Sixty Minutes

by Tony Salter

  ‘Stop it the pair of you,’ said Shuna, before Zoe had a chance to retaliate. ‘If you’re going to bicker, I’ll make you wait outside.’ She stood still until the ceasefire had held for long enough before setting off once again. ‘It’s just up here. By the park.’

  Evolution Travel made a point of being exclusive and bespoke. The prices tended to match the promise, but Shuna and Simon had been using the company for over ten years and had never had a bad experience. If anyone could make this birthday trip seamless, it would be Jonny Burbridge.

  Seamless or not, she could still feel hidden fears and resentments trying to resurface like foul-smelling bubbles in a witch’s cauldron. She hadn’t expected to be so nervous – it had been more than ten years, after all.

  Shuna took a deep breath. It wasn’t like they were even going home. At the closest, they would be almost five thousand kilometres from the Western Cape.

  But Africa was Africa … And Africa was in Shuna’s blood.

  She missed home like a missing limb. She could look around her and see that Africa was far away, but she could still feel it. Always. She only needed to close her eyes for a minute and she would be back.

  Apart from the children, every important milestone in her life had taken place in Africa; her first horse, Nomsa; her first hunting trip; her first kiss; her first everything. And, fifteen years ago, Simon had proposed to her on the sands at Knysna. Fifteen years. Almost to the day.

  Her parents were already separated by then. That had been on the cards from well before Shuna had left for London and, although they’d not yet divorced, the separation had been amazingly conflict-free.

  One of Shuna’s closest friends was a family lawyer and had once told her there was only one way for a divorce to be amicable – one party had to be ready to give in on absolutely everything. It only took one glowing ember of face-saving resistance: a favourite painting; half a dozen vinyl albums or an extra half-hour of visiting rights, to kindle a fire of righteous conflict which would leave little but burnt twigs and lawyer’s fees in its wake.

  Shuna’s father was the one who refused to fight. He hadn’t married an heiress for her land or money and didn’t need much to be happy. He was overjoyed when it was suggested that he move to the small Knysna summer house which, perched on the Eastern Head with steps dropping down to the lagoon, was a writer’s paradise.

  Her mother had kept the ranch and vineyards, of course. They had been in her family for almost six generations, since the days of the first voortrekkers. The Queen of Stellenbosch would no doubt be buried there, in the small, white-walled graveyard, together with her forebears.

  It was amazing that her parents had stayed together so long; on the face of it, they’d never had anything in common and it was perhaps more unusual that they’d got together in the first place. Maybe her mother had done it to spite her own parents; there was nothing out of the ordinary in that.

  Her mum had been young – only just nineteen, her dad was a good looking man and, when his first novel was shortlisted for a major prize, he quickly became a darling of the cocktail circuit. Not so hard to see how the story might have unfolded.

  Shuna could only remember happy times until she was about twelve or thirteen. Her world was one of sun and laughter and the house was always full of interesting people and noisy wine-rich debate.

  But, the gaps between her mother and her father started to yawn ever wider even as their beloved homeland started the long process of healing its own divisions. They both loved their country, but in quite different ways. The debates slowly morphed into dogma-fuelled arguments and the guests stopped coming.

  By the time Shuna was fifteen, she had understood that she no longer liked her mother. It was more than a simple disagreement about important principles, she actively disliked everything her mother had become – and probably always had been.

  In spite of that, she’d still loved her – strange how the mother-daughter bond can survive so much bitterness – and probably would have continued to do so if it hadn’t been for that last trip fifteen years earlier. There was a horrible predictability to what had happened, but that didn’t make it any more forgivable.

  It felt good to be going back to Africa, even if it wasn’t to the Western Cape. Shuna could feel herself standing taller as she saw the travel agent’s up ahead. The African sun would cleanse her and the soil would ground her once again.

  Dan

  Strange how, once the cork was pulled, and the genie let out of the bottle, it took one hell of an effort to persuade it to go back in.

  Dan had struggled for many years to lock those Austin memories away and to get on with life. Rachel had helped, of course. She was one of those women with an infinite capacity for patience and understanding and she’d known that the end of the tunnel wasn’t so far away even when he was flailing in the dark certainty of nothingness. Nothing apart from the fact that the world would never be truly right again.

  He would always remember Rachel’s bright, burning faith in him and, as he watched the young Spanish girl walking over to her boyfriend with a light, excited step, he wondered if he’d been a good enough husband to Rachel over the years. She deserved that and more, but he doubted he’d managed to give her as much as she’d given him.

  The fact that children hadn’t chosen to bless them wasn’t his fault – he knew that – but, in their absence, maybe he could have done more.

  As the old memories continued to snake their way through his thoughts, he was reminded that the thing which Rachel would have really wanted from him wasn’t in his power to give. He cared deeply for her and was grateful for her unconditional love, but he didn’t really love her. Not in the way she loved him. The capacity for love had been burned out of him before they even met, and nothing could change that.

  Not only did the genie not want to go back in the bottle, for the first time in all those years, Dan was no longer sure how hard he wanted to push. What did it matter now? Everything that had happened was a part of his life and, at the bottom of all things, a part of who he was.

