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

both subjects employing intelligent tradecraft procedures. The team had thought themselves – he did not mind mild vulgarity – the “bee’s bollocks”. He had twenty minutes to kill. Beside him the crisp packet was pocketed and a wristwatch studied as if the boy with whom he shared the bench was also checking a schedule.

None of them coming back into the work area after the successful eyeball, and photographs to go with it, had acknowledged Jonas’s part in the good outcome . . . The AssDepDG’s appearance would be token. His colleagues would be there a bare minimum of time. He was hurt, bruised . . . Did he make a difference? Not in anyone else’s eyes. Would he be missed? No. Was credit ever given him? No . . .

He had only seen the face of the boy beside him for a moment, but he had started to plumb deep into that mine of facial features and biographies that his memory carried. They had been Irish when he had started, then Cold War diplomats and couriers from eastern Europe, but now the operations of A4 were almost exclusively aimed at the jihadis.

Originally it had been intended to give him a self-assembly greenhouse. But he’d heard a rumour that such a purchase would outstrip the budget available: he would be presented with a John Lewis voucher as reward for a lifetime at the Security Service.

He knew the face, recognised him. Could put a name to it, and a mother’s address, and an age.

“It’s Winston, yes?”

He heard the suck of breath beside him, and a head that had been held low jerked up. The moment coincided with headlights U-turning in the traffic and catching the Burghers on their plinth, lingering on the boy’s face, then moving on. Quite an interesting moment for Jonas . . . Back where he worked, where just a few more minutes of employment existed, the sight of Winston Gunn – son of Ben Gunn, a Caucasian lorry driver, and Farida, Quetta born of solid Pakistani stock, and a very fractured family as a result of a pregnancy with a white-skinned Briton – would register interest. Dad was long gone. Mum had brought up the boy – listed as resentful, hostile to the world around him, excellent recruiting material. Jonas doubted that any of the other analysts in the work area would have identified the boy’s olive-coloured features without rifling through a laptop’s archive.

“Bit off your beaten track, Winston?”

And back there, in that work area, if they knew, there would have been an organisational stampede at the presence of young Winston – supposedly drawn into the activist net while serving eighteen months’ imprisonment, theft with violence, in HMP Pentonville – within a stone’s throw, or a hand grenade’s, from the Palace of Westminster, Mother of Parliaments, the beating heart of democracy . . . all that crap. Ringed now with dragons’ teeth, and barricades of concrete and police clutching H&K machine pistols, the illuminated edifices represented the High Value Target of the nation’s government . . . No chance Winston’s presence was innocent. They’d be calling up additional firearms units, alerting the ambulance service, warning ministers, planning evacuations, and demanding the immediate presence of the psychology team and behavioural experts. How to proceed? It would be batted around, as the clock ticked. Jonas was not a policeman, nor a paramedic, nor an elected Secretary, nor a psychologist or psychiatrist; he was the little man with an ugly mole on his chin and pebble-lens spectacles who was now getting out from A4 Branch, surplus to requirements. Seemed pretty damned obvious. The team would have been gripped by a fear of “getting it wrong”: he could remember those days in the aftermath of an atrocity when it had been plain as a pikestaff that a jihadi who had reached a target and done his suicide had been fully signed up to a blip on the radar. They would be passing the parcel, hoping the decision – whatever it might be – would be made by someone else. Damned obvious, what to do, and he’d get on with it.

“Don’t worry about me, Winston, I’m just the original nobody.”

The boy wore a big anorak but, as Jonas remembered him from the surveillance snaps, he would have been spare built, no flesh on his bones. The jacket, black and with a couple of paint smears on it, seemed worn and ready for disposal – as was intended. But the boy shivered as if the cold wind off the river reached inside it and hugged him. His breath came in little spurts. No one there to hold his hand. Young and frightened, and the words of encouragement they’d have used would be draining fast from his head.

“Did they volunteer you, Winston? Tell you that your name would be remembered year after year? That one day a plaque would go up on a wall for you, and crowds would say prayers on this day?”

His calm matter-of-fact questions were not answered: he did not expect them to be and did not want them to be. Jonas thought it best to keep a drip-feed in the boy’s ear, to smother his resolve. He was intrigued that Winston had not reacted angrily, exasperated at the use of his old name. The file said he was now called Salah, had been since his recruitment. Pretty much everyone else who came into and went out of the A4 area had experienced being close to those they tracked, had the chance – sometimes for continuous hours – to watch their movements. Not Jonas. He had never made the time to slip out of Thames House, take a bus down to Ludgate Circus, wander into the public gallery at the Old Bailey and sit in on a trial: he maintained the letter of his job description. Now with new-found mischief he shed familiar manacles. His knowledge of Winston, and any of the rest of them, was from what he absorbed from his screen and then stored in the paper files he alone maintained. The breathing next to him accelerated and