Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  I’d set my BlackBerry up with a link into my new Islambase account so I could scroll through the posts during the boring parts of the day. And there were many boring parts.

  At lunchtime we sat in Canada Square and had a look at Hamza’s posts. There was one picture of the family cat that made Bang-Bang laugh. ‘There you go, that’s a lead.’

  Directly below it were three other photos, captioned ‘View from our flat’. They showed a skyline at dusk or dawn, some overhanging trees and an expanse of water. Beyond were some vague outlines of white buildings. I zoomed in. Three silver regularly spaced objects also glittered, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what they were. I glanced at Bang-Bang. She shook her head.

  ‘Bluetooth it to me handheld, I’ll see if I can enlarge it.’

  Presently, Bang-Bang laughed again.

  ‘Heh. Cuz, look at this - watch when I hover the cursor over the cat photo.’

  I looked and laughed too. ‘Well I’ll be dipped in shit.’

  The shot data had come up- “taken with a Samsung SGH-G600 burgundy pink GSM quadband”.

  That would have to be his other half’s phone. I really couldn’t see Iqeel using a pink mobile. Bang-Bang tapped the screen. ‘At least we know to search for the right Bluetooth signal when we get close to where he lives.’

  ‘Blimey. This is turning into Hunting Pablo. What are those silver objects in the distance on the view shots?’

  Bang-Bang puffed out her cheeks. ‘You got me there. Could be anything. A sports centre? These buildings here though … don’t they remind you of Lego? Kinda red and white, I’m sure I’ve seen them …’

  She tailed off. A timer on her pager had just reached zero. At that point there was large bang and purple smoke began to billow from the main entrance to One Canada Square. Cue panic and screaming. People scattered. The CP exercise was back on. We gathered our kit and made for the main doors, into the smoke and chaos. The metal detectors picked up our pistols, but in all the screaming and shouting, they went unheard. And that was the object of the exercise.

  Three hours later we’d completed the debrief with the Colonel and the client. We handed over our video takes and wrapped up. Everyone seemed happy. Well, the Colonel and the client were happy. The rest of the building was fuming at all the damage we’d caused and was demanding to know if we were going to clear up. No we weren’t. Fuck ‘em.

  Bang-Bang needed a lift to see her mum out in Rainham so I drove her out on the A1020, out of town. We’d just gone past the Tate and Lyle works when Bang-Bang suddenly let out a scream and shouted ‘JESUS CHRIST! STOP THE CAR!’

  I pulled over, ignoring the no stopping restrictions, and drew my P88 Compact pistol from under my thigh, convinced we were about to be ambushed, but Bang-Bang was out of the car and jumping up and down with glee. What the fuck? I climbed out, placed the Walther against my leg, and went to see what on earth was grabbing her. I relaxed as I noticed that Holly’s pistol was still tucked into her waistband. She hugged me and was pointing out to the Thames, laughing. And now I saw it. The vague silver objects in the photos were the Thames Barrier. I, too, had to laugh. ‘Good one, Holly. You reckon he’s out there over the water somewhere?’

  ‘Yes. I reckon he is.’

  I breathed out and looked out towards Woolwich. Bang-Bang was looking around, squinting at the horizon.

  ‘Hah! There. Look. There’s those red and white buildings.’

  And yes, there they were, out towards the A13. Three tower blocks that looked like Lego.

  ‘So cuz, you take those two reference points and triangulate them in Google Earth or summink, and you get the location of those photos.’

  I nodded. And then I thought. ‘When we find him … I’ll tell you something for nothing, Holly. Iqeel is one dangerous cat, and he seems to have powerful friends. We’re going to need more guns. Not just pistols. Lots of guns. Machineguns.’

  Bang-Bang looked up at me with those non-committal hazel eyes. ‘We are the Blackeyes and we are la vida loca. You just bring the guns and tell us where and when.’

  11

  Halfway up Archway Road, just beyond Suicide Bridge, is a shuttered shop that’s never open. The cracked and faded sign reads “Jinnah Gun Co.”

  I parked outside the takeaway and walked to the shutters. I gave what was known as the Ho Chi Minh Knock on the blind - rap, rap-rap. I could hear a radio from inside the shop. Sunrise Radio, as per usual. Uncle Khan opened the heavy door and blinked in the sunlight.