  His beloved Dostoevsky questioned how it was possible for a man to live a life and to have no story to tell. Well, for Dan, Austin was a part of his story, Rosa was a part of his story and, without a doubt, Whitman was a part of his story.

  He wondered if he’d been a coward to hide it all away. He and Rachel had been together for most of his life – through good times and bad – but he’d never told her about Austin. Maybe she’d worked it out for herself, but he doubted it. He wouldn’t run away any more. At the very least, he owed her that.

  It was a lifetime ago. Almost fifty years had disappeared since he’d left. When the University of Toronto had offered him a tenure, he’d jumped at it. With things turning out as they had, there was nothing left for him in Texas but a never-ending spiral of blame and guilt.

  Dan could remember that morning in vivid detail. The August sun was already sweltering and he and Rosa were running late. She was beautiful in the yellow sun dress he’d bought her, the smooth curve of her belly just beginning to stretch the material. Everything about her was glowing with life and youth as she took a final gulp of her coffee and picked up her bag.

  They both worked in the same building which was only twenty-five minutes on foot, and they had time to make plans while they walked. Rosa had a late tutorial so Dan had agreed to pick up groceries on his way home and start supper. It had started like any normal, blissful day.

  Much as he’d tried to repress the memories of what had happened next, he’d never been able to stop himself replaying the day’s events over and over, looking at them from different angles trying to find answers or explanations. The thoughts usually slipped in uninvited during those unguarded moments between sleeping and waking – should someone have spotted the signals ahead of time? Could they have reacted faster? At least warned people to stay away?

  Nadia

  David swept back into the room, breathing heavily.

  ‘S
orry,’ he said. ‘That couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Critical?’ said Phil.

  David nodded, his jaw clenched and the wrinkles showing dark around his eyes.

  Nadia knew the cost of moving the threat level to critical was huge. All non-essential leave would be cancelled and relevant departments in the police and security services would be granted blanket overtime authorisation. If it turned out to be a false alarm there would be consequences … but if it wasn’t a false alarm …? Prestige and money be damned – she wouldn’t want David’s job.

  ‘Ed,’ said David, now back in his chair. ‘What have you got for us?’

  Ed used his phone to cast an image onto the TV. The huge screen was filled with the face of a heavily bearded man, piercing green eyes shining deep in his leathery face. A long scar ran over his right temple and across the bridge of his nose. His hair and beard were black, but liberally sprinkled with silver.

  ‘You’ll all have heard of Unicorn,’ he said. ‘Also known as Ibrahim Abdel Hak and Mohammed Assam. Until recently, we thought he was Afghani because of his Mujahideen background. In fact, we’re now fairly sure his real name is Fathi Auon. We believe he’s early 50s, born in Sidon in Lebanon, but we don’t know much about his childhood. He’s been a high priority person of interest for almost twenty years, linked to the Afghan Mujahideen, the Afghan Taliban and, most recently the TTP, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

  Nadia looked at the face on the screen and felt the emerald eyes staring straight at her; the cruel, sardonic sneer was meant only for her. She shivered. Her mother’s family were all from Sidon and this man was only two years older than her mother would have been. Had they met as children? It wasn’t impossible.

  She’d not been back there since she was a small child, but she could still remember her grandmother’s smile and the taste of the tomatoes which grew against the wall at the back of the house. Every day of that last visit, her grandmother would give Nadia a small jug of precious water and they would visit the tomato plants. She would stand back and watch as Nadia carefully divided the water, a few drops at a time, between each plant. It was the first time in Nadia’s life that she had felt useful, the first time she’d experienced that special sensation of completing a task which needed to be done.

  Thinking back with adult eyes, she could see how desolate the town had been – sand and concrete dust everywhere, rusty steel bars poking at random angles from collapsed walls and wild dogs slinking in and out of abandoned buildings. A far cry from the streets of her Paris home.

  And still, in the midst of all that, and the fear which lurked behind every corner, her grandmother had smiled, and the tomatoes had glowed red against the dirty white concrete.

  For all Nadia knew, the hard brutal man staring down from the screen had once been a small boy, standing on that same street, watching her own mother watering tomatoes from a small jug. She shivered again.

  Ed continued. ‘I’ve been working with an asset in Peshawar for the past three years. He informed me two weeks ago that Unicorn turned up at the Deobandi madrasa a month or so before Mullah Akthar suddenly passed away. He was working as a teacher, either hiding out or possibly recruiting. We don’t know.’

  ‘You think there might be a link between him and the mullah’s death?’ said Phil. ‘If so, why?’

  ‘We haven’t found a direct connection,’ said Ed, ‘but it appears that everything changed after Mullah Akthar’s death. The school moved from being moderate and progressive to becoming something quite different. And Unicorn is likely to have been one of the drivers of that change.’

  ‘You think he might have got to Snowflake?’ said Nadia, chill fingers of doubt creeping into her thoughts like an icy mist. Maybe she was wrong about him after all.

