The Sanction

by Mark Sennen

  Silva took the picture and examined it. The still was monochrome and showed a street scene. A minibus sat across from the cafe, slewed in the road. Three men stood beside it, two of them holding assault rifles, the other a pistol. In the distance, distorted by the wide-angle lens of the camera, Silva could see the tables and chairs of the cafe. Anonymous people sitting at those tables, their faces too pixellated to recognise.

  ‘My mother?’ Silva’s hand shook, the photograph flapping in her hand.

  ‘The picture was taken at 2.31 p.m. exactly. Thirty seconds later the camera went offline when it was hit by a stray bullet.’ Fairchild lowered his voice. ‘Take a look at the man to the right of the minibus.’

  Silva glanced down and tried to stop her hand from shaking. Like the other men, the figure to the right wore a chequered shemagh, but in this case it had slipped, revealing the face.

  ‘Mohid Latif?’

  ‘Yes. He was one of the attackers, and in the other picture there he is with Brandon Hope and a Saudi terrorist sympathiser. I don’t think they were discussing aid budgets.’

  Silva sighed. It was too much to take in. She looked at the picture of the villa again. The blue sea sparkled in the distance, white boats scattered on the surface of the water. Hope appeared hot and uncomfortable, the other men calm. It was like a scene from a movie set. Unreal.

  ‘And Karen Hope?’

  ‘Here.’ Fairchild reached for yet another photograph. ‘Tell me she isn’t involved.’

  Silva took the picture. The same metal bench, the same backdrop of sea and boats, the same green wall. Only this time Brandon and Haddad had gone and had been replaced by Karen Hope. Her head was turned towards Latif and the other man and was bowed slightly, as if she was listening intently.

  A tingle slipped across the back of Silva’s hand as she let the picture drop to the table. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘If this is true – if, mind you – then you have all the information you need to expose Karen Hope and her brother. I don’t see how I can add anything to what you’ve already discovered. Where do I fit in?’

  ‘You haven’t twigged?’ Fairchild smiled. ‘Where do you think these pictures came from?’

  ‘I presume you’ve got sources. People who snoop for you.’

  ‘These photographs were taken by your mother.’

  ‘What?’ Silva stared down, the photographs all of a sudden imbued with a heightened significance.

  ‘Yes. Your mother was in Italy tracking Brandon Hope.’

  ‘But what about the people-trafficking story?’

  ‘The people-trafficking story led her to the Hopes. You see, the charity Brandon runs operates a rescue boat that scours the Med for refugees. Your mother suspected something dodgy was going on and discovered the Saudi connection and a much, much bigger story. A story that ultimately got her killed.’

  ‘Because the Hopes wanted to cover up the links to Haddad?’

  ‘Precisely. What she didn’t realise as she took those photographs was that she was witnessing the Hopes signing her own death warrant. They were recruiting Latif and the other man to kill her. The attack on the head of the women’s charity was just a front, a blind. She was the bystander, not your mother. You mother died because she was about to expose the Hopes and their dodgy dealings. Had the story come out, Karen Hope would have been toast.’

  ‘How do you know all this? It can’t be common knowledge.’

  ‘Of course not. Your mother knew she was working on the scoop of a lifetime, a story that had the potential to bring down the most powerful person in the world. This was Watergate for the twenty-first century. Bigger, even. She knew that was dangerous so she took precautions. All her files were backed up to the agency’s server, but she also kept a personal set in a virtual time vault.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘They were stored in the cloud, and if your mother didn’t log into the vault once every week, the files would be emailed to a trusted address.’

  ‘My dad.’

  ‘Yes. He hadn’t a clue what he was dealing with when he received the files so he called me.’

  Silva slumped in her chair. The vast sitting room somehow appeared to be getting smaller, the ceiling lowering, pushing her down, weighing on her. Even as the room shrank, Fairchild appeared to be fading into the distance while at the same time his voice was getting louder.

