He sipped from his G&T and said, ‘Company director.’ Not so far from the truth. ‘You live locally?’
‘Over Leeds Road way.’
‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ he lied. ‘Just visiting.’
‘Business?’
‘You could say. I do a bit of football agenting. There’s a game tomorrow. Game on for me if I can shift this deal for the end of season. One of my clients …’ He tapped the side of his nose. She looked impressed. ‘State secret. You know,’ he said. It seemed she did. Her eyes widened.
‘Time to go,’ he said, and she didn’t disagree.
Later, in the middle of the night, he woke with a start. He’d turfed her out at two – Amy or Emma or whatever her name was – with fifty quid for a taxi back wherever, because he needed the kip. Tomorrow was a big day. He’d told her he had to see his client to talk through the offer of a new contract the next morning. I’ll be back here tomorrow night, though. Maybe see you in the lobby, around seven. She’d seen it for what it was, played the game, though. Yeah, sounds good.
Gone straight back to sleep and now here he was. So bloody wide awake it was unbelievable. He could go out right this minute and do the thing, he felt so pumped. Then, just as suddenly, it all went out of him. The fight. He felt as defeated as he’d ever been. It was just as well the end of it all was so near at hand. Touching distance. At bloody City. Would you believe it? A fitting stage for the final act.
Those other boys, brothers they might be but they were different from him. Bilal was a pernickety mummy’s boy and Abdullah little more than a fanatical thug. He’d as likely be a member of Britain First as of the caliphate; all he needed was a cause to harness his violent bitterness. In another life Adnan might have liked Rashid, had him as a friend. But this short life, five days remaining, was this life and he hardly knew him.
So tired, but he had to be in a fit state for today’s run-through. This was his calling, after all. He found a miniature of Kahlúa in the minibar – it was just about all that was left – and knocked it back before slumping back on the bed. Four sixteen. He’d sleep in until kicking-out time.
Rashid
Like Bilal, Rashid was at home. While his father listened to the radio and his mother read the Saturday papers he browsed Facebook and Twitter for the latest Trump outrages.
‘Want to do the crossword?’ his mother asked him.
‘Why not?’ he said.
They sat next to each other pondering the clues, murmuring to each other as answers or elements of them occurred to them. It had been his father who’d taught him the technique of the cryptic crossword. They’d sat side-by-side when they were away in Whitby for their summer holidays, doing the crossword in the paper his father had bought during his seven o’clock walk. They’d be sitting in the Magpie Cafe with fish and chips, bread and butter and tea, watching the rain. His father loved the seaside, the salty tang reminded him of Karachi, however faintly. Rashid had become completely immersed in this world of anagrams and riddles and wordplay. His mother had previously done the crossword with his father but seemed happy for him to be supplanted by Rashid.
Both sets of grandparents had returned to the subcontinent after retiring, to the heat and the smells and the relative safety of Asia in comparison with this place, with its criminals and fumes and cold. His parents belonged here, and so of course did he.
It would have been six years ago, maybe seven, that it had become so pronounced it could no longer be ignored. Now it was he and his mother who did the crossword together occasionally, while his father whiled away his life in the sometimes distressed and manic, but often happy, oblivion of early-onset Alzheimer’s. He was presently largely absent of rage but that might well come, they’d been warned. One of the small consolations of the condition, for Rashid, was that his father had been largely ignorant of his spell abroad and his involvement in the carnage. Now he was back, he and his mother never spoke of it. He knew she was anxious. She asked obliquely where he went in the evenings, to which he replied gruffly, ‘Here and there,’ but she never probed further. He saw her looking at him, though, all the time. There would, perhaps, come a time when they could talk properly. For the moment they chatted about the crossword or the weather, leaving those many other things unsaid.
Next Wednesday it would be over and a new, cleaner life would begin.
Leila
‘How do you think it’ll go?’ asked Leila.
