He had not examined the possibility of being recognised, identified, had not seen that as being relevant to him . . .
Was in his home city because his mum was there, and it was her birthday tomorrow and that would be her present – to have him back – and she’d pull faces and complain that he had not written, and never a phone call, and he would do the smile that had always won her. She would be in the kitchen and the rings would be lit, and she’d be cooking him something that was a favourite and special, might be chops with chips and mushrooms thrown in, and of course she’d have a can in the fridge, a beer for him, and then he would hug and kiss and smile all over again, and would slip away in the night when she had given him some money. First train of the day out and going to his meeting with the man who had facilitated the hit, then being driven to the target and its fence. Had to be here for his mum, owed it her, and had to be back at the cathedral where there had been big times. There he had been a star, then had been rejected – cut off. Joey Pickford blocked his way.
“Have I got this wrong? Don’t think I remember every kid I was at school with, but you’re special. Were special at school, got the chop from the private place, and then got more special. All that stuff in the papers . . . everyone said you’d have your arse blown off.”
Cammy said, “Don’t know who you are. If you’ll excuse me?”
“But you’re Cameron, Cameron Jilkes. Lived up the hill from Sturry? Had a thing with that Vicky . . . Are you not Cameron Jilkes?”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Talking about Cameron Jilkes. Brother was a bad one, sister got pranged in a car accident. Cameron Jilkes went off to fight. Cops all over his pad, photo on the front of the paper. Was with those people who slit throats, revolting bastards . . . Are you not Cameron Jilkes? Isn’t that who you are?”
He’d always thought Joey Pickford a shit and a bully . . . Doubt was now clouding his face. Cammy saw the shabby trousers and the shirt with a drainage firm logo on the chest. Where he had come from and who he had once been, he would have had Joey Pickford down on his knees and jabbering for mercy and wetting himself and messing himself, but that was then . . . And he remembered Vicky. He showed no hint of recognition.
“Can’t help you. Never seen you before.”
“Not Cameron Jilkes? Not the guy dating Vicky Wilson, married now, Gavin Davies and a kid . . .? Not the guy who went out to fight, headlines, cop raids, not him?”
“No, excuse me.”
He did a sort of wintry smile and walked right through Joey Pickford, and the guy had to stumble aside or would have been knocked over, and confusion was on his face and uncertainty. Cammy kept walking and was through the gate and the wall and he’d have bet that Joey Pickford stared after him all the time he could see him, . . . and if he gossiped and told mates and the news of it went viral in the limited and dead-beat group that Pickford would have moved with, by then Cammy would be well gone, distanced, and would be facing his target. Pickford was forgettable, not Vicky. What he could recall of Gavin Davies was of a keen, neat and tidy lad who had ambitions to wear a tie at work.
Daft of him, but all the time he had been travelling, ever since the break-out and his decision to come home and deal out damage, he had not considered the consequences of his flight, and the reaction. Kept walking towards the entry gate.
Almost enough, but not quite enough.
The photograph taken from his file, JILKES, Cameron (Canterbury), was now on his wall, adjacent to the crocodile’s image, and the ice-cream was still visible over the mouth, had shown up well through the print process.
He dialled a number, overseas and on the secure net: always preferred to speak direct, to listen and then weigh information rather than follow the fashion of impersonal email contact. Had to have “enough”. The war against the jihadis, scaling down, was run out of the al-Sayliyah camp close to the Qatari capital, Doha, where the US had their CentCom operation, and allies sent assets to show the flag and pretended that influence could still be exercised. Some British personnel did it better than others.
He had talked to those girls four times in the last year. They were Sixers and had been relocated as if that were part of a penance and a re-education programme. A section of Six across the river had been closed down after accusations from on high of a cavalier approach. The stables were supposedly in the cleansing process. All a bit childish to Jonas Merrick. Flamboyant, childish and theatrical. He supposed the girls existed in this American hinterland on a diet of air-conditioning, baked beans and peanut butter.
