Free A Loyal Spy by Simon Conway

W. Bush and below it the headline:
Justice will be done
.
    ‘We’ll go after them, wherever they are. We’ll hunt them down.’
    Revenge was the word on everyone’s lips. In the early hours of one morning in Gander, Jonah had found himself sitting on a pew in the church next to a straight-backed, grey-faced woman with a Bible on her lap. He hadn’t meant to intrude on her prayers but it was the only pew without someone stretched out on it, and she had offered him a weary smile. He had spoken to her out of politeness and in return she had confided in him. She spoke softly, without betraying any emotion: her daughter had been ‘taken’ in the attacks. She had been ‘judged’. The daughter had worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower, just above the point of impact. Jonah had been stunned by the woman’s composure.
    ‘We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government,’ the woman explained. ‘We’ve stuck our finger in His eye. The Supreme Court has insulted Him over and over. They’ve taken His Bible away from the schools. They’ve forbidden little children to pray.’
    Jonah tried to ease himself out of the pew, but there was an unstoppable momentum to her softly spoken words.
    ‘The battle of America has begun,’ she told him. ‘In the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. Retribution will be terrible to behold.’
    Not everybody in America had considered they were immune or out of reach, Jonah reflected. Plenty of people had been expecting it. They were the ones counting down the hours to the rapture. It was easy to understand how religious fundamentalists would latch on to the destruction of the towers as a foreshadow of the coming Armageddon. And both sides were at it: the symbolism was both biblical and Koranic. In the Bible, the people who built the tower of Babel were punished for their presumption; in the Koran, the people who failed to heed God’s messengers were destroyed in the punishment stories. As far as Jonah was concerned, Islamism and Christian fundamentalism were no different from each other – their adherents were both scrambling rabidly for the next piece of carnage.
    ‘This way,’ Mikulski said, producing a torch from his battered leather coat. They entered the Century 21 department store and picked their way through the rubble and smashed goods to the emergency stairwell. They climbed to the fifth floor and entered the offices of a law firm. Walking over to the windows, which were blown out, they stepped out on to the ledge.
    ‘There,’ Mikulski said.
    They were looking right into the heart of it, an enormous pile of smouldering wreckage. Parts of it were on fire. In the glare of the spotlights, they stood and watched firemen digging in the rubble and twisted metal. Just looking at it sucked all the hope out of you.
    ‘You have your answer, don’t you?’ Mikulski said. ‘You know now why they were converting cash into easily transportable assets, because they know that we are going to come for them like a whirlwind and they know that if they can’t carry it they’ll lose it. Diamonds are among the easiest, and by far the most valuable by weight, of commodities to move. They don’t set off metal detectors. They don’t have any scent. You take a diamond that’s been cut and polished and there’s no human being on earth who can tell with certainty where that stone came from.’
    ‘We think they purchased about twenty million dollars’ worth.’
    ‘They want to be able to fund future attacks,’ Mikulski told him. ‘This abomination isn’t enough for them; it’s not big enough or grotesque enough. Not by a long way. It’s only the opening salvo.’
    Within the counter-terrorism community, Mikulski had a reputation for being a maverick but also for plain speaking and honesty. He was the son of Polish immigrants, a former Baltimore