  ‘Do you understand now, Rebecca? Why you, as the best in your particular field, need to be involved in this? What you need to do?’

  The room had returned to normal but Silva had the sense she was floating above everything, looking down at herself in the armchair.

  ‘No,’ she saw herself say. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You need to travel to Italy. Once you’re there, you’ll make your way to the Amalfi Coast and the town of Positano. Every year Brandon and his sister spend a week there in the summer. It’s a family tradition and could well be the last chance Karen gets for a relaxing holiday before she’s elected president.’

  ‘And when she turns up?’

  ‘It’s quite simple.’ Fairchild tapped the photograph again, this time with more force. ‘When Karen Hope turns up… you’re going to kill her.’

  Chapter Ten

  London had been Taher’s base for a number of years. The city was filled with people from a hundred different countries and they practised a dozen different religions. It offered instant anonymity. He owned a small flat high up in a grotty tower block far to the west of the centre where nobody bothered him, nobody asked what he was up to and nobody cared.

  His journey back to the UK after the Tunisian mission had been a convoluted one. The trip took several days, but the route was well tested and allowed him to come and go without the risk of capture. On his return to the flat he prayed, unpacked, and ate a meal. That done, he stood at the window and looked out as the daylight faded. He caught sight of himself in the glass and moved closer to the window in order to banish his reflection. Lights blazed at the heart of the capital and he could imagine the night unfolding. It was a tableau that played out each evening, but he doubted the scenes were much different in Paris or New York or Sydney. The same type of people doing the same type of things. Alcohol and drugs leading to sex and violence. It was, he thought, a debasement of what it meant to be human. A dismal waste.

  In front of his face the glass blurred and distorted as his breath misted the pane. He brushed the window with the tips of his fingers and wiped the mist clear. Peering out again, he saw not the bright lights of London, but a tiny settlement on the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A small concrete dwelling surrounded by a number of billowing tents. A young boy running errands for his parents.

  He is twelve years old. Not nearly twelve, not twelve and a bit, but twelve exactly. Nothing is planned for the day of his birth – his father explains to him the celebration of anniversaries and birthdays is the way of disbelievers. Still, his mother has given thanks to God and asked that Taher should live long and be humble. Taher has given thanks too and when, in the late afternoon, his mother asks him to tend to the goats in the paddock, instead of moaning he nods and goes out the back to collect some fodder.

  It’s hot outside and Taher sweats as he carries the food to the goats. He can hear laughter from inside the house. His little brothers and sisters playing happily, too young to lend a hand, too young to understand the hardship. After he’s fed and watered the animals he kicks a rusty tin can round the yard. The sun is touching the horizon now, the heat slipping away as the stars rise in the east. A majestic spread of brilliance in the heavens over the desert. Taher imagines the stars are the glittering floodlights above a football stadium. It’s the World Cup final and he’s the best player on the pitch. He flicks the can up and over his shoulder and then boots it against a wall. ‘Goal!’ he shouts as his mother’s voice floats out into the night air. It’s dinner time. He looks over, seeing her silhouetted in the door to the house, his father behind carrying bread to the low table, his li
ttle sister Kaya on the floor at his mother’s heels.

  Then the world explodes, a fireball erupting from behind his mother, a heat hotter than a thousand suns searing through the air. Night turns to day and the scene imprints itself, scorching deep into his memories like a brand burned into the side of an ox.

  His mother is torn into three pieces, her chest and head slamming against the wall, her legs and lower torso spiralling into the air, one arm flailing to the ground and rolling into the distance. He sees Kaya run out into the yard, for a moment thinking she might be saved but then realising her flesh is melting before him, peeling away in layers as she burns, her screams mercifully dying with her in a few seconds. From inside the house nothing but the roar of flame, his father and three other siblings in there somewhere. Dead or dying. Gone.

