A Gentleman's Game Read online

  Then Tara had left, and they had never spoken of it, and nine days later Ed was sent to Caracas to back up the station on a surveillance job, and two days after that he was discovered dead in his bed in the Caracas Hilton. There’d been no sign of foul play, no sign of violence, and when the autopsy was completed, cause of death was attributed to a cerebral aneurysm, to natural causes.

  Chace shook the memory off, wondering why it had come back now, wondering if it was the death of the day or something else that was making her remember things she’d rather forget. She had a stack of folders beneath her arm, courtesy of D-Int by way of Kate, everything that could be scrounged up on HUM and its associations and activities, and it was brain-time now, not heart-time.

  And she would be damned if she’d let Nicky Poole and Chris Lankford see their Minder One looking anything less than ready to do the job at hand.

  •

  “We were starting to think you’d been eaten,” Poole said as Chace entered.

  “And a tasty treat I’d be,” Chase responded.

  The Pit was aptly named, a cube of a room, dead-white cinderblock walls with no windows and poor ventilation, gray carpet that utterly failed to diminish the cruelty of the concrete floor beneath it. Each Minder’s desk faced out from three of the walls, so that the Minder Two desk faced the door from the hall, and the Minder One desk, on the left as one entered, faced Minder Three’s. The remaining space was occupied with two metal filing cabinets, a coat stand by the door, and a file safe, on top of which sat the go-bags, one for each agent. Inside each small duffel were the bare essentials—toiletries and clean underwear and socks. The only decorations were, above Minder Two’s desk, an old dartboard, and above Minder Three’s, a map of the world that had been printed in 1989.

  Chace dumped the folders she carried onto the already cluttered surface of her desk. “The Boss was in with C when I got up there, kept me waiting for most of an hour.”

  “Are we on, then?” Lankford asked.

  Chace began sorting the folders, speaking without looking up. “It’s going to be a while, Chris, if there’s going to be action at all.”

  “How long a while?”

  “Days? Weeks? Months?” Chace finished breaking down the folders into their stacks, then picked up the stack closest to her and walked it across the room to Lankford’s desk, handing it over. “Maybe never. Crocker says the response might be military.”

  “Then why the hell did they call us in? What are we supposed to do?” Lankford took the folders without looking away from her, and again, she could read the frustration in his gaze.

  “It’s hurry up and wait, you knew that was the job when you signed up. Months of sitting on your soft end punctuated by bouts of bowel-freeing panic. Just because the tragedy was local doesn’t mean it moves any faster.”

  Lankford hesitated, frowned, then gave her a grudging nod of comprehension.

  Chace gathered the second pile, dropped it with Poole, then returned to her desk.

  “Harakat ul-Mujihadin, Abdul Aziz faction,” she told them. “No positive ID yet, but it’s the working theory. D-Ops wants anything useful, anything vaguely operational. Start reading.”

  Without a word, Poole and Lankford dove into the folders.

  Chace took her seat, wooden and designed, it seemed, by one of England’s crueler chiropractors, and began working through her own pile. Most of the information was already known to her, and the files served as a refresher course more than anything else.

  The HUM began as the Harakat ul-Ansar, formed in central Punjab in Pakistan in the early 1980s by Islamic religious elements. The group almost immediately began sending fighters into Afghanistan to assist the Afghani Mujihadin in their war against the Soviet occupation. Fighters were recruited from both central Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and the CIA estimated up to five thousand troops had entered Afghanistan to join the fight by 1987, with recruitment funding coming from Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, including the bin Laden family.

  As the war in Afghanistan progressed, more recruits were drawn from Muslim communities in other countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, and of course Kashmir. Recruits were trained in camps set up in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and run by Hezb Islami (Khalis) Afghan Mujihadin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later went on to join the taleban leadership as Minister of Tribal Affairs.

  The file noted that Haqqani was still alive and at liberty, presumably hiding in the mountains of western Pakistan.

