The Walking Dead

  It had been dark still when they were woken, in their separate rooms but at the same moment, by the distant bellow of the cow, perhaps a mile away. They had dressed, gulped a mug of tea and gone out with the wind on their backs propelling them forward. They had found the cow in a difficult labour under the shelter of the millennia-aged stones on the slope of Cnoc Mor. Neither man would have considered turning away from the cry of anguish.

  On a better day, as they had tramped to Cnoc Mor, as they had assisted at the birth, as they had turned for home, they might have seen the slow, languid turns of the great white-tailed eagles, the flying barn doors with a wing span in excess of seven feet, and that would have given them rare pleasure. They had not seen the majesty on the wing of the birds, or the hobby hawk, but they had heard the coughed shout of the ravens that had a nest on Aird a Chrainn.

  Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, in the tiny community–twenty-six souls when the summer tourists were away from Ardchiavaig–that was their home, had no past, only a present, and their future was unknown. The two men, lankily tall and muscularly short, had arrived fifteen years before at this remote corner of an Inner Hebridean island, had taken over a ruined croft's shell, built a roof for it, dug out a damp course and plastered the interior walls. They had used rough carpentry skills to construct a staircase, had laid a sewage pipe to a cesspit, and excavated the ditch that brought them water from an historic well. Electricity and the telephone links came on the wires that the wind bent and were held up on posts that the wind had angled. It was a place well suited to two men whose expertise and past were best hidden.

  The head of the heifer calf, born with a red-brown coat, peeped from between the opened buttons of the taller man's waterproof jerkin; he held it tight against him as if with love. The shorter man held his arm as they came off the last stones of the hill, then sank down into a reedy bog; the grip showed the extent of their friendship. The cow followed them. Unsaid between them was the extent of their guilt that she had been left out and had dropped the calf in foul weather, but the birth had been a full ten days before the scheduled time and a week before they had expected to lead her down to the stone byre behind the croft. They owned, the two of them, the one Highland cow and now one Highland heifer calf, fifteen ewes and a ram, half a dozen goats, eight chickens and a cockerel, and two geese. All were loved.

  But they were now on stand-by status: the call had come from London, from Mr Naylor, and if a second phone call was received, they would be gone because that was their past, and the McDonald family, who had the nearest farm to them would see to their beasts and birds. It was five years since they had last been called away, and they had travelled then from the Inner Hebrides to the mountain towns of Bosnia; seven years and ten years before, they had gone to the wild border country of the province of Northern Ireland. Whenever the past demanded their presence, they responded. And the McDonald family would not have queried where they went and why, or the McDougalls, and not the McPhersons, or Hamish who brought the post each day in mid-afternoon, or the Sutherland widow whose husband had been lost from an upturned crabbing boat. When they had returned they had not been quizzed on their business away from the island.

  When they journeyed away it was because of their knowledge of thresholds.

  A warm smile crossed the face of the taller man. 'Look at it, Donald, it's breaking. It's the last of the rain and the gale's taking it. See the sunlight coming?'

  With reverence, the shorter man said, 'And there'll be a rainbow to follow it, and then good skies, Xavier. It's a sign she'll be a fine beast. We did it. We saw her into this world.'

  'Makes you feel well.'

  'Makes you feel the best, Xavier.'

  'If her mother's Marigold, she should be Daisy.'

  'Marigold and Daisy, good names. I'm not arguing with that, Xavier.'

  They cleared the bog and reached the field of cropped grass. Their sheep and goats stampeded towards them. In Ardchiavaig, where the winter of the last months had been brutal in the intensity of the storms–as it was every year Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, both with their sixtieth birthdays behind them, would have been thought of as somewhere on a scale between lunacy and eccentricity. But none of the community they lived among would have cared. They were accepted for what they were–for what they were thought to be. They brought home the heifer calf, Daisy, and Boniface laid out fresh straw on the byre's floor of stone slabs while Clydesdale went to the store shed for a precious bale of hay for the cow, Marigold. It was the best straw they had and the best hay. When it was done, when the cow suckled her calf–only then–when the wind blew the sunlight against the stout walls of the croft, when the incoming tide thrust the whitecaps on to the beach, when the rough beauty of the place had settled on Ardchiavaig, they went inside to check the answer phone recording. The second call had not come.

