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  Everyone knew what the Israelis were doing, not least the Iranians themselves. That’s why they buried their uranium-enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow deep underground; impregnably so, they claimed. To most Western analysts, it was a question of when, not if, Israel would mount airstrikes at the dozen or more key installations on which Iran’s nuclear weapons programme depended. But from Israel’s point of view, that was the problem: everyone knew.

  Surprise would be impossible. Deniability non-existent.

  So Israel boxed clever. It used the MEK as its proxies for this strike, as it had for others before. Because of Iran’s refusal to halt its nuclear weapons programme, it was under a punitive regime of international sanctions. But where there are sanctions, there will also be smugglers. Mossad agents used those smuggling routes to infiltrate four SADM bombs into Iran.

  The 10-kiloton bomb Abou-Ali Bakhtiar detonated beside the IR-40 reactor blew a crater seventy-five metres wide by seventeen metres deep. It created a dazzling fireball from which blew a scorching hurricane. At least half the people within a five-hundred-metre radius were killed instantly, and those that survived received fatal doses of radiation. Human bodies and inanimate objects were transformed into lethal missiles. The blast reduced the heavy-water plant to rubble, and caused sufficient damage to the reactor to render it entirely useless.

  Above all, the IR-40 complex was so heavily soused in nuclear fallout as to be unapproachable by anyone unless they were wearing full protective gear. Even then, a stay of more than a few minutes could result in a dangerously high dose of radiation. And that, from the strategists’ point of view, was the other great benefit of this form of attack. It was not necessary to destroy Iran’s impregnable underground sites. The ground above or around them just had to be turned into toxic wastelands through which no human could pass, and they were effectively useless. The IR-40 nuclear reactor, the two uranium enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow, and the Nuclear Technology Centre at Isfahan were all rendered inoperable. The Iranian weapons programme was cut off at the knees.

  Meanwhile, not a single Israeli Air Force plane had been involved in any hostile action whatsoever. Deniability was ensured. It was a strategic triumph for Israel . . . and an unmitigated disaster for the rest of the world.

  As its nuclear sites lay blanketed in radioactive dust and debris the Iranian government looked for a way to strike back, not just against the Israelis, but also their allies in the West. Iranian naval forces immediately launched a series of missile attacks on the Strait of Hormuz – the shipping lane through which one-fifth of the entire global oil trade passed – hitting several vessels and sinking a massive supertanker. Maritime insurance premiums immediately rose to a level that made any passage through the Strait prohibitively costly, even assuming a ship owner or crew was willing to risk the voyage. With that crucial supply-line cut, the resulting spike in the price of oil had a devastating effect on an already battered global economy, ending any slim hopes of recovery. Meanwhile, conflict spread to the streets of Europe as the Continent’s Muslim populations rose up in outrage at the Jewish assault on their Iranian brothers and sisters.

  It was difficult, however, to distinguish these Muslim riots from all the other forms of civil disturbance tearing the EU to pieces. Repeated bailouts of the Mediterranean states had drained the Continent’s treasuries while failing to address any of the fundamental causes of economic failure. Indeed, they had simply made that failure even more acute. The grinding austerity demanded by Berlin as the price for supporting the failed economies of southern Europe had created economic damage that would take decades to repair. As the second Great Depression took hold, once-flourishing businesses collapsed, governments were unable to meet even their people’s most basic needs, and yet more millions of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese were thrown out of work to add to those already on the breadline.

  Greeks had long been familiar with the sight of government buildings going up in flames. Now Rome, Madrid and Lisbon were burning too. The French alliance with Germany fractured as the new government in Paris refused to accept the current self-flagellating orthodoxy, and embarked on a policy of spending more government money, not less, risking credit-agency downgrades, rising borrowing costs and even national bankruptcy rather than cutting spending to the bone. And slowly it dawned on the German electorate that by beggaring their neighbours they had destroyed their own most important export markets, harming themselves economically as well as reigniting old anti-German hatreds that the EU had been created to bury for ever.

