TWENTY-ONE

OBSERVATION – THE FIRST and most important skill the assassin learns. Unless you have surveyed every inch of the ground you are going to attack, all your weapons and your tactics are useless.

I look, I study, and only then do I strike.

Sallum had walked twice down Cedar Road now. He moved swiftly, with his head down, and changed his overcoat in the car before returning: if anyone was watching, he wanted to make sure he didn’t draw any attention to himself. He glanced at number sixteen through the corner of his eye, using the few seconds available to memorise every inch of the building. It was a typical Victorian terraced house, built on two floors, probably with a cellar, and another room in the loft. There was no entry at the sides, and although the front door would come away easily enough under sustained gunfire, it was likely to be well defended.

They are trained soldiers, and they are expecting me. They won’t die without a struggle.

Sallum walked on. Dusk was falling, and there were only a few people on the streets. Ash Road ran parallel to Cedar, another row of Victorian terraces, most of them bought up and modernised over the past few years – they all had expensive looking cars outside, and flash new kitchens inside. He walked along the street, counting out each house. Number twenty-two, unless he had made a mistake in his calculations, backed directly on to number sixteen. Unlucky, thought Sallum surveying the ordinary-looking house. But your number is up.

Sallum walked on, allowing himself one more glance over the house. If there were three or four men in there, he had a problem. He headed back towards the car, got in, and pulled out the laptop he kept under the back seat. Hooking up the computer to the mobile phone, he fired up a web connection, then logged on to the electoral roll site used by junk mail companies to compile their mailshots. You needed a password to get in, but Sallum had already signed up for a subscription using a false password.

He tapped the Ash Road house’s details into the computer. The information was transmitted down the line, and the answer took almost a minute to appear on the screen. Mrs Westhoff, plus a Celia Westhoff, described as a minor. A mother and a daughter – maybe a divorcee.

She will offer little resistance.

Sallum snapped the computer shut and walked briskly down the road. There was one other person walking along the street, and he waited for them to pass before making his move. He rang once on the doorbell, fingering the P7 in the palm of his hand.

The woman who answered the door looked to be in her early forties, with brown hair tied up behind her head, a loose looking dress, and no shoes. ‘Electricity meter,’ said Sallum sharply, taking a pace inside the hallway, half-closing the door behind him.

People judge you by your appearance, Sallum reminded himself. So long as you wear new, clean clothes, are clean shaven and smell of soap, they usually trust you. She was wary, but not so wary as to slam the door in his face. ‘Your card?’ she said, looking at him suspiciously.

He took another pace into the hallway, and dug into his pocket as if searching for his wallet. Then he swung the P7 up and jabbed the barrel of the gun into her forehead. He squeezed the trigger twice, the two bullets smashing through her skull. She dropped to the floor, her knees buckling beneath her. A trickle of blood seeped from the back of her head, draining into the blue carpet that stretched from the hall to the kitchen at the back.

Sallum slammed the door shut, then held the gun up, ready for anybody who might be coming down the stairs to see what had happened. He counted to twenty, then tucked the gun back into his pocket.

At least she was alone, he thought to himself as he stepped over the body. He had executed several children already this week, and he was starting to tire of it. They whimpered and screamed and wriggled. They didn’t know what death was.

Throwing two bolts across the front door, Sallum checked first the kitchen, then the first floor. The master bedroom gave the best view of the houses behind. The neatly trimmed lawn of this house backed on to a wooden fence, then the gardens of Cedar Road. Number sixteen’s was a tangled mess of weeds, a few metres of scruffy lawn, a rusted swing, and a huge pile of black plastic rubbish bags.

I imagine the woman I have just killed despaired of the way the neighbours behind keep their garden.

From the kit bag slung over his back, Sallum took out a Hensoldt 6 × 42 sniper rifle sight. The German-manufactured sight, as well as being one of the most expensive telescopic sights in the world, was the only one that fitted the Heckler & Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle that Sallum preferred for shooting at distance. He held the Hensoldt to his right eye. At up to six hundred metres it gave perfect vision; it was less than fifty metres to the house opposite, and he could see straight in. One light was burning in what he took to be the kitchen, and another was visible on the first floor. Scanning the other windows, he couldn’t make out any sign of movement.

Never mind, he told himself. They will be there soon.

The smell rose from the body as if it were an open sewer: a harsh, putrid stench of decaying flesh, sweaty clothes and unwashed hair. The skin had started to turn grey, and the limbs were showing signs of softening.

He had seen enough of them in his time, but Matt had never grown used to the scent of a corpse.

‘Let’s get him upstairs,’ said Ivan.

