The Walking Dead

Chapter 18

The sight was locked. The shape of the man's upper body, chest and head filled the telescopic lens. The finger was off the guard and on to the trigger bar. The squeeze started, with gentle pressure…The man had no face. At the base of the lens' view was a cardboard box. Perhaps the man paused for a moment to gather breath, perhaps had forgotten that the parapet of sandbags was lower there, that he was exposed. The sniper prepared himself for the recoil at his shoulder, and its bruising power. The man he would shoot had no face.

His mobile rang.

The sniper had been with him through the night. If he had slipped towards sleep, escaped from the marksman, the clock's chimes in the town had shaken him back to the image. On the settee, with the blanket nicked up and scarcely covering him, he had lived with the sniper in the darkness hours.

Reaching down, Banks fumbled for his mobile and found it underneath his trousers and the belt that held the pancake holster. He answered.

'Right, found you. Wally here. Banksy, where the hell are you?' He said the name of the town.

'Banksy, what's going on? I can't sleep, got an itch in my bum. I call the location, just a check and just doing my job — not intending to wake you. The location night-duty bugger tells me all's quiet, then adds you're not there, or the top Tango…What, in God's name, are you doing off camp with no clearance from me? I gave an OK for a few hours, not an overnight. What's going on? Am I asking something unreasonable? I don't think so.'

He lied, and it didn't seem a big deal. The lie was that the ailments of his Principal's sick mother and father had worsened. A mercy call, and really necessary to be there through the night.

They'd started up again in the bedroom. Banks could hear them through the thin wall and the thinner door — grunts, groans, a mattress heaving — and he cupped his hand round the mouthpiece of the mobile so that his chief inspector would hear only the quiet of a house of the sick and the ill. He said lie hadn't telephoned because he hadn't wanted to distract his superior from the planning of a kid's birthday party.

'If that's not impertinent, Banksy, I don't know what is. That's bloody cheek. If I don't know where my people are, it reflects on me. It makes me a prat, which I don't like, an inefficient prat.'

He said that he took responsibility for his decision, and that this morning the patients seemed in better health and that he hoped the kid's birthday party would go well.

'You have an attitude problem, Banksy. That's what I was told, that's what I've found out for myself. Here's a fact of life: you were assigned to us because you weren't wanted on serious business. There's a major bloody alert on. Every gun in the goddamn force is out on the streets, that's the word, but not you. You were not wanted because you have a problem. Don't think this won't be reported. I gave you support and my reward is that you've shat on me…Go back to your bloody beauty sleep and, when it's convenient, take your Tango back where he's supposed to be — and don't move a bloody inch without my say-so…You there, Banksy?'

The groans of the mattress had become squeals, shrieks. He lied again, said a doctor was due to call when the working day started and would give Mr Wright an all-clear on his parents. Then he would take the Tango back to the location. Again he wished the chief inspector well for the kid's party.

'You're a plonker, Banksy, a useless plonker and a—'

He cut the call, dropped the mobile back on to his trousers, on to the holster. And they finished. A last gasp, a final shout, and bloody finished. He lay on his back and his thoughts returned to where they had been previously.

He was with the sniper.

What had been with him through the night were the calculations the marksman would have made…Four years back, they'd done a course with paratroops out on the Brecon Beacons, and there had been a sergeant instructor who'd talked them through a sniper's skills. Wasn't relevant to Banks, but he'd listened. It was more for S019 gun people who might carry a rifle and be put on rooftops for a state occasion or be tasked into a siege situation. He'd thought, before he listened, that a sniper had a damn great 'scope on the barrel that did the work. He'd heard about the mathematics of 'wind deflection' and 'bullet drop', and he'd been shown the little laminated charts that listed the equations. The sergeant had talked about the need to watch a flag's motion or the bend of trees, and how an aim might be at a roof gutter when the target was lounged by a ground-floor door, or by sunshine or snow. He had learned of the experience and skills of the sniper, which overrode a pocket calculator…and a target could be hit at a thousand paces. During the night he had set himself behind the 'scope sight and had seen the last of the autumn's dead leaves blowing between the pocked shell-holes of Hill 421 across the Ebro valley, and paper scraps carried by the summer — wind. The sniper had used his skills and experiences, the same as the sergeant instructor's, to fire the bullet into the chest of Cecil Darke. He could not see his great-uncle's face. The sniper had. The sergeant instructor, men quiet around him and listening to an expert, said that the sniper — among his own — was a hated man. Shrapnel from an artillery shell, a mortar bomb's splinters or the bullets from a traversing machine-gun carried, random death. The sniper looked into the features of his target, saw the magnified eyes, saw the chest where a heart beat and where a photograph of a loved one was pocketed, made a judgement, and fired. Could he? Could he look into the face, through the 'scope, of a stranger and make him familiar and take the time to know him, then kill him?