  Following its initial entry into the conflict, the HUM established its own camps in Afghan territory, and Chace found herself leafing through old satellite surveillance shots, views of tents and training courses, and clusters of men engaged in all manner of paramilitary training. The camps were constructed just across the Miran Shah in the NWFP, and declassified Russian intelligence stated that some of the Soviet army’s fiercest opposition had come from HUM-trained soldiers.

  After the Mujihadin taking of Kabul in 1992 and the establishment of the taleban government, the HUA merged with the Harakat ul-Jihad-al-Islami, another Afghani partisan organization, and took the new name Harakat ul-Mujihadin, now directing its energies to defending the rights of Muslims all over the world. It expanded operations to those same countries it had drawn recruits from, and added Chechnya, Bosnia, and Tajikistan for good measure.

  In the aftermath of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Americans launched cruise missile attacks at the HUM training camps, and then again during the Coalition action in Afghanistan, virtually destroying the groups’ training infrastructure and scattering its various elements. D-Int’s assessment, and here Chace found a corresponding CIA analysis, was that the HUM had been driven out of Afghanistan entirely and pursued underground in Pakistan. Given the activity in the region, and the HUM’s ideological similarities to other radical Islamist—read Wahhabist—organizations, it was likely that those HUM elements still surviving had been absorbed into other militant groups throughout the region.

  It was out of these surviving elements that the Abdul Aziz faction was believed to have been born, founded by Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sa’id, an Arab of unknown origin who had been linked to Muslim extremist organizations throughout the Middle and Far East. Abdul Aziz was suspected of supplying material and support to al-Qaeda operatives in northern Africa, as well as providing the Semtex used in the recent Jamaat al-Islamiyya bombings in Micronesia.

  As with all such organizations, information on HUM finances was hard to come by. It was known that the HUM took donations from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Islamic states, as well as from individuals and organizations inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Rayburn noted that the HUM also solicited donations via magazine advertisements and through pamphlets, videotapes, and the like. The extent of the group’s holdings was unknown, but since the crackdown in Pakistan in late 2001, it was assumed much of its money had been redirected into more legitimate ventures—real estate, commodities trading, and the production of consumer goods.

  Chace shut the last folder and sat back, rubbing her eyes. Her watch now read nine minutes to ten, and she realized that she was both tired and ravenous.

  “You find anything in the circulars?” she asked Poole.

  Poole looked up from his file, shook his head slowly. He was a big man, perfect for rugby or leg-breaking, and, if he was to be believed, had spent much of his youth doing both. He certainly was adept with violence, though whether that was a result of his time in the SAS or something else seated far deeper, Chace didn’t know and, in fact, labored to avoid drawing conclusions. It mattered less where the Minders were from than what they could learn, and Chace herself was living proof of that. Everything in her own upbringing and education should have led her to a good marriage and a proper job, and yet here she was.

  Still, of any Minder she had ever known, it was Poole who looked most like the thugs Whitehall and the FCO and all the rest took the Specia
l Section to be. He wasn’t, of course; Crocker would suffer no bullies and no violence junkies, gourmet cooking notwithstanding. Chace trusted and respected Poole, all the more since he hadn’t batted an eye when Tom had left and they had all shifted desks anticlockwise, with Tara taking the first chair. Poole treated her exactly as he had treated Wallace, and Chace was grateful for that.

  “No mention of HUM, no mention of anything brewing targeted at us.” Poole pushed aside the folders on his desk and pulled open his desk drawer, rummaging about. “Unless something got dropped through the cracks, this one was a complete surprise.”

  “I’m not sure I like that very much,” Chace said.

  “Suppose it could be a good sign, at least with regard to follow-ups. You have to figure if they moved more than three men into England, someone somewhere would have noticed something.”

  “You’re putting a lot of faith in the boys at Box.”

  “I am a pillar of faith,” Poole said, smiling now, with a rubber band dangling from an index finger and a paper clip held between two others.

