The female officer returned and took them away. Her colleague closed the door and stood at the end of the bed. ‘You jumped into the sea to save a little girl?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Shepherd.
‘They said you nearly died.’
‘It was pretty close.’
‘Bloody brave.’
‘Spur of the moment.’
‘No life-jacket or anything?’
‘There wasn’t time,’ said Shepherd. ‘Like I said, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. She went over the side and I went in after her.’
‘There’s not many would have done the same.’
‘The kid was going to die. I couldn’t stand by and watch.’ Shepherd lay back and closed his eyes. He heard the officer walk to the chair and the legs scrape as he sat down.
‘If you want anything, a coffee or whatever, let me know,’ said the policeman. ‘Or if there’s anyone you want me to call, I’ll pass on a message.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just fuck off and leave me be.’ He could have done with some coffee but it was important to stay in character. He couldn’t afford to give the impression that he was more than a criminal facing a jail term.
The Saudi toyed with his salad of seared tuna ni?oise and looked over Circular Quay towards the Sydney Opera House, which squatted by the water like a huge beetle unfolding its wings. It would have been a superb target, but the area around it was too open, the tourists too spread out, and casualties, even from a large bomb, would be limited. He was sitting in a much better target, logistically and politically. The Hyatt Hotel was at the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which spanned the entrance to Circular Quay and was one of the most recognisable structures in the world. A bomb in the hotel’s restaurant on a Sunday lunchtime would kill up to a hundred people, and images of the devastation would be shown round the world, the aftermath of the explosion and, behind it, the bridge. It would be as powerful an image as that of the airliners flying into the Twin Towers in New York.
Hotels were practically the perfect target, the Saudi knew, especially American-owned chains. Embassies were good for shock value, but generally more locals were killed than foreign nationals. Hotels were full of wealthy foreigners. The sort that newspaper editors liked to splash across their front pages. It was the way the world worked. Kill a hundred Pakistanis in Lahore and no one outside the country would care. Kill five hundred Nigerians in Lagos and the world’s newspapers wouldn’t devote more than a few paragraphs to the story. But kill a single American in Sydney and it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the United States, and a breaking story on every television channel.
The Saudi chewed a sliver of tuna, but barely tasted it. A young couple were sitting at a table by the window, drinking cappuccino and discussing whether or not to take one of the guided walking tours across the bridge. They had London accents, and the man was wearing a Chelsea football shirt. A German couple at the next table were drinking a bottle of white wine and encouraging their two young children to eat their pasta. One of the children, a chubby-faced toddler, smiled at the Saudi and waved a fork at him. The Saudi smiled back. He imagined a bomb going off in the middle of the restaurant. The flash of light, the explosion, the shrapnel ripping through bodies, the glass exploding across the walkway and into the blue-green waters of the harbour. Dismembered limbs, blood, entrails, the moans of the injured and dying, the screams of the living. The Saudi didn’t make a habit of visiting the targets he intended to destroy, but sometimes it was too good an opportunity to miss. There was little police presence at the harbour, and he’d seen hardly any CCTV cameras. Not that it mattered. There was nothing to connect him with what was about to happen. By the time the bombs exploded he would already be out of the country. His flight to the United Kingdom left at just before five o’clock in the afternoon but the cell who would carry out the operation wouldn’t arrive for another week. They had all been trained and the explosives and detonators were already in the country, hidden in a self-storage facility in Melbourne.
The Saudi sipped his white wine. He liked Australian wine, especially the whites: it was unpretentious, like the Australian people.
A blonde woman in a beige hijab walked by, a flowing blue coat over her shirt and jeans. A convert after marriage, the Saudi was sure. An Australian, maybe. She was talking into a mobile phone, and laughing. The Saudi hoped there wouldn’t be any Muslims in the vicinity when the bomb went off, but if there were, so be it. There were always casualties in a war, and the jihad was no exception. Hundreds of Muslims had died when the World Trade Center collapsed, but what had happened on that September morning had been a clarion call to the whole Muslim world.
The Saudi put down his fork, emptied his glass and paid his bill. His waitress was a cheerful girl with a bright smile, her dark brown hair held back from her face with a large blue plastic clip. The Saudi wished her a good day as he left the restaurant, and wondered whether she would be among the dead.
He strolled along the wooden boardwalk and watched the ferries ploughing through the water and behind them a flotilla of sailing boats, toys for the city’s rich. It was a hot day and he walked slowly, seeking out shade where he could. The heat meant that the martyrs couldn’t use vests packed with explosives so the bombs would be packed into rucksacks. There were plenty of backpackers around and no one was paying them any attention. He turned right in to George Street and walked up the sloping road through the weekend stalls of Rooks Market. Under tented canopies stallholders were selling things only tourists would want to buy: painted boomerangs, home-made fudge, soft toys, framed photographs of Sydney landmarks, bowls made from local wood.
It was another perfect target, thought the Saudi, with lots of wealthy tourists for the Western media to mourn. He paused by the Mercantile Hotel. The first bomb would go off there, detonated by a martyr sitting at one of the tables outside the Molly Malone bar. Nuts and bolts would be packed round the explosives to turn into deadly shrapnel that would rip through the stalls and the shoppers. Those who survived would run down the road towards the harbour. The second bomb would go off just a minute later, at the La Mela Cafe opposite the Old Sydney Holiday Inn, and catch them as they fled.
The Saudi looked at his watch. There was a concert at the Sydney Opera House later that night and he was looking forward to it. He always enjoyed Mozart. He had acquired his taste for classical music from his father, although the older man preferred Schubert and Brahms. The Saudi’s father had taken him to concerts and the opera since he was seven. He remembered two things in particular of his childhood: his father’s lectures on classical music, and his hatred of the West. The war to end all wars, his father had said, would be the battle between Islam and Christianity. And Islam would prevail. He had rubbed the back of his son’s neck and told him that, one day, he would have a part to play in it. The Saudi’s father had worked for the Saudi Royal Family, which had brought him his wealth and their British passports. He had insisted that a British education was the best in the world, even though it had meant that his son spent most of his childhood away from his family. The Saudi’s father had beamed with pride when he had left Eton with a clutch of A levels, and on the day he’d graduated from the London School of Economics he’d presented him with a gleaming red Ferrari.
The Saudi had been with his father on 11 September 2001 in the family’s compound in Riyadh, and they had watched the destruction of the World Trade Center on CNN. It was the start of the war, the Saudi’s father had said, and it was time for the son to play his part. Introductions were made, oaths were sworn, and the Saudi had started on his path to jihad.
The Saudi would have liked to have taken his father to the concert that night, but he was old now and rarely left Riyadh. Besides, he refused to wear anything but traditional Arab garb and he would have attracted too much attention.
He walked through the stalls, listening to the different languages being spoken by the tourists: Chinese, French, German, British, a veritable smorgasbord of victims. He stopped by a stall selling didgeridoos. A middle- aged white man wearing a black and white bandana tied round his head was showing an American family how to play the Aboriginal instrument. A little blonde girl was jumping up and down, clapping her hands excitedly. ‘Can we buy it, Daddy?’ she pleaded. ‘Can we?’
The Saudi took no pleasure in killing children – he took no pleasure in killing anyone, but there was no alternative. The Israelis had killed thousands of innocent Palestinians. The Americans had killed tens of thousands of men, women and children in Iraq with bombs and bullets. The Saudi saw no difference between what the Israelis and the Americans did and the actions of the shahid. Death was death, whether it was carried out by soldiers or martyrs.
