Nimrod Rising

by Steven Griffiths

Genres: Action & Adventure

Synopsis

It begins when London's season of goodwill is ripped apart by a bloodthirsty and horrifying outrage. Evidence of the perpetrators points to a puzzling coalition between two widely different terrorist groups.

Though hampered by official political constraints, a rogue power-base within the SIS now decides on eliminating a major source of global mayhem. To achieve this they select a very special killer from the shadowy world of international mercenaries - an ex-Marine called Richard Tyler, codename Nimrod.

There will be one million sterling waiting for Tyler if he can pull off the most dangerous gamble of his life. For, surrounded by an army of trained bodyguards, the target is capable of striking back through his own deadly network of assassins.

But Nimrod's operation has already been uncovered. And now the hunter becomes the prey...

Release date: April 4, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

THE MAN WITH emerald green eyes stood aloof from the shoppers swarming in the maelstrom of Oxford Circus. Zippering his parka to the chin against the bitter winter wind, he squinted in the half-gloom over the madding sea of heads towards the distant Christmas lights of Selfridges, and decided this was close enough.

Bloody close. Maybe too close.

He waited near the edge of the pavement, his nerves raw and the bile rising in his throat. The nod came right on time, warning him. It meant the big saloon was gunned and waiting on Regent Street, ready to scream away northward. Slowly his blunt, sweating fingers closed around the object buried deep in his pocket. Silicon and printed circuits – it was slim and black, with touch-membrane keys, and to the casual eye it might have been a video controller.

Once more the green eyes scanned the length of London’s busiest street. Like an artist he was awed by the size of his canvas. It was the last Saturday before Christmas, and the crowds of people formed a buzzing, pulsating, multiplying organism. It must be the busiest day of the year. Holy Mother, it would be his masterpiece.

HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GOD,PRAY FOR US SINNERS,NOW, AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATHAMEN.

It was set to be a cold Christmas, with iron-grey cloud and not a sign of snow. Outside Selfridges a Highland piper in full tartan was competing with a one-armed busker carving out tortured carols from a polished trumpet. An occasional jingle of coins and a ‘God bless you’, but both men were largely ignored.

Across the street unlicensed street vendors shouted their wares. ‘Fiver yer perfumes – any one. Look ’ere, Yves St Laurent.’ The pavement was glutted as knots of curious punters surrounded the piles of boxes and listened to offers of cheap scent in expensive packaging.

‘All Left Bank stuff, my friends. Straight up, no rubbish.’ Micky Dillon was well into his pantomime. ‘Look, she’ll have one – thank you, darlin’. Who’s next?’

Crushing deadlock of the Christmas rush. Salaries paid early into bank accounts in time for the holiday. On that day it seemed the entire population of Greater London had converged on the West End in a desperate search for presents. Madness. Progress was painfully slow along the surrounding pavement, and pedestrians began to spill onto the road to battle against the blaring horns of red London buses and black cabs.

Constable Collins was out on foot patrol with Woman Constable Petry when he observed the obstruction and immediately he knew it was dangerous. Micky Dillon doing brisk trade – and the pavement blocked. It was only a matter of time before someone fell or was pushed in front of a vehicle. They would have to get chummy and his perfumes shifted quickly.

Micky Dillon was harvesting a crop of five-pound notes when the whistle came. The lookout was a young black kid who had been standing on a litter bin, shelling roast chestnuts. The kid whistled again and signalled two police officers approaching from the direction of Marble Arch. Micky cursed under his breath and began stashing his gear back into a cabin trunk, grabbing vainly at a sea of silly money.

‘Hey, wait a minute! Where’s mine?’ came the jostling protests.

‘That’s all, folks. Closing down.’

But escape was impossible. Already they were bearing down on him, and by the time he had closed up the trunk and turned to heft it onto a makeshift trolley, Constable Collins had him by the collar.

‘And a Merry Christmas to you,’ muttered the policeman, not without humour.

‘Do me a favour, plod. This is straight gear. Simple supply and demand.’

‘Save it, Micky. Hawking without a licence and causing an obstruction. I’ll throw in breach of the peace if you don’t come quietly.’

‘Leave it out, Mr Collins. Look, have a free sample for the wife, compliments of the management. You too, love.’ Petry just grinned at the man’s cheek.