A clump of hair came off in Matt’s hand as he grabbed Whitson’s head. He cast it aside, lifted the corpse by the shoulders from under the floorboards, and started climbing the stairs. Ivan took the legs and lifted the body clear of the ground. They stopped on the first floor landing, propping Whitson up against the wall. His head slumped forward and one of his eyes fell open. ‘The trick is to make him look alive,’ said Ivan. ‘Back home we used to pull this one regularly on the Army. Get a corpse, make him look like a live one, let the soldiers think they’ve shot him, and when they come over to inspect the body, you blow them up.’ Ivan chuckled. ‘Worked like a dream.’

Matt glanced down at Whitson’s corpse: he looked like a stiff, and a badly decaying one at that. ‘Christ, even when he was alive this bloke looked half-dead.’

‘Wash him up, and put some powder on his cheeks, that will freshen him,’ said Ivan. ‘At a distance, he’ll look alive. When you’re about to shoot a man, you don’t spend a lot of time checking how well he’s looking.’

The barrel of the Heckler & Koch PSG-1 would have been just visible at the first floor window: an inch of black metal emerging from a circular hole cut into the glass. The rifle was mounted on a black metal frame that held it perfectly still. Behind it, Sallum stood completely motionless, the lights all switched off around him, his eye level with the Hensoldt sight.

Sallum had played out the sequence of events a hundred times in his head: his preparation was always immaculate, and it was only through constant mental and physical training that he felt certain he could always claim victory over the odds. He would wait here until one of the two men in the house revealed themselves at the window, then he would shoot him with the rifle. When he was dead, he would rush through the garden, scale the fence and start his assault on the building. One man he felt certain he could defeat. That was why it was vital he shot the other one before he went inside.

He glanced down at his watch. It was eleven-fifteen at night, and he had been in position for three hours. His shoulder was starting to ache where the butt of the rifle was jabbing into the muscle, and the skin around his right eye was sore from being pressed against the sight. The waiting, he reflected to himself. That is when our strength is tested.

He glanced up to the sky. A moon was shining down and the stars were burning brightly. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a police car rushing towards Hammersmith Broadway, and down on King Street he could hear some boys getting into a closing-time punch-up. Soon I will be back in the Empty Quarter, in my homeland, he thought to himself. As soon as the railway bomb was delivered, he would leave the country and hide in the Saudi wilderness for a year or more. He longed for the cleanliness and purity of the desert.

A movement – a glimpse of a man’s head moving across the first-floor window. Sallum pressed his eye closer to the sight, keeping his finger poised on the rifle’s trigger. A man, definitely – he had vanished from view, but he had looked as if he was heading to the bathroom. That meant he would be back in a minute or two. Sallum composed himself. The moment of attack was approaching.

His mind drifted to thoughts of his friend Atta, who had led the attacks on the Great Satan with such spectacular success on 11 September 2001. A fine, upstanding man, Sallum still regarded him as the noblest individual he had ever met, and envied his martyr’s death. He looked forward to being reunited with him and the other fallen comrades in the kingdom of Allah. Just before the attacks, Atta had given each one of the martyrs a notebook to inspire them, and he had given one to Sallum as well. He had memorised it by heart, and one passage leapt into his mind now as he waited for the target to re-emerge.

‘Completely forget something called “this life”. The time for play is over and the serious time is upon us,’ Atta had written. He’d told them to consult the sura of the Koran called al Anfa, or the Spoils of War. Under his breath, Sallum recited the lines Atta had instructed them to commit to memory: ‘Remember how they said: “O Allah! If this is indeed the truth from Thee, rain down on us a shower of stones from the sky, or send us a grievous Penalty.”’

Another movement. Even at a distance of fifty metres Sallum could make out a flash of hair, and beneath it the skin of a man’s forehead. He steadied his arm, lining up the sights with the man’s head, checked that it was perfectly aimed, then softly squeezed the trigger. The bullet exploded from the barrel of the gun, smashing through the window of the house opposite. Glass shattered and Sallum could see the bullet colliding with the head of the man. Through the telescopic sights, he could see fragments of skull splintered against the wall, and body dropping to the ground.

Sallum paused, waiting to see if the target stood up. Nothing. The victory was his, he decided, a smile of professional satisfaction on his face. He unhooked the PSG-1 from its stand, holding it in his right hand, and ran down to the kitchen and out into the garden. He scaled the back fence in one swift movement, landing just next to the rusty swing. The moment for the assault was here.

Four of the thieves are dead, and the fifth man is about to die. The anger of the Prophet will be satiated.