A crisp voice answered. He remembered Alice. Pretty as a chocolate-box picture, might have been standing in front of an old stone wall where roses climbed. Gave the name and also spoke about a voice. Did he wish to hold or should she call back? He would hold. New Orleans jazz was played back to him. Jonas anticipated the answer.
The ice-cream ringing the mouth gave a small distortion but not enough to destroy the complexity of the face . . . He thought it one that he would have trusted, that of a man who would lead, one who would be followed. He could place himself in the minds and in the faith of an Iranian group who had started out on an odyssey, and who were within touching distance of a destination, but needed the spur of a single man’s courage to get them there. Deep eyes and an honesty in the chin . . . Jonas Merrick could read a face. Liked this one and was amused by the smear ringing the mouth. But the photograph was not contemporary. His files were packed with the images of those men and women who had returned from Syria, Iraq and any other of those wretched locations, and he knew their faces would have altered – lines indented where there had been smoothness, eyes dulled by what they had seen. All of them would carry the weight of a burden, and the final and undefined factor would be the anger bred from the scale of defeat. It was the anger, the hatred, that most concerned him.
The music stopped in the middle of a trumpet solo.
The voice of Alice. “You still there? Yes . . .? Good. We don’t know that name, but there was something marginally similar that we never seemed to get around to analysing. The name was Kami al-Britani, but no one did sufficient work on it. The man wasn’t a High Value Target, but had a ‘dead or alive’ bounty on him. Not a big one. We do have a footprint, something out of the ordinary.”
“I’d be grateful for that, the footprint.”
“You’d talked about a hymn singer.”
“I did. It’s what I am trying to identify – a man with knowledge of Christian hymns. Not a fundamentalist, but a young man familiar with the traditional church and its music.”
“There is only one footprint – we’d call it ‘aural’.”
“An aural footprint? Give it me, please.”
“It was picked up on a radio intercept. There was a squad opposite some of the US forces. Rated as high level, a bit kamikaze, but also survivors – if that fits. They were monitored. They were talking to their officer, an Iraqi national and a field commander and there was a low voice singing in the background. They ran it through all the filters because it was so strange. This is a crack unit in the black flags, and among them is a guy singing a Christian anthem. It’s one we used to do at convent school – How Great Thou Art. This is an ISIS crowd, and he was singing a hymn. It’s two years ago that it was heard . . . I’ve nothing else on singing.”
Before she rang off she gave Jonas the name of an American combat officer who was seconded into intelligence, and a line that would link to him.
“Thank you, Alice, and thank you for your aural footprint.”
It made good enough sense to him. He felt little immediate satisfaction because now they would be running, desperate to catch up, and always so little time. He rang Vera, was fulsome in his apology.
Chapter 7
Jonas’s screen told him that it was nearing the time that he should have been preparing to clear his desk, leave everything tidy behind him and think about getting his coat on and heading off into the evening. That night of the week,
Vera usually made a cottage pie for their supper. She had sounded surprised at his message, but had not quizzed him.
He was, he thought, almost at that moment when he could press the button, let loose the sirens and the alarms, and could circulate the photograph and biography of Cameron Jilkes. Others might already have done so. Down by his knee was the cupboard that held his bag. Others would have been fearful that should their world collapse, should an attacker break through the defences, should a bomb detonate, should a vehicle swerve on to a pavement and pile into commuters, tourists, innocents, they would have to explain to a subsequent inquest why they had backed off. Better to pass the parcel and give one’s superiors the responsibility of calling the shots . . . A quick and rather guilty smile at the thought of it. His fingers clattered on his keyboard.
In the office space there was still only the emptiness and the rattle of silence. It was why he was prepared to invest a few more hours, at his desk, his screen, his card files. The room beyond his partition was deserted because the men and women who usually milled there were committed. It would be the same in many other parts of the building, where the surveillance teams had their space. Nothing more to throw into the hunt and the chase, the defence of the state and its streets. It was possible that in a week or within two weeks, the pressure on resources would have eased: possible, but unlikely. It would be the same with the numbers of police serving in counter-terror units.
