The Walking Dead

Chapter 2

When he saw them loaded into the two pickups, Ibrahim felt a sense of loss. He had been with them since the previous evening. He did not know their names, where they had come from, what they would be leaving behind them, but in those few hours of chaotic trauma — for all of them — they had been his brothers.

New masters had selected them and now determined into which of the pickups they should climb. The fighting men, those who had made the choices and had seemed to weigh their value, barked instructions and gestured them forward. None was helped over the tail gates: they were left to struggle up. When they were all on board, crouched and half hidden by the sides of the vehicles, Ibrahim fought the stiffness in the joints of his legs and stood. The engines had started, and he heard the clatter of the mounted machine-guns being armed — an alien sound — and he wondered if he should wave in farewell to them.

Their laughter came to him over the gravel roar of the straining engines, as if now they were old friends, but distanced from him who would not travel with them.

None looked at him, none noticed him, so he did not wave.

The farewell that was seared in his mind was in front of him. The fighting men left the engines running and the machine-guns armed, and walked briskly to the man Ibrahim thought of as the Leader, his leader. Each in turn hugged him and their lips brushed the cheeks obscured by the balaclava. Those men had no joy, no happiness, and the kisses were perfunctory, without cheer or laughter. He sensed the difference between the fighting men, and his new-found leader, and the brothers crushed close in the pickups. They broke away, but each held the Leader's hand tight for a moment longer than was necessary, as if that farewell was more meaningful, as if a little of the danger and threat, risk and uncertainty was communicated between them. The pickups edged away across the sand, like the dhows going from the harbour at the end of the Corniche. Then, as the dhows did when they were outside the harbour wall, they increased speed, and the engines throbbed with power.

He watched them go.

For a few seconds the vehicles were lost behind the walls of the building. When he saw them again they were moving fast. He saw them bounce across the raised heap of sand where the single strand of barbed-wire was buried. To the right and to the left, the wire was raised and hung from rusted posts of iron, but at the point Of the track it had been lowered. The wire was the frontier. He did not know, when they were taken into Iraq, why he had been left behind. He watched the two billowing clouds of sand thrown up by the back wheels of the pickups for as long as he was able, long after his eyes failed to find them, and long after the sound of the engines had dispersed in the quiet of the desert.

He felt the chill of the coming evening. He had not noticed it the previous night because then the bodies of his brothers had been pressed close to him.

The Leader was a remote figure, pacing in the sand and staring back often into the last of the light from the sun's setting. Often, he peered in the gloom at the watch on his wrist, then looked up to scan the far horizon where a quarter of the sun's circle, blood red, teetered on the desert's limit. Ibrahim did not dare to interrupt him.

Instead he thought of his home and his family.

Ibrahim Hussein's father sold electrical goods from a business one street behind the Corniche in the town of Jizan. His father, and Ibrahim recognized it, was dominated by melancholy. His wife, Ibrahim's mother, had died four years before from peritonitis; she should not have done — but the incompetence of the medical staff at the clinic, and their panic in crisis, had killed her. His father was a prosperous man in his community and drove the latest model of Mercedes saloon, but inescapable depression ruled his life. Ibrahim, the medical student at university, had identified his father's symptoms as readily as he knew of the incompetence at the clinic when his mother had died unnecessarily. Like a lost man, with only the ignored company of his daughters, his father padded the corridors and living room of the family home, forswore his fellow traders and spoke only of the profit and loss from the business in the street behind the Corniche. Before Ibrahim's mother's passing, his father had mourned two Sons.

Aged only three at the time, Ibrahim could not now recall the news coming to the family home — brought by an imam — of his eldest brother's death in the Jalalabad region of Afghanistan. Now he knew that he had been caught without cover on a track that traversed a cliff slope. Often, the image came to his mind. His eldest brother, escorting a supply train of mules, on a bare path with a cliff face above and below him, had been spotted by the pilot of a Soviet gunship helicopter: cannon fire and rockets had killed him, his fellow jihadists and their beasts.

