Act of Vengeance

by Michael Jecks

  *

  19.02 London

  Sara was furious when she got to the police station. It had taken all her patience to hold back from shouting and screaming when she saw the white van and Vectra driving off, but there was no point.

  The house was trashed again. They had used a battering ram against her front door, shattering the hinges, smashing the lock, buckling the panels of the new door, so recently replaced. It lay upon the hall table, which was itself crushed with the weight of the door, and the family picture of all six of them was broken beneath it.

  It was enough to make her weep tears of rage and frustration. She had the feeling that the whole of her world was toppling. She loved her man, but the last months had made her almost want to see him taken away, and now that he had been removed, she felt an intense guilt that she had ever wanted him out. She wanted her husband back. Back here, in her home, back as he was, a powerful, intelligent man with a fierce belief in justice and the rights of his fellow men.

  She was sitting on the stairs, swamped with abject misery, when Mr Blenkinsop tapped on the shattered doorframe.

  ‘Mrs Malik, are you all right?’ he asked.

  He was a short, skinny, truculent man who’d retired before Sara moved here. Once he had been a soldier, she knew, but now his chest sagged, and his shoulders were stooped. He was no fool, though. Bright blue eyes studied her with some anxiety, as though he feared she may break down again at any moment, but his jaw was firm.

  ‘I just want my Mohammed home again. Why have they taken him this time? It is so unfair!’

  ‘Mrs Malik, you need to look after yourself,’ he said. ‘Can I make you some tea?’

  ‘Mr Blenkinsop, I need something a bloody sight stronger than tea!’ she snapped.

  He nodded, and disappeared. A few minutes passed, and he was back with a half-full bottle of Teachers. She took it gratefully and poured herself a large one in the tea mug she found on the floor. The handle had been snapped off, but it made no difference to her. She took a large gulp, and felt the raw burning in her throat.

  ‘Why did they take him?’ she said again.

  ‘Has he been breaking his terms? If he wandered too far from the house, they could arrest him again. Or if he broke the tag or something.’

  She was about to answer when she remembered the policeman who had threatened her and her little girl.

  ‘They just want to hurt us all,’ she whispered.

  The thought that the policeman might have reported her for obstruction or something hadn’t even occurred to her. She had thought that it was a single, foul incident, soon completed. But instead now she was forced to confront the thought that she may have been responsible for her husband’s rearrest herself. Because she had stood up to a bully in her own house, her man was taken away.

  ‘It can’t be that,’ she breathed.

  ‘What?’ Mr Blenkinsop said.

  She explained the incident and, as she did so, an appreciation of her inadequacy rolled over her, crushing her spirit. It was that, surely. It was all her fault that her man was taken away again. If only she had been more sensible, more rational in her response to the policeman, her Mohammed would still be here. A rebellious part of her mind pointed out that he would still be sitting in the chair in the front room, vegetating, but she thrust the thought from her. Better to have him here than back in the prison; better here than on a plane being exiled to some foreign land where they would use whips and electrodes just to satisfy themselves that he was truly broken.

  It decided her.

  No more would she sit back and accept the position of victim in this great, obscene conspiracy. She would shout from the rooftops and demand that she be noticed. Her husband must be returned to her, and at the least she would force her case into the media.

  She looked at her neighbour.

  ‘Mr Blenkinsop – could I use your telephone?’

  *

  12.12 Whittier; 20.12 London

  The light was thin when Jack returned to Whittier. It was tempting to drive on back to Anchorage and report to London that the journey was a waste of time, but something made him decide against. The hotel room would wait, and he may as well stay here a little longer. Tomorrow he could speak with the police who investigated the death and find out whether they had taken any paperwork. Important papers, bank details and insurance policies, would surely have been taken for safe-keeping. And then there was the matter of the bullet in the floor. He was no expert in forensic science, so surely someone from the local police must have noticed the same troubling angle.