  Little by little the fabric of Europe unravelled. Some of the crises were of minimal significance in any financial or geopolitical sense, but their symbolic weight was crushing. The Champions League, for example, was suspended as the explosive tensions on the streets of Europe’s major cities made it impossible for tens of thousands of supporters from different nations to gather together for a competitive event without the near-certainty of violence. Without that revenue source many of the major clubs collapsed under the crushing debts they had amassed in the pursuit of glory.

  Meanwhile Britain’s relative immunity from the crises of the euro counted for less and less. The EU’s implosion acted like an economic black hole, whose gravitational field dragged more and more of its neighbours into the same plunging death-spiral. The first generation of nine-thousand-pounds-a-year students graduated to find that their fees had been wasted: there weren’t any jobs for them to take. Their parents were no better off. As their property values plummeted and their painfully accumulated pensions were rendered worthless, so the respectable middle-classes of suburbia became as angry as the underclasses in the sink estates.

  The riots that had seemed like a single, exceptional outburst in the summer of 2011 were now a chronic condition, like a bad cold you just can’t shake off, or a cut that refuses to heal. No one knew where the next bricks and bottle-bombs would be thrown, or which once-peaceful shopping street or housing estate would find itself under siege. But almost every night, something seemed to kick off somewhere, until the festering anarchy became so commonplace that it took an event of exceptional violence – a policeman killed, or a well-known building razed to the ground – for the media even to acknowledge that anything had happened.

  National governments were helpless in the face of such unrelenting disorder, and as conventional politics failed to provide any answer to the chaos, siren voices started making themselves heard. They belonged to populists and demagogues promising simple, understandable explanations for the incomprehensible collapse of the old world order. They offered bogeymen to blame and hate; pat solutions to put things right. In their desperation, voters listened to these voices. They longed for strong, decisive leaders who could bring order to the anarchy and make everything work again.

  Yet even in the worst of times, whether beset by war, natural disaster or economic collapse, people have to get on with their lives. They strive to find work. They do their best to look after their families. They seek whatever comfort they can in their friends and lovers. And they can always console themselves with the knowledge that the sun still shines, the wind still blows and the world keeps turning, whatever mankind might do . . .

  1

  AS THE FIRST rays of the morning sun sparkled on the water, the Lady Rosalie made her graceful way between the massive concrete pillars of the Hubert C. Bonner Bridge, left the peace of Currituck Sound and poked her nose out into the dancing whitecaps of the North Atlantic. There was a fresh south-easterly breeze blowing, and as the forty-two-foot sloop left the last shelter of land and felt the full force of the wind, her sails filled, her hull heeled over and she raced away across the water like a racehorse bursting from the starting gate. The four high-powered rigid inflatable boats, crewed by armed men who were keeping watch ahead, behind and on either side of the Lady Rosalie, had to accelerate hard to keep up, as did the US Coastguard cutter keeping station a few hundred yards away and the Marines helicopter overhead.

>   It was a perfect fall morning, with a cloudless sky and the promise of highs in the mid-seventies, but at eight in the morning there was still a sharp, invigorating chill in the wind that hinted at the colder days of winter to come. The man at the helm was grinning with the sheer joy of being alive on such a day, in such a boat. His name was Lincoln Roberts. He was African–American, well over six feet tall, strongly built, with a hint of silver in the hair beneath his dark-blue baseball cap. He had recently celebrated his sixty-first birthday, yet his vigour was undiminished and his presence and charisma still dominated any room he ever entered.

  Roberts gave himself a few minutes to savour the pleasure of playing the yacht that was his most treasured possession against the constantly shifting forces of wind and water. Then he turned to the man standing next to him and shouted over the breeze, ‘Damn, this feels good! Worth dragging your ass out of bed for, right? You want a turn at the wheel?’

