by Tom Marcus
Nothing. Just the wind flapping the plastic sheeting over the holes in the roof.
The sudden bark of a fox along the side of the church made me tense. Had I forgotten something? I went through a mental checklist: all the doors firmly closed, all the padlocks snapped shut. So why did I have this nagging feeling something wasn’t right?
The matches. Shit. I felt in the pocket of my jeans and there they were. I needed to put them back with the candles by the altar. Or was that taking a stupid risk? I’d been lucky to make it back and get myself safely tucked in before Martindale reappeared. What were the chances he’d turn up now just when I was creeping around suspiciously? I could return the matches later, couldn’t I? I remembered his habit of sometimes lighting a candle instead of using the lamp when he needed a bit of quality time with the Almighty in the wee hours. Nope: I couldn’t take the risk. I had to get them back.
I got up and started feeling my way towards the altar in the dark. The flagstones were cold under my bare feet. The fox barked again, a high-pitched yelp that sounded like a cat being tortured. Get on with it, he seemed to be saying. I stubbed my toe painfully on the altar, but at least it meant I was in the right place. I reached out my hand and felt the edge of the tray full of candles with my fingers, then carefully placed the box of matches in its usual place. I resisted the urge to hurry back to my bed. The last thing I wanted to do was to knock over a can of paint or a bucket of rainwater now.
Still no sign of Martindale. Safely in my sleeping bag again, I finally relaxed, expecting the creak of the big door opening at any moment, knowing I’d covered my tracks. I waited five minutes. Then another five. I stopped relaxing.
I didn’t know how Martindale and Weston had got into the room under the church. I had a fairly clear mental map of the bits of the labyrinth I’d been in, but I had trouble matching it to the layout of the church above ground. The second entrance could be anywhere – maybe not even in the church itself. But if Martindale was hurrying back to make sure the church was locked up tight, surely it wouldn’t have taken him this long?
The thought occurred to me that Martindale was already in the church when I got to the vestry. He’d checked and found I’d gone AWOL and was waiting somewhere, biding his time until I returned. Would he have called Weston for backup? Were they both here? I listened, but all I could hear was my own breathing.
I was thinking about improvising some sort of weapon when I heard the scrape of the key in the church door. The door creaked open, then shut, followed by the heavy bolts clunking into place. There was no light. After a few seconds I heard his boots on the smooth stone, getting fainter as he went deeper into the church, towards the altar. Then a soft thump, as if he’d just dropped to his knees, followed by some indistinct mumbling. Was he giving thanks for the last canister of ZX4? Or double-checking with the Holy Spirit that it was OK to unleash it on the streets of London? Knowing Martindale, he wouldn’t be having any doubts about what he was doing at this stage of the game. He was probably just asking the Almighty to make sure his zombie helpers didn’t suddenly come to their senses.
I waited for as long as I could, fighting the urge to sleep. Either the adrenaline rush of my little adventure in the tunnel had seriously drained me or I had gone down with something nasty from that rat bite, but I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open. Or maybe it was some evolutionary thing: when it’s dark and quiet, go to sleep. If you start crashing around in the middle of the night, the chances are something that can see and hear better than you is going to have you for breakfast.
Either way, it meant that when Martindale put his hand on my shoulder to shake me awake, I didn’t have to pretend. For a moment I genuinely didn’t know where I was.
‘Peter,’ he said. ‘It’s time we talked.’
I followed him into the church then stood in the aisle while he went and lit some candles. He was dressed in a dark monk’s robe, the cowl down over his face. He blew the match out and pointed to the pews.
‘Sit.’
I thought he was going to join me on the pew, but he remained standing. His face was in darkness, but I knew he was looking at me, those X-ray eyes trying to penetrate my skull. After a while he made a satisfied noise, as if he’d just made his mind up about something or the Holy Spirit had just given him the go-ahead.
‘It’s time for me to tell you the plan. God is pleased with your work and He has told me your spirit is now ready. Do you feel ready?’
My heart was pumping. I didn’t feel tired any more.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then listen. The wrath of God has been prepared. The phials of the wrath of God are in our hands. The time has come to empty them out on the heads of Satan’s followers.’
‘When?’ I asked.
‘Soon. Very soon. First, I’m going to show you the phial – make sure you understand how it works, what you have to do. Then I’ll tell you where you are going to release it.’
He reached into his robe and pulled out a steel canister, placing it carefully on the pew beside me. It was about nine inches tall, like a small thermos flask with a bulbous black top. On the side was a keypad with four digits.
‘To open it, you must enter a code. A number. You must remember this number. Can you do that?’
I hesitated for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘It is a secret from God, so I cannot write it down. You must learn it. I will tell it to you now, and then tomorrow I will see if you have remembered.’
I nodded.
‘Two one two seven.’
‘Two one two seven,’ I repeated. ‘Two one two seven . . .’ I carried on muttering the numbers under my breath.
He nodded under the cowl. ‘Good.’
‘And what do I do then?’ I asked.
‘The seal will be broken. You can lift the lid. Then you’ll see a nozzle, like a spray – an aerosol. Just press the button – keep pressing, keep your finger on it – until it’s empty.’