Play God-could he?

He rolled off the settee.

The apartment was still. Beyond the thin wall and the thinner door, they were spent.

He found, at last, a way to lose the image of the finger on the rifle's trigger bar.

Banks took the magazine from the Glock, then the magazines that were housed in the holdall. He began, carefully and methodically, to empty them. He laid the bullets out on the back of his shirt, beside his trousers, made four little piles of them. It was a therapy, of no purpose but to clear his mind. Then he reloaded the magazines, pressed each bullet down against the spring. It was the routine of his working life, what he did each morning before going on duty. Unthinking, hands moving mechanically, Banks filled the four magazines and placed three in his holdall, and one in his pistol. He worked a bullet into the breach, checked the safety, put the Clock into the holster.

It was worth doing. The procedure was not so that he was proof against a jam of the firing mechanism but to clear his mind. Through the curtains, not closed completely, the dawn was coming. Later he would read the last page of the notebook, but he had succeeded, had lost sight of the sniper's finger that whitened as the pressure on the trigger grew.

The room was lighter, but Banks slept.

Also waking that morning and preparing for the coming day…

In the second bedroom of his mother's housing-association home, out in the Leagrave district of the town, Lee Donkin shivered as he dressed. The tremors were not from the cold: he had not injected brown into his veins last night, or the last day, not for fucking near a week. He did not pad to the bathroom, did not wash and had not run a brush across his teeth. He dragged on yesterday's sweatshirt over yesterday's vest, and yesterday's jeans over yesterday's pants, and yesterday's socks. From the floor he took his anorak with the hood and slipped into it, then prised his feet into his trainers. He could not control the shake and shouted an obscenity, but was not heard. He did not know where his mother was, from which pub she had been taken home by a punter. If she had been there she would have yelled back a curse from her room for waking her…She was not often there. He went to the kitchen, took bread from the bin, ignored the pale green mould on the crusts, and wolfed it down, but it had little effect on the shivering. He heard the couple who lived above them already rowing, and the baby next door was crying. He lifted up a chair from beside the kitchen table, and banged against the ceiling with its legs. Now he went to the bathroom and wrapped his hand in his anorak's sleeve. He stood on the lavatory seat and stretched himself up to the old cistern high on the wall and reached inside. He retrieved a short-bladed knife from the hiding-place in which it was taped. It went into his pocket. Later, before he left, he would rummage in the debris — clothing, fast-food plastic plates and syringes — on the floor of his room for his gloves, lightweight leather. His hands would never touch the handle of his favoured knife. He was too smart, too switched on, to give prints or DNA if he was done on the street with a stop-and-search. Just found it, hadn't he, just picked it up in the street and just going to hand it in, wasn't he? They had an operation going, the police had, and called it Failsafe, but they hadn't netted him, too smart and switched on. Because he craved the brown, Lee Donkin needed a snatch that morning — on the way to the shopping centre in the square and the sale when purses were loaded — needed it bad.

