When the helicopter's nose dipped and it lost height, both woke. Awaiting them at Glasgow airport was an executive jet, in RAF colours, fuelled and ready to fly them south.
They lived in dangerous times, and such times, they knew, demanded 'taking the gloves off'. Neither Xavier Boniface nor Donald Clydesdale would have said that this call from Mr Naylor would be the last.
He lay beside her, the scent of the ageing hay bales in his nose. The cottage was only five hundred paces away, but fifteen minutes' walk with the load they had brought across two fields.
The boy slept, breathing heavily, on a bed of fodder they had made for him on the far side of a low wall of bales.
Only the three of them remained. When the house had been cleaned, and the bedding bagged, he had sent away the lightweights — the driver to his mini-cab company in west London, the watcher to his family's fast-food outlet in the north of the capital. The recce man would still be travelling to reach his father's cloth shop in the West Midlands. They all believed his target was Birmingham — as did the kid who had fled. It had been a precaution of Muhammad Ajaq, the Scorpion of a faraway war where the strength of his sting was a legend, to deceive them with a lie, but his survival had always depended on precautions. The barn where he lay beside the girl, on damp, musty hay, was set back from the lane into the village. In an hour, before dawn came, he would make a fire at the back of the barn and burn their bags of bedding.
He manipulated her mind. His hand was under the coat she wore, the sweater and the T-shirt. His fingers played on the skin of her stomach. His nails made gentle patterns on the smoothness, softness of her navel. He did not work his hand up towards her breasts or down to her groin. She had not moved his hand.
He was not aroused by the touch of her against his fingers: what he did was a tactic of war. He made little sensual movements and could hear the growing pant of her breath. The experience of his mother, and, the scars left in him by the learning of it, had left deeper wounds on him than the pitted line across the forehead and cheek' of the girl. He had no trust in emotion, believed it weakness. To have had sex with her would have disgusted him perhaps frightened him. He heard the rustle and knew that her legs opened 'for him, but his fingers, nails, stayed on her stomach. Above the scent of the straw he smelt her wetness. He teased her, but it was only as a tactic of manipulation to achieve what he thought was necessary.
She was a virgin. If she had not been she would have pulled down his hand, buried it in her hair, and she had not.
He heard the breathing of the boy, steady but heavy with catarrh, beyond the wall of bales. It asked so much of him, the simpleton who was in love with God, that he must endure the delay, and he had thought hard as to how he could hold the resolve of the boy for more hours, more days.
The nail of his forefinger penetrated her navel cavity, and he heard the small gasps. He moved his hand away, rolled on to his side with his back to her, left her.
There was silence, long, and her breathing slackened.
He had angered her, knew it and intended it.
She was the pick of the cell, the only one among them that he valued.
Her anger burst. She spat out her whispered anger: 'Is it arrogance that drives you, or cowardice that rules you? Which? Are you, in your mind, too important to die, or too frightened? Which? It is never the leaders who make the sacrifice. The leaders choose targets, they make the vests, they recruit, and they tell young men of the rewards of Heaven and of the praise that will be heaped on them when they have gone to Paradise, but at the last they stand aside. Are you too valuable? Is the fear too great? Everything you have done since you came is to ensure your own safety and ability to run, to be clear. I have not seen, ever, from you one moment of compassion for him, nothing. And I have read that in Palestine it is not the young boys of the leaders who wear the vests, because they are sent away — abroad — for education and it would never be. permitted for them to wear one. I tell you, I think that he is the one with true courage, but you treat him, as if he were a package, disposable, to be thrown away. I despise you.'
The anger stilled. She would not have known it, in the darkness and with his back to her, but he smiled and was well satisfied.
Chapter 14
The ceiling light had been on, dull behind its mesh, since they had brought him back from the last session of questioning, but it was the cell door opening that woke Ramzi.
He jolted up on the mattress. For moments he did not know where he was, then the clarity came. A uniformed man stood in the doorway, eyed him with withering distaste, then tossed a bundle of clothing and a pair of trainers on to the end of the bed. He blinked, wiped his eyes. He realized his home had been raided, searched, and the clothing had been brought from there. For a few seconds he thought of his mother and sisters, of the violation of their home by men with cameras and plastic bags, and their sifting through his family's territory. Confusion wafted in him…Why? Why had he been brought clothing and shoes from home? He- looked for an answer from the man, but there was none, only a grim, sour face staring back at him. He pushed up off the mattress and felt the stiffness in his muscles.
Under the man's eye, Ramzi peeled the paper suit off his shoulders. Slowly, he dressed in the new gear given him, and he did not understand. When he was dressed, the man's finger beckoned for him to follow. He was led out of the cell, and the paper suit was left behind.
He did not know of the bitter row in the small hours, between a superintendent of the Anti-Terrorist Unit and an assistant director of the Security Service, that had raged in a corridor of New Scotland Yard's tower building. He did not know that an assistant director had won the hour. Or how.
In the corridor outside his cell's door, a clutch of men formed up round him, and none had a word for him. The echo of metal-tipped toecaps and heels played in his ears, but his arms were not held as they had been on each of the times he had been taken from his cell to the interviews…He had said nothing. He had followed every instruction given him when he had been recruited those many months before. He felt pride in that silence. Truth was, if lost hours could have been regained, if actions could have been undone, he would never have left the cottage — would have stayed in his bed and not disguised it. But Ramzi could not retrace those steps and all he could offer to the family — Syed, Khalid, Jamal and Faria, the Leader and the bomb-maker — was his silence, was the places at which he had focused on the floor, walls and ceiling. He had a small stirring, but growing, pride in his silence. And he walked, in the corridor, then through barred gates and up the steps, the better for his pride. Another door, steel-sheeted, was opened when numbers were punched by the head of his escort into a sunken panel. He was led left, and there was more uncertain chaos in his mind…They had used two interview rooms to question him — and to listen to his silence — but they were off, through a set of swing doors, to his right. He was brought to a counter on which were laid two plastic bags, and he hesitated.
He did not know that the two teams of detectives who had posed those questions were now stood down, asleep in their beds. He did not know that the assistant director had produced a single sheet of paper, headed with the printed address of a Home Office-sponsored forensics laboratory. He did not know that the superintendent had sworn out loud as he had read, 'I confirm that an initial examination of the swabs taken from the hands of the suspect RI 01 I 18.04.07 was flawed. Further and more detailed tests have shown conclusively that no, repeat no, traces of banned explosive materials were present on the samples given to us. No indications exist that the suspect handled or was in direct proximity to such materials. My department apologizes for the earlier false analysis provided to you, and trusts you have not suffered inconvenience. Faithfully…' There had been a scribbled set of initials over the typed name of a professor of Forensic Studies. He did not know anything.