  ‘Again, we don’t know for sure,’ replied Ed. ‘My source told me he thought they were sharing a room, so it seems likely.’ He looked around the table. ‘This is a very dangerous man; he’s always been one step ahead of us and his operations have a habit of succeeding as planned. As soon as we confirmed his location in Peshawar, we contacted the Americans and a joint operation was approved last week.’

  ‘To neutralise him?’ said Phil.

  ‘No,’ replied Ed. ‘We don’t do that. The plan was to take him alive.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Nadia.

  Ed tapped his phone and the wall display went black. ‘He vanished. He left Peshawar the day after the operation was approved. It was as though he knew we were coming for him. We have him leaving Karachi airport two days ago on a flight to Dubai and that’s it. As far as we can tell, he never arrived in Dubai. We’ve lost him again.’

  David was the first to break the silence. ‘Even though we have very little to go on, I think we have to assume that Snowflake and Unicorn are connected.’

  Nadia could see that Phil and Ed agreed and, in spite of her internal conflicts, she knew that it was a logical assumption.

  ‘And …’ David’s words hung heavily in the still room. ‘ … We have to work on the basis that an attack is planned for London. An imminent attack.’

  Nadia could tell the three men were struggling with the same frustration and tension as she was. There was enough evidence to conclude that something was about to happen, but they had nothing to hold on to. Nothing to help them decide what to do next. The fight-or-flight adrenalin had no outlet.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d felt that way – in fact it was fast becoming the norm. Technology allowed them to collect more information, more quickly, than ever before; the problem was that there was so much of it and, after years of austerity and the political implosion caused by the Brexit vote there were more and more people voicing anger and outrage. Only a tiny fraction of those people would ever seriously consider a terrorist action, but trying to focus limited resources in the right place always came with a massive risk of missing something.

  In fact, beyond arresting everyone with tattoos, a shaven head or a black beard, there was often little that could be done apart from waiting until an incident was close to happening – holding back until someone broke cover or a pattern suddenly emerged. That increased the risk of failing to be there in time and they were all struggling with the pressure of living with that Sword of Damocles permanently hanging overhead.

  David continued. ‘I’m expecting an update from GCHQ any minute. They’ve dropped all other projects to run known aliases for Unicorn and Snowflake through the database and query all London CCTV footage for the last three days.’

  ‘What if one or both of them has shaven their beards?’ said Nadia.

  ‘We changed standard face-recognition protocols while you were away,’ said Phil. ‘It’s standard practice now to match for ten different disguise permutations, including glasses, facial hair and skin colouring.’

  ‘Aha. That makes sense. Thanks, Phil,’ she said, struggling not to be annoyed by his smug, patronising manner. Neither David nor Ed seemed to have noticed.

  There was a knock on the door and Sue walked in, carrying a slim file. ‘Sorry to disturb, but these are just in. You’ll want to see them.’ She handed the file to David and left.

  He took just a few seconds to flick through the papers before passing the file to Phil.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We have something. An individual with an 85% match to Snowflake was picked up at Kings Cross half an hour ago. No beard, carrying a blue holdall. Copies of the files and images should be with you by now.’

  Nadia pulled out her phone and scrolled through the pictures. Snowflake was looking around the station with wide eyes like a small boy just arrived in the big city. Difficult to imagine him as a threat.

  ‘I’ve asked the Met to send CT officers to Kings Cross,’ said David. ‘As you can see, there’s also a lower quality match from fifteen minutes ago at South Kensington tube station.’ He looked at Nadia. ‘Nadia?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You and Ed go there and see what you can find. There’s a car waiting for you. Post any
updates to the thread. I’ll ping you if anything changes.’

  Nadia stood up, feeling a surge of energy and relief as the pumping adrenalin found an outlet. ‘On it,’ she said, turning towards Ed. ‘Ready?’

  He was already opening the door. ‘Let's go,’ he said.

  David grabbed her arm as she walked past. ‘I want you armed,’ he said. ‘And keep an eye out for Unicorn. He’s somewhere behind this. I know it.’

  11:18

  Jim

  Jim looked at his watch. Almost twenty past. His supervisor, Janet, would be making her rounds soon and he wasn’t in the mood for any of her sarky comments. He did what he could to straighten his fleece and made sure his thermos and cup were tucked neatly behind his chair – if twenty years in the Army taught you anything, it was the critical importance of a regular flow of “hot wets”.

  A purple fleece. What sort of bloody uniform was that? Did they want the museum guards to be respected or laughed at?

  He’d enjoyed watching Will’s bit of Spanish fluff get up from the bench and walk over to the other side of the hall where the young idiot was back in his spot, smug contentment plastered all over his stupid face. Ramona was wearing tight jeans, and she knew how to walk. Two bunnies in a bag. That’s how he and his mates would have described that walk once upon a time.

  The conversation with Will had sent Jim’s mind spiralling into forgotten places, scraping up thoughts and feelings which were buried for good reason. He’d lost all interest in sex after what happened at the tribunal and, to be honest, he didn’t miss it much. Life was much simpler when you weren’t being led about by your dick.

  Funny how easily those thoughts could pop up to the surface again. He’d never stopped subconsciously comparing women and ranking them in mental lists but, for some years, that hadn’t translated into physical desire. Until now.