Vast as is the National Security Agency’s complex of buildings, it is only a tiny fraction of Fort Meade, one of the largest military bases in the USA. Situated four miles east of the Interstate 95 and halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the base is home to around ten thousand military staff and twenty-five thousand civilian employees. It is a city in itself and has all the habitual facilities of a small city. The ‘spook’ part is tucked away in one corner inside a rigidly guarded security zone that Dr Martin had never visited before.
The sedan bearing him glided through the sprawling base with no let or hindrance until it came to the zone. At the main gate passes were examined, and faces peered through the windows at the British academic as his guide up front vouched for him. Half a mile later the car drew up at a side door of the huge main block and Dr Martin and his escort entered. There was a desk guarded by army personnel. More checks; some phoning; thumbs placed on keypads; iris recognition; final admission.
After what seemed like another marathon of corridors they came to an anonymous door. The escort knocked and went in. Dr Martin found himself at last among faces he knew and recognized: friends, colleagues and fellow members of the Koran Committee.
Like so many government-service conference rooms, it was anonymous and functional. There were no windows but air conditioning kept the atmosphere fresh. There were a circular table and padded upright chairs; on one wall hung a screen, presumably for displays and graphics should they be needed; small tables stood to the side with coffee urns and trays of food for the insatiable American stomach.
The hosts were clearly two non-academic intelligence officers; they introduced themselves with give-nothing-away courtesy. One was the Deputy Director of the NSA, sent to attend by the general himself. The other was a senior officer from Homeland Security in Washington.
And there were the four academics, including Dr Martin. They all knew each other. Before agreeing to be co-opted on to the no-name, no-publicity committee of experts steeped in one book and one religion, they had known each other vicariously from their published works and personally from seminars, lectures and conferences. The world of such intense Koranic study is not large.
Terry Martin greeted Doctors Ludwig Schramme from Columbia, New York, Ben Jolley from Rand and ‘Harry’ Harrison from Brookings, who certainly had a different first name but was always known as Harry. The oldest and therefore the presumed senior was Ben Jolley, a great bearded bear of a man who promptly and despite pursed lips from the Deputy Director produced and lit up a fearsome briar pipe on which he drew happily, once it was going like an autumn bonfire. The Westinghouse extraction technology above their heads did its best and almost succeeded, but was clearly going to need a complete servicing.
The Deputy Director cut straight to the heart of the reason for the convocation of the scholars. He distributed copies of two documents, one file to each man. These were the Arabic originals as teased out of the AQ financier’s laptop, and translations by the in-house Arabic division. The four men went straight to the Arabic versions and read in silence. Dr Jolley puffed; the man from Homeland Security winced. The four finished more or less at the same time.
Then they read the English translations to see what had been missed and why. Jolley looked up at the two intelligence officers.
‘Well?’
‘Well . . . what, professor?’
‘What,’ asked the Arabist, ‘is the problem that has brought us all here?’
The Deputy Director leaned over and tapped a portion of the English translation.
‘The problem is that. There. What does it mean? What are they talking about?’
All four of them had spotted the Koranic reference in the Arabic text. They had no need of translation. Each had seen the phrase many times and studied its possible various meanings. But that had been in scholarly texts. This was in modern letters. Three references in one of the letters, a single reference in the other.
‘Al-Isra? It must be a code of some kind. It refers to an episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.’
‘Then forgive our ignorance,’ said the man from Homeland. ‘What is Al-Isra?’
‘You explain, Terry,’ said Dr Jolley.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Terry Martin, ‘it refers to a revelation in the life of the Prophet. To this day scholars argue as to whether he experienced a genuinely divine miracle or whether it was simply an out-of-body experience.
‘Briefly, he was asleep one night a year before his emigration from his birthplace of Mecca to Medina when he had a dream. Or a hallucination. Or a divine miracle. For brevity let me say “dream” and stick with it.
‘In his dream he was transported from the depths of modern Saudi Arabia across deserts and mountains to the city of Jerusalem, then a city holy only to Christians and Jews.’
‘Date? In our calendar?’
‘Around six hundred and twenty-two
AD
.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘The Archangel Gabriel, mounted on a winged horse, took Muhammad up through the seven heavens and finally into the presence of Almighty God himself, who instructed him in all the prayer rituals required of a True Believer. These he memorized and later dictated to a scribe as what became an integral part of the six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six. These verses became and remain the basis of Islam.’
The other three professors nodded in agreement.
‘And they believe that?’ asked the Deputy Director.
‘Let us not be too patronizing,’ Harry Harrison interrupted sharply. ‘In the New Testament we are told that Jesus Christ fasted in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights and then confronted and rebuffed the Devil himself. After that period alone with no food, a man would surely be hallucinating. But for Christian true believers that is Holy Scripture and not to be doubted.’
‘All right, my apologies. So Al-Isra is the meeting with the archangel?’
‘No way,’ said Jolley. ‘Al-Isra is the journey itself. A magical journey. A divine journey, undertaken on the instructions of Allah himself.’
‘It has been called,’ Dr Schramme cut in, ‘a journey through the darkness to great enlightenment . . .’
He was quoting from an ancient commentary. The other three knew it well and nodded.
‘So what would a modern Muslim and a senior operative in Al-Qaeda mean by it?’
This was the first time the academics had been given an inkling as to the source of the documents. Not an intercept, but a capture.
‘Was it fiercely guarded?’ asked Harrison.
‘Two men died trying to prevent us seeing it.’
