She tipped her head while she digested this. In fact, it wasn’t a stock response: it was what he really believed. But now he was wondering if he had said the right thing. He was beginning to get the feeling he was being auditioned. Was this the right line to be taking if he was going to get them to help him find Karza?
She stood up. ‘We’ll try to find out more about your brother. I’ll contact you if we get anywhere.’
‘Or I could call you?’
She smiled bleakly. ‘All our calls and emails are monitored. Leave it with me.’ She moved towards the door. ‘I’ve got your address. I know where to find you.’
18
The track was rutted and puddled, speckling Tom’s legs with mud as he pounded along. He ran fast, filling his lungs with damp English air to clear out the last of the sticky Helmand dust. He came to the brow of the hill and paused to take in the view. A grey mist hung in the trees like smoke. Even in this light, with the rain falling around him, it was serene. There was no sound other than that of a pair of blackbirds in conversation and, further away, the drill of a woodpecker. Just where the track dipped down and disappeared into the trees a Mondeo was parked, no lights on, but a wisp of exhaust indicated it was occupied. The car looked as if it had been driven a long distance down a rainy motorway, its colour almost completely obscured by a thick coat of road grime out of which the wipers had cut clean semi-circles.
Everyone in the village and its environs knew each other, and Tom dreaded a conversation with some well-meaning neighbour eager to hear about what he was doing for his country and so on. He kept going, but something about the car bugged him. He had seen it before. As he pounded on, he replayed his movements since his return but couldn’t place it. By the time he stopped to take a second look it was gone.
For the first twenty-four hours he had done nothing but sleep — turbulent semi-consciousness crowded with shattering dreams: Dave’s limp, blood-drenched frame, his frozen, wide-eyed expression; Qazi’s contemptuous sneer. The poor Afghan kid, already wounded, helpless as he died. He knew better than to try to resist these replays. They were part of a process that had to be gone through. Emotional cold turkey, he’d once heard an army shrink call it. He woke drenched with sweat, gasping for breath, as if some unseen hand had got him by the neck, mistaking the sweat for Dave’s blood. He had taken the precaution of locking himself in his bedroom. One of his mates had once broken his daughter’s nose when she came in to wake him.
He also dreamed of Delphine, the early carefree days, but then her face dissolved into frozen blocks of pixels.
During the day he virtually barricaded himself into the TV room, flipping between the BBC and Sky’s rolling news as they ran a continuous commentary on the riots. Not only had his own world been pulled from under him, the country itself was in turmoil. No wonder Delphine had wanted out. He thought of Blakey, coming home from fighting the Taliban to this.
He turned off the track and dived into the woods, following a trail he had blazed as a boy. These were the happy hunting grounds of his childhood, where long school holidays passed in a flash as he and his mates became SOE operatives dropped by Lysanders into the French forests to blow up Nazi trains. At the edge of the woods he paused to take in the view, the field falling away to their Georgian pile, shaded by century-old lime trees, against the backdrop of the Precambrian hills, 680 million years old. Most of their land was leased to a local farmer now, since he had shown no interest in farming. Was this what was waiting for him? Was he staring at his future? What the hell was he going to do next?
When he turned on his phone there were four missed calls, three from a withheld number, no messages. He hadn’t the energy to be curious right now.
The fourth was his father. Tom dialled and waited.
‘Hello, old boy! Welcome home and all that.’
Breezy and positive was Hugh Buckingham’s default mode. Tom guessed his mother had been on to him, full of worry, but Hugh would know better than to ask questions or offer sympathy. ‘Soaking up some of your mother’s TLC, I trust.’
‘Yeah!’
‘Well, when you’ve had enough of that, come up to town and have lunch. I need your perspective.’
‘On what?’
‘On what the hell’s going on.’ Hugh knew he wouldn’t survive more than a few days down there without getting cabin fever.
‘Yeah, okay.’
His father tried not to overplay his joy. ‘Come to the club and we’ll take it from there. And…’ He paused, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘Did that chap Rolt get hold of you?’
Rolt? Tom couldn’t place the name.
‘You know, the Invicta chap — patron saint of ex-soldiers. You were at school with him.’
They’d been in the same house — hardly best buds. ‘What does he want?’
‘Just asked you to call. He’s quite a big deal now.’
Tom had no inclination to talk to anyone, and especially not if they were connected with the forces. ‘Okay, Dad. Will do. See you.’
19
Gusts of wind blowing across the airfield rattled the ancient hangar, which creaked in protest. Hastily painted white during some brief conscription for a UN project, it was revealing its much hardier original khaki, showing through here and there, the last remnant of its Battle of Britain glory days. From outside, the only suggestion of activity, apart from a few parked cars, was a mobile scanner, its ten-metre dish pointing skywards to send and receive all encrypted communications. Inside, the resident pair of Cessnas had been shunted to one side to make room for Woolf’s makeshift operations base. Half a dozen work stations had been erected, along with a couple of large flat-screen monitors and the long table, at the head of which stood Woolf. He hated presentations but Mandler had insisted. ‘Think of it as a peer review,’ he’d suggested unhelpfully. But Woolf knew there would be no arguing. MI5’s section heads would have to be brought into the tent sooner or later.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies for dragging you away from your desks to this godforsaken backwater.’ Mandler gazed down at the group. ‘What you’re about to hear is known only to myself, Woolf and…’ he glanced at his notes while he tried to remember the names of Woolf’s team ‘… these two bright young things who have been watching his back.’
Cindy and Rafiq smiled in unison. Mandler smiled back, reflecting silently that Cindy, with her pierced lip, and Rafiq, with his iPod lead permanently trailing out of his trouser pocket, were both less than half his age.
‘The Joint Intelligence Committee has yet to be informed, same for SIS, GCHQ and DIS. Why we are keeping this so close to our chests should become apparent. So…’ he paused to frown at Woolf ‘… only the home secretary has been given a sneak peek inside the kimono in case we need to bring her on-side.’
He rubbed his hands together. ‘You all know James. He doesn’t just think outside the box. He tends to squash the box flat, toss it in the bin and leave us to pick up the pieces.’
There was a ripple of amusement.
‘Any questions, don’t hold back.’
He motioned to Woolf to begin. The group stared at him stone-faced, except Cindy and Rafiq, who maintained their frozen smiles.
Woolf stepped in front of the screen. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new face of British terrorism.’
He tapped a key to bring up the next shot, a soldier in dress uniform: gingery hair, freckles, intense gaze. ‘Retired Corporal Mick Vestey. Household Cavalry sniper, commended for killing two Taliban from more than a mile away. Here he is in his prime: Kandahar, 2007.’