The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  Kwambai paused in mid-step. “You know what’s going on.”

  “But, why?”

  “Because we all do the best we can do, and this is the best thing for us to do.”

  The undertow pulled at his feet; the fear in his intestines felt like concrete. Everything seemed to be slowing down, even his desperate reply: “But you don’t understand! I don’t work for the bank. I never did! I work with Sam. I’m CIA, too!”

  Kwambai tilted his head and licked his lips, interested. “Sam said you were, but we weren’t sure we believed him.”

  “Sam said what?” Paul blurted, confused. What was going on?

  “Thank you for clearing it up,” said Kwambai.

  “And?”

  Kwambai’s hand settled on his shoulder. It was heavy and damp. He patted a few times. “And I must go.”

  “But the money’s real,” Paul told him. “It’s real. And I know the codes.”

  “But there’s no computer. The codes are useless.”

  “Someone has it. As soon as you find it, I can use the codes.”

  Kwambai stepped back, frowning. He wasn’t a man used to doubt. “But who has the computer?”

  “Benjamin Muoki. From the NSIS. He’s got to have it.”

  “Benjamin?” Kwambai grinned. “Well, well. Benjamin.”

  “You go get it. Or I’ll get it myself. Then I—”

  “Tell me the codes.”

  “They’re,” Paul began, then stopped. “I’ll type them in.”

  “We can’t risk you typing some emergency signal. Tell me the codes now,” said Kwambai. “Please.”

  Paul looked up at his fleshy face. “If I told you, I’d need some assurance that I’d be safe.”

  Kwambai blinked at him then, and suddenly began to laugh. It was a deep, room-filling laugh. “Of course, of course.” He shook his head. “You didn’t think we were going to kill you?”

  Paul tried to remember the man’s words. No, he hadn’t said that Paul was going to die. He’d never said that. Just hint, nuance. Threat. He exhaled loudly, then, closing his eyes, recited the key combination to connect to the bank, the ten-digit number that accessed the accounts section, and then the holding account number.

  “There’s nothing else?” asked Kwambai, a smile still on his face.

  “No. That’s all.”

  “Good.” Again, the politician patted his shoulder. “You’ve been very cooperative. Aslim Taslam will be sure to let your family know.”

  And he was gone. The logic of that last sentence didn’t arrange itself in his head until Daniel Kwambai was closing the door behind himself and the two men were putting out their cigarettes in the crystal ashtray.

  Paul began to say more things, but no one was listening. He couldn’t see the men’s expressions as they approached; fresh tears made details impossible to make out. He remembered Sam saying, We’re not all cut out for this kind of work. You never were. Then, as the two men neared—one had already taken out his pistol—he realized they hadn’t tied him down. He was just sitting there, waiting for death. They hadn’t tied him down!

  He stood, knocking the chair over, feeling a burst of hope that remained even as he felt the hammer of the first bullet in his chest. He stumbled, tripping backward over the chair. The breath went out of him; he couldn’t get it back. His wet arms floundered on the floor as he tried to find a handhold, and even when the two men appeared, looking down on him, his wet hands didn’t stop trying to hold on to something, anything. They kept slipping. The two men spoke briefly to their god.

  “Don’t,” Paul managed, thinking of a damp couch and a beautiful girl who could see his secret soul. Then they all disappeared—the couch, the girl, the soul—as if they had never been.

  NABIL

  The Imam reminded him of those unnaturally serene Afghans who first taught him the Truth behind the truth. The hairs of his long beard were thick, black wires that paled to white as they traveled down his robe. Around his lips they were stained yellow by hours spent around the communal water pipe.

  His Arabic was fattened by his Kurdish accent, but his grammar was beautifully precise. It almost seemed out of place in this tenement building on the outskirts of Rome. “You have brought your offerings to me, young Nabil, and for this I thank the Prophet (praise be upon him). Though few in number, your people seem to me to be a worthy addition to our holy fight. It is not your heart we question here, but your abilities.”

  Nabil, sitting cross-legged on the rug before him, kept his head low. “We are gathering weapons, Imam. We have communications abilities and the support of three major tribes in Puntland.”

  “That is good,” said the old man. “But what I refer to is the ability of the mind.” He smiled and tapped his weathered skull. “How does one discern truth from deception? How does one know the right path from the wrong, or the easy, one? Even the heart softened with love for Allah must be like stone when facing the infidels. The eyes must be clear.”

  Nabil wanted to have an answer ready but didn’t. He was a fisherman’s son. He had no special qualifications beyond the fact that he loved his faith and had learned to speak English like a native. So he waited.

  After a moment of silence, the Imam said, “Young Nabil knows when to hold his tongue, which is not only a virtue but a sign of wisdom.” He looked at the other men in the room, the young Kurds who now lived as his Roman bodyguards. By this look he seemed to be requesting their input, but they gave none. “And I believe you came to us via our mutual friend, Mr. Daniel Kwambai?”

  “We’ve known him for some time. He is sometimes of use.”

  “Yes,” the Imam said, pausing significantly. “But do not confuse use with friendship.”