He could remember well enough the death of his middle brother — the news had been brought to his father by the same imam. It had been on a sweltering day two months after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Americans, when every air-conditioner in the family home had been turned to full power, that the imam had reported the loss of Ibrahim's middle brother, killed near Kandahar with others of the 055 Brigade by the carpet-bombing of the giant B52 aircraft. His middle brother had followed Ibrahim's eldest brother into the ranks of the foreign fighters who had struggled to resist the invasion of Afghanistan, first by Russians and then by Americans. His middle brother had taken cover in a concrete-roofed bunker, which the explosive had collapsed; he might have been killed outright, or left trapped to suffocate slowly in the dust-filled darkness. It was not known.

A complex web of emotions had brought Ibrahim Hussein to this illicit border crossing, used by fighters and smugglers, where a track crossed from the Kingdom into Iraqi territory. At their heart was his feeling for his father, and the wish to give his parent cause for pride that would lighten his acute depression. And it was for revenge, to strike back at evil forces, and to show the world the determination of a young man's Faith…His mother had died because the Kingdom's rulers starved Asir Province of resources, and those corrupt rulers cohabited with the kaffirs, the unbelievers. His eldest brother had died in defence of a Muslim land raped and invaded by unbelievers. His middle brother had died at the hands of the worst of the unbelievers. He believed his own death, his own martyrdom, would liberate his father from melancholy.

He could barely make out the body shape of his leader against the darkening horizon. Then, far away and near to where the sun had been, he saw two pairs of pinprick lights. Now, the Leader came, shadowy as a wraith, towards him, and stood at his side. The hand rested on Ibrahim's shoulder, and he felt the reassurance of its power squeezing his collarbone and the ligaments there.

The voice was soft, the words spoken almost with gentleness: 'I told you, you were not rejected but were chosen.'

He nodded, unable to speak.

'Chosen for a mission of exceptional value, for which you are honoured and respected.'

'I hope to fulfil the trust placed in me.' Pleasure coursed through him.

'It is a mission that requires from you a degree of unique dedication.'

'You have the promise of my best…'

The Scorpion ground his fingers harder on to the boy's bone. It was difficult for him, in his exhaustion, to playact either kindness or concern for a medical student who had declared himself in love with death. But it was important to hold his belief.

'It is a mission that demands of you total obedience to the instructions with which you will be provided. Are you capable of obedience?'

'I believe so.'

'Please, listen carefully to everything I tell you.'

'I will do so, my leader.'

Under the balaclava, his mouth froze out a brief smile. He heard the boy's adoration and admiration for him, but did not seek it. The boy sought praise. He could give it if necessary; however false.

'Without dedication and obedience, the mission for which you are chosen will fail. If it fails, that is a great victory for our enemies.'

'I have dedication and I have obedience. I seek the chance to demonstrate them.'

Another boy with bright eyes, his Faith gleaming…What made him different from those in the two pickups speeding across the darkened Iraqi sands towards distribution points was the ability to walk well. His judgement had been made after he had seen them stride towards him: some had been awkward or heavy in their step; some had looked to the side and flinched when they came close to him; some had been hesitant to the point of almost tripping. This boy had a good step, had not hurried, had not looked around him, had walked as he would have on a pavement at home. That had dictated the choice made by Muhammad Ajaq — the name lived only in the recesses of his mind. The name that existed in the intelligence files of his enemy, and on the lips of those with whom he fought, was the Scorpion — and now, he grimaced, he was the Leader.

'Ibrahim, do you have military training?'

'None. My brothers did. My eldest brother was martyred fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The other was martyred in the war against the American invaders of Afghanistan. I seek to match their dedication, to be worthy…'

They all mouthed this shit. All the boys recruited by the gatekeepers in the mosques — of Riyadh and Jeddah, Damascus and Aleppo, Sana'a and Aden, Hamburg and Paris — spoke of the roots of their commitment. He was not a martyr, had no wish for suicide, and thought those who did were fools and deluded…But he needed them. They were the lifeblood of the war he fought. They took his opportunities of attack into defined areas of exactness that were otherwise unreachable. No shell, rocket or bullet fired from whatever distance had the same accuracy as a martyr bomb, or created matching devastation and fear. So he lived with the shit. He massaged the boy's shoulder and talked softly — as if the boy was his equal.

