Free The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth Page A

Preacher.”

4
    I n a world of code names to hide real identities, the Tracker had given his new helper the pseudonym Ariel. It amused him to choose the sprite from Shakespeare’s
Tempest
, who could fly invisibly through space and get up to whatever mischief he wanted.
    But if Roger Kendrick struggled on planet Earth, he was nothing like that when he sat before the treasure trove of intoxicating equipment the U.S. taxpayers had provided him. As the man from Fort Meade had said, he became a fighter ace, now at the controls of the best interceptor money could buy.
    He spent two days studying the construction the Preacher had built to mask his IP address and thus his location. He also watched the sermons and became convinced of one thing at the outset. The computer genius was not the masked man who preached religious hatred. There was another somewhere, his real opponent, the enemy ace flying against him; skilled, elusive, capable of spotting any mistake he might make and then shutting him out.
    Had Ariel but known it, his cyberenemy was Ibrahim Samir, British, born of Iraqi parentage, schooled at UMIST—the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Kendrick thought of him as the Troll.
    It was he who had invented the proxy server to create the false IP address behind which he could hide his master’s real location. But once, at the beginning of the sermon campaign, there had been a real IP, and once he had that, Ariel could place the source anywhere on the face of the Earth.
    He also perceived very quickly that there was a fan base. Enthusiastic disciples were able to post messages for the Preacher. He determined to join it.
    He realized the Troll would never be deceived unless Ariel’s alter ego was detail perfect. Ariel created a young American called Fahad, son of two Jordanian immigrants, born and raised in the Washington area. But first he studied.
    He used the background of the long-dead terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who had headed al-Qaeda in Iraq until wiped out by Special Forces and a fighter strike. A copious biography was online. He came from the Jordanian village of Zarqa. Ariel created two parents who came from the same village, lived down the same street. If questioned, he could describe it from online information.
    He re-created himself, born to his parents two years after they arrived in the USA. He could describe the school he went to, though now supposedly he’d been removed because of panic attacks.
    And he studied Islam from online international courses, the mosque he and his parents attended and the name of its resident imam. Then he applied to join the Preacher’s fan base. There were questions—not from the Troll personally but from another disciple in California. He answered them. There were days of delay. And then he was accepted. All the while he kept his own virus, his malware, hidden but ready for use.
    • • •
    T here were four Taliban fighters in the brick office in the village outside Ghazni, the capital of the Afghan province of the same name. They sat, as they preferred, not on chairs but on the floor.
    Their robes and cloaks were wrapped around them, for although it had just turned into the month of May, there was still a chill wind off the mountains, and the brick government building had no heating.
    Also seated were three government officials from Kabul and the two
farangi
officers from NATO. The mountain men were not smiling. They never did. The only time they had seen
farangi
(foreign, white) soldiers had been in the sights of a Kalashnikov. But that was a life they had come to the village to abandon.
    There is in Afghanistan a little-known program called simply Reintegration. It is a joint venture by the Kabul government and NATO, run on the ground by a British major general named David Hook.
    The avant-garde thinking among the best brains has long been that Taliban body count alone will never win. As fast as Anglo-American commanders