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eyes, mouths and noses, were smeared with cream in green and black slashes, and the ’scope’s lens had more scrim over it . . . The bloody rain dripped on them.
    It had been a good stag – good enough to justify the damp and the hunger: they’d eaten only a muesli bar each over a fifteen-hour period and drunk minimum water. Badger had identified the natural leader among the Muslim kids – bad not having the audio working, but the ’scope lens was enough to sort out the men from the boys. There was one to whom the others seemed to respond: he gave the instructions, didn’t do the runs up the hill with a weighted rucksack. He was a tall man, wore hiking boots, jeans and a heavy anorak; he didn’t have the trademark beard of a jihadist or the close-cropped skull. He wore thick rimless spectacles and might have been a library supervisor or a junior accountant – could have been anything – which meant he had worked on his anonymity with the help of a razor.
    Badger wasn’t armed and Ged had a disabling spray canister on his belt under the gillie suit; the power of the ’scope’s Leica lens, and the 500-ml one on the camera, meant they didn’t have to be closer. There was support at the pick-up point, with Glocks and H&Ks, but that was down on the road and in a lay-by closer to Beulah than Abergwesyn. The kids from Luton would have been fired up with holy-war stuff, and the discovery of a covert team watching them would have bred – no argument – angst, and from angst came violence, and from violence came a knife and a bared throat when a victim’s head was yanked back. The lenses they had been issued with meant they could stay a decent distance back, up the hillside, and do their business and . . . It was useful intelligence they had gained, and they had high-quality pictures and the number-plates of a Transit van that would be picked up when it was back on the road. Then it would be urban surveillance, and the guy with the rimless spectacles would be flagged for major attention. They’d each used a plastic bag, tinfoil and three bottles. Ged was wriggling to get them into the Bergen.
    The leader guy and one of the others had been outside a caravan, had stood and shivered – the ’scope’s night-vision attachment had shown this to Badger – and must have talked, something serious and not to be shared. Badger and Ged had identified a lieutenant, more trusted than the others, and could match up the night-vision image with the pictures taken in daylight so that he, too, could be marked out for extra attention. There was a scenario: in it, the leader and his right-hand guy did the speeches, talked of the sacrifice and might even have chatted up the prospect of the famous Seventy-two – the virgins waiting for a dismembered suicide warrior behind the gates into Paradise. Then they slid away and left the bastard dosed up with fervour to walk on to a train or a bus or into a shopping mall. Leaders and lieutenants did not do explosive vests wrapped round their own chests. The rest of the group would be fodder for the tailor who made the vests and wove into them the pouches for the ball bearings, screws, tacks and razor slivers, but they’d likely be rendered harmless if the top man and his bag-carrier were taken down at the knees.
    Lights burned now in two of the caravans and the booking with the farmer was until the following day. He reckoned the lads would be gone at first light. There’d be one surveillance vehicle facing down into Builth, another towards Abergwesyn and a biker was floating.
    They left the way they had come, and not even the farmer who had made the first call and who had worked that hillside with his dogs and sheep would have seen a sign of their approach or their departure, or noticed anything disturbed in the gorse.
    In the back office of the police station, where local priorities were listed on a poster as combating anti-social driving and curbing speeding on the Llanwrtyd Wells road