Mahsoud smiled.
Cornflakes in hand, he walked over to the small window, and looked up at the clear blue skies over south-east London.
Seven or eight miles away, over Bromley, a passenger jet was climbing away through 6,000ft.
Mahsoud watched it go.
Three hundred souls and a hundred tonnes of aviation fuel, in a thin aluminium tube.
So thin.
So vulnerable.
‘I have plans of my own, brother,’ he said.
But I’m afraid I cannot share them with you, he thought.
SEVERAL MILES NORTH, on the other side of the river, Paul Spicer – senior partner at the human rights law firm Spicer, McGraw and Hill, and long a thorn in the side of the government – was already at his table in the Booking Office restaurant at the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel.
He was eating a much grander breakfast, his plate piled high with crispy bacon and waffles, drizzled with maple syrup in the American style.
He ate methodically, his chin wobbling as he chewed, pausing only to drink from his cup of strong black coffee.
Around him buzzed smart waitresses, eager waiters.
On his left, the morning maître d’ showed another small group of businessmen to their seats, smiling unctuously.
At 7.45 a.m., Emily Souster joined Spicer.
Slim and elegant in her grey trouser suit.
Roedean and Cambridge.
Blonde.
Stunningly pretty.
At one time, Spicer had half-hoped… But she’d made it quite clear that there was no chance of that.
Emily sat down and looked at him, eyebrows raised.
Said, in her cut-crystal Queen’s English, ‘How on earth can you eat that?’
‘Easy,’ he said, in his broad Leeds. ‘Open your gob, shove it in, and chew.’
She shuddered. ‘I’m a bag of nerves,’ she said.
A waitress came over.
Took her room number and her order – no food, just a fresh pot of coffee and a glass of orange juice.
Spicer said, ‘What’s there to be nervous about?’
‘Aren’t you?’ she said.
‘No. I’m ninety per cent certain we’re going to win. And even if we don’t…’
Even if we don’t, we bank our money and move on.
He left it unsaid.
Shot her a glance.
The junior solicitor sitting across the breakfast table from him was a true believer: a passionate human rights lawyer, a righter of wrongs, a romantic burner of midnight oils in pursuit of every cause she could find.
Why was it so often like that?
Emily had known every advantage in life – an ambassador father, the best education money could buy, a trust fund to fall back on… If you grew up like that, it allowed you the space to spend what felt like half the year working pro bono, seconded to crew aid convoys, and going on marches and demonstrations.
Whereas, if you grew up like he had – born to a single mum in Harehills, eating chip butties for tea, sharing bathwater with three brothers…
Make no mistake about it, he loved the challenge, loved picking holes in the government’s cases, but if you came up like that then you knew the value of a quid.
‘There’s no even if we don’t, Paul,’ said Emily. ‘We have to win. We can’t let him rot in there for the next fifteen years.’
Spicer smiled absently.
‘I’ll say one thing, Emily,’ he said, forking half a waffle into his mouth. ‘It won’t be for want of trying.’
AS HE SAID that, Charlotte Morgan was getting out of the shower of her flat in Pimlico, and wrapping a towel around her dripping body.
She opened the door and leaned out.
‘What time is it?’ she shouted, wrapping another towel around her wet hair.
‘Quarter to eight,’ came the reply from the bedroom. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Bloody alarm,’ said Charlotte, half to herself.
Eddie appeared in the doorway of their bedroom, in his boxers and a white T-shirt.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, again. ‘It’s only twenty minutes. I’ll make you a cup of tea and some toast.’
‘Half an hour, if the traffic’s bad,’ said Charlotte. ‘I need to be there by nine. And my hair’s still soaking.’
‘You just crack on,’ he said. ‘I’ll check the cab’s booked.’
He passed her, and they kissed, before he disappeared downstairs, and she walked through to the bedroom to begin drying her hair.
Clicked on the Today programme.
‘…in the case of Zeff Mahsoud.’
The voice of the BBC Radio 4 presenter drifted from the speaker.
‘Mr Mahsoud, a charity worker from Yorkshire, you’ll remember, was arrested after arriving home to the UK on a flight from North Africa. He maintained that he’d been on a humanitarian mission to Libya, but six months ago he was given a lengthy jail sentence for terrorism-related offences. He has always protested his innocence, and an increasingly noisy campaign for his release has led us to the Court of Appeal where, later today, his case will be re-considered. Whatever their lordships decide, the appeal has thrown into sharp relief a number of questions about the operations of both MI5 and MI6, and…’
She clicked the clock radio off.
She most definitely didn’t need that.
AT JUST BEFORE 8 a.m., Zeff Mahsoud was taken from his cell to the holding area.
There he was handcuffed to a prison officer, who led him through three sets of steel doors to the cold air outside.
He breathed in deeply, despite the diesel fumes which were filling the vehicle yard.
Overhead, the blue sky was slowly clouding over, but still he felt an overwhelming sense of release.
No matter who you were, and what you were doing there, prison was prison, and Belmarsh was worse than most.
Several police officers, wearing body armour and carrying MP4s fitted with suppressors, watched with undisguised contempt as he was loaded into the back of a prison transport vehicle.
There was a short delay as they waited for an armed robber whose appeal was to be heard on the same day, and then the truck fired up and lurched out of the prison gates, sandwiched between two Met Range Rovers and assisted by a pair of motorcycle outriders.
It’s an hour dead from Belmarsh in Woolwich to the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand – for ordinary vehicles.
With their sirens and blue lights, and the motorcyclists zipping ahead to hold up crossing traffic, they made it in forty minutes.
On