'I believe a median solution will see us where we all want to be. I suggest that-'
'Excuse me.'
Gaunt flashed a glance at the source of the interruption, the Special Branch officer.
The assistant deputy director flicked a tongue -
Gaunt thought it a snake's strike – across his lips. 'Yes, Trevor?'
Not lifting his head, speaking with a gentle Welsh accent, Trevor said, 'Excuse me, but I think you miss the essential.'
'Do we, Trevor? Well, that's a late but interesting contribution. We are all busy men, so perhaps you could enlighten us. How do we "miss the essential"?
You have the floor.'
Gaunt thought it that sort of moment when men in waders stand in a wretched stream and identify the reward, a trout, and prepare to cast a fly over it… but a damn great cormorant comes from the clear blue sky and nicks the fish. His mood lightened and he anticipated amusement.
Trevor said, 'We are missing the essential. I tell you what is our fear in the Branch, and the same fear will be mirrored at Thames House. That fear is the "sleep-ers". Each time we go out on an arrest job I feel little elation. The fear is not bred by what I know, but what I don't know. I am in ignorance of the sleepers. How many? Where are they located? What are their common factors? I will answer each point. There might be ten sleepers, a hundred or a thousand, I don't know. They are located anywhere you choose to put a pin in a map, in any major city or in any provincial town. The common factors are that they swim unrecognized in our society, are normal and ordinary in every outward facet of appearance – and they hate us and all that we in this room seek to defend. I go further in explanation of us missing the essentials, with due humility. We are told that a resourceful and valued man, a co-ordinator of attacks, is seeking covert entry to Britain. Such a man does not waste his time, and hazard his freedom, if the individuals he will work with are of second or third grade. He will only travel if he believes he will meet young men or women of dedication and skill – and the purpose of his journey is to wake them. Who are they? I don't know. How do I find them? I can't. What is my assessment of their worth? A team of sleepers can inflict, guided by a strong hand, damage to us not equalled since the blitz bombing of the 1940s. We have to find them.'
He paused. Gaunt reflected that any of them round the table could have made that speech – perhaps not with such Celtic flourish – and hit the same nails… but none had. No chair scraped, no pencil was twirled, no fist masked a yawn. The Branch man used his hands as if he spoke of something of childlike simplicity, outstretched them. Said it, like it was obvious to an idiot.
'He takes us there. Arrest him at sea or in port and we will gain little because he will carry no laptop, won't have a convenient and uncoded address book.
He leads us to this disparate cadre. The new leaders are trained in counter-interrogation methods, trained well, and I doubt he would talk even without fingernails and with his testicles wired to the mains.
His is the road we follow. Lift him at sea, or on a dock-side, and we would have the empty shell of a body and not his mind's contents. I suggest we permit him to land and we are with him… Under close and expert surveillance, we let him run.'
The silence, into which only the Welsh voice had intruded, broke.
'By God, that's high-octane stuff.'
'Exciting, fascinating, challenging – a cell block filled with little scrotes.'
'Sends a signal to whatever cave that bearded bastard's in that we're on top of him, crushing him.'
The assistant deputy director smacked the palm of his hand on the table. 'I congratulate you, Trevor.
Original thinking where we were lacking – we let him run. First class. What I like, everybody is involved.
Special Forces shadow at sea. Suffolk and Norfolk are at the landfall, creating a sanitized perimeter. The Service, Dennis, are singing off the same hymn sheet as the Branch, Trevor, and will do the clever stuff, the surveillance in co-operation. I would like to suggest, if there are no dissenters, that I should chair a daily meeting of principals – I think noon as good a time as any. We're a big family and so much the more effective when we pull together. "We let him run". Brilliant.
Let's get it in place, gentlemen. Let's do the detail.'
Gaunt stood, and it seemed not to be noticed. The photograph of Anwar Maghroub lay on the table, and the women who did the shorthand had the details of Ricky Capel's life, and of the trawler that was called the Anneliese Royal, and of the island. He thought he had no longer a part to play. He turned to Gloria and, almost imperceptibly, raised an eyebrow, then flicked a glance at the door. He saw her smooth her skirt and drop her pad into her bag.
Around the table there was a sudden explosion of voices. A call to Hereford and the alerting of the section on stand-by, done staccato, then Poole notified. A barked demand to Constabulary Headquarters for firearms officers to be pulled off all other duties – no, not Sandringham. A full muster of Thames House guys and girls, A Branch people who did surveillance and bugs, to be made ready. Special Branch teams to be put together that afternoon. Gaunt moved towards the door, Gloria alongside him. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the look on her face of suppressed fury, her man put down, then hung out to dry – unwanted. He stepped aside to let her go through the door before him.
A voice, Dennis's, piped behind him: 'When you next call your island out-station, Freddie, tell the rookie we want the departure time, nothing more.
Imperative that she does not show herself – no intervention – just sits on a sandcastle a mile back.'
Then Bill, the bloody man booming as if he were on a survival run in the Brecons, 'And tell her to keep old White Feather clear – not that he sounds like a hero – right out of it.'
They went up together, and the lift was full. Neither spoke, but in the corridor he said quietly, 'They didn't want a doubter, did they? Didn't want a Thomas, a sceptic. Such excitement, such certainty
… What happens if they bloody lose him, or never bloody find him? What happens if we let him run screws up. I think, with our man across the water, you get one chance, and not to take it is a criminal act, but they didn't want to hear that. And they didn't want to hear what the professor up north told me: "Eradicate from your mind the due process of law – kill him." It'll rub off, always does, the gloss of excitement, and you and I will then be behind a big high wall of sandbags. Ah, well… time to say it was all right when it left us. We let him run. I wouldn't have but my opinion was not requested. What I think we need is a good strong cup of tea, with sugar.'
Inside his office, his sanctum, he dropped his briefcase as if he had no more use of it, dialled the number, heard the ringing, then her voice, the far-away wind and the cry of gulls.
Polly sat apart from him.
The phone was now back in her pocket. When it had rung she had crawled away from him and gone down a gully where the wind couldn't reach her. She had listened to Freddie Gaunt's faint voice and thought she heard his exhaustion. She had been left with the sense of a beaten man.
His back was to her. He tracked and scanned with the binoculars over the dunes and the beach, and watched the horizon; the swing of his head behind the eyepieces was the only movement he made. She did not know what the sex in the sleeping-bag meant to her, or what it meant to him. And always the bloody wind was on her, and the bloody rain… She did not know. She steeled herself, came and eased down beside him, but his hands stayed on the binoculars and he did not loop his arm round her.
Polly said, 'My people have decided what they want, Malachy. I don't know how it'll fit with you but it's the way it's going to be.'
She saw that his eyes followed the waving of the coarse grass stems on the dunes.
'You are – without belittling your achievements – outside the loop. They're all grateful in London, of course. We've moved on – there's a plan in place. It does not include you. I'm sorry, Malachy, but the concept of the plan is in concrete.'