  The knowledge of Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale concerned the thresholds of pain, carefully regulated as an arm of interrogation. The inflicting of pain, enough to make a prisoner spit out truths but not enough to win a babble of lies, was the prized expertise of these two elderly men and it came from their distant past, when they had first worked with Mr Naylor. They drank tea and made toast, the sunlight lit their room, and they gloried in what they had achieved that morning. They were usually called to action, where the thresholds they knew of were involved, when a target made a mistake, then paid for it in pain.

  The handler, with seventeen years' experience behind him, knew well enough the value of luck, but it came sparsely.

  He worked with spaniels that were trained to sniff and find, then to address the target, sitting on their haunches and barking, till he came to investigate. His last dog had been a drugs sniffer, and life had been exciting and busy. That little treasure had had a score of convictions to her name, and a dozen commendations for finding heroin, cocaine and amphetamines.. But Smack had been retired now for three years: she lived at home, with a basket in the kitchen, and was the ageing playmate of his children.

  The new dog was Midge, a pedigree bred from Welsh stock; as a working dog she had a kennel and pen out at the back. She was faster to boredom but had energy and intelligence. Boredom afflicted her because she was explosives-trained, and explosives were rare in the East Midlands. With her handler she did preparatory search work whenever royalty or a prominent politician was visiting the county, and was called out when a resident reported a 'suspicious' object at the railway or bus station; she had never found a 'live' cache of dynamite–not even a hidden sack of Second World War ammunition underneath an allotment shed. Razor sharp on exercises, Midge seemed to her handler to recognize that the 'real thing' had eluded her.

  Another day done. They had been out on loan to the airport at Castle Donington, where he'd taken her through Baggage Reclaim and let her scramble over the trolleys before the bags and cases went on to the carousel–showing the flag, really. After that, he'd had her alongside the check-in queues and she'd sniffed at the bags and cases stacked with holidaywear. The handler and his dog were as much a part of the reassurance-to-the-public policy as the officers who patrolled with machine pistols hooked on to their chests. But his duty day was completed…Every late afternoon, when they were finished, he'd leave the van in the driveway, shed his uniform, and walk the spaniel up on to Rose Hill, on the edge of the Normanton district of the cathedral city of Derby, and let her run free. There, kids played with her and she was everybody's friend.

  It did not matter to the handler whether it rained, sleeted, or if the sun baked him. He would be on Rose Hill at the finish of his shift–and tomorrow, because he had a nine o'clock start, before his shift began–and Midge would be charging and careering among the other walkers, the mums with their prams and the vagrants on the benches. Twice, Smack had identified kids with heroin wraps on Rose Hill, and that was luck, and the handler had made arrests. Never, of course, had Midge identified an ounce, not even five grams' worth of military or commercial explosive in
the park, but the little beggar wasn't one to stop trying: she sniffed at everything and everyone–just never had the opportunity to bark raucously and have a 'real thing' moment.

  He whistled; she came.

  He gave her a reward, a half-biscuit, tousled the hair on her collar, fastened the leash and started out for home.

  'I spoke, Dickie, of the kid who's been brought in to do the business. I'd like to focus on him and–'

  'I don't want to seem rude, Joe, but the assistant director's waiting upstairs for me–I hope Mary's looking after you.'

