The Kill List

He let them in, saw them start in the computer cupboard, became bored and went into the sitting room to mix himself a cocktail.

When the two technicians, both from MI5’s computer specialist office, reported to him, he put down his drink and agreed with lofty amusement to a test run. He went out, then let himself in. The bleeper sounded. He went to the cupboard and silenced it. To make sure, he stood in the hall and dialed his own spy camera. On his screen he saw himself and the two technicians in the middle of his hall. He thanked them and they left. Two days later, he also left, but for a week in Karachi.

The trouble with computer-based systems is that the computer controls everything. If the computer “goes rogue,” it is not only useless, it collaborates with the enemy.

When they came, the

MI5 team did not use the hoary device of the gas company truck or the telephone van. Neighbors might know the man next door had gone for a while. They came at two in the morning in dead silence, dark clothes and rubber shoes. Even the streetlights failed for a few minutes. They were through the door in seconds, and not a light went on up and down the crescent.

The leading man quickly deactivated the alarm, reached behind the box and killed the infrared rays. A few more taps on the computer panel and it told the camera to freeze on a shot of the hall entirely empty and the camera obeyed. Mr. Dardari could phone in from the Punjab and he would see an empty hall. In fact, he was still airborne.

There were four this time and they worked fast. Tiny microphones and cameras were installed in the three most important rooms: sitting, dining and study. When they were done, it was still pitch-black outside. A voice in the earpiece of the team leader confirmed that the street was empty, and they left unseen.

The only remaining problem was the Pakistani businessman’s personal computer. It had gone with him. But he was back in six days, and two days after that he went out for a black-tie dinner. The third visit was the shortest of all. The computer was on his desk.

The hard drive was removed and inserted into a drive duplicator known by the technicians as the box. Mr. Dardari’s hard disk went into one side of the box and a blank into the other. It took forty-four minutes for the entire database to be sucked out and “imaged” into the duplicate, then put back without leaving any trace. So much for the past.

A USB stick, or universal serial bus, or memory stick, was inserted and the computer turned on. Then the malware was fed in, instructing the computer to, in future, monitor every keystroke pressed, and the same for every e-mail coming in. This data would then be passed to the Security Service’s own listening computer, which would log every time the Pakistani used his computer. And he would not notice a thing.

The Tracker was happily prepared to concede that the MI5 people were good. He knew that the stolen material would also go to a doughnut-shaped building outside the Gloucestershire town of Cheltenham, home of the Government Communications HQ, the British equivalent of Fort Meade. There cryptographers would study the back file to see if it was in clear or in code. If the latter, the code would have to be broken. Between them, the two bodies of aces should be able to lay the Pakistani’s life bare.

But there was something else he wanted, and his hosts had no objection. It was that both the harvest of past transmissions and all future keystrokes be passed to a young man hunched over his machine in a half-dark attic in Centerville. He had special instructions that needed to go to only Ariel.

The first information was very quick. There was not the slightest doubt Mustafa Dardari was in constant contact with the computer at the canning warehouse in Kismayo, Somalia. He was exchanging information and warnings with the Troll and he was the personal cyberrepresentative of the Preacher.

Meanwhile, the code breakers were seeking to discover exactly what he had said and what the Troll had said to him.

• • •

Agent Opal kept watch on the warehouse for a week before his sleep-deprived vigil was rewarded. It was evening when the gate swung open. What emerged was not an empty delivery truck but a pickup truck, old and battered, with a cab and an open back. This is the standard vehicle for both halves of Somalia, north and south. When the back is fitted with half a dozen clan fighters clustered around a machine gun, it is called a technical. The one that passed down the street into which Opal was peering at through his crack was empty, and with just a driver at the wheel.

The man was the Troll, but Opal could not know that. He just had his handler’s orders: If anything leaves, except produce trucks, follow it. He left his rented room, unchained his trail bike and followed.

It was a long, brutal drive, through the night and into the dawn. The first part he knew already. The coast road led northeast, along the shoreline, past the dry wadi and the clump of casuarinas where he had met Benny and on toward Mogadishu. It was midmorning, and even his spare tank was almost empty when the pickup turned into the shoreside town of Marka.

Like Kismayo, Marka had been a rock-solid al-Shabaab stronghold until 2012, when federal forces, with huge backup from African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, had retaken it from the Jihadists. But 2013 had seen a reversal. The fanatics had come storming back and in bloody fighting clawed back both towns and the land between.

Dizzy with fatigue, Opal followed the pickup until it stopped. There was a gate guarding some kind of a courtyard. The driver of the pickup hooted. A small trap opened in the timber gate and half a face looked out. Then the gate began to swing open.

Opal dismounted, crouching behind his machine, pretending to attend to the front tire, peering through the spokes. The driver seemed to be known, for there were greetings, and he rolled inside. The gate began to close. Before it sealed off Opal’s view, he saw a compound, with a central yard and three low-built off-white houses with shuttered windows.

It looked like one of a thousand compounds that make up Marka, a sprawling complex of low white cubes between the ocher hills and the sandy shore, with the glittering blue ocean beyond. Only the minarets of the mosques reached higher than the houses.

Opal went a few littered alleys farther on, found a pool of shade against the rising heat, pulled his shamagh over his head and slept. When he woke, he patrolled the town until he found a man with a barrel of petroleum and a hand pump. This time, there were no dollars; too dangerous. He could have been denounced to the mutawa, the religious police, with their hate-filled eyes and canes. He paid in a sheaf of shillings.

He motored again through the cool of the night. He arrived in time for his shift at the fish market. Only in the afternoon could he compose a short verbal message, dig up his canvas-wrapped transceiver, hook it to the newly charged battery and hit the send button. The message was received at the Office north of Tel Aviv and, by agreement, passed on to TOSA in Virginia.

Within a day, a Global Hawk out of the American launch site in Yemen had found the compound. It took a while, but the message from Mossad mentioned a fruit market, with stalls and produce spread across the ground, just a hundred yards from the compound. And the minaret two blocks away. And the multi-exit roundabout built by the Italians, six hundred yards in a straight line due north, where the Mogadishu highway skirted the town. There could only be one like that.

Tracker had had a link from the J-SOC drone-operating center outside Tampa patched through to the U.S. embassy. He sat there and stared at the three houses enclosing the compound. Which one? None of them? Even if the Preacher were there, he was safe from drone strike. A Hellfire or a Brimstone would flatten up to a dozen of the close-packed houses. Women, children. His war was not with them, and he had no proof.

He wanted that proof, he needed that proof, and when the cryptographers were finished, he figured the Karachi-based chutney maker would provide it.

• • •

In his Kismayo cabin, Opal was sleeping when the MV Malmö joined the queue of merchant ships waiting to enter the Suez Canal. For them, motionless under the Egyptian sun, the heat was stupefying. Two of the Filipinos had lines out, hoping for a catch of fresh fish for supper. Others sat under awnings rigged in the lee of the steel sea containers, themselves like radiators, that contained the cars. But the Europeans stayed inside where the air-conditioning run off the auxiliary engine made life bearable. The Ukrainians played cards, the Pole was in his engine room. Capt. Eklund tapped out an e-mail to his wife, and the cadet Ove Carlsson studied his navigation lessons.

Far to the south, a Jihadist fanatic, filled with hatred for the West and all its doings, scanned the printouts of messages brought to him from Kismayo.