‘Your mistake was not legging it straight away, Micky,’ said Collins.

‘What and leave this lot?’ He indicated the cabin trunk. ‘Do you know how much this stuff is worth?’

‘Yes. That’s why I wouldn’t dream of giving such muck to the wife. Now come on, let’s go.’

WPC Petry was already talking into the microphone of her beat radio, requesting a transit van to take away the seized goods.

Micky Dillon felt pretty sick. To be nicked on a day when the punters were literally throwing their money at him was a crying shame. Diabolical luck, he told himself.

But he was wrong.

Micky Dillon’s luck was better than he knew. So, too, was that of the punters who had hurried off in all the commotion in the mistaken belief that they, too, would be arrested. In that moment all their lives were saved.

In less then two minutes a third policeman, PC Shepherd, arrived on the scene. He took Micky by the arm and escorted him off in the direction of a police transit parked round the corner in Lumley Street, leaving Collins and Petry to secure and hump the seized goods. Hands on hips, Collins glumly surveyed the pile of cardboard boxes, the battered cabin trunk, and the discarded packing material dumped in the shop doorway behind Dillon’s pitch. Playing dustman was one side of the job he hated. With equal distaste the woman officer stepped forward to inspect the debris. Stooping to pull clear a wad of shredded packing, she noticed something hidden there – something quite incongruous. It was a Scots-plaid sports holdall with a heavy brass zipper.

‘John,’ she whispered, staring at it unblinkingly. ‘I think we’ve got an s.o. here.’

Collins took one look at the bag and knew she was right.

‘Don’t use your radio. Just get everyone clear,’ said the girl, reacting professionally in spite of her fear. ‘Do it now!’

Collins turned quickly in an attempt to warn the passers-by above the clamour of the street. But he was dead before he could open his mouth.

When it came, the blast seemed to rip the very air apart. The shock-wave shattered every plateglass window within screaming distance, sending murderous shards in all directions. Silhouetted by an incandescent sheet of yellow flame, people fell to the ground while glass fragments rained down on their heads. Already the discarded boxes were on fire – and so were crumpled bodies nearby, soaked in burning perfume. The tortured screams of the wounded floated skyward with the rising pall of smoke. The bodies of the two police officers had been hurled like dolls into the road, forcing a black cab to swerve across the street and collide broadside against a doubledecker bus. The cabby now lay across the bonnet of his cab, his cap under the bus’s front wheel.

The screams of those merely in shock added to the rising level of panic – a surging crowd unsure which way to run. Some were already retching at the sight of all the blood. A traffic warden had removed his overcoat, determined to render help but dazedly wondering which of the bodies to cover first – his white face damp with tears of frustration. Unnoticed in the confusion, two young men reached through the shattered glass of a fashion shop and helped themselves to leather jackets and blue jeans.

Inside the transit van PC Shepherd heard the report and felt its sides shake. In disbelief he leapt out onto the road, losing his helmet in his headlong dash back to the disaster area. Dear God in heaven! His sergeant hardly recognised the strangled voice on the radio. Nothing in Shepherd’s training had prepared him for this.

A fleet of wailing ambulances was now approaching painfully slowly. What they found was chaos and utter carnage. A press of onlookers was jockeying for sight of the bloodbath, and only by mounting the pavement could the ambulances negotiate the jam of backed-up traffic stuck behind the mangled bus and the taxi. In the gathering darkness blue beacons flashed, ghoulishly animating the faces of the dead, and lending an extra madness to the writhing of the wounded.

Ashen-faced ambulancemen fought their way through, the glass on the pavement crunching under their feet. As one reached the epicentre of the blast he was appalled by the open-mouthed inertia of the ablebodied people looking on – unable or just unwilling to help. Then he noticed a fair-haired man, stripped down to an olive-green T-shirt, who was applying a makeshift dressing to a young girl whose arm had been severed at the elbow. With one hand he gripped her upper arm tightly to close off the brachial artery, whilst with the other hand and his teeth he desperately tried to tie off a bloody piece of cloth at the site of the spurting wound. This man clearly knew the dangers; he knew how quickly blood loss and shock could kill the injured, and that infection from soiled dressings was the least of their problems. The ambulanceman thanked God that someone had the presence of mind to act in time. This was good, basic, efficient casualty medicine: seal off the pipes and keep the poor sods breathing.

