The Walking Dead

Chapter 10

'Ah, up with the lark, I see…' Dickie Naylor shrugged out of his coat. It was not yet eight o'clock, but his visitor was already in place, sitting comfortably in the easy chair, cradling a steaming coffee mug in his hands. '…and no problems, I trust, at the front entrance?'

'No problems. That feisty Miss Reakes smoothed the way. I didn't have to strip down this time. So as we don't lose time on minimalities, I'll cut to the chase. I want to share my knowledge with you, Dickie.'

'I'm going to have a rather busy day. I don't know how much time I'll have for—'

The American's voice had a lacerating whip in it. 'Now, I think you're going to have to fit me in, Dickie, where your "busy day" permits. Make phone calls and I'll stop, but play with your computer and I'll talk — you ought to get used to the idea that I'm with you and am staying…What I heard, when you guys were hit the first time, you concentrated investigations on the bombers and their identities, but you failed to get at the kernel of it.'

'We think we did tolerably well, and "fail" is not a word we care to bandy about.' He did not care if his irritation showed. Mary bloody Reakes had not brought him coffee. An interloper had intruded into his workspace. He felt himself, already, treated as an imbecile. 'And I have a meeting in ten minutes.'

He might as well have kept silent: he was not heard.

The voice drawled and rasped at him. 'I'm going to say it. There was, Dickie, a failure in that you have circulated no information on the facilitator, or on the bomb-maker. Your efforts were aimed at the foot-soldiers. You boys should get it into your heads that foot-soldiers are in plentiful supply. Facilitators and bomb-makers are where you hit pay-dirt. Cut down the foot-soldiers and another crop will seed and spring up. Locate and eliminate the facilitator and the bomb-maker and you hit the Organization where it hurts most. The facilitator is known to me as the Scorpion, but the Twentyman is my pet name, and I know the bomb-maker by the title of the Engineer. In the unlikely event that you could walk more than a couple of hundred yards outside the fence wire and the blast walls of any military encampment in Iraq, that's the Sunni part, or beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad, and not have your throat cut, then settle down in a coffee-shop, interrupt the guys reading their newspapers or watching Al Jazeera on the screen and ask a question, it would be "Who is most successfully carrying the war to the Coalition?" The answer you will get — assuming you don't have a company of marines round you, which you'd need if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders — is that the Scorpion is the top guy, and alongside him is the Engineer. Kill them and you got yourself a real victory. Those men don't grow on trees. Look, Dickie, in Afghanistan and Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia, there has always been one son-of-a-bitch who gives himself the Scorpion moniker. It ain't me, it's them. A wriggling, burrowing little shit with a sting. He has made a mistake, and that mistake may well prove to be of dramatic proportions. He has come off familiar ground, he is no longer if I am correct — in the heartland of Ar Ramadi or al-Fallujah or Baquba or any of those murderous little enclaves of the Triangle. Whether from vanity, obedience or his understanding of duty, he has come on to your soil. I believe that making the journey was his mistake Now the son-of-a-bitch is vulnerable.'

Naylor looked down at his watch. 'Sorry, but I've to go to that meeting.'

'No problem; I ain't going anywhere. I'll be here when you get back, and we'll talk some more.'

'Has he returned yet?'

It was the third time that morning that Ibrahim had left the loneliness of his room, come into the living area and asked the question. He interrupted the first snarls of the argument, watched from a low chair by Ramzi. The heap of dirty clothing was in the centre of the carpet.

Syed said, waspish, 'If he was back you would see him. If you cannot see him he is not back.'

Faria said, 'You will hear him when he comes. I told you yesterday and I told you today, he has gone to Birmingham. When he has finished, he will return.'

'Where is Birmingham? What is in Birmingham? Why has he gone to Birmingham?'

Looking away, not meeting his eye, Syed muttered, 'You don't need to know.'

Staring at the ceiling, Faria blustered, 'It is better you stay in your room. You should be in your room.'

He retreated and shut his door on them. Nothing was as he had believed it would be. Again, and it was the same each day and each evening, they isolated him. From the moment he had been chosen in the desert and had sat close to the Leader, he had believed that he would be asked to express his desire as to the sort of target he would walk towards, and also asked what he wished to achieve by the sacrifice of his life…but he was shut away. His desires, wishes, were insignificant.

He could hear the movements in the room next to his, where the waistcoat was prepared, and he remembered the feel of its weight on his shoulders. Then, beyond his door, the argument broke again.

Syed's voice: 'I am telling you, do my washing.'

Faria's voice: 'Do your own washing, I have the meal to make.'

'You did his washing. You will do mine.'

'I will not.'

'My mother or my sister does my washing.'

'Then take it back to them and they can slave for you.'

'You take his washing, so why is mine different from his?'

Faria's voice, rising: 'Because — because he is different. Are you an idiot? Can you not see that? Different—'

Syed's voice, yelled anger: 'Women should do washing. You should do my—'

A door opened. The shout of the man who had so calmly, like a tailor, checked the fall of the waistcoat over his chest and stomach: 'Can you not be quiet? Do I fucking care who washes, who does not? I do my own washing. I have work to do, intricate work, and you disturb me. Where I am, I wash my own clothes — maybe in the river, maybe at a well, maybe under a stand pipe, maybe in a ditch. I wash my own because my wife is dead, killed by my enemy, and where I fight I do not have a servant. Get that fucking washing off the floor. I tell you, where I have come from you would not, any of you, survive a single day as a fighter. Your only use to me would be with a belt round your waist, and then I would not care whether there was filth on your clothing, whether you smelt like a fox's arse. And a fucking minute after the explosion of the belt I would have forgotten your name, your face.'

