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

All part of their quite dreadful vanity. What I’m saying is that we do not need clever people with top academic qualifications, nor the best of the psychologists, nor the sympathetic imams to read him. Just have to know that he is embittered, resentful, like that lone wasp, and he wants to hurt. Quite simple, except for a problem . . . You have to find him.”

“Grateful for your opinion . . . Are we winning? Is this the end-game?”

“God, no.” Doug laughed. “Of course not – just holding the line. Each one we lower, another stands up. Actually, they’re regrouping. Your age – it’ll see you to retirement . . . Sorry, you did not expect to hear that.”

The session was finished. Tristram and Izzy were left quiet, shell-shocked, had to absorb what was so different from the marginally more positive “Teaching According to the Book of Thames House”. All so basic, and from down at the level of the gutter. They did a brief handshake and Doug was already back at the window, leaning out, and there was a flash of his lighter, then smoke, then a muffled voice that echoed back to the room.

“So, only one problem. Good luck to you. You swat the wasp, but first you have to find him.”

They went out into the evening. A majestic church in front of them. The river flowing at high tide behind them. Crowded pavements, traffic jams, jostling crowds.

Tristram checked his phone.

“That’s Wobby. Wants to see the picture again, the one he tore up. Wants me to mark the necessary on it, the nostril and the eye, what he didn’t see first time he looked at it – now doubting his own judgement. Maybe his nerve’s going. Maybe.”

The table had been cleared, the dishwasher churned in the kitchen and the radio played a concert, and their talk drifted. Jonas had a notepad in front of him and wrote the barest of details of what needed checking, and thought . . .

Time to check the caravan’s tyres – probably needed changing.

The target the team went after that night was closer to “moderate risk” than “strong risk”, but was to go in the net because they were fearful now of letting a potential hazard stay loose on the streets. The men and women who made little secret of their feelings for him would now be deployed in vehicles or on foot, monitoring cameras’ images. It was the time when the Subject of Interest, the SoI, usually came from his brother-in-law’s home, walked the length of three streets, then returned to his own address. They would be sitting in their vehicles and leaning against shadowed shop doorways, and the pictures would throw a dull light inside the back of a van . . . and the police firearms teams would be readying their kit, the lethal stuff that added to the stress levels.

Time to hustle for reservations because any pleasant site would be booked up, already four months before the summer holiday, high season.

A front door opening, two men – both of Pakistani origin and both with a heritage in the frontier city of Quetta – hugging each other farewell on the doorstep. Engines starting up and the exhausts chucking out fumes, and fags dropped out of open windows, and the foot surveillance people gulping the last of a chocolate bar or spitting clear some well-worked chewing-gum, and the night’s “boss” watching the images and holding the microphone button in his hand and the veins showing on his forehead: always the big moment. The messages coming in as to which of them, near the SoI, had a good eyeball.

Time to decide whether this year the cat would go with them or be left with the neighbours; Vera refused to contemplate sending the Norwegian Forest to a kennel.

The cry was for “Go”. And repeated. “Go” resonant in a dozen earpieces. Never seemed important to Jonas to be there but the team, each last one of them and every team operating in the A Branch of Thames House, seemed to get a big kick out of being there: supposed it would be similar to when a fox was flushed out and the hounds started screaming and the horses galloped faster. Immaterial to Jonas but he was the one despised as the Eternal Flame and now grudgingly accepted because of the initials after his name. The SoI would be walking briskly on the pavement, head mostly hidden in a hoodie, hands in his pockets. The team would be closing around him, coming fast, two cars from the front and two from the back, and the guns out. What they all wanted, the adrenaline rush, and it meant little to Jonas.

Time to decide whether Vera could take the tomato plants with them, remove them from the greenhouse, and plan where they would be stored during the journey.

A residential street on the west side of Luton was transformed. The SoI was pitched forward by the first to reach him from the cars. Doors hanging open. Machine pistols aimed. The target flattened and spread-eagled. The air filled with near hysterical shouting because the guns would seek to dominate, and all of them hyper-ventilating and living the moment and believing what they did was “saving the nation”. His wrists twisted behind his back and the restraints being tightened. Hands running over his body, feeling in the orifices they could their get gloved fingers into. The target would have great saucer eyes, and would be panting, the reality of his situation not yet fully comprehended: give it ten minutes. Radios crackling, then the scrape of metal on metal as weapons were made safe. Lights coming on in front rooms, and faces peering from behind curtains, and yelling from the team and from the armed cops for them to get the hell out of sight. The target was down to Jonas, the Eternal Flame, who never went out, did not need to, and who could forego the theatricals. Was the guy armed? He was not. Was the guy likely to implode from an explosives