Believer should convert to True Islam in the privacy of his own mind and confide in no one. He should pray alone and listen only to the Preacher who would show the True Way. That way would involve each convert striking one blow against the infidel.

  He warned against the devising of complicated plots involving many strange chemicals and many accomplices, for someone would notice the buying or storing of the components of a bomb, or one of the conspirators would betray. The prisons of the infidel were peopled by brothers who had been overheard, watched, spied upon or betrayed by those they thought they could trust.

  The message of the Preacher was as simple as it was deadly. Each True Believer should identify one notable kuffar in the society in which he found himself and send him to hell, while he himself, blessed by Allah, would die fulfilled in the certain knowledge that he was going to paradise eternal.

  It was an extension of Awlaki’s “Just do it” philosophy, but better put, more persuasive. His recipe for ultra-simplicity made it easier to decide and act in isolation. And it was clear from the rising number of out-of-nowhere killings in both target countries that even if his message resounded with only a fraction of one percent of young Muslims, that was still an army of thousands.

  The Tracker checked for responses from every U.S. agency and their British equivalents, but no one had ever heard reference to any Preacher in the Muslim lands. The title had been given him by the West, for lack of anything else to call him. But clearly he had come from somewhere, lived somewhere, broadcast from somewhere and had a name.

  The answers, he came to believe, were in cyberspace. But there were computer experts of near-genius level up at Fort Meade who had been defeated. Whoever was sending the sermons out into cyberspace was keeping them untraceable and untrackable by causing them to appear to emanate from origin after origin, but then to whizz round and round the world, settling on a hundred possible source locations—but all of them false.

  • • •

  The Tracker refused to bring anyone, however security cleared, to his hideaway in the forest. The secrecy fetish that motivated the entire unit had gotten to him. He also disliked going to other offices within the Washington sprawl, if he could avoid it. He preferred to be seen only by the person he wanted to talk to. He knew he was getting a reputation for being unconventional, but he preferred roadhouses. Faceless and anonymous, both cafeteria and customers. He met the cyberace from Fort Meade at such a roadhouse on the Baltimore road.

  Both men sat and stirred their undrinkable coffee. They knew each other from previous investigations. The man the Tracker sat with was reputed to be the best computer detective in the National Security Agency, which is no small reputation.

  “So why can’t you find him?” asked the Tracker.

  The man from the NSA scowled at his coffee and shook his head as the waitress hovered expectantly, carafe poised for a refill. She drifted away. Anyone glancing into the booth would have seen two middle-aged men, one fit and muscled, the other with the pallor of offices without windows and running to fat.

  “Because he’s freaking clever,” he said at last. He hated to be eluded.

  “Tell me,” said the Tracker. “Layman’s language, if you can.”

  “He probably records his sermons on a digital camcorder or laptop PC. Nothing weird about that. He transmits on a website called Hejira. That was the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.”

  The Tracker kept a
straight face. He did not need explanations about Islam.

  “Can you trace Hejira?”

  “No need. It’s just a vehicle. He bought it from an obscure little company in Delhi that is now out of business. When he has a new sermon to transmit worldwide, he sends it on Hejira, but he keeps the exact geolocation secret by causing it to emanate from origin after origin, whizzing round and round the world, bouncing it off a hundred other computers whose owners are certainly completely ignorant of the role they are playing. Eventually, the sermon could have come from anywhere.”

  “How does he prevent tracing back down the line of diversions?”

  “By creating a proxy server to create a false Internet protocol. The IP is like your home address with zip code. Then into the proxy server he has introduced a malware or botnet to bounce his sermon all over the world.”

  “Translate.”

  The man from the NSA sighed. He spent his entire life talking cyberjargon with colleagues who knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “Malware. ‘Mal,’ as in bad or evil. A virus. ‘Bot,’ short for robot, something that does your bidding without asking questions or revealing who it is working for.”

  The Tracker thought it over.

  “So the mighty NSA is really defeated?”

  The government’s computer ace was not flattered, but he nodded.

  “We will, of course, keep trying.”

  “There’s a clock ticking. I may have to try some place else.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Let me ask this. Control your natural chagrin. Just supposing you were the Preacher. Who would you absolutely not want on your tail? Who would worry the crap out of you?”

  “Someone better than me.”

  “Is there any such someone?”

  The NSA man sighed.

  “Probably. Somewhere out there. I would guess from the new generation. Sooner or later, the veterans are overtaken by some beardless kid in every walk of life.”

  “Do you know any beardless kids? Any specific beardless kid?”

  “Look, I’ve never even met him. But I heard at a recent seminar and trade fair of a youngster right here in Virginia. My informant said he was not at the trade fair because he lives with his parents and never leaves their home. Never, not ever. He’s peculiar. In this world he’s a bundle of nerves, hardly talks. But he flies like a fighter ace when he enters his own world.”

  “Which is?”

  “Cyberspace.”

  “You have a name? Even an address?”

  “I figured you might ask.” He took a slip of paper from a pocket and passed it over. Then he rose. “Don’t blame me if he’s no use. It was only a rumor, in-trade gossip among us weirdos.”

  When he had gone, the Tracker settled for the muffins and coffee and left. In the parking lot he glanced at the paper. Roger Kendrick. And an address in Centerville, Virginia, one of myriad small satellite towns that had sprung up in the past two decades and then exploded with commuters since 9/11.

  • • •

  All trackers, all detectives, whatever and wherever the hunt, whoever the quarry, need one break. Just one. Kit Carson was going to be lucky. He was going to get two.

  One would come from a strange teenage boy too frightened to leave the attic bedroom of his parents’ backstreet house in Centerville, and the other from an old Afghan peasant whose rheumatism was forcing him to lay down his rifle and come in from the mountains.

