The Sword E-Book

Daniel Easterman

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 505

Beschreibung

'His heart was beating like a drum at dawn. Something clawed at his stomach, something with talons from his worst nightmares.' An invitation to visit one of Cairo's antiquarian booksellers sets in train a series of terrifying ordeals for Jack Goodrich. Having been shown a priceless sword claimed to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad, Jack returns home brimming with excitement. But that's when the nightmare begins - A dangerous new movement within the ranks of fundamentalist Islam wish to put a new Caliph on the throne, to rule the Muslim world. To do this they require the Sword, and they will stop at nothing to get it. With the deadliest of weapons in his hands, if the new Caliph were to declare jihad, the consequences would be catastrophic. This is a tense and gripping thriller on a truly international scale that poses a chilling question: how can you stop a holy war before it starts?

Leseprobe

The Sword

DANIEL EASTERMAN

To Beth. Who else? Who better? To put it differently: Here’s another one, Dido.

Quem for beijado por ti Atése esquece de Deus

Acknowledgements

Many, many thanks to those who helped get this right, in particular my dear wife Beth, for her shrewd comments on the text and for keeping everything running smoothly despite her own busy schedule, my agent Vanessa Holt, for her skilful management and advice, and my astute publisher Susie Dunlop. Thanks too to Sebastian Gutteridge, who carried out so well some calculations that seemed impossible to me.

Al-jannatahtazilalal-suyuf

‘Paradise lies beneath the shadows of swords.’

From the sayings of the Prophet

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsEpigraphPART ONECHAPTER ONE: In the Light Garden of the Angel KingCHAPTER TWO: A Jinni of the JinnCHAPTER THREE: In the City VictoriousCHAPTER FOUR: Broken EnglishCHAPTER FIVE: The EgyptianCHAPTER SIX: The Angel of DeathCHAPTER SEVEN: From Here to EternityCHAPTER EIGHT: The Sword of AllahCHAPTER NINE: Brothers in ArmsCHAPTER TEN: Death and the MaidenCHAPTER ELEVEN: Prime TimeCHAPTER TWELVE: Talons from his Worst NightmaresPART TWOCHAPTER THIRTEEN: A Highland RefugeCHAPTER FOURTEEN: FionaCHAPTER FIFTEEN: Whisky GaloreCHAPTER SIXTEEN: A Shot in the DarkCHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Gaelic PsalmCHAPTER EIGHTEEN: A Light in the DarknessPART THREECHAPTER NINETEEN: The Winds of Paradise CHAPTER TWENTY: Eyeless in Cairo CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: An Assistant ChargéCHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: One Thousand Nights and One NightCHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: In the City of the Quick and the DeadCHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: TaxiCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The Crimson and the WhiteCHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Blessed by MadnessCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: An Aryan ChildCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: HeadlinesCHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: At the Foot of the PharaohCHAPTER THIRTY: Cross-dressingCHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: AdventCHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Through a Glass DarklyCHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: A Bridge Too FarPART FOURCHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Persephone in EgyptCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: GeorginaCHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: VespersCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: In the Syrian PorticoCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Midnight MassCHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: The Father of TerrorCHAPTER FORTY: Christmas DayCHAPTER FORTY-ONE: On the RunCHAPTER FORTY-TWO: A VigilCHAPTER FORTY-THREE: Behind BarsCHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: The Absolute SuspectPART FIVECHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: Ill-met by LamplightCHAPTER FORTY-SIX: The People of ParadiseCHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: Son et LumièreCHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: In the Chamber of the KingCHAPTER FORTY-NINE: Across an Ancient SeaAbout the AuthorAlso by Daniel EastermanCopyright

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

In the Light Garden of the Angel King

The Gardez-Zarghun Shahr Road 

10 miles south of Zareh Sharan

Eastern Afghanistan

Monday, 27th November

High up in the hills, where ospreys danced with amur falcons, and white-tailed eagles swooped on what little prey could be found in the arid landscape, a man with powerful binoculars was watching events unfold beneath him. The binoculars were fixed on a small tripod. They could magnify objects one hundred and fifty times. That was enough to let the unseen watcher in his eyrie keep track of everything that took place on the valley floor.

A long wooden stake, about six inches in diameter and just taller than a man, had been fixed in the dried riverbed the previous day. This morning a jeep had arrived with seven Taliban soldiers on board. They had offloaded a single man who was clearly their prisoner. He seemed to have been badly treated: what the watcher could see of his flesh was covered in cuts and bruises, and he walked painfully, like a man who has been whipped on the legs or bastinadoed.

They had fastened the prisoner to the stake, with his arms tied behind it. Even though it was clear that the prisoner could never work his way free, one of the Taliban was told to stay behind to act as an armed guard. The others drove off in the jeep, followed by a cloud of ochre dust until it was out of sight. When the roar of its badly tuned engine finally faded, an absolute silence descended on the valley.

The watcher adjusted a tiny receiver in his ear. It had a wireless connection to a state-of-the-art parabolic microphone that allowed him to hear a normal conversation at almost one thousand feet away. The parabolic dish was turned directly toward the stake below, near which the microphone had been placed during the night. All morning there’d been silence. Now there was music from the guard’s radio.

Not very far away, the mountain peaks were white with snow. A bitter cold lay on everything. It was as though the air was ice.

* * *

Some yards set back from the road, the prisoner heard the same music. Somewhere behind him, a Dari song crackled on a small radio. It was an upbeat little number, a party song, Az yad-e rokhatmastam… ‘I am drunk remembering your face’. He strained for the words, as though eager to snatch some meaning from these last minutes of his life. It was being broadcast by Radio Free Afghanistan. Local stations no longer dared play music, not even hit songs by pop idol Farhad Darya. More and more of the country was gradually falling back into the hands of the Taliban, and music was being banned again. Except for this one thing, the prisoner thought: he was in the hands of the Taliban, and his guard was tuning in to the latest hits.