'What you need to know, we will teach you.'

'So that I may achieve success for my mission. Thank you.'

'Have you been prepared in the matter of resistance to interrogation?'

He felt the boy flinch. 'No.'

Of course, the gate-keeper would not have talked of capture, of torture, of the failure of battery-powered circuits. The possibility of failure would have weakened the boy's commitment. Sometimes a back-up electrical circuit was built into the car bomb, or the bomb in the belt, so that it could be remotely detonated from a distance if dedication died or a device would not ignite. Sometimes a sniper with a long-barrelled Makharov watched the advance of a bomber through a telescopic sight and would shoot to kill if will or circuit failed. A boy, this one or any of those now riding in the pickups towards the cities of Iraq, would know too much of recruitment and transport routes, safe-houses and the personnel who commanded their mission — he would talk if he was captured alive and tortured to make rivers of pain. But Ibrahim Hussein could not be followed with a telescopic sight when he travelled to his target.

He said, 'We put great trust in you, and you should trust us for our skills. Everything that can be prepared has been — but disaster can come from a sunlit morning, from a clear sky, without warning. There are successes, there are setbacks. I will not hide anything from you, Ibrahim.'

The lights, far away, became clear and the engines' sounds swelled as they approached. It was his tactic that the mention of failure, disaster, should be aired only at the end before they parted.

'Huge courage is asked of you. We believe of you that the courage will be found. They will use electrodes on your genitals, they will inject drugs into you, they will beat you with clubs and iron bars. You will be denied sleep. Shrieking noise will be played in your ears, and they will question you…and at the end you will face execution if you are still in this region or a lifetime of imprisonment if you are far from here. We will all be praying for your resolve, your bravery. Our ability to continue the struggle will depend on the courage we believe you have. God will be watching over you. Take a place with your eye on a crack in the ceiling, on a join of plaster between tiles on a floor, on a bar in the window, on what has been scratched on the floor and stay silent. Stay silent for a week. Give us time to dismantle and move. A week — do you promise me?'

He heard the small, stuttered answer: 'I will, a week, I swear it.'

'Whatever the pain?'

'Because I will be thinking of God.'

He cuffed the boy. He made that speech to all the boys sent across the frontier to him by gate-keepers, and they all swore to stay silent for a week…A day would be enough. He eased his hand off the boy's shoulder.

Two vehicles came close and braked, scuffing up sand. He told the boy, Ibrahim, that he must listen to what was ordered of him, do what he was told to do, give trust and not falter in his Faith. Through the mouth gap of his mask he kissed the boy's forehead. Then he led him to a Chevrolet truck. In the flash of the interior light, he saw the boy's face momentarily, the struggle with fear, then he slammed the door and the truck drove away.

From the second vehicle, a Dodge, he took a holdall that had been lying on the wide back seat, where he had known it would be. He stood in the sand between the Dodge and the truck with the machine-guns that had brought him, laid down his assault rifle, peeled off the webbing that held the magazines, dragged up his mask, unlaced his boots and kicked them off. He dropped his combat trousers to his ankles, stepped out of them, and stripped off the tunic. He lifted the laundered white robe from the holdall, passed his arms through the sleeves and wriggled into it. Within a minute he had passed from being a soldier at war, a commander in conflict, to a businessman of stature. The uniform, the boots, the webbing harness and the assault rifle went to the driver who had escorted him from the battlefields of Iraq. Within another minute, that driver was on his way back over the sand hump that covered the single strand of wire. Within a third minute he was driving away in the Dodge. He remained a soldier, but had exchanged one battlefield for another.

