Carver

8

Brick Lane, London E1

The package was addressed to Brynmor Gryffud at the office of his graphic design agency, Sharpeville Images. The company specialized in branding and website design for charities and pressure groups involved in controversial fields, such as minority and animal rights, environmental activism and anti-war campaigning. Gryffud was a tall, thickset, heavily bearded Welshman who looked and sounded as though he should be farming sheep, playing rugby and drinking a dozen pints a night — all of which he had done in his time. As he liked to tell clients in a rich, musical voice made for lyrical speeches, ‘Whatever the Daily Mail is against, that is what we are for.’

In addition to his design work, Gryffud ran a small, but vociferous, group of his own, the Forces of Gaia. It specialized in stunts that drew attention to what Gryffud and his supporters viewed as unacceptable assaults on the environment. Inspired by the fathers’ rights campaigners, who had attracted global coverage simply by appearing at high-visibility, high-security locations such as Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace dressed up as superheroes, Gryffud had relied on wit and imagination to make his point. His actions had given him a high profile, and even brought in new clients for his business, but he’d long since accepted that they hadn’t made a damn bit of difference to the environment.

The screensavers on his office computer were pictures he had taken of the Welsh hills where he had been raised, and to which he still returned whenever possible. Gryffud’s connection to that landscape and, through it, to the planet as a whole was part of his very soul. His certainty that man’s abuse of all the bounty that nature had bestowed on him was leading to the inevitable desecration, even destruction, of the planet caused him intense pain. Now his patience had run out. Recently, Gryffud had been listening to angrier, more radical voices. He had been persuaded that it was time for a total change of tactics.

He was looking at a standard white postal packing box, 180 mm long by 100 mm wide and 50 mm deep. Inside it were four clear plastic packets, each containing ten fat marker pens, along with a delivery notice stating that each packet cost?4.99, plus?7.75 post and packaging, making a total of?27.71, paid through PayPal. Two of the packets contained blue pens, the other two red ones.

It was an everyday transaction for a company like Sharpeville Images, one that had attracted no official attention whatsoever on its way through the postal system. In the choking atmosphere of state-sanctioned paranoia that pervaded early twenty-first-century life, any phone call or email was liable to interception. But old-fashioned snail mail was a much more secure means of sending covert messages and goods: provided, of course, that the postal service was up to delivering them.

When he had opened the box and seen the pens lying within it, Gryffud had got up from behind his desk and walked across his office. He had closed the door and lowered the blinds that covered the window, through which he could normally keep an eye on his staff and they on him. No one had thought anything of it. The lowering of ‘Bryn’s blinds’ was the accepted sign that Gryffud was deep in creative thought: that mysterious process through which he came up with the unexpected, innovative concepts that had made the company’s name and kept them all in work.

But it wasn’t a desire to tap into his creativity that had prompted Brynmor Gryffud to cut himself off from the world.

He went back to his desk and took one of the blue pens out of its packet. Using a scalpel, he cut open one end of the pen and held it at an angle, the open end above the palm of his other hand. Under normal circumstances, the reservoir that contained the pen’s ink would have slid out. Instead, an innocuous white plastic tube, about 70 mm long and 8 mm in diameter, landed on Gryffud’s hand. The burly Welshman’s beard was spit by a piratical grin. The tube was a detonator. Fitted with a fuse and inserted into a mass of explosive material, it would turn an inert collection of chemicals into a highly destructive bomb.

Gryffud repeated the process for a randomly chosen red pen, from which a bright yellow tube, similar to the white one, appeared. This was an igniter, virtually identical to the detonator, except that its purpose was to start an instant, short-lived, but highly intensive blaze.

The two devices were replaced in their respective pens and returned to the appropriate packets. Gryffud picked up his phone and made a call.

‘The pens have arrived,’ he said. ‘They’re exactly what we asked for. How about you?’

‘No worries, mate,’ replied Dave Smethurst, ‘Smethers’ to his mates, a former army staff sergeant who now worked as a private contractor. Like Gryffud, Smethurst had a specialized clientele. He went on, his voice imbued with the adenoidal flatness of the East Midlands — as dreary an accent as Gryffud’s was mellifluous — ‘The lads have grabbed all the containers we need. And the gardening supplies are piled up in the barn.’

‘I hope you shopped around, Smethers.’

‘Oh yeah, we went to at least ten different garden centres, looking for the best value. And meanwhile the ladies, God bless ’em, are hard at work making the cakes.’

‘Good, sounds as though we have everything we need for the party. I’ll see you at the farm, then.’

‘Oh yeah, this is going to be fookin’ great. It’s really going to go with-’

‘Don’t say it,’ Gryffud interrupted.

There was a laugh at the other end of the line. ‘Take it easy, Taff. I was just winding you up.’

Gryffud ended the call.

‘… a bang,’ he murmured to himself, finishing the other man’s sentence.

Then he pulled up the blinds and opened his office door to the world once again.