He sighed, trying to size up the area to which he’d been brought. Juniper, tamarisk, and wild pistachio trees dotted the scrub-covered hillsides, but there was nothing down below but rocks. They’d brought him to this spot several hours ago, when the sun was starting to rise out of India and Pakistan, lifting itself over the Toba Kakar range, just in front of him. To the north, the Hindu Kush straddled the world, its white-topped peaks emblems of impossibility.

Just across the border, where the Toba Kakar mountains get into full swing, lay the vast tribal region of Waziristan, where Muslim missionaries preached to the pagan inhabitants. Up there in the mountains, Pakistan had been developing its nuclear weapons programme, and a little further east, had carried out its infamous test explosions. What was worse, Waziristan was now Taliban country again, with Islamic rule imposed across its towns and villages. Khost, not many miles from where he now stood, had been the original recruitment base for al-Qaeda, under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s doctor and right-hand man.

Western analysts thought al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been defanged. The prisoner knew better. Militants were still crossing the border openly into Afghanistan. Some came in cars provided by Pakistan’s intelligence service, others made their way more slowly and more securely on foot by night, using local woodsmen as guides.

His current mission concerned something else entirely, something he thought – with a gnawing in the pit of his stomach – could prove more dangerous than the other two put together.

His captors had taken him several yards off the narrow road – it was more a track than a road – to a flat spot in which a tall post had been planted. They had tied his hands behind the post and left him with a single guard, a powerfully built Durrani tribesman who wore a striped turban, both ends of which hung down tress-like past his shoulders.

The guard sat on a rock, catching what little heat he could from the sun, still far from its midday position. His foot tapped to the forbidden music.

The prisoner, a short-haired man in his late twenties called John Navai, looked round for the hundredth time. This was one of the most desolate places in the world, he thought, not a region where the cavalry would come sweeping down from the hills. He was not surprised that no one had come to rescue him, by road or by helicopter: from the beginning he’d known that he would go in alone and, if captured, die alone. His identity had to remain a dark secret, even if it cost him his life. John was an MI6 agent, and his mission to Afghanistan was, he had been told, of supreme importance to British national security.

They’d already interrogated him higher up in the hills, at a secret base accessible only by mule and nimble foot. It had been a place of steep precipices, of crumbling rock on twisting paths, of deep gullies, and the snow-tipped needles of unnumbered mountain peaks. A world familiar to him, yet at heart as alien as the empty craters of Mars, a secret, inviolable realm that no one entered or left without permission.

They’d kept him in a smoke-filled cave, among a stinking collection of sheep and goats, and shackled him to a ring set deep in the wall. The floor had been covered in bat droppings, and in the day, further down from where he’d been held, the ceiling was black with their velvet hanging bodies.

His cave, he began to realise, was part of a complex, linked by underground passages. It was perhaps fifty feet below the surface, and accessed by a steep sloping tunnel whose entrance was heavily concealed behind undergrowth. A ventilation shaft set in the ceiling was the only source of air from the outside.

Each day they’d fed him a breakfast of boiled curd and stale bread. As he ate, a turbaned cleric called Hajj Ahmad had preached to him gently in English, asking him to convert to Islam and thereby save himself pain and death. Each day he’d remained quiet, and the akhund had smiled in respect for his decision. He was a Christian, they said, so they would not put him to death for his refusal to convert. If they killed him, it would not be for spiritual obstinacy but for his other offences.

What these were was soon explained. Hajj Ahmad said that the prisoner was a British spy, that he worked for MI6, or that he was a UK military intelligence officer attached to the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps HQ in Kabul. The prisoner was dressed in a flat-topped Afghan hat, and wore a woollen cloak over his body; he could have passed for a native. He did not admit to speaking either Dari or Pashtu, but his interrogator had only to look at his face to see he might have Iranian parentage, even if he did speak English with a strong English accent. Hajj Ahmad had a PhD in engineering from Newcastle University, and he had a fine grasp of English dialects. His prisoner was middle class, from somewhere in the south of the country. A lot of Iranians had fled to places like Brighton after the revolution, and Hajj Ahmad was sure this man was the child of exiled parents. Guesswork, of course; but Hajj Ahmad was good at making guesses.

The torture started every day after the call to convert. It was carried out by a succession of Afghan fighters under the direction of their soft-spoken leader, Hajj Ahmad. The prisoner knew exactly who his captor was. Hajj Ahmad was an Egyptian Arab, like his close friend al-Zawahiri. Originally a member of Egypt’s notorious Islamic Jihad, he’d been recruited in 1981 by a group set up by bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.

He’d stayed on as a member of al-Qaeda, one of several hundred ‘Afghan Arabs’ who’d realised the impossibility of safely returning to their home countries, where warrants were out for their arrest. In 1998 he’d helped set up bin Laden’s umbrella organisation, the Islamic Front for the Fight against the Jews and Crusaders. A medieval name, perhaps, but the Jews were citizens of modern countries, and the Crusaders were Americans, Europeans, Australians and anyone who supported them.

He had studied torture under the Russians; in exchange, he’d passed on raw intelligence, enough to convince them he was their man, when all along he was God’s and no one else’s. His given name was Ahmad and his next was Ibn Abdullah, the son of God’s servant. In his heart, whatever his actions, he tried to serve his Creator.

They’d tortured their prisoner by every means available. They possessed almost no technology – no electric prods, no high-speed drills, no headphones through which to deliver high-pitched sound – but long centuries of warfare – and Hajj Ahmad’s tutors – had taught them how to hurt a man.

They knew when to start and when to stop, when to cut and when to staunch, when to use harsh words and when a display of affection. They’d used flame – a little here, a little there – and near-suffocation, pressure from heavy rocks that nearly broke his spine and took whatever breath he had away, sharp knives that flayed him, and bandages and ointment to help him heal, ready for another session in three or four days’ time. The hours passed slowly, as though their one and only purpose was to bring pain, and then intensify it.

None of what they did was sadistic. They wanted information from him, and he made a point of giving them none, not even his name. He could have stopped the pain at any moment, just by telling them what they wanted to know. But he knew that, if he did that, they’d kill him anyway.

