Child Molester sprang up eagerly. He looked like he ought to be even more nervous than Shephard about facing the room, but probably lacked the self-awareness. Maybe just as well, given the nature of the crowd. After the support act's frustrating performance, the headliner was really going to have to deliver.

'I can't shed any more light on the questions Captain Shephard posed/ he said quietly, prompting immediate requests from all round the room that he speak up. She'd seen the type plenty of times before, an overflowing fount of information, but used to being tapped by a maximum of about three people at once.

Wells coughed a little, then resumed, his voice more projected but still not carrying particularly well. She estimated he had about thirty seconds to grab them by the throats before he'd be lost in a flood of impatient mumbling. Thirty seconds would be plenty, though, if she'd guessed right about his area of expertise.

'It is possible that General Thaba's information is as worthless as it is vague, in which case I am now wasting everyone's time. I sincerely hope that I am wasting everyone's time.'

48.The last remark cut dead a dozen sarcastic mumbles. Wells had more stagecraft than she'd thought, though he did have heady material to work with.

'General Thaba may have been delirious, he may have been dying, and he may even have been lying, but he mentioned the Black Spirit. That is what it has to do with you, officer, and that is why you've all had to come here this morning. The possibility we are facing is that one of the world's most dangerous and ruthless terrorists could be planning his first strike on British soil.'

A smattering of scornful tuts and sighs grew into a wider undercurrent of discontented mumbling. Lexington stayed put, significantly less protective of the wispy Wells than the SAS man. That significance, however, remained lost on most of the assembly.

'It's hardly grounds for a national alert, is it?' said one, a dumpy wee bloke she recognised from a placement she'd done in London last year. Hart, his name was, and like many in the big city he was used to a more tangible terrorist threat, with specific times, locations and codewords, not this airy-fairy bollocks.

'Not yet,' Wells said flatly, an unmissable admonition in his tone. 'But if it gets to that stage, then you're going to be very glad you paid attention to the speccy bloke from MI5. Because make no mistake, this is not just another homicidal fanatic with a shedload of Semtex, howling at the moon. The Black Spirit is a whole new species. He is a contract terrorist: you give him money and he kills people, that's the deal. He doesn't have a cause, he doesn't have an agenda, he doesn't have a leader, he doesn't have a sponsor and he doesn't have anything that could possibly ever be mistaken for a conscience. He does it because he gets paid, and believe 49.me, his services are in demand, because he is very, very good at it.'

Wells was fairly warming up now, banging out the goods with an undisguised relish. He'd been surprisingly unruffled by the early heckling, and her guess was that this was because, like most obsessives, he was obliviously confident that his audience would share his enthusiasm once he reached the meaty part.

'He first flashed on to our radar screens just under three years ago, when he blew up the American embassy in Madrid. You may remember that responsibility for the bombing was claimed by Islamic militants. In truth, they merely paid the piper. The Black Spirit played the tune. The audacity of the attack was, analysts believe, intended as an overture, and the theme of high civilian casualties has remained central to the symphony. As well as gutting the embassy of the self-pronounced "most powerful nation on Earth", the explosion also demolished a cinema in the adjoining building, killing forty-eight people. They were watching the film Close Action 2, which for those of you lucky enough never to have seen it, is about an elite US anti-terrorist unit. The timing of the blast was not thought to be coincidental.'

Wells could now have reverted to his previous quieter tones if he'd wanted. In fact, he could have whispered. Little chance of that, though: he was having way too much fun.

'Since then, his CV has included the sinking of the Black Sea cruise-liner Twilight Queen, the deputy Prime Minister of Georgia among the eighty-one dead; last year's poison- gas attack in Dresden, which claimed fifty-five victims, and January's St Petersburg railway disaster, in which he effectively turned a passenger train into a moving bomb then derailed it through a Russian army base. The death toll for 50.that one broke the three-figure mark. And these are only the ones I'm allowed to tell you about. He's been responsible for others, but his involvement in them remains classified.'

A hand went up amid the hush. It was Willetts, he of the Rosebud remark. He wasn't looking quite so jovial.

'How do you know these were carried out by the same guy?'

