DEAD GIRLS DONT LIE

Tony was terrified, but he knew that it was his only option. He also knew that in a few minutes' time, there would be hundreds far more terrified than he was right now.

He had his schedule and it was memorised to the second. He could even see the big clock on the wall that he had to work to. He watched the seconds tick down and took deep breaths to calm himself, it was not a particularly hot day, but he was perspiring profusely, so he took his handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket and stopped at a mirror to dab at his face.

He was beginning to calm down, the Valium was working. He had not thought that it would be this easy. He had a hundred metres further to walk and fifteen minutes to do it in. He dawdled, looking at the clothes along the way, and wondered, none of it would matter soon, and he wondered whether it ever should have. Shirts, trousers, suits, men's perfumery… he touched some of them, as you might a flower, then up the escalator to ladies' wear and along the aisles heading for the jewellery department. He knew the way; he had walked the route dozens of times.

Two minutes to go and he felt his heart pick up speed. Wait a few more seconds, don't get to close to the display cabinets, he had been told. In fact, he had been given a line not to cross, and lo and behold, there it was a metre before him. He stood on his mark, the point where two sections of the aisle carpet joined, and pretended to be reading an advertisement

Fifteen seconds to go. He looked around himself, a deep sadness in his eyes.

Ten seconds, he caught a sales assistant's eye and she started to walk towards him, he tried to will her away.

Five seconds, she was speaking to him, but he was not listening.

Four, three, two, one…

Zero.

Boom.

She never heard him say sorry, but then neither she nor Tony existed in this world any longer.

After the deafening explosion, there was complete silence for several seconds and then the screaming started. People were screaming, crying and running for their lives, those who were still able to anyway. There were people and bits of people lying all around and smoke from several fires.

Smoke and cries of agony and smells of fear and Semtex and spatters of Tony and the nice female sales assistant all over the ceiling and clothes and shoppers. The department store's alarm started and so did the sprinkler system seconds later.

Men in black raced in from the emergency staircase, but they were there to help themselves, not the wounded, and they carried machine guns, not medical bags, not that there was any resistance.

∞

The next day, the newspapers reported that at least thirty people had been killed and one hundred and fifty injured in the suicide bombing of a large department store in the centre of Baghdad.

Nothing more was to be read in the papers or to be seen on television, but the insurance world was abuzz about the jewellery heist from the store and so were the world's main intelligence agencies.

Ten and a half million dollars worth of goods had been stolen in the confusion and there were no clues as to the perpetrators. They had Tony on CCTV, but he was also dead. They saw that happen too, but then the camera stopped working. They put the losses down to 'looters, who probably included the security staff and the clean-up personnel' and left it at that.

It was not unheard of for security and clean-up staff to steal items of value that they found while in the process of carrying out their grizzly work. It was a perk and nobody really minded if the wealthy Western insurance companies were defrauded anyway, and if there was a clause against acts of war and terrorism, then some other rich people would foot the bill and that didn't matter to a bobby on the beat either.

Sympathy was reserved wholly for the dead, the maimed and their relatives, not the store owners.

The two most noticeable things about the suicide bombing of Scheherazade's department store were the misery that it caused to mostly local people and the overtime it gave them cleaning the place up, making it safe again and reopening it.

The damage it had caused to the shoppers and staff had been horrific, but the actual damage to the building itself had been negligible, because the walls around the jewellery department had recently been clad with slabs of marble and they had stood up well to the blast from the bomb, which had been designed to kill and to maim, but not to cause structural damage.

The six-millimetre-diameter shot that had surrounded the explosives had been heavy enough to wreck people and display cabinets of toughened glass, but not bring down walls or ceilings. However, not many people were aware of that, and neither had Tony been.

The inquiry into the blast began immediately that afternoon when the store's security staff handed their cameras' recordings to the police so that they could start trying to track down those responsible.

The surveillance cameras were mounted on very obvious 'glitter globes', six on each, hanging from the ceilings at such points around the store that every aspect was covered by a camera. Not all of the cameras were recording all of the time, but each one came 'on' for ten seconds before focus was switched to the next camera lens. The globes had been installed and the switching so set up, that almost every location in the store was under observation all of the time, albeit from different angles and from different focal points.

The Federal Police officers ran the recording sequence back from the detonation, so that they had an image of the bomber and then searched for his entry into the store. When they had found him entering the store, it was easy enough to track his movements. Every officer agreed that, in hindsight, it was easy to see that he had something to hide by his demeanour, if not by his clothing. He certainly had not looked 'padded out'.

Six officers watched the footage on both a large screen and a smaller one, because the large screen produced a pixellated image, although individual frames could be corrected to a large extent by software made for the purpose.

