The Walking Dead

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.