'Oh, he makes sure we know. He leaves us a sign, a, ehm, calling card, you could say. Like most terrorists, he's very protective of his work. He's not giving anything away, though, he's not stupid. It's his way of identifying the ones he wants us to know were his. We're certain he's carried out others anonymously, and if we could match him up to those we might get a better glimpse of his identity. The problem is, there's sixty terrorist incidents around the world per month, on average.'

'And what's the sign?'

'I'm afraid that's classified too.'

Groans echoed round the room. Lexington was right: cops hated secrets. They weren't missing much this time, though; she had seen the Black Spirit's little territorial piss- stain, and there was nothing mysterious about it. The reason it was classified was so that they could be sure when they were looking at his work, which helped to join a few dots; even if, as Wells admitted, they were only the dots he wanted them to join. If the signature became common knowledge, then every bampot with a bomb could spread it around to claim second-hand kudos and cloud the picture.

'Why is he called the Black Spirit?' Hart asked, unknowingly skirting the answer to Willetts's question. 'Can you tell us that much?'

'It's just a name,' Wells lied.

51.The reason wasn't important, but Wells didn't want to get their backs up further by telling them that that was classified too. It was verboten because it referred to the also classified signature: a crude, line-drawn, almost shapeless black blob given a face by two white ovals and an oblong grid of grinning teeth. It had generated a number of similar nicknames - the Dark Phantom, the Grinning Ghost, the Black Ghoul - but 'the Black Spirit' had been the English rendering that stuck around Interpol. Wells had stumbled when referring to it as a 'calling card', afraid he was giving something away. This was because that was exactly what the cheeky bastard left behind, printing the image on dozens of white business cards, which ended up blowing around the bodies and debris afterwards.

'Well, no, in fact it's more than a name,' Wells revised. 'At least, it has become more, and that's been his design all along. This individual has gone from obscurity to being one of the most wanted terrorists since Carlos the Jackal in the space of three years. And the explanation for this meteoric rise is not that he's the best, the baddest or the most prolific, though he's in with a shout at all those titles. It's because he has, effectively, marketed himself. I said he was a new species, and I didn't mean just because he kills for cash. This isn't merely contract terrorism: this is designer-brand contract terrorism. The reason he leaves his mark on his most high-profile works is so that his notoriety grows. So for your million bucks or whatever he charges, you don't just get your terrorist atrocity, you get your terrorist atrocity with the Black Spirit label attached. And as his notoriety grows, so does the marketability of that label. The bad guys know they can trust him to deliver, and the good guys shit themselves when they hear the name.'

52.Or cream themselves, as seemed a growing possibility in Wells's case.

'Normally, that kind of exposure works two ways. The downside of waving it in everybody's face is that you're increasing the risk of being fingered. Not this guy. He's been operational for three years and we know next to nothing about him. We don't know what he looks like. We don't know what nationality he is. We don't know his age. We don't know his associates. We don't know his intermediaries. We don't know his aliases. We don't know anything that's going to give us the slightest chance of identifying him if he gets on a plane and walks through immigration at Heathrow.'

The grumbling began to resume, but it had a very different edge to it now. It had changed from the impatience borne of not believing they were needed, to the discomfort of not believing there was much they could do anyway.

Millburn's hand went up, and all eyes fell on him, perhaps hoping his question would expose the threat Wells had built as merely a house of cards.

'How do you know this Black Spirit is one man? If you've no descriptions, couldn't it be a group, a gang?'

It was Wells's turn to look impatient. Though he had an answer for it, he obviously hated this question. He didn't like it when the children threatened to stop believing in Santa Claus.

"That possibility was considered for a while, yes. There is absolutely no doubt that he has collaborators, but people in this line of business tend not to operate on a democratic basis. No matter how tightly knit the group, someone has to be calling the shots, and the Black Spirit's exploits have been nothing if not egotistical. We also have . . . some 53.intelligence: second-, third-hand accounts of, well, variable veracity would be the euphemistic way of putting it. People saying they heard this or met that person who heard someone tell someone else . . . You know the deal. Terrorists and their associates are no different from other criminals in that they will either tell you nothing or tell you lies, but now and again there's the occasional inadvertent titbit dropped among the garbage. Anyway, for what they're worth, the accounts are consistent on enough points to confirm that they are talking about an individual. Unfortunately it's an individual nobody ever claims to have met or even seen.

