Reading Maps

Journeys from fiction drawn on the real world

Frederick Forsyth · 2013 · thriller

Frederick Forsyth's 2013 thriller. An online preacher is talking lonely young men in the West into murder, and nobody knows his name, his face or his country. A US Marine known as the Tracker is given the job of finding him - a hunt that runs through the internet, London, Pakistan and finally the Somali coast.

  1. 1
    Virginia

    In a windowless office in Virginia, the Tracker is handed a name at the top of the kill list - a preacher whose sermons on the internet have turned ordinary young men into assassins - and no clue whatever to who or where he is.

  2. 2
    London

    In London the technical work begins: analysts, a teenage hacker and linguists picking apart accent, idiom and metadata from the sermons, narrowing a whole world down to a region, then a country, then a house.

  3. 3
    Islamabad

    The trail runs through Pakistan, where the preacher was educated and radicalised, and where the men who move his money and his messages can be found - if they can be reached before they hear that anyone is looking.

  4. 4
    Marka

    He is finally located on the Somali coast at Marka, among warlords and militia - and the last act is a raid from the sea against a compound the Tracker has spent a year learning how to reach.

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The Kill List Map: Frederick Forsyth's Journey