‘Ah, well, yes. Understandable.’ Dr Jolley was studying his pipe with great attention. The other three looked down. ‘I fear it can be nothing but a reference to some kind of project, some operation. And not a small one.’
‘Something big?’ asked the man from Homeland Security.
‘Gentlemen, devout Muslims, not to say fanatical ones, do not regard Al-Isra lightly. For them it was something that changed the world. If they have code-named something Al-Isra, they intend that it should be huge.’
‘And no indication what it might be?’
Dr Jolley looked round the table. His three colleagues shrugged.
‘Not a hint. Both the writers call down divine blessings on their project but that is all. That said, I think I can speak for us all in suggesting you find out what it refers to. Whatever else, they would never give the title Al-Isra to a mere satchel bomb, a devastated nightclub or a wrecked commuter bus.’
No one had been taking notes. There was no need. Every word had been recorded. This was, after all, the building known in the trade as ‘the Puzzle Palace’.
Both professional intelligence officers would have the transcripts within an hour and would spend the night preparing their joint report. That report would leave the building before dawn, sealed and couriered with armed guard, and it would go high. Very high; as high as it gets in the USA, which is the White House.
Terry Martin shared a limousine with Ben Jolley on the ride back to Washington. It was bigger than the sedan in which he had come, with a partition between front and rear compartments. Through the glass they could see the backs of two heads: the driver and their youthful escorting officer.
The gruff old American thoughtfully kept his pipe in his pocket and stared out at the passing scenery, a sea of the russet and gold of autumn leaves. The younger British man stared the other way and also lapsed into reverie.
In all his life he had only really loved four people and he had lost three of them in the past ten months. At the start of the year his parents, who had had their two sons in their thirties and were both over seventy, had died almost together. Prostate cancer had taken his father and his mother was simply too broken-hearted to want to go on. She wrote a moving letter to each of her sons, took a bottle of sleeping tablets in a piping hot bath, fell asleep and, in her own words, ‘went to join Daddy’.
Terry Martin was devastated, but survived by leaning on the strength of two men, the other two he loved more than himself. One was his partner of fourteen years, the tall, handsome stockbroker with whom he shared his life. And then on one wild March night there had been the drunken driver going crazily fast; and the crunch of metal hitting a human body; and the body on the slab; and the awful funeral with Gordon’s parents stiffly disapproving of his open tears.
He had seriously contemplated ending his own by now miserable life, but his elder brother Mike seemed to sense his thoughts, moved in with him for a week and talked him through the crisis.
He had hero-worshipped his brother since they were boys in Iraq and through their years at the British public school at Haileybury outside the market town of Hertford.
Mike had always been everything he was not. Dark to his fair, lean to his plump, hard to his soft, fast to his slow, brave to his frightened. Sitting in the limousine gliding through Maryland he let his thoughts return to that final rugby match against Tonbridge with which Mike had ended his five years at Haileybury.
When the two teams came off the field Terry was standing by the roped passageway, grinning. Mike reached out and ruffled his hair.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we did it, bro.’
Terry had been seized by gut-wrenching fear when the moment came to tell his brother that he now knew he was gay. The older man, by then an officer in the Paras and just back from combat in the Falklands, thought about it for a moment, cracked his mocking grin and handed back the final line by Joe E. Brown in
Some Like it Hot
.
‘Well, nobody’s perfect.’
From that moment Terry’s hero-worship of his elder brother knew no limits.
In Maryland the sun set. In the same time zone it was setting over Cuba and on the south-eastern peninsula known as Guantanamo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever, to let his watchfulness slip.
The man who prayed had been in the jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually ‘Gitmo’ as short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in the black eyes above the black beard, so he was beaten the more. But he never broke.
In the stick-and-carrot days when inmates were encouraged to denounce their fellows in exchange for favours, he remained silent and earned no better treatment. Seeing this, others had denounced him in exchange for concessions, but as the denunciations were complete inventions, he had neither denied nor confirmed them.
In the room full of files kept by the interrogators as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him. He had civilly answered questions put to him years earlier by one of the interrogators who had decided on a humane approach. That was how a passable record of his life existed at all.
But the problem was still the same. None of the interrogators had ever understood a word of his native language and had always relied on the interpreters, or ‘terps’, who accompanied them everywhere. But the terps had an agenda too. They also received favours for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.
After four years the man at prayer was dubbed ‘non-cooperative’, which simply meant unbreakable. In 2005 he had been transferred across the Gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down permanent isolation unit. Here the cells were smaller, with white walls and exercise only at night. For a year the man had not seen the sun.
No family clamoured for him; no government sought news of him; no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees around him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.
‘Goddam Arab,’ said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.
‘He’s not Arab,’ he said. ‘He’s an Afghan.’
‘So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?’
It was Ben Jolley, out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.
‘Doesn’t sound good, does it?’ Terry Martin replied. ‘Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.’
‘No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this Al-Isra operation.’
‘But how?’
‘Well, I’ve been around spooks for a long time. Been advising as best I can on matters of the Mid-East since the Six Day War. They have a lot of ways: sources on the inside, turned agents, eavesdropping, file-recovery, over-flying; and the computers help a lot, cross-referencing data in minutes that used to take weeks. I guess they’ll figure it out and stop it somehow. Don’t forget we have come on a hell of a long way since Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in nineteen sixty, or the U2 took those photos of the Cuba missiles in sixty-two. Guess before you were born, right?’ He chuckled chestily at his own antiquity as Terry Martin nodded.