The Walking Dead

Chapter 6

He thought the judge was watching him. He was tense. Sweat ran down the back of his neck. Jools Wright gnawed at the problem engulfing him.

The judge seemed to break away from his laborious writing down of key points of evidence and glance up. His eyes roved across the well of court eighteen, his concentration fractured and his frown spreading, then came to rest on Jools — not on Corenza, Deirdre or Baz.

The evidence droned on: Ollie Curtis's turn in the witness box where he had been all day, lying, twisting and evading. But Jools had heard little of the wriggling denials. His problem was larger, causing him to squirm in the plastic chair. Once, Peter had turned in his seat and said soundlessly — but lip-readable: 'Can't you sit still for five minutes?' He could not, and the problem loomed bigger…Late-night shopping. He always went with Babs, after school finished on a Friday, to do the late-night shopping.

He tried to smile at Mr Justice Herbert, as If that would free him from the beady surveillance.

In the box, Ollie Curtis hadn't the stature of his brother, didn't create the same aura of intimidation but was still a formidable creature. It was a diabolical tissue of lies to suggest that two handguns had been brought by a woman, unidentified, to the shop's front door in a pram for him and his brother to retrieve from under a sleeping baby, then return to the same hiding-place when he and Ozzie had sprinted clear. He had been — injured innocence swam on his face — with his mother at the time of the robbery…Of course she could not come to court to testify: she was old, ill, and there was a doctor's certificate to prove it. Questions and answers wafted over Jools's head, because it was Friday, and Friday was late-night shopping, and there was the not-so-small problem of the increasingly imminent check-out.

'You state categorically, Mr Curtis, that you were not there?'

'Honest and truthful, I was not.'

Neither question nor answer was written down on Mr Justice Herbert's pad, but his eyeline was fixed on its target, and Jools's smile had failed to divert it.

The judge said, with studied resonance, 'I think we'll call it a day. Thank you, Mr Curtis. I have never believed that good justice is made when those before the courts are tired. You will be refreshed, Mr Curtis, by the weekend break before you resume your evidence on Monday morning…It has been a punishing week, not just for Mr Curtis but for all of us. There is something else I would like to say before we go our differing ways — in fact, to emphasize — and that is for the members of our jury…'

He paused. Jools stared back at him and the smile was frozen off his face. What's the old pedant up to? Recall of evidence was lost. The problem of late-night shopping was gone.

'We have been together a long time now and I am heartened by the commitment that you all, on our jury, have shown. It would be easy now for you, ladies and gentlemen, as we approach the final stages of the trial, to feel more relaxed about the strictures I have placed on you than you might have felt a month or two months ago. But, the guidance I gave you when we started these proceedings remains as important now as it was then. You might feel that a conversation with family or friends on the details of the case before you could not harm any of the participants. You would be wrong, members of the jury. I urge you most strongly. not — I repeat, not — to discuss any aspect of the trial with any person who is not a colleague on the jury, and then only in the assured privacy of your jury room. Is that, Mr Foreman, understood by you and all of those with you?'

Their foreman, Rob, looked down the row beside him, then twisted to see behind him. Heads nodded. Bizarre, and bloody unnecessary, but the judge had not addressed his remarks to Rob, Dwayne, Fanny or Fine, only to Jools. He jutted his chin, and could have shouted, 'Don't pick on me, friend. I know what's expected of me. I'm voting guilty as charged.' But didn't. Who was he going to talk to? Not much chance of him having a conversation with Babs while pushing the trolley at late-night shopping, getting closer to the checkout…no bloody chance. Hardly going to be spieling through the evidence with Hannah — in bed, Saturday night, thank God — was he? Rob, the officious prat, bobbed his head and bobbed it again: all understood. It was because the end was in sight that the judge had raised it. Not going to be easy, when it was over, to go back into the groove with the little thugs of year nine, and the statistics of the grain harvest in the Midwest and the consequences of the melting polar icecap.

'That's it, then. Have a good weekend — but remember not to discuss these matters with any third party, with nobody. My father was on the Atlantic convoys in the Second World War and he told me of the poster on the gates at Liverpool docks. 'Loose Lips Sink Ships.' Never forgotten it. So, no "loose lips" because these are matters only for you.'

Jools filed out of court. He wished his colleagues well, then ran for the station. He did not look beside or behind him.

Now Benny Edwards was hands on and had taken responsibility.

Two other rubbish bins had been checked out, and one of the males on the jury had been followed to his parents' home. Then the father had come back and been seen to wear that white shirt with the discreet straps on it that meant he was a uniformed policeman and off duty. Needn't have bothered, because they had the target, the best one — maybe the only one.

That morning, Benny had pulled on the latex gloves and sifted through a treasure trove of bills, demands and statements. A bonanza moment in his career of nobbling, he reckoned.

While he had been reading through the financial mess that was the life of Julian Wright, his photographer had been at work with a discreet little digital job — but that was for later.