In two hours, the Scorpion would be at a remote desert airstrip, used by contractors who drilled in search of mineral deposits, where a twin-engined Cessna aircraft would be waiting for him. He did not doubt that all arrangements would be delivered as promised. His belief was total in the organizational skills of the Base now controlling him, and in the Cessna he would find the documentation for the new identity to be used in his onward travel.

Yet he felt, so rare for him — even in the worst moments of combat — a little tremor of nerves. He had no Faith to comfort him, as the boy had. The nerves in his gut were because he journeyed to a foreign battlefield, on to ground he had not fought over before, and he had no knowledge of the quality of those who would fight beside him.

She knew the name of the driver, and more of him than she should have.

At Faria's direction they had twice circled the village after leaving the cottage. The driver, Khalid, had taken her back up the track from the cottage she had rented from the farmer's wife. On the far side of the village there was a sprawling, recently built housing estate, a bolt-hole escape for the middle classes who had abandoned the town that was her home; small detached brick houses were set behind pocket-sized front gardens. Faria understood the reason for their exodus from the streets where she and her community lived. The school in the town she had left six years earlier had then had 84 per cent Asian pupils; now she had read in the local paper that the figure had crept to 91 per cent. The new residents of the village distrusted the influx of migrants from the sub-continent, and had run from them. They would have whispered among their own, those who had fled from Luton, of the ghettos in their old town, of an alien state within a state and Muslim dominance as justification for uprooting their families.

She knew that the driver, Khalid, was twenty-three and came from Hounslow, in west London. She had told him to circle the village so that she might see where there was a shop selling fruit and vegetables, where there was a doctor's surgery, in case she needed it, and a dentist. She knew that Khalid had been a worshipper at a mosque near to his home, where he lived with his parents, and that he had been recruited a year and a half before, after meetings in the evenings at an upper room in the mosque. She knew that he had been ordered to leave the mosque, not to associate again with friends there, and to await a call. She knew that his father worked as a security guard in a bonded warehouse complex at Heathrow, and that his mother cleaned the offices of the Qantas airline…They had sat in the car, a Honda Accord bought for cash at auction, in front of a pub and had watched the traffic flow through the village, and they had sat in a lay-by up the lane from which the cottage's track ran and seen the farmer's wife leave by Land Rover. After less than two hours in his company, she now knew that Khalid worked as a mini-cab driver in Hounslow, for a company owned by his uncle, and that his parents believed he had taken two weeks' leave for a holiday with cousins from Manchester. She knew all the lies of his life, and was horrified at the babble beating in her ears — and she knew that the cause of it was fear.

Of herself, she had told him nothing.

The driver's eyes were on the road, flickering between the windscreen and his mirrors, but he talked as a tap dripped. 'Did they ask you? You know what I mean.'

'It is not important what they asked me. You should not talk of it.'

'If men come from abroad, important men, an attack is planned — yes?'

'I don't know what is planned.'

'What I believe, if an attack is planned and important men are coming it will be a martyr attack — so did they ask you?'

'What I was told, what I was not told, should not be talked of.'

At the time of her own recruitment the need for total secrecy had been emphasized, with nothing shared even in the privacy of her family. She did not know how to silence his torrent.

'I am saying it will be a martyr's attack — have you been asked if you would do that?'

'You should drive, not talk.'

'You know what happens to a martyr? 'I saw it on a website. If he has a vest or a belt, his head comes off. The head is taken off. It is how they knew which were the martyrs on the trains in London. They had no heads. In Tel Aviv, they found the head fifteen feet from his body, on a table, and he was still smiling. It was on the website.'

'Do you want me to tell you to stop? Shall I get out and walk?'

'It is not for me. I will help, I will drive and—'

'And you will talk — and by talking you will put all of us at risk,' Faria snarled.

'Do you think they would force one of us to do it, make it impossible to refuse? Could they do that? I support the struggle but—'

'Stop.'

The traffic flowed round them. If he had slowed, cars, vans and lorries would have swerved to overtake on the inside. He could not stop and she knew it.

'It is not just me they might ask, but you…Would you?'

