The Walking Dead

Chapter 3

'They are not before the court, Mr Curtis, but the case for the prosecution is that you were aided in this robbery by friends.'

'I don't have those sort of friends, sir.'

Maybe it was because the air-circulation plant was on the blink or switched off, but warmth seemed to have invaded court eighteen. Jools Wright had noticed that a bead of sweat had formed on the defence barrister's forehead. He'd followed it, watched the tiny rivulet it made from the forehead down between the shaggy eyebrows, then its passage under the bridge of the spectacles and along the nose. By the nostrils a drip had formed, had gathered in size and weight, and fallen — wow! — right on to the barrister's papers. Jools lifted his gaze back to the man's forehead and waited for the next rivulet to flow.

'Do you deny that among your friends, Mr Curtis, there is what we would call an "armourer"?'

'Never heard of anyone called that.'

The word he would have used to his students to describe the atmosphere in court was soporific: dictionary definition, 'inducing sleep'. He'd lost track of the growing size of the latest drip accumulating on the barrister's nose because his eyes had closed. Jools felt his head droop. His chin banged against his chest, then rested on his open-necked purple shirt. So hard to stay awake…and why should he bother? The damn man in the box was lying through his teeth.

'The weapons carried, allegedly, by you and your brother when — as the prosecution says — you were involved in this violent theft, were identified from witness reports as a military Browning 9mm automatic pistol and a Smith & Wesson revolver, a Magnum…Do you have, Mr Curtis, among your friends, an armourer, someone who could have supplied such fiendish weapons?'

'No, sir.'

'Have you ever touched, handled, aimed, threatened with a Browning 9mm pistol or a Smith & Wesson revolver?'

'Absolutely not, sir. God's truth, I have not.'

Head down again, not bothering to lift it. They'd been shown, four weeks before — it might have been five — photographs of the pistol and the revolver; a detective, with a litany of firearms experience behind him, had described the killing power of such weapons.

Not going to think about the weapons because that area of the case, in Jools's mind, was closed. He was going to think about Hannah.

'And you can state categorically that you have no friends who hire out such weapons, Mr Curtis?'

'I've a lot of friends…People seem to adopt me, like I'm an uncle to them — but I don't know nobody who supplies shooters. Personally, sir, I wouldn't touch nothing like that.'

'And, Mr Curtis, at the time of the robbery — as we established last week in your evidence under oath — you were with your mother who has a serious diabetic condition.'

Lovely Hannah. Sweet, delicious, sweaty Hannah. Brilliant, gorgeous Hannah–

There was a sharp, grating cough beside him. Jools's head jerked up. He blinked. Corenza coughed again, and gave him a savage glance. Should he concentrate? To shake off the desire to sleep, he locked his fingers together and cracked the joints, then wriggled his toes, looked down and saw the movement in his striped socks below the straps of his sandals. For the trial's first week he'd worn a suit and black shoes, for the second week he'd dressed in an open shirt, sports jacket and brogues. Now, as if to stamp his individuality, he'd reverted to work gear, and that, at the comprehensive, was jeans and sandals. He rather relished the individuality…No, nothing to be gained from earnest concentration Hannah was what he coveted.

'That's right.'

'I think we've nailed that little point down. You know of no individual who is paid to hire out deadly weapons, nor have you ever handled such weapons, in particular a Browning automatic pistol or a Smith & Wesson revolver. You confirm that?'

'Never, sir, that's correct.'

He'd heard it said in the staff common room, with the inevitable accompanying snigger, that men usually chose a mistress who was the spitting image of the wife back home. Barbara, the wife, had short-cut fair hair and so did Hannah, the mistress. Both had good hips, and both were endowed with breasts that could be snuggled in the palms of his hands…so similar. But — big but — one slept with her back to him and the other — God was kind — didn't expect to sleep at all in a long night. He had not been able to get to Hannah last weekend: Kathy's school concert, back row of the recorders, had denied him the well-worn excuse utilized to get him eight hours in Hannah's bed.

'Thank you. Now we're going to move on. Right, Mr Curtis, do you know what a "bag man" is?'

'I believe I've heard that expression.'

'What does a "bag man" do? What's his speciality? I doubt the members of the jury know.'

'Well, he's a money guy, isn't he? He takes care of the money.'

Sheets pulled back, the light left on as Hannah liked it. Hannah crouched beside him and the carpet covered with her scattered blouse and skirt, bra, tights and knickers. Hannah stroking him so gently. God, she was bloody marvellous…Babs didn't do sex except on his damn birthday or if he'd managed to lower half a bottle down her, and that was rare. He squeezed his eyes shut.

'Most members of the jury, I assume, use a bank to take care of their money, so where does a bag man enter the equation?'

'Criminal money. A bag man looks after thieved money, money from drugs deals, that sort of money.'

'Mr Curtis, among your circle, is there a bag man? A man who handles and launders the monies gained from criminal enterprises?'

'Not that I know of, sir. As a reputable businessman, I wouldn't associate with such persons, sir.'

