Fifteen minutes later, Berman, sweating with concentration, suddenly looked up and turned around. “All done.” He saw the device in Janson’s hand. “You change private key now?”
Janson pressed a button and did precisely that.
“Thank God!” He sprang to his feet. “Otherwise I break down and do the bad, bad thing—today, tomorrow, next month, in middle of night while sleepwalking! Who can say when? To have private key and not put to personal use would be like …” He adjusted his trousers.
“Yes, Grigori,” Janson interjected smoothly, “I’ve got the general idea. Now talk to me. What have we found out about the payer?”
“Is great joke,” Berman said, smiling.
“How do you mean?” Janson demanded, suddenly alert.
“I traced the originating account. Very difficult, even with sardine key. Required nonreusable backdoor codes—burned through valuable property to push through. Just like American pop song, ‘What I Did for Love,’ da?” He hummed a few bars as Janson glared. Then he reverted to the matter at hand. “Reversed asymmetric algorithm. Data-mining software go on hunt for pattern, search out signal buried in noise. Very difficult …”
“Grigori, my friend, I don’t need the War and Peace version of this. Cut to the chase, please.”
Berman shrugged, slightly miffed. “Powerful computer program does digital equivalent of triathlon competition, Olympic level, no East German steroids to help, but still identified originating account.”
Janson’s pulse began to race. “You are a wizard.”
“And all a great joke,” Berman repeated.
“What are you saying?”
Berman’s smile grew wider. “Man who pay you to kill Peter Novak? Is Peter Novak.”
As he arrived with his small convoy at the training camp, Ahmad Tabari felt a glimmering of relief. Traveling hopefully, he had long known, was overrated. Despite the many hours he had spent in a meditative trance, it had been a long journey and felt like one. The Caliph had made his way first by air to Asmara, in Eritrea. No one would have expected to find the head of the Kagama Liberation Front there. Then he had taken a high-speed boat north along the Red Sea coast to land in the Nubian deserts of northern Sudan. A few hours after landing, his Sudanese guides had taken him on the long and bumpy tracks through the desert, up to the camp near the Eritrean border. Mecca was only a few hundred kilometers to the north, Medina only the same distance farther. It pained him to know that he was as close as he had ever been to the holy places and yet could not walk where the Prophet, blessings be upon him, had stepped while he was on earth. He accepted, as always, God’s will, and he drew strength from the righteousness of his cause. Despite the recent setbacks in the Kenna province, the Caliph was a leader in the struggle against the corruption of the West, the brutality and depredation of a global order the West imagined to be “natural.” He prayed that his every choice, his every act, would move his country closer to the day when its people would rejoin the ummah, the people of Islam, and he could be their rightly guided Caliph in more than name.
Welcomed into the camp by smooth-faced boys and gray-bearded eminences alike, he felt the powerful brotherhood of his fellow believers. The desiccated, dun-colored soil was so different from the vibrant tropical vegetation of his native land, yet his brethren of the desert had a pitch of vigilance, zealotry, and devotion that came less naturally to many of his own Kagama followers. Barren land, perhaps, but it bloomed with the righteousness of the Holy One. The desert leaders were enmeshed in their own campaigns, in Chechnya, in Kazakhstan, in Algeria, in the Philippines. But they knew that every one of their conflicts was a skirmish in a greater battle. That was why he knew they would help him, as he had helped them in the past. God willing, they would, by working together, recover the whole earth for Allah one day.
The first order of business was to allow his hosts to impress him with their training school. He had heard about it, of course. Every leader in the worldwide fellowship of struggle knew of this university of terror. Here, while the government in Khartoum turned a blind eye, the members of this secret brotherhood could learn the ways of the new kind of war. In bunkers carved into the rock were computers that stored the plans of electric generator plants, petroleum refineries, airports, railroads, military installations in scores of countries. Every day, they searched the Web for more of the open secrets that the West so carelessly made available. Here, in the model of an American city, you could study urban warfare: how to block roads and storm buildings. Here, too, you could learn the patient arts of surveillance, methods of assassination, a hundred ways to make explosives from materials available in every American hardware store. As he passed from one unit to the next, he smiled his humorless smile. They were treating him like a visiting dignitary, the way they must treat the president of Sudan on his secret visits. They knew, as he did, that he was destined to rule his homeland. It was just a matter of time.