  'She's doing a fine job. Another day of this and I'll be fatter than a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep your man on hold a couple minutes. Imagine the kid. A Saudi Arabian boy, from the limited background of an upbringing in Asir Province, is in circumstances way out of his depth. He's far from home and has only his Faith to cling to. Where he is, in the safe-house, he has no friend. He is alone. I could almost feel sorry for him, Dickie–except that it was a kid like him who walked into the mess hall at Mosul. Those with him, except for the big man, are of an alien culture. They're not Arabs but Muslim Brits. They won't know how to talk to him, won't understand his feelings, and cannot offer him succour. His isolation is total. Some of those British will be jealous of him because he's going to be martyred and have that quarter of an hour of fame. Others' fear of death, eternity will have been heightened by his presence, proximity. Strains and stresses will create an atmosphere you could cut with a blunt-edged knife…and around them, bickering and complaining and wishing he was someplace else, is the big man. You following me? OK, so you have to go. Enjoy your meeting, Dickie.'

  The trial lurched on.

  After the lunch adjournment, the prosecution's barrister had started on his closing address to the jury; Mr Justice Herbert made a play at normality and busily wrote his longhand notes; the Curtis brothers glowered from the dock and the security round them had been reinforced by the presence of two more prison officers; the solicitor, Nathaniel Wilson, kept his head down as if that way he would not be noticed; the police guard in the public gallery had been doubled. The normality the judge had aimed for could not be achieved.

  Some of the jury seemed to listen to the barrister's droning repetition of the evidence laid before them; others scarcely made the effort.

  But in the morning when the jury had gathered in their room, and again during the adjournment, there had been lively anger, confusion, and an almost excited meld of gossip and anecdote between them. Confidentiality was gone, and something of a brotherhood in adversity had been shaped. They all–bar one–had difficulties with the new situation confronting them.

  Rob, a mouthpiece for the general anger, had said, 'No one seems to have given us a thought. My darts team's on the board tonight, and I'm the fixture secretary. I'm expected to turn out–but I'm told I can't. Where am I going to be? Nobody's told me.'

  While the bickering complaints had played in his ears, Jools Wright had said nothing. Could have. Could have spoken of the dour detective who had driven him home, who had introduced himself curtly to Babs and nodded with bare politeness to Kathy, who had checked all the windows and door locks, paced round the back garden, then drawn a plan of his home, who had asked for each of the family's blood groups, then been on the phone for an age with a map on his knee. There had been a red pen circle round the nearest Accident and Emergency hospital…Who had called him sir and his wife ma'am,- who had said he was either Mr Banks or Detective Constable Banks. Could have told them all that the- detective had bridled sharply when referred to as a 'bodyguard': 'That's what film stars have. I am a Protection Officer. You are not some minor celebrity, you are a Principal–and in case you have the wrong idea about all this, you have been assigned this level of security after a threat assessment recognized the danger you and your family now face. We are not friends, don't forget that. A final thing, we use a jargon phrase, "dislocated expectations". It means we can plan for what we think will happen but when the opposite turns up we have to be prepared for that. So, to cover it, I require you all to obey my instructions immediately I give them. I will not entertain discussion.' Could have said that a holdall bag had been brought into the hail and unzipped. The stubby shape of a machine-gun with a magazine attached was displayed, and a big fire extinguisher–like those in his school's corridors–was laid beside the holdall. Could have said that an hour of discussion, ignoring Jools, had centred on where Mrs Wright and her daughter would stay after they abandoned their home, and that this, too, was telephoned through to his control. Could have said that after he had gone upstairs to the spare room, he had not slept and had heard the regular checks made by the detective of the ground-floor windows, and low-pitched conversations with the police-car people outside. He'd come down for a coffee after three: the detective had been reading from a weathered old notebook and had not acknowledged him. Could have said that Mr Banks had been yawning and taciturn as he had driven Jools to Snaresbrook through the rush-hour traffic, and his eyes had spent more time snapping up at the mirror than on the roads ahead.

  But Jools Wright. had said nothing.

  In the last hour of the afternoon, Banks still had a mountain to conquer, with an apparently endless list of tasks to be completed. He reckoned that the detective inspector, Wally, regarded him as capable and the rest as second rate–maybe third.

