Spook Street полностью

And any secret doubts he harboured about this he’d kept in check this morning. Having laid out the facts rehearsed with Diana Taverner, he’d forged on into the territory that was Robert Winters—the man caught on camera detonating himself in a crowded shopping centre; a made-in-Britain version of all those headlines, which had shrunk over the years to a page-seven sidebar, about events in distant marketplaces. Nothing brought the meaning of “suicide bomber” home quite so hard as familiar logos glimpsed through the rubble. So there he was—now you see him, now you don’t—and they owed his name to the brilliant work of the boys and girls of Regent’s Park, who had traced his passage backwards through the streets of London, courtesy of all that CCTV coverage the liberal tendency decried; as if putting a smashed clock together, they had reconstructed the minutes that had ticked down to zero, each stage of the journey rooting Robert Winters more fixedly into the life he had emerged from, and loosening him from the explosive manner in which he had ended it. Here he was in the underground, among crowds of the ignorantly blissful; here he was changing lines at Edgware Road, his blurry features by now more familiar to his watchers than those of their own children. And so it went, step after step, fragments of footage spliced together in reverse order, and if he was still a cipher at this point, assigned a random codename nobody paid attention to, because he was always he—him—they had known long before they pinned him down that this was the inevitable end of their quest. Nobody so hunted could remain uncaught. We will have him was the common refrain, and it became almost irrelevant that he was unhavable, that what was left of him could be weighed on a set of kitchen scales; no, they would have him—they would bring him back to life through digital magic, interrogate his spirit, undo his evil. And in the end they achieved this much: one final flicker of footage showing him emerging from a backpackers’ hotel in Earls Court, eighty-one minutes before the detonation in Westacres—stepping from a cheap and nasty dive into a grey damp January London; the skies barely distinguishable from the pavements; the pavements wet and littered; the litter pulped and mushy.

Two minutes later a net had dropped over it so thinly meshed an anorexic flea couldn’t have slipped through.

The Earls Court hostel was their crime scene, and it was here, in one of its grubby rooms, that he acquired an identity at last, for not only had Robert Winters registered under that name, he had left his passport under his pillow for them to find, alongside the pay-as-you-go he had used to text Lucas Fairweather; and—naturally—as much DNA as the boys and girls could wish for. An amateur error? Pointless to ask: when it comes to suicide bombers, everyone’s a first-timer. No, this was a cock being snooked from the other side of death; Robert Winters nailing down his place in history before setting off to create his own sunset. It would be a far far better thing if they buried the passport with his victims and claimed never to have found it. Cheat the bastard of posthumous fame, and in doing so reveal his true nature: that whatever blaze of infamy he’d sought to depart the planet in, he had been at heart a nobody, a nothing; not worth the moment it took to learn his name.

Which, philosophically, might have been appealing, but wasn’t an acceptable approach to take in a COBRA briefing.

“Robert Winters.”

“Yes, PM.”

(He liked to be addressed as “PM.” Presumably because he still couldn’t believe it himself.)

“A British citizen.”

“That’s right, PM.”

“Not a convert . . . ?”

Because that would have helped: if the Westacres bomber had been radicalised by conversion. But—

“There’s nothing among his possessions to suggest that, no.”

“Pity.”

Claude Whelan couldn’t, in good conscience, respond to this.

The PM, though, hadn’t finished: “And no evidence yet of any other extremist affiliation—animals, veggies, climate change?”

“Nothing. But it’s early days. We’ll have a full working dossier by noon, see what happens when we shake the tree.”

But the PM, for all his faults—and there was an actual list of these in circulation, courtesy of a cadre of his own backbenchers—wasn’t always slow on the uptake. “But if you have to look for it, it’s not much of a cause, is it? Terrorists hang their flags out. No point perpetrating a massacre anonymously.”

This had troubled Whelan, too. Leaving a passport in open view was one thing, but he’d have expected a terrorist’s bible, a video message, a wonderwall. Look on my works and tremble sort of thing. But for the moment, he wanted to emphasise progress.

“The hostel’s a staging post. When we have his . . . lair, we’ll find motive.”

He regretted lair as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Somebody asked, “What about the bomb? Progress?”