'What I will tell you is this. Tell you once. The important people, when they arrive, I will tell them to dismiss you.'

'You have to think of what you would do if you were asked. There were videos from the struggle in Palestine. Women were used. In Palestine the word for them is shahida. Arafat called them his "army of roses". Women were martyrs who carried the bombs. Arafat said to them, "You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks." Have you not thought of what might be asked of you?'

Her ears were closed to him. Faria could not answer; neither could she threaten again to denounce him for cowardice, for lack of faith, for talking and putting them all into a marksman's sights or a prison cell. She stared from the window and the car brought her towards the town's centre. She had thought that as a stranger to the town he might find it difficult to locate the street that was her home when he came to pick her up, so she had told him, when he had called the mobile, to meet her at the extremity of the station car park. That mobile now lay embedded in the silt of the river Lea that divided the town. Faria had thought, before he had talked through the history of his life, that he could drop her close to home…The looseness of his talk frightened her. At the next set of lights, she swung open the door and was gone. She never looked back at him.

Have you not thought what might be asked of you? Faria had. In her room, at night, she had wrestled with that thought, sweated and been unable to sleep. She had read that in Palestine the funeral of the small pieces of a woman martyr was a 'wedding with eternity'. She could picture in her mind the photograph of the calm face of the shahida Darine Abu Aisha, who had gone to the bus station at Netanya, killed three and injured sixty. A friend had said of her, 'She knew that her destiny was to become the bride of Allah in Paradise.'

She did not know what she would say if it were asked of her.

'A police officer, in sworn testimony, described you, Mr Curtis, as a "main man", and meant by that, Mr Curtis, that you were a major criminal. Was he right or wrong?'

The defence barrister, in court eighteen, used a low lectern in the front row of the lawyers' territory between the judge's bench and the dock, now occupied only by Ollie Curtis and the minders.

'I can say quite honestly, sir, that the description of me is wrong. It is a lie, a fabrication.'

It was possible for Tools Wright to watch the barrister but not to permit his eyes to waver to the left, into a field of vision that included Ozzie Curtis in the witness box.

'I want to be quite sure of this. You are telling m'lord and the members of the jury that you are not a big player in the criminal underworld?'

'What I am saying, sir, is utterly truthful. I am not a big player, not a major criminal, not a main man.'

Jools watched the barrister ask the questions and listened to the answers. He thought that Ozzie bloody Curtis wriggled like a maggot on a hook.

'You are in fact, Mr Curtis, a businessman and a legitimate trader?'

'That's right, sir, dead right.'

'I'm asking this because I think the jury will expect to hear your answer to the allegations made by the police, in evidence, that you — associate with criminals, are in fact at the heart of a web of thieving and violence.'

'Maybe I meet criminals, but not intentionally. In business, buying and selling, I meet many people. Honestly and truthfully, though, I don't go round asking guys whether they've done bird. They sell to me and I sell to them. That's about it.'

'Now — and this is most important, Mr Curtis — a Crown witness has said, again on oath, that she can positively identify you as being in the allotment nurseries, and behind a lock-up shed, as you changed from a boiler-suit into more normal clothing, then dumped the boiler-suit, rubber gloves and a face mask in a brazier that was already lit. Was that witness correct in her identification or mistaken?'

'Absolutely mistaken. She got it wrong. I wasn't anywhere there — and it's lies if people say I was.'

'Possibly a lie, Mr Curtis, but more probably a genuine mistake.'

'Whichever, I wasn't there.'

Jools could remember that witness better than, any of the Crime Squad detectives who had given evidence and better than any of the forensics experts and the one who had said the men in boiler-suits and masks caught by CCTV inside the shop had identical physiques to the accused brothers. The witness had been small in build, plain-faced and with an ugly cold sore at her mouth, not more than twenty-two years old, probably younger — and she had been so certain. Jools had believed her. He would have staked his life on her.