He was up close to what he called the 'Tango'. He was always thorough and that was the basis of his reputation, which justified the charges he made on clients. The Tango and the wife had been through Fruit and Vegetables and were half-way down Cereals, and he was four trolley lengths behind them. There were others of his team in the coffee-shop beyond the checkouts, and another at the main doors, so a box had been formed round the Tango. It was all good, the way it should be done. Benny Edwards need not have been there, up close, but it was his tactic to observe before he moved on the approach run. This was confirmation, and he'd never reckoned that what another guy told him had half the value of being there, watching for himself and learning.

They had the right Tango, no question. The Tango gave them a chance. Too many failures, too many convictions, and the reputation he valued would slide. Too many jerks banged up in Belmarsh, Whitemoor or Long Lartin, and the price he could charge went on the slide. He had chosen well, could see it. The Tango's finances were a disaster, and worse. She'd pick something off the shelf — last one had been a branded cornflakes packet — and dump it into the trolley that he pushed, behind her. She'd go on, and the Tango would shove it back on the shelf and take instead the supermarket's own product, which might save twenty pence. Penny-pinching was good news, because with just the two options — the carrot and the stick — there looked to be a useful chance of making the carrot do the work. Less messy than the stick. Because he was there, and tracking them in the box, he reckoned — would have bet big money on it — that the Tango would do the business.

They'd switched aisles. They were through Detergents, had done bottom-of-the-range bread, had picked up only packets of sausages, mince and burgers — what Benny Edwards wouldn't have fed his dog on — from Meats, and they were at the start of the Beverages /Alcohol section. Her eyes lingered on wines, Bulgarian and the least expensive, and he'd seen but not been able to hear the short, snapped exchange between the Tango and his wife, and she hadn't put a bottle into the trolley. Then she'd marched to the checkouts and joined a queue, leaving him to trail behind.

It was all for Ozzie and Ollie Curtis. Two bulky packages were nestling in the rafters of Benny Edwards's home: one held fifty thousand in fifties, and the other was half of that. It was all for Ozzie and Ollie's freedom. Well, they were a legend, a throwback to the past. Hadn't moved on from the times of the east London gangs — all that shit about hitting wages vans, bullion warehouses, banks and a jeweller's, if there was enough tasty stuff inside the safe. Benny Edwards didn't do conscience and he didn't do morals. He did drugs importers if they had the cash, up front, to pay him. The brothers, blaggers, were history. Just about everyone he dealt with had gone over to drugs, and he'd learned that the trade bred deceit and double-cross: the drug dealers were shites, they had no bloody honour. Funny thing, but that was what the brothers had, honour. But he doubted he could do more for them than get a hung jury, which would cost them a whole big mountain of money. Worse, drugs importers would grass up an associate, and would look for the security of sliding information on rivals to the police. No way the Curtis brothers would do down an associate to get leniency, and they'd never pass information to the Serious Crime Directorate. Honour was an old-world thing, and when he'd finished with the blaggers Benny Edwards doubted he'd ever meet it again.

Where he stood, he could see them, the Tango and the wife, at the checkout. The plastic bags were filled. The Tango was into his hip pocket, had the wallet in his hand and seemed to be wondering which of his cards to use. Chose one, it was swiped, and the girl shook her head. Took out a second, offered it, had it rejected. Back into the hip pocket and the cheque book was produced. Benny Edwards had seen the bank statements and didn't rate the Tango's chances. Which was when the wife intervened. She had her purse out of her bag, then a wad of notes in her fingers. He saw surprise splash on to the Tango's face, like the poor bastard hadn't known she had that money. He heard her say, loud enough to share with the queue, 'I went to my mum this morning, told her I'd married a tosser who couldn't earn a proper wage, was too lazy or too stupid.' He saw the Tango flinch, and no other shopper met his eye. God, that was out of order. The Tango was loaded with plastic bags and stormed towards the doors before she'd taken her small change.

They traipsed away from him towards a bus stop. He used his mobile and broke the box round them. The approach would be in the morning, when the wife had softened the Tango some more and made him pliant. His usual line, which he used when it was a carrot job, played on his lips: 'There are no consequences, no kick-backs. You do me a favour and I do you a favour, and we forget about it. I promise, it'll be like it never happened…Except that the financial worry in your life is removed. Believe me, nothing will be different.' That was what Benny Edwards would say to the Tango and it was all true: nothing would be different.

In the first shower of London's evening, Ajaq walked the pavements. He cut across great squares and passed the seats of government and power. He went alongside the black-painted barriers of concrete that protected buildings from the approach of a car under their walls, a car that might have been low on its chassis under the weight of a half-tonne of fertilizer explosive. He was so far from his home, and so close to his blood. Great edifices towered over him. He passed policemen, made huge by the bulletproof vests under their top coats and noted their readiness to shoot: magazines loaded, a finger laid on a trigger guard, a machine pistol hung from the shoulders…but they did not know him. They were at the mouth of an Underground station, watching the surge of the crowds that pitched down the steps. They were in doorways. They were behind the gates that shut off a cul-de-sac, and Ajaq knew it was the workplace of a great enemy, the Americans' lap-dog.

