by Greg Rucka
He watched the pebbles bounce harmlessly from the Jamrah, and he felt himself begin to weep.
He understood. Satan was not a pillar. Satan would not be stopped with a pebble. Shuneal looked on the Jamrah and saw instead his parents in Sheffield, complacent and arrogant in their simplicity; he saw Americans rolling into Baghdad and the British rolling into Basra; he saw Coalition bombs falling on Afghanistan; he saw Israeli rockets in Gaza.
He threw his pebbles and offered his choked prayer, and when he had thrown the last, he bent to scoop more, enraged, and Aamil had to stop him then, to grab his hands and pull him away, telling him to be calm, that he understood, that he had seen it as well. Shuneal trembled with the anger, the effort of self-control, and though he could once again see the Jamrah for what it was, the image remained dancing before his eyes. Even as he ate of the goat that had been prepared, even as Aamil and he and the others shaved the hair from their heads, he found himself swimming in memories of fire and blood.
"How do you fight Satan?" he asked Aamil insistently.
"With everything," his friend answered. • Shuneal completed the Hajj, returning again to the Ka'bah, making the prescribed circuits once again, finishing the pilgrimage as it had been completed for over a thousand years. He and the others returned to Madinah, back to the house that Prince Salih had arranged for their comfort. All of them, it seemed, had been touched by their journey, each feeling its effects in privately profound ways. Some of the students, freed from the weight of their pilgrimage, began to laugh and joke again, talking of what they had seen and experienced, speaking of what they would do upon returning to Egypt. Their time was almost at an end, their visas, specially acquired for them by the Prince himself, soon to expire.
The impending departure filled Shuneal with a growing sense of despair. He had tried Egypt already and had been told there was no place for him there. He was not an Egyptian, not even an Arab, just a Muslim. After the past two weeks with other pilgrims, wrapped in the ihram, he had forgotten such distinctions mattered. But returning to Cairo reminded him, and he did not want to leave.
So when Abdul Aziz came to the house for a second time, Shuneal knew it was his only chance. • A cassette player rested on the dining table this time, and once everyone was seated and still, Abdul Aziz moved to it and, without a word, set the tape to play.
The voice that filled the room was immediately familiar to Shuneal.
"You who have come to make Hajj, give thanks to Allah, all praise to Him," Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari told them. His voice crackled, distorted through the tiny speaker on the cassette player. "You who have come to secure your place in Paradise, know that you have spared yourself Hellfire. You have achieved the fifth pillar of our faith, but there is a sixth, and who of you dare to reach it?
"To be muwahhidun, to be the greatest advocates of oneness, should be your highest aspiration. Jihad is a great deed, indeed, and there is no deed whose blessing, whose reward, is that of it. For this reason, if none other, it is the greatest thing you, any of you, can volunteer for.
"The warrior who gives his life in a true jihad becomes shahid, guaranteed that rarest place in Paradise. You must rub the sleep from your eyes, my brothers, and rise to jihad! Find the ember in your soul, and let your breath give life to the flame! Let that flame feed your hatred of those who defile and damn us, of those Jews and Christians and infidels who would steal from you that which is yours, your future as the One True Religion! We know the Jews are the objects of Allah's avowed wrath, all praises sung unto Him, while the Christians have long since fallen from the path of righteousness. The Qu'ran tells us the Jews are a nation cursed by Allah, a nation he turned into apes and pigs, who worship idols.
"You live in great times, the days before the Days of Judgment, with civilizations in conflict, with the civilization of the corrupt West on the verge of collapse. While the West seeks to steal our youth from us, to diminish our heritage as the One True Religion, we see they are weak, immoral, and corrupt. The battle before you is not one simply of ideas, but one to be fought with bloodshed, with the rifle, the airplane, the word, the bomb. This is a new phase in our great Crusade, to accelerate that collapse, to return in kind a thousandfold what they have laid at our feet.