  “Christ, I hate this,” Lankford said abruptly. “I bloody hate this.”

  Chace canted her head toward him, curious. “All fired up, are you, Chris?”

  “If you’re asking if I want a chance to hit back for this, that’s a no-brainer, Tara. I’d give a year’s pay for a crack at these bastards.”

  “And who, exactly, would you hit, Chris? Any suggestions? Unless you’re planning on taking on the whole of the Harakat ul-Mujihadin? And that’s assuming, of course, that it was the HUM and not someone else.”

  Lankford’s chair groaned with dismay as he tilted back in it, looking to Poole, trying to conceal a growing frown. “You know that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about cutting off the head, not taking pieces out of the body.”

  “You’re talking about assassination.”

  He looked back to Chace, and his expression surprised her with its certainty. “Absolutely,” he said.

  Chace didn’t respond, instead glancing to Poole, who was studiously avoiding involvement in the conversation by tilting back in his chair and trying to snatch the darts embedded in the board above him with the makeshift grappling hook he’d made from the rubber band and the paper clip. She didn’t know his stories, but the action told her that Poole understood, in the same way that Lankford’s certainty made it clear that the new Minder Three didn’t.

  After a moment, Chace said, “If it comes, it’ll be D-Ops who tasks it, not us. We just complete the mission, we don’t lobby for the action.”

  “Won’t be you, anyway, Chris,” Poole said, snagging one of the darts and then quickly scooting his chair back as the missile fell, point down, to the floor. “If they call for a hit, it’ll go to Minder One, with me as backup.”

  “Because I’m the baby?”

  Poole grinned at Lankford over his shoulder. “That’s right.”

  “It’s academic,” Chace interposed. “It’ll be weeks before anything is authorized, and that’s if anything is authorized. They’ll want to be damn sure we’re going after the right people before initiating any op.”

  Lankford’s frown deepened. “Then what the hell are we doing here?”

  “Nothing productive. If you boys want to shove off, I’ve no problem with it.”

  Poole grunted and tilted his chair forward, getting to his feet almost immediately. “You’ll tell the Watch?”

  Chace nodded.

  Poole moved past, fetching his coat from the stand.

  “The Boss won’t think we’re ditching?” Lankford asked.

  Chace shook her head. If Crocker had a problem with her turning Poole and Lankford loose, he’d bring it to her, not to them. And Chace doubted that he would have a problem. The fact was, until there was more data, until there was a mission in the offing, the three of them were just killing time. And time didn’t seem inclined to die without a struggle, not while all London was still holding its breath.

  Lankford hesitated, looked from her to Poole, watching the big man pull on his coat before rising to follow suit.

  “For what it’s worth,” he told Chace, “if he asks, tell him I’ll do the job.”

  “Of course you will, Chris,” Chace told him. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Preoperational Background

  Leacock, William D.

  Some nights, before plummeting into his exhausted sleep, Sinan bin al-Baari would stare at the shadowed ceiling of the tent and think about names.

  At twenty-two years old, he had already gone through two, not counting the odd handful that had served as covers or other deceptions, or the dozens that had been thrown unkindly in his direction throughout his youth. He had been christened William Leacock, but that name was long dead to him, and when his thoughts did stray to it—something that happened less and less frequently these days—it seemed to him the name of a boy he had known only briefly and had not much liked.

  Then he had found Allah and taken the name Shuneal bin Muhammad, as was appropriate to one who had found the True Faith. It was the name he’d used upon reaching Egypt, during the months he’d spent studying in Cairo. It was the student’s name, and though he would never be mistaken for an Arab, by that name he was always known as a Muslim. It was that student who had entered his first madrassa, had read ibn Abdul Wahhab’s Book of Tawhid. It was that student who had begun collecting the cassette tapes sold outside of mosques throughout Cairo, sermons by the great Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia. In his room, shared with Aamil and six other students, they had listened to the tapes for hours. To the sermons of the late Abdul Aziz bin Baz, to the passion of Sheikh Wajdi Hamzeh al-Ghazawi, to the fury of Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, and, most of all, to the faith of Dr. Faud al-Shimmari.