It was confirmation of the tactical decision he had already taken.

The centre of the city, where its authority lay, was hunkered down as if it awaited the inevitability of attack. Barricades and guns were its defence. He thought of it as the Green Zone, Baghdad, where the Americans lived with their allies and collaborators and where security was tightest. It amused him to walk among them, to feel the brush of bodies against his. There was, and Ajaq recognized it, a particular and peculiar thrill when he moved in the heartland of an enemy and was not known; he was merely a face in the crowd, anonymous.

The decision had been his and had been made four weeks before he had started out on his journey. It had not been queried by those who had created the organizational web in which he now crawled. The decision was that the protected city its ministry buildings, its sprawled labyrinth of train tunnels, its guards and weapons should be ignored. He had chosen to strike where the forces of his enemy were weakest. He thought of an underbelly that was soft, where a knife could dig deep, and where panic would be greatest. The decision had been committed to a handwritten note, a fine nib fashioning the coded characters on two sides of a single sliver of cigarette paper, which had been taken by courier across frontiers and boundaries to the cave or the compound in the Tribal Areas where the leaders of the base existed. He had never met them. The Engineer had, but Muhammad Ajaq had not. No counter-command had been issued, and every aspect of their planning was effective, had earned his admiration. He assumed that those men, the leaders, would sit each evening with a battery-powered radio or television downloading the satellite and would flick the channels, listening for news of his success.

He went past the parliament building and a massive clock struck the hour. He came to a garden and passed into it through a gateway. He crunched along a gravel path and approached a floodlit statue of coal-black figures, who stood in submission but with dignity — as if they were beaten but not defeated; he read that they were The Burghers of Calais, and that the sculptor was Rodin, but he did not know what 'burghers' were or where Calais was. There was an image of pride about those men that stayed with him as he crossed the garden, came Out on to the pavement and went past a great grey stone building where lights burned in every window. Two men came out of its swing-door entrance and stepped in front of him, which made him check his stride, but there was no apology that he was impeded and no acknowledgement of him — as if he did not exist.

'I tell you, Dickie, you don't know how lucky you are. It's going to get worse — couldn't be a better time to be getting out. Did you say a greenhouse?'

He heard them, took no note. What filled his mind was telling the Engineer — when he met him the next day — what he had learned and the sights he had seen.

They had confirmed his decision. Muhammad Ajaq started out on his lonely walk back to the hotel.

A table had been brought into the room and sheets of old newspaper were laid across it. On the newspaper he had placed what had been bought for him the previous evening from his list. Reaching him were the smells of cooking, not the scents of the Arab food with which he was familiar, but the odour of an Asian curry; he could eat it but would not enjoy it. That door was closed and the curtains of the room given him were pulled tight across.

In the centre of the table, across the middle of a fold in the newspaper, he had placed the artefact of his trade: the stack of explosive sticks that had been retrieved from the cupboard of a boat's kitchen. The slim, shiny detonators lay at the edge of the table. Between the sticks and the detonators and over the rest of the newspaper were what he would need for the construction of the device: a loose waistcoat of cotton fabric and straps cut from a towel, a packet of heavy needles and a reel of thick thread, big batteries for a flashlamp torch, coils of multicoloured wire, a soldering iron, a paper bag of two-inch nails, another of carpet tacks, a small plastic sack of screws, washers, bolts and ball-bearings, and a button switch from the flex of a table light. He could have fashioned the device with greater intellectual skill, but thought it unnecessary.

In his own country, far away and behind him, he built devices of ever-increasing sophistication. He could booby-trap a dead body and cause it to explode when the medical crews came from the Shia hospital. He could use mercury tilt switches that would detonate a device in a car parked close to a barracks, and the vehicle would explode as troops opened its doors. He could place culvert bombs under a road and have an infrared beam flare across the tarmac to catch a Humvee or armoured personnel carrier. He could spend many hours at his work, if his target was an enemy explosive and ordnance disposal officer…or he could spend a minimum of time and still create havoc, chaos and fear. But with every creation, clever or simple, he followed a basic rule of survival and used differing techniques of wiring, positioning of detonators and loading of a vehicle or waistcoat. He left no repetitious signature. All that was constant in his work was the devastation in the aftermath.

The name given him by his father was Tariq, but to all with whom he fought he was the Engineer. He doubted that a photograph of his head and shoulders existed in the headquarters of the intelligence buildings at the airport, but there a ghost's image of him would exist. He loathed his enemy, and where he could find them, he killed them, and that would have created, in their air-conditioned suites, respect.

He came from the Triangle town of Fallujah.

His wife, three children, and his mother had perished in the rubble of the assault on Fallujah, and he had never seen or prayed at the rough, quickly dug graves in which they were buried. His father — insane from the bombing, shelling, shooting and grief — now lived in a world of devastated silence at the home of his brother; he had never visited him. He carried no photographs of that family, only the memory of them and his hatred of those who had killed them and broken his father.

