The Walking Dead

The shock was still with him. The inspector had said, 'Sorry and all that, Banksy, but your pager going was a mistake. You won't be involved in the security up-grade. You shouldn't have been called in. My regrets that we screwed your evening. Drop by tomorrow and I'll set the picture out for you, if I've time.' He had stood and walked up the aisle in the briefing room, had known that every eye was on him but he had looked straight ahead. Outside the room he had heard the door shut behind him and a key had turned. He'd leaned against a corridor wall, shaking, then headed for the only place he knew where he could find comfort: Daff's basement.

'I suppose it's the little woman,' the armourer said, confidential; dropping his voice. 'Three years, isn't it? The world moves on and you have to forget her. Have I told you that FBI recruiting story about women?'

He could have said that the friction inside Delta had nothing to do with any of the scratchiness in his relationship with the others, the old tensions his divorce had created. Mandy did not figure, but if he had disabused Daff he wouldn't hear the story: the armourer's reputation for stories was gold-medal standard.

'You haven't,' Banks said drily, 'but I expect you will.'

The lilted tale began. 'It's like this…The FBI had an opening for an assassin, a dedicated killer. After all the security checks and interviews they were down to a short-list of three: two men and a woman. For the final test, the FBI's Human Resources took the first man to a big metal door and handed him a Smith & Wesson, and said, "We must know that you will obey orders to the letter, no matter what. Inside the room your wife is sitting in a chair. Kill her." The first man said he could never shoot his wife, and he was told, "You're not the right man for us. Take her and go home." The second man was given the same order and he took the pistol and went into the room. There were five minutes of quiet. Then he came out with tears on his face and said he had tried but finally realized he could not kill his wife. He was told, "You don't have what it takes, go on home with her." It was the woman's turn. Her husband was in the room, sitting in the chair, and she was to shoot him. She took the gun and went inside. Shots were heard, one after another, the whole magazine. Outside, they heard screams, crashes and bangs, then everything went quiet. Would have been at least three minutes more, then the door opened slowly and the woman stood there. She wiped sweat off her forehead and said, "This gun was loaded with blanks. I had to use the chair to kill him." Women for you, Banksy.'

He laughed. He laughed till it hurt. He realized it was the first time he had laughed, from deep in his belly, in the eleven days since the funeral — since he had been handed the diary kept by Cecil Darke. 'I like it.'

'Is it women? You got women aching in your gut?'

'No…Daff, it's a bit worse than women.'

The armourer's face contorted in mock horror. 'God, that bad? Then you have my sympathy, Banksy. Well, go on, chuck it up.'

He had come to the basement, to his friend — perhaps the only one he had — to get himself up against a shoulder that would take the burden of his problem. He spoke, haltingly at first, of words written seventy years before 'in a foreign land' and he quoted the verse of Psalm 137, and Daff knew it from chapel in childhood, and he said what had happened in the canteen, kids' play ending in spilt blood, and that he was damned if he would apologize when he had no guilt.

Blinking, Banks said, 'What it's come down to is that there is now a doubt as to my dedication to the job. Would I, because of what I said of my great-uncle, have the ruthlessness to shoot a suicide-bomber who might just be a "brave and principled" young man? Would I hesitate at that moment, going into double tap, and not think of him as a scumbag, a rabid animal, who should be killed — like it was in the Underground train? In their minds, the doubt exists.'

'No one knows, Banksy, how they'd be.'

'There's enough who talk up the macho stuff.' Banks's bitterness flowed. 'Plenty who say they're sure. I'm no longer trusted.'

The face across the counter brightened. 'Did you read that one about the suicide-bomber in Baghdad the other day? You didn't? It's real, it happened, went like this. A suicide-bomber drives his bomb-primed car right under an American M1A1 main battle tank and lodges beneath it and between the tracks and it weighs more than sixty tons. The crew hop out, think it's a road traffic accident and find this guy pinned in his crushed car. He tells them he's a martyr but the way the car's squashed he can't reach the switch to detonate himself. But he still dies, because they do a controlled explosion that kills him, but the tank isn't damaged. What do you think God told him when he got there? "Dear me, you look miserable, have a bad day at work?" You're not laughing now, Banksy.'