  He parked outside a small café and bar and asked whether there were rooms available. The woman behind the bar, a slim, short, pugnacious woman in her early thirties, with a tip-tilted nose and shrewd blue eyes nodded and offered him a room.

  It was not perfect. A tiny room with a sink in a corner, a shower down a short corridor, and a TV with a perpetual mist over the screen, but it was warm and clean. He took it.

  He sat downstairs at a table with a view over the bay, staring out to the south and west as the sun sank and the sky darkened. Here, with the high hills behind the town, and the low sun, it was dark almost as soon as twilight started. A mist moved in from the water, drifting towards his window like a wraith, and he was struck with a feeling of utter serenity.

  Out near the bay itself, he saw a girl. She was dressed in pale blue puffa jacket, thick and warm, and had a woollen cap over her head, but her long blonde hair whipped about her back. She had a multi-coloured scarf about her neck, and stood staring out over the water with a stillness that made him think of a film he had once seen, in which a woman stood staring out to sea waiting for her lover to return. She looked painfully sad.

  Simple sadness was an emotion he had not experienced while he was a spy. In his life in the Service, he had known panic, fear, and the thrill of action – but generally he had been most aware of the mind-numbing boredom of administration. In the early years, he had been abroad, and that had been fun. Entering East Berlin and having his luggage searched for incriminating items, firearms or bibles, had made him fall in love with the life of an agent. Being a dealer in secrets and lies, snaring opposition agents, forcing them to turn and spy for England, occasionally killing; he had found it exciting. It left him with a sense of power that did not diminish until the Russian collapse.

  That had not been foreseen. He certainly hadn’t spotted it himself, and the senior officers in the Service hadn’t either. There was such a swift change from Russia the enemy, to Russia the friend under Gorbachev, and then the decline into madness, with the attempted coup that was thwarted by Boris Yeltsin. If anybody had told Jack in 1985 that his career would soon be over because of the end of the Soviet empire, he would have laughed. But it had happened, and he had fallen behind a desk, there to grow bloated and disillusioned.

  In Vauxhall Cross, he had become depressed. It felt as though he was incarcerated in a prison, and at the same time Claire was withdrawing from him. His teams were rolled up, all the men and women he had gathered with threats, bribes, or cajoling, disappeared. Some had been found and murdered, some retired themselves, while others became leaders of the new Russia. One had somehow found funding and bought a large share of an oil company, then moved into television, and now was an exile from the St Petersburg mafia living in London.

  Scavengers gave him a second chance. He was still an agent with skills, and he could use them to organise new teams. Infiltration, spying, covert observation, the full gamut of Service work was his again, and he began to spend more time exercising, practising Karate, getting fitter ‘just in case’. Soon he was able to use his skills. One of Karen’s women in the Caucasus was raped and murdered in 2007 and, when it was realised her computer and communications kit was missing, Jack was sent to tidy up.

  Arriving under cover as the father of the victim, he viewed the photos of her body for a long time before going to negotiate with the men responsible. There were three. In less than an hour he deli
vered the stolen gear to the British embassy at Tblisi. No one found the bodies. It was a perfect demonstration of the Scavengers’ skills.

  And while he found a new purpose, Claire grew more distressed.

  Once she had asked him exactly what he did, and he had felt the question like a punch in his breast. The whole of his life from that moment stretched out before him, and he could discern the two tracks: one of honesty, one of deception. Honesty would involve cursing her forever, because she would be a partner in his deceits; lying would at least spare her the shame of complicity. He loved her. The thought of starting a relationship based on lies was hard.

  He told her he was a salesman with a petrochemicals firm, just as his cover demanded. Which was fine, until she learned the truth.

  *

  The sun was gone now. In the gloom outside, there were no lights visible on the other side of the bay, and he thought it was the mist at first. It was only a little while later that he realised that there were no lights, no habitation whatever on the opposite shore. Only the trees rising from the rocks.

