Her brief had been short and without too much information, but she had been told by Cavendish that the organisation known as The Chapter of Mercy, usually shortened to The Chapter, was actively taking young children from The Mission, the majority of who were in their very early teens, and passing them on to another group who smuggled children into the Western countries for use in prostitution and also to be used by paedophiles rings.
The child smuggling was merely an addition to the core business of The Chapter, which was the smuggling of drugs out of Afghanistan and the import of arms into that country. Shakira had to put faces to names and then attach blame and guilt. It was a tall order but she was a trained agent. She was also very clever and with a great intellect. Shakira had an honours degree in ancient Greek, which established in the minds of people like Sir Giles Cavendish that she was capable of compartmentalising problems in such a way that she could get right down to the meat on the bone, and leave out the trash.
Shakira had been at The Mission for one week when a visitor turned up and demanded to see the nuns. When Shakira pointed out that she was the Programme Development Co-ordinator, her visitor laughed and brushed past her, calling out for one of the sisters.
Shakira was annoyed to say the least, but in a way, not surprised. Her visitor looked quite brutal, and she was not about to invite an argument, particularly as she was only supposed to observe and report. She kept her temper and asked who he was.
He told Shakira that his name was Abdul Khaliq. He said he was a regular visitor to the mission, but he only ever spoke with the nuns. His name meant nothing to Shakira, but she did file it away in her memory to add to a list she was putting together.
Once she had taken him into the office, and he had come to understand that she was indeed running the orphanage, he agreed to sit down and state his business.
Khaliq told her that he had found several, childless couples who wished to adopt a child from the orphanage, but who were unable to do it legally in their own countries. So, because of the way in which the orphanage operated, he asked Shakira to prepare several girls who he would pick to be made ready for their new lives.
Shakira had great difficulty in not telling her visitor to get lost. She had to remember that he was one of the reasons why she was there and it wasn’t for her to moralise on the child smuggling; her job was to nail people like him and undo the damage his organisation was doing to countless young children.
What appalled Shakira was the absolute gall of the man that he could walk into the orphanage and ‘order’ several children. But what she did know was that each child was prepared with the correct paperwork by the nuns to be presented to the Afghanistan authorities so that they could be released into Khaliq’s custody. Or whoever it was that came calling, which she was to discover in time.
She also learned, to her horror that girls as young as twelve or thirteen were being brought to the orphanage as orphans and were being transferred out again within a matter of weeks. The nuns were given money provided by The Chapter every time children were brought in, but Shakira discovered that a great deal of what they received was passed on to their Order, which left very little to support the orphans.
It was about three weeks after Abdul Khaliq’s visit that five children had been made ready for collection by the obnoxious man. Shakira had been warned by the nuns that her presence during the handover might not be desirable. They didn’t explain why, but Shakira had a good idea why, and reasoned that the nuns were really turning a blind eye to what was going on. Either that or they were being deliberately naive.
So on the evening of the appointed delivery, Shakira parked her car in a convenient spot down the mountain road where she could remain, unobserved hopefully, until Khaliq went by with his new charge of vulnerable children.
The transport had arrived at The Mission just after sunset, and within an hour the Toyota Mini-bus came down the mountain road. Shakira immediately pulled on to the road as the Toyota passed by. She noticed Khaliq was not in the vehicle. This gave her some hope that the man who was driving would not think he was being followed.
The bus motored into the town of Jalalabad, not in a hurry judging by the care with which the man was driving. Shakira followed resolutely until the bus came to a halt outside the house that served as a consulate to the Turkmenistan nation. The children were immediately taken from the bus and bundled in through a side entrance.
Shakira waited, keeping the motor running until the driver came out. He climbed into the bus and pulled out into the sparse flow of traffic. She followed until the bus came to a halt in the car park of a small restaurant.
Although Shakira did not smoke, she needed a reason for going into the restaurant, so she purchased a packet of cigarettes from the cigarette machine. She saw the driver order a meal, so she decided to call it a day and left.
For the next three months Shakira followed people, whether they were innocent parties or suspect. To her it was a matter of complete indifference; she needed to build up a picture of the people who had reason to come and go at the orphanage.
But one day, Shakira was introduced to a journalist who had been commissioned to do an assignment on the work of the orphanage. His name was David Ellis, and Shakira took to him immediately. It wasn’t long before he was telling her silly jokes which made her laugh. He had a way of making her feel energised whenever he came into her presence. He was also very interested in the work of the orphanage and spent a great deal of time with her, particularly in the evenings when they would spend some time up on the hillside, watching the sunset and talking small talk.
Every two or three days, after spending some time with David, Shakira would shut herself in her office and write a short report for Sir Giles Cavendish. She would encode the report and then send it with her mobile phone via the recently launched Mercury 6 British military satellite. The satellite pass time was in the region of ninety minutes, which gave Shakira plenty of time to prepare her report and send it.
What Shakira did not know, and would never know, was that the CIA in and around the Middle East and Central Asia used that satellite as part of its overall communications cover, under the auspices of Her Majesty’s Britannic Government. And although she used a one-time pad for obvious security reasons, no one in MI6 considered the CIA posed any threat, or represented any risk as compliant sharers of that satellite link.
But it was that very naive thinking on the part of British intelligence that led to the murder of Shakira and almost fatal wounding of David Ellis. Since the attacks on the twin towers in New York, remembered all over the world as 9/11, the National Security Agency, the NSA, in America had eavesdropped on all communications traffic originating in the Central Asia as part of its terrorist surveillance programme. And the British intelligence authorities assumed that all their traffic would be sacrosanct, and left untouched by the NSA.
It was this blunder that led to the CIA being made aware of short bursts of traffic emanating from the heartland of Al Qaeda and other Muslim terror groups in Afghanistan itself.
The signals were intercepted and decoded, then passed on to the CIA in London, because this was the tracked destination of the coded messages. Ordinarily the message would have been identified as British Military Traffic and deleted, but for reasons best known to the Americans, they were filed into a dead box.
Because the United Kingdom came within the overall responsibility of the Station CIA chief in London, the knowledge of these signals was passed to Randolph Hudson, a covert member of The Chapter.