‘That’s a simple question with a complex answer,’ Stevenson replied. ‘Most of the analytical work has been done in Israel, so doesn’t apply here, but there the shahid is acting, as he sees it, to rid his legitimate homeland of its Jewish invaders. That’s the general reason for the attack, but most shuhada also have a second, more specific, reason for carrying out their mission, usually involving something like a desire to exact revenge for the death of a close friend. In the case of the Palestinians, there’s also the feeling that the suicide bomb is the only viable weapon they possess. And this is a weapon that’s extremely difficult to detect or counter. There’s also fear and the moral element.’
‘And that means what, exactly?’ Hutchings demanded.
‘Fear, because almost anyone, anywhere, at any time, could turn out to be a shahid. Fear that the man standing next to you at the railway station, or at the bus stop or in the elevator or in the queue at the shop, could have a belt of TNT wrapped around his waist, and might choose this very moment to pull the trigger. Can you imagine the constant strain of living like that, day after day? For the planners in Hamas and Hezbollah, striking fear into the hearts of the Jewish population is just as important as the deaths caused by the attacks.’
Stevenson took a sip of water, then continued. ‘And in a sense the shuhada manage to seize the moral high ground as well. Their victims are to some extent of secondary importance, what you might almost call collateral damage, but the shuhada themselves are making the ultimate sacrifice, being forced to take their own lives because of the immoral acts of their perceived enemies. A suicide bomber achieves a kind of nobility simply because of his own sacrifice.’
‘We don’t need to get too deep into this aspect, David,’ John Westwood interrupted.
‘Agreed, sir. Well,’ Stevenson went on, ‘this kind of attack is very common in the present political climate, though Damascus is a somewhat unusual target. The Syrians are still puzzled by Assad’s claim to be acting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, because in that country the organization is virtually extinct. But they found reading material in Assad’s rooms that had clearly been inspired by the Brotherhood, so they’ve concluded that the motive he claimed was probably genuine.’
Again he paused to ensure he had their full attention. ‘You’re here because of two unique aspects of this particular attack. To go back a step, the Palestinian suicide bombers are normally sent out by dispatchers who brief them carefully on their target, the route they must take, and how to initiate the detonation. The dispatchers will also make a videotape featuring the shahid, to release after the bombing. Frequently they can be heard acting as prompters, or asking questions to produce the answers they want the rest of the world to hear. Sometimes they themselves will even feature on the video, masked and anonymous of course, and interview the shahid. On Assad’s tape, there are no such prompts, no questions, no hint of an interview. He just reads out a short speech, obviously memorized.’
‘So?’ Hutchings asked.
‘We got a first-generation copy of the tape from Al-Jazeera, and our techies here have been analysing it. They were looking for the usual stuff — clues to identify where it was made, extraneous sounds and so on — but nothing showed up until right at the very end of the tape, in the last second and a half, to be exact, and I’ll come to that in a moment.
‘The technicians also deduced that Assad wasn’t wearing a microphone, or speaking into one somewhere out of shot. They believe that the mike being used was the one built into the video camera itself, which is important for two reasons. First, it suggests this was an amateur or at least a low-budget operation, because the professional dispatchers usually supply either a clip-on mike or one on a stand in front of the shahid. They want the bomber’s message to be clearly heard and understood.
‘The second point is an extraneous sound they detected. Just before the video ends there’s a very faint noise on the soundtrack. Before enhancement, it sounds like a cough. Once the techies had cleaned the tape and amplified it, they realized it was actually a single word, spoken very quietly. The word is “good”, and the voice that’s speaking it is an adult male — most likely American, but just possibly Canadian.’
Paul Richter sat in only moderate discomfort in the economy section of the Boeing 777, contemplating the remainder of the seven-hour direct flight to Dubai without any particular degree of enthusiasm.
He didn’t know quite what to make of Salah Khatid’s information. He had no doubt that the Arab was accurately reporting what he’d heard, but there was frankly too little data to go on for him to do anything about it. He would just have to keep his eyes open. But there had been something he could do about Holden’s alleged premonitions. Richter had spent the previous afternoon reading through half a dozen files he’d requested from the Registry. And what he’d read in them had, frankly, surprised him.
Three of the files were unclassified, and had originated from the American Defense Intelligence Agency. They dated from the seventies and weren’t directly relevant to his tasking, but still provided some useful background information. The first was DST-1810S-387–75 entitled ‘Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research’; the second was ST-CS-01–169–72, ‘Controlled Offensive Behavior’; and the third DST-1810S-074–76, ‘Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation (Radiowaves and Microwaves) — Eurasian Communist Countries’.
He’d also read three files classified ‘Secret’ that had originated at Vauxhall Cross. All dealt with an American remote-viewing project primarily based at Fort Meade in Maryland, at first called Star Gate, then Center Lane and finally Sun Streak, before being shut down. The author of the file suggested that the ‘shutdown’ had been more cosmetic than real, designed to divert government and media attention away from the programme while its research continued in a covert environment, supported by ‘black’ funding. The project had possessed an operational wing, known as Grill Flame, which had been used by American intelligence for active espionage against the then Soviet Union.
Richter had read it all thoroughly, and it had sounded like science fiction — and bad science fiction at that. What surprised him most was how much money the Americans had poured into the project over the years. They’d actually admitted to spending in excess of twenty million dollars, which suggested that the actual budget had probably been a hell of a lot higher.
After that, he’d read a fourth pink file, classified Top Secret and bearing a WNINTEL caveat, and that one had surprised him even more. Like the other three, it had been prepared by analysts at SIS, and it detailed what little was known about ‘Black Box’, the Western code-name for a top-secret Russian psychic research unit located a few miles from St Petersburg.
The details were sketchy, to say the least, and it looked to Richter as if the data contained in the file had been acquired from somebody who had visited or worked at the target establishment only occasionally. HUMINT was usually the most accurate and reliable information source, but obviously more or less constant access was needed to produce comprehensive results. But even the incomplete picture obtained by SIS showed that the Russians had been spending prodigious sums of money — the file suggested an annual budget greater than the total the Americans had spent over a ten-year period — in wide-ranging investigations and experimentation in various fields of paranormal activity.