They watched Tony, although they did not know his name, for the almost twenty minutes he was in the department store at normal speed and then they watched the footage in slow motion.

Several times.

They watched, and spent all night watching, the film, over and over again, while scenes of crime forensic experts and other police and army officers inspected the gruesome aftermath.

At daybreak, fourteen hours later, they had to stop, and reluctantly went home for some rest. The night shift took over, but on overtime until the day shift could get back in five hours later. They watched the footage over and over again and made notes, which they could share with their colleagues.

One point that everyone on both shifts agreed on, was that it was obvious that the bomber was nervous and the chief officer of the night shift wrote a memorandum to include parts of the film in a training video for store security staff on how to spot people acting suspiciously. However, for the rest they were stumped.

When the day shift took over again, they sat with a coffee and played the film again in slow motion.

"Sir, stop it there! Rewind it a few seconds, please, now, one frame at a time and get ready to freeze it when I say so, " said a young female Federal Police officer. "I think I saw something… See there? The perp just mopped his brow, and look! There is brown on his handkerchief! It was either very dusty yesterday, or… I think our man is wearing make-up, stage make-up. We, or I at least, have assumed that he is from the Middle East, but now I am not sure. Look, his forehead is a little whiter now… patchy. Go back and play that sequence again, sir, if you please. See what I mean?

"Could he be European?"

They ran and re-ran that part of the footage over and over again.

"Suzette, you might just have something there, " said the commanding officer, Federal Police Captain Ali Allawi, what do you guys think?"

Most agreed, some reluctantly.

"So, our bomber might not be Arab or even from these parts at all. I did notice that he did not shout 'Allahu Akbar!' at detonation."

"Can you give us a clear close-up of his face?"

The female IT expert twiddled some knobs and moved a few virtual sliders in order to enhance the image until it was the best she could produce.

"Sir."

"Throw it up on both screens and print off a dozen hi-res copies, please."

The officers inspected the screens and the print-outs in minute detail.

"Can you manipulate this image, Lieutenant? Try removing those heavy eyebrows… and the moustache, and lighten his skin, especially around the eyes. That's it, a bit paler, north European. Yes…

"Good. Now give him brown hair instead of black, yes, that's it. He could be European or of European descent, but it's only a long shot… a very long shot… Has Scenes of Crime found any bits of him that we could use for ID?"

"No, sir, not yet. Not that I am aware of. The blast took out the nearest pod of cameras and the flash from the explosion over-exposed images from other cameras near-by, so we don't know where any of him flew off to, sir."

"OK, give someone at forensics a call and check."

"Sir! Will do right away, sir! When I called fifteen minutes ago they said that there is massive carnage and anything could belong to anyone within twenty metres of the bomber. They said that it is hard to impossible to check for any DNA matches on the walls and the ceiling because of smoke damage. Pollution, sir."

"All right, lieutenant. Keep in touch with them and let me know the minute anything happens – day or night, on shift or not, understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"OK, guys, for the rest of this shift, we will work on the assumption that the bomber was a white European or American. I will put that in our shift log, but for the time being, it is only speculation, all right? It does not, and I repeat most strongly, it definitely does not, rule out the possibility that he was an Arab terrorist, who committed this atrocity for political or religious motives.

"Who knows what is running through the mind of someone who is on the verge of meeting Allah and taking innocent people with him? Perhaps he just forgot to say 'Allahu Akbar'. Perhaps he hadn't seen the need to wash his face that morning, in the circumstances… Do not allow your minds to close off any possibility. I am only saying that for the rest of this shift, we will run with Suzette's idea that he might be European, or American, let's say Caucasian, and see where it takes us. There is absolutely no historical evidence relating to Caucasian suicide bombers.

"White people bomb things, yes, and blow other people up, yes, but they don't normally kill themselves in the process, at least, not on purpose.

"Our man here is on a mission and he is going to die. If he is Caucasian, then we are dealing with a new breed of suicide bomber, a type no-one has ever met before.

"Question. How many Caucasians were at the scene of the crime at the time of the blast? Someone find out.

"Let's see how many unclaimed teeth we can find, and bits of bone. Get them all off for DNA testing. Let's see whether we have any unattributable body parts of Caucasian origin."

"Forensics are not going to be happy about that, sir. It'll take them weeks, if not months."

"Who cares what they think. It can't be helped; we could be on the brink of something new here. A new terrorist organisation or a new splinter group, although I must say that if that is true, why would a Caucasian blow himself up in an Iraqi department store?

"It doesn't make sense! Christians just don't do that sort of thing simply to prove a point.

"Has any group claimed responsibility yet?"

"No, sir, nothing at all from any of the usual sources."

"Have you phoned our sources and asked them?"