Avril Harris crawled from her bed, stumbled to the bathroom. All through the night, she had festered the anger that she had been sold short, had bought a car that was already broken. She had been out the previous evening for a curry with three of the other girls from A and E, and she'd been the one who hadn't drunk a beer or three and had given two of them a lift back. Every time she'd slowed at the damn lights, the backfire had gone. A hell of a noise. Hadn't frightened the others, with beer inside them, but had made them laugh hysterically. They had laughed at her car, when it should have been her pride and joy. In the bathroom, under the shower, her anger slackened. She thought through her day ahead…Up and out and into the car, bloody thing. A drive into the town and at the multi-storey car park around nine, and into the shopping centre a few minutes after Wasn't going to hit the mad rush for the opening of the doors. Into work by eleven. If it hadn't been for the car — sluicing herself under the shower's rose — it would have been a day to look forward to.

His alarm, old-fashioned with a clapper bell, woke Steve Vickers. His had been a good, dreamless sleep. Off to the bathroom and he ran the piping-hot water. He was content, as close to happiness other than when he had an attentive audience round him. Without his daily bath he would have been — his opinion — a lesser, unfulfilled man. Living alone, he had no queue outside the door, no one to bang it and urge him to hurry. He lay among the suds and talked to himself, aloud, of the history he would impart that morning. He believed that what he did in bringing history alive was valuable, couldn't imagine anything else he might achieve had greater value. He lingered, ran more hot water, had time enough before he met his audience in the town square.

George Marriot's sister shook him awake. She gazed down at him and he recognized the affection that linked them. He assumed that at the pub — could not be otherwise — his life with his spinster sister was a source of sniggering amusement. She was already dressed. They would laugh in the pub, when he had gone out through the door and had started on his walk home with his sticks to aid him, that they were two lonely, misplaced souls, the flotsam rejects of ordinary life…They knew sod all…She was always up at five and she always woke him at six. He could get to the bathroom without the support of the sticks. There was a line made by his hands along his room's wallpaper, along the corridor and into the bathroom. Informer times, it was him that would have risen at five, but they were gone. He used the shower, always cold water falling on him. It took him back to the days of the camps at Kandahar and Jalalabad, when the dawn peeped up over the mountains and fighting men prepared for their day and the scars on his legs still puckered and were deep blue where the surgeons had probed for detritus. The chill of the shower invigorated him, gave scope to his memories of the best of days…One cloud, always one bloody cloud in a sky of clear blue. The petty remarks about his shirt — true, but should not have been said — had hurt, were wounds. When he had eaten his breakfast of kedgeree — egg, fish and rice, she cooked it for him every day of the week — he would go down to the village, take the bus to the town, buy three shirts in the sale and, with luck, still have change from a twenty-pound note and bring flowers for her back with him. The water ran on his skin, as it had done when it had dripped from an elevated oil drum and he'd hunted men for bounty, when his life had had purpose. The long-nurtured memories gave him comfort.

'He'll have slept rough,' Hegner said.

'Joe, I'm already about a light year's miles beyond any authority I once owned. I'm outside. Hours back, the card I swipe at the door of Riverside Villas will have been made invalid. If we lose this, I'm done for.' Dickie Naylor would be anyway, and he knew it.

He heard the snort of derision. 'I've gotten the feeling you're a man who sees his glass as always half empty. Buck up, Dickie, tell me where we are.'

His boys, the elderly Boniface and Clydesdale, were in their car and the glow of their cigarettes lit their faces, so passive and calm, as if what had gone before was past history, worthless. Not so with Naylor. He seemed to hear the screams, had heard them while he drove south and west. They were the same, piercing, as those of the gulls that had flown from the water when the first of the dawn's smear was on the horizon.

Naylor said, 'We're facing the sea.'

'I feel it on me.'

'About two hundred yards to the right of us is the entrance to the ferry terminal. Two entrances, for vehicles and foot-passengers. Nearest to us is the foot-passengers' gate. Going on from the terminal is the commercial area, warehouses and company offices, but that's all fenced off. Then there are cliffs that go out to the big headland. We're on the esplanade, that's the walkway between the road and the beach. The road is well lit, but not the walkway. The lights are aimed away from it. There are benches and—'

'Not a tourist brochure, Dickie, stick with the programme.' Asked, with acid, 'What time is your flight?'

'Time enough for this to have finished — and don't you worry, Dickie, you're going to be a hero. Take me left.'