He heard the front door slam.

A minute later, through the crack in his curtains, he saw the man who had made the waistcoat pace in fury on the grass.

She had done his washing because he was different.

Would he be forgotten? Would she forget him?

He sank down on the bed and his head dropped into his hands.

'You're back. Let me pick up where I left off. I was talking vulnerability.'

Dickie Naylor grimaced. 'Sorry, et cetera. I've only a few minutes, Joe, then another meeting.'

'So, the Saudi boy who lodged the shrapnel inside me was a student of economics, probably with an intelligence quotient higher than mine, and he killed twenty-two men. Some of them were queueing for lunch and some had just sat themselves down at a table. He wounded a whole lot more, and I was one of them. Embedded in his bomb were ball-bearings, two-inch nails and one-inch screws, and it was one of those that robbed me of my sight. That was at the Marez garrison camp in Mosul — it's the forward operating base at the airport. The boy is unimportant, might as well have been a parcel in the post. The man who brought him out of Saudi, who collected the intelligence required to get him into our mess hall, who oversaw the documentation he needed, and the transport and the safe-house for the night before, is a master of his trade. He is the Scorpion…

'Of course you risk failure against a man like that. You, Dickie, you have the assistance of gadgets and staff alongside each step you take. You have computers, you have telephones with land-line connections and analogue and digital systems, you have assistants, you have a line manager who guides you, you have a building that is secure and protected. What does he have? He lives like a fugitive, sleeps rough, cannot use any form of telephone and is constantly aware, around him, of the sophistication of his enemy's arsenal. But he has the charisma of leadership, and will enforce it with ruthlessness.

'He had a prisoner, an American boy from Utah and from the 1^st Infantry Division. There was a charade of negotiation but the boy was doomed to have his throat sawn through. The boy, clever and brave, escaped his hell-hole — but was recaptured and murdered. The Scorpion would have thought one of the guards helped the boy to that short moment of freedom. His reaction: he personally killed fifteen, fifteen, of the men charged with the boy's imprisonment, which made certain he had the right one, the traitor…He is that ruthless. But, and I live in hope, by coming here he may have made a mistake. In his game, mistakes have fatal consequences. How are we doing?'

'I have to be gone,' Dickie said.

It was the chance that Ramzi had waited for.

In the kitchen, Syed — pathetic and unworthy of a place in the cell — was sourly studying the washing-machine manual. He had measured out the soap powder and spilled enough of it on the floor. Beside Syed, not acknowledging him, Faria — arrogant, full of herself, too ready to argue — was cutting vegetables on aboard. Jamal was up the drive and out in the trees…and the car had not come back…and he was in his room…and he could see the shape of the man's back1 hunched in anger, as he strode on the grass like the caged animals he had watched on school trips to zoos.

He slipped from the chair. He did not think Syed or the girl had seen him move. He padded, tiptoe, across the carpet and into the corridor. He counted his way past the doors, then his fingers dropped to a handle. He turned it and the door, unlocked, opened. When the man had surged out of the room to demand an end to the dispute, he had come in explosive fury and Ramzi had not heard him turn the key…and that had created the chance.

What was it like? His home was swamped by women, his mother and sisters, and they watched the satellite channels from the Middle East, and they cooed together in a sort of keening wail of excitement when the last video message of a martyr was played. What was the feel of it? His sisters idolized the young men whose faces flickered over the satellite, and each time the message of sacrifice to the Faith was complete they would look across the room at him. It was never said, but was implicit: he, too, could gain their especial love and esteem. What did it weigh? He. thought his sisters would have flushed with pride, not wept, if it had been their brother whose face was on the television and whose words were played on the speakers, but the opportunity had not been given him. What was the size of it? His elder sister had downloaded a document — The Virtues of Martyrdom — from the Internet, and his younger sister had read to him: 'There is no doubt that the sacrificing of one's soul for the sake of Allah in order to defeat His enemies and support Islam is the very highest level of sacrifice.'

What was the shape of it?

It lay on the table. It was inches from his hands.

He skirted the table and the bed, went to the window and gently held back the curtain. He saw the man striding, relentless, as if he tried to lose devils that trailed him. The face was knotted with fear or anxiety — but the man had not lost them and would walk more.

He was back at the table. There was an envelope and on it were two tickets. On opening out their leaves, he saw the printout for ferry sailings, noted the port of departure, the dates and times different — and names he did not recognize. He closed the tickets because they did not seem of importance to him, and his eyes roved on across the table.

It seemed so simple, so ordinary. Ramzi thought it something that children could have put together, like a school's project. He had read in the newspaper of a school in Palestine, in Gaza City, where teenage boys were taught the virtuous lessons of the bomb on their bodies, the journey to Paradise and the welcome of the virgins…a school for martyrs. The quiet clung round him. He reached out. He had the right to touch, to learn. He was treated with contempt. He did not particularly admire any of the others; but the same level of contempt was shown to them all. A bomber, a martyr, should be revered, not forgotten — it was what the maker of the waistcoat had said — after one minute. His sisters did not forget and could recite names from Grozny, Jenin and Baghdad. In secrecy, he would tell them of what he had seen, would whisper in their ears how it had felt, the weight, the size and the shape of it.