‘Like you do with an air freshener?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t see whether he was smiling, but he seemed to like that. ‘An air freshener. Just imagine you’re spraying a room, a room full of terrible smells – death and decay and corruption – and you’re making it clean and new and sweet-smelling again, a place fit for Our Lord.’
I nodded, grinning. ‘Yeah. I can do that.’
He reached into his robe again and came out with a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘And this is where you must do it.’
I looked at it, resisting the temptation to snatch it out of his hand. I needed to seem eager, but not too eager. This was one piece of the jigsaw. But there were four us, four of his little brain-dead helpers, therefore four targets. I had to know the location of all of them. There was no way I could ask, and no reason for him to tell me. I was going to have to figure it out – or someone was – before we could stop it. One thing I was sure of, though: the attacks would be simultaneous.
He pushed the piece of paper towards me. ‘Take it. Like the number, memorize the name and where it is. I’ve drawn a map so you can find your way from here. Then tomorrow, give it back and I’ll burn it.’
He isn’t completely mad, then, I thought. He’d send us out to do the killing and then wash his hands of the whole thing. Four homeless nobodies would sacrifice themselves to start a religious war and he’d just sit back and watch, knowing the evidence of what he’d done would be destroyed the moment we sucked in the first breath of ZX4.
The second part of his plan suddenly became clear in my mind. Analysis would show exactly what type of nerve agent had been used and where it had come from. The people who opened the canisters might be expendable, but behind them would be some real VIPs. Their names might never be revealed, but the fingerprints of Britain’s ruling elite would be there for all to see. Would that be enough to set off the powder keg Martindale was praying for? Civil wars had been started for less, I reckoned. Retaliation, counter-retaliation: a lot of people would be dead before the cycle was ov
er, that was for certain. And the country would be torn apart. No putting the lid back on after that. Anybody who still believed in loving thy neighbour could fuck off to Sweden.
I unfolded the piece of paper and looked at Martindale’s map. The lines were thickly drawn and the names written in big capital letters, like he’d made it for a child. There was even a little drawing of the target, so I’d recognize it even if I didn’t know the name. But I did. The irony of the whole thing hit me right between the eyes. Oh yes, I knew the Hanbury Place Mosque, all right. Back in the day, I’d spent many a happy hour pretending to be a homeless beggar squatting on the pavement opposite while secretly taking note of everyone who went in and came out, as we tried to keep track of a suspected terrorist cell.
Now I was a homeless person all over again.
But this time my job was a bit different.
This time I was going to watch the mosque filling up with the faithful and then go inside and kill every last one of them.
51
Alex didn’t really mind poking around in rubbish bins; it was the dressing up she didn’t like. But even she had to admit, if you didn’t want to stand out like a sore thumb, you needed to look the part. Anyone up to their elbows in garbage who didn’t already stink of the stuff was obviously Old Bill, or at best some kind of gutter journalist. Either way, you were going to attract attention, and that was something Alex couldn’t afford to do. So as she entered the alleyway alongside the church, she wasn’t sure if the smell of stale sweat and rotting food was coming from her or the row of bins at the end.
The grey one, Logan had said. In the uncertain glow of the one working street light they all looked grey. When she got close enough to see properly, she realized that was because they were.
Brilliant. When all this was over she’d definitely have a word. For now, she had no choice but to look under all of them. Which meant more time and more risk.
The other problem was that they were all full and weighed a ton. It looked like people had been chucking old bricks and bits of broken furniture on top of whatever other crap was in there, compacting it down to the consistency of concrete.
She put her hands on the rim and heaved. The bin lifted a couple of inches off the ground, but there was no way she could bend down and look underneath without it coming crashing down. She tried poking the toe of her boot under and wiggling it around, hoping that might turn up something, but nothing doing. It was hopeless. The other two bins looked even more crammed with shit. If she was going to get a proper look at what was underneath, she’d have to push the bins over, and that would sound like a bomb going off. She’d probably have dead people coming out of their graves to see what the commotion was all about, never mind the neighbours. No way was she going to risk that.
She took a step back, trying to figure out what to do before she became an object of suspicion just by being here this long. She gasped as something brushed her ankle. A lean-looking fox with dark ears was sniffing at the bins.
‘Bloody hell, don’t mind me,’ she said, laughing.
The fox took no notice. It sniffed at each bin in turn. Whatever it was looking for didn’t seem to be there. Alex folded her arms and watched, just happy for the moment to be in the presence of a wild animal, even if it was one that lived on takeaways in styrofoam boxes. The fox went back to the first bin, then put its snout to the ground, snuffling around at the bottom.
‘I’ve tried that,’ Alex said. ‘It’s harder than it looks.’
The fox carried on undeterred, then started scraping with one of its paws. Alex leaned down to look. The fox seemed to have got hold of a piece of paper, tugging it out from under the bin with its teeth.
‘Let me have a look at that,’ she said, stepping forward. The fox looked over its shoulder, as if seeing Alex for the first time, and bolted.
