fast, desperate blows, the strike against the apartment door's lock. Then the shooting. At first, one weapon recognizable by its sharp clatter on automatic.
Then answering gunshots. A scream, shouting, competed with the firing.
She knew, instinctively, that it had already failed.
Half a minute after the first blows on the door high in the building, with a sledgehammer, Polly Wilkins knew it was screwed. By now, if the storm squad had succeeded, there should have been the thunderclap of the flash grenades in the room and the curl of the immobilizing gas swirling from the window. She thought that the bodyguard and the man reckoned by Gaunt to be a co-ordinator, had been ready for them and waiting. More volleys of shots, but not the flash grenades and not the gas canisters.
Ludvik said, 'I think they will be inside very soon.'
'Accept it.' Her voice was cold. 'They're not inside.
Because of the bloody heritage you waited too long. It failed.'
'You cannot call it failure, which is insulting. You cannot, yet, call it failure. They are closed in. They have nowhere to go.'
She said, as if tiredness swept over her, 'What my boss would say. Dead they're hunks of meat, alive they're an intelligence dream. We wanted to talk to them.'
He bridled. 'I suppose you will report we are incompetent.'
'I will report that the heritage of the Old City dictated more fire engines were ordered up, that you had many fire engines but no explosives to blow the door off.'
'They are inside, that is what is important.' He faced her, intense. 'Trapped. I tell you, Polly, I believe you give these people too great an admiration. They will shoot, and they will think. When they have thought of their position they will surrender. They are going nowhere. Give an enemy too much importance and he will dominate you.'
She blinked as the pain of exhaustion caught her.
She looked up the alley. Two casualties were brought out. The one with the face wound had rich red blood dribbling from the mouth in his balaclava and she could hear the choke in his throat. The other was carried by two colleagues and his hands were across his lower stomach, down from the bottom edge of his bulletproof vest, and he howled as they struggled to run with him. She felt small, alone, so inadequate.
And Ludvik, alerted by the beat of the boots and the howl, watched with her.
Polly said quietly, 'I don't give them too much importance.'
They went back to a cafe behind the cordon.
He crawled across the floor towards the half-open window. It was slow going and the pain came in rivers. It was a big effort for him to crawl, and a bigger one for him to locate the grenade's pin and work his finger into it. He gasped, dragged out the pin, then propped himself up on an elbow and tossed it through the window. For a moment it seemed to bounce on the sill and he wondered if it would roll back and drop down beside him, but it did not. Far below he heard it bounce, men's yells, panic, and the explosion.
Muhammad Iyad bought time. Not much time left to him, but time for the man he protected.
The door was barricaded with the cooker and the refrigerator, and with the mattresses from the beds, all wedged between the door and the wall opposite by the table, chairs and the wardrobe from the bedroom.
If they came close on the landing above the staircase, he fired sprays of bullets on automatic above the barricade, then slithered back to a corner where the answering shots could not find him. He was down now to his last grenade and to his last three magazines of bullets.
He lay in a pool of his own blood. It was smeared across the carpet from each time he had manoeuvred himself to the firing position. It came from a chest wound and from his shattered knee. To kill the pain, he had only his faith in God and the image of his wife, and the thought that the man would use well the time given him. It was an hour, more than an hour, since they had last approached the door when he had expended a whole magazine from the machine pistol, and a handful of minutes since he had thrown a fourth grenade through the slit of the open window. Of course he would die in the little room on the top floor in a city far from his home and the family he loved. He had no fear of death. The only uncertainty in the mind of Muhammad Iyad was that he had not given the man the time that was needed.
Before they had come – in the night – before he had heaved the barricade into place, he had cleaned the apartment. With water and soap, he had scrubbed down every surface where the man's fingers might have rested, plates he had eaten off and cups or glasses he had drunk from. The bedding in which he had slept, the clothes from the man's bag, his toothbrush, razor, and spare trainer shoes were piled in a loose heap in the room's centre. They were there because Muhammad Iyad was one of the few in the Organization who understood the power of the enemy. The skill of their fingerprint experts and the quality of their ability to examine for microscopic particles of DNA were known to him. No trace of his man was to remain when the ability to fight – not the will for it – had seeped from Muhammad Iyad's body.
There were new sounds beyond the barricade – scraping noises, as rats might make, and he thought they chipped away stones from the dividing wall under the roof tiles and sought to come at him from above.
He knew about the grenades with the thunder noise that deafened and the flash that blinded, and about the gas that choked. Too long – if he waited for them to come, waited too long, and he was unable to light the fire… but every second he delayed, each minute, every hour he bought, gave the man more time. They were closer, more urgent in their work.
Muhammad Iyad hoped that prayers would be said for him. He trusted that in his village, in the far-away mountains of Yemen, men would speak well of him.
There was a story of the dying moments of the great prince Saladin, who had defeated the Crusaders on the hill of Kurn-Hattin. He had been told the story, as a child, by the imam of the village: when Saladin lay dying he called for his standard-bearer and ordered him to ride round the limits of the city of Damascus with a torn-off rag from Saladin's shroud on the tip of the standard-bearer's spear, and to shout out that Saladin had gone with no more of his possessions to his grave than his shroud. It was fitting to be so humble, and Muhammad Iyad hoped to ape the great prince. Nothing would go to his unmarked grave, the body buried in the dead of night, but his faith in God, his love for his family and his sense of duty to his brothers and friends. He fired an angled burst into the ceiling, towards where the scraping had been, and heard the rats squirm back. An oath was muffled by the stonework and the ceiling's plaster cascaded down to whiten him and make a film over the blood in which he lay, like the snow of the Afghan mountains. He reloaded, tossed away the empty magazine and called instructions, as if he was ordering another man where to be and when to fire.
He felt the weakness growing – knew that God and Paradise beckoned. If he delayed, if the weakness overwhelmed him, the DNA would not be destroyed.
He took the last grenade from the black bag and the last magazines, and a box of matches. He laid the grenade on the whitened floor, put the magazines on top of the heap of bedding and clothes, then made a little burrowed space at their base. He tore up scraps of paper from the bag, the coded instructions for each move forward in the journey. He struck the first match, and the paper lit.
Then he struck a second match, lit the paper better, and a third, and blew lightly on the fire; blood from the chest wound was at his lips.
When he saw the flames climb and spread,
Muhammad Iyad pulled the pin from the grenade and slid it under his stomach, his gut held down the lever.
If he moved, or was moved, the lever would fly free and seven seconds later the grenade would detonate.
The smoke gathered in the room and the wind from the open window fanned the fire.
When the bedding and clothing under the magazine caught and the heat reached furnace point, the bullets would explode and career round the room and into the walls and the ceiling, which would win more minutes; if he shifted away from the fire the grenade would explode.
He did not think he could have done more to win the man time to get clear and resume the journey to the north German coastline.
He had something that day to tell his wife.
The wind came in low off the sea and caught the wires that divided the gardens of the properties in Westdorf. The homes, the few that were occupied all year and the many that were opened and aired only when the