He felt spent, exhausted, as he did when Hannah slid off him.

'It's a big ask, Nat. You could say that it's a very big ask.'

'Yes, Benny, but it has the potential of being rather a well-paid big ask.'

Nathaniel Wilson saw a quick smirk cross Benny Edwards's lips. They were in a café's annexe; the main area was nearly empty so they had the overspill to themselves. A colleague of the Nobbler's lounged in the doorway, blocking entry. Friday had gone by, and the weekend, and this week's Monday, but the Nobbler had been at his pad in a village outside Fuengirola and he had a tan that shouted he went there often.

'And the trial's near run its time?'

'The jury will be out within two weeks, and I don't reckon they'll be taking long.'

'Open and shut?'

'More shut than open. They're going down. There's no time to be wasted.'

'Not an easy one'

'They're looking at big stretches, but not looking forward to them. I can't see there's a cat in hell's chance of getting an acquittal, but with the jury down to ten I reckon that nine to one against means a retrial. Only bit of luck we've had is two jurors dropping down the tube. A retrial could be a year away, or a year and a half, and all that time I'd be yapping for bail and might just get it. What's more important is the chief prosecution witness, just a bit of a girl, up for it now but might not be in eighteen months. She's had a witness liaison officer assigned and been moved to a safe-house — she's had a witness protection scheme team. For another eighteen months, with the cost of that, I reckon they'd cut her adrift because the cost'll hurt them. She might just go off the boil if she didn't have liaison and protection in tow, might find her enthusiasm dwindling — and, not my business of course, she might show up where she's spotted or her family might be induced to lean on her…That's all in the future. What's for now is to ensure the jury's hung this time round, can't reach a guilty verdict. What do you think, Benny? Are you up for it or not?'

They were a mile from the Snaresbrook complex. Nathaniel Wilson had walked over and, after his lengthy association with players in serious and organized crime and a lifetime of sitting in court listening to police evidence, he had good perceptions of the arts of close surveillance. At one moment he had been sitting on the bench behind the barrister, the next he had been gone — as if needing a comfort call — and he'd been walking hard to be clear of the place. Only if he'd given a telegraphed warning, and looked furtive, would there have been the possibility of a tail. He'd done the routines including two dog-legs in side-streets and was happy enough that his security was intact. The business needed total secrecy if the Nobbler was to have a chance.

'I don't come cheap, Nat.'

'But your reputation says you're the best, Benny, and no one's expecting you to do it for charity rates.'

'Those blaggers, are they dumb? I thought blagging, going into jewellery shops waving guns, went out with the Ark. Why don't they do coke, smack, like everyone else?'

'See that as beneath them. I think it's the adrenaline rush…No, don't ask me. They make a healthy living from whatever they do, pleasantly healthy. I'm not authorized to bargain, but I'm permitted to offer — take it or leave it — the sum of fifty K win or lose on a retrial and paid up front, a further twenty-five K paid in the event one juror becomes the Great Persuader and it's an acquittal. Then there would be, also up front, twenty-five K as an inducement should it be a carrot rather than a stick. How does that sound?'

'That's all cash?'

'Cash and handed over on trust.'

'Handed over when?'

'Tomorrow — it's in place.'

'When I'm satisfied I don't argue.'

A hand snaked across the table, took the solicitor's, shook it gently, and the reverberation of the deal's conclusion slid through Nathaniel Wilson, as the implications invaded his whole body. Why? Why get involved? Something about perceived slights from established lawyers in the distant past, something about sneered and curled lips when he was young, had had suit trousers with a shiny seat, and had put together a basic law degree at night classes and from correspondence courses. Truth to tell, he had some admiration for the criminal classes, their esprit, their limited code of honour, even their bloody-minded — arrogant and obstinate — determination to breach the system: it was not something he often thought of. He leaned closer across the empty coffee cups. 'I've done some notes on the jury. There's five males and five women — does the sex matter?'

He made a show of ignorance that was not justified. Nathaniel Wilson had not used Benny Edwards as a Nobbler before but he'd been on defence teams who had, and he could recognize that they now moved on to high-risk territory. Yes, he knew very well what the answer would be to his question.

'Carrot and stick, right? I don't like using women. Dangle the carrot; but women aren't that interested in cash — they don't worry about the mortgage arrears, and don't give a stuff if the credit card's stacked with debt. Wave the stick and women are likely to throw the big wobble, tears and screaming, shrieking and howling, and then it's all gone out of control. No, men are the better bet…Five, you say?'

That morning, in court, before he slid off his seat, Nathaniel Wilson's note-taking had not involved the evidence given by Ozzie Curtis. Instead he had jotted down a description of each juror and their clothing. He pushed the single sheet of paper across the table. The Nobbler scanned it. His finger rested on the new foreman for a moment, then eased on down the sparse pen-portrait of the Afro-Caribbean, the young, keen one, the moaner who looked to have a permanent ache in his ear or his tooth, then to the one who could barely stay awake and wore a purple shirt with bloody sandals. When he'd read it, absorbed it, the Nobbler took a cigarette-lighter from his pocket and burned the paper, leaving the flakes to fall into the table's ashtray. Then he gave a first name and an address to which, the next day, a suitcase of banknotes should be delivered.