  Samuel Carver grinned back. ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘You don’t have to call me “sir”, Sam. This is the weekend. And I’m not your president.’

  ‘True . . . but as long as this is your boat, you are my skipper.’

  Roberts laughed and gave Carver a friendly pat on the back as they exchanged places. ‘I should’ve said this last night, but it’s good to see you again,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long. I feel bad about that.’

  ‘Don’t. You’ve had much more important things to worry about.’

  ‘You saved my life. That’s pretty damn important.’

  ‘I was just doing my job. Anyway, you send me those personally signed and dedicated Christmas cards every year. You should see people’s faces when they see one of those babies on the mantelpiece.’

  ‘Yeah, that presidential magic works a treat, doesn’t it? I mean, take a look at this jacket . . .’ Roberts pointed at the embroidered presidential seal decorating the right chest of his windbreaker. ‘Five years I’ve been in this job, and I still get a thrill putting it on.’

  ‘I heard the presidential jellybeans are pretty special, too,’ said Carver.

  ‘You know that’s true, they are. I’ll get someone to send you a jar.’

  The two men stood in companionable silence for a while, feeling the sun and spray on their faces as they savoured the pleasure of being out on the water. Then the President drew a little closer to Carver and, in a lower voice, bereft of humour or bonhomie, said, ‘You happen to know what happened to all that money Malachi Zorn stole? It’s been more than two years, north of fifty billion’s still missing and I’ve got a whole posse of very angry people – and I’m talking rich, powerful, influential people who could make my life real difficult come election time – wanting to know what happened to their investment.’

  ‘I’ll bet they’re angry,’ said Carver. ‘They got taken in by the greatest con-man in history. So did two British prime ministers and at least one member of the royal family, come to that. He promised them the earth if they invested in him, then he took the lot. But I don’t know what happened to it all.’

  ‘Really? I heard you had a lot to do with taking Zorn down. Word is, you were right by him when he died.’

  ‘He was killed at a reception where there were more than five hundred guests. A lot of people were right by him.’

  Roberts put an arm round Carver’s shoulders. It looked like an amicable gesture, but as Roberts clenched his fingers until they were digging into Carver’s skin there was an icy edge to his voice. ‘Don’t bullshit me, Sam. We both know Malachi Zorn didn’t die at that reception.’

  Carver looked out towards the horizon, gathering his thoughts for a moment before he replied. ‘I didn’t kill Zorn, you have my word on that. But I was with him just before he died. I even asked him what he’d done with the money – and forget fifty billion: he said it was over a hundred. Zorn wasn’t telling. If you want my opinion, he really didn’t care about having the money himself. He just wanted the people he’d taken it from not to have it. He wanted to hurt them and he knew, with rich bastards like that, nothing hurts more than losing money.’

  Roberts caught the note of contempt in Carver’s voice. ‘Sounds like you agree with him.’

  ‘Not enough to do the things Zorn did.’

  Roberts relaxed his grip on Carver’s shoulder, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t holding any information back.

  ‘You know what? I know this sounds nuts but I worry about you, Sam. You must’ve made a heap of enemies along the way. Sooner or later one of ’em’s gonna come back to bite you.’

  ‘Hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘So? You think that’ll stop it happening some other time? You’ve hurt a lot of people and you know things that could hurt a lot more. That’s a dangerous combination . . . I guess what I’m saying is, “Watch yourself.”’

  ‘I will, Mr President. You can count on it. So . . . you want the wheel back now, or what?’

  2

  DANNY CROPPER WORKED in the hazy no-man’s-land between security and crime, where tough men who once served their country, men with shaven heads and pumped-up muscles slowly turning to fat, do dirty work for the rich and powerful who want to keep their own hands clean.