He touched the material and the coarse stitching was against his fingertips. They ran on over the wires and the taping, and flies buzzed round him. He could see, inside the plastic bags, the clusters of nails and screws, the small ball-bearings. He touched the batteries, then moved to the switch. He lifted it and dared to allow a finger to brush, so softly, against the button. In Palestine there were posters in schools and on the walls of public buildings of the smiling young men who were martyrs. He eased a stick from its cloth socket. He was careful not to tighten the wire, to break the taped connection. He held the stick in his hand and it was smooth, moulded, with a tackiness on its surface. He let it lie in the palm of his hand. The weight of the stick rested there. He bent, put his nose close to it and tightened his grip on it, suddenly fearful that it might drop and wrench clear the web of wires, but it had no odour. He replaced the stick.

He lifted the waistcoat.

He held it by the collar and raised it so that its hem cleared the table. He saw himself, side view, in the mirror. It was against his body; his sweatshirt was hidden by it. The mirror was on a chest of drawers, old, stained and flawed, and the image of the sticks was thickened and the wires seemed to Ramzi to cascade into a tangle, and hanging loose, below the mirror's field, was the button switch.

Perhaps a mosque would have been named after him or a cultural centre. He would go to God with the love of his sisters. But the waistcoat was too small for his muscled shoulders, was meant for another and would not have fitted him. He panted, almost an exhalation of relief. He could not have worn it. A shadow crossed behind him. A hand was at his throat and he froze. He felt the fingers tighten and the breath was squeezed out of him.

He choked and he could not turn. Past the opening in the curtains he saw grass, then the hedge and an empty field. His strength from gymnasium weight-lifting did not help him. He could not break the hand's grip.

He was freed. Ramzi staggered back. The waistcoat was laid neatly on the table, but his hand, which went up to his throat, where the pressure had been, still had the tackiness on it.

He ran from the room, and in the corridor he heard the sound of a car's approach.

'I've less than five minutes, Joe, then I must rush. It's our A Branch, the surveillance people — not that I have anything to offer them for tracking but it's a matter of keeping them in the picture.'

'We were talking mistakes, Dickie. The Scorpion is the equivalent of a corporation's chief executive officer, except that he's not all warm and comfortable on the thirty-ninth floor, and he doesn't have Research and Development below him, or a finance section, or half a hundred from Media Relations or Human Resources. He has to do it all with couriers, use cut-outs, flit between houses, byres and holes in the ground under the stars for sleep. Yet, without a CEO's back-up, this guy is running us ragged. But, and this is important, when the business big-shot makes a mistake, he has minions to clear up the mess. Not my guy. He is alone, and more alone on your territory than if he had stayed in Iraq. What does he think of the people he has to work with here? A British Asian is from a different culture, has not been toughened by combat, is used to having sheets on the bed. He will think little of them. His mistake was ever to have travelled. I tell you, Iraq is a safe environment for him, but this is not. To make him pay, and dearly, for that mistake, we need one thing. That's the priceless commodity of luck…Now;off you go, Dickie, if you're not to keep those good folks waiting.'

'He could have damaged it.' The anger, cold and controlled, sparked in the Engineer's eyes.

'But was it imbecility or sabotage?'

He had come into the cottage, followed by Khalid. The driver had carried the box and the big plastic bottle, and before he had set them down on a chair, the Engineer had burst into the living area and made the accusation. For a moment, briefly, Ajaq had floundered. Now he had heard the story. His glance, withering, fell on Syed and Faria and they had turned away as if they believed the guilt of Ramzi was their responsibility too.

'Probably stupid, without thought, but handling it under no supervision could have damaged it, and I would not have known. What do I do? Do I check every fastening, unpeel every taping join? He could have broken it.'

'But it was not sabotage?'

'I don't think so.'

'If there is, in your mind, a whiff of the scent of that, then…'

The sentence was left unfinished. He did not need to speak it. If his friend, the Engineer, had harboured that suspicion the consequences were clear. A knife from the drawer in the kitchen Himself and his friend taking the creature away into the fields in the evening, when darkness had come, and one of them bringing a spade. A walk across the ploughed fields to the trees.

'He is stupid, vain, but a child.' The Engineer's voice dropped to a murmur and its pitch would not have reached Khalid, Syed and the girl. 'It is a shit place and they are shit people. They should not have been given to us. We should be out, gone.'

'Friend, when we are ready. Not here, later, we will talk…Where is he?'

'In his room. Probably he whimpers for his mother.'

'I will speak with him.'

He told Khalid to open the box, take out the contents and learn to work the camera. They scuttled with it to the kitchen. He slapped the arm of the Engineer in affection. They were colleagues, brothers, but far from home. He went out of the room, ducked his head under the beams and came to the door.

As he entered, the boy lay on the bed, but started back and cringed against the headboard. He saw the terror bright in the eyes and the heavy shoulder muscles quivered. But the world of Muhammad Ajaq, the Scorpion in the files of his enemy, was both the creation of fear and the breeding of loyalty He smiled. He allowed the warmth of his smile to run on his lips and he saw confusion spread over the idiot's face…But he could not mask the contempt in his eyes, because they carried truth and the smile was a lie.

He said, 'Your life, Ramzi, was in the palm of the hand of my friend. If there had been with my friend a suspicion of betrayal then you were dead. Not a martyr's death but a traitor's. My friend says to me — and he held your life in his hand — that you were stupid…So, you live.'

The voice was hoarse, as if a fist was at the boy's throat. 'Thank you…I meant no…'

'You meant no harm. I understand. You were inquisitive. You were given to us, Ramzi, put into this cell because it was thought you could be relied on, depended on. Where I fight, a cell must be secure or it will fail, and failure comes when respect inside the cell is lost. Trust was placed in you. Should I doubt that trust?'

'No…no,' the boy stammered.