  Jack sighed. He ate a thick stew, drank some beer, and stared through the window into a blackness so intense he felt it reflected his soul.

  *

  20.14 London

  Mohammed felt the tears on his face, but he was still too petrified to make a sound. He had no idea where he was.

  They had not bothered to knock. He had been in his front room, cradling a hot mug of tea, when the front door slammed open. They must have had a battering ram, he thought, and then he was thrown to the floor, the tea scalding his hand and forearm, while black-clothed men with masks forced him onto his belly. They grabbed his arms and yanked them round to his back, and then fitted the plasti-cuffs, pulling them tight.

  ‘Come on, you bastard. We want a word with you!’

  He was jerked to his feet, and he moaned with panic as they hustled him to the door.

  In the hall a man was taking a small box and fixing it to the phone cable where it entered the house. Mohammed was made to stand still while the man held a scanning device to his leg tag. When the scanner bleeped, he pulled what looked like a SIM card from the back. He nodded at the men, and they hustled him out. Mohammed glanced back and saw the man push the card into the box dangling by the phone wire, and then he was through the door.

  He couldn’t know that this small box sent an electronic signal which overrode that of Mohammed’s leg tag. This box could fool the police into thinking he was at home when he was not.

  Outside, Mr Blenkinsop stood glowering, while other neighbours watched, most with arms folded in demonstration of distrust. They all believed he was guilty. He only wished he knew what he was supposed to have done. It made no sense to him.

  He stumbled, but hands under his arms kept him upright. A white windowless van was parked in front of his house, the back doors wide open. He took it all in, it and the similarly unmarked white Vectra behind it, as would a man given a last sight of the world before he was blinded. Then he was hurried up the metal steps and into the back of the van, where he was shoved to the ground again. The doors were slammed, the engine roared, and he was rolled to the back of the vehicle as it sped off.

  It was strange, he thought, that there was no siren.

  *

  13.43 Whittier; 21.43 London

  The room was still warm when Jack returned to it and lay on the bed.

  He picked up his mobile phone and flicked through the photos he had taken at the cabin. One was of the kitchen, and his eye was drawn to the picture of the solitary pine. Blasted, it could have been dead, he thought. Whatever could have persuaded Lewin to buy that, he didn’t know. Presumably the man had wanted the picture there – if it came with the cabin’s rental, surely he could have taken it down from the wall. Jack would have.

  Setting the phone beside him on the bed, he tried the TV, but the picture was so fuzzy that he couldn’t face it. Instead, he found the book he had taken from Lewin’s room. It opened at the page where it had been left and, as Jack looked, he realised that the book had annotations in the margins. He frowned as he read, ‘Just like me!’ against a paragraph, and read it. The section told of how the author had suffered from post-traumatic stress, and had woken to find himself in the kitchen, crying, naked. Clearly it was a scene that Lewin had associated with, because the whole passage was underlined extensively.

  Flicking through the pages, Jack began to get a feel for Lewin’s experiences. Fear Up Harsh was based on the experiences of one interrogator in the American army, and told how he had gradually slipped from basic interrogation into more intensive questioning, allowing the prisoners to believe that they were going to be attacked by dogs, electrocuted, set on fire, or shot – all were used, and the book told of the constant choices that a man must make when ordered to find out what a prisoner knew. If the man denied knowledge of anything, he could be questioned more and more harshly until he broke down – but the intelligence was rarely useful. Most snippets of information were clearly invention, created in the heat of the moment by a man so desperate that he would say anything to stop the questioning, the sleep deprivation, the cold… Men would say anything to stop it.

