'He's disappeared.'
10
Brown's Hotel, Mayfair, London – Saturday, 16th September 2006, 15.08 hrs
The receptionist at Brown's, an exclusive hotel consisting of eleven Georgian houses joined together in the heart of Mayfair, had an appraising eye, which was discernible only to those who did not meet his exacting standards. Falcon thought him polite, but did not realize how restrained this politeness was until someone, instantly recognizable but whose name escaped, appeared behind Falcon's shoulder. That was politeness, or maybe a caricature of it. Whatever, Falcon was made to wait for no other reason than it was evident, from his lightweight suit in autumn, that he did not belong.
The call was eventually made to Yacoub's room. Falcon, who'd already given his name twice, was asked to repeat it as if he might be a purveyor of game birds to back entrances. There was a lengthy silence while the receptionist listened. Then Falcon experienced the fully-fledged form of British hotel politeness.
Yacoub embraced him in the corridor outside his room. He put a finger to his lips, beckoned him in and shut the door. From the state of the room it was clear that Abdullah was staying there as well, but was not present. Still with his finger to his lips, he indicated that Falcon should undress. He went into the bathroom, shook out a towel and laid it on the bed. Falcon stripped to his underpants. Yacoub indicated that they had to come off as well.
They went into the bathroom. Yacoub didn't turn on the light. He ran the taps, shut the door. He minutely searched Falcon's ears and scalp and then made him take a shower and wash his hair. He fetched a packet of cigarettes from the bedroom and sat back on the bidet while Falcon dried himself off.
'Can't be too careful these days,' said Yacoub. 'They have devices the size of a nail paring.'
'Good to know you still trust me.'
'You've no idea how careful I have to be.'
'I don't know what's happening any more, Yacoub. One moment I'm swimming happily in the shallows, the next I'm off the continental shelf. I've got no idea who is with me or against me.'
'Let's talk about trust first,' said Yacoub, stone-faced. 'You spoke to Pablo.'
'You told me Abdullah was in a training camp back in Morocco.'
'You spoke to Pablo,' said Yacoub, pointing an accusing finger at Falcon's bare chest. 'That's why you're out of your depth. We've lost control of the situation. They, now, control it. The CNI, MI5 and MI6… probably the CIA, too. If you hadn't spoken to Pablo it would have been between us.'
'I don't have the experience in this game to let something like Abdullah's recruitment go without getting advice from Pablo,' said Falcon. 'I knew when I met you in Madrid that, at best, you were being economical with the truth. I thought that was a breach of trust. So I spoke to Pablo and he confirmed that you'd lied to me, Yacoub.'
'He's my son,' said Yacoub, lighting a cigarette. 'You will never understand that.'
'You gave me information, not so that we could control the situation, but so that you could,' said Falcon. 'I would always be in the dark because blood is thicker than water. You told me that from the beginning.'
'My only motivation is to protect him.'
'Well, he's unprotected now, isn't he?' said Falcon, leaning back against the cistern. 'You knew that it would eventually get back to me that you'd met up with Abdullah in London and that I would then know that you'd lied to me in Madrid. I spoke to Pablo and found out a bit earlier, that's all. What we have to do now is re-establish the trust. I can understand why you were in a state in Madrid. I can understand your wariness and your paranoia.'
'Can you?' said Yacoub, derisively. 'Before I got into this I thought I could imagine it, but I had no idea it would be like this. So you've got there without even experiencing it. Impressive, Javier.'
'We're talking now,' said Falcon, nodding at him. 'I'm happy. I can feel the old Yacoub.'
'The old Yacoub is long gone,' he said, and smoked.
'I don't think so,' said Falcon. 'But I've got to give the CNI some answers now. You knew it would come to this in the end. You can't lose MI5 five times over the last three months and not expect questions to be asked. You can't tell me that your son has been recruited to the GICM without giving any idea of his involvement. The intelligence agencies are looking at you and asking themselves: Who is Yacoub Diouri? What is his connection to that Turkish businessman from Denizli he met at the trade fair in Berlin? Has he been making contact with an active GICM cell in London that they've learnt about from the French? Who is the stranger living at his home in Rabat? And none of these questions has come about because I spoke to Pablo. It's happened because you've been behaving like a… maverick.'