He was tired, of course. But he had no time to rest. The evening prayer was over. It was time for the meeting.
Within a tent, they sat on low cushions on the cloth-covered ground and drank tea from simple clay cups. The conversation was cordial, yet shied away from specifics. All knew the Caliph’s extremely fraught situation—his astonishing recent gains, and the fact that they were under ceaseless assault by the coordinated forces of the Republic of Anura. There had been reversals, humbling ones. There would continue to be reversals—unless additional assistance could be provided. The Kagama’s repeated attempts to enlist the support of the Go-Between were met with frustration. The Go-Between not only declined to provide the needed support but grew emphatic that the Caliph desist in his efforts at exacting vengeance! Oh, the perfidy of the infidel! Then his further attempts to reestablish contact with the Go-Between, to persuade him of the inexorability of the Caliph’s will to justice, had failed, utterly and mysteriously. That was why the Kagama leader was here.
Finally, they could hear the sound of a military helicopter, feel the whomp-whomp percussion of its propellers. The camp leaders glanced at one another and at their Kagama guest.
It was the visitor they had been waiting for. The man they called Al-Mustashar, the Adviser.
Colonel Ibrahim Maghur was a man of the world, and his connection with the insurrectionists in the camps was necessarily clandestine. He was, after all, a senior member of Libyan intelligence, and Tripoli had officially renounced its direct links to terrorism. At the same time, many powerful members of the regime retained their sympathies for their brethren in the struggle against Western imperialism and did their best to provide discreet assistance. Ibrahim Maghur was one such man. In the course of his secret visits to the camp, he had provided valuable information from Libyan intelligence. He had pinpointed the location of enemies and even provided suggested assassination techniques. He had supplied valuable terrain maps and detailed satellite imagery that gave the freedom fighters significant strategic advantage. And he had provided them with caches of ordnance and small arms. Unlike so many members of Libya’s effete and decadent elite, Ibrahim Maghur was a true believer. He had guided them toward the lethal satisfactions of their objectives in the past; he would do so again.
Now the colonel strode from the helicopter, emerging from a small artificial dust storm, and bowed before the leadership of the Islamic Jihad, which had assembled to greet him.
His eyes met those of Ahmad Tabari, and he bowed again before extending a hand.
The Libyan’s gaze was at once penetrating and respectful. “It is truly an honor to meet you,” he said.
“The Prophet smiles upon us both that we two should be introduced,” Tabari returned.
“Your military successes are astounding, truly brilliant—deserving of attention in the textbooks,” said the colonel. “And I am a student of history.”
“As am I a student of history,” said the Kagama rebel chief. His ebony face looked almost coal black in the dim light of the desert evening. “My studies tell me th
at territories swiftly claimed can as swiftly be reclaimed. What do your studies tell you?”
“They tell me that history is made by great men. And something about you indicates that you are a great man—a Caliph indeed.”
“The Prophet has been generous with his gifts,” said the Kagama, who had little time for false humility.
“Yet great men have great enemies,” the Libyan intelligence official said. “You must be very cautious. You must be very cautious indeed. You are a threat to powers that will stop at nothing to annihilate you.”
“It is possible to be crippled by caution,” said Tabari.
“You speak truly,” said the Libyan. “A risk for lesser men than you. It is your very boldness that vouchsafes your greatness, the security and survival of your cause, its final victory. Your khalifa shall be established. Yet everything will depend upon the timing and the targeting.” He looked around at the rapt faces of the five seniormost leaders of the Islamic Jihad, and then returned to the fabled leader of the Kagama Liberation Front. “Come,” he said. “Let us go for a walk together, Caliph. Just you and I.”
