The Walking Dead

'The experience you have had in Britain came from inside. That, oddly enough, can be dealt with more easily. The probability is that links will be found with those providing safe-houses and supplying the explosives, and that the network's cell will be dismantled. I can accept the argument. Intelligence will flow from the investigation and the gate-keepers in local mosques will be identified on the back of the discovery of the bombers' backgrounds. It's slow and painstaking, but evidential routes are uncovered that will lead inevitably, I promise it, to the destruction of the cells. That is what you have had, and I consider you fortunate because then you have the possibility to cut with scalpel knives into the mind of your attacker.

'What is worse? Far worse? It is when there is no mind to saw into. If the bomber is foreign you cannot so easily explore the nucleus of the cell structure that facilitates his act. He materializes from that familiar "clear blue sky" and, with detonation, he returns there — and nobody knows a thing. Understand me. He has never been in your gaols, where his recruitment can be identified; he has never been in your mosques or cultural centres, again where traces will have been left; he has never been, younger, in street protests where he might have been photographed and where group leaders have been seen. He comes from nowhere — all right, that is somewhere, but beyond your reach. If you knew him you could raise the walls around him — but you don't so you can't.

'Already, in your country, the trauma of Seven-Seven has passed and I'll bet your security services' guard has slipped. You're vulnerable again, because memories are short. Of course you have paid agents — informers — scattered in the mosques, and all meetings of the firebrands are monitored, but they will not deliver you the foreigner. He uses links that are beyond your sight. If, in Iraq, the suicide-bombers were home-grown the problem would have been cauterized by now. They aren't. They come across the international frontiers.

'The route used most frequently into Iraq is from Syria and their nexus point is Damascus, but plenty come over the Saudi frontier. My own injury was caused by a boy, barely over twenty-one, from a good and respectable Saudi family. Now the Saudi chain, and my work is to monitor it, is controlled by one man. I don't know his name or his face, but it's like he's a street trader and the melons, apricots, peaches and dates arrive on his stall…What I have, right now, is the scent on him. I call him, because it fits, the Twentyman.

'So, here we stand. I caught the scent of the Twentyman. I have a boy whose family thought he was in the Yemen visiting family, but. was in reality boarding a European flight out of King Khalid International. Ibrahim Hussein is twenty-one years old and a promising student of medicine. He is not with his relatives but is heading for Europe where he has no friends, no contacts, no family. What he's got is sibling guilt — two brothers dead in Afghanistan — one killed by the Soviet forces, and one by our boys. I have his picture for you.

'If I were a betting man, I'd bet the ranch that Ibrahim Hussein, only surviving son of an electrical-goods retailer in Ash Province, has journeyed to Europe with the sole intention of killing himself in a public place. Southern Europe — Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece — isn't a target for a flight into Amsterdam. In the north of the continent, on the mainland, there is most likely a "covenant of protection" — France, Belgium, Holland and Germany have, in differing degrees, opposed the coalition intervention in Iraq, which leaves only the conveniently placed United Kingdom where neither "covenant" nor "protection" exists. I hope you're following me.

'I've got a gnawing feeling in my gut. The Twentyman operates out of Saudi and concerns himself only with attacks of the greatest ferocity. A boy has left the Kingdom and is now within spitting distance of your country. My gut tells me there is a mix of hard fact and hunch. I can't divide 'em, or weigh their different parts. To me, they run together. But the "hard fact" is that the boy has travelled. "Hunch" is that he will die in your country and take as many as he can with him, himself to Paradise and them to wherever unbelievers end up. In the opinion of Joe Hegner, your society is threatened. Now, you are perfectly entitled to pull the vehicle over, turn it around, drive back, drop me at the embassy gate and do nothing.'

The car bumped on to the hard shoulder, turned, then sped back towards the city.

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