The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,137

were shut. ‘Adam? Did it work? What’s your name?’

‘My name is . . . Mohammed Nithar Qasid,’ said Adam, a Pakistani lilt to his accent.

‘When were you born?’

‘The twelfth of Ramadan, 1407.’

‘What?’ she gasped.

He opened his eyes and smiled crookedly. ‘Islamic calendar. May tenth, 1987.’

‘God, for a minute there I thought you’d taken on his past life or something.’ She unfastened his skullcap. ‘Come on, we’ve got to pack all this up.’

Adam didn’t move, an odd expression on his face. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

His look slowly became one of dawning horror. ‘I know how Qasid recognised me. He had met me before. In Islamabad, ten months ago.’

Bianca realised the significance of the date. ‘That was when the Secretary of State was killed, wasn’t it?’ He nodded. ‘What were you doing there? Were you trying to find the mole?’

He scrambled to his feet, reeling away from her. ‘No, no – you don’t understand!’ he cried, his voice anguished. ‘I gave the Secretary’s route to al-Qaeda! I am the mole!’

37

Inside Man

Adam paced back and forth across the Cube, struggling to keep his head above the rising whirlpool of emotion threatening to swallow him. Horror, panic, shame . . . and guilt.

And those were only his feelings. Qasid’s were also trying to pull him under, the terrorist filled with gloating pride at having turned an American agent to the cause. He was caught in a downward spiral, the other man’s triumph worsening his own stress and self-loathing.

The more he tried to deny it, searching Qasid’s memories for some hint of deception, the more he knew it was true.

Qasid had met him three times. The first had been a sounding-out mission for the al-Qaeda operative, simply to check if the supposed sympathiser could be trusted. The meeting had been in a small café – with five armed men lurking nearby. At any sign of Pakistani or American security forces, the man calling himself Adam Gray would have been the first to die.

But there had been none. He seemed genuine.

Adam relived Qasid’s memories, the vision of his own face disorienting, surreal. Nightmarish. The two men had been brought together by a mutual contact, an al-Qaeda supporter within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He listened to himself explain to Qasid why he was there. His grandfather on his father’s side was Waziri, from Pakistan’s mountainous western regions bordering Afghanistan. This family connection was what had brought him to Pakistan, as an intelligence officer – and it had also fuelled his disgust at his own country’s actions, as American drones bombed the tribal lands with impunity. The CIA claimed publicly that only terrorists were being killed by the missiles, but he knew, having seen the raw intelligence reports before they were sanitised, that innocent civilians were being murdered.

Now, blood demanded blood.

Qasid believed him enough not to have him killed, but was still not fully convinced. The American had to provide proof of his sympathies.

So he did.

The next time the two men met, this time in a filthy slum house in Sector G-7 of Islamabad, Adam handed over a DVD containing footage of a Reaper drone strike two days previously. The Pakistani government had condemned the attack on a village in South Waziristan, in which the Americans claimed that four al-Qaeda fighters were killed – but the recording not only made it clear that numerous civilians in nearby houses had died in the blast, but also that Pakistani military intelligence officers were working directly with the CIA to guide the attack, picking out targets. The footage was quickly released to Al Jazeera and other news networks. Pakistan and the United States immediately declared the audio portion to be fake, but it still roused popular anger for several days.

Qasid was pleased – as were his superiors. They wanted more.

And on the third and final meeting, Adam Gray provided it.

The memory was as clear as if it had just happened. This time, the two men met in the open, spending barely twenty seconds together. Qasid brought a bag containing fifty thousand US dollars; his contact, a memory stick. ‘The details of the Secretary of State’s visit,’ Adam heard himself say as he handed over the little flash drive. ‘The route, the timing, decoys, security assignments – everything. Make good use of it.’

‘We will,’ Qasid replied, giving him the bag in return. ‘Allah be praised.’

The American nodded, then walked away.

The drive contained a full itinerary of the politician’s impending assignation – so comprehensive, in fact, that Qasid at first thought