“Please, Mrs. Shah, do not be alarmed to see me again. I came to apologize for yesterday. I did not mean to upset your husband. I brought a little gift to express my regrets.”
He placed the bottle of Black Label on the coffee table. It, too, had been in the car, as requested. She gave a nervous smile, as the translator interpreted, and sat down.
“I had no idea there had been a rift between father and son,” said the Tracker. “Such a tragedy. I had been told your lad — Zulfiqar, is it not? — was so talented, speaking English as well as Urdu and Pashto — which, of course, he must have learned from you.”
She nodded, and again tears welled in her eyes.
“Tell me, do you not somewhere have a picture of Zulfiqar, even when he was your little boy?”
A large drop emerged from each eye and ran down the cheek. No mother of a son quite forgets the once beautiful little boy she held on her lap. She nodded slowly.
“May I see it. . please?”
She rose and left the room. Somewhere she had a secret hiding place and there she defied her husband by keeping a photo of her long-lost boy. When she came back, she was holding a single photo in a leather frame.
It was a graduation-day picture. There were two teenage boys in the frame, grinning happily at the camera. It was from the days before the conversion to Jihad, the carefree school-end days, a rolled baccalaureate scroll and harmless friendship. There was no need to ask which boy was which. The one on the left had luminous amber eyes. He handed back the photo.
“Joe,” said the Tracker quietly, “use your mobile to ask our driver to come knock on the door.”
“But he’ll be waiting outside.”
“Do as I ask, please.”
The junior staffer made the call. Mrs. Shah did not understand a word. A few seconds later, there was a sharp rap on the front door. Mrs. Shah looked alarmed. Not her husband; too early, and he would simply enter. No other visitors were expected. She rose, looked helplessly around, pulled open a drawer in the credenza by the wall and pushed the photo into it. The door knocker rapped again. She left the room.
The Tracker was across it in two strides. He removed the photo and snapped it twice with his iPhone. By the time Mrs. Shah returned with their puzzled driver, her older visitor was back in his chair, the younger one standing bewildered by him. The Tracker rose with a warm smile.
“Ah, time to go, I see. I have a plane to catch. I am so sorry to have missed your husband. Please give him my best regards and my apologies for upsetting him.”
This was all translated, and they saw themselves out. When they were gone, Mrs. Shah retrieved her precious photo and returned it to her secret place.
In the car to the airport, the Tracker expanded the picture and stared at it. He was not a cruel man and did not want to deceive the once-beautiful woman with the jade green eyes. But how, he mused, do you tell a mother still crying for her lost baby boy that you are going to hunt him down and kill him for the monster he has become?
Twenty hours later, he touched down at Washington Dulles.
The Tracker crouched in the tiny space available to him in the attic of the small house in Centerville and stared at the screen. Beside him, Ariel sat in front of his keyboard, as a pianist before his concert grand. He was in total control; through the equipment TOSA had donated him, the whole world was his.
His fingers flickered over the keys, and images came and went as he explained what he had done.
“Troll’s Internet traffic is coming out of here,” he said.
The images were from Google Earth, but he had somehow enhanced them. From space, the watcher plunged downward like aerial daredevil Felix Baumgartner diving to Earth. The Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa filled the screen, then seemed to rush past his ears as the camera roared down and down. Eventually, it halted its insane dive, and he was staring at a roof; square, pale gray. There seemed to be a courtyard and a gate. Two vans were parked in the yard.
“He’s not in Yemen, as you might have thought, he’s in Somalia. This is Kismayo, on the coast at the southern end of the country,” said Ariel.
Tracker stared, fascinated. They had all been wrong — CIA, TOSA, Counter-Terrorism Center — to think their quarry had emigrated from Pakistan to Yemen. He had probably been there but had moved on to seek sanctuary not with the AQAP, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but with the fanatics controlling AQHA. Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, formerly called al-Shabaab, which controlled the southern half of Somalia, among the wildest countries in the world.
There was much to research. So far as he knew, Somalia, outside the guarded enclave surrounding the token capital Mogadishu, was virtually out of bounds since the slaughter of eighteen Rangers in the incident known as Black Hawk Down, which was die-stamped onto the American military memory — and not in a pleasant way.
If Somalia had any fame at all, it was for the pirates who for ten years had been hijacking ships off the coast and ransoming vessels, cargoes and crews for millions of dollars. But the pirates were in the north, in Puntland, a great and desolate wilderness peopled by clans and tribes that the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton had once termed “the most savage people in the world.”
Kismayo was in the deep south, two hundred miles north of the Kenyan border; in colonial days a thriving Italian trade center, now a teeming slum ruled by Jihadi fanatics more extreme than any others in Islam.
“Do you know what that building is?” he asked Ariel.
“No. A warehouse, a large shed, I don’t know. But that is where the Troll operates the fan base. That is where his computer is located.”
“Does he know you know?”
The young man smiled quietly.
“Oh, no. He never spotted me. He is still running the fan base. He would have shut down if he knew I was watching him.”
The Tracker backed out of the loft and eased himself down the ladder to the landing below. He would have it all transferred to TOSA. He would have a UAV, a drone, circling silently and invisibly over that shed within days, watching, listening for any cyberspace whisper, sensing body-heat movements, photographing comings and goings. It would transmit everything it saw in real time to screens at Air Force Base Creech, Nevada, or Tampa, Florida, and thence to TOSA. Meanwhile, there was much to do with what he had brought back from Islamabad.
The Tracker stared for hours at the photograph he had swiped from the picture treasured by Mrs. Ali Shah. He had had the laboratory enhance the quality until it was pin sharp. He looked at the two smiling faces and wondered where they were now. The one on the right was irrelevant. It was the boy with amber eyes whom he studied, as in World War Two General Montgomery had studied the face of Rommel, the German Desert Fox, trying to imagine what he would do next.
The boy in the photograph was seventeen. That was before he converted to ultra-Jihadism, before 9/11, before Quetta, before he walked out on his family and went to live with the killers of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the 313 Brigade and the Haqqani clan.
The experiences, the hatred, the inevitable killings witnessed, the harsh life in the mountains of the Tribal Agencies — all that would have aged the face of the laughing boy.
The Tracker sent a clear picture of the Preacher now, masked though he was, and the left-hand side of the picture from Islamabad to a very specialist unit. At the Criminal Justice Information Services, an FBI facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, there is a laboratory that is expert in aging faces.