Nathaniel Wilson hurried back to court eighteen.

Eight more full working days to go.

Sitting in his small, closed-in territory as though he were a subsistence farmer with minimal ground, Naylor's mind scraped over the wretched, irritating little spat before he had left home that morning. The sniped exchange with Anne weighed on him.

'Dickie, you're just a sore-headed bear and making a fuss about the inevitable. For Heaven's sake, everyone has to retire and pack it in. Daddy accepted it — and started a new life — and so can you,' she'd said, exasperated.

Her father's new life, and he'd responded churlishly with it, had been three mornings a week on a south-coast links course and membership of the golf club's catering committee. It had gone downhill from there. Unwisely, he'd commented that he wanted more from the future than worrying about the price of breaded cod fillets served up in a golf club bar and whether tartare sauce should be served in a bowl or from sealed sachets. She'd retaliated that her father had carried a burden of greater responsibility when he'd finished than Dickie had ever been given, and he'd flounced away to the cupboard under the stairs for his raincoat and umbrella. He'd been bending to pick up his briefcase from its place under the hall table when she'd punched him, verbally, in the flab of his stomach.

'Oh, I forgot — Mary in your office rang yesterday, quite slipped my memory'

'I was sitting a dozen feet from her all day. What did she want that she couldn't have said to me?'

'God, you're in a foul mood. Mary— she seems a sweet girl — rang, behind your back, to talk about the leaving bash they're giving you, and what you'd like as a present. The DG can't make it, and the deputy DG is on leave, but one of the assistant DGs hopes to be there…Anyway, your present. Well, I said that we had clocks littered all over the house, and didn't want another. I also said that we had a perfectly good cut-glass drinks set and no room for more of the same. I suggested a greenhouse, not a big one, but where you can grow tomatoes in the summer and keep the geraniums and fuchsias in the winter, somewhere you can potter. That's what you're getting — Mary thought it an excellent idea. There'll be vouchers for it.'

He should have gone on out through the front door, after kissing Anne's cheek, and should have started out on a brisk walk to the station. He'd turned. Said malevolently, 'And what did Daddy have, bloody golf clubs?'

'You know he did.'

'And was the director general at his bash to make the speech and hand them over?'

'You know he was.'

Then, too late, he'd tried to do the kiss but her head had turned away and his lips had pursed against thin air. He'd snorted and gone. It had been a cross he'd carried since his first day with the Service, thirty-nine years before, that his father-in-law had not only been an iconic counterintelligence figure with legendary status and the right to take an early-evening sherry or gin with successive DGs, but had put a word in an ear that had ensured his son-in-law was recruited for employment as a junior general-duties intelligence officer. He had never matched the importance in the Service carried by Anne's father — but only when he goaded her was he reminded of his failings. Her, father, before heading off to the golf links, had tracked traitors, the pathetic, dangerous creatures who had sold out their loyalty to their country and passed military secrets to the agencies of the Soviet Union. Those creatures had gone to the Old Bailey for high-profile trials and inordinately long sentences of imprisonment. Dickie Naylor, after thirty-nine years' hacking at anything thrown down on his desk, had never rivalled her father's favoured position. The proof of it for all to see: the top cats would not be at his party, and he would be getting a flat-pack greenhouse — if he were ever able to assemble it — for tomatoes and frost-endangered plants. All arranged by Mary Reakes.

So little time left, and what made it worse — hardest to accept — was that there was bugger-all, sweet damn all of nothing, for him to look back at and feel a shimmer of pride in. He was a journeyman. He had failed at nothing but succeeded at less, and a week on Monday would see him wrestling with the sections of a greenhouse, and no one would have noticed his going. He snorted annoyance. There was nothing on his computer screen now that had not been there the day before.

The section he headed, overseeing Mary Reakes who had officer rank and four women who did not, had twin responsibilities in Riverside Villas. It was tasked with identifying the possible arrival into the United Kingdom of a suicide-bomber of foreign origin, and — considered of greater importance and therefore greater threat — the arrival of what the neighbouring sister 'Firm' in Ceauescu Towers across the river called a 'coordinator' and the residents of the Villas described as a 'facilitator'. Since Nine-Eleven and the formation of his section, neither had appeared on the horizon…Dickie and Anne had not been blessed with children, therefore were denied grandchildren. There would be no small boy to sit on his knee and ask, 'What did you do in the war, Gramps?' and get the answer, 'Nothing, darling, because on my watch the bloody enemy never came.' Plenty to tell the kid, who didn't exist, if he had been following the money trails of that enemy's credit-card frauds, which financially supported their planning; too much to tell, if he had been setting up informants in mosques and madrassa schools where the principles of the Koran were taught and the texts learned by heart; or he could have talked of the computer records of those youths from north London or the west Midlands who shuffled passports and took flights to Karachi or Rawalpindi…Nothing to recount and nothing to speak of, and Dickie Naylor's time was slipping away.

