Banks closed the door silently after him. In the movement his jacket flapped on his hip where the holster was, and he felt the added weight in his pocket of the notebook. He thought that he had stood the corner of his great-uncle, and had had no option but to do so.
'I've only one question, Joe, and I'll listen to your answer, whether it takes two minutes or two hours. Is this hard information or gut instinct? Convince me it's hard and you can be guaranteed that I'll push it to the desks of serious customers with all the influence I have. Tell me.'
The intelligence officer, based at the British embassy in Riyadh, had been in-country only four months. Joe Hegner had not met him, but then, Joe forswore the fruit-cocktail circuit of diplomatic receptions. And the tone of the man, Simon Dunkley, suggested a polite indulgence towards a 'cousin' from a sister service — as if the Bureau agent's reputation was not known to him. It happened often enough. In Iraq, one week in four, or in Riyadh for three weeks in four, he was familiar with the sensation of being unknown and unproven. The Briton drove, rare for an expatriate and probably unwise, but it was at Joe's suggestion that he should be picked up at his embassy's outer gates, and he thought they headed in the darkness for the desert sands: he had asked for the air-conditioning to be switched off, and had felt for the window button. Now the wind raked his cheeks, which gave him pleasure.
'I deal with the world of the young men and women who seek to attack our civilization by the sacrifice of their lives. The suicide-bomber is, believe me, the most efficient weapon you can dream of. More valuable than a bomb from an aircraft, which can be affected if darkness or low cloud covers the target, more accurate than an artillery shell, where the strength of the wind or the density of the humidity can alter its trajectory path while in flight. He or she can go right to the core of the target. The accuracy in the delivery of the explosion by a suicide-bomber cannot be bettered.
'If I talk to you of the devastation made by suicide-bombers against the state of Israel in the last several years, it is to remind you of the equivalent death toll — per capita of population — that your country would have suffered and mine. Imagine it, ten thousand of your citizens dead, and forty thousand Americans. In Iraq it is many times worse. The bombings are not a strategic use of weapons, but in the tactical field they have massive impact. Maybe you were in London twenty months ago, maybe you know a little of the chaos. They are not a danger to the stability and survival of the state, yours or mine, but their effect on the national psyche and economy are incalculable — and we don't know of any protection against this threat other than the vigilance of law enforcement and gathered intelligence.
'The experience you have had in Britain came from inside. That, oddly enough, can be dealt with more easily. The probability is that links will be found with those providing safe-houses and supplying the explosives, and that the network's cell will be dismantled. I can accept the argument. Intelligence will flow from the investigation and the gate-keepers in local mosques will be identified on the back of the discovery of the bombers' backgrounds. It's slow and painstaking, but evidential routes are uncovered that will lead inevitably, I promise it, to the destruction of the cells. That is what you have had, and I consider you fortunate because then you have the possibility to cut with scalpel knives into the mind of your attacker.
'What is worse? Far worse? It is when there is no mind to saw into. If the bomber is foreign you cannot so easily explore the nucleus of the cell structure that facilitates his act. He materializes from that familiar "clear blue sky" and, with detonation, he returns there — and nobody knows a thing. Understand me. He has never been in your gaols, where his recruitment can be identified; he has never been in your mosques or cultural centres, again where traces will have been left; he has never been, younger, in street protests where he might have been photographed and where group leaders have been seen. He comes from nowhere — all right, that is somewhere, but beyond your reach. If you knew him you could raise the walls around him — but you don't so you can't.
'Already, in your country, the trauma of Seven-Seven has passed and I'll bet your security services' guard has slipped. You're vulnerable again, because memories are short. Of course you have paid agents — informers — scattered in the mosques, and all meetings of the firebrands are monitored, but they will not deliver you the foreigner. He uses links that are beyond your sight. If, in Iraq, the suicide-bombers were home-grown the problem would have been cauterized by now. They aren't. They come across the international frontiers.
'The route used most frequently into Iraq is from Syria and their nexus point is Damascus, but plenty come over the Saudi frontier. My own injury was caused by a boy, barely over twenty-one, from a good and respectable Saudi family. Now the Saudi chain, and my work is to monitor it, is controlled by one man. I don't know his name or his face, but it's like he's a street trader and the melons, apricots, peaches and dates arrive on his stall…What I have, right now, is the scent on him. I call him, because it fits, the Twentyman.
'So, here we stand. I caught the scent of the Twentyman. I have a boy whose family thought he was in the Yemen visiting family, but. was in reality boarding a European flight out of King Khalid International. Ibrahim Hussein is twenty-one years old and a promising student of medicine. He is not with his relatives but is heading for Europe where he has no friends, no contacts, no family. What he's got is sibling guilt — two brothers dead in Afghanistan — one killed by the Soviet forces, and one by our boys. I have his picture for you.
'If I were a betting man, I'd bet the ranch that Ibrahim Hussein, only surviving son of an electrical-goods retailer in Ash Province, has journeyed to Europe with the sole intention of killing himself in a public place. Southern Europe — Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece — isn't a target for a flight into Amsterdam. In the north of the continent, on the mainland, there is most likely a "covenant of protection" — France, Belgium, Holland and Germany have, in differing degrees, opposed the coalition intervention in Iraq, which leaves only the conveniently placed United Kingdom where neither "covenant" nor "protection" exists. I hope you're following me.
'I've got a gnawing feeling in my gut. The Twentyman operates out of Saudi and concerns himself only with attacks of the greatest ferocity. A boy has left the Kingdom and is now within spitting distance of your country. My gut tells me there is a mix of hard fact and hunch. I can't divide 'em, or weigh their different parts. To me, they run together. But the "hard fact" is that the boy has travelled. "Hunch" is that he will die in your country and take as many as he can with him, himself to Paradise and them to wherever unbelievers end up. In the opinion of Joe Hegner, your society is threatened. Now, you are perfectly entitled to pull the vehicle over, turn it around, drive back, drop me at the embassy gate and do nothing.'
The car bumped on to the hard shoulder, turned, then sped back towards the city.
Late into that Friday night, as the end of the holy day approached, the officer of the Secret Intelligence Service sat in his protected office, behind steel-plated doors and blast-proof windows, and fashioned the signal he would send to London…and he reflected on the prematurely aged, small, dumpy man, with the drawled red-neck accent, who peddled his theory of catastrophe. Travelling at night, glorying in the blast of sand-laden air on his face, his eyes hidden by tinted glasses, the stick always in his hand and slotted against his knee, the man had offered Simon Dunkley what was only a hunch but so believable.