  Taher runs towards the house but the heat is intense. He raises his arm to protect his face, the wash of flame scorching his skin. He staggers forward one step, two, three, but it’s no good. He can’t get any closer and even if he could there’s nothing he can do. Everyone he knows and loves is already in the hands of God. He falls to the floor and crawls away through the dirt, passing out among the goats, their frantic bleating the last thing he remembers from that awful day.

  The glass steamed again and he wiped it once more. The desert was gone, London back. London. The capital of Great Britain. So-called Great Britain. Taher had to prevent himself from thumping his fist on the window and obliterating the image. He hadn’t known it all those years ago, but the devastation wrought that evening in the desert had come from a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a Royal Navy destroyer stationed three hundred miles away in the Persian Gulf. The new way of waging war. The modern way. Just like a computer game. Type a few letters and numbers. Hit the enter key. Wipe away half a dozen innocent lives in a targeting error. For the few people that bother to read the news reports the lives lost are dismissed in a phrase that brought bile to Taher’s throat: collateral damage.

  He rubbed the area of old scar tissue on his right forearm and then looked through the dirty glass again, the city spread out before him. Cars spiralled along roads. People disappeared into a tube station. Aeroplanes hovered on the horizon on their final approach to Heathrow.

  Well, there were other ways of fighting back, he thought. You didn’t need a million-pound missile fired from a billion-pound ship, you didn’t need to be a global military power. You just needed determination, a few trusted followers and the knowledge you were performing the will of God.

  Yes, the day was surely coming when the good folk of London would experience collateral damage for themselves.

  * * *

  Silva was back in Plymouth. Walking the round. Delivering the letters. Thinking about the utter craziness of Fairchild’s suggestion.

  When Karen Hope turns up you’re going to kill her.

  She’d walked out on him after that, his voice echoing in her ears as she started her bike and rode away.

  …you’re going to kill her.

  Fairchild was living in a world of make-believe and movies where snipers took potshots and escaped by jumping from buildings or hanging on to a rope lowered from a helicopter.

  …kill her.

  Assassinate the future president of the United States? Straight up madness.

  And yet as she trudged the streets in the warm summer rain, the story Fairchild had spun snagged at her thoughts and refused to lie buried. What if her mother had discovered something about the Hopes that was incriminating enough for them to consider murdering her? Although her mother had no interest in American domestic politics, she’d certainly had many assignments related to US foreign policy. The relationship with Israel, the funding of the Taliban, the two wars in Iraq, the war on terror. Fairchild wasn’t a back-room general either, and he’d served in several wars. Would such a man indulge in high fantasy? She didn’t know, but if it hadn’t been for the cryptic postcard her mother had written her she may well have dropped the whole thing.

  …hidden secrets… definitely Hope…

  There was something there but, try as she might, she couldn’t fathom it, and by the end of the week her head was so muddled she decided to clear it by going for a run. She rode her motorbike up onto the moor and ran under dark skies. She pushed through the pain barrier, her lungs bursting, her legs aching. After two hours of physical hell, she returned to the boat, exhausted. She took a shower in the toilet block and collapsed on her bunk, thinking her head was no clearer.

  A while later, her mobile rang. She blinked and reached for the phone. Outside the sun was playing hide and seek with the rain clouds, the inside of the boat alternately a warm yellow or a cold grey. She peered at the screen. Didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘Hello?’ She swivelled round and sat on the edge of the bunk.

  ‘It’s me, Becca. You OK?’ Beneath the American accent there was a hint of Irish. Like an aftertaste in a whiskey. Wood smoke, coffee, peach. ‘Because I just heard, sweetheart. About your mom.’

  ‘You just heard?’ Silva recognised the voice and felt her grip tighten on the phone. ‘It’s been weeks, Sean.’

  ‘I’ve been in-country. Sudan. It’s a long story, but the gist is I knew about the shooting but I didn’t get the names. I didn’t connect.’

  ‘You didn’t connect?’ She remembered the space between them. Geographical and emotional. No one to blame, no one at fault, just circumstances.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Becca. If only I could have been there with you. If only… well.’

