… sure.. – certain
… He was Ricky Capel. But, the shiver and the weakness had come on bad and he was swaying on his feet.
The shout came. Rahman had found them, the only ones of the crew who had been intact enough for identification. Two stones side by side. A wireless-operator's grave and a bomb-aimer's grave, and they'd both been friends of his grandfather. He never did photographs and had never owned a camera: cameras and pictures, to Ricky, were the Crime Squad and the Criminal Intelligence Service. If he went, and it was rare, to a wedding, he'd spend half the reception making bloody certain he was not in a photograph, that no camera was aimed at him
Would have been nice to have a picture to take back to old Percy, though. One of them had been twenty years old and one was nineteen, and there were pansies and daffodils in front of the two stones. He stood in front of them, pulled in his stomach and straightened his spine, and the rain fell on him -
Rahman was on the phone, which didn't help the dignity of it. The uppers of his shoes were wet from the grass and his trousers clung to him. A full minute he stood there, and Rahman came off one call, then took another. Then, doing it for his grandfather, he laid the roses in front of each stone in remembrance of a wireless-operator and a bomb-aimer, dead in the first week of August 1943, stepped away and felt good for what he'd done.
As they walked back to the car, Ricky said, 'I expect, Mr Rahman, you're proud to be Albanian, and I'm proud to be British. You'll love your country, Mr Rahman, as I love mine. Mad, isn't it? You come to a place like this and you're proud. Daft, isn't it, how a place like this gets to you? Don't mind saying it, I love my country…'
No one, in twenty-six months, had come to seek her out.
She lived in south-east central England in a town best known for its budget-cost airport and motor-manufacturing industry: Luton, with a population of 160,000. Her home was with her parents, who had come two decades before to Britain to escape the brutal ravages of political oppression in the Libyan city of Benghazi. That she had been born a healthy, vigorous baby had been by chance, her father had often told her. Her mother had been two months pregnant with her when the thugs of the regime's secret police had come to their home and beaten each of her parents in turn, on suspicion of handing out leaflets of protest at the godless rule of Gaddafi; blows from boots and batons had been used against her mother's belly. Her father, once a teacher of philosophy at the University of Benghazi, worked in Luton on a production line, manufacturing windscreen wipers for vans and lorries.
Through childhood and her teenage years she had harboured hate for any who rejected the true faith of Islam. She had been chosen at a mosque in the town: her fervour had been recognized. A video had been shown, in a back room to a selected few, of what the imam called the declaration of a martyr widow. A Chechen woman, clothed in black and veiled, had worn the belt holding the explosives, the wiring and the trigger button, and had made a statement to the camera of her happiness at gaining the chance to strike against the Russian enemy who had murdered her young husband. She had spoken – not in a language understood in the mosque's back room
– in a voice of calm, love and resolve. The film had continued with a distant street shot. A slight, small figure in black had approached a checkpoint of soldiers and when she reached them there had been the detonation, fire, smoke and chaos. At that moment, the woman in Luton had stood before the video ended, and cheered in exultation, in admiration at the blessing of martyrdom.
Now she never watched such videos and was never invited to the back room of the mosque. She worked in a creche with children too young for school, while their mothers stood in lines and manufactured
PVC
windows. She was good with the children and her employers praised her dedication – and she waited. A man would come, either to her home or to the creche, one day. He would say: 'And He sends down hail from mountains in the sky, and He strikes with it whomever He wills, and turns it from whomever He wills.' She would answer: 'The vivid flash of its lightning nearly blinds the sight,' His statement and hers were in the Book, 24:43. Five days a week she played with and amused small children, and at the end of each day she was thanked by mothers for her kindness and devotion.
When he came, she would slip away from the creche and would do what was asked of her.
'What we cannot accept, Freddie, is a further failure.'
'Of course not.'
The meeting between Frederick Gaunt and the assistant deputy director took a familiar choreography.
He paced as he talked and the ADD, Gilbert, stayed awkwardly hunched at his desk.
'Quite simply put, a new failure would be intolerable.'
'Of course.'
Rain laced on the window and the desk light failed to lift the gloom.
'It just cannot be countenanced, Freddie.'
'I'm on board. Bodies crammed in morgues, mutilated victims stacked on corridor trolleys waiting for doctors, the shock and trauma of blood on the pavements. Without reservation, I accept that a major atrocity in our cities is not acceptable. No argument.'
He saw a splash of surprise on his superior's face, then annoyance that the obvious drift of the argument had not been interpreted.
'No, no, Freddie – take that as read.' He leaned forward and jabbed his finger for emphasis at the moving target, Gaunt striding. 'I am talking – don't you follow me? – about the effect of a new failure on us. Difficult times we live in. It is as if we are under siege. The reputation of the Service is at stake. There are corners of Whitehall in which our efforts, first-class efforts, are derided. There are, Freddie, enemies at large and they wait for one more cock-up – forgive me – on the scale of Iraq. We are perpetually scrutinized. Surely, Freddie, you see that? If there were to be a new failure, it's we who would be the victims. I don't exaggerate, there would be another weeding out and we would face desperate times.'
'Oh, yes.'
There was a shrill laugh from the desk. 'You know, Freddie, for a moment I didn't think you understood the true seriousness of the danger to the integrity, dignity, of the Service. Forgive me. Have you all you need?'
'Computer time at Menwith, too low on the priority list. Do I want a galley-load of young Turks bustling around me? No. Do I want Berlin in on the act? No. Do I want a full charabanc sent from London to sit on Polly Wilkins in whom I have complete faith? No.
What I want is luck, buckets of it.'
'That is hardly a satisfactory shopping list. Freddie, very frankly, are you up for this one?'
Was he? Wasn't he? He wondered briefly whether selfishness and a personal pride in his ability caused him to reject the battalions of help on offer. Word of any section's success always eddied through the building, crossed the need-to-know fences erected for internal security, and the men and women responsible for secret triumphs achieved an heroic status, and rank envy – damned if he would pass up the chance, damned if he would share.
Gaunt said airily, 'Never been more confident, Gilbert. It's falling nicely into place.'
'But you promised me, with the Prague business, you talked of a rat run that you'd interrupt-'