He’d spoken with them in English, since the slightest hint that he knew either Dari or Pashtu would have blown his cover. In an attempt to draw him out, Hajj Ahmad asked one of his fighters to recite Persian poems to him. In between torture sessions, the man would chant softly to himself, mystical verses by Rumi which he knew by heart, and his prisoner would listen and remember his father’s voice reciting the same poetry. But he never gave himself away, not by so much as a flicker of an eyelid.

A damp chill would creep into the cave, where it was cold in all seasons. It hurt at times to remember the light. When the sun shone, Afghanistan was more beautiful than any place he’d known.

There had been a day when he’d visited the tomb of the emperor Babur in Kabul. Though badly damaged by the recent wars, it had retained its character, a low roof and pillars over a simple sarcophagus, swallowed by light and air. The inscription on the tomb said that Babur lived eternally in the light garden of the angel King, where he was both king and angel.

Sometimes, they would let him sit by the entrance, looking out on a night sky that blazed with millions of stars. They told him the stars were lamps held by the hands of angels in the first firmament. He did not believe them. They told him God was watching. And he still did not believe them.

CHAPTER TWO

A Jinni of the Jinn

His legs were starting to give way, and his back hurt as though a thousand demons of hell were attacking it. Slowly, he allowed himself to slide down the pillar, fearing all the time he might never get back up again. Perhaps they’d just shoot him in the back of the neck while he crouched there. He hoped he wouldn’t piss himself when the time came. He hadn’t emptied his bladder since just after waking, and his initial discomfort was rapidly turning to pain.

He looked up and down the road. There had been no traffic for hours now. His captors must have sealed off this stretch of track. He wondered if they’d leave him exposed to the elements once they’d finished with him.

He’d told Hajj Ahmad that he was a Christian, that his mother had brought him up in the Anglican Church, and that, as a Christian, he was entitled to the protection of Islam. Christians and Jews, he said, were guaranteed their safety, even if they did not convert.

‘You are deluding yourself,’ the mulla had replied. ‘We are at war with the Christians and the Jews. The sheikhs have declared jihad, and they have made holy war a duty for all true believers. You are a spy in a time of war, and your life is forfeit a thousand times over.’

He had told Hajj Ahmad that he had a wife and child at home, that his wife was innocent of any wrongdoing on his part, but that if they killed him, they would kill her as well, and ruin a little child’s life. His wife was called June and his little girl was Mary. He told that to Hajj Ahmad, as though their names would make him soften.

‘Do you want to make June a widow and Mary an orphan? She’s five years old.’

‘How many widows and orphans have the Americans and British made in Afghanistan?’ Hajj Ahmad rebuked him. ‘In Iraq? Innocent women, innocent children, who died because they were Muslims. My wife was Iraqi. She was in Baghdad when your war started, visiting her family. They all died in an American attack. You are nothing special. Your heart is nothing special. Your wife and child are nothing special. Your love for them and their love for you are nothing special. If you do not tell me what I want to know, then I will make this torture seem as nothing. If you think you have suffered before this, think again. I can inflict more pain than you can imagine. You will tell me what I want to know, and then I will reward you with a speedy death.’

The sound of a motor truck came from further up the valley. As it drew nearer, the guard switched off his little radio and concealed it in his turban. John watched him stand and come towards him.

‘You can’t squat down there! Hajj Ahmad is coming. You can’t let him see you like this. He’ll think you’ve been resting.’

They came back in a battered Ford pick-up that showed traces of blue paint but was an overall rust colour, dented and holed, but very fast. It came down from the hills, trailing clouds of ochre-coloured dust, like a winged demon or a jinni of the jinn.

There were three men in all: two guards sporting old Russian AK47s and bandoliers stuffed full of magazines, both seated in the rear of the truck next to some large planks. At the wheel was Hajj Ahmad. They parked the truck about twenty yards behind the pole. Hearing the tailgate go down, John wanted to see what they were up to, but he’d barely managed to get himself back to a standing position when the cleric entered his field of vision.

‘You have been very brave,’ his tormentor said. ‘But we are in the endgame now, and your courage will soon be tested beyond breaking point. You will break, I assure you of that. But the sooner you tell me what I want to know, the sooner I will give you a quick and painless death.’

Out of sight behind them, the mulla’s companions, joined by the guard, had started to assemble something from their wood, hammering away with easy, sharp strokes that rang out among the steep hills like the notes of an imperfect bell.

He spoke to the mulla quickly.

‘Don’t you realise that anything I tell you in the heat of pain will be deliberately misleading? I’m not a spy. I’ve told you this a thousand times, and still you won’t listen to me. I’m a journalist. I work for the Guardian. Have you heard of it?’

‘I used to read it,’ said Hajj Ahmad, smiling. ‘A fine newspaper.’

‘Then why won’t you believe me? My papers are in my bag, but you refuse to treat them as genuine. All you have to do is make a telephone call to my editor, and he’ll confirm my story.’

‘I would like to do that. But if I made a phone call to London, don’t you think I’d soon be tracked down? You must know that if you know nothing else. That’s your job, isn’t it? Tracking people down.’

‘Then send a telegram, something.’

Hajj Ahmad smiled.

‘I have done that. One of our people sent it from Kabul. A man calling himself Ronald Anderson answered. He confirmed that a journalist called Mike Smith is indeed on the staff of the Guardian. Unfortunately, that did not get you out of the woods. Someone called Clement, or perhaps a secretary acting on his behalf, made a bad mistake. They sent the return telegram from a post office situated inside MI6 Headquarters. Vauxhall Cross, if my memory serves me. No doubt you know the post office in question.

‘Now, if you’ll forgive me, I think my friends have made things ready. Let me unfasten the cord round your wrists.’

He felt himself freed, but was frozen to the spot, afraid to look round, for he knew that, when he did so, he’d see his fate and that the mulla and his guards would permit no escape. The heart had gone out of him. How could his cover have been blown so stupidly?