  She remembered the aftertaste. Burning and bitter and the warm glow seeping through to the tips of the fingers and making her whole body shiver. Her shadow stood black against the side of the cabin for a moment before fading as the sun disappeared once again. That was her and Sean. A warm glow fading to… to what?

  Sean Connor, her sometime boyfriend, was thirty-three. An American of Irish descent out of Eastport, Maine. ‘As north and east as is possible and as close to you Brits as that,’ he’d said to her, holding up his thumb and finger an inch apart. ‘Just the Atlantic Ocean between us.’ The gesture had come with a wink and a raising of his glass as they’d sat in the bar on the base in Kabul. She’d first met him earlier in the day as the stars had twinkled in the predawn sky. Her patrol was making final preparations for an excursion into the mountains south of the city when the CO had turned up with Sean in tow. Plainly annoyed, the CO had introduced Sean and gruffly added ‘out of Langley’ as if that was all the explanation needed. Later, as they’d sat in the back of the Foxhound patrol vehicle taking them to their drop-off point, Sean had elaborated. He was a CIA intelligence officer, there to identify a particular terrorist leader believed to be in the area. Silva had spent the rest of the day with Sean, hunkered down in a makeshift bunker with only Itchy for company. Sean had watched as Silva had dispatched a fighter who’d made the mistake of venturing forth and then nearly crapped himself when the one man had turned into twenty and they’d had to do a rapid exfil down a steep gully.

  Back in the Foxhound, speeding along the dirt road towards the base, Silva had ribbed him. ‘I thought you were a spy. James Bond, Jason Bourne, derring-do and all.’

  ‘Fuck that.’ Sean had given her a grin and tapped his head. ‘I’m an intelligence officer and my brain tells me to steer clear of bullets.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Forgive me for saying so, but force alone never wins the battle.’ Sean nodded at Silva’s rifle. ‘Analysis of the situation leading to the formation of a specific strategy for victory will.’

  ‘And what’s your strategy for victory?’

  Sean smiled, his intent now obvious from his flirtatious look. ‘To ask you to have a drink with me tonight when we get back to the base.’

  It had started there and ended, at Silva’s behest, three years later. Their relationship had been conducted on Skype and WhatsApp and in the short periods of leave they could arrange to coincide. Silva had been in Afghanistan, then back to the UK
, and then to Afghanistan again on what would be her final tour before she was court-martialled. Sean had flitted between Baghdad, Kabul, London and the US. He’d visited her once when she’d been in the glasshouse and she’d told him not to come again. When she’d been released she’d met him in London during one of his stopovers and that was the last time she’d seen him.

  ‘Where are you, Sean?’ Silva asked. From the delay and crackle on the line she suspected he was using a satellite phone and calling from somewhere remote. She felt her defences rise as if she needed to protect herself from something. Almost unconsciously she hardened the tone of her voice. ‘And what do you want?’

  ‘I’m in Plymouth, Becca. And I want to see you.’

  * * *

  The first week of Holm’s pretend investigation panned out pretty much as he expected. Colleagues poked their heads round the door of the little office to see what he was up to, Huxtable nodded with approval when she saw the fake brief Holm had written on animal rights groups, and Javed continued to slurp his coffee, crunch his biscuits and clip his nails in a way that annoyed Holm immensely.

  The two of them monitored the Twitter account of the mysterious user known as TCXGP1505, while Holm set up the dummy animal rights operation. He phoned his contacts and let them know what he was up to and made requests for information from various agencies. A policy book was created and a budget drawn up. Javed scoured the internet for extreme material and organised everything in a database.

  The initial excitement Holm had felt when Javed had shown him the tweet slowly ebbed away though. TCXGP1505 remained silent. The account followed nobody and had no followers. The sole tweet was the one in Arabic that referenced the innocent one.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Holm said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if our source, if that’s what it was, has been compromised.’