'It will not happen again…will not.' He stood over the boy, above him. He saw again the squirming movement against the pillows. He did not realize then the mistake he made, the scale of it, or the consequences. His hand rested loosely on the boy's shoulders — as it had on Ibrahim Hussein, who would die when he walked — and he felt the tension in the muscles there.

The mistake was made and he had no knowledge of it.

He left the room.

'Let's pick up where we left off, Dickie. Mistakes.'

'Would you like more coffee, Joe? I can get it made.'

'No more coffee. I'll need to relieve myself. No, thanks…How long we got this time?'

'We have a desk officer, downstairs, assigned to this. He's pulling together what strings we have — supposed to be with him ten minutes ago. Anyway…'

Joe Hegner said, 'I was at mistakes…But there is pressure on the Twentyman, the Scorpion. If we take a wider picture, over the last few months there have been in excess of sixty suicide-bombs, walking and driven, in Iraq. They are pumping them through and there is no sign that the belt is emptying. Each bomb has a diminished impact — the same happened on a lesser scale in Israel. Life has to go on, because for the living there is no alternative. Children go to school because they must have education. Families shop because they must eat to survive. Men stand in queues outside police recruiting offices because they have no other alternative of employment. Many die, atrocities are frequent, but the social fabric continues to exist, even if at Stone Age levels. I said "diminished impact". That is crucial to the mistake. The war against the Coalition demands impact. Can't find impact in that God-forsaken place. Impact requires momentum. Momentum gains headlines in newspapers and leads on the satellite channels. Bali, Madrid and your experiences a year and a half ago gain newspaper inches and television time.

'You Brits, your society is flabby and has an unprotected underbelly. You could not sustain what is the daily chore of life in Iraq. So, the son-of-a-bitch is sent here where the hazards to his safety are so much greater. In the wake of his arrival there are the growing — perhaps inevitable — chances of more minor mistakes, which, if you boys are lucky, will kill him. Why is there the probability of "minor mistakes" to add to the big one? In Iraq, on his own ground, he is among everything that is familiar, and he surrounds himself with proven men. Here, he cannot. Here, it's about who he has now to work with and—'

'It'll have to keep, Joe. I'm sure you understand.'

Through the wall of the room, Ibrahim heard the sounds of a man's weeping.

It should have been a time of joy as the day approached. He should have been able to share joy with brothers and a sister, but there had been dispute and argument, and now he heard desolate weeping.

He recited to himself from the Book, 3-169: 'You must not think that those who are slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive and well provided for by their Lord.' He had thought the words would comfort him, but they did not. Despair was hooked in his mind. There was no celebration of what he would do when he walked, when he held the switch in his hand, only raised voices — and now hopeless tears were offered him through the wall. Why? Why was there no joy?

Ibrahim left his room, went down the corridor and away from the crying. He came to the living room and the curtains were drawn there. He stood in the shadows at the door. He was not seen.

From the centre of the room, a beam of light sliced the darkness and fell on the face of Jamal. The source of the light was a small video-camera — what his father would have sold in his shop — and its beam was on Khalid's face and his eyes, which blinked. Syed was behind the camera, and at his side was Faria. None of them saw him. He was not noticed. He held his breath and listened.

Khalid held a sheet of paper in his hand, and complained: 'It's so difficult — it's hard to read with the light in my face.'

'Doesn't matter,' Syed said. 'He will have had time to learn it.' Faria said, head angled and her hands on her hips, accentuating her curves, 'I'm not sure it sounds right, do it again.'

Syed took on the accent of an American — he was crouched over the camera, eye pressed to the view-finder, as if it was Hollywood. 'Ready? OK. Action. Go in five.'

Beside him, her hand out, Faria dropped each finger as she counted down five seconds, then pointed to Khalid.

Khalid gazed at the lens, and his eyes seemed to water. 'Here we go…"I would like to say to you that I have come to Britain in order to strive in the path of God and to fight the enemy of Muslims. I am the living martyr. God, be He exalted…" It's so difficult to read this. Do I keep going? Right…"At this time we say to the whole world, and declare it as a mighty shout, that the will of Muslims will not weaken and that the retaliatory fire will blaze until the crusaders and oppressors have departed from the Muslim homeland…" Do I have to read it all, or can I go to the end?'

'Just do the end,' Faria said.

'The last sentence, his sign-off,' Syed said.

'Going in five…"To Blair and Bush, I say that the curse is on your faces. I will await you all, my brothers, in Paradise. Do not forget me in your prayers…" That's it. Can he learn that, no stumbles, straight to The camera?'

'Yes, he can,' Faria said. 'At the moment it sounds like the written word, not the spoken word. It needs to be drafted again.' Syed mimicked the studio director: 'Cut. Break the set.'

'It is impossible to read it with meaning and make it a sincere testament because it is not me that is going to walk,' Jamal said.

Ibrahim turned away, went quietly into the corridor. Then lights flooded on and he heard the curtains dragged open.

'He will say it well,' she said, her voice faint to him. 'Just as he will walk well because he has the dedication — we do not — and the strength.'

Dickie Naylor said, 'We're moving fast, little pieces beginning to slot together. It's all about The Threatened Swan. I apologize, is that a riddle to you?'

'Miss Reakes briefed me on the work of Jan Asselyn in the Rijksmuseum, but out in Montana we're not big on art,' Hegner said, drily.

'I don't know how many hotels, accommodation addresses we've checked but it'll be hundreds…It's the swan on the T-shirt that did the business. Ibrahim Hussein was in a hotel in north London until Saturday. They remembered him checking in. Never left his room all the time he was there. So, he's somewhere in London and we have the city in lock-down. There were others in the hotel, probably linked, and it's being worked on. For the first time, Joe, I feel a faint justification of optimism.'

