What Alex Siebart did not add was that he had warmly recommended the contract to Liam McKendrick if it came his way, and the old skipper had concurred. If Siebart and Abercrombie could find him a cargo from the USA back to the UK, it would make a very nice and profitable triangular voyage for the spring.
Unbeknown to either man, Mr Lampong contacted someone in the British city of Birmingham, an academic at Aston University, who drove himself to Liverpool. With high-powered binoculars the Countess of Richmond was examined in detail and a long-range lens took over a hundred pictures of her from different angles. A week later Mr Lampong e-mailed back. He apologized for the delay, explaining that he had been upcountry examining his sawmills, but that the Countess of Richmond sounded exactly right. His friends in Singapore would be in touch with details of the cargo of limousines to be brought from the UK to the Far East.
In truth the friends in Singapore were not Chinese but Malaysians; and not simply Muslims but ultra-fanatical Islamists. They had been put in funds out of a new account created in Bermuda by the late Mr Tewfik al-Qur, who had deposited the original moneys, before transfer, with a small private bank in Vienna that suspected nothing. They did not even intend to make a loss on the limousines, but to recoup their investment by selling them once their purpose had been served.
Marek Gumienny’s explanation to the CIA interrogators that Izmat Khan might be coming up for trial was not untrue. He intended to arrange exactly that, and to secure an acquittal and release.
In 2005 a US Appeals Court had decreed that the rights of prisoners of war did not apply to members of Al-Qaeda. The Federal Court had upheld President Bush’s intention to order the trials of terrorist suspects by special military tribunals. That, for the first time in four years, gave the detainees the chance of a defence attorney. Gumienny intended that Izmat Khan’s defence would be that he had never been in Al-Qaeda, but a serving Afghan army officer, albeit under the Taliban, and had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 or Islamist terrorism. And he intended that the court should accept that.
It would require the Director of National Intelligence to request his colleague the Secretary of Defense, to ‘have a word’ with the military judges of the case.
Mike Martin’s leg was healing nicely. He had noted when he read Izmat Khan’s slim file after the concordat in the orchard that the man had never described how he had acquired the scar on the right thigh. Martin saw no reason to mention it either. But when Michael McDonald arrived back from Langley with the more copious notes from Izmat Khan’s numerous interrogations, he had been concerned that the questioners had pressed the Afghan for an explanation of the scar and never received one. If the existence of the scar was by any chance known to anyone inside Al-Qaeda and Mike Martin bore no such scar, he would be ‘blown’.
Martin had no objection for he had something in mind. A surgeon was flown from London to Edzell and then by the newly acquired Bell Jetranger helicopter to the lawn of Forbes Castle. He was the Harley Street surgeon with full security clearance who could be relied on to remove the occasional bullet and say nothing more about it.
It was all done with a local anaesthetic. The incision was easy, for there was no bullet or fragment to be extracted. The problem was to make it heal in a few weeks but look much older than that.
The surgeon, James Newton, excised a quantity of flesh tissue beneath and around the incision to make it deeper, as if something had come out and created a concavity in the meat. His sutures were large, clumsy, unstraight stitches, drawing the edges of the wound together so that they would pucker as they healed. He sought to make it look like the work done in a field hospital in a cave, and there were six stitches.
‘You must understand,’ he said as he left, ‘this scar is supposed to be over fifteen years old. A surgeon would probably spot that it cannot be, but a non-medical man should accept it. Especially if it has twelve weeks to settle down.’
That was in early November. By Christmas nature and the body of a very fit forty-four-year-old had done an excellent job. The puffiness and redness were gone.
CHAPTER NINE
‘If you are going where I think you are going, young Mike,’ said Tamian Godfrey on one of their daily hikes, ‘you will have to master the various levels of aggressiveness and fanaticism that you will be likely to encounter. At the core is self-arrogated jihad or holy war, but various factions arrive at this via various routes and behave in various ways. They are not all the same by a long chalk.’
‘It seems to start with Wahhabism,’ said Martin.
‘In a way, but let us not forget that Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden has declared war on the Saudi establishment for being heretics. There are many groups way out on the extremist wing beyond the teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab.
‘He was an eighteenth-century preacher who came out of the Nejd, the bleakest and harshest part of the interior of the Saudi peninsula. He left behind him the harshest and most intolerant of all the many, many interpretations of the Koran. That was then, this is now. He has been superseded. Saudi Wahhabism has not declared war on the West, or on Christianity; nor does it propose indiscriminate mass murder of anyone, let alone women and children. What Wahhab did was leave behind the seedbed of total intolerance in which today’s terror-masters could plant the young seedlings before turning them into killers.’
‘Then how come they are not still confined to the Arabian peninsula?’ asked Martin.
‘Because,’ cut in Najib Qureshi, ‘for thirty years Saudi Arabia has used its petrodollars to fund the internationalization of its state creed, and that includes every Muslim country in the world, including the place of my birth. There is no reason to think any of them realized what a monster was being set free or how it would be diverted to mass murder. Indeed there is ample reason to
believe now, a bit late in the day, that Saudi Arabia is terrified of the creature it has funded for three decades.’
‘Then why has Al-Qaeda declared war on the source of its creed and its funding?’
‘Because other prophets have arisen, even more intolerant, even more extreme. These have preached the creed not simply of intolerance of anything not Islamic, but of the duty of attack and destruction. The Saudi government is denounced for dealing with the West, permitting US troops on its holy soil. And that applies to every secular Muslim government as well. For the fanatics they are all as guilty as Christians and Jews.’
‘So who do you think I shall be meeting in my travels, Tamian?’ asked Martin. The scholar found a stone the size of a chair and sat down to rest her legs.
‘There are numerous groups but two are at the core. Do you know the word “Salafi”?’
‘I have heard of it,’ admitted Martin.
‘These are the back-to-the-beginning brigade. They really want to restore the great golden age of Islam. Back to the first four Caliphates, over a thousand years ago. Wild beards; sandals; robes; Sharia’ah – the rigorous legal code; rejection of modernity and the West which brought it. There is no such earthly paradise, of course, but fanatics were never deterred by unreality. In pursuit of their manic dream Nazis, Communists, Maoists, followers of Pol Pot have slaughtered hundreds of millions, half of them their own kith and kin, for not being extreme enough. Think of Stalin’s and Mao’s purges – all fellow Communists but butchered for being backsliders.’
‘When you described the Salafis, you were describing the Taliban,’ said Martin.
‘Among others. These are the suicide bombers, the simple believers; trusting their masters, following their spiritual guides, not very bright but completely obedient and believing that all their deranged hatred is going to please the mighty Allah.’
‘There are worse?’ asked Martin.
‘Oh yes,’ said Tamian Godfrey, resuming her walk but directing the party firmly back towards the castle whose tower could just be seen two short valleys away.