Part 25 (1/2)

'Like they sprayed us in the war. This was different, though. They told us about it. Had to. We had to strip naked, and let the stuff dry.'

'What was it?'

'G.o.d knows.' He was far away, maybe back in North Africa. 'Could have been water. That's what we thought for a while, in fact. There were stories, you know, about the guys coming back from the war with problems. Dying. We thought it might be some kind of psych-ops thing. See if we could take it. Already knowing the stories.'

'But it wasn't.'

'No,' he said. 'It wasn't.'

'How long? How long did they do that for?'

He shrugged. 'You lose track of time, you know? A few weeks. It stretched into months, I guess. That was when they said we were dead.'

'In a helicopter crash off Cyprus.'

'Tommy hated that. When we found out about it. That's when he knew we were really in the s.h.i.+t.' He looked directly at Sarah. 'Helicopter crashes, that's the kind of thing the army likes to pretend never happens. If they were using one of those as cover, well, Tommy said we were never coming back to life. We were on the island by then.'

'Which island?'

'That comes later.'

'Tell me what happened in the desert.'

He looked back to the TV screen, where a reporter leaned against an all-terrain vehicle, talking urgently at the camera. 'They took us into the sands one day. Drove us there. Miles from anywhere. They said, this time it's not an exercise. There's bad guys out there. We want you to take them.'

'The boy soldiers.'

'That's who they were. But we were told they were the real thing.' He shook his head. 'We were told to bring them home alive.'

She hardly dared ask. 'And did you?'

'Christ, yes.' He was still shaking his head, as if it were all some big story. 'They were kids. Six of them, too. But they didn't know a thing, they were kids. They weren't soldiers.'

Something was stirring in her memory: fragments of bulletins, and loud denials in the press. 'They were Iraqi, weren't they?'

The look he gave her was pure scorn. 'Well, of course they b.l.o.o.d.y were.'

Six Iraqi conscripts who had perished in a storm on the Syrian border twenty months ago. Who Iraqi ministers claimed had been captured murdered by Western troops.

It was Sarah's turn to shake her head. She didn't want to look at the TV screen, and know there was a war happening. She didn't want to know any of this at all.

'Tell me,' she said.

The circles he'd drawn on the maps rendered the towns targets. Ground Zero was a railway station. Red dots were hotels. (It was far from foolproof n.o.body had to tell Crane that but rapidly becoming a compulsion.) Blue dots were B&Bs; there were probably unlicensed places in both towns. Which put them off the map. And there were green dots for hostels, homeless shelters; places they'd have had to bluff their way into, but which he couldn't completely ignore. Of course, it would take weeks to check, by which time Downey and his woman could be anywhere. But long shots were always worth playing. Every week, some fool won the lottery. When that happened, they stopped being fools.

Howard drifted back in. 'Are you staying here forever?'

'If that's how long it takes.'

Crane's desk was a junkyard accident. He'd already broken the phone, for ringing when he wasn't ready. Splintered ends of pencils formed a tepee-shape on top of his computer casing: you had to do something while you were waiting for the b.a.s.t.a.r.d to search a database. And a shredded polystyrene cup, little white flakes of it, adding the impression that Crane was having a bad hair day: Howard looked at all this, but made no comment. Which provoked Crane more than anything.

'Haven't you got papers to shuffle? Chits to sign? We need more pencils round here. Isn't it you who buys the pencils, Howard?'

'We're a Government Agency, Amos. We don't operate for your sole benefit.'

'Govern-Ment-A-Gency. I can just hear the capitals when you speak, Howard. Did you learn that at university?'

'Your brother f.u.c.ked up. I'm sorry, Amos, but that's what he did. Now we can draw lessons from that, which would be a useful thing to do, or you can sit here steaming, planning your revenge. It's a job, Amos. And it needs to be done. But it needs to be done properly. You go off the deep end and f.u.c.k this up too, I'll hang you out to dry. Believe it.'

Amos whistled through his teeth.

'I mean it. You go solo and spill unnecessary blood, your days here are over. You might as well book the plot next to Axel.'

'Unnecessary blood?'

'You know what I mean.'

He laughed. 'You ever wonder what it's like at the sharp end, Howard?'

'Don't start. I had enough of that from Axel. Laugh at the desk man. Who knows nothing about anything. But you tried driving a desk on this one, Amos, and look what happened. Your brother's dead, there's civilians this close to official secrets, and you're looking for a needle in a haystack so you can go do the John Wayne bit. Very b.l.o.o.d.y impressive.'

'I'll find him.'

'So you said. You also said Axel could handle it.'

'Careful, Howard.'

'Don't threaten me. You've no friends in the Ministry, Amos. Downey may be the target, but there were a few sighs of relief when he bagged Axel.'

Amos jabbed him in the throat with his forefinger.

It was curious, he thought, as he watched Howard drop to his knees and sc.r.a.pe at the air for a breath, how stress brought out the best in some people. Here's Howard, a man born to be office furniture, learning to speak his mind. Probably been having s.h.i.+t poured on him from above. Once a month or so, poor Howard was summoned for a b.o.l.l.o.c.king from a bloke whose name he didn't even know: now that was sad. Crane knew the name, of course, but that was because he believed in making the effort.

He leaned forward now and breathed in Howard's ear. 'I will find him, Howard. If not now, later. When he comes for the girl. And when I find him, I'll kill him. And if I have any complaints from you on the matter, I'll drop you from your office window. Clear?'

There was little point in waiting for an answer.

He patted Howard on the cheek. 'When you can breathe, get up and leave. Don't talk to me any more.'

And he turned to his screen, already thinking: Big hotels. Chains. The kind of places with a network he could break into. He didn't hear Howard leave. That was because Howard left very quietly.

They had fought all day, Michael said, though 'fought' wasn't the word, not really the boy soldiers had fired a shot or two, but nothing that came near causing danger, then tried to dig themselves in at the top of a dune. It was easy to see they were scared witless. Screaming at each other, probably about whether to surrender or not; one of them stood up at the end, stretched his arms skyward; babbling in obvious prayer. Tommy Singleton shot his knee off.

'They were kidnapped. Brought there. For you to practise on.'

Michael said, 'I think so. Yes.'

She couldn't believe it, or wished she couldn't. Wished she couldn't see it in her mind, either, helped along by images on the TV screen: the scared boy standing, screaming at the world to leave him alone. The bullet picking him off like a tin duck at a fairground.

After that, Michael said, they all folded. Threw their guns down the hill, and waited to be captured.