the end of the strand across from the house, a mobile beach concession had appeared, a sandwich and burger bar on wheels with canvas chairs and fold-up tables, most of which were taken. Dillon stopped and ordered tea and an egg sandwich, sitting close to the bar.
The woman sympathetic to the Cause whom the Master had mentioned to Flynn sat not too far away, keeping an eye on the situation over the road where the helicopter had just drifted in behind the house. Her name was Lily Shah, and she worked in the dispensary at the Army of God headquarters in London.
She was quite small, wore sandals, a Panama pushed down over fair hair, her blue linen shirt loose over khaki shorts. She removed her Ray-Bans to scratch her nose, revealing a calm, sweet face. She was forty-five and looked younger. On seeing Dillon, she replaced her Ray-Bans, took a sound enhancer from her shirt pocket, slipped it into her right ear, and adjusted it as Sara Gideon crossed the road.
‘Anything special happen while I’ve been out?’ Dillon asked as he finished his tea.
Lily could hear perfectly as Sara answered. ‘The President wants Cazalet safe. The black team from last night is coming in tomorrow to start doing all sorts of security things to the house. Since it’s been in the family since before the Civil War, Cazalet is not pleased. Even more, the staff have been suspended. Dalton’s going to hang on to hand over to the team, and Mrs Boulder keeps Murchison, bless her. And I’m here to tell you to get a move on – we’re boarding the helicopter in minutes.’
They hurried across the road and entered the drive, cutting it very fine, for it seemed no more than five minutes later that the helicopter lifted above the trees and turned away, causing a certain excitement among the tourists.
Once things settled down, Lily wandered along the beach, turned across and down the side of the house, the marshy area with the reeds growing high. She stood looking at the place where the fencing gaped and, on impulse, scrambled through into the garden, and then ventured a little further cautiously to where the carnage had taken place.
The windows on the terrace slipped open and Dalton walked through, comfortable in shirtsleeves, a can of beer in one hand, and sat down on the swing chair. He opened the newspaper, and she pointed her right index finger at him, thumb raised, then smiled, eased back through the jungle of the garden, and left.
Walking back to town, barefoot at the sea’s edge, she phoned the Master and told him what happened. ‘So Ferguson and company will be back to trouble you again very soon.’
‘And trouble is the right word. He’s been a thorn in our side for much too long. I’m sure he was responsible for the disappearance of General Ali ben Levi. We know that he flew in here, to Northolt, in pursuit of the traitor Declan Rashid. This is a fact.’
Referring to Ali ben Levi as flying ‘in here, to Northolt’ Airport had been an unfortunate slip, for his choice of words had indicated that the Master was speaking in London. Come to that, Lily was sure she’d once heard Big Ben chiming in the background of one of his calls. Lily was intrigued, but concentrated on the matter at hand.
‘The Russians tried to eradicate Ferguson and his Prime Minister’s private army some years ago. All they got was a bloody nose,’ she said.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Dr Ali Saif, when he was head of education at the Army of God.’
‘What a damn traitor he turned out to be. Another turncoat.’
‘But not to Ferguson. As far as I know, MI5 claimed him. Perhaps he found it preferable to facing twenty-five years in Belmarsh under anti-terrorism laws,’ Lily said.
‘A traitor is a traitor. And as far as Ferguson goes, I’ve received an order from the Grand Council. They want revenge for ben Levi. Nothing less than assassination. Bullet or bomb, I’m open to either.’ He laughed. ‘I suppose I could put it to Tod Flynn.’
Lily was shocked at the implication. ‘The political upheaval would be enormous.’
‘And so it should be. That would be the point. That no one is safe, not even those working at the highest level for the Prime Minister himself, and there’s a thought.’
Lily tried to sound enthused, but managed only a muted ‘I hear what you say.’
‘Good. With luck, you should be back in London tomorrow. Give my sincere thanks to Hamid Bey for allowing you the few days’ leave to assist me as you have. He has been a revelation once he took over as imam. AQ acknowledges its debt.’
‘I’ll speak to him as soon as I get back. Is there anything more I can do for you?’
‘Yes, I’d like you to look up Tod Flynn’s niece at the Royal College of Music. She interests me. It seems that when she was fourteen, she lost her parents to a car bomb on a trip to Ulster and was crippled.’
‘Dear God,’ Lily said, genuinely shocked.
‘Her father was Flynn’s elder brother, Peter. Flynn became her legal guardian, and she’s been raised by him and her great-aunt. I want to know more about her. Something tells me it’ll come in handy for keeping Mr Flynn in hand.’
‘The usual file?’
‘Exactly, now be on your way. God go with you.’
She continued to walk at the water’s edge, thinking of Pound Street Methodist Chapel, now converted to the mosque and the headquarters of the Army of God charity. She was a cockney girl who from childhood had only wanted to be a nurse, had qualified against the odds and then joined the Army Medical Corps. In the seven years that followed, one war after another had given her an unrivalled experience of the barbarism, the butchery, that people could inflict on one another.
In Bosnia, she’d seen open graves with hundreds of Muslim bodies tumbled into them, as if the Nazis had returned to haunt Europe. In Kosovo, you had to get out of the ambulances to pull the corpses of mothers and their children to one side of the road so you could continue. In northern Lebanon, she had served with the Red Cross and UN with only a handful of soldiers to try to control the rape and pillage outside the mission hospital.
It was the only time she’d fought, and that was in desperation, picking up a dead soldier’s Browning pistol and emptying it into savage faces one after another, and then the trucks had roared up with the men and rifles. Al Qaeda, ruthlessly shooting wrongdoers, bringing order where there was none.
Two years later and out of the army, a nursing sister at the Cromwell Hospital in London, she’d met the love of her life, Khalid Shah, a handsome Algerian charge nurse, married him, and they’d moved to the dispensary at Pound Street, where it became clear that he was a follower of Osama bin Laden.
It was a year later that the cruelty of life took him away from her, when Al Qaeda called him in for service in Gaza, an Israeli air strike a month later ensuring his stay was permanent. She couldn’t hate Jews because of what had happened, for her dark secret, even from Khalid, was that she was only a Christian through her father, because her mother was a Jew and had married out. Hamid Bey, the imam at Pound Street Mosque, seemed a reasonable man, and as the dispensary was multi-faith, Lily’s Christianity caused no problem. The fact that he also looked the other way where Al Qaeda was concerned was understandable, when one considered that the greater part of his congregation supported it. She had yet to realize that she was entirely wrong in her assessment of Hamid, a savage zealot, who supported the Cause as much as the Master.
As