Alex reached up and tipped the bin back, then scraped the rest of the paper out with the sole of her boot. She let the bin come to rest as gently as she could, picked the piece of paper up and carefully unfolded it. It was covered in writing but she quickly realized that wasn’t going to help her. It was a page torn out of a hymn book. She held it up to the light. There were faint marks, as if someone had used a thumbnail to make impressions on the paper. At a certain angle, it almost looked like writing. This had to be it.
And if it wasn’t? If it wasn’t, she really didn’t know what she was going to do.
Three and a half hours later, dressed in the same long, ragged skirt and stained puffer jacket, her hair in matted clumps hanging over her dirt-streaked face, Alex sat hunched against the wall of a derelict warehouse by the river. For the past twenty minutes she’d been walking round in circles, muttering loudly to herself: snatches of poetry she’d learned at school, imaginary shopping lists, the plots of TV soaps she’d watched – anything that came into her head – to reinforce the impression that she was someone probably best avoided. In the eyes of her fellow down and outs who were beginning to gather in a loose group in the centre of the empty space, a stronger deterrent was the fact that she didn’t have a bottle or a smoke or anything else that might be worth trying to get off her. How long before someone decided to mess with her just for the sake of it was another matter. If Logan didn’t turn up soon, she might have to move further down the riverbank to somewhere more secluded, even if it meant he might miss her altogether.
She’d just decided to give it another five minutes when she saw the van pull up. Thank fuck for that. A couple of the more together members of the group got up and sauntered over towards the van. She resisted the urge to go with them. Logan had to come to her, and in his own time. At least now everyone had something else to focus on apart from the crazy woman with the wild hair.
She watched as Logan and another man doled out soup and sandwiches from the van, then Logan walked into the warehouse and squatted down by the little group sitting or lying on the floor. She heard wheezing laughter, a few choice swear words, then Logan patted one old guy on the shoulder and moved off. He caught sight of her and changed direction.
‘Before you say anything, I don’t want any of your terrible soup,’ Alex said.
‘Your loss,’ he said, shrugging.
‘So what’s happening?’
He laughed, as if she’d said something funny, and she grinned back, adding a cackle of her own.
‘It’s in the church. I’ve seen one of them, and the rest of it is—’
‘Slow down – what are you talking about?’ she said, still smiling and nodding.
Logan breathed in. ‘He’s got hold of a nerve agent. ZX4. From Weston. It’s British –’ he saw her expression change – ‘don’t ask. I don’t know how much, but there are four of us, so four targets. Mine’s a mosque, Hanbury Place, so we have to assume the other three are mosques as well. He’s keeping it under the church – it’s a bloody maze down there.’
Alex thought furiously. ‘How will they get the stuff inside? Security’s tight these days.’
‘They won’t have to. It’ll be crowded enough outside.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Don’t know. He keeps us all isolated most of the time, so he has control.’ Logan looked over his shoulder. ‘He’s coming. I don’t want him to start talking to you. He’s a clever fucker and he’ll suss you if you make a mistake.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘You’re welcome. Just get this back to the team, and when I know when it’s kicking off I’ll let you know. Figure out a plan.’
‘You don’t have one?’
He touched her shoulder. ‘OK, you take care now,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘Try and find somewhere safe to sleep, yeah?’
She got to her feet and started walking towards the other end of the warehouse, away from Martindale, resisting the temptation to break into a jog.
52
‘Bloody hell,’ Ryan said. ‘Four locations packed with people. We don’t know what the delivery system is, but that’s hundreds dead
for sure. The ZX series is nasty stuff.’
‘More to the point, it shouldn’t exist,’ Mrs Allenby said.
‘So how the hell did Weston get his hands on it?’ Alex asked.
Mrs Allenby thought for a moment. ‘It seems to me there are two possibilities. Either somehow the stocks of ZX4 were not destroyed when the treaty was signed . . . possible, I suppose, but I would like to think that could not have happened. And I very much hope no one would have then handed it over to someone like Weston. That simply doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘So what’s the second possibility? That this isn’t the real stuff at all?’ Ryan asked.
‘Then why say it is?’ Alex objected. ‘Martindale wouldn’t care what it was as long as it did the job.’
‘No, I’m guessing that Martindale really is in possession of ZX4,’ Mrs Allenby said.
Alex looked confused. ‘I don’t get it. So . . .?’
‘This is not common knowledge – in fact, I’m sure it’s still classified – but I seem to remember there was a report back in the late Seventies – never confirmed, one source who we subsequently lost, but we took it seriously enough at the time – that the Russians had a programme to manufacture copies of British and American biological weapons.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Alex asked. ‘Didn’t they have enough of their own?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Allenby said. ‘More than enough, I would say. But every batch of nerve agent is unique. If you have a good enough sample, it can be traced back to the factory that made it. The Salisbury attack, for instance: there was absolutely no doubt that it was Novichok. At first, you might think they’d been careless. But I don’t think so. The Russians might have denied responsibility officially, but in reality they wanted any other defectors or double agents to know exactly who was responsible. They were saying: look, this is what we’ll do if you betray us.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Alex said. ‘What’s this got to do with ZX4?’
