'In the early 1990s the Taliban started to emerge as a powerful force in the country, then al-Qaeda. Ahmed was effectively Westernised by then; certainly he had no sympathy for the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He was able to infiltrate the higher echelons of both those groups — he even met Bin Laden a couple of times in the mid-Nineties — and even when American policy towards the mujahideen changed, he remained loyal to us. He was an intelligent guy and I guess he saw what was happening, saw that the Taliban could only ever be bad news for his country.'
'And, of course, you were still paying him,' Will observed flatly.
Priestley nodded. 'We were, as you so rightly point out, still paying him,' he agreed. 'And we got our money's worth, Will. You don't need to know the details, but let me tell you — the kind of information that was fed to us by Faisal Ahmed during the late 1990s was pure gold dust. Information of al-Qaeda plots, details of their rank and file, their structure. If it weren't for him, we'd have been in the dark. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that his information directly saved thousands of lives. Thousands, Will. And you know what? If he'd still been with al-Qaeda at the time, there's a very good chance that 9/11 would never have happened. That's how important he was to us.'
'So what went wrong? 'Will asked.
Priestley shrugged a little sadly. 'His cover was blown.'
'Who by?'
Priestley and Pankhurst glanced at each other. 'We don't really know, Will,' the American admitted. 'But it seems likely that it was someone in our own ranks.'
'You're telling me that al-Qaeda infiltrated the CIA?'
'No security service is impregnable, Will,' Priestley said quietly. 'We've shown that by infiltrating enough ourselves.
You'd be surprised if I told you some of the places where we have agents.' He smiled. 'Which I'm not going to do, of course. Anyway, Ahmed was taken over the border into Pakistan, to an al-Qaeda training facility. He was tortured for three days — brutal torture, Will, sickening torture. Physical and mental. The skin on his back was flayed and allowed to go septic. He was beaten and branded. But as far as we know, he didn't crack. And at the end of it, more dead than alive, he managed to escape. He fled west into Iran, from where he managed to make it to the United Arab Emirates. Ten weeks of escape and evasion, horribly wounded. It was something else.'
Will nodded.
'It was in the UAE that he contacted us and we picked him up. For someone who had been through such a lot, he was still remarkably calm and focused. We offered him safe passage to the US, but he declined.'
'I'm not surprised,' Will commented.
'Why's that, Will?'
'Because governments aren't exactly famous for treating their ex-soldiers well,' he said. 'And with everything he knew, he could easily have become a potential liability to the US. He was probably scared that someone would come up to him in a dark alley and put a bullet in him.'
Priestley smiled.
'I don't think he was afraid of that, Will. Despite what you might think, the US government would have looked after him. We're not as bad as some people make us out to be, you know. No, that wasn't the reason. The reason was that we couldn't tell him who it was that blew his cover. He knew that coming back into the US under CIA protection would be a death warrant. And so he decided to go to the UK — somewhere he could be anonymous. Somewhere he could be safe.'
'Don't give me that,' Will sneered. 'I bet you stopped paying him once he was no use to you.'
'We didn't have to continue paying him, Will,' Priestley continued, 'because our British counterparts took over that job.' He glanced over in Pankhurst's direction.
The director had been sitting in his chair, fingers pressed together, and a look of concentration on his face as Priestley's story had unfolded. Now, though, he stood up, walked to the front of his desk and perched on the edge. 'Faisal Ahmed,' he explained, 'was a unique asset for us. We were very grateful to the CIA for allowing us to make use of him.'
'He wanted to carry on working?' Will asked. 'After everything he'd been through?'
Pankhurst looked Will straight in the eye. 'What else could he do, Will?' the director asked. 'He was intelligent enough to know that if a military man stops his career before the time is right, he risks wasting away into nothing.'
Will looked down awkwardly as Pankhurst continued.
'Ahmed was a stranger in a strange land. He had been a fighter from the age of ten, a trained spy from the age of sixteen. Now he was in his early thirties. I hardly think he could have been expected to go and work in a supermarket, do you? We gave him work to do. We made him feel useful. On his arrival in England he was given a new identity and a place to live in an area of London known to be a hotbed of fundamentalism. It wasn't long before he had infiltrated a number of terrorist cells and was using his considerable skills to tip us off about their activities. Faisal Ahmed warned us about any number of potential terrorist strikes all over the country and we were able to prevent them. He worked with us for three years and in that time I estimate that he put a stop to ten major terrorist operations.
'But then, in 2003, he went dark. Vanished completely.'
Pankhurst stood up and walked over to the window. 'It's pretty hard to vanish in this country when MI5 really want to find you, Will. But as you've heard, Ahmed was well trained.'
'Maybe he left the country,' Will suggested.
'That's just what we thought, at first. Until intelligence started coming in that a person matching his description was involved in masterminding a series of low-level terrorist strikes like the ones I just showed you.'
'The Glasgow Airport bombing?'
'Among others. The intelligence was sound and we know Ahmed was involved. We even discovered where he had been staying on a couple of occasions — bedsits, usually, on the outskirts of satellite towns around the UK, the sort of places anyone could merge into the background with ease. But every time we closed in on him, he had always disappeared. At first we cursed our bad luck, and of course the excellent training the CIA had given him.' He smiled somewhat ruefully at Priestley, who affected a look of false modesty. 'But soon it became clear that there was more to it than that. Ahmed was being tipped off and it could only be by someone in the security services.'
'Five's got a mole, you mean?' Will asked directly.
'Yes, Will,' Pankhurst said calmly. 'Five's got a mole. Like Don says, it's hardly a great surprise — we expect this sort of thing from time to time. But it means we are extremely compromised in our search for Ahmed.'
'Why do you think he went dark?' Will asked.
'We don't know,' Pankhurst admitted. 'Not for sure. But we can hazard a guess. The last contact we had was in February 2003, about three weeks before the invasion of Iraq. You don't have to be a political scientist to know how unpopular that little move was, even among ordinary white Britons and Americans. But obviously it was also very unpopular among moderate Muslims in both countries. We can only surmise that Ahmed objected to the invasion on some ideological level and that caused him to change his allegiance.'
'He's a strangely principled man,' Priestley interjected, 'and if you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense. When the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, there were sound reasons for doing it, not least that the Taliban were most likely giving Bin Laden refuge. But Iraq? That was political, cynical — at least, that's what plenty of people thought.'
'Anyway,' Pankhurst continued, 'whatever the reason, the first terrorist attack that we know Ahmed was involved in occurred about two months after the invasion of Baghdad and they've been going on ever since. With a few exceptions, nobody has been hurt in any of his attacks — it's almost as though they've been warning shots, as if he's letting us know that he's still around and that he's — ' Pankhurst seemed to be struggling to find the word.