In Iraq, alongside the graves of his family, there were many hundreds more; he and his hatred were responsible for them.

The Scorpion had asked him to travel far from his home. 'For what reason? Am I not more valuable here?' The Scorpion had spoken of the 'underbelly' and its softness. 'I accept it. I will go with you. The underbelly attracts me.' Why did it attract him? 'The town of Fallujah was an underbelly. The home of my wife, my children, my mother and father was an underbelly. They should learn what was done to us in their name. They should be hurt where they are soft.'

The hands that had laid out the items he would meld together in a killing device were thick and pudgy inside thin surgical gloves. He was in his forty-fourth year, was built like a bull, had rippling muscles. He smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. He had not prayed since the deaths of his family, and before that only on the holiest of festivals to please his mother. He had fought in the Iranian war on the front of the Faw peninsula, had been in the humiliation of the retreat from Kuwait, and had reached the rank of major in a battalion of the Republican Guard, specializing in ordnance, when the Americans had launched, four years back, their campaign of Shock and Awe. Then his unit had dispersed in confusion. He had joined the fledgling insurgency and had met the Scorpion. He valued the day of their meeting, under the searching gaze of aircraft circling overhead. In a sewer ditch, with bombs falling and missiles, with death close, they had met…The fingers matched the bulk of his body yet they were nimble and he could control their movement to the most subtle degree. The devices he made — if handled correctly — always worked, always, and many hundreds of graves, and more graves in the cemeteries of America, were filled as proof of his fingers' delicacy.

He would not see the underbelly target, he had no need to. When the youth with the swan on his chest walked to the target, Tariq— the Engineer of destruction — would be long gone, far from his work.

Bent over the waistcoat, grinning to himself, thinking of where the straps would be sewn, how much thread was necessary to hold the weight of the sticks, what length of wire would run from the batteries to the button switch, how easy to make the detonation for the boy, he heard the light rap at the closed door.

Concentrating, his mind filled with problems and' solutions, he murmured, 'Wait — a moment.'

And he did not realize that he had spoken in Arabic.

The door opened. He felt a draught against his cheek. He saw the girl. Anger sprawled through him. 'Get the flick out. Close the door.'

But she did not, was rooted, and her mouth was sagging open as if in shock. He could not hide what was laid out on newspaper across the table — the explosives, the detonators and what she had brought him.

'You never come in here. Never.'

She stammered, a tiny voice, that food was ready.

'And tell the rest of them. You, they, any of you never enter my room.'

She fled. The first of the tears had welled in her eyes — and she was gone. She hadn't closed the door. He went to it, kicked it viciously. Paint was dislodged by his toecap and flaked to the carpet. The door slammed. In a Triangle town or in Mosul or Salman Pak to the south, if a foot-soldier had come into his room and had seen the detail of his work, the Engineer would have shot him. Straight out into the yard, ankles kicked away, hair grabbed, pistol cocked and trigger pulled — shot dead. She, they, saw his face each time he emerged from the room allocated to him. He did not know them, there were too many of them — and they had not earned his trust.

For the first time since he had left all that was familiar to him — as he peeled off the gloves — he felt a sense of unease.

But he left the room, locked the door after him and went to the table. The girl, red-eyed, set a bowl of spice-scented curry before him and his mind drifted to the weight that the waistcoat would carry, the thinness of the shoulders and chest that would be inside it.

Ibrahim paced. He had not been out of the room for the whole of the day and into the evening. No explanation had been offered to him, not by the Leader, whom he had not seen since the huge hands had taken his fingers and held them with gentleness, and not by the fat one, Ramzi, who brought him food that was each time more foul than the last.

He had thought that by now — nine days since he had been chosen in the desert — he would be walking closer to God, in the company of those who were his brothers. The room had not been cleaned since he had come and the sign to tell staff not to disturb him hung outside on the door handle. He could only pace and pray. What comfort he could find, other than when he faced the window and prayed, was in the memory of the photographs in his room at home, on the far end of the Corniche in Jizan, of his eldest brother and his middle brother. Did they wait for him, beside God, in Paradise? Would he find them? His solitude strained the strength of his Faith. He heard laughter and shouting, a television's music, from the rooms above and below him; lavatories were flushed and water sprayed from shower heads. His eyes shut, he walked the number of strides on the carpet that the walls allowed…Would they know him?

When the building was quiet, and the street beyond the hotel's yard, the television was off and he had sunk, exhausted but dressed, on to the narrow bed, Ramzi came. 'You all right, friend? Of course you. are, why wouldn't you be? We move on tomorrow to where…Well, you know. It's a nice place you're going to, pretty, and close to…You are all right, aren't you?'