  When he wasn’t working, Cropper had two main interests: getting wrecked and getting laid. It had been a long Saturday night, and he woke at half two on Sunday afternoon with a sore head, a lurching gut and a mouth that tasted like a fishmonger’s dustbin. He heaved himself out of bed, wincing at the backache that always seemed to hit him worst first thing, then sat bleary-eyed on the edge of the mattress with one hand in his well-worn underpants. As he gave his package a ruminative scratch he wondered whether to wake up the girl snoring softly on the other side of the bed. No, why bother? She hadn’t been that good a fuck last night, and she looked a lot rougher now than she’d done when he’d had his beer-goggles on.

  She farted in her sleep, and that made Cropper’s mind up for sure.

  There was a packet of fags on the bedside table. The tobacco companies weren’t allowed to put their colours or logos on the packs any more, only the health warning and a brand-name in plain black text. Cropper thought it just demonstrated the stupidity of politicians. The economy was in the shitter. The streets were a battleground. The electricity kept cutting out because the Greens wouldn’t let anyone build power stations that actually worked, and if the dustmen or the tube drivers weren’t on strike then it was the nurses and the cops. The whole world was falling apart, and all the twats in Westminster could worry about was lung cancer.

  Cropper pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and lit his first cig of the day, stuffing the pack into his trouser pocket as he shuffled out of the room. He made a cup of tea – so strong it was darker than coffee, with a shot of condensed milk and three sugars – then took the cup to the kitchen table where his laptop was lying. He logged in and scanned the headlines. A rocket attack on Tel Aviv had killed forty-five Israelis, including a dozen children. Barclays Bank had just been bought by a Brazilian corporation. As net immigration to the UK reached record levels – ‘Fuck knows why they want to come here,’ Cropper muttered to himself – the government was denying, for the umpteenth time, that it had lost control of Britain’s borders. With another half-dozen clubs facing financial oblivion, the football authorities were considering merging the former Premiership and Championship divisions to create a single league, with no promotion or relegation. And some royal tart had stood next to a celebrity tart Cropper had never heard of, but they’d both been wearing the same dress, so that was a big fucking deal, apparently.

  He checked his emails. Amidst all the spam, promising cheap drugs and a bigger penis, there was one message that interested him. It purported to come from a girl called Veronika, and the subject line was, ‘Baby, I want to meet you.’ The message read, ‘Hi, Baby, I am looking for new friends. I am cute and I love big men who can make me feel good deep inside. I would really like to meet you, and if you really want to know how much fun we will have toget
her, just open up the video I have sent you and look at my hot, wet pussy. It is waiting here for you.’

  Cropper moved the video to a digital editing application, and watched four minutes of tacky Romanian porn until the image faded to black. Three seconds passed with a blank, silent screen, and there was a brief burst of static interference and white noise. Cropper cut and deleted everything apart from this burst, which was less than half a second long. Then he played it again through another app, which mimicked the function of a super high-speed tape recorder, allowing Cropper to replay the message in real time. He heard a voice, itself distorted to the point where it was un-recognizable, saying, ‘Got another job if you want it. Wednesday night, starting at eight-fifteen precisely. Three locations: Netherton Street, London SW4; Cleveway Road, Bristol BS13; Dunstone Lane, Leicester LE3. The aim is maximum devastation of property. Theft and arson would be good. Moderate levels of human collateral damage are acceptable. But we don’t want bodies everywhere. And arrange for maximum social media coverage at all locations: we want this viral across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram – the works. Signal acceptance by usual means. First payment will be transferred on receipt of acceptance.’

  Cropper replied to the email: ‘Hi, Veronika . . . I want your hot, wet pussy. Let’s meet . . . Big D.’

  He jotted down a note to himself, reminding him to sort out the two key personnel at each location: someone local who’d get the scum together to do the actual damage, and one of his own lads to keep a discreet eye on things and make sure everything ran to plan. Then he sat back and finished the rest of his cold, sweet tea. This was the third time he’d got one of these jobs, and the first two had been the most lucrative gigs he’d ever been given. But they’d not been so specific about timing. Usually he was given a two- or three-day window, but this was timed to the minute. What was that about?