‘Mr Smith, or whatever your real name is, I have brought you here to be executed. I now intend to carry that out. Let me warn you, however, that you will not die quickly. The death I intend to inflict will be excessively painful, probably more painful than you can imagine. I will explain it all in a moment. Now, please turn round.’

Behind him stood a cross, seven feet or more high and five feet wide, a blasphemous intrusion on the Afghan countryside, a symbol of an alien religion and an alien deity.

John’s first reaction was horror, not so much that they were planning to crucify him and to subject him to God knows what while they did so, as that the cross itself had no right to be in this place.

‘This is blasphemy,’ he said. ‘The Koran clearly states that Jesus was never killed or crucified.’

‘But it goes on to say that someone else was substituted for him. There was a cross, the Koran has never denied it. But the Prophet Jesus never died on it. And you must know yourself that crucifixion was a common form of execution in the Roman empire.

‘Let me explain to you what will happen. It’s important you not be in the slightest doubt about what you will suffer as long as you are on the cross.

‘You will be lifted onto the crossbar and your arms will be tied to it. Your ankles will be nailed to the outsides of the vertical column. When that is done, we will put long nails through your wrists, between these bones…’ He pointed to his wrist, unsure of his terminology. John closed his eyes tightly, struggling to take it all in.

‘The radius and the ulna,’ he said, as though helping a student through a translation exercise.

‘Thank you. Yes, the nails will go in between your radius and your ulna. Not through the hand, as your Christian painters would show it. The bones of the hand are too weak, they would not hold your weight. Your ankles will be the same, between two bones.

‘You will also find a small seat on the vertical strut. It is there to give some relief. It will keep you alive longer, it will prolong your agony. Death may come in hours, if you are lucky. But luck is never the issue among believers. It is God’s will that counts. And today, God wills you to suffer.

‘You will die from one or more causes. There will be the shock of being nailed: if you have a weak heart, that will kill you. You could become dehydrated, but we will take steps to prevent that. Over the hours, your chest muscles will grow weaker and weaker, until you suffocate.

‘Once you have been suspended, the weight of your body will pull you down until your shoulders and elbows are dislocated. They will pop out of your joints, tearing ligaments in the process, making it much more difficult for you to raise your chest and breathe. Because your arms are stretched out, your chest cavity will be expanded, making it even harder to drag air in.

‘But you will come to all that in time. Or you can be spared. Tell me who you came here to see, and what it was you brought for him. Or, if not a thing, information about a thing. Where it is, who has it, how it got there. Do you understand? Did you bring a sword, or news of a sword? You know what sword I mean, don’t you? Did you see a document, a letter? An Arabic letter? A very ancient letter. Do you know where the sword is? Has it left Cairo? Have your people taken it, or is it still with Goodrich?’

John did know what the mulla meant: he knew nothing about a document, but he had heard about a sword, and someone had told him about Goodrich. Goodrich didn’t have the sword, they were pretty sure of that. His people were sure al-Masri had stolen it, and they were almost as sure it had been sent to Afghanistan, to bin Laden. That was why he had been sent to Afghanistan, to find out. But if only he could hold out long enough, he swore he would pass nothing on to Hajj Ahmad. Everything depended on the sword, on whether it was genuine or not, on whether they could stop it falling into the wrong hands. Beside it, his life was of no greater importance than the life of the yellow snail crawling at his feet.

He said nothing, so they stripped him and nailed him, first his right foot, then his left, and the pain was more terrible than anything he’d ever known before. And when they pinned him to the crossbar by nails through his wrists, he screamed for mercy and wet himself, and prayed for a quick death.

He hung like that for hours, and every moment it felt as though his entire body was about to fall apart. There was no part of him that did not ache ten thousand times, no inch of his flesh that did not burn, no scrap of muscle that was not torn or in the process of tearing. The effort of lifting himself up onto the little seat brought a few moments’ relief to his overstrained chest and lungs, at the price of pain beyond all measure in his ankles and feet. But the second he took the weight off his ankles, he would slump and suffer the double agony of pain in his ankles and a sensation in his chest as though he was drowning in lard.

He tried to think of anything that might distract from the mounting agony – his home in Cambridge, his parents, who had fled from men like Mulla Ahmad all those years ago and made a new life for themselves in England, June, Mary, old friends, colleagues; but none of these thoughts lasted more than a second or two. He tried to remember pieces of music, songs that had moved him, singing ‘Jerusalem’ at morning assembly in the Leys School, poetry that had lifted his spirits, his father’s voice rising and falling as he chanted odes by Hafiz in the early morning, June’s face that had bewitched him all those years ago; but the memories merely flickered like meteorites passing through a dark sky, and vanished.

Moments passed, hours passed, for all he knew days went by, and still he hung, thinking that every moment he would die. From time to time he managed to open his eyes, and on every occasion he would catch momentary sight of Hajj Ahmad, standing still and silent, watching him. There was blood in his eyes, mixed with tears, and blood ran in streams from his nose and ears.

He thought he would have screamed out loud from the pain, but he did not. His lungs could scarcely draw air into his chest, much less provide the strength to shout or scream. At most he moaned, and did so until his moans were the only sound in the universe, and his body became the universe, and the universe was in freefall, spinning out of control.

‘Just speak to me, Mike. Just a word. A name. A hint. Tell me where the sword is kept, tell me who has it, and I will end this for you in an instant.’

He struggled to open his eyes, and through a blood-red haze saw his persecutor facing him, lifted up to his level by some sort of stepladder or other elevation.

‘How…long have…I been…up here?’ he asked, his voice rasping, dry as sandpaper, each word choking him.

‘Half an hour,’ the mulla said. ‘I’ll come back.’

Half an hour? It had seemed like half an eternity. What would an hour be like? How could he get through a day? How could he face a long night when bitter cold would replace the sunshine?

All semblance of thought vanished. He was just a machine struggling for a moment’s comfort or an end. Like an automaton, he would push up and fall back down, tearing fragments of muscle, ripping ligaments, severing nerves, shredding tissue.