Vera had said to him, “Jonas, you’ll not be doing anything stupid?”
He had replied, “No dear, nothing stupid, it’s just that we’re thin on the ground.”
“Don’t do anything daft. I’ll cook the dinner anyway, and we’ll have it whenever.”
“Yes, whenever. Anyway, I’d better be getting on with things.”
“Nothing idiotic, Jonas.”
“And I’m sorry about our dinner, very sorry, and the inconvenience.”
He’d rung off. Had he lingered, she would have questioned him about the contents of the bag, would they be creased, a multitude of matters that he could not, at that time, handle. The bag had been brought to the office on the evening before his investiture. If it had to be awarded him, he would have preferred it to have come in the post, but powers beyond the reach of Jonas Merrick, and convention, had demanded that the medal be pinned in person . . .
He had been earnestly asked to give some detail on the circumstances where he had found himself sitting next to young Gunn, but he had been sparse with his answers and the “royal” might have had the impression that security confidences were not to be shared. The bag, as Jonas remembered it, contained socks, a folded shirt, underwear, pyjamas and his shaving stuff, and a toothbrush. He had stayed overnight at a B&B, and been driven there and back, and had been “economical” with anecdotes on getting back to Raynes Park.
He had not known resources to be so stretched, at break-point, in all his time in the Service. And himself? Also stretched. Good at disguising the stress, adept at masking it, most of the time. He could have looked up at the image of the beast with the ferocious teeth, or at the dark pool from a lagoon or a tidal estuary and seen two ringed areas, could have focused his attention on the picture of a young man whose mouth had a smeared and untidy halo around the lips. Could have . . . and then pondered why he, Jonas Merrick, a low-grade official in a Service with a payroll of thousands, seemed to have so much weight on his shoulders. He allowed that moment of indulgence. Of course, self-inflicted. Had he not been out of the building that evening, and walking in the light rain, had he not sat down next to a prospective suicide bomber, had he not been on a bench adjacent to the Mother of Parliaments where the “great and the good” paraded, and had he not been stupid enough to tug free the cables running from the power pack to the detonator, he would now be in gentle retirement, with abundant time to plan caravanning holidays. He was an oracle. Unloved but now with a basket full of grudging respect, his opinion valued. It was a time of maximum danger. Jonas feared that he would buckle under the weight of those pressures . . . Of course he was not alone. Many men and women in the building endured similar burdens, tried to worry through. He could have said that his reputation, unwanted, damned him.
He called, spoke to Izzy. Told them what he wanted.
The bag was light, would be easy to carry. He called the AssDepDG’s office and named a time when he would appreciate a meeting . . . and his screen told him that the team from 3/S/12 was confused because the German counter-terror people had lost a surveillance target, had lost it, had lost contact with a lethal weapon being couriered to the ferry port at Hull. But that was another problem, lying across someone else’s desk . . . It was a pleasant face, the one on his wall beside the crocodile’s head.
The building towered over him.
It was, for Cammy, the end of a pilgrimage. This was the place he had to come to if he were to purge an old life and prepare for his last actions.
The cathedral was, as he knew, a place of death, of violence and of bloody struggles for power. Was also, and this had been dinned into him when he was a valued part of the majesty of it, a symbol of power and of authority. He was outside the gate policed by cathedral constabulary, but he stayed inconspicuous, waited with his head tucked down until a party of schoolchildren, German, were ushered through. A teacher at the front had negotiated the group’s entry, and another teacher was at the rear and, as they came past him, he took the necessary half pace to his left and was swept forward.