  ‘Riz! Come in, my boy!’

  I crossed the threshold into the gloom, and that old scent of joss stick incense, cigarette smoke and Bisley gun oil. It was good to be back.

  ‘How are the sights I put on your ’88? Bright enough?’

  ‘Plenty bright, uncle, and thanks.’

  He coughed and shut and bolted the door.

  ‘Uncle - I’ll level with ya. Me and Holly need some serious pocket firepower.’

  ‘In that case the boat is most definitely in. Chalo - come this way.’

  We went through to the back to the miniature firing range. It was all of twenty feet downrange, with some standard NATO figure 11 targets at the end. On a table before us was - whoah, Christmas had come early. Shotguns, pistols with suppressors, a MAC-11, some MP5 variants. There was even an L86 Light Support Weapon.

  ‘Wallahi, Uncle! Where did this lot come from?’

  ‘Promise not to laugh? We’ve got a contract from Thames Valley Police to destroy all the firearms they seize.’

  That was the funniest thing I’d heard all week.

  ‘OK, what can I take? Can I have a shottie … erm … the Mossberg, that HK there, and the LSW?’

  Uncle Khan bowed stiffly.

  ‘All yours.’

  I picked the MP5 variant up and pointed it downrange. It had a holographic red-dot sight fitted. Nice. I turned it on and tracked it up and down.

  ‘You still left-eyed and right-handed, Riz?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Ji, Uncle, strange but true.’

  When you put a weapon into the aim, you found your dominant eye focused on the target. Even though I was right-handed, my dominant eye was my left eye. What could you do. I scooped all three weapons into a go-bag, together with the correct ammunition for each, some spare magazines, and the cleaning kits.

  ‘Be sure not to bring them back, son.’

  I grinned. Then I stopped grinning as I tried to lift the bag and realised how bloody heavy it was. I put the bag down and separated out the magazines and ammo, and placed them in another separate bag. Better.

  We embraced. Good times remembered.

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  12

  In Rainham the party was in full swing. Holly’s mum was chuffed I’d brought her errant daughter round, and she’d got the pans out to cook for us. In Asian families, there is no escaping this. You stayed, and you ate the damn somosas.

  ‘Rizwan, pay attention beta. Watch!’

  Mrs Kirpachi rapped the back of my hand with the ladle she was holding. She was a small, pretty, birdlike lady, just like her daughter. I had to behave myself as I was now in her kitchen and thus, her domain.

  And her domain was suffused in the smell of chopped onions, garlic, curry powder, and fresh coriander from her garden.

  ‘You will learn how to make this family’s vegetable and cashew somosa recipe. Listen.’

  Her hands started moving over the ingredients. This was the bit you couldn’t get tired of, my Mum was like this too. Ingredients seemed to magic themselves into the pan for them. Mrs Kirpachi and my Mum weren’t just relatives, they hadn’t just come from the same village in Kashmir, they’d come from the same street .

  ‘Boil potatoes in water till slightly soft. You add the peas. Cook till potato has softened fully, drain and season. Heat oil in frying pan, add onions, fry till golden brown, add the spices, ginger, potato peas, cook gently, gently. Riz are you listening?’

  I was - I had nowhere
else to go.

  ‘Remove from heat. Slightly mash the pea and potato filling. You stir in the cumin and cashew nuts, and a handful of chopped coriander. You see? You see, beta? Easy, even for you. Ha.’

  She tapped my cheek and went to work on the pastry.

  I had homework. I borrowed Holly’s netbook, remembered that her password was “bl0odbl0odblood!” logged into the family wifi and got online. Her netbook was a strange, customised thing- it ran Linux and she’d taped black masking tape over the net camera, as she was convinced that they could be turned on remotely by the bad guys. The Tor browser was also customised to run Firefox and the Tails encryption programme. I hated Firefox.

  I logged onto Flash Earth, typed in “Thames Barrier” and soon had myself an overhead satellite view of the barrier and the environs. Now I needed to find those red and white buildings. I swiped the touchpad and let the map roll lazily south for a bit. City airport…A13…there! That looked like it was them, three buildings, evenly spaced just on the arterial.