'See the TV at lunchtime — the news? More bloody trouble, more heartache, more bombs in Iraq — you see it? If they hadn't screwed up in the Tora Bora, none of it would be going on now. I told them then, but they didn't want to know. Those days in Afghanistan were a window of opportunity, but they didn't snatch it — and, Christ, they're paying a price. I told them…'

The stool at the left end of the bar was George Marriot's. Only a brave man, or a total idiot, among the regulars would have claimed it on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday evening, when Gorgeous George stomped down from his home and came to the pub in the village that was half a dozen miles north of Luton. On GG's nights, even if the darts team was at full strength and playing at home, or the golf team had been lowering a few after a competition, and the bar heaved, that stool was never taken. It was his, where he drank whisky chasers and pints of ale.

'They had two choices, the Yanks had, didn't they? At Tora Bora, they could have left it to us, that's the Northern Alliance people who'd hired me, or they could have done the whole damn thing themselves. He was there, you see, Osama was. He was all ready for picking off. My people and me, we could have done it — maybe even the Yanks on their own could have. Osama was bottled up. What did the Yanks do? Well, worst of two worlds. We had to wait while they took their time and lifted a block force in. Too long hanging about and Osama broke the trap. Typical Yanks. We were all itching to go, but the Yanks wouldn't have it, not till they were ready. Yank trouble was that they wouldn't take casualties. And Osama was long gone by the time they'd put their act together. If we'd had him then, God, wouldn't life be different?'

Some in the pub, particularly any with the misfortune to be within earshot of the stool, thought of Gorgeous George as sad; to others he was a 'loony'; to most he was the Rose and Crown's resident five-star bore. Many would have claimed to know by heart the story of the failed Tora Bora operation, and the net through which Osama bin Laden had slipped to safety across the Pakistan border — and he had been a freelancer and a bounty-hunter, the CIA had loved him, the British spooks had called him a genius of a guerrilla fighter, and he'd been up the mountains with his tribesmen within a spit of Osama, but the Yanks hadn't let him do the business until they'd put their own men, Special Forces and 101^st Airborne Division troops, into the block position.

'Fierce country you see. Mountain precipices that were razor sharp. Total cover so's you couldn't see the Al Qaeda fighters till you were damn near standing on them. Worse than anything we'd had in Oman. My people, me — and I wasn't a spring chicken, was forty-seven then — we could have hacked it, but we had to wait for the Yanks…You know the 101^st Airborne? Well, they couldn't handle the ground. They couldn't walk in there like we did. Had to have the CH-47 choppers lift them in when they finally moved. Where's the surprise with that? It was criminal letting Osama get clear. I said to a colonel of the 101^st that we were up for it, my tribesmen and me — wouldn't have it. Had to be Yanks that got the big man's head. So what happened? Nobody got him. The Yanks told us that if we moved before they gave the say-so they'd bomb us. At that time, I'm telling you, we weren't more than a day's hike from the cave where Osama was holed up. Bloody wicked, and look at the consequences.'

No one in the saloon bar of the Rose and Crown believed a word of it. The tales dripped over the regulars' heads — all a fantasy, of course, but harmless. The general opinion was, most likely, he'd not been south of Bognor Regis. He was humoured, and he did no harm other than bend ears, was as much a part of the fabric as the horse brasses on the walls.

'Everything that happens today, these kids blowing themselves up — the suicide people — it comes from me and my tribesmen not being allowed forward in the Tora Bora. I doubt Osama was more than four miles from us — a day's hike in that country, if you're fit. We'd have cut his head off. It would have been close-quarters fighting, rock to rock, enemy at fifteen paces, but we'd've had him and sawn off his head. You kill a snake by cutting off its head…Suppose I'd better be gone, or Sister will be fretting.'

He slid off the stool and braced his weight on the surgical sticks. The crowd parted for him and he hobbled out. When GG, or Gorgeous George, or George Marriot, had first arrived in the village, moved in with his sister in the last cottage on the Hexton Road, come to the pub and taken the stool, they'd seen how badly he walked. Even with the aid of the sticks, his progress was painful to watch. Many had offered to drive him home and been ferociously refused. It would take him the best part of an hour, in the moon's light or in rain, defiantly edging along the road with his sticks, to reach his sister and the little two-bedroom cottage, with roses on the wall, that was their home.

Always, when he stood in the door, the landlord would shout across the bar crowd, 'Safe home, GG. See you next week.'

'Would you like to take a chair, Banksy?'

But David Banks was wary. To be called in on successive evenings by the REMF, his inspector, broke the pattern of life in protection. He shook his head, didn't care if that wasn't the polite response. And he wouldn't be calling the inspector by his given name, Phil, which was usual. He stood by the door and was trying to puzzle out why, late on a Friday evening and Delta just coming off a hotel run with a Principal, the Rear Echelon Mother Fucker didn't have a home of his own to go to.

'Please yourself, Banksy. You remember our little chat last night?' He lied, but casually, 'Vaguely, sir.'

'Then I'll refresh your memory. I asked you if the atmosphere was good on Delta. You said it was fine. You went on that if I wasn't satisfied with that answer I should ask around, speak to the others. You remember that?'

'I do now, sir.'