The defence barrister was a tall, bowed man, with a hawk nose and a casual stance — his weight was taken by the lectern on which his notes were laid out — and he was dressed in crumpled striped trousers and waistcoat, and a tatty old robe that might have been slept in. Not for a night but a month. Jools thought that the studied indifference was part of the barrister's well-practised art. Confronted by the eye-witness, he had started out with bogus sincerity in challenging her, but received no satisfaction. He'd gone through the quiet, sneering phase and still failed to shake her. Then he'd barked. Eyeball contact and courtesy slipped away, and flat statements demanding that she contradict what she had already stated. He'd not broken her. She was as strong after four hours of ruthless cross-examination as she had been when she'd started in the box. Jools had thought her so gutsy. Himself, he couldn't have turned in such a performance, and he'd gone home that evening, after she'd finished, and told Babs about the girl's courage in the face of her ordeal. All of them in the jury room had believed her.

'And where were you, Mr Curtis, at the time the jewellery shop was robbed by armed men who threatened the lives of the staff and who wore boiler-suits, rubber gloves and face masks? Could you tell the jury where you were?'

'Down at my mum's, sir. She's not well.'

'She has, I believe, a medical history of diabetes mellitus, Mr Curtis.'

'That's what they call it. I look after her, and Ollie does. I was with my mum and so was he.'

He heard a little snigger from Corenza. Ettie murmured to Baz that Curtis must have been watching too many police soaps on TV Peter grunted scornfully. Yes, it was a pretty old one — sick mum, loving and dutiful sons playing carers.

'So, we can be very clear on this. At the time that this criminal enterprise was under way, you were more than twenty miles away with your mother…and a witness who says otherwise is mistaken?'

'Right. Yes.'

The judge intoned, 'I think this a good moment to adjourn.'

After he was gone, and the Curtis brothers with their minders, Jools and the rest were led out by their bailiff. He wondered, going to the door sandwiched between Fanny and Dwayne, whether the accused men realized they were scuppered, knew they were on a conveyor-belt to a guilty verdict.

'What do you reckon?'

'You want it straight up, Ozzie?'

'Straight up? Course I bloody do.'

'Then I have to say that you're shafted — and I can see no different outcome for Ollie. Both of you, well and truly shafted.'

As a hard-working solicitor who represented a superior strata of the criminal classes — if they had the resources to pay for his services, and pay substantial sums — Nathaniel Wilson had a potent reputation. A serious facet of it, alongside his willingness to beaver away all the hours of the day and week on behalf of his clients, was frankness.

'You can't see any way out?' A cloud had settled over the elder Curtis brother's face. They were dinosaurs, from a world long extinct. Armed robbery, waving handguns in the faces of the staff at a jeweller's — it was the stuff of fossils.

The solicitor shrugged. 'We'll try, your brief and I. If there was going to be a happy ending I'd be the first to tell you…and I'll be the first to tell you when you're going down.'

Ozzie Curtis turned to his younger brother. 'Be a good lad, do us a Dolly.'

Singing, good cadences, burst from Ollie's mouth. Nat Wilson thought the younger brother, must be the hero of every pub karaoke night he patronized. Dolly Parton bounced off the cell walls. 'I Will Always Love You' filled the space from the mesh-covered ceiling light to the scarred floor tiles on to which they flicked cigarette ash. No way that any detective from the Robbery Squad would deliberately bug the confidentiality of a meeting between a legal representative and his clients, but there might just happen to be an old wire going to a device fitted into the cell bars, or the light casing, or the panic button. And that old wire might just lead to a tape-recorder that happened to be loaded. So Ollie Curtis sang 'I Will Always Love You' and placed his back so that it covered the cell door's spy-hole, and Ozzie Curtis leaned close from the mattress bed on which he sat to Nat on the hard chair. 'It's as bad as that? We're shafted?'

'Not looking very clever — not just my opinion but the brief's as well. Goes right back to that star, the little bitch, because we didn't shift her, and you could see the jury believed her. They lapped her up. I watched them again this afternoon. I have to tell you, Ozzie, we didn't score any points with them. They're getting bored, want it over, want to get their lives back, and when they're bored they're not open to argument…Sorry, you're going down.'

