The Tracker thought over his reply. There is a subtle difference between lying and being what a former British cabinet secretary once described as “economical with the truth.”
“That’s what Dardari seems to be saying.”
“What do the Brits think?”
“They think,” said the Tracker quite truthfully, “that the bastard is sitting in his London town house, passing scuttlebutt to his friend in the south. By the by, are my requests still getting a no-no from upstairs?”
He wanted to get the subject away from the issue of Mustafa Dardari, messaging out of London, when he was staring at the rain in Caithness with three former commandos for company.
“Absolutely, Tracker. No missiles because of Agent Opal and no beach assaults. And no heli-borne attacks from our compound in Mogadishu. One shoulder-fired rocket into a hovering helicopter full of Delta boys and we have another Somali catastrophe. You’ll have to find another way.”
“Yes, boss,” said the Tracker as he put the phone down.
The Preacher was right about the uselessness of his Kismayo computer for secret transmissions, but he did not realize that his ally in London, his boyhood friend and secret supporter, had also been unmasked, and his encrypted messages, shielded inside the vegetable price code, had also been broken. So he broke security again and sent Dardari a request from Marka. It was intercepted and deciphered.
Colonel Jackson?”
“Yes, Ariel.”
“There’s some very weird stuff going between Marka and London.”
“You should know, Ariel. You’re sending it in Dardari’s name.”
“Yeah, but Marka has just replied. He is asking his friend to lend him a million dollars.”
He should have foreseen it. Certainly the budget could stand it. That sum was just a fraction of a single missile. But why waste tax dollars?
“Does he say how he wants it to be sent?”
“Something called Dahabshiil.”
Tracker nodded, alone in his London office. He knew about it. Cunning and safe and almost untraceable. Based on the centuries-old figure of the hundi man.
Terrorism costs money, a lot of money. Behind the bomb-planting dupes, often no more than children, are the controllers, usually mature men who have no intention of dying. Somewhere behind them are the ring chieftans, and behind them are the financiers, often leading lives of apparent respectability.
For antiterrorist agencies, the money sources for terrorism have proved a fertile field for tracing the paper trail from operating account back to its source. For money movement leaves a paper trail. But the hundi man does not. In the Middle East, the system goes back many centuries.
It started because back then moving wealth through a landscape teeming with bandits was too dangerous without a small army. So the hundi man takes the money in country A and authorizes his cousin to disburse the same amount, minus commission, to the beneficiary in country B. No money moved across borders, just coded phone call or e-mail.
Dahabshiil was founded in Burco, Somalia, in 1970, presently headquartered in Dubai. In Somali, it just means “gold smelter,” and mainly remits money earned by the hundreds of thousands of Somalis working abroad back to their families in the homeland. Many of the Somali diaspora are in Britain, accounting for a flourishing office in London.
“Could you break into Dardari’s banking system?” asked the Tracker.
“I don’t see why not, Colonel. Can you give me a day?”
Ariel went back to his glowing screen and into seventh heaven. He delved into the Pakistani tycoon’s investments and his means of purchasing them, which led him to the offshore accounts, of which the principal was in Grand Cayman. It was protected by complex and sophisticated firewalls. The teenager with Asperger’s syndrome in an attic in Virginia went through them in ten hours, transferred a million dollars to Dardari’s personal London account and departed without leaving a trace, except confirmation that Dardari himself had done it legitimately.
The transfer from a London bank to the London office of Dahabshiil was a formality, along with details of the beneficiary, as listed by the Preacher in the e-mail that Ariel had intercepted and decoded. The Somali money brokerage warned that such a sum in U.S. dollars inside Somalia would take up to three days to assemble. And, yes, they had a branch in Marka.
Fort Meade and Cheltenham intercepted and logged the communications to and from the London computer but had no information other than the presumption it was Dardari sending and receiving. And their brief was to eavesdrop but not interfere.
Jamma, I have a task for you of great delicacy. It can only be done by a Somali because it involves people who speak no other language.”
With all its sophistication, Western technology can rarely intercept the personal emissary. For ten years, Osama bin Laden, not living in a cave at all but in a series of safe houses, communicated with supporters worldwide without once using a cell phone or being eavesdropped upon. He used personal messengers. It was the last of these, al-Kuwaiti, who was unmasked, tracked across the world and who finally led the followers to a compound in the town of Abbottabad.
The Preacher stood Jamma in front of him and recited the message in Arabic. Jamma translated it in his head into Somali and kept repeating it until he was word-perfect. He took one Pakistani bodyguard with him and departed.
He took the same pickup that had brought him from Kismayo two days earlier with the London message. From high above, foreign eyes watched the rear, filled with plastic jerrycans of extra fuel.
They were watching in the bunker outside Tampa as a tarpaulin was drawn over the fuel cans, but that was a normal precaution. Two men were seen to climb into the cab, but neither was the shrouded figure of the Preacher nor the slim young man in a red baseball cap. The pickup left and turned toward Kismayo and the south. When it passed out of view, the Global Hawk was instructed to resume its surveillance of the compound. Then the pickup stopped; the men in it removed the tarpaulin and painted the cab roof black. Thus disguised, it turned back, circled Marka to the west and headed north. At sundown, it skirted the Mogadishu enclave and pressed on toward Puntland and its numerous dens of pirates.
On pitted, rutted tracks, often driving over sharp-stoned deserts, with refuels and changes of tires, the journey to Garacad took two days.
Mr. Gareth, it is I.”
Ali Abdi was on the phone from Garacad. He seemed excited. Gareth Evans was both tired and strained. The relentless grind of trying to negotiate with people devoid of the simplest concept of haste or even the passage of time was always exhausting for a European. That was why the top hostage negotiators were few in number and highly paid.
Evans was also under constant pressure from Harry Andersson, who phoned daily, and sometimes more than that, seeking news of his son. Evans had tried to explain that even a hint of haste, let alone desperation, from the London end would make matters ten times worse than they already were. The Swedish billionaire was a businessman, and that half of him accepted the logic. But he was also a father, so the phone calls never stopped.
“Good morning to you, my friend,” said Evans calmly. “What does your principal have to say this fine sunny day?”
“I think we are moving toward closure, Mr. Gareth. We would settle now for seven million dollars.” Then he added, “I am doing my best.”
It was a remark that, even if he were being overheard by an English-speaking Somali in the service of al-Afrit, would not be offensive. Evans realized it meant the negotiator in Garacad was trying to earn his second million-dollar bribe. But north and south of the Mediterranean Sea, the word “hurry” has two different meanings.