'Well, I did just that.' There was the earnestness that was well practised in a veteran of policy meetings. It itched correctness. 'Banksy, I value esprit in a team.'

'Don't we all, sir?'

'A close team works well, Banksy. A divided team does not.'

'Sir, you won't find me arguing with you.'

He was, at heart, a country boy, from the border farmlands where the counties of Somerset and Wiltshire joined. The spring of his childhood had been happiness, and every summer evening and every day of the school holidays he had ridden with his father in the tractor's or the combine's cab.

'Right, I'll spell it out from what I can tell. I understand that Delta is not working well — and, most certainly, is divided.'

He said quietly, but with flint hardness, 'I'd say you've been listening to gossip, sir, ill-informed gossip.'

'I'm being patient, Banksy, trying to be reasonable — and you playing the dumb bugger isn't helping. All right, all right, you can have it straight. I'm told you're on the outside of your team following your striking of a colleague, a blow that drew blood. I cannot think of much that is more serious than that.'

'You won't find me snitching, sir — and you shouldn't believe everything you hear.'

A hand slapped on to the desk. 'That's offensive, Banksy, bloody rude and unworthy of you. You struck a colleague and, as a result, blood was spilled. That's what I hear.'

'I have no comment to make, sir, except that what you may have been told is a parody of the truth.'

He had been with his father, on a November weekend, ploughing a field into which wheat would be sown. He hadn't noticed the pain that creased Henry Banks's face, had only been alerted by his last little gasp as the tractor had slewed off course. At nine he'd known how to halt it — and that his father was gone. He'd run a half-mile across sodden fields, mud caking on his boots, to the nearest farmhouse and had made the call for an ambulance, then gone back to the tractor and sat holding his father's hand till the crew had come. When his father's corpse had been taken away, he had walked two miles home, and had told his mother when she came back from work. It was the day he never spoke of, but it was inside him and always with him. It had shaped him.

'In denial, is what you are. You disappoint me, Banksy. I admit it, I'm surprised at your response. Well, I've put a deal of work into this. I have better places, right now, to be than here — at this God-awful hour — with you playing semantics.'

'Then, sir, why don't you go home?'

'Banksy, you're trying me…' Again the smile was used, but was not sufficient to disguise growing frustration. 'There was some horseplay in the canteen, some mucking about. You lost your temper, which is not something to be expected of an AFO. An Authorized Firearms Officer is supposed to have emotions, sudden anger attacks, well buckled down and under complete control. I'm looking at a failure on your part, and the failure led you to strike a colleague on the ear,and hard enough for it to bleed. True or false?'

His father had been a tenant, and their farmhouse had been reclaimed by the landlord. His mother had moved into a bungalow near the town of Frome. Mother and son lived off a small annuity and from her wages as a counter-staff librarian. He had applied to join the Metropolitan Police the day after he had finished school, a modest achiever but dogged in carrying the academic workload. London was about as far as it was possible to get from the fields, hedgerows and wildlife around him where the heart-attack had taken his father.

'With respect, sir, you were not there. You are ignorant of what happened and why.' He spoke as if to a child who had strayed far from his remit. 'I suggest that the matter is best left alone, and that you go home.'

'At this precise moment you are outside the culture of the team. The team is united against you by a count of eleven to one, and the one is you. Don't interrupt me and don't come up with another stonewall of what I'm saying. If you want it in your face I'll put it there. You're looking at the edge of a precipice. I have negotiated—'

In shock that was genuine and not play-acted, he rasped, 'You've what, sir?'

'I have negotiated — hear me out — what seems to me to be the best solution to a difficulty that has now become unacceptable. I feel that I have been rewarded with a generous response from the rest, the majority, of the team, and they have given me categoric assurances on how the curtain can be brought down on this piece of silliness. It is silliness, Banksy, and I will not tolerate anything as daft as this affecting the work of the team, now or ever. I have their agreement.'

That experience, death brought close to a child, had left him with a legacy of remoteness. He had nurtured, as a uniformed constable in west London and then as a detective constable in the south-west of the capital, the ability not to share his inner thoughts. The investigation of burglaries and domestic violence was not adequate to hold his attention: he had applied for and been transferred into S019, the firearms unit. His heritage from his father was the ability to handle a gun: from the age of six he had walked the fields with a single-barrel .410 shotgun and his spaniel. He had thought to find in the unit something challenging, exciting, dramatic and worthwhile, and still sought the Grail.

'I'm pleased to hear that, sir.' He had narrowed his eyes, and respect for rank was lost in the night. There was a hitch of insolence in his voice.

'It's not going to take much. In private, to the members of Delta only, you will put this matter behind you with a straightforward general apology. Then, to the colleague you struck in an unlikely moment of temper, you will make a specific apology — and that's the end of it. You should do that in the morning and turn a new leaf. Not bad, eh? An end to it.'

His studied gesture of contradiction was a slow shake of the head. 'If I have nothing to apologize for then I cannot, with any sincerity, apologize.'

