The Walking Dead

A figure snapped upright in a doorway, and he swung, went Isosceles and had the safety off. His finger lay on the trigger stick, and he saw the shape of a woman, and against her chest, down his Glock's V sight and needle sight, was a life-size image of a held baby. He had not fired the paint bullet that would have 'killed' the baby and maybe the woman too.

There was stiffness in his legs and the pistol was a lead weight. He was on his own, isolated. The tribe was quiet behind him: a titter would have broken their prized code of 'professionalism', their totem god. The woman had been to his left — half-way down the Alley. To his right, a figure was thrown up in a window frame. A man: chest in the sights, finger on the trigger, starting to exert the pressure, then seeing, blurred, the man's empty hands with the palms exposed. He had not fired and the man lived. Went on, past more doors and more windows, more broken cars.

He was near the end of the Alley. Fatal, with only a few steps to the end, to relax. He summoned the dregs of his concentration. The car on the left. Two figure shapes jerking upright from either side, their bodies half hidden by the two doors. Saw, a flashed moment, that the shape — male — nearest him held a plastic supermarket shopping-bag. Saw, a lightning fast moment, the far man had a lifted and aimed handgun. Double tap. Two shots fired. A splurge of red paint on a lower chest, and second on the shoulder above the lung space and below the shoulder's bones. Two rivulets ran down the cardboard. He reached the end of the Alley.

When he looked back up it, only the instructors stood there.

He was told he had done well, that three of the others in the Delta team had killed innocents and that two more had fired on 'bad guys' but had missed their targets.

Banks went back to the range with the senior instructor. He learned that the rest of the Delta team had decamped to the canteen. He did not ask, so did not learn, whether they had watched him shoot — but he felt a small glow of satisfaction in the knowledge that three faced a possible murder charge, and two more were dead — and he knew, from that feeling deep inside his mind, that he would not, ever again, make the effort to be assimilated back into the tribe.

On the range, with the senior instructor watching over him, he made his authorization to continue carrying a weapon safe, secure. He scored forty-eight out of fifty and the senior instructor slapped his back cheerfully, then told him not to be a pillock again and waste everyone's time.

When he'd finished they weren't in the canteen. They were sitting in the minibus that would ferry them back to London. The engine kicked into life when he was barely inside, and there was no query as to how he'd done, passed or failed, but the message was there: that he was a pain for delaying them all.

He heard, said in the front, with a camp accent intended to mimic him, '…"perfectly possible that such men there" — Iraqi suicide-bombers, bloody foreigners—"are brave and principled, and though I don't agree…" What fucking crap.'

His eyes closed, Banks shut them out.

He came off the Eurostar, and was a 'clean skin'. Not that Ibrahim Hussein, the youngest and only surviving son of an electrical-goods dealer in the extreme south-west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, knew that phrase. His knowledge of the covert world of his enemies was as limited as were the inches of rain falling in a twelvemonth on the great desert, the Rub' al Khali, the hostile expanses that he had traversed at the start of his journey and that he would not see again. The importance of keeping his identity as 'clean' as the scrubbed skin on his cheeks was beyond his experience.

What he had learned already was the extent of the tentacles of the organization he believed he now served, and would serve with his life.

He wore the same jeans and trainers as he had at the airport in Riyadh, but his T-shirt was different and showed a reproduction of Jan Asselyn's The Threatened Swan on his chest. He had been told to leave his leather jacket loosely open when he went through the immigration checks at the London terminal. It had been explained to him that the T-shirt, and its motif, created an image of European intellect. He walked from the train towards the descending escalator stairs. His faith in the organization brimmed. There were no doubts.