"Allah will take revenge against the tyrants with His sword in this world, and in the world to come. We beseech Allah to grant Mujihadin everywhere speedy victory, and forsake America, and those who help and are allies with her, and bring destruction upon her and her friends. It is Allah's will, and it will be done.
"Allah's prayers upon you, you who would be jihadi." • The silence after the tape ended was heavy, broken only by the sound of their breathing, the students seated on the floor. Abdul Aziz did not move, letting the cassette run out, and there was a shocking snap as the button on the player popped up once more. From the corner of his eye, Shuneal saw several of the students start at the noise, surprised.
Abdul Aziz took the cassette player from the table, tucked it beneath his arm, and, still without uttering a word, turned and walked out of the room. Shuneal could hear him moving away, the echo of his steps on the tile floor, and then the sound of the door opening and closing. Around him, other students exchanged looks of confusion and loss.
Shuneal moved first, taking a step forward, then stopping, looking back. Aamil, still seated, hesitated, then rose to follow. Shuneal heard the rustle of cloth as more of the students got to their feet, but he didn't wait, and he didn't look back, now moving faster, suddenly afraid that Abdul Aziz wouldn't wait for him. He reached the door, pushed it open, and rushed out into the cool Madinah night.
Abdul Aziz stood at the back of the battered military surplus truck that had pulled up outside. Canvas covered the sides and back of the bed, but as Shuneal approached, Abdul Aziz reached up and drew it back, then pulled the latch and dropped the gate. Shuneal started forward, reached out to hold on to the side of the vehicle to help pull himself inside, but Abdul Aziz put a hand on his breast, a forceful pressure just short of a push.
"Give me your name, boy."
"Shuneal. Shuneal bin Muhammad."
Abdul Aziz's face broke into an amused smile and the shining scar on his jaw seemed to climb to reach his eye. "You are British?"
"I am a Muslim."
"Do you still have your passport?"
Shuneal couldn't understand why it mattered. "Yes, with my belongings."
"In the house?"
"Yes." Shuneal dropped his hand from where he was still gripping the side of the truck, felt a swell of desperation so acute and so sudden, he was afraid it would bring him to tears. When he spoke, he tried to keep the whine from his voice. "Please, I understand. I understand what you told us, before we made the pilgrimage, I saw it, I saw the Jamrah, Abdul Aziz. I saw it."
"I know." He said it with such flat conviction that Shuneal realized all at once that Abdul Aziz had been watching him throughout the Hajj. "Shuneal bin Muhammad?"
"Yes, the name I took when I avowed my faith."
"No, no more."
Abdul Aziz reached out and took hold of Shuneal's still newly shaven head in a surprisingly strong grip, and turned him to face Aamil and the others who had come outside.
"See your brother," Abdul Aziz said. "He has the heart of a jihadi, and I give him the name of one now, the name Sinan bin al-Baari. The spearhead of God."
He released his grip.
"Get on the truck," Abdul Aziz ordered.
And Sinan bin al-Baari, who had been Shuneal bin Muhammad and who had been christened William Dennis Leacock, climbed aboard and began his long trip to his new home in the Wadi-as-Sirhan.
5
London-Wood Green, North London 10 August 0414 GMT Chace came around the back way on foot, as instructed, mounting the six steps to the apartment building, hands thrust deep in her windbreaker, head down, pretending to the walk of shame, just in case anyone who shouldn't see her coming did. She'd passed one of Box's surveillance vans almost two hun
dred meters back, done up to look as if it was on its last legs, and she knew they'd seen her, and that was to the good, because it meant no one would be surprised by her arrival, and that therefore no one would shoot her by mistake.
She was armed herself, an HK P2000 tucked at her waist, and that in and of itself was almost as odd as the errand she'd been sent on. It was a rule broken: Minders did not go armed in London.
But the errand itself broke another rule: SIS and Box do not work together.