Several times he collapsed into unconsciousness, only to be brought round by a rapidly acting drug Hajj Ahmad injected into his thigh. The stimulant kept him awake for long, unendurable minutes, until it wore off and he sank back into a deep well of darkness again. He lost all track of time. His seconds and minutes were measured now in pain.

‘How long?’ he asked, his voice croaking with thirst. It was as if his throat had been filled with hot sand.

‘Ten minutes,’ came the sheikh’s placid voice.

‘Tha…that’s…impossible.’

‘Just one word. Just one name.’

He tried to shake his head, but it would not move. His heart was beating faster and faster, as though about to burst. Hajj Ahmad’s drug was racing about his system; he could feel it weakening his heart.

More blissful blackness, more agony pulling out of it. His buttocks were raw from the slipping and sliding of the rough wooden seat beneath them. He could feel his ankle-and wrist-bones grating against the thick nails that held him in place, and the pain in those places was transmitted across his body into all his joints. His mouth and nose were full of blood and mucus. Fear cut through him like a rusty sword.

* * *

Up in the hills, a lammergeier circled on long wings, drawn to the spot by the smell of blood and the sight of naked flesh. The watcher put down his binoculars, balancing them so that the lenses would not catch the slanting sun. From a pocket he took out a mobile and dialled a number halfway across the world. The call was transmitted to England by one of several US telecommunications satellites constantly orbiting the earth.

‘Malcolm? Listen, I think he’s about to break. They’re going to kill him anyway. If he talks, they’ll know we can’t find the bloody sword. In the next few minutes. Do I have your permission to go ahead? Yes? I’ll do it now. Give my love to Christina. Ciao.’

Shutting off the phone, he reached behind him for a rifle that was already attached to a short tripod, and made it fast in front of him. It was a Barrett .50, the best sniper’s rifle in existence. With its long barrel, it could deliver almost 13,000 foot/pounds of energy, enough to kill a man half a mile and more away. It had already been zeroed earlier that morning, and all he needed to do was aim and fire. To be sure of the wind and how it might affect his shot, he used a whizz wheel, calculating the correct angle for the shot.

Down on the valley floor, Hajj Ahmad watched his victim writhe, and knew he had to make up his mind quickly. If he left his prisoner much longer, the man’s heart would give out or he would suffocate without giving the information the sheikh wanted. Or he might go on for several more hours. Despite what Hajj Ahmad had said, Smith had not been on the cross for minutes, but for over three hours now. He had held out well, but now it was time to bring things to an end.

He went up the stepladder again and spoke loudly to his victim, promising him rest at last.

At that same moment, from out of the clear sky, from the habitation of eagles and hawks, from the distant hills, came a sharp report. The bullet took the dying man in the chin, passing through his lower skull and destroying his cerebellum, killing him instantly. He did not choke or cry out, but simply slumped, blood pouring from the wound in his head.

Hajj Ahmad leapt from the ladder and threw himself flat on the ground. His colleagues followed suit. But there were no more shots. With eyes accustomed to the harsh terrain, they scoured the hills ahead of them, but they saw and heard no one.

Hajj Ahmad swore beneath his breath, then got to his feet, dusting himself down. The marksmanship, he thought, had been worthy of an Afghan, but no Afghan possessed the sort of rifle that could cover such a distance with such accuracy. He didn’t even think it worth sending men out to hunt down the gunman: whoever had carried this out would have back-up built in all the way to London.

CHAPTER THREE

In the City Victorious

Two months earlier

Cairo, Egypt

Monday, 18th September

2.05 p.m.

Cairo was hot and stuffy, the air thick with sand from the desert, the Nile swollen and turgid, its water ochre-coloured. From north to south, from east to west, the great city was stuffed with people, clogged with cars, raucous with donkeys, motorbikes, and the crackling loudspeakers of fifteen thousand mosques. This was the largest city in the whole of Africa, the thirteenth most populous in the world. Fifteen million people scrabbled for space along the narrow margins on either side of the Nile.

Jack Goodrich was English, nominally C of E, and a member of King’s College, Cambridge, where he’d been an undergraduate and postgraduate; but for several years now he’d counted himself one of the fifteen million, a citizen of this great metropolis. Cairo was raucous, dirty, smelly, hot, dusty, and unkempt, but he loved the place with almost religious devotion.

He had barely sat down in the battered leather barber’s chair when the first bomb went off. The barber, an astute man of middle years called Ali Hamid, swore softly in Irish, pog ma hon. It was an old swearword, taught him years before by an Irish professor, with the assurance that it would be meaningless to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the human race.

Jack, being English and famously imperturbable, ignored the imprecation. He knew what it meant, of course, everybody at the university did, but he’d never let on to Ali.

‘Where the fuck was that?’ he exclaimed.

Ali, who owned the little barber’s shop near the American University, preferred not to think of the bombings that had been terrorising the city in recent months. They were bad for business.

‘Nowhere near here,’ he reassured his client. But they both knew that the bomb might have been anywhere: a small bomb close at hand, a large one far away, and any number of combinations in between. It might have been a suicide bomber at work, or a car bomb detonated by a timer.

Imperturbable or not, Goodrich was anxious. His greatest worry was that the explosion had been at either the American or the British embassy, which were both fairly near at hand, just a step across the river. His wife worked at the British embassy as a secretary. Ever since they’d been in Cairo the Goodriches had shared a single ongoing fear – that one or the other might be caught up in a terrorist attack, either at the embassy or the university.

‘Stay for now, Professor,’ Ali said. ‘The bomb could have been anywhere. It’s too early for news, but I’ll leave the radio on for the first bulletin.’

He spoke in Arabic, in the dialect form peculiar to Egypt, in which Goodrich was as fluent as any foreigner had a right to be. Over the years, the professor had learnt more Cairene Arabic from his shaving and hair-cutting sessions with Ali than from the formal classes he’d once paid for in the department.

Ali stood poised, shaving brush in hand. He was a prima donna among barbers, if such a thing exists. If he’d been on a stage, he would have strutted. The lather glistened on the bristles, rich as cream. Goodrich shook his head, telling him to wait.