  “We endeavor to know the difference, Imam.”

  “Those who can help are welcome, but those whose help takes too much from us, those should be dealt with harshly.”

  Again Nabil nodded but could find no words.

  The Imam leaned back and patted his knees. “Let us agree first of all that one does not give one’s hand without first knowing the other hand intimately. So it shall be here. We will come to you, young Nabil. You may or may not recognize us—that is of no concern. You should act as you believe correct. That is all we ask. Once we have observed your sense of right, we will come to our decision. Does that strike you as satisfactory?”

  “It strikes me as a blessing, Imam,” Nabil said, though his chest tightened. How much longer would this go on? He’d brought the money Ansar al-Islam had demanded, had given them a layout of the entire organization, and had even let them keep one of his men. Yet here he was, still feeling very much like the darkest man in the room.

  “You are very patient for a man of your age,” the Imam told him, as if he could read his thoughts. “This does not go unnoticed.” He folded his hands together in his lap. “There is something you can do for us today, in fact. Something that would move things along more quickly.”

  “However I may be of service,” said Nabil.

  A smile. A nod. “Downstairs, in the basement of this very building, are two men. They became our guests only yesterday. Through questioning we have learned that they work for the Americans. One is an Italian, while the other is more despicable because he is not even European. He is Moroccan. A foul, homosexual Moroccan, in fact. What they attempted to do to Ansar al-Islam is not important; it is only important that they failed. I would consider it a great kindness if you would kill them for us.”

  One of the guards, sensing his cue, stepped forward. He held a long cardboard box, the kind used for long-stemmed flowers, and opened it on the floor in front of Nabil. Inside was a rather beautiful sword.

  * * *

  —

  Four days later, on Sunday, after he’d finished his Dhuhr prayer and was packi
ng to return to the continent he understood, where when you left you could say exactly what you had accomplished, the American knocked on his hotel room door. He found a light-haired but dark-eyed man in the spy hole who said, “Signore Nabil Abdullah Bahdoon?”

  “Sí?”

  The man peered up and down the corridor, then lowered his voice and spoke in English. “My name is Sam Wallis. I’m here with a business offer. May I come in?”

  Though his impulse was to send the man away, he remembered, We will come to you, young Nabil, and opened the door.

  Once inside, Sam Wallis was surprisingly—perhaps even refreshingly—straightforward. He wanted information on the pirates. He represented some companies interested in securing their shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden. “I don’t know what your rank is,” Sam told him, “but I’ll lay odds that the money I can give you will move you upward.”

  “Upward?”

  “In your organization.”

  Nabil frowned. “What do you think my organization is?”

  “Does it matter?” Sam said, flopping his hands in an expression of nonchalance. “There’s always some position above our heads that we’d prefer to fill.”

  “You think like an American.”

  “I think like a human being.”

  Despite his pretty face. Nabil was a man of broad experience. He’d trained for three months in the mountains of Afghanistan, then spent a harrowing six months in Iraq on the front lines; then, once his worth was proven, he helped plan pinpoint strikes. Despite what Paul Fisher would later think, Nabil had not had to prove himself to his fellow fighters for years, and it was because of this respect that he would never find himself driving a truck or a speedboat laden with high explosives. He was too valuable to be wasted like that.

  It was why he had been chosen to be Aslim Taslam’s envoy to Ansar al-Islam’s Roman cell. His comrades knew that he would think through each detail and come to the correct conclusions.

  So when Sam Wallis offered a half million euros for intelligence on the pirates—a sum that Aslim Taslam needed desperately to further its plans—he did not answer immediately. He stepped back from the immediate situation and tried to see it from the outside.

  You may or may not recognize us—that is of no concern. You should act as you believe correct.

  Could this relaxed American be a messenger—witting or unwitting—from the Imam? Might this be the initial stage of the test? He pulled the blinds in the room, turned on the overhead lamp, and examined the American’s dark eyes. Refusing money from an infidel was a morally unambiguous way of dealing with the situation. But perhaps too simple for the Imam. Too simple to assist the jihad.

  If the money was real, then it could buy weapons. Using the infidels’ technology and finances against them was a historically proven method of jihad. As for the information on the pirates, it could easily be manufactured, though there was no love lost between Aslim Taslam and those drunken thugs of the high seas.

  “If you’re serious,” Nabil told him, “come to Africa and we’ll discuss it further. Mogadishu.”

  Sam Wallis shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere near Mogadishu. I’m paid well, but not that well. Next week I’ll be in Kenya for the Kajiado Cross-Country Rally. Can we meet in Nairobi?”

  * * *

  —

  Nabil was careful not to keep this a secret. He was thinking in layers now. If he kept the American a secret from his comrades, it would look to Ansar al-Islam’s observers—who he had to assume were everywhere—that he was either planning to keep the American’s money himself or hiding him because he was going to sell real information. Neither of these were true, and in a small house east of Botiala he sat with his five most trusted men and talked them through it.

