The Walking Dead

On the train, he sat sandwiched in a football team of teenagers with their bags restricting his leg room. Of course he would never be free of her father. Naylor had been a junior inspector in the colonial police and serving in the Trucial States in the early 1960s, transferred to Aden when internal security had collapsed and been seconded to the RAF's police investigation branch. She had been a secretary at Government House. They'd met at a drinks party. Rather unpleasant, but he'd done the right thing — she'd told him, two and a half months after a late-night swim session on Gold Mohur beach, that she was pregnant, and they'd married in the main salon of the Residence. A month later she'd said that she'd got her dates wrong and that no sprog was on the way. No sprog had been on the way since.

Aden had ended and Government House had been abandoned to the apparatchiks of the National Liberation Front; the RAF and he had flown home. The dust had not gathered under his feet. Daddy, once of the Palestine Police, was now a senior M15 officer with an empire at Leconfield House and had slipped the word that his son-in-law was a.'good sort and reliable', which had been more than enough for his recruitment into the Security Service. He was not privy to whether he had been a disappointment to Daddy or not but the introduction had ensured his employment for thirty-nine years, and he was grudgingly grateful for it. It gave him, and had done since he joined, a thrill to work for an organization charged with the Defence of the Realm, to see the innocent and ignorant around him and know that he — anonymous and unnoticed — was charged with their safety. God, he would miss it.

It had taken Dickie Naylor an hour and three minutes to make the seamless transition from domesticity to his professional workplace.

If he had been under oath and cross-examined, he would have sworn that the face of Mary Reakes fell as he swept into the outer office — she would have known that treason was abroad, and he'd been telephoned. Penny, the guilty one, had her face close to her screen and seemed to hide behind it — she'd earned, at the very least, a box of chocolates. He would make his point and give not a damn if he verged on rudeness.

'So that everybody understands, from this coming Friday evening I will not be called in if the heavens open. Up to this coming Friday evening, while 1 am charged with the running of this section, I have responsibilities and will exercise them. So, please, Mary, would you bring me up to speed?'

It was done with reluctance, but he was handed the digest of the signal that had come across the Thames from the sisters at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He read it. He thought that at last something meaningful was before his eyes. He read the name of Ibrahim Hussein, medical student and citizen of Saudi Arabia, then his movements. Suddenly the final days had purpose, and he was not ashamed of his excitement. As he held the signal his hands trembled. He studied the photograph of an open, pleasant face. Then a winnow of fear: would the matter run beyond the stretch of the coming week at the end of which his swipe card would be taken from him? There was a reference to the Twentyman, then the signal's two bottom lines: 'The information given is a hunch, no more than guesswork, but the source (Josiah Hegner, FBI agent/Riyadh) has unique and personal experience in his field.'

He said, 'Right, let's go to work.'

In his office he pushed the buttons and his screen lit; the box engine ground to life. He looked up. She was gazing into the cubicle, embedded in thought.

'What has carried you away, Mary, and where to?' he called to her.

The positioning of her new desk, the placing of the new filing safes, whether to go with magnolia, peach or ochre on the walls.

'Just, Dickie, that it's such a strange code name for an enemy, and I haven't an idea what it means — the one Hegner calls the Twentyman.'

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