Jake shrugged. ‘Who knows? I’m old enough not to make any predictions. Last time …’ He struggled for words and, for the first time for a month or more, was close to tears.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean –’
‘It’s all right. We both need to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. We have to keep our heads. The risk calibration’s been ratcheted up, one notch closer to complete avoidance. If Rashid does anything untoward, they’ll call it there and then.’
‘Do you think he will?’
‘No idea. I have a better feeling about him than I did with … I don’t have the same doubts. Anyway, feelings are beside the point. This is where we are, this is where we’d want to be, and this is where we do our job. What time is it?’
‘Two fifteen.’
‘Bloody hell. I think we’ve done this to death. Is there anything else?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Leila.
‘You get off, then. You’ve got your car?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Straight home, straight in the house, no messing.’
‘You’re advising me about my security?’
He smiled. ‘Text me once you’re inside and all’s OK. I’ll close up here.’
‘See you tomorrow, Jake.’
‘Yeah.’
They waited patiently through the night. Those covering Adnan had it easiest. They spoke to hotel security and managed to get the next-door room. Two of them took it in turns to walk through the corridor of the fifth floor while the other sat in the room, a stethoscope to the thin dividing wall. The room phone was covered. Down in the hotel’s security room others sat monitoring the CCTV of the mainly silent building. The girl was mopped up when she left the room and interviewed under caution by the police. No need to hold her under the Terrorism Act. Poor girl was terrified, and there were no adverse traces. A detective constable drove her home and was deputed to stay with her the whole day. She was so distressed she was glad of the company.
The other crews sat in their cars and vans outside the homes of the other boys, in falling temperatures and driving rain. The pitch would be heavy for the big game tomorrow, one said to another. Correction: today. They would come off shift at nine, handing over to the day crews, but would be required back by early afternoon, in plenty of time for the day’s show. All hands on deck. A chance to grab a couple of hours, was all.
16
SUNDAY
Today something would be done about it, and something would be seen to be done. Eventually. Good, whatever that was, could prevail over evil. Or it might, again, fail. Evil might prevail over evil.
Which would be the lesser of the multiple evils? Degrees of differentiation were not pertinent at this moment. He tossed and turned, turned and tossed as he agonized over the right thing to do. Right in what sense?
He had set the alarm for five but rose ten minutes before. He switched his mobile phone off and went to the kitchen, filling the kettle and flicking it on, scratching his eyes as if the action would bring some sense into the world. It seemed for a moment that he might have all the time in the world at his disposal, the rest of his life at least, and he shook his head, like a dog flapping its jowls, to wake. He drank a mug of instant coffee, two spoonfuls so the bitterness struck the back of his throat. It tasted of burnt wood.
He put on his running gear and tied his laces carefully in a double bow. He filled his water bottle and placed it in the rucksack he carried on these morning runs, not every day but as often as he could manage. He pulled the pack tight to his back a
nd then removed it to check that he’d packed his keys. He had.
As he left the flat he heard the click of the lock and checked that the snib had engaged and that the door was secure. He was on his way.
The dawn broke tentatively as he ran. It was still dark in the city streets, washed clean by the overnight rain. He ran under the sodium glare and the little boxes with the swivelling basilisk gaze of their cyclops eyes. He did not exert himself, settling into an easy pace. Nice and steady, he thought. His normal route took him down the silent canal towpaths that belonged to a more solid age, with their worts and buttercups and rough grasses peering between the worn paving stones, under bridges whose stone was blackened to a filthy darkness. It could be dangerous down there, people said, with the homeless and the druggies. But they would just shrug amicably at the rich guy in the emerald-green shorts.
Just after the railway station, still boarded up nearly four months on, he dived down the steps to the arches on his way to the towpath via the extensive network of tunnels beneath the modern city, where entrepreneurs of various hues undertook their daily business, often shady: mechanics in grimy workshops fitting reconditioned shocks, vendors of second-hand appliances and industrial machines, buyers and sellers of knock-off IT kit, TVs, audio equipment and whatever electronic gear could command a price. The cafe at the end, selling the full English at less than five quid. None of them open at five forty-five on a Sunday morning. No sign of life.
