‘What the fuck?’ said Marsh as he caught the can, dropping his book as he did so.

Nothing. No bang. No boom.

‘Fuck me!’ Marsh said as the tin scorched his flesh and he threw it to the floor. Jax watched from the cell entrance as the goons moved in to examine the can. It started to fizz and froth, a white foam spewing from the hole.

‘It’s a bomb!’ Grub screamed.

All together, they turned and ran for the door.

Jax closed his eyes, planted his feet, and blocked the only exit.

CHAPTER 24

Langley, Virginia, USA

SAMI felt like he was sitting at somebody else’s desk. He still had an office at Langley, even though he spent at least ten months a year overseas. He’d once worked at this desk full-time, but that was almost twenty years back. Before a couple of planes had flown into a couple of buildings.

He gazed at the picture on the desk: a young man and a young woman, a toddler on each lap. He felt like he was looking at somebody else’s family. Another life.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the twins, now teenagers. His boys didn’t want to know him. He put it down partly to hormones but mostly to resentment. He had fathered by way of correspondence, all his parenting delivered over the phone from places like Paris, Beirut and Moscow. Unsurprisingly, his marriage had gone about as well as the co-parenting had.

Back in the US since the Alabama bombing, he had hoped to see his sons. But a month had now passed and they still weren’t returning his calls, replying only by way of text to say that they were busy and ‘Maybe next time’. He had wanted to be a proper father. He still wanted to be a proper father.

He was actually on okay terms with his ex these days – he hadn’t cheated on her or walked out, not with or for another woman anyway. It was the CIA that had cost him his marriage and his family. Even during the two months a year he was at home, his mind was always somewhere else. Terrorists didn’t take holidays, and neither did he.

Sami wondered what his desk would have looked like if Osama Bin Laden had never been born. He imagined the photograph would have been part of a series, the boys bigger in each picture, his wife sporting different hairstyles but retaining her ageless beauty, and him getting greyer and fatter while his smile grew a little wider in each frame. He wondered if he’d ever again been as happy as he was on the day of that photograph on his desk.