The Sanction

by Mark Sennen

  ‘Where?’ he said, sitting up, aware of his clammy skin as the duvet slipped off his upper body.

  ‘Tunis,’ the voice in his ear said, adding in a sympathetic tone, ‘Sorry, Stephen.’

  The voice belonged to Martin ‘Harry’ Palmer, Holm’s friend in SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, better known to the public and journalists as MI6. Palmer worked the North Africa desk and was Holm’s contact at SIS and his sometime drinking partner. They’d known each other for years, since way before either of them worked for the security services, and Palmer was an old hand to whom Holm could express his frequent dissatisfaction with work and life in general. If he wasn’t a friend then he was as close to one as Holm had, and Holm always appreciated the way Palmer managed to sound calm even when chin-deep in shit, his tone being similar to that of a weather forecaster reporting the possibility of a short rain shower: Pack an umbrella or a lightweight mac. Don’t worry, it’ll be brighter by the afternoon.

  ‘Tunis?’ Holm threw off the rest of the duvet, climbed from the bed and staggered from the bedroom. He headed down the hallway of his little flat and into the living room. The location given by Palmer had momentarily thrown him, and he tried to work the angles and come up with something that made sense. Nothing did so he picked up the remote for the TV and blipped it on. ‘How bad?’

  There was a momentary pause before the answer came. ‘At least four UK citizens so far. Three other fatalities, a dozen critically or seriously injured. The total death toll could well rise into double figures.’

  ‘Right.’ Holm was staring at the TV screen, taking in the news footage at the same time as his mind began to run the numbers. The casualty figure was bad but manageable. The location – Tunis – was a nasty surprise.

  Holm moved back into the hall and towards the bathroom, wondering if there was going to be time for a shower, thinking no, a squirt of deodorant would have to do. ‘Random or targeted?’

  ‘Targeted. It appears the attackers were after the head of a British-run women’s charity. She was killed along with a journalist who happened to be interviewing her at the time. The other dead are tourists: British, American, French and German.’

  ‘Shit.’ Holm worked the facts. American. French. German. Non-UK dead complicated the matter. For a moment he scolded himself for forgetting these were people no matter what their nationality. ‘Have we got anything from the Yanks yet?’

  ‘No, but BND has been in contact. They’re pretty upset at the misinformation you sent yesterday.’

  ‘Misinformation?’ BND. The Bundesnachrichtendienst. The German intelligence agency. Holm could imagine the director fuming at the killing of one of his citizens, irate that the warning the British had issued was so bungled. ‘That’s unfair.’

  ‘Fair or not, most of Europe went on high alert because of you lot and yet nothing happened. Then you cancelled the alert and when the attack happens it’s somewhere completely off the radar.’ There was a pause before Palmer continued. ‘You might like to start devising some elaborate excuse for the Spider on why you fucked up on this one, OK?’

  Holm shivered as Palmer ended the call. The Spider. Real name Fiona Huxtable, Holm’s immediate boss and the deputy director of MI5. The Spider lived on the fifth floor at Thames House and spun sticky webs that could trap the unwary. Like many female arachnids, she enjoyed eating the male of the species alive, although in Huxtable’s case it didn’t involve sex beforehand.

  He tossed the phone onto the sofa. In the bathroom he splashed water on his face and groped in the cupboard for a can of deodorant. The aerosol hissed out as he sprayed himself and he was struck by the thought that no amount of deodorant was going to prevent the stink Huxtable was going to kick up over this.

  * * *

  Silva turned away from the car park and back to the job in hand. She walked round the corner to where depressing flats stood above tired shops. She opened her postbag and took out a bunch of letters. Flat 2. She stuffed the letters into the slot, heard them fall onto the mat, let the flap clang shut, turned away.

  The uniform. Red and blue, and she really hoped the boy in the car park aspired to be something more than a postal worker.