'Normally with terrorist groups, there's so much factionalism and internal politicking that members eventually start turning dissident and selling out their former comrades. Again, this hasn't applied to the Black Spirit. For one thing, there are no ideological tensions because there's no ideology to argue about. But our anecdotal evidence suggests that there are two stronger reasons for the loyalty he has enjoyed. One is that his collaborators are handsomely remunerated. The other is that he has a long memory and nobody in their right mind wants to get on the wrong side of this bastard.'

No, course not. All the fanatics, psychopaths and assassins round the globe, they all skip a beat at the mention of his name. He eats guns and shits bullets. He bathes in blood and dines on body parts. Oh God, keep talkin' baby, keep talkin', ooh yeah baby. He's the baddest of the bad. He's a killing machine. Ooh you say it so good, you say it so nasty, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooooooh . . .

Fuck off.

Lexington had probably told Wells to ham it up in order to light a fire under everybody, but there had been no need 54.for such priming. If the Black Spirit had walked in the door right then, the MI5 creep would have dropped to his knees and swallowed every inch.

He's a whole new species. He's audacious. He's resourceful. He's ingenious. He's cool. He's bad. He's scary. He's got a two-foot cock.

Aye, very good.

He's a wanker, that's what he is.

All terrorists are wankers. Whatever flags they wrapped themselves in, whatever religions, histories or myths they attached to their crusades, they were, to a man, just wankers. They told themselves and anyone bored enough to listen that they were in it for the glory of their cause or the welfare of their 'people' (few of whom were ever consulted about this), but the truth was that they were in it because they liked killing people. Every last fucking one of them.

Listening to Wells eulogise about this tosspot was making her itch. Her spine was stiffening, her fingers stretching taut by her side, clenching and unclenching. 'Designer-brand terrorism.' Listen to yourself, you prick.

Oh yeah, it's mass murder, but it's mass murder with style.

The victims should be bloody well honoured to die at the hands of someone with such panache. It was laughable to hear him talk about how inventive, how proficient, how good the Black Spirit was at terrorism. You didn't have to be 'good' to be a terrorist, you just had to be, well, no better way of putting it: a wanker. You just had to be prepared to do despicable things; there was no genius required in their execution. You could walk up behind Captain Shephard eating in a restaurant and smash him unconscious with a whisky bottle - that didn't mean he wouldn't plaster you across the four walls in a square go. The whole 55.point about terrorism was that any arsehole could do it, anywhere, anyhow. That was where the 'terror' part came from - society not being able to protect itself from a threat that could come from any source and strike at any target. It was all about attacking the unsuspecting and the undefended.

The cops and the politicians could be relied upon to go on TV and denounce every terrorist incident as 'cowardly'. The perpetrators would be smirking at this flimsy little insult, or justifying it to themselves as a legitimate tactic against a much larger foe. But it was cowardly. Planting bombs in unguarded places took no balls at all.

How hard was it for the Black Spirit and his wankers- in-arms to blow up that train in St Petersburg? You wouldn't get far in an airport with a suitcase full of C4, but at a railway station, you could simply climb on board, stick your luggage in the rack, then walk away again, which was what they did. No checks, no X-rays, no sniffer dogs, and no-one in the carriage left alive to give a statement.

Madrid had taken slightly more sophistication, but for Wells to describe it as 'audacious' was a generosity borne of infatuation. The word he was looking for was 'sneaky'. For effect, Child Molester had said the explosion 'also' demolished the adjoining cinema, which was true but more than a trifle disingenuous. It was the cinema itself that was bombed, its adjacency proving the point of least resistance in attacking a heavily guarded target. The intelligence agencies racked their brains to decipher the political ramifications of it being the Spanish US embassy that was singled out, before they were forced to conclude that there were none. It had an accessible public building backing on to it and other US embassies didn't, that was all. The nationality was irrelevant.