He diverted substantially from his normal route, tracking back and forth under the arches that extended as far as the suburbs. Eventually he reached the lock-up, where he began his preparations. He released the high-security padlock with one of the two keys but he didn’t go in. He bent double and breathed deeply. He loosened his laces. He opened the rucksack and put it on the floor, extracting the items he needed, methodically making his preparations, swallowing his fear. Finally he took out an ancient pay-as-you-go phone, never used, and switched it on. He knew he would have a faint signal here but not inside the lock-up. He dialled.
‘Yeah,’ came the sleepy voice.
‘We have to meet,’ said Jake. ‘Urgent.’
‘Come on. Give me a break.’
‘Afraid I can’t. It has to be now. At place D. How long?’
‘Maybe ten.’
‘Me too. Ten it is, then.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘When we meet.’
Every case had its fallback for a crash meet. In this case it was place D: here, understood between them. He was ready. He had to be. It was in motion. He glanced around for somewhere to put his pack. Behind a pillar would do. No one was about to come here for the next few hours at least. He hoped. No, he knew. He was a diligent spook who did his recces.
The padlock secured a chain looped through two crude square holes cut in the battered metal face of the doors. This, too, had been part of his calculation. It was fiddly, though, once inside, to pull the chain tight, lock the padlock and loop it back out so that it could be unlocked from the outside and look as if no one had yet arrived. It took three attempts and some forceful pushing. There was less give than he’d anticipated. Panic almost set in as he felt the ten minutes expiring and the rasp of the kitchen timer in his head sped towards its final ping. Time up.
Job done, he breathed in the earthy air.
He could not assume but knew, really, that ten minutes was typical bravado. It’d be twenty, more like. It was only a short drive but he’d have to dress and make himself look good. Undoubtedly he’d park under the arches. Meanwhile, Jake just had to wait those inching minutes.
Sure enough, eventually there it was, coming closer and louder, the wheezy clatter of a workhorse diesel, not his normal conveyance. The engine quietened and Jake tried to find a moment of calm so that he could locate the inner tranquillity and physical stillness that would see this done. Much as he liked to know the reasons for everything, there would be no dialogue, no whys and wherefores, no excuses either way. No insincere greetings, the purpose of the meeting tacit and hanging there, dangerous. Pointless to ask why, since neither of them would know. It simply was.
Steps, sounding jaunty, scraping grit on the tarmac, amplified in the silence. Snakeskin boots, no doubt. At least he didn’t whistle, though Jake wouldn’t have been surprised. There was a metallic fiddling at the door and then the clatter of the length of chain being pulled through the hole, close at hand.
Jake had placed himself in the darkness directly behind the door. In he came, eyeing the length of the lock-up, Jake could see. If he closed the door there would be a messy confrontation at the entrance. Jake had calculated that it’d be left open to await his own arrival, and he was right. He was not thought to have got here yet.
There is something fascinating in watching other people when they believe themselves to be completely alone, unobserved. Simply being, they don’t need to be doing anything of interest to be of interest. Best if not, in fact: just entirely themselves, neither self-conscious nor aware of anything other than their own selves, the sound of their own breathing, the smell of their own bodies. He was carrying his usual take-out cappuccino casually in his right hand. Jake could smell the coffee. He glanced again down the narrow length of the unit, into the dark space at its distant end where they were supposed to meet.
There, Jake knew, were two chairs and a battery lamp, switched off. He’d set them up himself this morning. No power and no electricity bills. Just the cash payment every three months to the shyster that owned most of these places. In advance. It was a one-time meeting place not on record at HQ, acquired by his own private enterprise through a series of aliases and cut-outs on the premise of an imaginary business that all participants in the transaction knew did not exist but about which no one asked questions. Off the books altogether and strictly forbidden. One of Jake’s insurances: against what? Against contingencies that he hadn’t been able to articulate when he’d acquired it eighteen months before but which he’d felt inchoately to be if not necessary then prudent. There was no time to congratulate himself on his unformed prescience.