Looking around as he quickly went to work in checking blackened bodies for any glimmer of life, the ambulanceman saw other evidence of the man’s handiwork. He had used a leather belt and strips torn from his own outer shirt to lash plastic bags over a sucking chest wound and pinion the casualty’s arm over his stoved-in chest, thereby saving the victim from drowning in the frothy blood he was coughing. He had clearly treated others too: some of the unconscious were lying face-down with heads tilted into the recovery position, to prevent fluid seepage from blocking their air passages. They at least had now some chance of survival.

‘That’s all right, mate,’ said the senior ambulanceman arriving with trauma pads and heavy-duty sterile dressings, as his men followed up with stretchers. ‘You’ve done your bit, thanks. We’ll take it from here.’

The man in the T-shirt spoke rapidly, as if his mind was on auto-pilot: ‘The two in the gutter are dead. No throat pulse at all. We need IVs and plasma – fast. Tell your men to watch out for glass and nail fragments. There may also be booby traps, so don’t touch any wires you see.

‘Jesus Christ. Look after this little one – she’s hurt bad. Lost a couple of units. Shallow breathing, weak pulse. Unconscious but still hanging in, poor kid.’

As the ambulanceman took over control of the brachial pressure point, the man in the T-shirt gently stroked the girl’s cheek, feeling for a break beneath the swelling.

‘It’s OK, I’ve got her.’ Numb with shock the uniforms took over, and a slow wail of fire-engine sirens accompanied their work. Fortunately the injured would not bleed as quickly in the cold weather, but many were still under threat of death through shock and exposure.

‘Are you a doctor, sir?’ The voice belonged to a police sergeant. ‘The medics say you’ve saved some lives here.’

The man in the T-shirt was crouching by a blackened and twisted litter-bin. He gazed intently at the scorch marks on the shop-fronts and at the charred remains of the burned-out cardboard boxes. It was cold now and he shivered.

‘Sir, for the record, are you a doctor?’

‘No, I’m not a medic,’ the man murmured at last and massaged the back of his neck. ‘Just seen a lot of this stuff before, that’s all.’ He forced a reassuring grin. ‘Sergeant, do you think they could spare one of those blankets. I’m freezing my nuts off.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Bet you could do with a drop of brandy, too. I’ll check if they’ve got a St Bernard in the wagon.’ The young officer turned to walk away.

From out of the freezing darkness came the paddle of helicopter rotors accompanied by the blinking red and green spots of navigation lights. The police observers looked down upon an army of black-coated officers that were cordoning the area. Neither had seen anything like it before.

They saw the scene of desolation, of twisted bundles under grey blankets and the black oily puddles. There were large milling crowds at either end of Oxford Street, which had been closed off between Marble Arch and Regent Street with orange luminous tape and metal stanchions. Outside broadcast units could be seen taking equipment from huge trucks parked at the bottom of Baker Street.

For the onlookers the sight of gay Christmas lighting on the streets merely underlined the tragedy of the event: the eerie desolation of a deserted Oxford Street just before rush hour, and the innocent lives that were scattered on the concrete.

After two hours Chief Inspector Kramer, the senior uniformed officer at the scene, ran over his notes knowing there would be brass hats all over him in the morning if he had forgotten anything. In the Met you only screw up once.

The emergency medical teams had been deployed and the dead and injured had now been ferried away. Cordons were positioned, traffic cleared (some by tow trucks) and order restored. Forensics, EOD and Anti-Terrorist Branch had all been notified, and the District Commander briefed by phone. The immediate response had been handled by Tactical Support Group in their roving transits. The command post was a burger-bar from which Kramer coordinated media briefings. The press wanted every last detail – but what they wanted most were two things: the perpetrator of the outrage and the name of the man in the olive green T-shirt.

Kramer made no comment in response to the first question, despite what he thought privately. When he made enquiries on the second question, he was told that no one had bothered to ask. The man was fair, about five-eleven, tanned and fit-looking, with no distinguishing marks. He had simply disappeared into the crowd, leaving behind the borrowed blanket. One minute standing there with a plastic cup of brandy – the next minute gone.

The sergeant had been the last to speak to him.

‘Sorry about the little girl. I take it she wasn’t yours.’

‘No. Not mine.’ A heavy sigh.