56.Not that the cinema was entirely a soft touch. There were very few capital cities in the world where you could catch a flick without first having someone root through your handbag, and given ETA's on-going bloodlust, Madrid wasn't one of them. However, no matter how security- conscious the staff were trained to be, if there was one thing guaranteed to inspire credulity in modern-day Europe, it was bureaucracy. People are sceptical of what seems too good to be true, but if something sounds like a pain in the arse, they've no problem believing it must be for real. The Black Spirit's outfit posed as officials from the city's Health and Safety department, complete with IDs and paperwork, there to perform a spot-check on the cinema's alarms, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems. They removed all of the extinguishers, saying they didn't meet the latest specifications, then fitted their own replacements. According to the house manager's death-bed statement, they even got him to sign a receipt, telling him an invoice would follow shortly. It sure did.

Audacious?

When she was nine, someone wrapped a dogturd in newspaper, placed it on her doorstep, set it alight, rang the doorbell then fucked off. Her father answered the door and immediately began stamping on the flaming parcel, covering his slippers in shit. That was roughly how audacious the Black Spirit's activities were. Neither perpetrator had the guts to look their victims in the eye.

It wasn't the only thing they had in common, either. They were both bullies, both cowards. They picked on the little guy and then they ran away.

Teachers the world over faithfully preached the message that bullies were cowards. In her classroom, the bullies had smirked, the way she pictured the terrorists smirk. Load 57.of shite, they were telling themselves. They weren't cowards; cowards shat it, and they shat it from no-one. They were some of the hardest guys - and girls - in the school, no question they could look after themselves in a barney. But funny, they didn't go picking fights with the other hard cases. If they wanted to look tough, surely that's what they should have done?

Don't be stupid.

Human experience taught that when people wanted to look tough, they picked on easy targets. A short-arsed megalomaniac picked Jews. A Lilley-livered political mediocrity picked single mothers. A deludedly ambitious cardinal picked gays. A bloated Ugandan dictator picked Asians. And endless halfwit nonentities in Leeside had picked the wee darkie lassie with the funny name.

Consequently, she had serious anger-management issues around the whole bullying thing. And the whole racism thing, and the whole sexism thing, though they were really just parts of the same whole. Her parents and her brother had all handled the abuse a lot better. Mum and Dad, having been expelled by Amin with a two-year-old son and a baby well on the way, perhaps had a wider perspective on it. A council house in Renfrewshire was a bit of a comedown from the lifestyle they'd once built for themselves, but under the circumstances it was sanctuary, and if some of the locals called them names or left turd-bombs on their doorstep, then it was still a lesser form of racial abuse than what they'd already survived.

Her brother, James, had always been thick-skinned and easy-going to the point of irritating. He got his share of verbal and physical abuse, arguably more than her, being older and therefore first into each of the educational snake- pits. It just never seemed to get to him; at least not in any 58.way that he let anyone see. Perhaps that was how he coped, in combination with being too bloody affable to make many enemies. It helped that he was good at football, which accorded a certain respect as well as the protection of his fellow school-team members. When he reached secondary age, he also had the subsidiary benefits of going to Parkhead every other Saturday, which seemed to place him in a context that made him easier to accept, even to the bampots. Maybe especially to the bampots.

She had never enjoyed any comparable advantages, being far too short to get picked for netball, the only game the girls were ever offered at St Mary's primary school. At Sacred Heart secondary, she did make the hockey team, but sporting prowess was not the same source of kudos among the female peer group. Clique politics and popularity power-struggles were far more important. Athletic ability only counted for something if it was one of the in- crowd that had it; hence the hundred metres was a big deal in first and second year when Maggie Hanley won it. When the wee darkie girl with the funny name won it in third year, it was because Maggie wasn't interested in 'that wee lassie stuff any more (though the wee darkie girl with the funny name remembered Maggie looking pretty fucking interested as she overtook her with ten metres to go).

By that age, she'd been too long the outsider to want anything to do with the fake sorority of all that fickle factionalism. Bereft of anything substantial that they had in common, the cliques were usually united solely by who they didn't like. Across the various parties, this tended to be a reciprocal list, but most of them had room on it for her too. This was because she 'didn't make it easy for herself, which she took to mean she didn't drop to her knees in gratitude whenever one of these bitches condescended to 59.actually be polite to her for a change. The other inference was that she had to expect a certain amount of racial abuse and she shouldn't be so sensitive; or to state it more simply, she should know her place. And to put this attitude into full perspective, it had to be appreciated that the source of the quote was the assistant headmistress.