'Not warranted, Dickie.'

'Christ, you ape a kill-joy well. Why not?'

'Where I come from, Dickie, all the bombs are not at the airport or up against the Green Zone of Baghdad. A few, but not the majority. They hit round the country, not where the security is tightest Here, it won't be London. You call for a lock-down and you've every gun-carrying policeman you can muster on the streets, off days in lieu and furlough breaks, and every one of them who would be doing thieving, mugging, fraud, rape and administration. Your capital is stiff with policemen standing shoulder to shoulder. So, the Twentyman, the Scorpion, leaves it well alone. Go look where you're soft and unprotected, where your citizens gather in numbers, because that is where the threat will be. Look where there are no guns, no barricades. Look where ordinary people go about their daily business, where your citizens think they're safe.'

'But that could be anywhere.'

'I'm telling you it won't be London but somewhere that thinks it's safe and out of the terror frame. Somewhere there is still innocence, and ignorance.'

A wraith figure, Lee Donkin followed the woman. The light ebbed on the Dunstable road. The woman was perfect and soon she would come to the underpass tunnel. She was on her mobile as she walked and the handbag on her arm wasn't even zipped. And it all went bloody pear-shaped. This gang spilled out of the food shop, saw her and recognized her, and it was all kisses, and she was in the middle of them — in a knot of men and women — and she'd been perfect. Wasn't perfect any longer. He crossed the road, drifted on and never looked back. Twenty minutes he'd been following her. Twenty minutes wasted. He cursed, kicked a can off the pavement into the traffic, and went through the tunnel. After twenty minutes of it, psyched and steeled for the snatch, then let down like the fix was finished, he hadn't the will — or the energy — to go looking for another target. He went on into the town centre, head down and hood up, but his savage mood was short-lived. He was in the square. Through the trees, past the vagrants and the dossers on the benches, Lee Donkin saw the posters on the Arndale's walls…Bloody good, bloody ace. Sales, bargains and giveaways on offer this coming weekend. Starting up Saturday, nine a.m. Bloody brilliant. Punters would be coming into town, women would have their purses bulging, and they'd be half asleep, hurrying down the Dunstable road. Bloody first-class pickings.

Naylor scribbled reminders on the sheets of his Post-it pad and stuck them on his desk surface, where clear spaces could be found. Joe Hegner was far back in his chair and talked on. So much was now crammed, squashed, into Dickie Naylor's mind. Everything that day, the meetings and the briefing, had been of critical importance but his ability to absorb was failing — his thoughts were far away, where he had heard the gulls, the waves and the wind.

'Dickie, his problems are with the quality of the cell he has been given. They're not people of his choice. The Twentyman, or the Scorpion, has not interviewed them, has not had the chance to run vetting over them, or to check references — as a CEO would have. The only one alongside him whom he's certain of is the bomb-maker, the Engineer. The rest he has to take on trust, and that's a big step for him, but he cannot do without them. He will be in safe accommodation, probably a short-term rental. With him will be a driver, a guy who has done the necessary reconnaissance of a target, another who will provide immediate security where the cell is gathered, and another who is there to watch over the perimeter of those premises and is staked out at the end of the street or wherever, and he will need some sort of logistics individual. Can he rely on any of them? He will not be happy to depend on individuals whose recruitment was not in his own hands. Then, introduced into this little coven, there is the boy who will do the walk or will drive the car. They are all, believe me, boxed up together, and there will be tensions — have to be tensions — and it is then that mistakes are made, and you have the chance to get lucky. But the stakes for him are high and he must live with the stresses that might be fracturing the cell. If there's an opportunity, you have to be able to exploit it. Will you? Can you?'

Outside his cubicle office, Mary stood at her desk, gestured to Naylor, tapped the face of her watch and pulled a droll face. She seemed to have looked after the self-invited guest well, because each time he returned there was a new sandwich wrapper beside his chair, or a fresh glass, and most recently there had been a finished soup bowl.

'Sorry and all that, time's up. My answer is, most definitely, I will and I can react to Lady Luck or a mistake.'

The gulls wheeled and shrieked over the disintegrating carcass of a cod that had been discarded from a fishing-boat. The sea beat in a fury against the headlands of rock fingers at the extremities of the bay, known in the old language as Port Uisken. The wind, with rain in it, came from the south-west at a strength of force eight, blistered spray over the rocks and whined in the telephone wires…On those telephone wires, the message had come that had put them on standby status.

Two men trudged into the teeth of the elements and returned to their home. They came over a hill, too slight in elevation to have been given a Gaelic name but it had provided them with a minimum of protection while they were in its lee. Now they were exposed: the wind whipped them and the rain thrashed them, but they struggled on with the determination that was their hallmark. The taller of them carried a new-born heifer calf under his waterproof jerkin and the shorter steadied his friend when they came down off the hill and over weather-smoothed stones where the lichen was soap-slippery. Trailing them was a Highland cow and, behind them, the afterbirth mess that by the following morning would have been taken by the carrion crows or the ravens if the pair of big eagles that nested on the duff, the Cnoc nan Gabhar, had not ventured up and found it. The calf, still wet and with slime on it, was under the jerkin of Xavier Boniface. The steadying hand was that of Donald Clydesdale.

It had been dark still when they were woken, in their separate rooms but at the same moment, by the distant bellow of the cow, perhaps a mile away. They had dressed, gulped a mug of tea and gone out with the wind on their backs propelling them forward. They had found the cow in a difficult labour under the shelter of the millennia-aged stones on the slope of Cnoc Mor. Neither man would have considered turning away from the cry of anguish.