Zaki Ibrahim would not reach the chairs. Jake moved quickly and economically, conscious of the tiniest rustling noise that his motion caused. This clothing was not designed with stealth in mind. Zaki seemed not to hear him, intent on his destination. Overhead Sunday morning trains rumbled from their platforms. Jake was not complacent. Zaki was at best sly, and at worst a self-satisfied, mediocre epitome of banal evil. Jake could not see his face, and would not. The cold not of icy precision but of sweaty fear ran down his back and he stifled a shudder as he made up the ground. Suddenly, and startlingly, he was upon him.
No words, no acknowledgement, not even an exchanged look to tell him he’d worked it out and was oh-so-clever. Jake wanted to understand but understood, too, that this was a mistake. He never would. The plan was that Zaki would not know anyone was there, let alone Jake, until, possibly, the millisecond of awareness when it was far too late.
Jake raised the weapon and the oversuit creaked audibly and alarmingly. He exhaled through the mask. He placed the barrel of the weapon on Zaki’s neck, resting on the top of the vertebra, and pulled the trigger. There was a boom in the arched chamber, this little cathedral, and a recoil. The expulsion of matter through the top of Zaki’s head was not visible in the dimness, though Jake could feel a little warm rain. It may have been coffee.
All systems down. No flailing. Power disconnected. Partly for verisimilitude, partly for certainty, Jake gripped Zaki momentarily and fired again, then let him drop.
There was a moment when Jake felt not depression or disgust but a compulsion to raise the weapon to the flesh just beneath his own chin and fire again. It would have offered a kind of symmetry. But he knew he had to think of the rest of the day and Abu Omar.
Rashid, he corrected himself with a start.
He dropped the gun. Acquired from a criminal who’d been on the periphery of a separate investigation and whose details he’d mentall
y recorded, its serial number had been expertly filed. It had probably been used in other crimes; it wouldn’t be used in the future. He’d obtained it in Glasgow two years previously. Another of the insurances against the awful unforeseen eventuality. It hadn’t been premonition.
To drop the thing here would serve the fiction of the professional hitman hired by angry heroin traffickers that Jake hoped the police might construct as a working hypothesis to start with. There was no reason, despite his role as a low-level informant, to connect Zaki Ibrahim with terrorism. Until, that is, the police came to search the white Transit van parked outside.
He had maybe a few more minutes of his putative canal run beyond the scope of the city’s CCTV before he would be required, for future exculpatory purposes, to reappear for the cameras. He glanced outside the lock-up and all was as it should be. He decided to risk a glance inside the van and went back to Zaki to fish out the keys. Though he already knew, he had to see it to make it real.
The cab was empty. The rear was secured by a large professional padlock with a sign saying: NO TOOLS KEPT IN THIS VEHICLE OVERNIGHT. Inside were four small rucksacks, identical to the one that Rashid had showed him and Leila. He dared not touch them, had no idea whether Zaki had booby-trapped them. It would be just like him to fit an anti-tamper detonating device that he would remove just before they were substituted for the boys’ empty bags later in the day. It was foolhardy enough of Jake just to glance in here. He edged open a plastic carrier bag cautiously. It contained four battered mobile phones. Strewn in the dust on the floor were black robes, a checked keffiyeh and – of course – a false luxuriant beard with a tube of theatrical gum. Things must have been catching up with poor old Zaki, Jake thought. He’d have expected him to be fastidious in folding his costume and storing his props securely. Maybe he’d disturbed him this morning in his preparations.
The effect of this get-up would have been almost comical. No wonder he wanted them to keep a distance. No wonder the boys, from some subliminal inkling in their hearts, had laughingly called him the sheikh.
A Fatal Game Page 18