Inside, he stopped, gazed around him, and above, and drank it in. He had not stood here since the day that he had been dumped off the choir, and his mother had come to collect him – would have taken time off work, and had puffed and reddened eyes and had tried to hurry him away. He had snatched his hand from hers and had paused to look up and into the dark rain clouds and see the height of the Bell Harry Tower, and the glory of the glass, look at it a last time. Then had turnd and walked briskly, never twisted to glance behind him, and his mother had had to chase after him, and they had taken the bus home to Sturry, and his dream had been taken from him. Had often thought of this place, and its effect on his life when he had been with his brothers. Had talked of it. Had sung to them, quiet all around him, or just hummed the tunes, and the only interruption might had been a stray incomer, 110mm or 151mm, from the enemy’s artillery.
Could remember the first day, being brought here by his mother, pride creasing her tired face, and him sauntering in with a hand in his shorts pocket. A new blazer, and a tie he barely knew how to knot. They could have gone to the building where the choristers lived but his mother had wanted the taxi – rash expenditure for her – to drop them at the cathedral. She had struggled with his case, and he had not helped her, and they had gone inside after the rain had spattered them and left diamonds on her hair: he would have liked, that afternoon, to kiss them from her head but had not done so. This was to be his new home, and he was a chosen one. They did scores of auditions, chose only the best, and he wore the black shoes and grey socks and the short trousers and white shirt and tie and the blazer to prove his status.
He went through the doorway into the great cavern of the building. A guide sidled up to welcome the German party. Cammy loitered and listened. A teacher translated. The guide said nothing about the glories of worship, private prayer, or the joys of choral music. He talked of the killing of one archbishop, and the decapitation of another, and of the great, revered and feared, fighting men of their time. He spoke of the looting of the building by a monarch determined to break the power of the Roman church, and the carrying off of 26 cartloads of valuables – gold pieces, silverwork, statues fashioned from rare Italian marble – and the memories were sharpened for Cammy of how it had been in what had seemed to be the pinnacle of his life. And the guide told the kids of the consequence of a Royalist defeat when civil war had split the nation, and how the cold men who were the victors had vandalised the interior – what he called “mindless destruction” – and the great multi-coloured windows had
been smashed by men on high ladders, and the glass they could not reach was broken by musket balls . . . and mentioned a later war, did not name the nation then arrayed against Britain, and said bombs had fallen on the city but by some intervention, luck or divine, the cathedral had been spared.
The guide began to walk forward, and the kids followed. Cammy had time to lose . . . for the first time since he had gone into the water, the matter of his freedom concerned him. It could have been the quiet of the ancient building, or the depth of the shadows thrown down, but he felt a chill on his neck. Cammy had not considered that he might be a hunted man. He would not advertise his presence, of course not, but the matter of whether some official apparatus was actively searching for him had not occurred to him.
He would return, he would come to the cathedral which had shaped so much of his life, he would visit his mother, then move onto his last journey. He had been told where he would meet a facilitator who would have the photographs and maps of the target and who would bring him the weapon that he would use . . . All that was clear, but the chill on his skin, under his unfamiliar shirt collar, seemed to warn him of danger.
No one to ask, and no brother from whom he could take confidence. He was alone . . . he shivered and the hugeness of the building seemed to close around him. He swayed on his feet, then was aware that he attracted attention. He bit at his lip, scratched the palms of his hands with his nails. He walked towards the nave.
They were moving professionally, not in a cluster but strung out, Mikki somewhere in the middle. There was a moon which gave them enough light. Mikki was from Ukraine.
They walked towards a wilderness. The aim was to get clear of the fighting zone beside the Euphrates river, and to keep away from roads and vehicle tracks, to lie up in daylight in abandoned buildings. They would light no fires, would stay hidden, then, when the light fell, they would move on and use instinct, or a compass, to get them into remote territory where only nomads lived, or others with black flags folded and hidden in rucksacks. Cammy had not told them, nor had there been a discussion amongst them, where they were headed, which frontier they might cross, which conflict they might enter, not yet determined. Stanislau led.
The Crocodile Hunter Page 16
