The Afghan

Martin wondered whether it contained salmon or trout, or neither. Just before Keig, a side road turned across the river and up a long, winding private drive. Round two bends, the stone bulk of an ancient castle sat on a slight eminence looking out over a stu

“It’s Mike, and you were expecting me. How? Angus here made no phone call.” “Well, actually, we had a man on the airplane. Just to be on the safe side,” said Phillips.

Mike Martin grunted. He had not spotted the tail. He was clearly out of practice.

“Not a problem, Mike,” said the CIA man McDonald. “You’re here. Now a range of tutors have your undivided attention for eighteen weeks. Why not freshen up, and after lunch we’ll start the first briefing.”

During the Cold War, the CIA maintained a chain of safe houses right across the USA. Some were i

And there were some chosen for their obscurity, where a Soviet defector could be held in the kindliest of detention while checks were made on his authenticity, and where a vengeful KGB, working out of the Soviet Embassy or consulate, could not get at him.

Agency veterans still wince at the memory of Colonel Yurchenko, who defected in Rome, and was amazingly allowed to dine out in Georgetown with his debriefing officer. He went to the men’s room and never came back. In fact, he had been contacted by the KGB, who reminded him of his family back in Moscow. Full of remorse, he was daft enough to believe the promises of amnesty and redefected. He was never heard of again.

Marek Gumie

The answer came from his real estate colleague in no time at all. “We call it ‘the Cabin.’ It is lost to the human race, somewhere up in the Pasayten Wilderness of the Cascade range.”

Gumie

Hundreds of thousands of visitors go to the park every year while it is open, and it is riddled with tracks and trails, the former viable for rugged vehicles, the latter for hikers or horses. And the wardens know every inch of it. The logging forest is off-limits to the public for safety reasons, but it, too, has a network of tracks along which snarling trucks habitually haul the felled tree trunks to the delivery points for the sawmills. In deep winter, both have to close down because the snow makes most movement almost impossible. But east of them both, ru

Winter and summer, the wilderness teems with wildlife and game, the few cabin owners tend to summer in the wilderness, then disco

Years earlier, a remote log cabin had come up for sale, and the CIA bought it. It was an impulse purchase, later regretted, but occasionally used by senior officers for summer vacations. In October, when Marek Gumie

Despite the fact he was talking to a colleague, Gumie

“It is not just a question of keeping an ultra-high-value asset away from prying eyes, nor of preventing him from escape. I have to consider his own safety. Even in supermax jails, there have been fatalities.” The head of safe houses got the point. At least, he thought he had. Utterly and completely invisible, utterly and completely escape-proof. Totally self-contained for at least a six-month period. It was not really his specialty. He brought in the team who had devised the security at the fearsome Pelican Bay supermax in California.

The Cabin was almost inaccessible to start with. A very basic road went a few miles north of the tiny town of Mazama and then ran out, still ten miles short. There was nothing for it but to use skyhooks and use them extensively. With the power invested in him, Marek Gumi-e

The build team was from Army Engineers; raw materials were purchased locally with state police advice. Everyone was on a need-to-know basis, and the legend was that the Cabin was being converted into an ultra-high-security research center. In truth, it was to become a one-man jail.

At Castle Forbes, the regime started intensively, and became more so. Mike Martin was required to change out of Western clothes into the robes and turban of a Pashtun tribesman. His beard and hair were to grow as long as the time allowed.

The housekeeper was allowed to stay on; she had not the slightest interest in the laird’s guests, nor did Hector, the gardener. The third remaining resident was Angus, the former SAS sergeant who had become Lord Forbes’s estate manager, or “factor.” Even if an interloper had wished to penetrate the estate, he would have been most unwise with Angus on the prowl.

For the rest, “guests” came and went, save two whose residence had to be permanent. One was Najib Qureshi, a native Afghan, former teacher in Kandahar, refugee given asylum in Britain, naturalized citizen and translator at GCHQ Cheltenham. He had been detached from his duties and transferred to Castle Forbes. He was the language tutor and coach in all forms of behavior that would be expected of a Pashtun. He taught body language, gestures, how to squat on the heels, how to eat, how to walk and the postures for prayer. The other was Dr. Tamian Godfrey; midsixties, iron gray hair in a bun at the back, she had been married for years to a senior officer in the Security Service, MI5, until his death two years earlier. Being “one of us,” as Steve Hill put it, she was no stranger to security procedures, the cult of need to know, and had not the slightest intention of mentioning her presence in Scotland to anyone ever.

Moreover, she could work without being told that the man she was here to tutor would be going into harm’s way, and became determined he would never slip up because of something she had forgotten. Her expertise was the Koran; her knowledge of it was encyclopedic, and her Arabic impeccable. “Have you heard of Muhammad Asad?” she asked Martin. He admitted he had not. “Then we shall start with him. Born Leopold Weiss, a German Jew, he converted to Islam and became one of its greatest scholars. He wrote probably the best commentary ever on al-Isra, the journey from Arabia to Jerusalem and thence to heaven. This was the experience that instituted the five daily prayers, keystone of the faith. You would have had this at your madrassah as a boy, and your imam, being a Wahhabi, would have believed totally that it was a real, physical journey and not just a vision in a dream. So you believe the same. And now, the daily prayers. Say after me…”