  It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who had first heard jihad described as the Sixth Pillar of Islam. It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who had nodded his head in agreement at al-Ghazawi’s words when his recorded voice said, “Jihad is the peak of Islam.”

  It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who, with Aamil and two others, had begun lurking in the mosques and cafés of Cairo in the vain hope of making contact with some member of the Jamaat al-Islamiyya. But although Shuneal bin Muhammad was a Muslim, even perhaps a Wahhabist, he was not, and would never be, an Egyptian. After three months of fruitless attempts at contact, it had been a lean and quiet man named el-Sayd who had explained it to him in the back of a Cairo café, off Sharia Muski, in the Islamic Quarter.

  “We fight to free our country,” el-Sayd had said quietly. “We fight to overthrow this government of mushrikun, to make Egypt a true Islamic state. That is not your fight, Shuneal, and you have no place in it.”

  “I want to be a jihadi,” Shuneal had answered in his best Arabic, the tongue finally beginning to sound natural on his lips. “I am a Muslim, and I must follow all the teachings, and you would deny me the Sixth Pillar of our faith. If you will not take me, where do I go?”

  El-Sayd had started to answer, then bitten it back, instead finishing his coffee. Shuneal bin Muhammad had waited, unmoving in his seat, staring. Aamil, seated beside him, seemed to barely breathe.

  “Continue your studies,” el-Sayd had said finally. “Be true in your faith. Allah, all praise to Him, will provide a way.”

  And with that, Shuneal and Aamil were escorted out of the café, to return to the madrassa with their disappointment.

  Less than a week later, the imam of the school spoke to Shuneal and Aamil after isha’, the evening prayer.

  “You are favored,” he told them both. “Prince Salih bin Muhammad bin Sultan, may Allah watch and keep him, has offered to bring certain of our students to Madinah, that they may make the Hajj. You have both been chosen.”

  •

  Sponsorship for the Hajj wasn’t unusual, but Shuneal felt fortunate nonetheless. To properly perform the Fifth Pillar—to make the pilgrimage to Makkah—was to guarantee one’s entry into Paradise, the desire of every Muslim. That Shuneal and Aamil had found a ben
efactor was remarkable; that such good fortune fell upon them at such a young age was extraordinary. There were millions who, in their lives, would never have the opportunity to see Makkah, to walk in the Prophet’s shadow, prevented by either poverty or other provenance.

  Near the end of January, Shuneal and Aamil flew from Cairo to Madinah in a private jet, supplied by Prince Salih bin Muhammad bin Sultan. Eighteen others traveled with them, young madrassa students like themselves, gathered from other schools in Egypt, Tunisia, and Sudan.

  The jet was like nothing Shuneal had ever experienced, and it spoke loudly of the Prince’s generosity and wealth, from the walnut-inlaid fixtures to the thick red carpeting on the floor and the marble-topped counters in the bathroom. They sat on comfortable couches and in overstuffed chairs, and Aamil drove the blood from his hands as he clutched the armrests of his seat when the plane climbed into the air, and Shuneal realized he had never flown before.

  At the airport, they were met by a guide from the Prince himself. He escorted them to an air-conditioned coach, then drove them to a private home in Madinah. There they were given rooms to share and a meal to eat, then taken to Masjid al-Nabee, the Mosque of the Holy Prophet, for prayers and the recitation of ziyrat. Kneeling toward Makkah, so close to the Holy City, Shuneal found it impossible to clear his head, to focus on his worship. Here, where it was said that one prayer was worth more than a thousand prayers offered anywhere else, except in Makkah, he felt insincere, and the more he fought his mind to concentrate and focus, the more obsessed with his thoughts he became.