On a better day, as they had tramped to Cnoc Mor, as they had assisted at the birth, as they had turned for home, they might have seen the slow, languid turns of the great white-tailed eagles, the flying barn doors with a wing span in excess of seven feet, and that would have given them rare pleasure. They had not seen the majesty on the wing of the birds, or the hobby hawk, but they had heard the coughed shout of the ravens that had a nest on Aird a Chrainn.

Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, in the tiny community — twenty-six souls when the summer tourists were away from Ardchiavaig — that was their home, had no past, only a present, and their future was unknown. The two men, lankily tall and muscularly short, had arrived fifteen years before at this remote corner of an Inner Hebridean island, had taken over a ruined croft's shell, built a roof for it, dug out a damp course and plastered the interior walls. They had used rough carpentry skills to construct a staircase, had laid a sewage pipe to a cesspit, and excavated the ditch that brought them water from an historic well. Electricity and the telephone links came on the wires that the wind bent and were held up on posts that the wind had angled. It was a place well suited to two men whose expertise and past were best hidden.

The head of the heifer calf, born with a red-brown coat, peeped from between the opened buttons of the taller man's waterproof jerkin; he held it tight against him as if with love. The shorter man held his arm as they came off the last stones of the hill, then sank down into a reedy bog; the grip showed the extent of their friendship. The cow followed them. Unsaid between them was the extent of their guilt that she had been left out and had dropped the calf in foul weather, but the birth had been a full ten days before the scheduled time and a week before they had expected to lead her down to the stone byre behind the croft. They owned, the two of them, the one Highland cow and now one Highland heifer calf, fifteen ewes and a ram, half a dozen goats, eight chickens and a cockerel, and two geese. All were loved.

But they were now on stand-by status: the call had come from London, from Mr Naylor, and if a second phone call was received, they would be gone because that was their past, and the McDonald family, who had the nearest farm to them would see to their beasts and birds. It was five years since they had last been called away, and they had travelled then from the Inner Hebrides to the mountain towns of Bosnia; seven years and ten years before, they had gone to the wild border country of the province of Northern Ireland. Whenever the past demanded their presence, they responded. And the McDonald family would not have queried where they went and why, or the McDougalls, and not the McPhersons, or Hamish who brought the post each day in mid-afternoon, or the Sutherland widow whose husband had been lost from an upturned crabbing boat. When they had returned they had not been quizzed on their business away from the island.

When they journeyed away it was because of their knowledge of thresholds.

A warm smile crossed the face of the taller man. 'Look at it, Donald, it's breaking. It's the last of the rain and the gale's taking it. See the sunlight coming?'

With reverence, the shorter man said, 'And there'll be a rainbow to follow it, and then good skies, Xavier. It's a sign she'll be a fine beast. We did it. We saw her into this world.'

'Makes you feel well.'

'Makes you feel the best, Xavier.'

'If her mother's Marigold, she should be Daisy.'

'Marigold and Daisy, good names. I'm not arguing with that, Xavier.'

They cleared the bog and reached the field of cropped grass. Their sheep and goats stampeded towards them. In Ardchiavaig, where the winter of the last months had been brutal in the intensity of the storms — as it was every year Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, both with their sixtieth birthdays behind them, would have been thought of as somewhere on a scale between lunacy and eccentricity. But none of the community they lived among would have cared. They were accepted for what they were — for what they were thought to be. They brought home the heifer calf, Daisy, and Boniface laid out fresh straw on the byre's floor of stone slabs while Clydesdale went to the store shed for a precious bale of hay for the cow, Marigold. It was the best straw they had and the best hay. When it was done, when the cow suckled her calf — only then — when the wind blew the sunlight against the stout walls of the croft, when the incoming tide thrust the whitecaps on to the beach, when the rough beauty of the place had settled on Ardchiavaig, they went inside to check the answer phone recording. The second call had not come.

The knowledge of Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale concerned the thresholds of pain, carefully regulated as an arm of interrogation. The inflicting of pain, enough to make a prisoner spit out truths but not enough to win a babble of lies, was the prized expertise of these two elderly men and it came from their distant past, when they had first worked with Mr Naylor. They drank tea and made toast, the sunlight lit their room, and they gloried in what they had achieved that morning. They were usually called to action, where the thresholds they knew of were involved, when a target made a mistake, then paid for it in pain.

The handler, with seventeen years' experience behind him, knew well enough the value of luck, but it came sparsely.

He worked with spaniels that were trained to sniff and find, then to address the target, sitting on their haunches and barking, till he came to investigate. His last dog had been a drugs sniffer, and life had been exciting and busy. That little treasure had had a score of convictions to her name, and a dozen commendations for finding heroin, cocaine and amphetamines.. But Smack had been retired now for three years: she lived at home, with a basket in the kitchen, and was the ageing playmate of his children.

The new dog was Midge, a pedigree bred from Welsh stock; as a working dog she had a kennel and pen out at the back. She was faster to boredom but had energy and intelligence. Boredom afflicted her because she was explosives-trained, and explosives were rare in the East Midlands. With her handler she did preparatory search work whenever royalty or a prominent politician was visiting the county, and was called out when a resident reported a 'suspicious' object at the railway or bus station; she had never found a 'live' cache of dynamite — not even a hidden sack of Second World War ammunition underneath an allotment shed. Razor sharp on exercises, Midge seemed to her handler to recognize that the 'real thing' had eluded her.