It was a big, sad building, late fifties architecture that had forgone aesthetics in pursuit of efficiency, but even that had failed it, and in the cast of the electric lights over the door the masonry had the hue of a smoker's teeth. She pushed through the entrance, out of the night, and into a hallway that was even more poorly illuminated than the world outside. She stopped to let her eyes adjust before continuing down the hall, stepping carefully around the trash in the corridor, food wrappers, empty bottles. A television was playing in one of the apartments she passed and she heard the unmistakably empty passion of a porno.
She ignored the elevator and took the stairs, climbing three flights before stepping onto a landing and orienting herself. The light was marginally better, flickering from a spastic bulb in a fixture halfway along the wall. Chace slowed down, going as quietly as she could. She passed four-twelve, stopped in front of four-fourteen, and didn't knock.
The man who opened the door was dressed in black tactical BDUs, and he motioned her inside without a word. Chace stepped through, then aside, and he closed the door as silently as he'd opened it. He pointed to her, indicated toward the main room, and Chace nodded, following as he led the way.
There were three others just like him, one affixing a fiber-optic cable to the wall with strips of tape he'd stuck to the left thigh of his pants. The other two were crouched around a laptop, their faces lit in green from the light from the screen. All were armed, pistols set in holsters on their legs, MP-5s hanging from the straps at their backs. None of them looked up.
The furniture had been moved to the far side of the room, and Chace could see the naked picture hooks on the wall that adjoined four-twelve, where the Assault Team had taken down the frames. Resting in a corner of the couch, she counted four stuffed animals, heaped haphazardly atop a stack of picture books. One of the toys was a small fat panda bear, with thick, brightly colored pieces of hardened rubber stuck to its hands and feet.
A family's apartment, Chace concluded. One child, young enough to still be teething.
She wondered where they'd been relocated to, and if they had any idea why the Security Services had so covertly and unceremoniously evicted them from their home.
The man guided Chace across the room, pointing down to indicate the coiled power cables and cords, mutely warning her to watch her step, heading for a door opposite the wall to four-twelve. She heard a soft whine, cast a glance back to see that the one who'd been placing the fiber optics was now using a small electric drill to cut a lead hole into the drywall. They'd place charges next.
The man gave her another nod, then left her to go through the next door alone. She did so, stepping into the bedroom and more light than she'd encountered in the last ninety minutes. She hadn't expected it, and it blinded her for an instant, and when her vision came back she was facing a man.
"Fucking hell," David Kinney said softly, and he looked anything but pleased to see her. "You."
"Me, Mister Kinney," Chace said. "How nice to see you again."
Kinney pulled a face, then turned away from her, lifting the radio in his hand to his mouth, whispering a string of orders. He was built of a similar stock as the Deputy Chief, but a larger version, as if Weldon had been the structural test case and David Kinney the final product. In his early forties, straight black wiry hair and a mustache to match, black suit, hands like hammers, he always made Chace think of the stereotypical trade union leader, at least physically. Kinney's position was much like D-Ops's own, except at Box, where he ran Security Service operations in the Counter Intelligence and Counter Terror divisions.
This was most certainly a CT operation. It made sense that Kinney would be here.
But Chace had to wonder why he couldn't have been somewhere else instead, at one of the two other operations running, perhaps, where Poole or Lankford would have had to deal with him instead of her. But she knew the answer as soon as she posed the question; she'd dealt with Kinney before, and the bad blood of that past encounter notwithstanding, Crocker had been obliged to send his Head of Section as a courtesy. Anything else would have been an insult.
Chace waited until Kinney was finished on the radio, then asked, "How many?"
Kinney sucked air through his teeth, as if debating whether or not to tell her. It was against his every instinct to be honest with SIS, just as it was against all of Crocker's to play fair with Box. But tragedy made for strange bedfellows, and for the moment inter-service rivalry had been forced into the backseat, at least for tonight.
"Five," Kinney said. "Three men, two women."
"Armed?"
"That's what we've been led to believe."
"Explosives?"
"Suspected. Not confirmed."
"And they're HUM-AA?"
"That's what our intelligence suggests, yes." Kinney looked at her pointedly. "Unless you have anything to the contrary?"
She shook her head. "Terrorist cells operating in London are your province, not ours."