He rehearsed what he would say, turned away from his screen and dialled home. He apologized, curtly and awkwardly, stuttered through it.

Naylor heard her: 'Don't be silly, nothing to be sorry for. Everyone has to do it, retire and start a new life, as I said. You just caught me as I was going to the supermarket — it'll be nice, you being able to come with me.'

He grimaced, and replaced the receiver.

In a room high in the principal building inside the protected complex of the American Embassy in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, Cindy read aloud from the situation reports that had come through on the teleprinter. She had a fine voice, and Joe Hegner listened. In his mind he played pictures of the carnage she described from the flimsy, neatly bullet-pointed sheets.

Without interruption, Joe Hegner heard her as she stood in the open doorway and read to him. He knew the men who worked as civilians and guarded the electricity-supply engineers, or who came in to fix the sewage plants, or who tried to keep the oil flowing through the pipelines that crossed the desert sands. With them, a bad bet for life insurance, were their guards. Many of the guards were from the old apartheid days of South Africa, some were prematurely retired paratroops and special forces from the UK; more were from the Midwest states of America and had left behind broken relationships and mounting debts. They could earn, for riding shotgun in armoured SUVs with the contractors, five thousand US dollars a week. They had, as a stereotype, shaven heads, muscles pumped up by weights and steroids, and skin covered with the permanence of crap-done tattoos…and now two were dead. Later that day, from the safety of an office in Johannesburg, London or Los Angeles, an email or a telegram would be winging to an abandoned family, and in a few days a bag would be packed with the censored contents of a locker, the porno magazines not included. In the evening, Budweisers and slugs of Jack Daniel's would be downed by the survivors, and toasts made…Joe Hegner liked them as free spirits, liked them well. He felt it more keenly because his experience of Mosul had scarred him.

His shoes off, Joe Hegner had his feet on the desk, and there was a hole in the heel of his right sock, but there didn't seem time, these days, to call up a driver assigned to the Bureau and the necessary security people and travel downtown to get new pairs. His stick was propped against the desk edge. Many times he had been into police barracks, and he had good friends among the newly recruited officers. He had a rapport with them that verged on love. Most Iraqis living in the goddamn Triangle preferred to go short; see their family half starve from privation, rather than risk signing up and taking the American dollar, but a few were prepared to break the mould of fear. They had such damn awful equipment — shitty vehicles, shitty weapons and shifty barricades round their barracks — but they seemed so cheerful when he was over there, one week in four. For seven days in every month he was out of the embassy in Riyadh, holed up in the protected Green Zone on the Tigris river that split Baghdad, and before he caught the flight back to the Saudi capital, he would make damn certain:- even if he had to get there inside the armour-plated walls of a Main Battle Tank — that he visited policemen in their barracks. There were Agency boys in the Green Zone, and agents from the Bureau, but they never moved off their asses and never went to meet the men at the real front line. He seemed to hear the keening wail of widows, brothers and mothers, as the bodies of policemen were identified — what-was left of them, after the explosion of a liquid fuel tanker. He knew Ar-Ramadi as a place of rare hatred, of particular cruelty.

Thoughts formed in Joe Hegner's mind, and they ran alongside the images he held of the days when he had lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the Green Zone, before his hospitalization, before his convalescence, and before it was confirmed that he could work out of the embassy in Saudi Arabia…A queue outside a grimy building that was set back from concrete blast barriers and sandbag parapets. A line of young and middle-aged men watching uneasily behind them as they shuffled forward with painful slowness. A table with three clerks sitting behind it and a wad of application forms, riffled by an early-morning breeze. A man joined the far end of the line, and perhaps he smiled, as if at peace, and perhaps his clothing was too bulky for the size of his shoulders or the shape of his head, and perhaps the sweat ran on his forehead when the sun was not yet high, and perhaps those in the queue smelt the scent of danger and started to run back, and perhaps a security guard — paid a pittance — had had the courage to charge towards the sweating, overweight, smiling man. But a hand was inside the robe. A finger was on a switch. A bomb detonated. A body disintegrated and many other bodies were mutilated…He knew those young men. They were the secondary field of Joe Hegner's expertise.

He winced at the catalogue of disaster. He was not thirsty but sipped water from a plastic beaker as if that might moisten his dried, cracked lips. Joe Hegner never interrupted Cindy when she read aloud for him. The two unconfirmed Killed in Action soldiers might be sturdy white boys from Montana, where Hegner had been reared, or tough young black guys from Alabama, where he had done early years in his Bureau career. Each one, whatever part of his country they came from, was a wound to him. Part of that wound came from emotion, but more was from the failure of his professionalism. He was contemplating the scale of the attack on the gaol perimeter, estimating how many insurgent fighters had been deployed, considering the enormity of the use of five suicide merchants, pondering on the supply line — on a scale that Wal-Mart would not have sniffed at — of death volunteers his enemy could muster into line.

'That it?'

'Yes. Nothing else, thank God. That's what we have.'