'That's not what I'm looking to hear, Banksy.' The palms were clapped together, better to make the point.

'It's me that's owed the apology.'

It was his habit, guarding the privacy of his thoughts, to remain on the fringe of any group, and it could not be hidden from those he worked with that he did not share their enthusiasm for the fellowship of belonging. If he socialized he seldom drank. If there were off-duty recreations — sea-angling, a trip in a cabin on the London Eye, a theatre visit with tickets courtesy of the show's management — he would decline. If he had no conversation to contribute, he did not speak…But David Banks was as good at his job as any in the team. That could not be gainsaid.

'Right, right…I won't have it said that I didn't try. I've busted my bollocks on this one. I told you that you were looking at the edge of a precipice, and I'm saying that the step back for you is an apology — actually two, one general and one specific.' The desk's papers were abruptly shuffled together, then dumped in a drawer: meeting concluded, evening wasted. Bitter…'So, for the record, are you going over that cliff face? Are you refusing to apologize?'

'When it's not my call just to keep the waters calm — I do not apologize.'

The chair was pushed back. A snarl tinged the voice. 'Your head, Banksy, not mine. You that's going into free-fall, not me. I've tried very hard to be reasonable and adult. It was just some damn notebook, wasn't it? A bit of larking around, what's the damage in that? But you're on your high horse because somebody picked up your notebook in fun, harmless fun. What's so special?'

It was in his pocket, the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket. The notebook gave extra weight to the pocket and with it were coins and a couple of quartz pebbles he had picked out from the shingle on Brighton beach at last year's political conference. The weight of the money and the pebbles, augmented by the notebook, would make it easier to throw back the jacket's material if he had to reach for the Glock in its pancake holster. The notebook, the testament of Cecil Darke, was more a part of him than the pistol in its holster.

'You weren't there, sir.'

He stood and glowered across the cleared surface of his desk. 'I'll tell you what you have — and it's about as damaging to a copper's career as anything gets. You have, Banksy, an attitude problem.'

'If you say so, sir.'

A cupboard was opened, an overcoat retrieved, and a briefcase picked up. 'Just like that, have to have the last word. It's a bad, bad, attitude problem — and don't come running to me when you feel the consequences of it.'

'Good night, sir, and thank you for your time.' He turned and walked to the door.

A final volley, a fusillade of bullets, as if they were on automatic, was aimed at his back. 'I gather you gave a defence, a strident one, to the cult of a foreign suicide-bomber. A suicide-bomber, if you didn't know it, is our top-of-the-tower enemy. I hear you defended them: "brave and principled", yes? They are scum, and if they come where we can hit them, we bloody well will. You're out of line and out of kilter, Banksy. There might be just a half-second to decide whether to shoot, but not a half-second to have a bloody seminar on "brave and principled". I didn't want to say that but it's what the rest of Delta team thinks. You may not be up for it, dropping the scum in his tracks. Get out.'

Banks closed the door silently after him. In the movement his jacket flapped on his hip where the holster was, and he felt the added weight in his pocket of the notebook. He thought that he had stood the corner of his great-uncle, and had had no option but to do so.

'I've only one question, Joe, and I'll listen to your answer, whether it takes two minutes or two hours. Is this hard information or gut instinct? Convince me it's hard and you can be guaranteed that I'll push it to the desks of serious customers with all the influence I have. Tell me.'

The intelligence officer, based at the British embassy in Riyadh, had been in-country only four months. Joe Hegner had not met him, but then, Joe forswore the fruit-cocktail circuit of diplomatic receptions. And the tone of the man, Simon Dunkley, suggested a polite indulgence towards a 'cousin' from a sister service — as if the Bureau agent's reputation was not known to him. It happened often enough. In Iraq, one week in four, or in Riyadh for three weeks in four, he was familiar with the sensation of being unknown and unproven. The Briton drove, rare for an expatriate and probably unwise, but it was at Joe's suggestion that he should be picked up at his embassy's outer gates, and he thought they headed in the darkness for the desert sands: he had asked for the air-conditioning to be switched off, and had felt for the window button. Now the wind raked his cheeks, which gave him pleasure.

'I deal with the world of the young men and women who seek to attack our civilization by the sacrifice of their lives. The suicide-bomber is, believe me, the most efficient weapon you can dream of. More valuable than a bomb from an aircraft, which can be affected if darkness or low cloud covers the target, more accurate than an artillery shell, where the strength of the wind or the density of the humidity can alter its trajectory path while in flight. He or she can go right to the core of the target. The accuracy in the delivery of the explosion by a suicide-bomber cannot be bettered.

'If I talk to you of the devastation made by suicide-bombers against the state of Israel in the last several years, it is to remind you of the equivalent death toll — per capita of population — that your country would have suffered and mine. Imagine it, ten thousand of your citizens dead, and forty thousand Americans. In Iraq it is many times worse. The bombings are not a strategic use of weapons, but in the tactical field they have massive impact. Maybe you were in London twenty months ago, maybe you know a little of the chaos. They are not a danger to the stability and survival of the state, yours or mine, but their effect on the national psyche and economy are incalculable — and we don't know of any protection against this threat other than the vigilance of law enforcement and gathered intelligence.