There was a low mist on the beach, hovering at the edge of the esplanade. He described it. He could see a pier, supported by pillars against which waves broke, a haze clinging round it.

'Am I getting on your nerves, Dickie? Don't mean to. I would have traded my right ball, right anything, in exchange for the sight of two good eyes. You're a friend to me. How far is the pier and what's beyond it?'

Naylor softened. He realized it now: the American's hand was loose on his arm. He 'could not imagine it, the darkness that was for always, and shuddered. He peered down the esplanade, squinted — damn tired from the drive and he hadn't slept in a bed for so bloody long, and tomorrow was his sixty-fifth birthday, and then he was as washed up as the weed the waves lifted — and said that there were more benches and a shelter hut. He told of all he saw.

Naylor's arm was held in a firmer grip. The voice rattled, as if the cold was in Hegner's throat. 'He'll have slept rough, depend on it, but stayed in sight of the sea. He has to see the boat come in, unload its people. Then he's within sight of safety. Don't reckon he's gone to the right, where you say it's commercial, because there'll be cameras there and security men and it won't be a place he can loiter. He'll want to seem like a vagrant, a drifter, and that's a bench or a shelter. Go into his mind. Right at this moment the ferry coming in is the single most important item in his life. The boat is freedom. He will be travelling alone…That kind of man, trusting damn near nobody, believes he is safest when solitary — on foot. Will see the boat come in, see it disembark its people, will come walking…Dickie, take my advice and I'll promise the red carpet out in front of you, except there'll be a fence round it so nobody sees you.'

He was beyond fighting, went with the flow. He was the bureaucrat who accepted orders. Had done all his life, could not change on the eve of a birthday.

'You don't have a photograph, don't even have a description.'

'It'll be the way he walks. How many male foot-passengers? A dozen or twenty? How many of them in the demographic window? Five or ten? But only he, the Twentyman, will walk in a way that betrays him.'

'Shuffling? Nervous, hesitant?'

'You're a mile off, Dickie. He's a leader. He's a man who has come, done his business. He's a captain of war, and is going back to familiar territory. He'll think not as a fugitive but as the guy who fucked you over. He'll walk as a leader does, like a captain. We go down from here towards that pier. We sit there and we wait. Each man who comes, you tell me how he walks. That'll be good enough for me.'

The gulls came over Naylor, and the wind freshened on his face. He searched the sea's horizon for the ferry-boat but saw only the pink of the sky on the grey of the sea. The car started up, U-turned in the road beyond the esplanade and headed off past the empty benches and the shelter hut. It stopped level with the pier. Naylor strode after them, and the beat of the waves against the pillars grew in his ears.

The lights, when Ajaq first saw them, were blurred in the mist.

The dawn grew bolder. A wetness from the night hours had settled on him and the damp hung on his face and hands. It was too soon for him to move, to leave the bench. He would have preferred rain and cloud low over the shoreline and the harbour because grey gloom dulled men's senses. He wanted them dulled when he reached the queue for the foot-passengers, when his passport was examined by men who yawned, fidgeted and shivered. A cleaning cart came behind him, the brushes scouring up rubbish from the gutter beside the esplanade's kerb. The first cars of the morning were on the road. A woman crossed it with a dog on a leash and took the animal down to the shingle and sand below him; he watched the dog squat close to the surf.

Now he could see the ferry clearly. Its decks were floodlit, its navigation lights flashed, its portholes and picture windows blazed. It came steadily on towards the harbour's marker buoys.

Twisting, as he had often done in the night since the man had come to him and taken the video-cassette, Ajaq stared up the straight road at his back. He was able to see, from the bench, the brilliantly illuminated sign and the wash of light round it at the harbour's entrance. If the place was staked out, if they watched for him, he would have noted columns of men disgorged from vans. When the Americans came to raid a safe-house, half of a battalion was deployed. Each time he had turned to look, he had seen only a few cars and more long-distance lorries tugging trailers behind them…and they did not have his photograph, he knew it.