  3

  About the only unconventional or audacious thing Lt. Col. Musharraf Ali Shah of the Pakistan regular army had ever done was marry. It was not the fact of marriage but the girl he wed.

  In 1979, at the age of twenty-five and single, he had been briefly posted to the Siachen Glacier, a bleak and wild zone in the far north of his country where the border abutted Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India. Later, from 1984 to 1999, there would be a low-level but festering border war in the Siachen, but back then it was just cold and bleak, a hardship posting.

  The then-lieutenant Ali Shah was a Punjabi, like the majority of Pakistanis, and presumed, as did his parents, that he would make a “good” marriage, possibly to the daughter of a senior officer, which would help his career, or a rich merchant, which would help his bank balance.

  He would have been lucky to do either, for he was not an exciting man. He was one of those obeyers of orders to the letter, conventional, orthodox, with the imagination of a chapati. But in those jagged mountains, he met and fell in love with a local girl of startling beauty named Soraya. Without the permission or blessing of his family, he married.

  Her own family was pleased, thinking a union with a regular army officer would bring elevation in the great cities of the plain. Perhaps a large house in Rawalpindi or even Islamabad. Alas, Musharraf Ali Shah was one of life’s plodders, and, over thirty years, he would plod up the rankings to finish as lieutenant colonel, clearly going no higher. A boy was born in 1980, to be named Zulfiqar.

  Lieutenant Ali Shah was in the Armored Infantry, getting his commission at twenty-two in 1976. After his first tour on the Siachen, he returned with his heavily pregnant wife and was promoted to captain. He was allocated a very modest house on the officers’ patch in Rawalpindi, the military concentration a few miles from the capital of Islamabad.

  There were to be no more behavior shocks. Like all officers in the Pakistani army, fresh postings came up every two or three years and were divided into “hard” and “soft.” A posting to a city like Rawalpindi, Lahore or Karachi counts as soft and is “with family.” Being sent to the garrison of Multan, Kharian, Peshawar in the throat of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan or the Taliban-infested Swat Valley counted as hard and are for unaccompanied officers only. Through all these postings, the boy Zulfiqar went to school.

  Every Pakistani garrison town has schools for the offspring of officers, but they come in three levels. At the bottom come the government schools, then the army public schools and, for those with family funds, the elite private schools. The Ali Shahs had no money outside the very modest salary, and Zulfiqar went to army schools. They have the reputation of being well run, employing many officers’ wives as teachers, and they are free.

  The boy matriculated at fifteen and passed on to army college, taking engineering on his father’s orders. This was the skill that would grant automatic employment and/or a commission in the army. That was in 1996. The parents began to notice a change in their son in his third year.

  The now-major Ali Shah, of course, was a Muslim, practicing but not passionately devout. It would have been unthinkable not to attend mosque every Friday or join in the ritual prayers as and when required. But that was all. He habitually dressed in uniform for prestige reasons, but if he had to dress in mufti, it would be the national dress for males: the leg-tight trousers and long, front-buttoned jacket that altogether make up the shalwar kameez.

  He noticed his son began to grow a straggly beard and wear the fretted skullcap of the devout. He prostrated himself the required five times a day and snapped his disapproval when he saw his father taking a whisky, the tipple of the officer corps, and stormed out of the room. His parents thought the devotions and intense religiosity were a passing phase.

  He began to steep himself in written works about Kashmir, the disputed border territory that has poisoned relations between Pakistan and India since 1947. He began to veer toward the violent extremism of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group later responsible for the Mumbai massacre.

  His father tried to console himself with the thought that his son would graduate in a year and either enter the army or find a good job as a qualified engineer, a talent always sought after in Pakistan. But in the summer of 2000, he flunked his finals, a disaster his father put down to abandoning his studies and poring over the Koran; that and learning Arabic, the only permitted language in which the Koran may be studied.

  This event marked the first of a series of blazing quarrels between the son and his father. Maj. Ali Shah pulled s
uch strings as he was able to in order to plead that his son had been unwell and deserved a chance to take the finals again. Then came 9/11.

  Like virtually the entire world in possession of a television set, the family watched in horror as the airliners slammed into the Twin Towers. Except their son Zulfiqar. He rejoiced, he noisily jubilated, as the TV station repeated the spectacle over and over again. That was when his parents realized that along with extreme religious devotion, a constant reading of the original Jihadist propagandists Sayyid Qutb and his disciple Azzam, and a loathing of India, their son had developed a hatred of America and the West.

  That winter the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and within six weeks the Northern Alliance, with enormous U.S. Special Forces help and American air power, had toppled the Taliban government. While the Taliban’s guest Osama bin Laden fled over the Pakistan border in one direction, the Taliban’s one-eyed and bizarre leader Mullah Omar fled into the Pakistani province of Balochistan and settled with his high council, the Shura, in the city of Quetta.

  For Pakistan this was a long way from an academic problem. The Pakistani army and indeed all the armed forces are effectively ruled by the Inter-Services Intelligence branch, simply known as the ISI. Everyone in uniform in Pakistan walks in awe of the ISI. And the ISI had created the Taliban in the first place.

  More, an unusually large percentage of ISI officers were of the extremist wing of Islam and were not going to abandon their creation, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda guests, to become loyal to the U.S., though they would have to pretend to. Thus began the running sore that has bedeviled U.S.-Pakistan relations ever since. Not only did the senior ranks of the ISI know that bin Laden was in that walled compound in Abbottabad; they built it for him.

  In the early spring of 2002, a high-ranking ISI delegation went to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura. They would normally not have deigned to invite the humble Maj. Ali Shah to accompany them but for one thing. The two senior ISI generals spoke no Pashto; the mullah and his Pashtun followers spoke no Urdu. Maj. Ali Shah spoke no Pashto either, but he had a son who did.