Kinney started to respond, then seemed to think about what she'd said. He closed his mouth abruptly. Chace continued before he could respond to the slight.
"So we're taking them?"
"We are taking them, yes."
"When?"
"When we're ready. You're here as an observer, Miss Chace, as a courtesy. This is a Box operation, not some Minder shoot-'em-up. We want them alive, for questioning."
"That's a lovely sentiment," Chace said. "Have you shared it with them?"
Kinney held her stare for a second, then turned away, speaking into his radio once more. • Chace moved back into the main room before dawn, settling on the couch to watch the video feed of the action coming in over the laptop. The CT team had finished placing their breaching charge, a snake of explosive that ran in a tall oblong on the wall, roughly half a meter from where the camera had been placed. The detonator sat beside the laptop, a toggle switch with a lead that ran back to the explosive on the wall.
The camera itself could be turned nearly ninety degrees in any direction, controlled by a remote with a thumbstick set in its center, and the image it sent back was remarkably clear for a device so small. Looking into apartment four-twelve was like looking into a mirror image of their own room, at least in terms of dimension and layout. But content was radically different, and there was no question in Chace's mind what all that equipment on the kitchen table was meant to do.
Four-twelve held explosives, and its occupants were building themselves a bomb.
"If there's one, there could be others," Chace said. "We don't know what else is in that apartment."
"The second team drilled through into the bedroom, from four-ten," Kinney retorted. "They've seen nothing but the two women asleep in the bed."
"Where are the men?"
"Out and about. We've got them under surveillance. We'll take them when they get back."
"Out and about at five in the morning? They're scouting locations, Mister Kinney."
"We have them under surveillance. If they try anything, they'll be stopped."
The four men on the CT team had stopped their work, listening to the hushed debate. Chace looked to the man who'd let her into the apartment, the one she took to be the team leader. He shook his head slightly, turned his attention back to the laptop.
"The point is that they're not trying anything yet," Chace whispered. "You wait until all of them are in the apartment, you're giving them a chance to react."
"Miss Chace, you're here as an observer-"
Chace gest
ured angrily at the laptop screen. "You don't even know if it's armed! For God's sake, Kinney, at least start evacuating the building!"
Kinney clamped his mouth closed, and for a second, Chace thought she could hear his teeth grinding.
"Miss Chace," he said, "if you cannot keep your voice down, I will have one of these men escort you from the scene."
"You want to get blown up?" she demanded.
Kinney leveled a finger at her. "One more word. One more word and you're out. Now, be a nice little girl and sit down, shut up, and mind your own."
Chace bit back the immediate urge to respond, feeling heat climbing down from her neck to her shoulders, feeling the eyes of the four men on the CT team on her again. Normally she could take sexism in stride, but here, now, coming from Kinney, in front of an audience, it infuriated her. She knew why he was opposed to evacuating the building, let alone the floor; it would tip his hand, give the game away, and as far as it went, he was right, it would. His targets might escape, and he wasn't willing to let that happen, especially in the wake of the disaster on the tube only three days gone.
The Security Services were taking it on the chin, and Kinney wanted the big success, to prove that they were still in the game. Hence the three operations in one night, timed to coincide; a message to say, what you did to us, we can do to you.
Chace understood it, right down to the symbolism of Box picking three targets of their own. But looking at the monitor, and on it the view of the kitchen table, of the bomb-in-the-making, it seemed an awful risk to take for the sake of soothing a bruised ego.
Kinney moved forward, bending his mouth to the ear of the CT leader, whispering. The leader glanced at Chace, then back to Kinney, nodding. Kinney returned to her, fingering the radio in his hand.
"I've informed Sergeant Hopton that if you so much as cough, he is to remove you from the site," Kinney whispered at her. "Further, should it be required, he has been directed to take whatever action is required to keep you silent. I'm sure you understand what that means."
Chace stared at him, then mouthed the word "yes" as widely as she could manage. Hopton was watching her, and she caught him looking, and he turned his attention to the laptop once more.