  OK. Now I had to get graphical. I hit ctrl/print screen and dropped the screengrab into CorelDraw. Here was where a bit of guesswork came in. I Bluetoothed the original photos over from my phone to the netbook and set them up on the right hand side of the screen. You could see the Barrier on the half-left, and those buildings on the right. So…

  In CorelDraw I drew two red lines, one down from the Barrier, and another down from the buildings, thinking of a vanishing point. The lines intersected south of the river east of Woolwich, near HMP Belmarsh. Interesting.

  I now had a hunting ground.

  I wandered back into the kitchen and got busy chopping coriander. Mrs Kirpachi was stirring onion gravy. Apropos of nothing she asked

  ‘Beta. What is my daughter doing these days, for a job?’

  ‘Graphic design? I have no idea, Mrs Kirpachi.’

  Mrs Kirpachi turned while drying her hands and gave me a long, hard look.

  ‘Rizwan. You are family and you are meant to be looking after my daughter, who is still, in case you have forgotten, engaged to be married to you. But I get the impression that you are not looking after her. I think she is looking after you’.

  She turned away. Well that told me.

  There were some sharp snaps, like suppressed pistol fire, from the back garden. What the hell was she up to? Mrs Kirpachi started rattling rapid-fire Urdu in the direction of whatever her miscreant daughter was doing. I walked out onto the veranda. Holly was firing an air pistol in the air and birds were scattering.

  ‘Bloody magpies. Yahan ao bhai, dekho na.’

  Come, cousin, look at this, she was saying. She took my arm and steered me to the cherry tree at the back.

  ‘See? The bird nests. The bastard magpies are after the chicks.’

  I couldn’t see a thing. I looked at the air pistol.

  ‘Is that loaded?’

  ‘Oh, no. I couldn’t actually kill a magpie. They’re such pretty birds.’

  As we stood there, some of the garden’s other wildlife returned. Order was restored. Holly linked her arm in mine and leant her head on my shoulder. Mrs Kirpachi’s garden was a work of art. Suddenly the fattest woodpigeon I had ever seen flopped down onto the patio and began pecking at bread. We both burst into giggles.

  ‘Would you look at that thing! It’s the size of the Hindenburg!’

  The woodpigeon pecked away regardless. Mrs Kirpachi yelled at us from the kitchen.

  13

  At dawn next morning I quietly let myself out of Holly’s parents’ house and drove down to Woolwich, via the Queen Elizabeth Bridge. At Woolwich Arsenal I parked the car in a quiet cul-de-sac and began my long walk along the riverfront. I had Hamza’s original photos on my BlackBerry, loaded up for viewing. It took me an hour, but as I walked along the pavement at Thamesmead, the view slowly became that from the photos. I double checked and then turned about face to see what the photographer had been aiming from. A crescent of monolithic blocks of flats faced me. I sent a text to Holly. ‘ Cuz . When this wakes you - I think we’ve pinged him .’

  That evening I had Krav Maga training, which was basically an exercise in boxing, masochism, and pain. Why people paid for the privilege of being beasted by some bionic bastard I just didn’t know. On the way out, with sore ribs and lungs feeling like they were filled with broken glass, I checked my BlackBerry for anything new on the Islambase forum.

  My God. There was. They’d invited me to join the restricted brothers-only section.

  I drove back from the gym as fast as the various speed cameras would allow me. All that was going through my head on a repeat loop was ‘hot damn, I’m in the Brothers Section’. What was I going to say? I had better not screw up.

  I raced up the stairs to my door, two stairs at a time, heart pounding. And I skidded to a halt. There was light coming from under my front door. I hadn’t left the light on.

  OK, control your breathing, Riz, I told myself. Very slowly I reached behind me and drew my Walther from my waistband. Even more slowly, I pulled the topslide back a fraction to brass-check. A cartridge glinted against the landing light. Good drills. There was a round in the pipe ready to go. I cocked back the hammer and thumbed the safety up.

  Ever so gently, I walked forward and got my key in the lock. Turned it right until the click. God, that was too loud. My heart was hammering so hard the people over the corridor could probably hear it. I pushed the door inwards with my right foot and followed the sight picture of the Walther into the hall. I crept forward, concentrating on the rear sight, pistol held in Weaver stance.

