The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

said where his home was nor why he would try to cross the Channel with them, and what he intended once he had arrived. They were clever people and he thought them gentle and dignified. Cammy did not regard himself as clever, nor gentle, and had no dignity that he knew of . . . He thought that when they looked at him the black mood settled on his face; they were frightened of him and went quiet.

He walked away from them. They hung back. He went into the dunes and the ground ducked down and they would have lost sight of him. They did not follow him and would have feared annoying, irritating, angering him, would also have known that without him they would not cross the Channel. His anger was bad and he was alone.

Jonas nodded the briefest of recognition to the pair of armed police on the pavement, then wiped his face and satisfied himself that no crumbs were stuck around his lips.

He passed through the security gate and walked down the corridor that led into the atrium, where he should have been on his farewell night . . . Had he been there then he would have been handed a department store voucher: he had never received it, instead a week later a flat-pack greenhouse had been delivered and Vera valued it. Harry had brought it to Raynes Park and assembled it on flagstones collected from a garden centre. Jonas went up in the elevator. He was good at standing in a crowded space and avoiding eye contact, let alone the need to speak. Down a corridor and into the work area – third floor, south side, 3/S/12.

A favoured corner had been allocated him. He had a window with a view over the river, one prefabricated wall of frosted glass, his own bank of secure filing cabinets, and his own desk. The distorted screen separated him from the dozen or so who shared the space. Nominally this end of the corridor – Rooms 12, 13 and 14 – were the territory of A Branch, who did surveillance . . . Jonas had space inside his personal fiefdom for his work chair, also for a foldaway canvas seat in which he could doze of an afternoon. The electric kettle was used more often than the Service issue laptop. He drank coffee continuously when at work, but preferred paper to electronics and his bank of knowledge was stored in the filing cabinets.

Jonas was often the first into Room 12, and was usually first out, hurrying to make the 5.49 train when the evening had barely started . . . it was under cover of darkness in autumn and winter and spring that much of the team’s work was deployed. The individuals, those of High Interest, whom they watched, followed, plotted against, preferred the cover of the hours between dusk and dawn. Not a difficulty for Jonas Merrick: he was in early and went home at an appointed hour and fulfilled his allocated weekly hours.

A swoop was planned for that evening. Those working out of 3/S/12 would be involved, at the front line.

If the suspect was in his home, among the nineteenth-century terraced streets to the east of the railway station, there would be uniforms, dogs and firearms in support, and a fair excess of excitement for the 3/S/12 people on site. He supposed it felt similar to the adrenaline rush his cat, huge and powerful, might experience when it tracked a vole or a shrew or a mouse and closed in for a kill: it would not get a meal from the prey but a drift of satisfaction from decapitating the little creature, crunching its skull, then abandoning the corpse and returning to the back door and being lifted by Vera onto the kitchen units to scoff supermarket cat food. The man they were going after that evening, of mixed Somali and Eritrean origin, would let their excitement burn off. They would go in at a rush but leave the laying on of hands to the uniforms, and the shouts would be deafening and the lights would illuminate the street and the guns would add to the drama and the dogs would be straining on their leashes. A good show, but not for much return.

Jonas knew few policemen. His choice. He was not familiar with detective or investigator culture. He had once heard a phrase used about a Branch man who had worked against the early activists of the Provisional IRA, five decades earlier. The man had been physically unimpressive, with round shoulders and thin claw-like hands and a nose shaped like a parrot’s beak, and wore thick-lensed spectacles: the detective inspector had been brought into Special Branch, it was said, because he was an incomparable “thief taker”. Nice phrase, useful description. Would have had that sense of where to go and where to look, when to act and when to stand back and allow a target to run: a man who could sense the locations and contacts used by the target.

An American who came into Thames House, open and frank and who seldom shot the party line, had spoken of the massive electronic surveillance effort put into hunting down Zarqawi, the top target of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. US intelligence had put a $25 million reward on his head, dead or alive. A Jordanian spook had won the Americans’ trust; he had been invited in, had walked up to the big wall map and had poked his finger at a city that was nowhere near the province being quartered by the drones and their cameras: it was where they had killed Zarqawi, put a 500lb Paveway bomb down his chimney. All about instinct and a nose . . .

The one they were going after that evening, in Luton, had been fingered by Jonas. Only three weeks out of gaol, had done a minimal sentence for radicalisation and courier work, and now might, or might not, be into shifting bomb-making precursors across the Bedfordshire town. The decision had been taken, on high, to