would have been around the villas on the slopes above Jamaran where the tagt-ut-tee lived, the idol-worshippers who only pretended to re sped the teachings of the Imam.
It was for reconnaissance. It was to find the way in and know the way out.
He heard the noise of cars ahead, slowing and changing down through their gears. He was beside a fence and hidden by ornamental bushes from a small path. It was well timed… He had arrived at his vantage-place when it was light enough for him to see ahead, and dark enough to preserve his cover. It was the few minutes of the point between night and day. He could not yet see the vehicles because bushes were blocking his view. He lay very still. A woman in a night-robe came out of her door and he heard the clink of the bottles she carried. The light above her door flooded the path as she went to the gate. The empty bottles rattled onto the concrete and she went back inside, slamming the door behind her. He saw the lights of cars rolling across the houses ahead of him, and illuminating the open ground.
He crawled on. The photographs of the house and the target man were seared into his memory.
He heard the mutter of low voices as the engines of the cars were killed. The voices were indistinct.
On his knees and elbows he edged forward, and gently parted the branches and leaves of a garden shrub.
He felt the shake in his hands… There was a police car, with two men in it, a dozen metres from him.
Beyond the police car was the open grassland of the photograph, and beyond the open ground were two more cars. Four men stood beside them. Two wore civilian clothes. The others wore blue over ails and across their chests they carried machine-guns on straps.
He felt the cold twist in his stomach.
Beyond the cars was the house shown in the photograph. All the curtains were drawn, and no light showed. He had been told the target was without defence, had no protection. He thought the men in front of the house were changing shifts. He watched. The car nearest to him started up, and the roving eyes of the marksman and the barrel of a machine-gun peeped above the door and out through the opened window as it edged slowly away. One of the men at the house was stretching, arching his back, as if he had stayed the night in his vehicle.
The two men with the machine-guns went to the door of the house in the photograph: he saw their wariness and that one covered the back of the other. When the door was opened there was no light in the hallway. It was professional protection. They went inside and the door closed on them. If he had come a few moments later he would not have seen the machine-guns.
He had the photograph of the man and wanted to look into his face as he took the knife or the gun from under his coat: it was important that the man could see his face and the eye of vengeance.
He slipped away. He crawled through the hedgerow, pulled back the length of chicken-wire, climbed the fence and scurried in the growing light towards the scrub and the shelter of Hoist Covert.
He waded the stream, then staggered across the bog among the trees. It was not the threat from the machine-guns to his own life that made his hands shake and his breath pant. He would be carried as a martyr to the Garden of Paradise; he had no fear of death from the bullets. It was the fear of failure. The brigadier, the man who loved him as a son, who had replaced his long-dead father, would be waiting in the office high in the building of the Mimstry of Information and Security for news of his success. Vahid Hossein could not contemplate the cloud passing over the face of the brigadier if the message carried word of failure.
He came through the trees on to Fen Hill and stopped dead in his tracks.
He had seen the bird.
The beak, tugging, and the talons, clinging, were at the rabbit's carcass. He saw the raw wound on its wing. The bird was at the limit of its strength. Its beak was tearing at the fur but had not the power to rip it aside. It was less than five paces away. He saw the wound and the movement of ants in it, and the colour of the flesh at the wing was not pink and pure but putrefied, like the old wounds of the men in the Haur-al-Hawizeh. The bird flapped the damaged wing and the good wing as if to flee from him but the strength was not there and it only hopped, crippled, a few metres from the carcass. He knew the harriers from the Haur-al-Hawizeh and from the Shatt-al-Arab and Faw. They were often with them as they hid up in the marshes and watched for the Iraqis, waited for the darkness and the opportunity to probe into their enemy's de fences He had grown to love them, to worship the beauty of their feathering. They were light, the harriers, in the darkness of the killing grounds. He dropped to his knees and crawled forward slowly to the carcass. The wound would kill the bird if it could not feed.
With his fingers, he tore little strips of flesh from the rabbit.
Vahid Hossein believed the hunger would defeat the bird's fear, and that the bird was his escape from failure.
He took the black felt pen and the clean sheet of paper to his door, ripped off the existing message and fastened on its replacement. He scrawled the words. DAY TWO.
It was seven forty-nine. The traffic had not yet built up on the Embankment outside Thames House, but already they were at their desks. Geoff Markham had come in on the underground before the crush, but they had beaten him there. Cox was in to supervise the expansion. Fenton was huddled with the American, chuckling, as if they were conspirators. Gary Brennard was there from Administration (Resources), organizing the new team, their new consoles and new telephones. A red-haired woman, Markham recognized her from one of the Irish sections but didn't know her name, was sitting, scratching her head and wiping her eyes, looking like she'd been heaved half awake from her bed. There were two probationers and one of the old men from B Branch. They were in early, as if they feared they might miss the entertainment.
He'd slept in his own bed at his own place, and there'd been four messages from Vicky on his answer phone How'd it go? Did you do all right? Was it OK? Did you do enough to get it? He went back into his partitioned office room. Overnight, in his own bed, he hadn't thought about the interview but about the American with his pen, and whether that constituted a criminal assault, whether it was a sacking offence, whether he was just too damn squeamish for the job. He'd make the call later in the morning. When the new team was bedded down, he'd ring Perry.
He wandered across the open work area towards the new cluster of desks and screens. He went by the woman with the red hair. She seemed tired and uninvolved, was flicking the pages of a newspaper maybe nobody had told her, maybe they'd told her and she didn't think it mattered. Fenton's laugh was louder.
Fenton said, 'Morning, Geoff, just hearing about last night -damn good.'
He said it grimly, 'What we did was illegal.'
'Bollocks.'
Fenton strode away.
The American sidled over to him.
'Sleep OK, Mr. Markham? Not so well? If I could say to you, it's a rough world and rougher when the stakes go high. You get to play hard if you want to win. Remember Alamut and then you can judge your enemy. Do it by the rules and your enemy will walk over you. They came out from Alamut, two of them in 1192. Their target was Conrad of Montferrat who was the king-elect of Jerusalem. They caught up with him finally in the city of Tyre, present-day south Lebanon, but they'd stalked him nearly a half of a year. He was guarded close, had the best security of the day, and they beat it. They were dressed as Christian monks, the clothes of their enemy. They went right through the security and knifed their man to death. The way they did it, they condemned themselves, but they reached their target. Go legal if you want to if you do, you won't win against cunning, patience, ruthlessness, dedication… Is there anywhere you can get a decent coffee round here?'
She'd been up early to take the pictures off the bedroom walls, and had stacked them, glass down, behind the dressing-tabl2. Everything off the top surface of her dressing-table had gone into the drawers. Then she'd crisscrossed the mirror with heavy adhesive tape. Frank had watched her from the bed.
She'd snatched breakfast, and dumped a plate of cereal down in front of Stephen. She was already late for the school bell.
They'd been changing the shift at home when she had left -nothing to say to her, nor to Frank, but the uncles had time to chat with Stephen about his lorries. She'd had to drag him away from them. On their shoulders they'd had machine-guns on webbing straps. She'd thrust Stephen into the car and Frank had stayed inside.
Emma Carstairs had once told Meryl that she had best-friend status. They'd been to dinner there three