The boat ploughed past the nearer buoy, where a red light showed. Then it turned on its own length and began to reverse towards a low light at the extreme end of a breakwater. He reached into his pocket, as he had many times, and felt reassurance as his fingers touched the slim shape of the ticket. He stretched on the bench, arched his back. It was nearly time, a few minutes more, for him to move.

He felt regrets.

Regret that he had not taken more time to toughen the mind of the Saudi boy, to prepare him better. In the country where he fought — and the boat would take him on the first step of his journey to return there — he had satisfied himself that a cuff on the shoulder and the murmur, always the same, of 'God waits for you, God loves you, God will give you virgins', the briefest of brush kisses on the cheeks was enough. And the Engineer, checking the wiring on a belt or to a switch on the dashboard, would have told the idiot that failure would mean torture by the Americans and worse torture from the collaborators, the Shi'a Iraqis. Should he have done more?

Regret that he had not organized classes in the cottage for the cell. Not classes in indoctrination and Faith, but on resistance to interrogation, of the procedures to counter surveillance, of the making of explosive devices, of the chemicals to be mixed if commercial and military dynamite could not be obtained, of the selection of targets…but he had thought them imbeciles and not to be trusted, except the girl with the scar on her face and the smooth skin on her belly.

And regret that he had not gone far to the north and found a man alive or dead, that he had not gone to the door of a small retirement house and confronted, with fury and violence, his father, or had gone to a cemetery and kicked down a gravestone, had not, on the step-or by the grave, spoken the name of his mother. It would never happen now, and that was the most wounding of the regrets.

The hull of the boat rose over the breakwater, dwarfed it. When he was on board, when the coastline — and there would be sunshine on it — faded, he would be on a remote corner of a deck. He would not use the canteen self-service or sit in a public area. He would find a place where the wind blustered cold and where passengers did not come, sit alone there with his thoughts, and the regrets would be gone. It would be two hours after the sailing that the boy walked into the square, went towards the crowds waiting for the doors to be opened. He would be on the deck, with the boat's wake stretching out behind him and the dark line of land barely seen, when the boy died.

The woman with her dog came off the shingle and sand, used steps that were close to him. She walked past him, then stopped, smiled. 'I think it's going to be a fine day,' she said. 'The sort of day it makes one glad to be alive.'

And she walked away.

Ajaq killed more minutes, and the light brightened the paving slabs of the esplanade, glimmered prettily on the sea's waves, and he felt the first traces of the sun's warmth.

Pricks of light, and zebra lines of it, crept through the holes in the plywood over the windows and the gaps between the planks nailed across the door.

She had not slept. She had held him.

She did not want to move, to wake him.

He had cried out in the night, twice. He had used the Arabic language that she could not understand. She did not know whether he called for God, or for his family, but it was not for her. Each time, to calm him, she had wrapped her arms tighter round him and had let her nakedness warm him.

He was still now and his breathing was quiet. His head was against her, cradled in her arms. Faria did not know whether she would be cursed or praised. She had been told to give him love and had done so. He was at peace.

She did not want him to wake, but could lie there no longer. She extricated herself.

Ashamed of deceit, no glow of pride, she moved first the arm that was above her shoulder and round her neck. Then the arm that reached across the small of her back, and the hand over her hair. His eyes did not open. So slowly, she eased away from him. She rolled on to the floor, felt the bare boards and a protruding nail gouged her buttock. She went on to her hands and knees and crawled clear of him.

He did not stir, slept on. He had not touched her scar — had never gazed at it. He had shown no sign that the scar — a motor accident in a cousin's van, on early-morning ice — frightened or disgusted him. Every other man she had known in the Dallow Road, and all those in the cottage, had stared so blatantly at it, as if it repelled them. He, in spite of the scar, had loved her. For that, she believed she owed him more than he owed her.

Tears came to her eyes. She convulsed, wept.. She was a whore, she betrayed him…The imam who had recruited her, twenty months ago, had said before she was sent away to sleep, 'Much may be asked of you. Only the most strong and dedicated are capable of doing what is asked of them. Are you?' She had sworn she was. Her strength and dedication was to sleep, body to body, him inside her, until she had given what was asked of her. She swallowed hard, and used her wrist fiercely against her face to wipe the tears. She had been, through one night, loved.