  Next address. More letters. A dog growling behind the door. She shook her head as she heard the dog rip into the mail. Not her problem. She moved on. In the next flat a baby was crying, and over the child’s distress a couple argued. Obscenities flew back and forth. What love there ever was drained away by poverty and circumstance. Silva didn’t care. She drifted up the street and the day drifted with her. Just like every day. Work the round, deliver the mail, end the shift. In the evenings she retreated to the little boat she called home. It sat on a berth at the end of a pontoon in a rundown marina where nobody bothered her. She could cook herself a meal and try to sleep. Wake the next morning. Do it all over again. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. She took all the overtime she could and enjoyed the fact the job involved walking everywhere. She relished the constant movement, finally understanding Itchy’s affliction: if you kept moving you didn’t have to think. You lived for each step, each swing of the arm, each twitch of the head. Seventeen strides to the front door. Push the flap, shove in the letters, walk away. Twenty-five strides to the next house. Push the flap, shove in the letters, walk away. Walk, push, shove. Each bag of mail represented ten thousand steps. Ten thousand little segments of time when she wasn’t still, wasn’t thinking.

  Monday to Saturday she worked, but Sunday she was forced to take off, so on that day she ran. Wind or rain, she ran. Often she pounded the same streets she’d been walking the day before, but sometimes she took her motorbike out onto the moor and ran up there. From the vantage point of a rocky tor, she could see the city of Plymouth sprawled below, the ocean beyond. Warships lay anchored in the sheltered waters of the Sound or moored up alongside in the dockyards. This was the largest naval base in Western Europe. Nuclear submarines came here to be repaired and refuelled, and there was a huge armament facility on the far side of the river. The military had been inexorably bound up with the place for centuries, and conflict had shaped the city. She’d wandered here after prison, searching for a cheap place to moor her boat for a few nights while she was visiting Itchy, and ended up staying. Out here in the far west she was as anonymous and unloved as the city was, but like the city she bore the scars of war deep inside.

  The Afghan boy, yes, but the others too.

  She remembered her first kill as if it was yesterday. He was a figure rising from behind a wall, gun in hand. The four hundred metres between the end of her rifle and the man in the sights compressed until he was no longer a distant enemy soldier. The scope magnified his features and she could see he was somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s husband. She slipped her finger from the trigger and raised her head. Her perspective changed from a restricted view of the man to a vista that took in a tree-lined road leading to a small fort. An armoured vehicle headed down the road, a squad of men marching behind. If she didn’t take the shot the man behind the wall would shoot at the patrol. Lives were in her hands. During training, her instructor had cautioned her not to overthink it, not to dwell on the morality of the act. Still, she was aware she was, for that one moment, God.

  She lowered her eye to the scope once more, pulled the trigger, and the man went down. A figure crumpling in the haze, a mirage blurring the air as he died. Was that his spirit departing his body or merely a spiral of dust kicked up as he fell? She didn’t know, but later, lying on her bunk at the base trying to get to sleep, she thought back to the moment of the man’s death and wept. Then the next day she tried not to think of it again. She stuck the memory in a little box and pushed it to the far recesses of her mind. It’s what soldiers did.

  Silva could count the number of local friends she had on one hand: Itchy, also discharged from the army for his part in the death of the Afghan boy; a woman who was a doctor whom she’d met on a run; a girl at the Royal Mail who’d been in the nav
y. Life in the military provided a ready-made family, but once you left you were on your own, all of a sudden shorn of the common thread which had sustained friendships through the most horrific of circumstances. Civvy Street seemed mundane and trite after the streets of Kabul, everyday worries trivial or even offensive when you considered the situation in other parts of the world. When you had pulled a trigger and ended an innocent young life.

  Away from Plymouth she had a few acquaintances scattered round the country, but they weren’t much more than numbers and faces on her phone. They weren’t people she could call up and talk to. Aside from her mother, there was really only one person who she’d ever been able to do that with and she had no idea where he was. She didn’t even know what country he was in. Besides, she’d burned her bridges with him. Ended it. Her decision, no regrets. None. At least that’s what she told herself every time he slipped into her thoughts.