‘I’ll try ringing. If she answers, there’ll be no need to worry.’

There had been several terrorist attacks in the past week, most of them on foreign targets.

He took out his mobile and dialled. Nothing. He looked at the signal bars.

‘Ali, what’s wrong with this place? I can get a signal across the road anywhere in the university. I can get one next door, in the Café Faruq…’

Ali shrugged.

‘We’ve been through this before,’ he said. ‘You have to be patient.’

He bent forward and switched off the radio.

‘Try now,’ he said.

This time it rang, and Emilia answered.

‘Go away, Jack. We’re perfectly all right. The bomb was right on the other side of the river, at the Anglo-American Hospital. We’re still waiting for a report on the casualties.’

‘Doesn’t Dr Fathi work there?’

‘Yes, and his wife is a nurse there too. Jack, you’ve got to stop calling me like this. Every time a bomb goes off somewhere in Cairo, the phones in here all start ringing like mad. You should know by now that this is one of the safest places in the Middle East. We learnt our lessons from the Yanks in Mogadishu and Lebanon and Baghdad.’

‘I get worried, that’s all. And I don’t buy your story about how safe the embassy is, or how much the Americans learnt in Beirut. There’s nowhere a suicide bomber can’t get to if he really tries.’

‘Someday you should try getting past security here. You’ll see. Now, shouldn’t you be working?’

‘I’m in Ali’s. Having a shave.’

Emilia had never met Ali. The little barber’s shop was strictly male territory.

‘Tell him to go easy on the aftershave, please.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’re lucky you’ll find out tonight. Now, my boss wants me to take some dictation.’

The connection went dead. Jack put the phone back in his pocket.

Ali straightened the striped sheet over Jack and freshened the shaving cream in his old, cracked mug. No one lathered like Ali. Goodrich had once suggested he get a badger-hair brush, but the barber had gently explained that badgers were religiously unclean, which meant they could neither be eaten nor touched.

In his way, Ali was devout. He prayed five times a day, fasted every Ramadan, attended his local mosque at noon on Fridays and dozed through the sermon. Best of all, he went on a pilgrimage every three or four years – not to Mecca (which he was saving for his retirement), but to the annual moulid celebrations at the tomb of the great Egyptian saint, Sidi Ahmad al-Badawi.

He started to strop his straight razor lazily against the leather strap reserved for his own use. He never shaved until the edge was perfect. This was what he liked best about his job: the fact that his regular customers trusted him. Bearing in mind that most of them were teachers from the AU, Americans and British for the most part, their trust said a great deal. In Algeria, the hard-line religious had made throat cutting their trademark. The trust went both ways: in Baghdad, extremists had cut the throats of barbers who shaved the cheeks of non-believers.

As Ali began to scrape the bristles from Goodrich’s cheeks, radio news stated that there had been a second explosion at the Carrefour supermarket in the Maadi Mall to the south. No more information was available. In the stillness that followed, they could hear sirens drift through the city streets. This was the largest city in Africa, but every time the sirens sang, it seemed to shrink to a handful of streets and alleyways.

CHAPTER FOUR

Broken English

Cairo

2.30 p.m.

Back on the street, he experienced that momentary panic all outsiders feel in Cairo: too much traffic, too many people, too much noise and dust, too many smells. He was standing on a pavement in Tahrir Square, the city’s largest public space. Big Mercedes saloons (‘chicken’s arses’ in local slang) snarled at buses, the buses roared at anything that threatened to get in their way, mopeds charged bravely (and often fatally) between everything else, and everywhere Goodrich looked he saw young men in jeans and children in baggy sweaters, old women in shabby galabiyyas, young women in headscarves all risking their necks just to cross the road.

He looked at his surroundings: traffic signs that had gathered dirt and rust long ago, posters for the latest products of the Egyptian film studios, shop signs in Arabic and broken English, the catch of light on dirty window-panes, motes of dust continually descending in shafts of sunshine. On one corner, the face of the Sphinx stared into nothingness. Opposite, a young movie star called Basma turned her large eyes and seductive smile on passers-by. Everywhere, the intricate turns and twists of Arabic letters graced the square. Past and present joined forces at every juncture. Time was nothing here.

He passed shop doorways throbbing with the latest Egyptian pop tunes, walked past a beggar with his hand outstretched, and gave him money, one Egyptian pound. Not a lot of money, he thought, only a few pennies in English terms. But a little went a long way here.

He looked at his watch. Half past two. It should start to cool down in a little while, but for the present it was hot, dusty and noisy, and there was no getting away from it. Most Cairenes lived their lives in single rooms, whole families were crammed into ridiculously tiny spaces where babies cried, old men and women clung to lives of misery, and young men and women coupled in the shadows silently, without joy. In the Islamic City of the Dead, on the edge of the living city, the poorest lived in the tombs, sharing their meagre existence with the long deceased.

He took out his mobile and tried Emilia’s number. No reply. He rang the main switchboard.

‘I’m afraid she’s in a meeting, sir.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll ring later.’

He put the mobile back in his pocket. It was all right: the embassy was still standing.

Back at the university, a stack of post was waiting for him from the morning. Miss Mansy popped her head round the door of his office to say his four o’clock class on seventh-century South Arabic verb forms had been cancelled.

He stepped into the corridor just to watch the secretary’s rear end move back down the corridor. It was generally reckoned she had the best backside in Cairo, and in a city where most of the women still covered themselves from head to foot, that was something to be treated very seriously. Some of the Egyptian students got themselves into enormous entanglements and suffered unending pangs of love for Miss Mansy. She, however, had long since made up her mind to entangle an American professor or a rich man who would take her away from life as a secretary in a university department.

Goodrich closed his door and went reluctantly to his desk. He didn’t know what he’d do if Miss Mansy left or was snatched by Sociology or English. They all wanted her because, sex kitten or not, she was the best secretary in the university. She had a degree in Arabic, which she could speak fluently in five dialects and in the modern literary form, and she’d gone out with single male members of staff from several departments. A treasure. Irreplaceable. And sexier than a tribe of monkeys.

