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He takes his keys and phone and garage remote control from a silver dish. As he steps outside and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of seagulls come inland for the city's good pickings. The streets round here are usually empty at weekends, but up ahead, along the Euston Road, a big crowd is making its way east towards Gower Street, and in the road itself, crawling in the eastbound lanes, are the same nose-to-tail coaches he saw on the morning news. The passengers are pressed against the glass, longing to be out there with the rest. They've hung their banners from the windows, along with football scarves and the names of towns from the heart of England - Stratford, Gloucester, Evesham. From the impatient pavement crowds, some dry runs with the noisemakers - a trombone, a squeeze-ball car horn, a lambeg drum. There are ragged practice chants which at first he can't make out. Tumty tumty tum. Don't attack Iraq. Placards not yet on duty are held at a slope, at rakish angles over shoulders. Not in My Name goes past a dozen times. Its cloying self-regard suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice. Henry prefers the languid, Down With this Sort of Thing. A placard of one of the organising groups goes by - The British Association of Muslims. Henry remembers that outfit well. It explained recently in its newspaper that apostasy from Islam is an offence punishable by death. Behind comes a banner proclaiming The Swaffham Women's Choir, and then, Jews Against the War.

On Warren Street he turns right. Now his view is east, towards the Tottenham Court Road. Here's an even bigger crowd, swelled by hundreds disgorging from the tube station. Backlit by the low sun, silhouetted figures break away and merge into a darker mass, but it's still possible to see a makeshift book stall and a hot dog stand, cheekily set up right outside McDonald's on the corner. It's a surprise, the number of children there are, and babies in push chairs. Despite his scepticism, Perowne in white-soled trainers, gripping his racket tighter, feels the seduction and excitement peculiar to such events; a crowd possessing the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose conveying an intimation of revolutionary joy.

He might have been with them, in spirit at least, for nothing now will keep him from his game, if Professor Taleb hadn't needed an aneurysm clipped on his middle cerebral artery.

Perowne knows that when a powerful imperium - Assyrian, Roman, American - makes war and claims just cause, history will not be impressed. He also worries that the invasion or the occupation will be a mess. The marchers could be right. And he acknowledges the accidental nature of opinions; if he hadn't met and admired the professor, he might have thought differently, less ambivalently, about the coming war. Opinions are a roll of the dice; by definition, none of the people now milling around Warren Street tube station happens to have been tortured by the regime, or knows and loves people who have, or even knows much about the place at all. It's likely most of them barely registered the massacres in Kurdish Iraq, or in the Shiite south, and now they find they care with a passion for Iraqi lives. They have good reasons for their views, among which are concerns for their own safety. Al-Qaeda, it's said, which loathes both godless Saddam and the Shiite opposition, will be provoked by an attack on Iraq into revenge on the soft cities of the west. Self-interest is a decent enough cause, but Perowne can't feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment.

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