Battle Sight Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Near to the bus station, in a shadowed street where the boys usually met her and where there were no elevated cameras, she would wait for them. Always, when she came back to the town and knew they would be in the car and there to meet her, she felt a cold chill on her skin, whatever clothing she wore, not fear but excitement, and she would know that the blood coursed in her veins. She lived a lie, and relished it . . . and later would be back in Manchester and with the boyfriend, and to herself, and soundlessly, she chuckled, the noise from her throat swallowed by the material drawn tight across her face. She was always early; the boys said it was a crime to be late for a meeting they had fixed. She was satisfied with her precautions, what the boys called ‘tradecraft’; they lectured her that danger was always close by, that around all of them was extreme threat. She waited.

  ‘Have you done him before?’ He had asked her the same question eighteen minutes earlier and fifteen minutes before that.

  She gave him the same answer. ‘I’ve not done him before.’

  ‘So, we don’t know whether he’s a punctual little creature.’

  Both were from the North West Counter Terrorist Unit. Both were detective constables and both would have said there were better things to be done at the desk screens where they worked in the city of Manchester than being parked up in a place used by bird-watchers and dog-walkers in daylight, and assorted perverts after dark.

  ‘No, don’t know.’

  ‘He’s an hour late.’

  They were out of the city towards Greenfield, just short of the moor at Saddleworth. Both were well beyond the first flushes of enthusiasm, both would have said that experience had taught them when a rendezvous would not be kept.

  ‘Don’t want to labour it, but I can read the time.’

  ‘He’s late and I’m not happy sat here.’

  They had been half an hour early, and they had sat in the car, kept the engine ticking over and the windows were misted; he had left the car once to head off to a corner to piss, and she had been out twice to steal a cigarette. The CHIS had stood them up. Not that they knew much about him. This particular Covert Human Intelligence Source was newly recruited and not yet bedded down into the system. He should have been at a meeting point the previous evening farther south on the Glossop road where there was a late evening coffee and snack truck, but had not shown and they were tasked for the fall-back option, this car park out by Saddleworth. They had been told that he’d come in an old blue Vauxhall saloon, and they’d waited, had waited some more, and each had risen in their seats when a vehicle had turned into the car park. A guy had come with three plastic bags of stripped off wallpaper that he dumped by a filled bin; another had pulled in and eaten a sandwich and drank from a thermos and then taken ten minutes’ doze. Two men together, in the unmarked police car, would have stood out, but the man and the woman would have seemed just like any other couple and there for a few minutes of squeeze on the way home from the office. It went unsaid, but was mutual between them: it was a rotten old life being a ‘CHIS’ and on the books of NWCTU: Christmas came round rarely and a goody bag was hard to come by, and likely also that the individuals they targeted would not take well to the intrusion. Enough, for these two detectives, to feel a frisson of anxiety for the wellbeing of the source.

  ‘Time to call it?’

  ‘Call it a day, yes. We’ll catch the traffic all the way back . . . expect he’ll get a serious bollocking whoever sees him next.’

  ‘Yes, a serious one.’

  She drove. He reported in . . . Twice an informant had failed to show.

  They did it turn and turn about at that time in the afternoon. Their office was in the London district of Vauxhall, not on the river but close to it. The building was off a narrow street and hemmed in by offices and yards. There was the civilisation of one public house and not much else. It was an address that a stranger would have needed exact directions for, or would have had no chance of finding it. Discreet, sensibly located. It had been Gough’s duty to slip out to the nearest café, old fashioned and treasured, to collect two beakers of tea, his with sugar but not hers, and excessively large slices – that day – of carrot cake. The cake and the tea were an improvement to what came round on the trolley, and both would have indignantly claimed it was deserved because of the long hours they worked. Most in that office were there early at the start of a day, and would not shrug into coats and go out to face the evening until well after the streets had cleared of the conventional rush-hour. Gough had to do the full rigmarole of his ID at the outer door. Short cuts were not tolerated. Janice who sat there in a cubicle, and Baz who was perched behind her, had known Gough in excess of nineteen years, and had known his assistant – Pegs – for fifteen years, but they showed their ID and would not have taken a liberty . . . Not actually ever mentioned, but Gough assumed that Baz wore a jacket every day, warm or cold and sometimes with a cooling fan and often with a two-bar heater, because it would better obscure a shoulder holster and a Glock 9mm. The security was necessary because of their work, all that messy sort of stuff that dealt with agents who needed handling and informants who needed comforting. The work area contained a few of the juniors at a central octagonal table at the centre of the first floor but off to the side were four cubicles with walls of misted glass.

