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

eyes flashed at him in the gloom, and twice more the wristwatch was checked. To be expected. Just a few minutes to seven o’clock, and the traffic around Westminster was near solid, and the boats were doing good noisy trade. Jonas should be in the atrium with the smattering of colleagues and standing smartly for the arrival of AssDepDG . . . Also on the hour the shift of armed police around Westminster changed. It had been learned from phone intercepts that the perceived jihadi wisdom was to attack a protected target just before the relief team showed up, and when the guards’ concentration was drifting.

“I suppose you did a video, Winston. Usually takes several attempts to get it word-perfect. I suppose they wrote it for you? Treating you like a pack animal really. Just a donkey, there to carry the load. Did you wonder, Winston, when they were coaching you for the video, why their own kids and their own nephews never seemed to be asked to wear the vest? Look after their own, don’t they? Sometimes, they don’t think the donkey will go the whole mile, and might bug out, so then they sit a little distance away and watch and have their own electronic firing trigger. Unlikely they’ll have put real trust in you, Winston. Could be observing us now, could be about to . . . Don’t mind me.”

He reached across the shadow shape, slipped a fist inside the Velcro fastening of the anorak, felt the boy squirm away from him. It was a moment of maximum risk. The boy would have had his hand on a button deep in his pocket. Might press it, might not. Jonas’s fingers found a mess of wires and his grip closed on them. It would not have been part of the boy’s induction to martyrdom to receive a lesson in defusing the beast. The back of Jonas’s hand brushed against metal builders’ nails, ball-bearings and assorted junk for shrapnel wounds, and worse. The boy did not resist, not yet . . . If Jonas had not chosen that bench Winston would now be walking, like a trance had trapped him, towards an entrance to the Palace of Westminster where the public milled and officials and politicians would be leaving and the armed police were stationed. But he had unwittingly chosen that bench. The boy did not fight him, did not detonate, did not flash a blade at him, just wriggled, his breath coming faster. Jonas had not an idea in his head as to the detail of the potential wiring, and whether it would blow when he tugged.

“I’m thinking how it was, Winston, when they dropped you off. Driven you up from Peckham or wherever they had you in the countdown. A few words of encouragement, but not many. A little slap on the back and a bit of a lecture on the evils of the Crusaders. The door opened for you and you step out, and it slams behind you, and you might just have seen the tail-lights disappearing . . . But one of them might still be watching – getting agitated now because you’re running late. Except the scattering of your body parts here, and mine, is hardly a big deal. But a bit of a waste after all the time and resources invested in you, Winston.”

He had a tension on the wires, and gulped. Jonas had never attempted anything that ticked the box marked Danger, had never considered an action labelled as Extreme Danger, and the last time he had witnessed a fight outside Waterloo station he had not thought of intervening but had crossed the road, looked the other way . . . They would be, by now, in the atrium. The prosecco would be uncorked, nibbles laid out, and the chorus would have started, and the AssDepDG would be coming down in the elevator carrying an envelope with the voucher in it, and a piece of paper with something anodyne written on it . . . A blur of conversations and impatience. “Little sod, he’s buggered off home . . . I’m not hanging about, not kicking my heels here . . . A waste of space, no idea of the reality of keeping the streets safe . . . Just a cursor pusher . . . We had a result today, brilliant eyeball . . . you might have noticed there was nothing from him, sitting at his bloody desk – no praise, no cojones, nothing – how rude can a guy get?” His fault that he had no friend there? Their fault that he was outside the loop? But, whatever Vera said, past caring.

“I’m wondering, Winston, if you had the chance to call your mum, or didn’t they allow that? An opportunity for a little cuddle before you went off to Paradise and all those virgins waiting for you. I think your mum would have been properly upset when the police came to break down her front door, tell her what you’d done, show her the video. Better this way, lad. What I always say, rather be safe than sorry. So we don’t have an accident.”

Believe that? Not really . . . He pulled. His mouth sagged open. Nothing happened except that the motion dragged the boy half across his lap. The wires came away, and a small household battery with them. His hands shook and the boy gasped, and there was no flash and no thunder roar and no spiralling up of body parts. Horns trumpeted in the traffic and a party on a boat was raucous.

“Just lift your arms up, Winston, please. Don’t think of bolting back where you came from, because they won’t love you. They’ll speak badly of you. Yes, arms up.”

Docile, obedient. It was how, long ago out on the Surrey hills on a sunny Sunday, he might have worked a cardigan from Vera’s shoulders – without much hope of action to follow. The boy raised his arms and Jonas eased off his anorak. The rain had come on harder and the air was chilled and the boy’s shiver was worse. A length of knotted string tied the vest around the boy’s