Every client of Nathaniel Wilson knew of his loyalty to them. They paid well for his commitment to causes beyond the hopeless, and because he never gave them the crap they might want to hear. He worked from behind a battered door in east London's Hackney, and lived with his wife in the flat above. Nathaniel and Diane, who did the books, the paperwork and the filing, grossed in excess of a quarter of a million a year. They were hugely wealthy but had no extravagant tastes; they took an annual fortnight's holiday on the Isle of Wight in a guesthouse, and in their wills everything they owned was destined for the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.

'That stuff about Mum…'

'Didn't cut any ice. I watched their faces. A complete contrary reaction, like it was so obvious, so manufactured. One even laughed to herself. We're not getting to them.'

He heard Ollie starting again, back on the first verse of 'I Will Always Love You', and perhaps his voice or his enthusiasm was failing because Ozzie had swung towards him and lifted his arms, gestured that more was wanted and louder.

Ozzie Curtis's mouth was less than an inch from Nathaniel Wilson's right ear. 'If you're right, and I'm not saying you're wrong, we need Benny in on the act.'

Nathaniel Wilson's breath hissed as he sucked it in between narrowed lips. 'That's fighting talk, Ozzie.'

'For fuck's sake, if I'm going away for an eighteen or a twenty — I'm bloody going to go down fighting.'

'And not long to set it up.'

'You said three weeks for this to run.'

'I said, Ozzie, the trial will be complete within three more weeks, not a day more and likely less.'

'So we need Benny, need him on the move now.'

Seldom a demonstrative man, Nathaniel Wilson raised his eyebrows and let a frown furrow his forehead. For a moment he seemed to lose the odour of the cell, and the smell of Ozzie Curtis's body lotion. 'Not with the time that's available — and he'd have to drop everything else. It won't come cheap.'

Ozzie's chin jutted in defiance. 'Nothing about me is cheap — too fucking right it isn't.'

'You'd be looking at a hundred for an acquittal, and seventy-five for a retrial.'

'Not a problem. Get Benny. You do that, Mr Wilson.'

'If that's what you want.'

'Can't see another option — I want it. Hey, Ollie, shut that fucking row.'

The singing died. Nathaniel Wilson stood, lifted his briefcase and rang the bell beside the door. He smiled at the guard who unlocked it, then said that his legal consultation was complete. As he stepped out into the corridor he saw two detectives lounging at the far end, the bastards, and he was happy that Ollie Curtis was an uncrowned karaoke champion.

He went out of the court building, into the growing dusk. In half an hour, inside a security ring of guns, the brothers would be leaving for HMP Belmarsh and another night on remand. In an hour he would be making a first contact with Benny Edwards, with the promise of big bucks to attract the man's interest — and his own fee would be ratcheting up. He faced spending his old age in a cell alongside the brothers, and being struck off all Law Society lists, if it became public knowledge in the Robbery Squad that Nathaniel Wilson was, on behalf of clients, in touch with the man better known as the Nobbler.

Banks jerked upright in the passenger seat of the car. First reaction, to slide a hand inside his suit jacket, down to his belt and the pancake holster, feel the cold, hard shape of the Glock. Second, to drop the weathered leather-covered notebook into the jacket pocket where it would lie on the folded black tie he had discarded after leaving the funeral. Third, to reach for the door handle and prise it back.

'Delta Group. Principal with you in a half-minute.'

Their car was parked over double-yellow lines. For the protection officers of the Delta Group traffic restrictions were of no importance; neither did it matter that the nearside wheels were on the pavement. In front of them stood the black limousine, weighed down with armour plating, in which the Principal would be taken away, and forward was the car that would be driven ahead of the limousine. Already the motorcycles were easing past them to take up the position where they could clear traffic hold-ups from the passage of the convoy.