‘They say one minute she was doing fine; next minute she just went. Bloody shame.’

After that the man said nothing. Just melted away.

* * *

The man’s disappearance was bad news. His evidence could be important for the inquest and for the criminal investigation that would inevitably follow. Chief Inspector Kramer felt a slow-burning mix of rage and despair rise within him. Was it just the evidence he wanted? Or something else? It was difficult to tell, as he relived the horrors he had witnessed. The deaths of two of his own officers. Two kids planning their wedding in the spring. Two lives wasted for a headline. Dear God, let someone pay for that!

Pay for all of it.

THE PAYMENT HAD begun with a ‘Red Jacket’, and it fell to Halliday to see the debt paid in full.

Sitting at his desk on the fifth floor of Century House, the gleaming glass-tower headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, he could remember it clearly. It had been early January, just after the holidays: the first day of snow that winter.

‘I’d like you to handle this one, Peter,’ the Deputy Director-General had said at the conclusion of morning prayers when the other senior officers had dawdled from the room and the two of them were alone.

Sir Alistair was not quite himself on that day, distant and brooding throughout the meeting. Not until later did Halliday realise how the older man had lain in ambush for him. For that’s what it was: an ambush. ‘I feel the matter merits our most special attention; your most special attention,’ he had said without looking up from his notes. The folder slid across the polished surface of the table and came to rest just inches from Halliday’s curious fingers.

A Red Jacket – Director-General’s special enquiry.

Halliday had picked it up with equal measures of trepidation and excitement, sensing the political advantage it represented to a man like himself: one poised on the brink of directorship. He glanced at the title sheet already knowing what he would see.

‘The Oxford Street bomb.’ He raised his eyebrows in that urbane manner for which he was already well known. ‘Something of a hot potato, I understand.’

‘Quite. Stick your head out the window and you can hear it from here: gnashing teeth at the Cabinet Office and Fleet Street baying for blood. PM’s furious with the Special Branch goon squad.’

‘And you expect me to take it?’

Sir Alistair had expected a touch of reticence. That was good, a man too eager to stick his neck out would have ulterior motives, but Halliday was exercising a healthy degree of caution.

‘Don’t worry, Peter, there’s no question of any pressure from Whitehall. We’re not the ones on trial, the Defence of the Realm is still the responsibility of MI5, and they’re the buggers who’ll carry the can for the Oxford Street mess.’ Sir Alistair put down his fountain-pen and fished in his jacket pocket for a crumpled white handkerchief which he used to dab the ink from the side of his index finger. The ink he used was green, as was the privilege of Directors-General of MI6. ‘This is my investigation. No outsiders. You’ll answer directly to me.’

‘If that’s what you wish, sir, then I’ll do my best.’ Nice touch of modesty from Halliday.

‘It is – and you’d better.’ There was a trace of a scowl as his wiry eyebrows knitted together aggressively. ‘Bloody thing’s been twice round Whitehall before landing at the Foreign Office. I’m not altogether happy we should be handling it, but there we are. Somebody has to clean up after Five.’ Sir Alistair was enjoying his current stint in the DG’s chair while the old man convalesced after a major bowel resection. And he never missed a chance to rubbish the sister service.

‘You’ll keep the team small, pull young Stephenson in – he’s a good man – and indoctrinate nobody without my express permission. Is that clear?’

It was. Perfectly.

That was back in January, Halliday reflected at his desk, staring out at bare branches against a white sky over the murky Thames. Nearly a month after the incident; Christmas and New Year already celebrated and forgotten. He had received the file then with decidedly mixed feelings. What had changed in the interim?

This was now mid-February and the Red Jacket that had come to him almost empty, and had occupied the majority of his working days since then, was now over four inches deep, with three hundred enclosures. But he was no happier about his custody of the file. How could he be? Reading the new enclosures as they trickled in, day after day – the frustration had infected him more than anyone. In quiet moments, long after the tumult had died away, he was struck by the obscenity of the act. Death by remote control. From the pages of the folder their names appealed to him for justice like Scrooge’s Christmas ghosts, and in some strange way he felt himself the caretaker of their memory. For him, the dead would not rest easily while their killers still walked the streets.

Now had come the subtle change of attitude. The meetings with Sir Alistair – back in his own office after the return to duty of the Director-General – were becoming more frequent, more certain of their ultimate, inescapable course of action. Halliday now realised what Sir Alistair had intended all along, right from the morning he first slid that folder across the table.