Light, spots and lines, lay on his body.

She dressed, then rooted in her bag. She lifted clear from it the black robe, the jilbab, that would cover her from neck to ankles, then searched for and found a deep grey scarf, the dupatta, that would mask her neck and hair and would be drawn across her face. But Faria did not yet dress in the jilbab and the dupatta, would not make them filthy.

He slept and her movements threw glancing shadows on to his skin. He seemed to reach out for her, not find her, and his arm subsided, but he did not wake. In two hours his life would be over — finished, destroyed — and she thought it good that he slept. She slid on her shoes. What should she tell him at the last? What were the last words she would speak to him before she slipped away, left him? Awake, him holding her and her holding him, she had rehearsed what she would say…She took the new bucket and went to the door.

Faria heaved open the loose plank. It groaned. She thought he must wake, but he did not.

She crawled through the hole. The back of her T-shirt caught a wood splinter, and she wriggled to free herself.

Looking around her, up at the windows of the houses on either side, out into the gardens beyond the broken fencing, Faria saw that she was not watched. She took the top from the rain butt, lowered the bucket into it, filled it and saw the swirling scum. She replaced the top, and went back into the dark and the damp of the room, through the hole and worked the bucket after her.

He slept, but soon she would wake him — must.

'Tell me about the way men walk, describe to me every inch of their faces.'

'Yes, Joe — same as the last time you asked me.'

The low sunlight made jewels on the wave caps, but Naylor sat beside Joe Hegner in the recesses of the shelter hut where the sun did not penetrate. It was more than an hour since he had last rung his assistant director…Nothing to add that was new. Neither had he rung home…Nothing to say. They were in place as the American had demanded. A hundred yards west along the esplanade was the pier, and the tide must have reached its high point: the sea lapped the top of the pillars then fell back and tossed up weed. Set in the middle of the esplanade, level with the pier, was a foot-high brick square in which Parks and Gardens had planted shrubs and alongside it were the boys, Boniface and Clydesdale, in their cat A further thousand yards, Naylor's approximation, down the esplanade was the entrance to the ferry-port, where the big boat now unloaded articulated lorries from its bow ramp. A man came towards them, pushing a pram in which a baby yelled.

'He's fifty. A grandfather, maybe. Caucasian. It'll be the daughter's kid and howling.'

'Thank you, Dickie. I'm not deaf as well.'

A minute passed. He had no conversation, nor did it seem expected of him. Hegner sat beside him, hunched, alert, and he had the stick upright between his legs and leaned his chin on it. Another man came.

'Little chap, could be forties, but he's all wrapped up. Has a fishing bag on his shoulder and—'

'Thank you, Dickie.'

Another minute slipped. No, Dickie Naylor would not have said he was near to panic, would have denied panic. But his gut was tightening and his hands clasped and unclasped, and he shifted his weight continually on the slats of the shelter seat, and his eyes ached from peering ahead. Not yet panic, but closing on it. Thoughts raced, jumbled, in his mind. A bomber would strike and he didn't know where — a cell member, a junior, under torture, had supposedly spoken of a ticket and where it would be used and at what time — a gamut of arrogance and egocentricity and the chase for a career's legacy had put him, Dickie bloody Naylor, into the palm of the American.

'Two lads, around twenty. Big rucksacks. One is Caucasian and one is Afro-Caribbean. Look to be half pissed…students.'

'Thank you, Dickie.'