  I could smell cooking. Cooking? I went round the corner.

  In the kitchen, Bang-Bang was stirring things in pans. She flashed a big smile at me. ‘Hiya!’

  I lowered the gun and sagged against the wall.

  ‘Holly, how the fuck did you -’

  ‘You lent me your spare set of keys the other night, remember? Dipstick.’

  Her own personal gun, her CZ85, was sitting on the kitchen worktop, within her reach. I safetied and decocked my pistol and put it back in my waistband.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Bang-Bang while she messed about with cooking utensils, ‘while you was out, I’ve been looking at ways of cracking into the Islambase site. They’re on Joomla, so I’ve been trying some exploits. No joy yet though. Go and have a look. It’s on the lefthand screen.’

  ‘”Lefthand screen”? I haven’t got a …’

  I went through to the lounge to look. My PC now had TWO twenty-one inch screens and seemed to be running Linux and Windows XP at the same time.

  ‘Holly! What have you done to my computer?’

  For the love of … I left the flat for a day and before I knew it, the Moties had been at all my gear. I sat down and looked at the readouts.

  On the lefthand screen she’d set up the various Joomla exploits, and on the righthand screen a bruteforce password cracker was ticking away at various options for getting into Islambase. Like she said, nothing yet. I dimly recalled that websites running on the older versions of Joomla were vulnerable to remote admin password changes. You simply typed an “’” in a token field. You could also do what was known as a “zero-day attack”. Many ways to skin a cat. Nothing yet though by the looks of it. Seeing as she’d monopolised the entire rig I got my laptop out and logged into Islambase. I called to the kitchen.

  ‘Holly! Did I tell you they’ve let me into the brothers’ section?’

  ‘Ayyyy?’

  ‘Never mind…I said never mine, I’ll tell you in a minute!.’

  Bang-Bang went back to chopping stuff, and then started singing in a parody of Asha Bosle’s voice.

  “ hum dono ke dil chaahe , hum aaj yahi mil jaaye

  yeh sabki marji hai , yeh rab ki marji hai …”

  I rolled my eyes. I wriggled my pistol round from front-carry to reverse carry in my waistband. More comfortable that way, and easier to rest your elbow on. OK. Deep breath. I was in the brothers’ section with fifteen other
blokes… and Hamza. I clicked on the posts. And here we were. Hamza was collecting money for the Iftar for the Belmarsh prisoners. The post read:

  ‘ Guys . Its that time of year again when we dig deep for our brothers inside the kuffar prison system . Im doing this on behalf of Cageprisoners . If u want to donate , drop me an inbox message and Ill send you bank details so you can give . Wslmz’

  Hot damn. Bank account details. Bang-Bang was at my shoulder. She leant on me and read the post. She was trying to feed me a jalapeno pepper. I bit it. She laughed and nodded at the screen.

  ‘Do it, cuz.’

  I got Hamza’s private message facility up and emailed him - ‘ Brother , I will give .’

  That night was spent watching old Bollywood movie clips on the big telly. We amused ourselves by trying to find the cheesiest songs. She won by a mile with that one from Teesri Kasam. I gave up and let the film play. By 1am Bang-Bang had fallen asleep on me. Coast was clear for me to watch the news. I hit the remote to get Al Jazeera English. I got as far as a report on the fighting in Syria before succumbing to the iron grip of sleep too.

  Dawn broke. Holly had disappeared. That girl was like a cat. A law unto herself. I looked at my laptop screen. I had a private message waiting for me in Islambase. It read:

  “ Royal Bank of Scotland

  Sort code 60 - 12 - 44

  Acc no . 57866032 ”

  Iqeel had taken the bait. I drove to my nearest RBS branch in Plaistow and leant on the first available counter. The cashier smiled at me.

  ‘Morning sir, what can we do for you?’

  ‘Morning. If I give you some RBS current account details, can I deposit some money into it?’

  ‘Of course! Can I have the sort code and account number?’

  I rattled them off from the piece of paper I was holding under the counter, and handed over a £20 note. The cashier concentrated on her screen for a while, then sat back. A printer buzzed. ‘All done for you sir, and here’s your receipt.’