  More letters into letterboxes. Bills and court summonses and bad news. The occasional birthday card or a postcard from abroad. Somewhere hot and sunny where you didn’t have to stay behind hard cover or crap yourself when you walked down a street because your opposite number had found a standout position.

  She came round the side of a block of flats and the car park loomed above her once again. The boy had gone and there was nobody up there now. Nothing but a mass of concrete and rows of cars and, above it all, a brooding grey sky the colour of gunmetal.

  * * *

  Holm stood by the sink for a moment longer. He examined himself in the mirror, trying to see beyond his reflected image, to somehow see the future. There was nothing but a creased brow and a face with a dozen craggy lines, lines which he knew had deepened in the past few years. Was that life and ageing or were the marks indicative of a more serious malaise? He wasn’t sure, but either way the job wasn’t helping and the current debacle marked a new low point in a career that had recently been short on highs. Perhaps he should just resign himself to the fact he was past it. His mind simply didn’t work in the same way as it once had. His creative juices had been sucked out by the constant stress of trying to stay on top of the latest threat. If you made a mistake, people died. And as Palmer had said, he’d fucked up on this one.

  Big time.

  He met his gaze in the mirror and wondered how in hell it had come to this.

  * * *

  Stephen Holm was a senior analyst at the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. Part of MI5, its role was to sift through intelligence and assess the threat level posed by various groups and individuals. Holm’s route into JTAC had been circuitous. He’d started his career as a beat bobby on the Met before moving to CID where he’d been attached to Special Branch. He’d joined Special Branch long before 9/11, when the word terrorist invariably referred to the Northern Irish situation. That had been a dirty war, but the enemy had been familiar. They had the same colour skin, worshipped the same God and spoke the same language. They understood there were certain rules both sides had to abide by. If 9/11 changed that cosy view forever then the British equivalent – 7/7 – brought it to the streets of London with a literal bang. JTAC had been formed in the aftermath of 9/11 as the security services realised they were way behind the curve, and Holm had moved across from the police to Five around then, taking up a position in international counter-terrorism. His assignment to JTAC had come at fifty, and in the intervening years JTAC had had many successes and a few failures, but nobody kidded themselves the war was even close to being won.

  No, Holm thought to himself, not even close.

  There’d been whispers of a possible attack earlier in the week. Some vague intercepts from GCHQ. A person of interest making an unscheduled journey. A word from Palmer that he’d picked up a nugget from a deep-cover contact in Belgium. All these things suggested something might be about to happen, yet none pointed to an exact target or date. Nevertheless, Holm had a gut feeling of impending disaster but – as he often said to junior colleagues – you couldn’t go to the Spider and offer her a mere hunch. You needed a juicy morsel if you wanted her to bite.

  He’d scuttled round all week trying to extract information from various sources, even tapping an informant he usually reserved for times when an attack was believed to be imminent. The informant, bribed with a cup of sweet black coffee and a fifty-pound donation to a local homeless charity, had mentioned a mosque he’d attended in west London. There’d been a visiting cleric from Palestine. A meeting of a youth group where pictures of atrocities committed by UK, American and Israeli forces had been passed round. Talk afterwards.

  ‘Hotheads and idiots,’ the informant, a moderate who had no truck with extremism, said as he bent to sip his coffee. ‘You want their names?’

  Holm had nodded, but knew this wasn’t it. This was just lads being lads. For all the religious fervour a leader could drum up among young, impressionable minds, he doubted the bravado was any different from that found among young men who followed other creeds or even no creed at all. There were morons in any country, from any culture, of any colour. He’d taken the names anyway, cross-referenced them and drawn a blank.

  When Thursday evening ticked over into Friday morning, the chatter died to nothing. Bleary-eyed junior analysts kept casting him glances, and at a little after four a.m. Holm called it safe and sent everyone home. He remained in the situation room for another couple of hours and then checked out himself.