The occasion was significant too. After years of Pilate- class hand-washing on the part of the teaching staff any time she reported being punched, kicked, spat on or merely insulted, it was suddenly a serious matter the first time the abuser came off second best. She had 'over-reacted', she was 'hyper-sensitive', even 'volatile'. Yeah, maybe she was. Maybe it was that junior-sibling syndrome, being ultra- assertive, over-competitive, always wanting to leave her mark or have the last word. Or maybe it was that since the age of five she had been taking shit in the classrooms and playgrounds of schools where other than herself and James, the closest thing they had to an ethnic minority was the Byrne twins from Dublin.

'Chocolate Button' had been her unwanted nickname since Primary Two, applied because she was small and brown, get it? Chocolate was, in fact, the prefix for any number of hilarious remarks, all of which only got funnier the more she heard them. If she was a Proddy, she would be a Chocolate Orange. No, please, stop, these pants have got to do me all day. Granted, it wasn't the most offensive term she would hear ('She'd diarrhoea an' she thought she was meltin' - ha ha ha ha'), but the term itself didn't matter. What mattered was that she heard it every day, and every time it was used, the intention was to remind her that she was different and she didn't belong.

That was why she 'over-reacted' and 'brought shame on the school' during a third-year hockey match against St 60.Stephen's. 'All' her opponent had done was sing the chorus of that Deacon Blue song, Chocolate Girl, every time she came within earshot. The girl hadn't meant any offence, she said later (though it had sounded more like 'mmm hmm hmm mmf hmm mmf'). She had heard it on the radio at lunchtime and just couldn't get the song out of her head all afternoon.

Sure. Same as the Sacred Heart winger didn't mean to hit her. The hockey stick accidentally flew out of her hand and into the poor girl's face. Twice.

But did it solve anything? No. Did it change the other girl's racist attitude? Probably not. Did it make her instantly popular and respected in the eyes of her classmates? Don't be daft.

And did it make her feel better?

Oh, fuck yeah.

It was an epiphany.

Like she was reborn. It would be facile to say that she found her vocation in that violent catharsis, but its roots could certainly be traced back to there. In that moment, all the mouths that had ever called her chocolate this or darkie that became as one: one that was spitting teeth, dripping blood and thoroughly wishing it had stayed shut.

Her parents hadn't been entirely enamoured of the idea when she professed her intention to join the police. Their experience of uniformed authority had understandably not made it something to which they wished their children to aspire (though to be fair, in their adopted home, they had been reassured enormously by the gormless plods telling them 'we're looking into it' after each instance of harassment, vandalism or flaming jobbies). She therefore acquiesced when they suggested she go to university first, an undertaking they were undoubtedly sure would shake this 61.undesirable notion from her head. It didn't. She flirted with new ambitions on a daily basis - that's what university is for, isn't it? - but flirting was as far as it went: she and the polis were betrothed.

Campus extra-curricular activities often led graduates down previously unforeseen paths, but in her case, she hadn't been able to plausibly envisage any financial or long-term prospects in Tai-kwon-do, Shorinji Kempo, Karate or pistol-shooting. There was, however, one line of work in which she reckoned they might prove useful.

The degree came in handy too, not least the languages, which had tipped the balance in her favour when she pitched for the Interpol liaison post. Her mother was Belgian by birth, so she and James picked up a solid grounding in French as both a product and necessity of eavesdropping on their parents. To that she had added Spanish and Dutch at university, this last proving the most prized by her senior officers due to so many investigative roads leading to Amsterdam, where she found herself cultivating links with Interpol. This led in time to a three-month placement in Brussels and ultimately her liaison role for the Strathclyde force. It wasn't a post ever likely to occupy her full-time, more a responsibility that fell to her as and when, but it made her contacts, got her face known far and wide, and consequently opened a lot of doors.

It was in Brussels that she got her inside gen on the Black Spirit. She was there when he hit Strasbourg, one of the 'classified' atrocities Wells had alluded to. He engineered the collapse of a disused flyover on the autoroute at the height of rush hour, killing seven people instantly and twenty-eight more in the ensuing pile-up.