Another day done. They had been out on loan to the airport at Castle Donington, where he'd taken her through Baggage Reclaim and let her scramble over the trolleys before the bags and cases went on to the carousel — showing the flag, really. After that, he'd had her alongside the check-in queues and she'd sniffed at the bags and cases stacked with holidaywear. The handler and his dog were as much a part of the reassurance-to-the-public policy as the officers who patrolled with machine pistols hooked on to their chests. But his duty day was completed…Every late afternoon, when they were finished, he'd leave the van in the driveway, shed his uniform, and walk the spaniel up on to Rose Hill, on the edge of the Normanton district of the cathedral city of Derby, and let her run free. There, kids played with her and she was everybody's friend.

It did not matter to the handler whether it rained, sleeted, or if the sun baked him. He would be on Rose Hill at the finish of his shift — and tomorrow, because he had a nine o'clock start, before his shift began — and Midge would be charging and careering among the other walkers, the mums with their prams and the vagrants on the benches. Twice, Smack had identified kids with heroin wraps on Rose Hill, and that was luck, and the handler had made arrests. Never, of course, had Midge identified an ounce, not even five grams' worth of military or commercial explosive in the park, but the little beggar wasn't one to stop trying: she sniffed at everything and everyone — just never had the opportunity to bark raucously and have a 'real thing' moment.

He whistled; she came.

He gave her a reward, a half-biscuit, tousled the hair on her collar, fastened the leash and started out for home.

'I spoke, Dickie, of the kid who's been brought in to do the business. I'd like to focus on him and—'

'I don't want to seem rude, Joe, but the assistant director's waiting upstairs for me — I hope Mary's looking after you.'

'She's doing a fine job. Another day of this and I'll be fatter than a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep your man on hold a couple minutes. Imagine the kid. A Saudi Arabian boy, from the limited background of an upbringing in Asir Province, is in circumstances way out of his depth. He's far from home and has only his Faith to cling to. Where he is, in the safe-house, he has no friend. He is alone. I could almost feel sorry for him, Dickie — except that it was a kid like him who walked into the mess hall at Mosul. Those with him, except for the big man, are of an alien culture. They're not Arabs but Muslim Brits. They won't know how to talk to him, won't understand his feelings, and cannot offer him succour. His isolation is total. Some of those British will be jealous of him because he's going to be martyred and have that quarter of an hour of fame. Others' fear of death, eternity will have been heightened by his presence, proximity. Strains and stresses will create an atmosphere you could cut with a blunt-edged knife…and around them, bickering and complaining and wishing he was someplace else, is the big man. You following me? OK, so you have to go. Enjoy your meeting, Dickie.'

The trial lurched on.

After the lunch adjournment, the prosecution's barrister had started on his closing address to the jury; Mr Justice Herbert made a play at normality and busily wrote his longhand notes; the Curtis brothers glowered from the dock and the security round them had been reinforced by the presence of two more prison officers; the solicitor, Nathaniel Wilson, kept his head down as if that way he would not be noticed; the police guard in the public gallery had been doubled. The normality the judge had aimed for could not be achieved.

Some of the jury seemed to listen to the barrister's droning repetition of the evidence laid before them; others scarcely made the effort.

But in the morning when the jury had gathered in their room, and again during the adjournment, there had been lively anger, confusion, and an almost excited meld of gossip and anecdote between them. Confidentiality was gone, and something of a brotherhood in adversity had been shaped. They all — bar one — had difficulties with the new situation confronting them.

Rob, a mouthpiece for the general anger, had said, 'No one seems to have given us a thought. My darts team's on the board tonight, and I'm the fixture secretary. I'm expected to turn out — but I'm told I can't. Where am I going to be? Nobody's told me.'

While the bickering complaints had played in his ears, Jools Wright had said nothing. Could have. Could have spoken of the dour detective who had driven him home, who had introduced himself curtly to Babs and nodded with bare politeness to Kathy, who had checked all the windows and door locks, paced round the back garden, then drawn a plan of his home, who had asked for each of the family's blood groups, then been on the phone for an age with a map on his knee. There had been a red pen circle round the nearest Accident and Emergency hospital…Who had called him sir and his wife ma'am, — who had said he was either Mr Banks or Detective Constable Banks. Could have told them all that the- detective had bridled sharply when referred to as a 'bodyguard': 'That's what film stars have. I am a Protection Officer. You are not some minor celebrity, you are a Principal — and in case you have the wrong idea about all this, you have been assigned this level of security after a threat assessment recognized the danger you and your family now face. We are not friends, don't forget that. A final thing, we use a jargon phrase, "dislocated expectations". It means we can plan for what we think will happen but when the opposite turns up we have to be prepared for that. So, to cover it, I require you all to obey my instructions immediately I give them. I will not entertain discussion.' Could have said that a holdall bag had been brought into the hail and unzipped. The stubby shape of a machine-gun with a magazine attached was displayed, and a big fire extinguisher — like those in his school's corridors — was laid beside the holdall. Could have said that an hour of discussion, ignoring Jools, had centred on where Mrs Wright and her daughter would stay after they abandoned their home, and that this, too, was telephoned through to his control. Could have said that after he had gone upstairs to the spare room, he had not slept and had heard the regular checks made by the detective of the ground-floor windows, and low-pitched conversations with the police-car people outside. He'd come down for a coffee after three: the detective had been reading from a weathered old notebook and had not acknowledged him. Could have said that Mr Banks had been yawning and taciturn as he had driven Jools to Snaresbrook through the rush-hour traffic, and his eyes had spent more time snapping up at the mirror than on the roads ahead.

But Jools Wright. had said nothing.

In the last hour of the afternoon, Banks still had a mountain to conquer, with an apparently endless list of tasks to be completed. He reckoned that the detective inspector, Wally, regarded him as capable and the rest as second rate — maybe third.