  Safe.

  Stupid idiot.

  Holm gave himself another squirt of deodorant for good measure and returned to the bedroom to get dressed.

  Chapter Two

  Silva had just a handful of letters left to deliver when heavy rain began to fall. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance as she passed a shop with televisions in the window display. Water streaked down the glass, blurring the TV images. She pulled her waterproof around her, fastened the hood, and made sure the flap of the postbag was closed. A few steps ahead, the boy she’d seen at the car park earlier smiled at her as his father dragged him from the wet street into the store. The pair stopped in the entrance and stared at a huge screen. A red bar ran along the bottom of the image, the word Breaking flashing on and off. The father shook his head, bent and said something to the boy, and then they were gone, deeper into the store.

  Silva looked at the screen too and found herself moving forward. A wash of warmth from an air curtain greeted her as she stepped into the shop. There were others looking at the screen now. An elderly man. A young couple. A woman in a business suit.

  ‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’ the old man said to nobody in particular. ‘We need to wipe them off the surface of the earth.’

  Chaos flashed on the screen. Blue lights strobing, soldiers running, ambulances lining the street. The camera panned and showed the remains of a cafe. The entire front had been destroyed in a fusillade of bullets, the street littered with tables and chairs and debris. A pool of red stained the pavement near a pile of something pink and raw, and the camera quickly panned away. Silva felt a drop of cold rain slip from the hood of her waterproof and fall onto her neck. She pushed through and stood at the front.

  ‘Where’s this?’ she said.

  ‘Tunisia,’ the businesswoman said. ‘Thank God.’

  The cafe on the screen emerged from a recent memory. A cup and saucer and cinnamon sticks with the coffee. Fancy little biscuits. An evening spent in the fading heat of a day not more than three months ago. The next morning, hugs and kisses and a promise that they’d catch up soon. A flight back to the UK, Silva staring through the aircraft window as Europe glided below, wondering what it would have been like had her parents led normal lives. Had their wanderlust rubbed off? Was that why she never felt settled?

  The camera moved to the right. Three body bags lay at the front of an office block where a plate glass window had crazed into a spiderweb pattern. Next to the window stood several police officers, sub-machine guns cradled in their arms. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolled to the left. The head
of a British women’s aid charity had been assassinated in an attack on a cafe in Tunis. Other expats and tourists had also been targeted. Seventeen people injured, at least seven fatalities. The raindrop ran from Silva’s neck down to her chest and she shivered. She’d been to the cafe, she was sure of it. Then her phone rang and she was stepping away from the crowd, out into the street and the rain. She pulled the phone from her bag and saw the caller. He never rang her, not at work. In fact he never rang her at all. She realised her hand was shaking as she moved the phone to her ear.

  ‘Dad?’ she said.

  ‘It’s your mother.’ The voice hesitated, stumbled over words, muttered a series of broken phrases. Although good at barking orders, dealing with emotion had never been her father’s strong point. ‘She’s… well, she’s dead.’

  ‘I know,’ Silva said.

  She ended the call and dropped the phone back into the postbag. She left the flap open and rain patted in among the letters as she began to walk. After a few strides an involuntary spasm ran through her and she started to jog. She ran away from the main shopping area and headed towards the seafront, her feet moving faster. Trotting, running, sprinting. At some point she lurched to a stop and looked down at the bag. Everything inside was sodden. She dropped the bag onto the pavement and removed her waterproof coat. The red and blue. The uniform. She folded the coat neatly and placed it on the pavement and ran up to the expanse of grass that overlooked Plymouth Sound. Out to sea, sheets of rain swept across the water, lashing down on a solitary grey warship moored in the centre of the bay. For a second a shaft of brightness shimmied across the sea but then it was gone as dark clouds rolled in from the west. Silva ran across to a nearby bench and slumped down, breathless, on the wet surface. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked herself back and forth as the rain continued to fall, not wanting to stop moving, not wanting to think.