of light, instinctively flattening them into the high arched doorway of the building they were standing against, as if in the hope that it might open and offer them sanctuary. But the door was firmly locked. He looked up and realised where they were: outside the mosque that had once been a synagogue and before it a church. From the wall above his head an ancient sundial protruded, above it a two-word Latin inscription: ‘ Umbra sumus ’. We are shadows.
All of a sudden the spotlights were extinguished and the darkness swallowed them.
16
The difference between day and night is not what is used to be in the modern world. The sun’s rays never entered the fifth-storey office in the grey granite slab on Millbank where Sebastian Delahaye was whiling away what for those outside were the hours of darkness. There were no windows from which to savour the view across the Thames to Lambeth Palace or along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. If there had been, Delahaye would not have noticed; he had his own windows on the world. Thousands of them open upon the streets of London alone.
There were eyes everywhere and he could look through any of them. As a senior field coordinator of the intelligence service – and a man with a classical education – Sebastian Delahaye liked to joke privately he had more eyes than Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed watchman of the Greek god Zeus. Argus was the name he had given to the multilayered computer program that could gain immediate access to any of them.
The powers it wielded had not come cheap. But the cost had been spread thinly. Surveillance cameras on motorway bridges had been paid for by the Highways Authority for the sake of safety, at ATMs by the banks to deter fraud, in shopping malls by the retailers to deter shoplifters and pickpockets, at pedestrian crossings and on street corners by local councils working with police to reduce accidents and street crime, in London by the socialist mayor keen to cut traffic levels with his congestion charge.
Britain’s surveillance society had arguably grown from a single incident. In 1993 cameras at the Bootle Strand shopping centre outside Liverpool picked up crucial images of toddler Jamie Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who were to murder him. That was followed by the 1994 Home Office paper entitled ‘ CCTV-Looking Out for You’ and a mushrooming of cameras in every town and city, on every ‘dangerous’ bend on a country road or pedestrian crossing in a rural village. Civil liberties groups estimatedthat the number of surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom was in excess of six million, or one for every ten members of the population.
In the days that followed the London bombings of 7 July 2005, surveillance cameras had identified the four British Muslims – three of them born and bred in Yorkshire – who had fallen under the spell of Al Qaeda – and murdered fifty-two of their fellow citizens. They also tracked down another gang of intended suicide bombers two weeks later, but when it came to action on the ground, the police instead misidentified and killed an innocent Brazilian plumber.
The advocates of surveillance, who included Sebastian Delahaye, insisted that error was human but surveillance remained efficient. That efficiency was being put to the test right now. As first reports of a killing in London’s volatile Bangladeshi community had come in, Delahaye had begun doing what he did best: sifting and collating.
For the better part of three months Delahaye’s department had been keeping loose but strict tabs on the movement of a man known as Sidi Al Barani, an Algerian granted political asylum from his country’s military regime after the rigged elections there in 2002, despite being known as a dedicated Islamic fundamentalist. Since his arrival in Britain Al Barani had taken pains to keep on the right side of the law, avoiding the outspoken Muslim clerics who attracted police and media attention
All of a sudden the spotlights were extinguished and the darkness swallowed them.
16
The difference between day and night is not what is used to be in the modern world. The sun’s rays never entered the fifth-storey office in the grey granite slab on Millbank where Sebastian Delahaye was whiling away what for those outside were the hours of darkness. There were no windows from which to savour the view across the Thames to Lambeth Palace or along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. If there had been, Delahaye would not have noticed; he had his own windows on the world. Thousands of them open upon the streets of London alone.
There were eyes everywhere and he could look through any of them. As a senior field coordinator of the intelligence service – and a man with a classical education – Sebastian Delahaye liked to joke privately he had more eyes than Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed watchman of the Greek god Zeus. Argus was the name he had given to the multilayered computer program that could gain immediate access to any of them.
The powers it wielded had not come cheap. But the cost had been spread thinly. Surveillance cameras on motorway bridges had been paid for by the Highways Authority for the sake of safety, at ATMs by the banks to deter fraud, in shopping malls by the retailers to deter shoplifters and pickpockets, at pedestrian crossings and on street corners by local councils working with police to reduce accidents and street crime, in London by the socialist mayor keen to cut traffic levels with his congestion charge.
Britain’s surveillance society had arguably grown from a single incident. In 1993 cameras at the Bootle Strand shopping centre outside Liverpool picked up crucial images of toddler Jamie Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who were to murder him. That was followed by the 1994 Home Office paper entitled ‘ CCTV-Looking Out for You’ and a mushrooming of cameras in every town and city, on every ‘dangerous’ bend on a country road or pedestrian crossing in a rural village. Civil liberties groups estimatedthat the number of surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom was in excess of six million, or one for every ten members of the population.
In the days that followed the London bombings of 7 July 2005, surveillance cameras had identified the four British Muslims – three of them born and bred in Yorkshire – who had fallen under the spell of Al Qaeda – and murdered fifty-two of their fellow citizens. They also tracked down another gang of intended suicide bombers two weeks later, but when it came to action on the ground, the police instead misidentified and killed an innocent Brazilian plumber.
The advocates of surveillance, who included Sebastian Delahaye, insisted that error was human but surveillance remained efficient. That efficiency was being put to the test right now. As first reports of a killing in London’s volatile Bangladeshi community had come in, Delahaye had begun doing what he did best: sifting and collating.
For the better part of three months Delahaye’s department had been keeping loose but strict tabs on the movement of a man known as Sidi Al Barani, an Algerian granted political asylum from his country’s military regime after the rigged elections there in 2002, despite being known as a dedicated Islamic fundamentalist. Since his arrival in Britain Al Barani had taken pains to keep on the right side of the law, avoiding the outspoken Muslim clerics who attracted police and media attention
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