The Crocodile Hunter Gerald Seymour (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📖

area, and Jonas Merrick’s space, were expected to be tidied, the desks cleared and the screens locked down, so that the cleaners could come in overnight. They were all vetted and regarded as truly faithful of the security rigours, and they would take out all the overnight paper debris, along with food rubbish and the usual mountain of squashed tissues and water bottles. Discarded paper would be earmarked for shredders or general disposal. Torn segments of a view of a dark stretch of water, location unknown and unimportant, where debris floated and where the surface was undisturbed, would not have been regarded as a security lapse. The cleaners had removed what he had, dismissively, torn up. The new picture was spat out. A pair of circles had been marked on the picture. He took a magnifying glass from the drawer of his desk and used it to scrutinise the two areas of water within the circles; good enough to see the nostril cavity and the brightness of the eye. From the top drawer he found his Sellotape. He stretched up, fastened the picture to the wall.

Dominating his thoughts were not the picture of the crocodile’s head and shoulders, not the one that showed the uneven rows of teeth, but the two circles and the signs that he had not recognised.

The quiet built around him. Usually, even if Room 12 on the third floor, on the south side of Thames House, was empty except for him, he would hear the comings and goings in the corridor outside and doors slamming and voices, greetings and laughter – talk of “fucking traffic”, of babies shrieking all night, of a restaurant that had been a “total bloody rip-off”, and “absolutely off-side, referee a complete wanker”, and he heard nothing. Nothing until . . . the sound of footsteps with iron tips at the toes and heels.

The outer door opened. “You about, Jonas?”

“I am.”

His protector: the man who provided Jonas Merrick with what was known in the Russian mafia as the “roof”, the power in the land that kept him safe. “A bit of a shambles in the night.”

“Affecting me? I don’t think so or I would have been notified.”

“Not affecting you as long as we are not bidding on your behalf at auction.”

“All quiet on my front. Nothing that disturbs me except for that. Nothing . . . ‘nothing’ that I know of.”

“A bad time, Jonas.”

“With respect, a bad time for the last two years. A thumb over the dyke crack.”

“I suppose it’s what we might call a Churchill moment.”

“The Battle of Britain. Churchill asks, ‘What reserves do we have?’ And the fight in the skies is at a desperate stage, and they are coming in waves, and Keith Park answers, ‘There are none.’ Is that where we are?”

Jonas had learned in the last three years that the man he knew as AssDepDG had been baptised with the name of Huw Denys, knew that he was state educated, had worked in pretty much every section of the Service, would not rise higher and entertained a lack of correctness . . . his like would not be seen again. Wanted to have the sole of a boot on the throats of the returnees, gave not a damn – however harmless they now might be – for the one-time fighters languishing in Syrian, Iraqi or Kurdish gaols. Talked up Jonas’s corner in meetings with the Thames House hierarchy. Was an ally but would also, with ruthlessness, keep Jonas tethered to the treadmill.

“With brass knockers on it, you could say . . . Had to rout this team from out of the pub last night. No clean knickers and no clean socks, unless they had them here, no time to go home, and we’ve parcelled them off to meet a courier run. Fully involved in North-East, North-West, West Midlands, and South-West is covering from Bristol almost up to Thames Valley. The onus on our surveillance teams, Jonas, length and breadth of the country, is at breaking-point, unsustainable . . . The courier is sailing tonight from Zeebrugge and will dock at Hull. Believe it is a decisive weapon. Don’t know about a hand-over point, or a target. Big cock-up because North-East were tasked with it, but they made a case for the full works on a Leeds boy. We are shuffling round the board, Jonas – but not your problem.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said without warmth. Was regarded as a “miserable old sod” and did little to prove the title wrong.

“Just thought you should know – just thought you should know not to bid at auction, if you know what I mean.”

Conversation over, footsteps echoing away. Jonas buried himself in the almost private world of his card index archive and searched for new snippets of information on buoyant jihadi fighters gone, fate unknown as the war turned brutally against them, all of them potential returnees if they had survived, and the tantalising scraps offered up by the interrogators doing their business in the holding cages. Flitted between the identities of the fighters he rated as dangerous.

He knew that section of beach because he had been there with his mother and with his elder brother and his sister.

It ran west from the town of Deal. Where he sheltered, the sand had been replaced by an orange carpet of shingle. The boat had been pulled up, high enough to be clear of the surf. He shivered, could not control it. Down the coast was the ferry port of Dover. It would have been twelve years since he had last been on the beach here, and his mum would have taken a day off work, the sun had been shining, and he remembered that she had persuaded his half-brother to come, aged 22 then, and had sat against the low wall at the back of the shingle and had worked his way through a six-pack and had smoked half a packet of fags. And his half-sister had been there and had spent most of the afternoon whining about being bored, alternating the complaints