They had the right Tango, no question. The Tango gave them a chance. Too many failures, too many convictions, and the reputation he valued would slide. Too many jerks banged up in Belmarsh, Whitemoor or Long Lartin, and the price he could charge went on the slide. He had chosen well, could see it. The Tango's finances were a disaster, and worse. She'd pick something off the shelf — last one had been a branded cornflakes packet — and dump it into the trolley that he pushed, behind her. She'd go on, and the Tango would shove it back on the shelf and take instead the supermarket's own product, which might save twenty pence. Penny-pinching was good news, because with just the two options — the carrot and the stick — there looked to be a useful chance of making the carrot do the work. Less messy than the stick. Because he was there, and tracking them in the box, he reckoned — would have bet big money on it — that the Tango would do the business.
They'd switched aisles. They were through Detergents, had done bottom-of-the-range bread, had picked up only packets of sausages, mince and burgers — what Benny Edwards wouldn't have fed his dog on — from Meats, and they were at the start of the Beverages /Alcohol section. Her eyes lingered on wines, Bulgarian and the least expensive, and he'd seen but not been able to hear the short, snapped exchange between the Tango and his wife, and she hadn't put a bottle into the trolley. Then she'd marched to the checkouts and joined a queue, leaving him to trail behind.
It was all for Ozzie and Ollie Curtis. Two bulky packages were nestling in the rafters of Benny Edwards's home: one held fifty thousand in fifties, and the other was half of that. It was all for Ozzie and Ollie's freedom. Well, they were a legend, a throwback to the past. Hadn't moved on from the times of the east London gangs — all that shit about hitting wages vans, bullion warehouses, banks and a jeweller's, if there was enough tasty stuff inside the safe. Benny Edwards didn't do conscience and he didn't do morals. He did drugs importers if they had the cash, up front, to pay him. The brothers, blaggers, were history. Just about everyone he dealt with had gone over to drugs, and he'd learned that the trade bred deceit and double-cross: the drug dealers were shites, they had no bloody honour. Funny thing, but that was what the brothers had, honour. But he doubted he could do more for them than get a hung jury, which would cost them a whole big mountain of money. Worse, drugs importers would grass up an associate, and would look for the security of sliding information on rivals to the police. No way the Curtis brothers would do down an associate to get leniency, and they'd never pass information to the Serious Crime Directorate. Honour was an old-world thing, and when he'd finished with the blaggers Benny Edwards doubted he'd ever meet it again.
Where he stood, he could see them, the Tango and the wife, at the checkout. The plastic bags were filled. The Tango was into his hip pocket, had the wallet in his hand and seemed to be wondering which of his cards to use. Chose one, it was swiped, and the girl shook her head. Took out a second, offered it, had it rejected. Back into the hip pocket and the cheque book was produced. Benny Edwards had seen the bank statements and didn't rate the Tango's chances. Which was when the wife intervened. She had her purse out of her bag, then a wad of notes in her fingers. He saw surprise splash on to the Tango's face, like the poor bastard hadn't known she had that money. He heard her say, loud enough to share with the queue, 'I went to my mum this morning, told her I'd married a tosser who couldn't earn a proper wage, was too lazy or too stupid.' He saw the Tango flinch, and no other shopper met his eye. God, that was out of order. The Tango was loaded with plastic bags and stormed towards the doors before she'd taken her small change.
They traipsed away from him towards a bus stop. He used his mobile and broke the box round them. The approach would be in the morning, when the wife had softened the Tango some more and made him pliant. His usual line, which he used when it was a carrot job, played on his lips: 'There are no consequences, no kick-backs. You do me a favour and I do you a favour, and we forget about it. I promise, it'll be like it never happened…Except that the financial worry in your life is removed. Believe me, nothing will be different.' That was what Benny Edwards would say to the Tango and it was all true: nothing would be different.
In the first shower of London's evening, Ajaq walked the pavements. He cut across great squares and passed the seats of government and power. He went alongside the black-painted barriers of concrete that protected buildings from the approach of a car under their walls, a car that might have been low on its chassis under the weight of a half-tonne of fertilizer explosive. He was so far from his home, and so close to his blood. Great edifices towered over him. He passed policemen, made huge by the bulletproof vests under their top coats and noted their readiness to shoot: magazines loaded, a finger laid on a trigger guard, a machine pistol hung from the shoulders…but they did not know him. They were at the mouth of an Underground station, watching the surge of the crowds that pitched down the steps. They were in doorways. They were behind the gates that shut off a cul-de-sac, and Ajaq knew it was the workplace of a great enemy, the Americans' lap-dog.
It was confirmation of the tactical decision he had already taken.
The centre of the city, where its authority lay, was hunkered down as if it awaited the inevitability of attack. Barricades and guns were its defence. He thought of it as the Green Zone, Baghdad, where the Americans lived with their allies and collaborators and where security was tightest. It amused him to walk among them, to feel the brush of bodies against his. There was, and Ajaq recognized it, a particular and peculiar thrill when he moved in the heartland of an enemy and was not known; he was merely a face in the crowd, anonymous.
The decision had been his and had been made four weeks before he had started out on his journey. It had not been queried by those who had created the organizational web in which he now crawled. The decision was that the protected city its ministry buildings, its sprawled labyrinth of train tunnels, its guards and weapons should be ignored. He had chosen to strike where the forces of his enemy were weakest. He thought of an underbelly that was soft, where a knife could dig deep, and where panic would be greatest. The decision had been committed to a handwritten note, a fine nib fashioning the coded characters on two sides of a single sliver of cigarette paper, which had been taken by courier across frontiers and boundaries to the cave or the compound in the Tribal Areas where the leaders of the base existed. He had never met them. The Engineer had, but Muhammad Ajaq had not. No counter-command had been issued, and every aspect of their planning was effective, had earned his admiration. He assumed that those men, the leaders, would sit each evening with a battery-powered radio or television downloading the satellite and would flick the channels, listening for news of his success.
He went past the parliament building and a massive clock struck the hour. He came to a garden and passed into it through a gateway. He crunched along a gravel path and approached a floodlit statue of coal-black figures, who stood in submission but with dignity — as if they were beaten but not defeated; he read that they were The Burghers of Calais, and that the sculptor was Rodin, but he did not know what 'burghers' were or where Calais was. There was an image of pride about those men that stayed with him as he crossed the garden, came Out on to the pavement and went past a great grey stone building where lights burned in every window. Two men came out of its swing-door entrance and stepped in front of him, which made him check his stride, but there was no apology that he was impeded and no acknowledgement of him — as if he did not exist.