'About as bad as it gets.'

'What are you thinking, Joe?'

It was the way they habitually worked. After she'd read to him, and he had assimilated what she'd told him, she would feed him anodyne questions that had the purpose of stirring the analytic juices in his mind. They had been together in Riyadh from three months before the launch of the invasion, had been together in the Green Zone from a week after the occupation of Baghdad to the December day in 2004 at the mess hail in the garrison camp at Mosul, and together once his convalescence had started in the Frankfurt military hospital. She had stayed at his side on his return to Riyadh. It was not a master-and-servant relationship — him an agent and her from the personal-assistant pool — or a relationship touched by sexual attraction, or unrequited affection, but had the stamp of elder brother and younger sister. He would have sworn that without her he would have been a finished, spent man; she would have said that meeting Josiah Hegner was the only meaningful event of her life. What hurt her most was that she was no longer permitted, by diktat of the Bureau, to fly with him for that one week in four when he returned to Iraq: then she lost the opportunity to watch over him. He was in his fifty-second year, and disfigured; she was thirty-four and attractive, but unavailable to any of the embassy staffers who pitched attention towards her. She waited for his answer.

'It's the scale of it that tells the story.'

'Five strikes in different locations and all within an hour of each other.'

'That's eleven in one sixty-minute slot, and five in just one strike.'

'Like they've a line of them backed up, and no shortages.'

'All coordinated. All put together by a single individual who controls them and wants to send a message to us. He is more important, so much more, than the fodder he's pushing forward. It's all about the coordination — it's about one man.'

In the old days in Riyadh, in his embassy office where an armed marine-corps guard stood sentry at the door, he had plastered the walls with photographs of the first men who had been identified as leaders of the insurgency. They were all gone. And 'one man's' image could not have gone on to the wall anyway because that man had neither a name that could be given him, nor did a photograph exist.

'But, Joe, you know who he is.'

'Yes. Yes.'

'It's the Twentyman, Joe. What are you thinking?'

'I've got a sense, almost a scent — but like he's signing off and moving on. Does that sound stupid, giving him that name? Christ, there ain't anything laughable about that bastard…but it's what he is, the Twentyman. He's the only guy who could do eleven suicides in an hour, four locations but — and this is my sense — it's as if he's heading for a rest or for new territory. Can't say which, but it has to be him — know nothing about him, only his quality. Has to be the Twentyman. I feel it.'

The flight was called, the departure of a KLM air-liner to Amsterdam.

He rose from the bench where he had waited for the announcement.

Ibrahim Hussein had been chosen, so the man he thought of as the Leader had told him, because he walked well. In front of him, inside the number four terminal of the King Khalid International Airport, lay an open expanse of shining floor, and he strode across it, not looking back to see if his last escort watched him go. He had been driven from the desert, then taken to a house in a slum quarter of the town of Qatif to sleep dreamlessly, then brought to the airport. In all of that time, and with each of the escorts, he had not been offered conversation, and he realized it was intended that he should not know who had handled and moved him. That morning he had been given a new pair of jeans, a yellow T-shirt, a leather jacket and trainers. He had a lightweight rucksack hooked over his arm, and on his head was an 'I Love NY' cap with a broad, extended peak to hide part of his face from the terminal's ceiling cameras. In the airport car park he had been passed an envelope containing a passport and a single sheet of scribbled writing that described a family history and justified the visa entry for the Netherlands on the passport's second page; he had been given time to read the sheet, then it had been taken from him and dumped in a rubbish bin. Already he marvelled at the care for detail that had been employed. At one moment, as the flight was called, his last escort had been at his side; at the next, the escort was no longer there. His target was the departure gate and, as was expected of him, he walked purposefully towards it. He heard the shout from far behind him. A name was called: not the name on the passport he held tight in his hand. The shout came again. He did not break his stride and as the departure gate yawed open automatically and swallowed him, the shout was repeated: 'Ibrahim? Is that Ibrahim Hussein? Are you Ibrahim—'

The gate dosed and shut out the sound of the shout.

Across continents and time differences another flight was called. The charter for Sun Tours would fly a cabin of Spanish tourists from Barcelona to the English airport at Stansted.

He could not fault the arrangements in place for him, or the cover supplied by his travel documents. He was not Muhammad Ajaq, or the Scorpion. He would make the final leg of his journey with a Spanish passport, and the light olive skin of his cheeks and hands — not European and not north African — would be explained in the passport he now carried by a father's origin in Valencia and a mother's in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. He obeyed orders given to him three months before, but with them had come a labyrinth of planning of which he had no criticism. At every travelling stage he had been met, treated with the courtesy and respect to which he thought himself entitled, and money had been provided. Rendezvous arrangements had been flawlessly in place. The previous day he had been driven by a man, who asked no questions and made no idle conversation, into the mountains to the north-west of Barcelona, and there he had met a cell of Basque fighters from the Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, two men and a woman. Near to the town-of Irurzun, overlooking it, in a shed where winter animal fodder was stored, he had been shown and then had purchased fifteen kilos of PTEN explosives in one-kilo sticks; he had paid twenty thousand American dollars, and four commercial quarrying detonators were added to the package.