'That is a perfect description of my situation,' said Yacoub. 'I'm in the goldfish bowl. Everybody is looking at me. I have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I am as suspicious to my "friends" at the CNI as I am to my "enemies" at the GICM. Are you surprised that I start to act alone, that I am not as transparent as you'd like?'
'You might be in the goldfish bowl, but you've still managed to hide,' said Falcon. 'Now I have to explain how an "untrained" agent of mine can lose the professionals of MI5 five times over the last three months on their own turf – the first time barely a month after your recruitment. They know you've been trained. And I know it wasn't done by the CNI. So who did it? If we're going to get help for Abdullah, we have to rely on these people. It's the military wing of the GICM who are going to arrange a mission on which your son might well be killed, not MI5 or the CNI.'
The water rushed out of the taps. Yacoub's head rocked back against the wall. He smoked and stared at the sky beyond the high window for some time.
'Look at me,' he said. 'Look at what I have become.'
'What do you want me to say, Yacoub?' said Falcon. 'I'm sorry? I'm sorry that we went into this not knowing…'
'Nobody knows,' said Yacoub viciously. 'Do you think these professional recruiters tell their "victims" what it's like? How many new agents do you think they'd get if they told them they'd be… vivisected, masterfully kept alive while all their structures are dismantled around them, until all that's left is a mind with blood running through it; seeing things, hearing things, remembering things, photographing things, reporting things.'
'I want to help you, Yacoub, but I can't if I don't know anything, if what you're telling me is only the partial truth.'
'And if I tell you, who will you tell? Who will they tell? There's no knowing where it will end. We'll become chess pieces in a three-dimensional game where the players are incapable of calculating the ramifications of each move until it's too late.'
'It's not just symbolic that I'm sitting here naked in your bathroom,' said Falcon. 'They wanted to wire me up. I told them it wouldn't be possible for me to talk to you if I knew they were listening in. With your precautions, we know they're not. This is between you and me. And I know I'm back with you. This is different to what it was like in Madrid. So let's talk. Let's get it out in the open and then decide who should be told what.'
Yacoub looked across at him. The dull light from the big grey outside turned one side of his head to pewter. His eyes shifted and glinted in the dark. Their scintillas of light were like needles into Falcon's mind. Are you the right stuff? they asked.
'The reason why the GICM accepted me so readily when I crossed to their side of the mosque was that they'd wanted to recruit me for the past nine months,' said Yacoub slowly. 'Despite my family history and connections to various "movements" in the past, they had not made any approaches, because there was nothing in my behaviour to indicate that I was of their mentality. As I said before, they were nervous of that half that wasn't Moroccan, and still are. But the reason that I was taken in and elevated so rapidly that, for instance, I met their military high command within days of crossing the line, was that they'd been watching me for a long time. I had something that they wanted.'
'But you had no idea what they wanted or that they knew that you had something they desired?'
'No. I was naive. I thought it was my game,' said Yacoub, tapping his chest, then grunting a laugh. 'It was like going to meet your prospective wife in an arranged marriage, expecting the demure virgin and discovering someone terrifyingly experienced.'
'And when did you find this out?' asked Falcon.
'When I came back from Paris that time.'
'In June?'
'They were vetting me. We all thought it was to do with our mission and the four-wheel drives filled with explosives going to London, but it was nothing of the sort. They were making sure I was clean, that I didn't contact anybody and that nobody came anywhere near me.'
'So what did they ask you when you came back to Rabat?'
'Are you ready for this, Javier?'
'What do you mean?'
'Once you know it, you're a part of it, you can't unlearn it,' said Yacoub. 'You'll find yourself not just with knowledge, but holding things in your power, precious things, like people's lives. My life. Abdullah's life.'
