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 101st 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 101st
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 101st 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 singl
e-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?'
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