He had thought the men good and strong, the woman pretty — there had been a moment when her hand had rested on his thigh as she made a point of emphasis, and excitement brimmed in him — and there had been trust. If he was captured and talked, they would be destroyed, and if they were taken and went down under interrogation, he would be broken. The woman had limped, and had said, matter-of-factly, she had been tortured long ago, which had clinched the trust for him. He had left them, the men wrapping him in bear grips, the woman kissing him full on the mouth, and carried away the fifteen kilos of explosives with the detonators, in waterproof paper sealed with masking tape.

With the parcel in the car's boot, the driver had negotiated narrow, winding roads and brought him to the port of Castro Urdiales. There, he had sat in a café and sipped coffee with a florid-faced Englishman, who had failure written at his mouth and defeat in his eyes. The price, without haggling, was agreed at twenty-five thousand American dollars, and the parcel had been slipped from its place on his knees under the table into the grasp of the Englishman, and the money was given over. From the near-empty café's window, he could see the grey skies over the harbour and the spray climbing over the outer groyne. The launch was pointed out to him — it nestled against a pontoon but shook in the swell.

He had been taken back, through the night, towards Barcelona, and in the dawn, with rain in the air, near to a station on the city's railway, he had suggested that the driver might wish to relieve his bladder after the long drive. Then he had come behind the man, taken his throat in his hands and strangled him. He had torched the car and left the body in undergrowth at the end of an uncleared track; the killing was to protect his identity. He had taken the train, with the day's early commuters, and after two changes had reached the airport, and forgotten the man who had driven him.

As he presented his ticket — best to travel in a tourist mass because with a group the scanning of passports at his destination would be slack — a ground hostess smiled at him, and he smiled back, but his eyes were on the bursting cleavage under her blouse.

She giggled and he laughed, as if he was going on holiday, took back his ticket, walked on and was buried in the flow of tourists.

He thought the package was drugs — heroin from Afghanistan or cocaine from Colombia — and Dennis Foulkes didn't give a damn. He was broke, and likely to be formally bankrupted. The cash stashed in a plastic bag in a galley cupboard would be enough to hold off the creditors, and protect his proudest possession.

She was the Joker of the Pack, and Dennis Foulkes loved her with passion. The money paid to him would hold off the inevitability of their parting. She was a motor-cruiser with two Volvo 480 h.p. engines that gave her a maximum speed, in good conditions, of thirty-three knots. She was a little over thirteen metres from bow to stern, with a beam of fractionally more than four metres. Inside those specifications were a cockpit, a saloon, a galley and dinette, three master staterooms — two of them en-suite — and crammed into every corner of her hull were the luxuries of wealth…He had had wealth. Money had dripped off him when he had run a prospering Rover car dealership, and he had not heard the warning sirens — eye off the ball — because he had just shelled out £265,000, paid without a loan, and he had taken the berth at the Kingswear marina on the south Devon coast, and had thought his business could run itself.

What a bloody fool. The car factory had collapsed in insolvency, what was in his showroom couldn't be given away, and he had not seen it coming. House gone — repossessed when the mortgage could not be met. Wife gone. All he had to remind him of what he had once been was the Joker of the Pack, which boasted the best electronic navigation systems, cocktail cabinets in solid wood, carpets and a bed in the biggest master stateroom that he could have shagged three little beauties in and not felt it a crowd. He did chartering. Any sod who'd pay could get a ride across the Channel, and he wasn't too proud to do day trips to Plymouth in the west or Lyme Regis to the east. He was for hire, and each pound or euro he was paid helped to keep his love under his feet. And if there were no punters, too early in the season, just a package wrapped in waterproof paper and bound with masking tape — stacked at the back of the galley cupboard — Dennis Foulkes wasn't losing sleep. The nightmare in his life was that his creditors at the bank or the mortgage company would hear of the Joker of the Pack, send in the bailiffs and flog her off dirt cheap to settle against the million, might be two, that he owed the bank and the building society — but a drip of cash showed willing and would keep them off his bloody back…Necessity, and love, dictated that he had made no judgements on the man who had sat with him in the café overlooking the harbour at Castro Urdiales.

The Joker of the Pack shuddered under him in the crested waves of a force six, might be seven, and he was far out in the Bay of Biscay and on course for a landfall sighting of the French coast at the Île d'Ouessant and then the run, God willing in calmer waters, across the Channel and into the Dart estuary.

He reflected, hanging on to the wheel as she bounced on the swell and water cascaded on to the bridge's windows, that the girl who had come tripping down the pier at Kingswear to arrange all this hadn't seemed the type tied into drugs importation. The guy had, cold sort of bastard for all his smiling, and he'd left a taste of fear behind him that was still in Dennis Foulkes's throat — but he'd thought her a nice girl. A pity about that awful bloody scar on her face.

He kept her shoulders and back always in view. Jamal was beside her, but it was the woman on whom he concentrated his attention.