If Hegner was close to a similar state of panic, he showed none of it. Not even apprehension. He had started to hum a tune. One of those sickly sweet, sentimental songs that were played on the radio at this time, as Anne cooked his breakfast with that station on her radio. Irritation swarmed in Naylor, was kept with difficulty in check. The humming lilted on. He imagined consequences. Men and women of the Internal Investigation Branch, grim-faced and no understanding of the reality of pressures, would come out of the dark burrows, would examine the logs for details of the release of a prisoner, would confiscate mobile telephones and locate the source place of calls, would dig down into the earth, drag away concrete debris and uncover a body wrapped tight in plastic, would check the tasking of an RAF helicopter and…God, it was a bloody nightmare. He saw himself confronted in a police station's interview room by Branch officers — probably would know them, but no damn chance they'd acknowledge previous association. Heard the caution given. A bloody nightmare like no other. The American had said that a red carpet would be unrolled for him. Naylor doubted it. He gazed away, as far as his eyes could focus, along the length of the esplanade. Didn't believe in red bloody carpets. Saw emptiness, no one coming. He stamped his feet, beat a tattoo with his shoes. He flinched as the first of the sun's strength slid into that corner of the shelter hut and the light bounced on Hegner's darkened spectacles. He shifted again and let the breath, his frustration, whistle in his teeth.

The humming stopped. 'Calm yourself, Dickie. He'll come.'

'There's no one coming.'

'Think of the glass as half full. Just keep describing the faces and the walk.'

'Time is cut fine, they'll be starting to board. Where you said, there's no man coming.'

Naylor saw the wide smile, thought it was meant to belittle him. 'Your problem, Dickie, is that you let your worries get on top of you. Believe me, he will come, right here and right past us.'

They were approaching the last turn-off from the motorway. Then, with their sirens and lights, they would have a clear run into Birmingham's city centre.

'I mean, it's like Daff said when we were back there and drawing the gear…It's a pin in a damn haystack. He's God's definition of a great comforter.'

'Maybe they should have closed up the whole damn place.'

'Can't lock down an entire city. So the centre's closed and he, slimy little sod, goes somewhere else, where people are.'

'Don't see how we can win.'

Some talked quietly, some read their magazines but interjected. There was no bravado, no joshing and crack.

'We have the photograph, and we have this daft bloody bird on the T-shirt. But he'll wear a baseball cap, and have something over the T-shirt, stands to reason, to hide the belt.'

'Remember that briefing last year — I'm not trying to be funny — that business about the smile? The Israelis say they all seem to smile. They're smiling before they go off to screw those virgins.'

'Can't shoot every Asian lad who's in the city centre and bloody smiling. Bloody ridiculous.'

The Delta team were in the lead Transit and behind them were Golf and Kilo.

'Got to be a head shot, double tap and hollow nose rounds. Only place where there isn't a spasm is the head. Chest, even straight through the heart, and his hand's on the button switch, and up the shebang goes.'

'A head shot with a Glock at ten paces — it's a miracle. How you going to use the H&K, a crowded street and all that crap? He sees you aim, and you have to, and presses the tit, and it's curtains time.'

'At ten paces, if you don't drop him, blow his effing head off — and his finger's on the switch, you go with him—but you don't get the women like he does.'

'Best thing to hope for, pray for, he's not on my bit of pavement.'

They would be on the streets, along with every gun from West Midlands and Mercia, Warwick, Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire, before the shops and offices opened. The big man of Delta, the nick on his earlobe well healed, tried with gallows humour to break the Transit's pessimistic mood. 'You got it all wrong, guys, you haven't figured it. What to do is get out a bloody great bullhorn and shout into it. What you shout is: "Anyone here with a rucksack or a big belt that's heavy, take your hands out of your pockets, and raise them over your head if you're brave and principled"…How's that?'

'Don't mention that jammy bastard, just don't.'

'Because he's history'

The sirens and the lights took them fast through the traffic, and into the city's suburbs.

The first of the management and shop staff were let in through the side door.

There had been a bad Christmas and a dead New Year of trading. Few did not appreciate the importance of the sale as a way of jacking up the turnover of the brand-name stores at the centre.

Lights flickered on, lit the shelves and counters, piers and interior window displays.

The managers began to check the tags with old prices crossed out and new prices highlighted. The shop staff started to tidy the stock they had dumped in place after closing the previous evening.

A commercial-radio DJ, from a local station, was booked to declare the sale open.

Although it was more than an hour before the outer doors would be unlocked, a small knot of customers was already gathered on the steps that led up from the square, but the feeling, and the hope, of management and staff was that, by the magic hour, the steps would be packed tight and the queues would stretch away towards the town hall.