'The reason I'm here is so that you don't have to go through this alone,' said Falcon. 'We went into this together, naive as we were, and I'm not going to desert you now. So tell me.'
'If I tell you, you'll be in my boat, and that means you won't be able to tell anybody; not your own people and certainly not the British or the Americans.'
'Let's hear what it is before we decide anything.'
'There's no "we'll see" about it, Javier,' said Yacoub. 'I'm as good as dead if anything I tell you goes out of this room. You'll just have to live with the knowledge. And they'll interrogate you, pump you for everything you've got.'
'Spit it out,' said Falcon.
Yacoub ran his hands over his head, prepared himself.
'A short introduction,' he said. 'As you know, the primary design of the GICM was not international operations but to bring about a change in the Moroccan government.'
'They want Islamic rule with Sharia law,' said Falcon.
'Exactly. And the situation in Morocco is no less complicated than that other country which butts up against Europe's eastern border: Turkey. There is a complex battle between the religious and secular in both countries and terrorism is used on both sides. The situation is a little different in Morocco, because we have a monarchy of the Alawite dynasty, which can trace its ancestry back to the Prophet's son-in-law. We also had a king, Mohammed V, who identified himself with the nationalist struggle for independence back in the 1950s and was exiled for it. So the king had both religious lineage and political credibility, which meant that after independence he wasn't pushed to institute parliamentary government.
'He died early and his son, Hassan II, the hard man, took over in 1961. He didn't believe in democracy. Leaders of political parties were exiled. A whole apparatus of secret police, informers and terror was installed. His was a despotic regime, but it did maintain a secular order. Mohammed VI took over in 1999 and there has been a general relaxation: human rights, power and freedom for women, political pluralism. The fundamentalists don't like these reforms, but with the security system more or less dismantled, they saw opportunities.'
'To get themselves organized for political disruption.'
'That's right, but they needed help. They needed money,' said Yacoub. 'Nothing much seemed to be happening until 9/11, but even by then important connections had been made to the people who would eventually become known to the world as al-Qaeda. Extremely devout Moroccan Muslims have been going to the Middle East for centuries, ostensibly to receive an education, but since the 1980s they started getting fired up by what was happening in Afghanistan.'
'So there were already the right people around in Morocco by 2001, who could plug themselves into the al-Qaeda network.'
'The GICM was like a little start-up company looking for help from a larger corporation. But if you want to make yourself attractive, you have to be able to bring something to the table, which is why they involved themselves in international operations. But it didn't happen just like that,' said Yacoub, snapping his fingers. 'It's taken the GICM years to get into this position, with people-smuggling routes in and out of Spain, networks of cells to facilitate surveillance of targets, logistics of material, ID card and passport forgery and bomb-making.'
'So, in trying to make themselves attractive prospects, they've become formidable players.'
'Now they wouldn't even have to ask al-Qaeda for money,' said Yacoub. 'They're involved in drug-running, bank-card fraud and internet scams, all of which they see, not as criminal, but as legitimate "attacks" on the West. All part of the jihad. So, like anybody who's become a power in their own right, they start to think of themselves differently. Success brings a change of focus. They start thinking globally. Why bother to overturn the monarch of some poor, far-flung kingdom when you could bring about the complete revolution? Return all lands from Pakistan to Morocco, and maybe even Andalucia, to Islamic government and law, as we were over a thousand years ago.'
'The jihadi's dream,' said Falcon. 'But how do you pull it off? So far they've had a limited impact by blowing up the World Trade Center, killing commuters in Madrid and London, but they're a long way from the dream.'
'And they've realized that,' said Yacoub. 'All Osama bin Laden did was put them on the map. He made them understand that they have power. Only then… after 2001, did the real thinking start.'
'So, go on, how are they going to pull this off?'
'You see, Javier, that's the fatal error of the West.'
'What?'