“Al-Mustashar’s advice is a treasure beyond price,” one of the hosts told Ahmad Tabari. “Go with him.”
As the two men strolled around the desert encampment, a cool wind began to gust, billowing through the Caliph’s long robes.
“I can assure you that your setbacks will prove only temporary,” the Libyan colonel told him in a low voice. “There is much I will be able to help you with, as will certain of our allies within the Islamic Republic of Mansur. Soon your cause will be coming along swimmingly.”
“And in what will it swim?” the islander asked the desert warrior with a brooding half smile.
“That’s easy,” Ibrahim Maghur replied, and his face was utterly serious. “Blood. The blood of the infidel.”
“The blood of the infidel,” the Caliph repeated. The words were both reassuring and uplifting.
“How the hell can you know such a thing?” Janson demanded.
“Cross-tabulation of wire transfer indices,” said Berman, vigorously stirring jam into his tea. “Origination code can’t be spoofed.”
“Come again?”
“Sixteen million dollars comes from account in name of Peter Novak.”
“How? Where?”
“Where I say. Amsterdam. International Netherlands Group. Where Liberty Foundation have headquarters?”
“Amsterdam.”
“So no surprise.”
“You’re telling me that at a time when Peter Novak was locked away in a dungeon in Anura, he authorized a transfer of sixteen million dollars into a blind account I controlled? What kind of sense does that make?”
“Could be preauthorization. Preauthorization possible. Postauthorization not possible.”
“No jokes, Grigori. This is crazy.”
“I just tell you origination code.”
“Could somebody else have laid their hands on the Novak account, got control of it somehow?”
The Russian shrugged. “Origination code just tell me ownership of account. Could be many specifications as to access. This I cannot tell you from here. This information not flow from modem to modem. Legal certification held by institution of origination. Bank in Amsterdam follows instructions established by owner. Account suffix says it’s linked to Foundation. Paperwork at bank, paperwork at headquarters.” Berman pronounced the word paperwork with the distaste he reserved for older financial instruments, directives and stipulations that could not be reduced to strings of ones and zeros.
“This makes no sense.”
“Makes dollars!” Berman said merrily. “If somebody put sixteen million dollars in Grigori account, Grigori not insist on dental examination of gift horse.” He held out his hands. “I wish I could tell you more.”
Had Peter Novak been betrayed by somebody near and dear to him? If so, by whom? A high-ranking member of his organization? Márta Lang herself? She spoke of him, it seemed, with genuine affection and respect. Yet what did that prove, aside from that she might have been an accomplished actress? What now seemed irrefutable was that whoever had betrayed Novak was in a position to have earned his trust. And that meant the agent was a master of deception, a virtuoso of the patient arts of craft and deceit and waiting. But to what end?
“You come with me,” Berman said. “I show you house.” He put an arm around Janson’s shoulder and propelled him up the stairs, down the magnificent hallways of the estate, and into the airy, light-filled kitchen. He pressed a finger to his lip. “Mr. French not want us in kitchen. But Russians know that heart of house is kitchen.”
Berman stepped toward the glittering stainless-steel sink, where the casement windows looked onto a beautifully tended rose garden. Beyond it stretched Regent’s Park. “Take a look—twenty-four hundred acres in the middle of London, like my backyard.” He pulled out the sink spray nozzle and held it to his mouth like microphone. “Someone left the scones out in the rain,” he sang in a thick Russian basso. “I don’t think that I can take it …” He pulled Janson closer, trying to form a duet. He raised an expressive hand high in the air, like an opera singer on the stage.
There was a tinkle of glass, and Berman broke off with a sharp expulsion of breath. A moment later, he slumped to the floor.
A small red hole was just visible on the front of his hand. On the upper left quadrant of his shirtfront was another puncture wound, just slightly rimmed with red.
“Jesus Christ!” Janson shouted.
Time slowed.