Goodrich sighed and sat down in front of his post. It had been accumulating for several days now, and he hardly knew where to start. He fished in his desk drawer for his letter opener. As usual, the mail was stunningly dull. Anything of interest nowadays came via email. There were several book catalogues, including one of antiquarian books neither he nor the university could afford.

Jack had been the AU’s professor of medieval Arabic for five years now. The job had come out of nowhere following Emilia’s posting to the embassy. Before that he’d been happy in London, where she’d worked at the Foreign Office. The job in Cairo had been a promotion for her, and going with her had been perfect for him. His lectureship at the School of Oriental and African Studies had been headed nowhere. Money was short, as it was throughout the university sector, departments elsewhere had been cut, and at forty he had little hope of a senior lectureship, much less a professorship.

He’d come into academia late in life. His first love had been the army, which he’d joined at seventeen, moving three years later from his local regiment, the Royal Anglians, to the SAS. Before being sent to Iraq during the first Gulf War, he’d studied Arabic for several months at the Defence School of Languages in Buckinghamshire, and he’d come top of his class. His teacher thought he had an aptitude for it. By the time the war ended, he’d seen enough brutality to last a lifetime. His youthful enthusiasm for matters military had given way to something softer, a love of learning, and, in particular, Arabic culture.

He’d met Emilia during a launch party for an exhibition of Koran manuscripts he’d helped organise at SOAS. He’d been nursing a vodka in a remote corner of the room when she’d come up to him and started a conversation that fifteen years later showed no signs of ending. They’d slept together for the first time that same night, and that also showed no signs of fading out.

He moved on to the next layer of mail. He scrunched up a heap of advertising circulars and tossed them unread into his wastebasket.

Almost at the bottom was a letter from his friend, the scholar and bookseller, Mehdi Moussa. Like all of Mehdi’s letters, it was written in the most exquisite Arabic penmanship, in the ruq‘a script. The language was flowery, based on all the best classical models. After several lines using the most convoluted of phrases taken from al-Hariri and anyone else with a good prose style, Mehdi got to the point.

Dearest Professor, the letter read, I regret tomake such demands on your time. However, if it isat all possible, I would be very happy for you tocome to my shop, if possible on Monday afternoonabout five. I have something to show you. For themoment, I am not showing it to anyone else, partlyfrom friendship, partly to protect myself. I know Ican trust you, hence this invitation and this specialopportunity for you to examine what I will showyou. I assure you it will be no waste of your time.As the proverb says: ‘Believe what you see, and setaside what you have learnt’.

If you cannot do this, I shall have to go quicklyto someone else. But I would much prefer it if youwere the first to see and the first to comment. I willwait until six o’clock, and if you do not come bythen, my course is set.

Jack laid the paper on his desk with a sigh. No doubt the old boy had found him another manuscript of the Kitab al-Bukhala, a ninth-century text the bookseller greatly favoured. But even if it was something worthwhile, he didn’t think there was much he could do about it: the departmental budget was thinner than usual, and he was sure the ever-present need for basic equipment would outweigh another manuscript or lithograph. On the other hand, Moussa was a shrewd operator. He knew his clients’ budgets down to the last piastre. He wouldn’t be offering to show something he didn’t think he had a chance of selling, and he had identified Goodrich as his first choice for customer. Jack cancelled a class for that afternoon, and looked forward to his meeting with the bookseller. Not even in his most mangled dreams could he have guessed what would come from it.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Egyptian

The al-Manar Prayer House

Ishaq Alley

Imbaba, Cairo

Monday, 18th September

3.00 p.m.

In the streets outside, children played on rubbish heaps, families were crowded thirty to a room in makeshift apartment blocks built from mud and brick, and on the narrow, festering alleyways, the ground moved like quicksand, shimmering with the bodies of ten million flies. In silence, their wings made a song, a serenade to squalor and neglect. Thick black smoke from local factories filled the torrid air. Imbaba bred disease. Disease and religion.

Back in the nineties, Imbaba had been a virtual state within a state. Wits had called it the Islamic Republic of Imbaba, and that had been near enough the truth. In its complicated web of narrow alleyways, walled-off cul-de-sacs and tall apartment blocks groups of radical Islamists had held sway, imposing the strict laws of the Koran, taxing Christians, punishing criminals and feeding the poor. They had seemed untouchable. Then, in a rapid series of raids, the security services had come in and flushed them out, arresting every man with a long beard and shaven head, any woman in a heavy veil, and flinging them into jail to rot or be tortured.

Now, well over a decade later, they were back, but not as before. These new militants were clever. They used mobile phones and laptops, they had spies everywhere, and they acted behind the scenes. They weren’t interested in running Imbaba: they planned to rule the world. Their work was done quietly in cells, they recruited only the most dedicated, they punished disobedience and treachery by instant death. Every Friday, they would meet for prayers in little rooms away from prying eyes. When they met for other purposes, they did so in secret, in hidden places that could only be reached through a maze of stinking alleys, or tunnels dug deep beneath the ground.

Places like this prayer room, tucked away at the back of a cul-de-sac in a cluster of apartment blocks called Hayy Fatima. The room was on the ground floor, in an apartment that acted as the HQ of a cell belonging to a small but dangerous organisation named simply al-Jaysh: The Army. The walls were thin, and sounds came from the apartments upstairs – a baby crying, a couple arguing, a teenager’s radio. From outside came the roar of a moped, then the shouts of boys running home from their lessons at the local Koran school. Some had already found a rag ball and started playing football.