An 'official' inquiry blamed structural fatigue, accelerated by the vibrations of haulage traffic. It was never made 62.public that the disaster wasn't an accident, let alone who had been behind it. There was no paymaster on that occasion, no Looney-Tunes collective trumpeting their responsibility, hence the option to keep the truth quiet. This one he had done for his own satisfaction, a little 'fuck you' to the European Parliament, which had recently agreed new international protocols to speed up the extradition of wanted terrorists. The protocols would, according to their architect, 'drive a high-speed road between the courts of every nation'. Extradition wasn't even something the Black Spirit was likely to be bothered about, not unless he was planning to get himself arrested any time soon. It was sheer sabre-rattling, a reminder to the authorities that his dick was still bigger than theirs.

The fall-out turned into an all-hands drill across every Interpol bureau, which was why she got access to files and individuals she would otherwise never have been allowed near. Interpol was like the Internet: it wasn't so much a body in itself as a means of connecting other disparate entities. It was therefore constructed around a number of nodes, which ranged from fully-staffed offices to individual liaisons such as herself.

Brussels being the nearest thing Interpol had to an HQ, she met a number of terrorism intelligence experts there, people who had followed the Black Spirit's 'career' from the start. They knew a shitload more than Wells, and their attitude to their subject was a great deal less reverential, mainly because they had seen the bodies. The men and women who had been on-site to collect the Black Spirit's calling cards kept their disgust beneath - but close to - the surface, where they needed it, to drive the fight no matter how bleak it looked.

Enrique Sallas had been involved in the hunt since 63.Madrid, and he knew better than most how bleak it could get. He had been on the force thirty years and told her he had never encountered a phenomenon that scared him more.

"This is a guy who truly doesn't give a fuck, and I don't even mean about the victims. That goes without saying. But this guy doesn't give a fuck about the causes he's assisting either. He doesn't even give a fuck about the money, that's my opinion. He does it because . . . he can. He does it because it makes him feel good. We can't negotiate with him, we can't compromise with him. A change in politics can't sideline him. One conflict is resolved, he's offering his services where the next one emerges. Others call him the Black Spirit because of the picture on the card. I think of him as the Black Spirit because I fear he will always be with us, in one form or another. He is blood- lust, he is murder, and he will shape-shift and remanifest wherever hatred is to be found.'

Impassioned as he was wont to become, even Enrique didn't miss the irony that the Black Spirit was trading on a mystique they had played a large part in giving him. It wasn't just Wells who couldn't help but be fascinated by this shadowy figure, even if only because he posed so many questions. She was guilty of it too, though she might put that down to foreign terrorism naturally seeming more exotic than the version she was familiar with. In the UK, terrorism meant Ulster sectarianism, a repetitive cycle of violence in which the horror was the only thing greater than the boredom. From a professional perspective, if she was interested in moronic neds obsessed with Anglo-Irish history, she could always volunteer for Old Firm match-duty.

Having said that, there were few better illustrations of terrorism's perverse allure than the vicarious thrill-seekers and their braindead paraphernalia at Ibrox and Parkhead.

64.She remembered overhearing some of James's halfwit mates talking about a banner they had seen at the match one day. It had incorporated the tricolour and the Palestinian flag, and read: 'IRA - PLO. Two peoples, one struggle.' They thought it was 'really cool'. None of them ventured to explain the cool part about nail-bombs and dead children, but there was no question this romantic- sounding ideal had some kind of aura for young and simplistic minds. Fighting for freedom, battling against oppression, blowing up the Death Star. The question was, would 'the struggle', any struggle, still have the same aura if guns and bombs weren't involved? Well, nobody had ever turned up at Parkhead or Ibrox with a 'Gay Rights' or 'Free Tibet' banner. It was about boys and toys. No guns, no glory.

