'How can I help?'
'Is everything all right? I mean, I've eyes in my head. Are there, problems in Delta?'
'Not that I know of.'
'Are you sure, Banksy, nothing you want to tell me of?'
'Can't think of anything.'
'What about the atmosphere in Delta, you and colleagues?'
'It's fine…If you don't believe me, ask around and see what answers you get. Will that be all?'
'I will. Don't want any niggles in a good team. Thanks, Banksy, and safe home.'
He went out into the night. He was an intelligent man but too racked with exhaustion to recognize that deflecting the enquiries of the REMF, his inspector, was not clever. He walked briskly towards the station and the late train home to his bedsit where all the company he would have would be in the lined pages of a notebook, scrawled with pencil writing, each entry harder to read than the last. It was not clever because he had put himself on to a track and did not know where it would take him.
Chapter6
Friday, Day 9
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 th
e 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 heav
y 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.
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