There was a pecking order of importance in the Delta Group. Foremost on the pyramid's pinnacle were the officers of the Royal and Diplomatic Protection team — Delta 1 and Delta 2–who would have had a table inside the hotel's restaurant, but not eaten with the Principal's own people. Half-way up the pyramid were the men — Delta 3, Delta 4, Delta 5 and Delta 6–who had loitered outside the restaurant door in the foyer and in the kitchens. At the bottom were the drivers, and the guys who sat in the front passenger seats: David Banks was Delta 12. He stood on the pavement, his back to the hotel's revolving doors, and made his body into a barrier to prevent late-night pedestrians, perhaps spilled out from a theatre, a film or a meal, obstructing the passage of the Principal.

'Delta Group. All clear?'

'To Delta One. Bring him through.'

He heard the bleak, controlled voices in his ear. He opened his arms, held them wide apart and blocked the pavement. A tourist in a Burberry raised a camera, but Banks shook his head and the lens was lowered. It was the power he had. Power came from proximity to a rated Principal. He twisted his head, at speed, and saw the Minister, the man they protected, scurry across the pavement and disappear into the limousine. Banks walked backwards briskly, and when he was level with the car's door, he ducked down and inside, and they were gone into the late-evening traffic.

Banks almost resented the interruption of the Principal's departure from the hotel. He'd been using a small torch to decipher the faded pencil writing in the notebook. He had read of the journey across France and into Spain and, within a few minutes, had been captivated by the story written seven decades earlier by a relative he had not heard of before. When the Principal had been hustled from dinner to the car, he had known a moment of irritation at being snatched away from the drill yard, the straw-filled bedding and the brain-spattered walls — but, more important, he had begun to feel, just, that he walked in Spain's sunshine with the humility and bravery of Cecil Darke.

The motorcycles cleared a way for them. He could see the top of the Principal's close-cut grey hair through the limousine's back window. The Principal was the Minister for Reconstruction in Baghdad and the carpet had been rolled out for him in London, where he had come to beg and borrow resources. The word was that he would go home with little more than a few asinine meetings under his belt and a few decent meals in his stomach. The Principal was a prime target in Baghdad; there, he would have been at risk every time he stuck his toe outside his front door, but how was he a target here? Only a target if the information was trumpeted to Al Qaeda's office in Iraq that the Minister, for Reconstruction was arriving at 8.35 p.m. at a particular hotel restaurant in a particular street (see attached map), would be entertained by an undersecretary at Overseas Development, then head off again at 10.47 p.m. Al Qaeda, Baghdad, did not have an army of floaters drifting round the West End with primed bombs, loaded handguns and, maybe, an armed rocket-propelled grenade-launcher, all on the lookout for the faint chance of being in the right place at the right time.

No, it was not about the threat.

Yes, it was all about the show.

As David Banks saw it, the size of the escort of Protection Officers was an indication to the Principal of the respect in which his hosts held him. Little on offer in resources and funding, but the compliment of two cars riding front and back of the limousine and a small army of well-dressed men to open and close doors. It was flattering, and it bred self-esteem, and Banks knew that the dread of every home-brewed politician who had held a sensitive office of state was to get the heave from Downing Street or the electorate and have protection removed overnight.

Along with the flattery of the Principal went similar doses of feel-good for the Protection Officers. They were an elite. They rubbed shoulders with the movers and shakers of government, and the biggest and best that came in from overseas. They had the privileged access that dictated they were party to little mutters of gossip and the tantrums of the great and mighty…But David Banks was different, which was why he was an outsider and anchored at the bottom level of the pyramid.

'Hey, Banksy.' It was Delta 6, the sergeant, leaning forward from the back.

'Yes.' He didn't turn, kept his eyes on the pavements they sped past: might be an outsider but didn't think his commitment to his work could be faulted.

'Just a little problem. We like to look the part in this team. It's your shoes, they've got mud on them. That's not good, Banksy — don't let it happen again.'

He could have said he'd been to a family funeral, and that the mud had come from a crematorium garden where he and his mother had laid flowers, but he held his peace.