The Walking Dead

  '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.'

  Chapter7

  Saturday, Day 10

  The phone rang. Spread across the kitchen table, among the coffee mugs, toast crumbs and the plate on which he had been served scrambled egg and grilled tomatoes, were the brochures. With his breakfast, Anne had been feeding her husband on holidays and the choice was Dickie's. He could plump for an early-season Mediterranean cruise, last-minute booking and therefore at a cut-rate price, or a railway journey to the Swiss Alps, or a boat trip up the Rhône with excursions to vineyards. But the phone yelled to be answered and he saw irritation on his wife's forehead. Under duress, he was looking at the train trip to the mountains. She beat him to it and Naylor was only half out of his chair by the time she was at the door and heading for the hall table. She'd said that as soon as he had erected the flat-pack greenhouse, and put in the tomato plants–she had already arranged for Mrs Sandham next door to water them–they should be off to the Mediterranean, Switzerland or France.

  The ringing had stopped.

  Did he care which it was? Not a great deal. He wasn't good on holidays. Whether it was Bournemouth, Bruges or Bordeaux, he would do the tramping, the galleries and museums, then buy a newspaper and, back in the hotel room or cabin, he'd flick for the running news channel on the television, and the books he'd brought stayed unread. She told him each time they went that he only lightened up when they were travelling with home as the destination, and work the next Monday morning.

  She was at the door. 'It's Penny, doing night duty. She wants to speak. I said she'd caught us just before we went out–she said she needs to talk to you.'

  She stood aside, arms akimbo, hands on hips, her familiar gesture of annoyance.

  He smiled as if helpless. 'On a Saturday morning–funny, that.'

  Naylor went to the phone, paused and looked down at the receiver. It lay off the cradle and on the Yellow Pages. He hesitated, then lifted it. 'Dickie here–good morning, Penny'

  From Riverside Villas, it was not a secure line to 47 Kennedy Avenue in Worcester Park. Guardedly, he was told of a signal that had come across the river from the 'Sister' crowd, and that it had created 'something of a flap'.

  'Who's in?' he asked.

  'All the minor bosses, and the major boss is on stand-by and might be in by mid-morning. From what I can see, Dickie, it's a big, big flap.'

  'And is it ours?'

  'Yes. It's what we do.'

  'Is Mary in?'

  'Been here an hour. She said it wasn't necessary to spoil your weekend, it being the last. Now she's in a meeting, and I thought it right to call you. I wouldn't have bothered you but nobody's walking, everybody's running.'

  'I'll be straight there,' he said.

  Back at the kitchen door he offered a curt apology to Anne. What was she supposed to do? Go to the travel agent on her own? She should. And book? Whichever option she preferred. He was on the stairs when he heard her angry hiss: 'Daddy never went in at weekends. What do they want you for when you're virtually out of the door? Daddy would have told them to go jump.' He thought, reaching the landing, that only if he were blessed would he never again hear of her father. In their bedroom, he dragged a suit out of the wardrobe, a work shirt and tie from a drawer. His black London shoes were under a chair. He stripped off his Saturday clothes and dressed again.

  Back in the hail, unhooking his coat from the stand, he called, to the kitchen, 'I don't know when I'll be back.'

  'How much do I spend?'

  He grinned cheerfully, 'As much as you can lay your hands on. Splash out, why don't you?'

  Naylor was gone. A brisk stride down Kennedy Avenue, as much of a shambling run along the main road's pavement as his sixty-five years permitted, then a scramble up the steps at the station.

  On the train, he sat sandwiched in a football team of teenagers with their bags restricting his leg room. Of course he would never be free of her father. Naylor had been a junior inspector in the colonial police and serving in the Trucial States in the early 1960s, transferred to Aden when internal security had collapsed and been seconded to the RAF's police investigation branch. She had been a secretary at Government House. They'd met at a drinks party. Rather unpleasant, but he'd done the right thing–she'd told him, two and a half months after a late-night swim session on Gold Mohur beach, that she was pregnant, and they'd married in the main salon of the Residence. A month later she'd said that she'd got her dates wrong and that no sprog was on the way. No sprog had been on the way since.

  Aden had ended and Government House had been abandoned to the apparatchiks of the National Liberation Front; the RAF and he had flown home. The dust had not gathered under his feet. Daddy, once of the Palestine Police, was now a senior M15 officer with an empire at Leconfield House and had slipped the word that his son-in-law was a .'good sort and reliable', which had been more than enough for his recruitment into the Security Service. He was not privy to whether he had been a disappointment to Daddy or not but the introduction had ensured his employment for thirty-nine years, and he was grudgingly grateful for it. It gave him, and had done since he joined, a thrill to work for an organization charged with the Defence of the Realm, to see the innocent and ignorant around him and know that he–anonymous and unnoticed–was charged with their safety. God, he would miss it.

  It had taken Dickie Naylor an hour and three minutes to make the seamless transition from domesticity to his professional workplace.

  If he had been under oath and cross-examined, he would have sworn that the face of Mary Reakes fell as he swept into the outer office–she would have known that treason was abroad, and he'd been telephoned. Penny, the guilty one, had her face close to her screen and seemed to hide behind it–she'd earned, at the very least, a box of chocolates. He would make his point and give not a damn if he verged on rudeness.

  'So that everybody understands, from this coming Friday evening I will not
be called in if the heavens open. Up to this coming Friday evening, while 1 am charged with the running of this section, I have responsibilities and will exercise them. So, please, Mary, would you bring me up to speed?'

  It was done with reluctance, but he was handed the digest of the signal that had come across the Thames from the sisters at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He read it. He thought that at last something meaningful was before his eyes. He read the name of Ibrahim Hussein, medical student and citizen of Saudi Arabia, then his movements. Suddenly the final days had purpose, and he was not ashamed of his excitement. As he held the signal his hands trembled. He studied the photograph of an open, pleasant face. Then a winnow of fear: would the matter run beyond the stretch of the coming week at the end of which his swipe card would be taken from him? There was a reference to the Twentyman, then the signal's two bottom lines: 'The information given is a hunch, no more than guesswork, but the source (Josiah Hegner, FBI agent/Riyadh) has unique and personal experience in his field.'

  He said, 'Right, let's go to work.'

  In his office he pushed the buttons and his screen lit; the box engine ground to life. He looked up. She was gazing into the cubicle, embedded in thought.

  'What has carried you away, Mary, and where to?' he called to her.

  The positioning of her new desk, the placing of the new filing safes, whether to go with magnolia, peach or ochre on the walls.

  'Just, Dickie, that it's such a strange code name for an enemy, and I haven't an idea what it means–the one Hegner calls the Twentyman.'

  He walked briskly. There was no rain and a pleasant, cool sunshine played on his face. It was because of a British boy from the city of Leicester, to the north, that Ajaq had gone early that morning to the coach station close to the Victoria terminus, had bought the ticket and boarded the bus to the town of Bedford. That boy had been with him for a night and a half-day, four weeks back, after being collected at the market point along the frontier with the Kingdom. A few hours earlier, the courier had come back from the mountains of the Tribal Areas and had delivered the detail of instructions as to how he should travel from Iraq to the place from which he should launch this attack of importance. He had stripped that boy's mind and memories of anything that might be of use, the siting of cameras and the levels of surveillance, and had decided then that the closest observation was on trains and on the capital's underground railway. Because of what he had learned from the boy he had used the bus network, first for a long-distance coach, then for the connection–painfully slow–to the village. After that night and half-day, when he had leached what he thought significant from the boy, Ajaq had sent him on his way, towards a Shi'a district of Baghdad, with four kilos of military explosive under his loose robe.