'You don't believe it's possible. You think it's some ridiculous, far-fetched notion of a bunch of towel-headed fanatics sitting in mud huts, making plans with sticks in the sand.'
'I don't underestimate the capabilities of these groups,' said Falcon. 'But what I do know is that the Arab world has never been able to show a united front.'
'The leaders of the Arab world,' said Yacoub. 'Those people who've become the lapdogs of the West, they can't show a united front with the disenfranchised Palestinians, the split Lebanese, the sinister Syrians, the undecided Turks, the occupied Iraqis, the impossible Iranians. But what about their populations with sixty per cent under the age of twenty-five, who have nothing but belief and a sense of injustice? The people are more ready than ever to show a united front.'
'All right,' said Falcon. 'But there's still a long way to go.'
'But there is a key,' said Yacoub. 'One Arab country holds the key to everything. Not only is it the richest, with fabulous reserves of the most desired commodity in the world, but it also holds the keys to the holiest sites in Islam.'
'Saudi Arabia,' said Falcon. 'Your theory about why the Americans invaded Iraq with such haste was to protect that monarchy, who are the guardians of their most valuable interest.'
'A very difficult relationship for most Muslims to understand,' said Yacoub. 'Why do the guardians of the holiest sites in Islam embrace the most despised infidel on the face of the earth, the one who upholds the rights of Zion in the heart of the land of the Prophet? Very tricky, Javier. Possibly more understandable if the Saudis used their wealth, power and influence to achieve justice for the most abject people of the Arab world, but they don't.'
'So nobody would cry if the House of Saud came to an ignominious end,' said Falcon. 'But how do you achieve it?'
'First of all, al-Qaeda might not be able to get rid of the Americans from Iraq, but they will keep them so fully occupied over such a long time that, when the moment comes and the Americans have to respond, they will be too weak or overstretched or lacking in will to do so.'
'And in the meantime…'
'There are more than six thousand members of the Saudi royal family,' said Yacoub. 'Their total wealth is greater than the GDP of many smaller nations. All those people with all that wealth make the royal family a political monster. Every point of view is represented by its members, from the utterly corrupt, drug-running friends of America, to the reclusive, ascetic, profoundly devout Wahabi fundamentalists. Some flaunt their wea
lth in tasteless displays of extravagance while others quietly channel funds into international terrorism.'
'So the GICM and other terrorist groups have realized that it could just be a question of tipping the balance in favour of the radical fundamentalists within the royal family.'
'Combined with the support of a disgruntled population, who will see more opportunities for equality in an Islamic state than they ever would from an old-fashioned monarchy…'
'And there you have the makings of a new world order,' said Falcon. 'But it's not something that will be pulled off easily. How are the GICM going to do it? And how do you fit in?'
'Persuasion, manoeuvring and, if necessary, assassination,' said Yacoub. 'One by one.'
'I imagine there's quite a considerable security apparatus attached to the House of Saud,' said Falcon uneasily.
'Very experienced. Very well trained,' said Yacoub, nodding, staring at his feet.
'Did they train you, Yacoub?'
He looked up at the wall above Falcon's head. The light in his pupils seemed to be coming from a long way off, like a traveller at night making slow progress over a moonless desert.
'This is where you decide, Javier,' he said. 'I wouldn't blame you if you went next door, put your clothes on, left the room and we never see each other again.'
'I don't want that,' said Falcon.
'Why not?' asked Yacoub, lowering his gaze to meet Falcon's eye, his curiosity genuine.
Falcon thought about this for some time, not because he was unsure, but because it suddenly struck him how valuable this relationship had become to him. His friendship with Yacoub had all the complexities of the ties of blood, but without there being any. And he also knew there was no greater bond than that between parent and child. This bizarre situation: sitting naked in Yacoub's hotel bathroom, with a world of trouble seemingly on the brink of fulmination, made him feel a terrible loneliness at the loss of his own parental relationships and the knowledge that he would always be secondary in the lives of others who were important to him.
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