‘My people have to presume that if Al-Isra is to be the next spectacular it will be the USA that is the target. Waiting for a miracle that may not happen will not pacify Washington. Besides, AQ must know by now we got the laptop. Chances are they will never use that phrase again, except person to person.’
‘Well,’ said Hill, ‘we could put it about in places they would hear it that we have it all and are closing in. They would discontinue, cut and run.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. But we’d never know. We’d still be in limbo, never knowing whether Project Stingray had been terminated or not. And if not? And if it works? Like my boss says: is it nuclear, biochemical, conventional? Where and when? Can your man Martin really pass for an Arab among Arabs? Is he really that good?’
‘He used to be,’ grunted Hill and passed over a file. ‘See for yourself.’
The file was an inch thick, in standard buff manila, and fronted simply with the words: ‘COLONEL MIKE MARTIN’.
The Martin boys’ maternal grandfather had been a tea-planter at Darjeeling, India, between the two world wars. While there he had done something almost unheard of. He had married an Indian girl.
The world of the British tea-planters was small, remote and snooty. Brides were brought out from England or found among the daughters of the officer class of the Raj. The boys had seen pictures of their grandfather, Terence Granger, tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth and gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger.
And there were pictures of Miss Indira Bohse, gentle, loving and very beautiful. When Terence Granger would not be dissuaded the tea company, rather than create an alternative scandal by firing him, hit on a solution. They posted the young couple to the wilds of Assam, up on the Burmese border.
If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride loved the life up there: a wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers. And there Susan was born in 1930. By 1943 war had rolled towards Assam, the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Terence Granger, though old enough to avoid the army, insisted on volunteering and in 1945 died crossing the River Irrawaddy.
With a tiny widow’s pension from the company, Indira Granger went the only place she could, back into her own culture. Two years later came more trouble; India was being partitioned for independence. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Muslim Pakistan to the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India to the south. Waves of refugees rolled north and south and violent fighting broke out.
Fearing for her daughter’s safety Mrs Granger sent Susan to stay with her late husband’s younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later the mother died in the rioting.
Susan Granger came at seventeen to the land of her fathers, which she had never seen. She spent a year at a girls’ school and three as a nurse at Farnham General Hospital. At twenty-one, the youngest age allowed, she applied to be a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and the skin of an English girl with a honey-gold suntan.
BOAC put her on the London–Bombay route because of her fluent Hindi. The route then was long and slow: London to Rome to Cairo to Basra to Bahrain to Karachi and finally Bombay. No crew could make it all the way; the first crew-change and stopover was at Basra, southern Iraq. There, at the country club in 1951, she met oil company accountant Nigel Martin. They married in 1952.
There was a ten-year wait until the birth of the first son, Mike, and three more years to second son Terry. But the two boys were like chalk and cheese.
Marek Gumienny stared at the photo in the file. Not a suntan but a naturally saturnine complexion, black hair and dark eyes. He realized the genes of the grandmother had jumped a geneation to the grandson; he was not even remotely like his brother the academic in Georgetown, whose pink face and ginger hair came from his father.
He recalled the objections of Dr Ben Jolley. Any infiltrator with a chance of getting away with it inside Al-Qaeda would have to look the part and speak the part. Gumienny skipped through the rest of the boyhood.
They had both gone in succession to the Anglo-Iraqi school and learned also from their dada, or nanny, the gentle plump Fatima from up country, who would go back to the tribe once she had saved enough wages to find a proper young man for a husband.
There was a reference that could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin: the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdash, racing about the lawn of the house in Saadun suburb, Baghdad, and his father’s delighted Iraqi guests laughing with pleasure and shouting, ‘But, Nigel, he’s more like one of us.’
More like one of us, thought Marek Gumienny, more like one of them. Two points down of Ben Jolley’s four: he looked the part and could pass for an Arab in Arabic. Surely with intensive schooling he could master the prayer rituals?
The CIA man read a bit more. Vice-President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq Petroleum in 1972. Nigel Martin had stuck it out three more years before bringing the whole family home in 1975. The boy Mike was thirteen, ready to go to senior school at Haileybury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and a coffee.
‘He could do it, you know,’ he said when he came back from the toilet. ‘With enough training and back-up he really could. Where is he now?’
‘Apart from two stints working for us when we borrowed him, he spent his military career between the Paras and the Special Forces. Retired last year after completing his twenty-five. And no, it wouldn’t work.’
‘Why not, Steve? He has it all.’
‘Except the background. The parentage, the extended family, the birthplace. You don’t just walk into Al-Qaeda except as a youthful volunteer for a suicide mission; a low-level low-life; a gopher. Anyone who would have the trust to get near the gold-standard project in preparation would have to have years behind him. That’s the killer, Marek, and it remains the killer. Unless . . .’
He drifted off into a reverie, then shook his head.
‘Unless what?’ asked the American.
‘No, it’s not on the table,’ said Hill.
‘Indulge me.’
‘I was thinking of a ringer. A man whose place he could take. A doppelgänger. But that’s flawed too. If the real object were still alive, AQ would have him in their ranks. If he were dead, they’d know that too. So no dice.’
‘It’s a long file,’ said Marek Gumienny. ‘Can I take it with me?’