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.’ He turned to look at Caroline again.‘Well, perhaps Professor Stenton would like to take the floor.’Caroline stood up.‘Thank you, Bruce,’ she said.‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve recently returned from Helmand Province.While I was there I accompanied a team of British Army personnel on the ground where we discovered a facility capable of producing a high-level radiological weapon.The facility was neutralised, and a flight case of materials confiscated.We’ve now had the opportunity to analyse them.’There was absolute silence around the room as Caroline continued.‘The case we removed contained a quantity of caesium-137.I’ll try and keep the science simple, but what you need to know is this: it’s highly toxic and has a half-life of just over thirty years.This makes it suitable for the production of a particularly devastating dirty bomb.’The Director General interrupted.‘Let’s have some specifics, Professor Stenton.When you say “particularly devastating”, what exactly do you mean?’‘It’s difficult to give an exact prediction.I would estimate that the quantity we confiscated would be sufficient to infect ten thousand people within a radius of about a mile.Of those, I would expect ten per cent fatalities within thirty days and fifty per cent within a year.’ She let that sink in before continuing.‘Of the remainder, most of them would probably wish they were dead anyway.And with a thirty-year half-life, if somebody had successfully detonated such a bomb in a highly populated area, we would be feeling the aftershock for decades to come.Small quantities of caesium-137 were released into the atmosphere after the Chernobyl disaster, and we all know what sort of effect that had.’Another uncomfortable silence.Bruce Sterne stood up again.‘Thank you, Caroline.’ He looked around the room.‘I would like to state for the record, ladies and gentlemen, that a number of our special forces lost their lives in the process of capturing this material.Our debt to them, and to Professor Stenton, is greater than we perhaps realise.’ Sterne looked as if he was waiting for some acknowledgement of this statement, but none came.With a slight shrug, he turned directly towards the Director General.‘There seems little doubt,’ he said, ‘that this is the terrorist threat of which our intelligence reports warned.Since it has been neutralised, I propose that we reduce the terrorism threat level from critical to severe.’He sat down once more.There was a little hum of conversation from the assembled members of the JTAC, and their faces were substantially paler than they had been at the beginning of the meeting – the expressions, perhaps, of people who felt they’d just had a lucky escape.The Director General spoke up.‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced.‘I’m sure you’ll all join me in thanking Professor Stenton for her work.’The nodding of heads.‘Now that this threat has been dealt with,’ Daniels continued, ‘I see no reason not to downgrade the threat level.Perhaps I could have a show of hands for any of us who disagrees with this course of action.’There were no raised hands.The members of the JTAC were all political creatures, and they knew as well as anyone how much easier a downgrading of the threat level would make their own lives.‘Good,’ the DG said, his voice brisk.‘Then unless there’s anything else, I’ll inform the PM immediately.’ He gathered the papers laid out on the table in front of him, gave a nod to the assembled company, and quickly left the room.Back in the day, when Siobhan was being trained up in the Det, she’d had an instructor.He was a foul-mouthed bastard who for some reason had managed to sleep his way through at least half the females under his tutelage, and he never made it a secret that he’d like Siobhan to be another notch on his bedpost.She never succumbed, not only because the guy made her flesh creep, but also because it was in the early days with Jack, and her boyfriend would have nailed the instructor’s bollocks to the floor if he thought he was messing with Siobhan.That was what Jack was like.Still, say what you like about the instructor, he knew his stuff.Siobhan was more than happy to put up with his lechery if it meant she learned something.That was what she was like.Siobhan found herself thinking of that instructor now.‘Surveillance,’ he had told her, ‘is boring.Fucking boring.But boredom’s your biggest enemy.You get bored, you get careless.You get careless.’ He’d made a gun shape with two fingers and thumb, then mimed shooting himself in the head.‘And it would be a shame to be scraping your pretty little face off the pavement.’Siobhan had never forgotten that.Since her days training in Hereford, she’d spent countless hours performing covert surveillance and she knew every trick in the book.Which was why she now found herself crouched in the boot of her old Volvo estate – a vehicle selected for no other reason than that it was perfect for a boot fit like this, with the back seats up and the space covered.Enough space for her to stay hidden, for her stash of different styles of clothes to help her blend in to whichever neighbourhood she was staking out, and for the briefcase opened up beside her, which contained a small radio receiver, a loudspeaker and a mess of wires like colourful spaghetti.Her torch was off, but light seeped in to the boot from the two peepholes that she had drilled into the number plate.At the end of the Troubles, the IRA had grown cute to boot fits like this and had started blowing up vehicles they only suspected of containing surveillance operatives.But those days were gone, which meant some of the old techniques could come back into play.As she entered the fourth hour of surveillance outside the Horse and Three Feathers, she kept the instructor’s words firmly in her mind.Under ordinary circumstances she’d have a partner, someone to share the duty with.But these circumstances weren’t ordinary.Kieran’s tip-off of a Drugs Squad police officer on Cormac’s payroll meant she couldn’t trust anybody on the force
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