  Twenty minutes on a phone trying to find a coach that had privacy windows. Failing…Getting a coach that had done a school run and was littered with crisps packets, supervising its cleaning, and himself Sellotaping newspaper pages over the passenger windows. Working through the drills with the motorcycle escorts, where the traffic would be blocked to allow the coach to get clear of the court without risk of it being followed. Waiting on a security check and vetting to come through on the coach driver. Finalizing the route to the destination with the driver and the escorts. Calling the destination to demand catering facilities for the jury members, the escorts and the security detail. So much to be done and the clock ticking against him. And the thought kept scratching in his mind that he was on jury protection while the Delta, Golf and Kilo teams were strutting their stuff in the capital's streets where a suicide-bomber was thought to be on the loose, where the security status had been ratcheted up to the highest level. Not David Banks's bloody concern but his mind couldn't escape it. He was out of it because he was rated inadequate–big pill to swallow with a bitter taste. Told himself he didn't care, and tried to believe it. It was time to move.

  Carrying suitcases and grips, they filed from a back door into the closed yard used to load prisoners into the vans. He thought some looked curiously at the coach, and others glowered in resentment.

  Banks was the last to climb the steps, carrying the holdall. He did the head count. All present, all correct. He gave the thumbs-up to Wally, who would follow in a chase car, and the driver swung the door shut. His hand, in an automatic gesture, slipped to the holster, felt the Glock's butt and the hard edges at the end of the magazine. The high yard gates opened. The coach drove through; the motorcycles gunned their engines and slipped into their stations. He went down the aisle, took the empty seat behind the key man and sat.

  The school teacher, Banks thought, had not the marks on him of a hero. Funny that. Looked rather ordinary, hadn't the appearance of a man brimming with public spirit. Seemed pretty damn average. And there had been only a pretend kiss on the doorstep that morning, the hero and his wife, with daylight between their cheeks.

  The coach accelerated. Banks thought he could handle whatever might be thrown in his face–even 'dislocated expectations'–with ease.

  'Don't mind me saying this, Dickie, but something seems off. Did your meeting not go well?'

  'It went fine, thank you.'

  'Something's off. Deny a man his sight and his instincts compensate. Why don't you get Mary to take on some of your load?'

  'Your concern, Joe, is admirable, but I'm able to cope with my job.'

  'Where was I? Yes, the big
man, he's the target worth having. I–'

  'Very interesting, Joe, but from my perspective the target worth having is the little scum-bag who has the intention of killing and mutilating as many people as he can gather round him. Am I wrong? How is your perspective so different?'

  'Not only are you bent out of shape, but you're also getting irritable and that, Dickie, is exhaustion. You're not a law-enforcement officer. You are, Dickie, a counterintelligence officer: a whole world of differences, a canyon between them. Getting the bomber saves a few lives, short term, but in the scheme of things is peanuts. The elimination of the Facilitator–my Twentyman, my Scorpion–is a battle of importance won and–'

  'Because, I suppose, he's responsible for blinding you.'

  'That's below the belt, Dickie. I'd started to think better of you.'

  'I apologize…Christ, I'm tired.'

  'Water under the bridge…He, by now, is as tired as you are, but more stressed. He does not have limitless reserves of self-control and will be looking towards the preservation of the skin on his back–the way out. He will not be here when the bomb is detonated, will be long gone. The detonation is for the son-of-a-bitch who carries the device and the lowlifes who are with him at the end. I did not come here, Dickie, to attempt to use my experience in the prevention of one bomb exploding. I came to get up close to the Facilitator of many bombs. He will have no feelings for the lowlifes or the kid, because his own survival is paramount for him. As soon as he believes that the operation is in place, that creases have been ironed out, he will ditch them and run. However fast you respond in aftermath time, you will be too late, and all you can, hope to net will be the foot-soldiers. It's all about mistakes and luck, the ability to exploit. Who's waiting for you now?'