  Lewin had gone through the same experiences. He had volunteered to help the effort against terrorists, and when he arrived he had been an idealist, keen to do all he could to save lives. His job, as he saw it, was to take in those arrested by the troops, and to break them so that their intelligence could be used in the fight against the enemy. Troops would be sent out each night to snatch those against whom there had been allegations. Those brought back were questioned, intimidated, terrified, and forced into stress positions while troops punched, kicked, shouted, and spat at them; the men were given no sleep until they confessed to a crime or gave information themselves. After which it would be assumed they knew more, so they would endure still longer periods of torture until the army interrogators grew bored and sent them away, either to a local prison, to a foreign prison where more overt torture could be used, or to Guantanamo Bay. They were to be broken, because the administration of information did not allow for the innocent to have been captured. The army had declared a man suspicious, and that meant he must know something. If he then gave a snippet of information against another, both were necessarily guilty. Both must be broken so that every shattered memory could be sifted for data.

  But when Jack interviewed him, it was Lewin himself who had been broken.

  *

  22.06 London

  The van rocked and bucked along the streets, and Mohammed found himself being thrown across the van as they went around corners. There were a lot of corners.

  Mohammed was close to collapse. Years of solitary confinement in gaol had blunted his faculties, and the grim, relentless emptiness of his last months of close confinement in his house had torn away any last vestiges of self-reliance. Life happened to him, he was without power or authority. When he had been a solicitor running his own practice, he had been confident and proud. His family gave him enormous pleasure, his work was a source of gratification, and he felt as though his efforts gave him standing in the community.

  All had been ripped from him by the grotesque nature of his arrest and incarceration. The prison in which he had first been held, Belmarsh, had been rigorous and brutal. All the warders plainly viewed him as an ally of Satan himself, and he was regularly spat on and tripped or kicked. After a few months of that, he had retreated into himself. Complaints were pointless. Asserting his innocence was merely a source of amusement for those who took malicious pleasure in causing him pain.

  The thought of his family was like a knife in his belly, slowly twisting. He hated to think what his poor Sara would think of this latest disaster. She would probably be better off if he was being taken away. At least the children would be free again. There would be no more threats of them being frisked as they entered the house to prove that they weren’t bringing in contraband – a mobile phone, or perhaps a laptop that their fat
her could use. All communications with Mohammed must be monitored permanently. Without him, the house could perhaps return to normal.

  With a sudden jerking rock, the van drew to a halt. Mohammed slid over the floor, his breast catching a loose rivet in the floor, which tore his shirt and ripped a long scratch in his chest. The pain made him hiss.

  The door in the side of the van was drawn back with a low, rumbling rasp. Two men climbed in, and went to his legs. One man knelt on his calves, which was excruciatingly painful. The second had a stainless steel tool that looked like a pair of scissors, or pliers. Mohammed threw a look over his shoulder at them, and when he saw the tool he began to moan and wail. He thought some form of torture was about to be inflicted upon him, but instead the men removed his watch and then cut through the reinforced strap holding the tag to his ankle. They took them to the door and hurled them out.

  ‘No good now. No one knows where you are, fella,’ said one of the men, and both laughed as they clambered out again. The back door rumbled shut, echoing in the empty metal container, the doors to the cabin slammed, and the van began to move off once more, rocking and bucking on the uneven surfaces.

  Mohammed was terrified. Not only by the fear of why he had been taken, but also because of the man’s voice. He hadn’t expected to hear that accent. Not here in England.

  The man was American.

  Sunday 18th September

  02.20 London

  Sara al Malik lay weeping in her bed. The crushing desolation of losing her Mohammed was more than she could bear. There was a dreadful emptiness in her soul. What could she do, what would her children do, without him? All they had was the result of all his efforts.

  She looked at the clock glowing green in the darkness. Two twenty in the morning. There was a sobbing from the bedroom next door – Aaeesha didn’t understand why her daddy was gone, and already both the boys were talking in undertones. She had heard one mutter something about the ‘fucking fuzz’, but she couldn’t tell them off. She couldn’t say to them that they must try to ignore what had happened – how could she? They had seen first hand how the police behaved with people of their faith. They had seen the results: the smashed doorway, the broken photos and table, and the stain on the carpet. All for what? They had done nothing, but their lives had been stolen away in the last few years. Their father was gone. And…