Janson looked down at Berman, stunned and motionless on the gray tiled kitchen, and then out of the window. Outside, there was no sign of disturbance whatever. The afternoon sun nuzzled well-tended rosebushes, their small pink and white blossoms radiantly emerging from the tight-clustered leaves. The sky was blue, dappled with sparse wisps of white.
It seemed impossible, but it had happened, and his brain raced to make sense of it, even as he heard the approaching footsteps of the butler, obviously roused by his exclamation. On arrival, the butler immediately pulled Berman’s supine body out of range of the window, sliding it along the floor. It was the correct response. He, too, scanned the view from the window, holding a P7 sentry pistol in a hand as he did so. An amateur might have fired a shot out of the window for show: the butler did not do so. He had seen what Janson had seen; an exchange of glances revealed his bafflement. Just a few seconds elapsed before the two retreated to the hallway, safely away from the window. From the floor, Berman made rasping, wet noises, as breath forced its way through his injured airway, and his fingers began to scrabble at his chest wound. “Motherfucker,” he said in a strangled voice. “Tvoyu mat’!”
The fingers of his intact right hand trembled with exertion, as the Russian probed his wound with remarkable single-mindedness. He was fishing for the bullet, and gasping for breath, he yanked a crumpled mass of brass and lead from his chest.
“Look,” Janson said to the butler. “I know this has to be a shock to you, but I’m going to need you to stay calm and collected, Mr … .”
“Thwaite. And I’ve had fifteen years in the SAS. This isn’t a perimeter breach, we both know that. We’re looking at something else.”
“SAS, huh?”
“Mr. Berman may be crazy, but he’s not a fool. A man like that’s got enemies. We’ve prepared for the usual exigencies. But that shot came out of the clear blue. I can’t explain it.”
How had it happened?
Janson’s mind emptied, and then filled with elliptic curves and right angles. The horrific scene of bloodshed he had just witnessed dissolved into a shifting geometrical schema.
He’d need every fact that was available to him. He connected the point of penetration of Berman’s upstretched arm to the upper-left-quadrant chest wound. An elevation of approximately thirty-five degrees from the horizontal. Yet there was nothing visible in the vicinity at that angle.
Ergo the bullet had not been fired from the imme
diate vicinity.
The mass that Berman had pulled out was confirmation. It had to have been a long-distance shot, toward the end of its trajectory. Had it been fired within a hundred yards, it would have penetrated Berman’s body and punched an exit wound. The amount of crumple and the size of the projectile: the crucial information was there.
He stooped and picked up the bullet. What had it been? A six- or seven-hundred-grain, brass-jacketed round. Penetration had been two inches; had it struck Berman’s head, it would have been instantly fatal. As it was, the lung hemorrhage made a fatal outcome fairly probable. What had it delivered: a hundred, two hundred foot-pounds of force?
Because of air resistance, impact diminished in a non-lineal relation to distance elapsed. The greater the velocity, the greater the air resistance, or drag force, so it wasn’t a simple, linear relation. The velocity-distance matrix involved a first-order differential equation, and Reynolds number—the sort of thing Alan Demarest could solve in his head, maybe Berman, too—but, relying on trained intuition, Janson estimated that the distance traversed would have been twelve hundred yards out, or about two-thirds of a mile.
Janson’s mind filled with the skyline of the area, the Palladian roofs of Hanover Terrace, the round dome of the Central London Mosque … and the minaret, the tall, slender tower with the small balcony, used by the muezzin to summon the faithful to prayer. Lacking intrinsic value, it was likely unguarded; a professional would have had no problem gaining entry. If Janson’s rough calculations were correct, one had.
It was diabolical. A sniper had stationed himself on the balcony of the minaret, a flyspeck from the perspective of Berthwick House, and bided his time, waiting in case his target appeared in the casement windows. He would have had plenty of time to figure out the requisite angles and trajectories. But how many men were even capable of such a shot? Were there forty such in the world? A couple of Russians. The Norwegian sniper who came in first in a worldwide competition hosted in Moscow last year. A couple of Israelis, with their Galil 7.62 rifles. A handful of Americans.