'The experience you have had in Britain came from inside. That, oddly enough, can be dealt with more easily. The probability is that links will be found with those providing safe-houses and supplying the explosives, and that the network's cell will be dismantled. I can accept the argument. Intelligence will flow from the investigation and the gate-keepers in local mosques will be identified on the back of the discovery of the bombers' backgrounds. It's slow and painstaking, but evidential routes are uncovered that will lead inevitably, I promise it, to the destruction of the cells. That is what you have had, and I consider you fortunate because then you have the possibility to cut with scalpel knives into the mind of your attacker.

'What is worse? Far worse? It is when there is no mind to saw into. If the bomber is foreign you cannot so easily explore the nucleus of the cell structure that facilitates his act. He materializes from that familiar "clear blue sky" and, with detonation, he returns there — and nobody knows a thing. Understand me. He has never been in your gaols, where his recruitment can be identified; he has never been in your mosques or cultural centres, again where traces will have been left; he has never been, younger, in street protests where he might have been photographed and where group leaders have been seen. He comes from nowhere — all right, that is somewhere, but beyond your reach. If you knew him you could raise the walls around him — but you don't so you can't.

'Already, in your country, the trauma of Seven-Seven has passed and I'll bet your security services' guard has slipped. You're vulnerable again, because memories are short. Of course you have paid agents — informers — scattered in the mosques, and all meetings of the firebrands are monitored, but they will not deliver you the foreigner. He uses links that are beyond your sight. If, in Iraq, the suicide-bombers were home-grown the problem would have been cauterized by now. They aren't. They come across the international frontiers.

'The route used most frequently into Iraq is from Syria and their nexus point is Damascus, but plenty come over the Saudi frontier. My own injury was caused by a boy, barely over twenty-one, from a good and respectable Saudi family. Now the Saudi chain, and my work is to monitor it, is controlled by one man. I don't know his name or his face, but it's like he's a street trader and the melons, apricots, peaches and dates arrive on his stall…What I have, right now, is the scent on him. I call him, because it fits, the Twentyman.

'So, here we stand. I caught the scent of the Twentyman. I have a boy whose family thought he was in the Yemen visiting family, but. was in reality boarding a European flight out of King Khalid International. Ibrahim Hussein is twenty-one years old and a promising student of medicine. He is not with his relatives but is heading for Europe where he has no friends, no contacts, no family. What he's got is sibling guilt — two brothers dead in Afghanistan — one killed by the Soviet forces, and one by our boys. I have his picture for you.

'If I were a betting man, I'd bet the ranch that Ibrahim Hussein, only surviving son of an electrical-goods retailer in Ash Province, has journeyed to Europe with the sole intention of killing himself in a public place. Southern Europe — Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece — isn't a target for a flight into Amsterdam. In the north of the continent, on the mainland, there is most likely a "covenant of protection" — France, Belgium, Holland and Germany have, in differing degrees, opposed the coalition intervention in Iraq, which leaves only the conveniently placed United Kingdom where neither "covenant" nor "protection" exists. I hope you're following me.

'I've got a gnawing feeling in my gut. The Twentyman operates out of Saudi and concerns himself only with attacks of the greatest ferocity. A boy has left the Kingdom and is now within spitting distance of your country. My gut tells me there is a mix of hard fact and hunch. I can't divide 'em, or weigh their different parts. To me, they run together. But the "hard fact" is that the boy has travelled. "Hunch" is that he will die in your country and take as many as he can with him, himself to Paradise and them to wherever unbelievers end up. In the opinion of Joe Hegner, your society is threatened. Now, you are perfectly entitled to pull the vehicle over, turn it around, drive back, drop me at the embassy gate and do nothing.'

The car bumped on to the hard shoulder, turned, then sped back towards the city.

Late into that Friday night, as the end of the holy day approached, the officer of the Secret Intelligence Service sat in his protected office, behind steel-plated doors and blast-proof windows, and fashioned the signal he would send to London…and he reflected on the prematurely aged, small, dumpy man, with the drawled red-neck accent, who peddled his theory of catastrophe. Travelling at night, glorying in the blast of sand-laden air on his face, his eyes hidden by tinted glasses, the stick always in his hand and slotted against his knee, the man had offered Simon Dunkley what was only a hunch but so believable.

He was going far out on a limb. He imagined the reaction to his signal: chaos. Then the enquiries: new on station, wasn't he? Had he the experience to assess the supposed intelligence? No bloody option but to send what was another agent's, another national's, hunch…It went to code, was transmitted. For a long time he stared into the night and could not lose sight of his source. Then the call-backs started.

To each of them, Simon Dunkley had the same answer: 'I have sent what I have been told but, personally, I'd rest my life in Joe Hegner's hands. It's the man he is.'