Perhaps it would have been wisest for him to push the folder right back across the same table. Too late now. With each new meeting, he had to watch himself.

‘What does C make of it all?’ Halliday had asked, that very morning, giving the Director-General his traditional designation and expecting the reassurance of the master’s blessing. Sir Alistair had gone very quiet at first.

‘Sir Alistair, C is aware of the findings of my report?’

‘He is not.’ Stated simply, as headmaster to pupil. ‘Nor shall he be. I told you right from the off that this was my enquiry and was restricted.’

‘But I thought the Director-General, after all …’

‘I’m afraid the DG is not one who is prepared to stand up and be counted. He is not one of us.’

‘Us?’ Halliday did his utmost not to appear impertinent. ‘And who are we … sir?

‘The Old School. Cold Warriors. Ways and Means Act, and all that. The man doesn’t belong amongst us. Twenty-two years at the Ministry of Defence – good God, the man’s never run an agent in his life. We both know the Cabinet Office insinuated him into that chair so that he could tattle back to Whitehall.’ It was an open secret around SIS headquarters that Sir Alistair’s accession to the chair, on the death of the previous DG, had been blocked at the last moment by the Cabinet Secretary. It was the Cabinet Secretary’s job to chair the Joint Intelligence Committee and to appoint the chief of each intelligence service. Though the exact reasons remained shrouded in secrecy, Sir Alistair knew he would never be numbered amongst the immortals whose portraits gazed down from the walls of C’s office. Understandably, perhaps, Sir Alistair now harboured a bitter resentment against the virtual invalid who had deprived him of the ultimate accolade.

There was a part of Halliday which sensed the danger that attended their conspiracy, and urged him to steer clear before his own career was dragged into the abyss. But there were the ghosts, too, to be considered, and a powerful sense of outrage behind his relentless investigation – one of blind justice crying out for action.

Now was the time for that action.

Dispassionately he regarded the Red Jacket on the desk before him. He opened the file and re-read the damning evidence once more.

There had been an indecency about the speed of the initial investigation and its conclusions, but when the Prime Minister wants answers, everyone moves fast. That goes without saying.

The whole circus had been drawn in: Police Bomb Disposal Unit assisted by specially attached Ammunition Technical Officers drawn from the army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) units. They had moved in at first light with an impressive array of equipment designed to isolate and identify fragments of the bomb. Fortunately someone had covered the scene with plastic sheets so that the overnight winds and rain had not obliterated vital evidence. The blinking and beeping hand-held detectors played their part, but in the end it came down to the human touch: brushes and tweezers and numbered plastic packets, and the infinite patience of professionals. When all the many fragments of metal, canvas, leather, glass and unidentified charcoal had been collected from the scene, the jigsaw puzzle was taken away to the Police Forensic Laboratories in Chepstow where the bomb was to be rebuilt. There was a quite understandable delay in completing the job, due to the fact that many of the pieces had to be surgically removed from the bodies of the victims – the living and the dead.

Over two thousand individual fragments were catalogued, including the heavy-duty brass zipper from the Scotch-plaid hold-all which had held the device. Harmless enough in the normal course of events, that zipper had penetrated the spleen of a 34-year-old mother of three who had subsequently bled to death. Each twisted piece of metal or fragment of glass told its own grisly story: one of cowardly and senseless murder.

The report which eventually landed on the Prime Minister’s desk put the bomb at about twelve pounds of fragmentation materials packed around an explosive charge of just sixteen ounces of commercial dynamite. There was an extra degree of cold-bloodedness in the way the nails and ball-bearings had been packed on one side of the charge only, so as to achieve a concentrated arc of destruction shooting away from the shop doorway and into the crowd of shoppers. A full report of casualties and statements from surviving witnesses was included, but their evidence added nothing to that of the forensic investigators – apart from chilling first-hand accounts of the experience. No one had seen anything suspicious or anyone actually placing the hold-all in the shop doorway. That was hardly surprising really; it was the holiday rush and everyone had been too busy. No one was expecting to be blown to pieces for Christmas.