A hundred and fifty yards behind her and Jamal, it was hard for Syed to follow her, but he had the skills. Syed's home, where he lived with his parents and where he worked in the kitchen of a fast-food kebab store, was north-west London, Hanger Lane, but the skills he now used had been learned on the teeming streets of Peshawar. Pakistan was where he had travelled two years before, aged nineteen, to visit family, and there he had been recruited. He had been putty in the hands of those who had noted him: four months before he had flown to the homeland of his father and mother, his elder brother had been attacked on a late-night bus, punched and kicked unconscious by white yobs — why? Because his brother was a Muslim, Asian, a 'bastard bloody Paki', the family had spent weeks travelling to and from the West Middlesex Hospital to see a young man who, for three days, had lingered close to death with tubes and drips keeping him alive. His brother was now recovered in body, but seldom left his Hanger Lane home. For what had been done to him, Syed had no regrets at having accepted the advances of the recruiters.

In Peshawar he had been trained in the arts of following a man or woman and remaining unnoticed. Ahead of him, the woman guided Jamal through the streets in the centre of the town and into the wide square, where the first buds were on the trees, and led him towards the steps up to the shopping centre. Using what he had been taught in Peshawar, Syed was in place to satisfy himself that the woman had no tail on her. If there had been a tail from the security people, he would have spotted the signs from as far back as a hundred and fifty yards. He would have seen men pass women and move forward without acknowledging a colleague, and men or women lift their hands to speak into their wrists, and the loitering of those men and women with newspapers who did not read the columns of print. They had believed him an excellent pupil in Peshawar, and told him so *. It was the first day that Syed had met others from the group, and the first time since his return from Pakistan that he had been called forward. He thought, his initial impression, that the woman believed she owned too great an importance with them, that she was flawed by the scar that marked her out and would make her remembered, but those decisions had been taken by others.

They climbed the steps to the shopping centre. From that distance, a hundred and fifty yards from it, he hated the place, and his thoughts were of avarice, its corrupting influences and ostentation. He saw the woman and Jamal skirt a gang of white youths. His brother would be avenged, his Faith protected, when the man came from abroad and they struck the target that was given them.

Looking for opportunities on Luton's streets was how Lee Donkin spent his days and evenings. Then, if he had found some and could buy, he spent his nights nodding out in the arms of injected heroin.

The best opportunities, and he had experience to back his opinion, were about in mid-morning: women pushing prams and buggies along the Dunstable Road, the Dallow Road or the Leagrave Road on their way to the town's shopping centre. Going to spend, weren't they? Cash in their purses, hadn't they? Never going to fight, were they? Lee Donkin, nineteen years old, fed his addiction with mugging and bag-snatching, and if the victim went down on to the pavement that was their fault for being flicking stupid and resisting, wasn't it? He had spiked hair, bleached white blond, but it was too distinctive when he worked and then he had his black hood over it. What made Lee Donkin most proud was the knowledge that he was a considerable statistic in the offices of the town's police station, among the detectives in the anti-street-theft team, but he had not been successfully prosecuted since he was sixteen when he had served thirty months in a young offenders' institution. Now, he reckoned, he was too smart for them. He was small and short but that was deceptive: his wiry body rippled hard muscle…He had an opportunity. A woman, not old but using one of those hospital sticks and bad on her feet, was ahead: she'd just missed a bus into town and was going to walk. She had a handbag hooked on her elbow, and he closed on her. Alongside that section of the pavement was the school playing-field over which he could leg it when he'd done her.

The hand of Lee Donkin slid into his pocket as his pace increased, as he came nearer to her, and he used his thumb to prise off the little leather sheath that covered the blade of the knife.

He held the notebook in front of his eyes and lingered on each sentence, every pencilled word. Voices were in his ears, but Banks ignored them, and the card game…That morning, the Delta team had been, in the dawn light, down the motorway in convoy — with the sirens going and the motorcycles ahead — to Heathrow, to deposit the Minister for Reconstruction. They had waited with him until it was time for his flight to Amman, the first leg of his journey home to Baghdad.

The team — less the Royal and Diplomatic guys — were now in the canteen of the police station at Vincent Square, a usual watering-hole when they were stood down and killed time before the next briefing. The talk at the far end of the table, which slid past Banks, was of clothing kit, a tour of the business end of Downing Street organized by a Special Branch sergeant, and a new modification to the Heckler & Koch's telescopic sight…The only image of the morning that had lasted with Banks was the insistence of the Minister — going home to bloody Baghdad — that he should shake their hands individually, thank them one by one. God, and they weren't bullet-catchers: none of the Delta team would have chucked his body into the line of fire to save the poor bastard. The plane had barely started its taxiing run before they had been on their way back for the canteen, cards and chaff talk.

'Hey, Banksy, what you got?' He was with Cecil Darke, far away. 'Banksy, are you in this world or out of it?'