Twenty minutes on a phone trying to find a coach that had privacy windows. Failing…Getting a coach that had done a school run and was littered with crisps packets, supervising its cleaning, and himself Sellotaping newspaper pages over the passenger windows. Working through the drills with the motorcycle escorts, where the traffic would be blocked to allow the coach to get clear of the court without risk of it being followed. Waiting on a security check and vetting to come through on the coach driver. Finalizing the route to the destination with the driver and the escorts. Calling the destination to demand catering facilities for the jury members, the escorts and the security detail. So much to be done and the clock ticking against him. And the thought kept scratching in his mind that he was on jury protection while the Delta, Golf and Kilo teams were strutting their stuff in the capital's streets where a suicide-bomber was thought to be on the loose, where the security status had been ratcheted up to the highest level. Not David Banks's bloody concern but his mind couldn't escape it. He was out of it because he was rated inadequate — big pill to swallow with a bitter taste. Told himself he didn't care, and tried to believe it. It was time to move.

Carrying suitcases and grips, they filed from a back door into the closed yard used to load prisoners into the vans. He thought some looked curiously at the coach, and others glowered in resentment.

Banks was the last to climb the steps, carrying the holdall. He did the head count. All present, all correct. He gave the thumbs-up to Wally, who would follow in a chase car, and the driver swung the door shut. His hand, in an automatic gesture, slipped to the holster, felt the Glock's butt and the hard edges at the end of the magazine. The high yard gates opened. The coach drove through; the motorcycles gunned their engines and slipped into their stations. He went down the aisle, took the empty seat behind the key man and sat.

The school teacher, Banks thought, had not the marks on him of a hero. Funny that. Looked rather ordinary, hadn't the appearance of a man brimming with public spirit. Seemed pretty damn average. And there had been only a pretend kiss on the doorstep that morning, the hero and his wife, with daylight between their cheeks.

The coach accelerated. Banks thought he could handle whatever might be thrown in his face — even 'dislocated expectations'—with ease.

'Don't mind me saying this, Dickie, but something seems off. Did your meeting not go well?'

'It went fine, thank you.'

'Something's off. Deny a man his sight and his instincts compensate. Why don't you get Mary to take on some of your load?'

'Your concern, Joe, is admirable, but I'm able to cope with my job.'

'Where was I? Yes, the big man, he's the target worth having. I—'

'Very interesting, Joe, but from my perspective the target worth having is the little scum-bag who has the intention of killing and mutilating as many people as he can gather round him. Am I wrong? How is your perspective so different?'

'Not only are you bent out of shape, but you're also getting irritable and that, Dickie, is exhaustion. You're not a law-enforcement officer. You are, Dickie, a counterintelligence officer: a whole world of differences, a canyon between them. Getting the bomber saves a few lives, short term, but in the scheme of things is peanuts. The elimination of the Facilitator — my Twentyman, my Scorpion — is a battle of importance won and—'

'Because, I suppose, he's responsible for blinding you.'

'That's below the belt, Dickie. I'd started to think better of you.'

'I apologize…Christ, I'm tired.'

'Water under the bridge…He, by now, is as tired as you are, but more stressed. He does not have limitless reserves of self-control and will be looking towards the preservation of the skin on his back — the way out. He will not be here when the bomb is detonated, will be long gone. The detonation is for the son-of-a-bitch who carries the device and the lowlifes who are with him at the end. I did not come here, Dickie, to attempt to use my experience in the prevention of one bomb exploding. I came to get up close to the Facilitator of many bombs. He will have no feelings for the lowlifes or the kid, because his own survival is paramount for him. As soon as he believes that the operation is in place, that creases have been ironed out, he will ditch them and run. However fast you respond in aftermath time, you will be too late, and all you can, hope to net will be the foot-soldiers. It's all about mistakes and luck, the ability to exploit. Who's waiting for you now?'

'Just the desk man. I'll be half an hour, Joe, perhaps a bit more.'

The bus slowed, then stopped. By craning his neck, looking over the heads in front of him and past the screen behind the driver, Jools could make out wire fences, a lowered barricade, arc-lights, a guardhouse and sentries. The soldiers were in battle dress and had rifles against their chests. Jools grinned to himself. He understood why they had not been told where they were headed, or what was their destination: it was a bloody army camp.

The detective, a morose blighter and without conversation through their hour's journey, had gone up front, had spoken through the open door to a sergeant, then turned to them. 'Thank you indeed, ladies and gentlemen, for your patience. You will be shown to your sleeping quarters, then given a meal. You are all, I guarantee it, quite safe here, and—'

'It's not my safety I'm concerned with, it's my cat's,' Fanny piped. '- every effort will be made to ensure your comfort.'

Safer than a vault of the Bank of bloody England, Jools reflected. But for how long? The little toad man had told him: There would be nowhere to hide. My friends have long arms and longer memories. He felt the cold through the open door of the coach, and shivered.

'I don't want to say this but, Dickie, you don't seem so well.'

'Just tired.. I suppose I ought to invite you for a bite to eat.'

'Wouldn't hear of it. What you need is bed, and maybe a Jack Daniel's for company. Don't have a conscience about playing host to me. I have a date, and I'm told it will be Italian so I'm going to go out there and make a fool of myself with a spaghetti bowl. I'll be dropped back at my hotel.'

'See you in the morning, Joe. Hope you don't feel your day's been wasted.'

'Been a good day, Dickie. We're only short of one thing. Luck.'

The cottage slept, but in one room the curtains flapped and an open window whined on its hinges.