'I'm feeling good,' the centre's chief executive told whoever had time to listen to him as he walked the aisles. 'Quite honestly, I don't reckon the start of the Third World War would keep them away'

He had been to the bathroom, had used the shower and found a razor in the cupboard over the basin.

He'd dressed. Always carried with him in the holdall a clean shirt in a plastic bag and a pair of clean socks. Had to rifle deep down among his gear for them. The shirt was crumpled from burial under the grenade canisters, the first-aid box and the ballistic blanket, but hadn't been ironed anyway after its wash at the launderette in the high street near his bedsit. Trousers on and belt buckled, he'd touched the holster with the pistol in it, as a man did to be certain he had his wallet or a handkerchief in his pocket, or his cigarettes and lighter…had knotted his tie. He'd felt decent, like he could face another day. Banks punched the settee cushions back to shape and folded the blanket he'd been given, made it neat.

There was movement behind the thin wall, and he heard their low voices beyond the thinner door.

She came out, closed the door behind her. 'Morning, Mr Banks. Looks like a nice one. You sleep well?'

'Thank you, yes. Can't remember when I slept better.'

She was coy, rolled her eyes. 'We didn't disturb you?'

'No, not at all. A big battle wouldn't have, slept great.'

She wore only an old rugby shirt, faded red hoops on a faded blue background, a trophy, he assumed, and it stretched down to her upper thighs. Oh, yes, and flip-flops on her feet. It was too long for him to remember when he had last seen Mandy with that same satisfied, well-screwed look — and tired eyes that still held mischief, and the grin…There had not been another woman since his wife had gone.

'I was just going to make a pot of tea.'

'Thank you, I'd like that.'

'And do some breakfast, the full works.'

'Brilliant.'

'And what's the rest of your day?'

'Take him back where we came from.' He added, his voice dry but his expression impassive, 'Take him back after he's been to visit his sick parents…'

'He's a lying bastard,' she said.

'…then field the flak about escorting him away from the location for an overnight, put my feet up, then we're all off on a bus outing for the afternoon. It's an all right sort of day.'

'Actually, he's a complete shit,' she said, matter-of-fact.

She went to the bathroom. He sat on the settee and reached to take a magazine from a side-table. He started to read about a film star he'd not heard of, and the making of a film he'd never see. The toilet flushed. So bored, so unfulfilled, so wrecked. She went from the bathroom to the kitchen, and he doubted she regretted calling her bed-partner a shit. Turned more pages and started to scan a profile on a couple who had renovated a castle in west Wales, and were younger than him, and had spent a half-million on consultants and builders. So worthless, so inadequate. He heard the whistle of a kettle and the clink of crockery. Read about a seashore holiday let in Barbados, with guest chalets, that cost for a week's rental — without flights — what he was paid for seven months' work. Felt so bloody useless, washed up and a spare part that had been discarded. The mug was placed on the table beside him. Sausages had started to sizzle and hiss in the kitchen. Carelessly, he chucked the magazine on to the side-table and a little of the tea slopped from the mug on to its surface. He wiped it clean with his handkerchief.

'And a very good morning to you, Mr Banks. Sleep well?'

His Principal was behind him, in the doorway, wore only his underpants.

'Very well.'

No drop in the pitch of his voice. 'I tell you, no messing, she goes at it like a bloody tiger. Right, first I'm off for a crap and a bath and a scrape.'

'What's second?'

'Second I go for my little walk.'

'Where to?'

'Into the town.'

'What for?'

'God, are we playing the professional? I go into town, after a night of shagging — always the same routine — for a packet of fags and the day's newspaper. Then, if you want to know, she has my breakfast ready and I eat it and read my newspaper. Then it's over for another week. It's not all bad, you know.'

'Just tell me when you're ready.'

'You don't have to come with me into town. I'll be fine. Five minutes there and five minutes back, not a big deal. It's only to a newsagent's on the square.'

'If you didn't know it,' Banks said, irritation rising, 'it's why I'm here.'

'Christ, aren't we dedicated?'