Nine men squatted in a rough circle on a floor covered in cheap carpeting. They were visibly poor, but unlike so many on the streets outside, their clothes were spotlessly clean, their beards were neatly trimmed, and their heads freshly shaved. Men like these lived simply, emulating the humble lifestyle of the Prophet, who slept on a straw mat and ate a handful of dates each day, washed down with water. They wanted to be like him. He was their model in everything. Their love for him knew no bounds. They had sworn solemn oaths to defend his honour with their lives. One man stood out from the others. He dressed the same way they did, he wore his hair and beard like theirs, and held a plastic rosary in his right hand just as they did. But nothing about him was the same. No one would have questioned for a moment that he was their leader. It was in his eyes, in the set of his mouth, in the way he sat up straighter than the rest, in the calm he radiated. His fingers did not fiddle with the beads as some of theirs did. He did not fidget. His stillness was the stillness of a marble statue. Only his eyes moved, and they moved slowly, taking in each man in turn, as though he was one of the twin angels sent to question them in the grave. He was forty years old, and his face bore the traces of a life spent fighting with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq. His name was Muhammad, like the Prophet, and his family name was al-Masri: The Egyptian. Muhammad the Egyptian. Everyman. A simple enough name. But not a simple man.

Despite his name, Muhammad al-Masri was not just anyone. Papers long in the possession of his family made that clear. He was a living descendant of the last of the great Abbasid Caliphs, the rulers of the Thousand and One Nights, whose palace in Baghdad had once been the wonder of the world. Muhammad’s ancestor had been killed by the Mongols when they sacked Baghdad in 1258. He had been trampled by horses while rolled inside a carpet, so the superstitious conquerors did not shed a ruler’s blood.

Alone of the Caliph’s family, one boy, Ahmad, had escaped the pillage and destruction. Ahmad had fled the burning City of Peace and headed for Cairo, bearing with him documents that proved his lineage. Those were the papers that had been handed down to Muhammad al-Masri, given to him by his father before he died several years earlier. Among them was a will and testament in Ahmad’s hand, appointing his son the next Caliph, and his sons in direct line after him until God took the earth back to Himself.

Muhammad considered himself and was believed by his followers to be the true leader of Islam, the man who would restore the Caliphate and launch the last jihad against the infidel West. He would finish the task started by the Prophet back in the seventh century, to bring all nations under the rule of the one God.

He lacked just one thing, one thing that would permit him to make a public proclamation of his true identity and call for Muslims from round the world to join him in his sacred mission. He had known of it for years, and now he thought he knew where he could find it. He closed his eyes, muttered a short prayer, then opened them again. ‘God be praised,’ he said. ‘Sixty-one died in the explosions today. Each of our martyrs took unbelievers with them. The unbelievers are in Jahannam, the deepest pit of hell. The martyrs are in paradise, drinking wine that does not intoxicate, among virgins with skin the colour of honey.’

One after the other, the assembly cried out Allahu akbar. ‘God is Greater’. One of the martyrs, a boy of sixteen, Hamid, had been recruited by their cell, the core cell of the movement. His family would be well looked after. Al-Masri’s followers might look poor, they might meet in a shabby room in a slum, they might live humble lives; but the organisation had wealthy backers, pious men and women who could afford to bankroll an ongoing terror campaign. The Koran does not just call on believers to fight in the holy war: it asks them to spend their material wealth to allow others to join the struggle.

‘But God requires more of us than this. The Americans, the Jews, the Crusaders everywhere still cast their shadow over the believers. Killing some here and some there is not enough. Destroying the twin towers was not enough. We have to strike a blow that will bring them to their knees. We must lay their cities waste, just as God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah. We must send their kings and presidents to Satan. It will soon be time, my friends. You will see it with your own eyes.’

He smiled, and when he did his stern face became a different face. It was not a politician’s smile. It had no side to it. No one could resist its openness, its unfeigned sincerity. Muhammad al-Masri was dangerous precisely because he was not like a politician. He would never compromise, never negotiate, never promise more than he knew he could give.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘it’s time for your reports.’

One by one, the group provided feedback on the cells they ran, not just in Imbaba but across Cairo. Al-Masri’s cell was the leadership group, composed of his lieutenants, one of whom was his younger brother. To all other members of the movement, he was a shadowy figure. None of his followers except for these eight men had ever seen his face. Everywhere, he was known only by the name Muhammad. His true identity was a closely guarded secret.

It was Rashid who noticed it first. It happened gradually: a dimming of sound. The baby stopped crying, but that was only natural. The radio was switched off, but perhaps the teenager’s mother had lost her patience. The voices of the quarrelling couple faded away, but all arguments end sometime.

As Rashid listened, he noticed that no fresh sounds had replaced those that had been there just minutes earlier. He realised he hadn’t heard a moped or the cries of the boys at play for some time.

He put a hand up to silence the man next to him, who was giving his report.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can you hear anything?’

Nothing.

They looked at one another. There was just silence all round them. They knew what it meant.

‘Quickly,’ shouted al-Masri. ‘To the other room. Hurry!’

Without panicking, they filed into the next room, which was furnished like a regular living space. A shuttered window gave onto the alley outside. Rashid rushed across and removed a metal disc, exposing a hole through which he was able to look outside.

‘Police!’ he hissed.

Outside, a squad of armed police and security service officers were lining the cul-de-sac. They carried sub-machine guns and wore body armour. Rashid could see they were ready to attack any minute.

One man had already opened a false wall and was taking guns from a space behind. He handed them to the others.

As he did so, one of the policemen opened fire. A row of bullet-holes crashed through the shutter, and a bullet took a man called Mustafa, piercing his forehead and spreading his brains across the wall behind. The others threw themselves to the floor, and, as they did so, all hell broke loose outside. The shutter was peppered with bullet-holes, then the holes were torn to shreds by each successive round of bullets, until the shutter fell to pieces and they were firing through an open window, smashing plaster from the walls.

Rashid crept to the window, raising his Kalashnikov in one hand, and fired blindly through the opening, burst after burst of fire. There was a cry outside, then another, and the firing into the room halted. Inside, a second man went to the door that led into the corridor outside. He fired straight through the thin wooden panelling, tearing it to pieces. His bullets found their targets in the bodies of the security troop that had been waiting to break in. Three men died when hot lead slammed into their unprotected faces, others took bullets in their arms and legs. The militant went on firing, pausing only to reload his weapon.