What he missed most was his inability to fashion a picture of Cecil Darke. He could not put a face or features to his great-uncle. Did not know whether he was tall, as David Banks was, whether he was well-built with broad shoulders, as David Banks was. Dark- or fair-haired, or shaven bare at Albacete, did not know. As a substitute, while he read, he imagined a short young fellow — fourteen years younger than himself — with a pale complexion, and probably a concave, shallow chest, with clothes or a uniform that hung on him as they had on the scarecrows Banks's father had erected on new-sown fields. There would have been thin shoulders, pulled back with pride, weighed down by the old French rifle as he'd gone up the Gran Via. But it was only Banks's imagination, a poor substitute for knowing.

'Anyone home, Banksy?'

He tried to think what he believed in. What would have made David Banks — a detective constable who had never gone for the sergeants' exam — travel to join someone else's war? Couldn't imagine it. What would have made David Banks — divorced from Mandy, resident in an Ealing bedsit — go into a secondary line and think about sleep under shellfire rather than the dawn when he would charge over open ground? Couldn't comprehend it.

'Banksy, don't mind me saying it, what's the matter with you?'

Perhaps they were bored with the merits of various brands of thermal socks, or the self-esteem that came from a Downing Street tour and access to the Cabinet room, or the added magnification of the latest gunsight…He closed the notebook and saw the printed, faded, gold-leaf name. He knew so little of the man whose name it had been, and who, in the morning, would face an enemy and fight.

'It's a diary Banks said quietly.

'What's so special about it — makes us not interesting enough?' Banks said, 'It was written by my great-uncle seventy years ago.'

'And…So…? The way it's been stuck in your hands it might be a Tablet brought down from the mountain.'

Trying hard to control his irritation, Banks said, 'My great-uncle, aged twenty-one, packed in his job in London and went to Spain for the Civil War. He was a volunteer in the International Brigades and—'

'One of the great losers, a fucking Commie?'

His head rose to face Deltas 6, 8, 9 and 11. 'He was not a Communist,' Banks said evenly, through his teeth. 'He was an idealist. There is a difference.'

They came at him as if in an avalanche, and boredom was gone. It was sport.

Delta 6: 'Come off it, they were all reds, Soviet-supplied and Soviet-funded, controlled by the Comintern, recruited by the Communist Party of Great Britain.'

Delta 8: 'Just a load of wankers interfering in another dog's fight.'

Delta 9: 'What you could say, your great-uncle was yesterday's terrorist — like any of those bastards from outside going into Iraq, exactly the same, to slot that Principal who's on his way home. What you reckon, Banksy?'

The notebook was in front of him, with its worn leather cover and its faded gold-printed name. At that moment, David Banks could have grinned and shrugged and even laughed — could have pushed himself up off the hard chair and asked who needed another coffee or tea, how many sugars, could have defused it. But the blood ran warm in him. He was tired to the point of exhaustion and his temper surged. 'You lot are talking right out of your arses.'

'Oh, that right, is it?' Sport over, conflict joined. 'That's not very pretty, Banksy.'

He was an Authorized Firearms Officer. He had been given the highest responsibility a policeman held: the right to carry a lethal weapon. He was not allowed the personal luxury of anger. But all that had gone clean out through the canteen's window. No apology, no backing off. Banks stared up at the ceiling, which was a mistake.

It was Delta 11 who saw the opportunity of advantage and took it. Beyond Banks's main eyeline, fast as a snake, Delta 11 came past two empty chairs, and had the notebook in his fist. Banks's reaction was a clawing grab at Delta li's sleeve, but he couldn't hold it. Delta 11 sank again on to his chair.

'Right, let's have a look — let's see what the Commie's got to say for himself.'

It had begun as a lark, then gone serious.

Banks was up — his chair fell back behind him — along the length of the table and his right hand snatched at the back of Delta li's neck while the left dived for the notebook. His left wrist, with his watch on it, brushed Delta li's earlobe, and the little metal angle holding the strap in place nicked the flesh. Banks had the notebook in his hand as the first drop of blood hit the table. Only a nick, just a scratch, but there was blood on the table. He spun on his heel and went back to his chair at the end of the table. Then he could have apologized, and maybe thrown his handkerchief to Delta ii.

Banks said, 'Actually, my great-uncle was an idealist and prepared to make sacrifices for those ideals, a brave and principled man.'

Delta 9 mocked, 'And what would make him any different from the foreign suicide-bombers in Iraq and their "sacrifices"? Come on, I'm listening, Banksy.'

Without thinking, without weighing, Banks spat back, 'It's perfectly possible that such men there are brave and principled, and though I don't agree—'

For a moment the silence hung, and the enormity of his statement, which contradicted the culture of Protection Officers, billowed in him. He saw their huddle re-form, and he heard, wafting low towards him, the debate resume on whether useful thermal socks could be bought for less than twenty pounds — and he was shut out.

Regret was not in David Banks's nature, or humility. And his great-uncle, Cecil Darke, had made no compromises.

He dropped the notebook into his jacket pocket, and went to sit at a far table — where there was no blood from a nicked ear — away from the clatter of conversation.