Two days later, when the Metropolitan Police Commissioner presented the findings of his investigations to a specially convened briefing in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, he had no hard evidence of who the bombers were or why they had acted. That wasn’t good enough, the Prime Minister let him know – not when the whole country was screaming for answers and Fleet Street editorials were telling them the culprit was so bloody obvious.

Only Halliday’s department had remained deliberately noncommittal, and for very good reasons. The agent they had been running inside the General Staff of the Provos had actually supplied details in advance of the planned outrage. Not exact details, but close enough. Sir Alistair’s decision then had been to protect the identity of his agent by sitting on the information, reasoning that the planned telephone warning would give police time to clear the area. In the event no warning was given. Those involved in the suppression of this information then closed ranks, hoping to God that ‘Lochinvar’ would prove to be worth the sacrifice.

On the third day after the explosion, and with Christmas Eve only days away, the incident took on an extra dimension. Within the the space of an hour, two separate claims of responsibility were logged. The first came from a man with an Irish accent who telephoned Moss Side Police Station in Manchester; after giving the correct recognition code, he claimed a victory for the Provisional IRA.

That seemed to be it: what the Security Service was waiting for.

But then came the second telephone call, one which flashed through Whitehall like wildfire. It was received by the International Affairs Editor of the Economist. According to this claim, a blow had been struck against ‘military, economic and cultural imperialism’ by a group calling itself ‘Al Sharif’.

It was that which split the case wide open – and Special Branch liaison had been forced to call in the spooks.

Halliday studied the file with care. With the same care an expert uses to assemble a bomb, knowing that one slip might mean his own demise.

He heaved a long sigh, terminated with a public schoolboy’s curse. Maybe he had been too many years in Her Majesty’s armed forces, and later the Intelligence Service; now he felt his country had finally bled him dry. As group head in charge of Middle East theatre he was constantly on call, answerable at a moment’s notice to the DDG, who was in turn frequently turned out in the middle of the night to answer questions at the Foreign Office. If he had had any real sense he would have followed his two brothers into merchant banking, and been worth a fortune by now.

Bollocks!

He knew that the Red Jacket had come to him for a reason: not because he was the one man at Century House who had all the pieces of the Middle East puzzle, but because he was reliable, the DDG’s man, and allegiance mattered more than anything in their line of business.

He flicked through the folios to remind himself of the events which had led up to this latest outrage. The bulky file was jammed with copies of documents supplied by his contacts within friendly agencies, the network of Western Intelligence: CIA, FBI, RCMP, ASIO. Here and there were the distinctive over-sized transcripts of diplomatic cipher traffic accompanied by the crest of GCHQ in Cheltenham. As in all such investigations the file represented hundreds of hours of painstaking effort. But what it really represented was a mandate to act. His bomb was assembled.

A knock on his door.

‘Yes.’

The door opened and a thin man entered, carrying a blank cover which contained a secret loose-minute folder. Within the building such folders, their contents temporarily extracted from the main file, were always carried around with titles and serial numbers covered; no one was to know who was working on what, unless it directly concerned them.

‘Six minutes late, Stephenson.’

The other man winced in a well-practised manner which gratified Halliday. Just one of the few advantages in having such a passive animal working as one’s section head was being able to vent one’s anger upon him.

Stephenson checked his watch, knowing he was early.

‘Sorry, I thought you said …’

‘Never mind that now. Let’s have it.’

Stephenson placed the loose-minute folder, an extract from the Red Jacket, into the extended hand of his boss. He was keenly aware of the shortness of Halliday’s fuse these past weeks, but was still as yet unaware of the true reason for it.

‘The evidence, Stephenson?’

It was to be yet another review.

‘The connection is quite clear,’ explained Stephenson, while Halliday read the results of their newest and most promising line of enquiry. ‘The trail leads back to the Colonel.’

‘ “Quite clear” you say.’

‘Yes, sir. Via the customary conduits and middle-men.’

Halliday decided to play devil’s advocate for a while.

‘If I were to tell you this all looks far too circumstantial, how would you handle that criticism?’ Even Stephenson knew that this question was one Halliday was already anticipating from the DDG. ‘Take it a stage at a time, walk me through to the conclusions.’

‘OK. Leaving aside the negotiations with the Sanussis for the moment. Bomb goes off in London. Immediate speculation in the newspapers that the IRA are at it again. No particular reason for that, but it’s the obvious conclusion to jump to. The