However, the not so young and simplistic were fascinated too, so maybe it was something deeper, perhaps even something primal. In the uncertain, ever-changing adult world, was there something paradoxically comforting about believing there was a manifest embodiment of evil on the loose out there? Were we like the boys in Lord of the Flies, dreaming up 'the beast' because it was less frightening to believe in a malevolent being than to confront the chaos of the truly unknown? Perhaps the Black Spirit was a repository for our fears and insecurities about crime, violence and ultimately death: we could combine them all as one totem and fear that; rather than have countless numbers of them scuttling around our heads like hatching insects.

Whatever he represented, in reality the Black Spirit couldn't be all the things she, Wells, Sallas or Interpol believed him to be. What was certain, however, was that he did exist, he was out there, and according to Lexington, 65.he was heading this way. Wells having mopped up his spilt jizz and sat down, the bossman was back at the lectern.

'I know what you're all thinking, so let me state as clearly as I can that you can't afford to think it. General Thaba's delirious remarks may have been cryptic, but remember that he traded his way out on the specific mention of a terrorist threat to the British state. Those were his precise words. "A terrorist threat to the British state." All he gave us in the end was "the Black Spirit", the meaning of which should now be frighteningly clear, and "an eye for an eye", which, the Good Lord's proprietary claims notwithstanding, is the war cry of those intent upon vengeance. General Mopoza, it is fair to say, falls into that category.

'As I mentioned earlier, Mopoza has a proven fondness for historically significant dates. Had the late General Thaba been in a clearer frame of mind, he might have mentioned that Sonzola annually celebrates its independence from the British state on September the sixth. That's this Saturday, ladies and gentlemen.''Well it still sounds like bollocks to me.'

The band had left the stage with no clamour for an encore, only the sound of chairlegs squeaking on the floor as the gathering began to disperse. Wells had circulated briefing packs, the facts and figures padded out with speculatory analysis and a seriously reaching psychological profile which she'd seen before.

Like the Eskimos' enhanced vocabulary for describing snow, she thought there should be a panoply of terms to distinguish the subtle but significant varieties in tone and nuance of the low grumbling that followed every police briefing. With experience, she had learned to recognise most of them. This one was an unusual blend of 'it won't 66.even concern us' mixed with subtly discordant elements of 'we're being fucked about here' and 'there's something they're not telling us'.

'I'm not saying I wouldn't be worried if this Black Spirit bastard showed up on my patch, but what have we really got to go on? This Thaba bloke wanted an exit and he had to give them something, so what better than flinging in a name that's guaranteed to frighten the horses?'

'Why are they taking it so seriously? I think either that Wells bloke has been blowing smoke up Lexington's arse, or they're not giving us the full picture.'

'It's a wild-goose chase.'

'Total wind-up.'

'Ants in their pants all because someone mentioned the Bogeyman.'

'Understandable caution, really. Keep your eyes and ears open just in case.'

'Nothing we can do if we don't bloody know anything.'

Millburn held the door open for her as they exited to the lobby.

'You're keepin' it close to your chest, X. Either that or you were bored into catatonia.'

'Bit of both.'

'I'm bettin' you know more about this heid-the-baw than that MI5 bloke.'

'That's classified.'

Millburn smiled.

'Don't suppose it'll be botherin' you up there in the People's Republic. Terrorists are like tourists. First stop London, every bloody time.'

'You were the one who ran away to the big city.'

'Aye, but not for career reasons, you understand. You canna get United tickets for love nor money in Newcastle, 67.and London's got five Premiership teams. That's five away games, pet.'

Millburn was under the mistaken (but never corrected - she hated anyone thinking she was one of the boys) impression that she wasn't interested in football, which was why he saw it as a challenge to crowbar it into their every conversation. Tutting and rolling her eyes, she gave him a playful push to send him on his way.

He was one of the good guys, and a very smart cop, but he was wrong about whose doorstep the Black Spirit was more likely to end up on. That was why every force in the country had been represented this morning. London was the last place he'd think of hitting. Armed police all over the shop, public areas evacuated if anyone left so much as a McDonald's bag lying around. Forget it. Vulnerability was what he sought first and foremost. Look at Strasbourg. He didn't go near the parliament itself, nor did he need to to make his point. His style was to attack places that no- one had thought to attack before, meaning that neither had anyone thought much about defending them. Even in St Petersburg, where he hit the more traditional terrorist target of an army base, he had done it using a civilian passenger train.