Retribution by Ian Barclay Read Free Book Online Page A

shoulder, obviously expecting to be fed. Quite clearly
     she needed to take action urgently then. Didn’t the kind-looking man agree?
    Naim nodded and avoided the eye of a man smirking at his predicament. Normally Naim would not have minded at all listening
     to her patter. But today he wanted to pass unnoticed. He did not utter a word in case his Arabic-accented English might draw
     further attention to him.
    She said she had a brilliant idea. She would take the bird feeder off the stone column and hang it from a bamboo pole stuck
     in the ground. The ligfit weight of the small birds would hardly affect it, but heavy pigeons trying to land on the feeder
     would cause the bamboo and feeder to whip back and forth and dislodge the pigeons.
    Naim smiled brightly to demonstrate his appreciation of this maneuver.
    This was the kind of occurrence he had beenwarned about in training. Once an operation was under way in earnest, simple everyday things which can be depended upon not
     to change suddenly show remarkable ability to do so. The Americans had a phrase for it: anything that can happen will. For
     a century the English were famous for not talking to strangers on trains. Here was the exception to prove that rule. He somehow
     managed to mumble and smile his way until the train neared Oxford, when he fled from his seat. Damn, some of those passengers
     would remember the foreigner pestered by the crazy bird lady.
    He walked down the hill from the station and caught a red bus to Carfax, a major Oxford intersection. Ali met him on St. Aldate’s
     Street and handed him a briefcase out the car window.
    “Join Hasan,” Naim said unnecessarily to Ali, who drove away. Yesterday they had all come to Oxford together in one car.
    Tom Tower stood nearby over the main gate of Christ Church College. Hasan had carried an empty briefcase yesterday and had
     not been asked to check it or reveal its contents. But why should he? They were in the heart of peaceful England.
    “If you care to wait, sir,” one of the men at the gate said to him after he had paid admission, “I will be giving a short
     talk on some points of interest to these Japanese and American gentlemen following you.”
    Naim looked back and saw a dozen or so men who might be academics or medical doctors on a convention outing. “How long will
     I have to wait?”
    “No more than three or four minutes, sir.”
    “Thank you, I will.”
    He lingered a little, then wandered casually into Tom Quad. Having opened the briefcase, he set the digital timer for six
     minutes and spent an anxious moment as he snapped the current on. A misconnection or fault in the circuit could have set the
     bomb off. Hooking the device to its live power source was always the most dangerous point in handling delayed-action mechanisms.
     Naim set down the briefcase against the base of the building’s ancient stone wall. Then he walked away quickly toward the
     east side of the quad. He turned right into Peckwater Quad and hurried on to the smallest of the college’s four quads, Canterbury.
     Outside the back gates of the college, Hasan and Ali waited in their cars. He joined Hasan and Ali followed them, ready to
     run interference if they were chased.
    “Christ Church was Henry the Eighth’s favorite Oxford college,” the guide announced in a slightly bored way to the law professors
     from Japan and the United States. They were attending some event at one of the other colleges and came around here in batches
     of two nations at a time. Already today they’d had the Italians and Nigerians. He ushered them into Tom Quad, looked for a
     moment for the other visitor, decided he hadn’t waited, and promptly forgot him. A fountain played on the green lawn of the
     quad. “Garden parties are held here. But, gentlemen, please don’t walkon the grass. That privilege is reserved for members of the college,” by which he meant the teaching staff.
    The visitors looked suitably impressed.
    The guide