  All five of these tall, dark men were from his village, and in another world they would have remained fishermen like their fathers. But in this world the fish started to disappear from the gulf, their sleek bodies absorbed by the big trawlers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They watched as the other young fishermen, many of them friends, learned that taking to the seas with speedboats and weapons, full of liquor and marijuana, could bring in more money than fishing ever had. They blew their money on satellite televisions and four-by-fours they sped up and down the coastline, sometimes running over children on the way. Nabil and his friends watched, remembering what the visitors from Afghanistan had taught them.

  There were no fish left, and piracy was despicable to them. But there was a third way. A better way.

  When he told them of the American, they pulled back visibly, so he took them through his line of reasoning. While the pirates were not their friends, giving them up was not an option. So they would fabricate the information. Transit routes, bank accounts, hierarchies. “And if it looks as if the American is going to cheat us, we will kill him.”

  “But what of the Imam?” asked Ghedi, looking for unambiguously good news.

  That he suspected the American had been sent by the Imam was too much for them to absorb, so he only said, “He wants to teach us patience.”

  He returned to Kenya by one of the softer land routes, and on Saturday, before the start of the cross-country rally, he entered Sam Wallis’s InterContinental room with a look of pain on his face. “I’m sorry, I cannot risk it. It’s an impressive amount of money, but in my region of Somalia if you become an enemy of the pirates, your life is no longer worth anything.”

  Sam settled on the end of his bed and considered the problem. “It’s one reason I came to you, you know. Your group separated from Al-Shabaab because of their cooperation with the pirates. I thought you’d have the balls to stand up to them.”

  “You think you know a lot about me, Mr. Wallis.”

  “My employers think they do.”

  “We may not like the pirates, but we still have to live in their country.”

  “You needn’t stay in Somalia.”

  “It’s our home.”

  Clearly, this argument carried no weight with the American, but he accepted it as the logic of primitive peoples. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said after some thought, “but my bosses say I can go up to two million euros. So I’ll do that. The offer is now two million.”

  It was as Nabil had suspected. No opening offer is a final one, and now he had quadrupled Aslim Taslam’s income. “How will you pay it?”

  “Account transfer. I can get one of the bank employees to come to Nairobi to take care of it.”

  “We would prefer diamonds.”

  “We’d all prefer diamonds, but I’m limited by what my employers are willing to do.”

  “How quickly can it be prepared?”

  Sam considered this. “The race ends next Sunday, then I’ll go to Switzerland to set everything up. I can be back the following Wednesday. I’d guess that the banker could make it by Thursday. Will that work?”

  * * *

  —

  Before returning home, Nabil set up a meeting with Daniel Kwambai, the man who had originally connected him to Ansar al-Islam. For the appropriate fees, Kwambai had been useful to Aslim Taslam, as well as to Al-Shabaab before Nabil and his comrades left.

  They had met face-to-face a few times before, but this was Nabil’s first visit to one of Kwambai’s houses, a four-bedroom in the low hills north of the Karura Forest. In the comfort of his own house, fat Kwambai chain-smoked and sipped whiskey as if it were water. His house was full of representational art that made a mockery of Creation. It was an unnerving place to be.

  While he gave Kwambai the layout of the situation, he was careful to avoid actual names, which didn’t trouble the politician. “You’ll need a secure place for a transaction,” Kwambai told him. “And the money—you can’t just send it directly to your account. I’ll have to move it around some.”

 
“Through your accounts?”

  Kwambai shrugged, pulling at his fat lower lip. “I do have some accounts already set up. They’ve served the purpose before. I can put them at your disposal.”

  Nabil had the feeling that Kwambai had been waiting for him, the accounts ready. He reminded himself that Kwambai was a politician, and as such had been thinking in layers since childhood. He was a man to watch carefully.

  Kwambai was also nearly bankrupt. With his fall from political grace he’d lost the bribes that had kept his lifestyle and three large houses in operation. Debt was a wonderful motivator. “I suppose you’ll ask for a commission,” Nabil said.

  “What’s this attitude?” Kwambai said, waving his empty glass. “I’ve helped your people for a long time now. Of course I’ll need some money—there are bank charges, after all—but without my help you’d have nothing. Remember that.”

  Nabil acceded that this was true enough. “How about this place?” he asked, looking around at all the decadence.

  “What?”

  “This house, for the transfer. I see there’s a basement. We can bring the banker here blindfolded and take him away likewise.”

  Kwambai seemed troubled by the idea, which Nabil had expected. Though he had an attic apartment over in Ngara West he could use initially, he wanted to give the politician a reason beyond money to keep security tight.

  “We would of course pay you for the trouble,” Nabil insisted.

  He returned to Somalia and filled in his comrades on the developments. He asked Ghedi and Dalmar to come back with him for the final stage, and after a week, as they settled on their path back through the border, Kwambai called in a panic. “It’s off, Nabil. We’re not doing this.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “Sam Wallis? One of my friends in the NSIS knows him. It’s the work name of Sam Matheson. Of the CIA.”

  The question posed itself again: Was this a test? It didn’t look like one, but the Imam, he knew, plotted in the labyrinthine way he interpreted the Koran. His reach was long, and his thoughts were deep. Might he have knowingly sent an American agent to perform the examination?