  Gough crossed the room, edged around the main table and chairs, was confronted with his own closed door and slopped some of the tea in contorting to open it, and went in, shutting the door with a kick from his heel. He could not have remembered which was his and which was hers but the counter staff had sussed him years back and the beaker with the inked tick would be for Pegs. He was a veteran, never used his rank, but was senior. Had he gone higher, he would have of necessity given up fieldwork, so he had stayed on the plateau. It would see him out, another two years or three . . . But the threat was worse, had steadily racheted while he had been in the office off Wyvill Road. Worse now that the kids were drifting back from having their arses kicked in Syria and Iraq, and then there was the home-grown crowd who had not made it abroad and were looking to catch up, climb the ladder fast, do their bit for the cause. Gough would have said, deadpan and serious, that life in an anti-terror environment was only tolerable if there was a generous slice of carrot cake on offer in the late afternoon.

  The office was shared with Pegs. She was not a serving policewoman but a civilian enhancer. She did logistics, ran a system, kept Gough and a few others where they needed to be, which was with information pouring out of their skulls and organisation wrapped tight round them. She had a phone wedged against her head, and was belting her keyboard. He would never interrupt when her face was screwed up and the breath came hissing from between her teeth. He put down the tea in front of her and had a small cardboard plate for her portion of carrot cake and the usual plastic knife. He went to his own place and shrugged out of his coat, shook it to get some of the rain off, slung it behind the door, and sat and waited. He would be told when she was good and ready. In Gough’s experience very little that came down the phone lines, or that popped up on the screens, slotted into the ‘good news’ category. Most was right for the pigeon-hole of what he did not want to know, but would have to. He began to nibble at his cake. If it were not for Pegs running his office, and the relationship, then he might well have jacked the job and made things a little warmer with Clare and gone down to the south coast, and hit a golf ball and walked a dog.

  She said, ‘It’s not Armageddon, but it’s not nice.’

  They called him Tommy when they talked among themselves. Most of the CHIS people had a CHIS name. He was T for Tommy, Tommy Ahmed, and was a new recruit, and had seemed keen, and committed; some were there for the long haul and some were short-term expedient, and it would have been rare indeed for Gough to have said into which box Tommy was squashed.

  ‘What is not nice?’ asked Gough, eating his cake.

  ‘Should have been a meeting yesterday, with the locals, but didn’t show. Simple enough, then they went f
or the secondary process, and he didn’t show for that either. He’s skipped two schedules. No trace on his phone. That’s where we are.’

  He went on with his cake, and she started hers. Could, of course, be that little Tommy had suffered a puncture, and then another, and in between had switched off his phone, and lost it, or could be something different. They both remarked that the carrot cake was good, and said nothing about an informant gone missing, and where the poor beggar might be, and the implications.

  Clean jeans, and a clean shirt, and a brush run over his hair. A glance in the mirror. A grin from Andy Knight. Looked good enough.

  He checked his wallet, was satisfied he had sufficient cash, not too much.

  It had been a hard day, and the roof spars were all in place on the site, and he was tasked with different deliveries the next morning: pallet loads of concrete building blocks were going across to another quarter of the city. Nothing about his work was particularly varied, day in and day out, but others would have said work was hard enough to find that paid above the minimum, and he never complained or grumbled, in company, but kept the basics of cheerfulness clamped in place.

  He looked around him, shrugged. The same as every day and every night since he had moved into the bedsit. It was sparsely furnished: what the landlord would have been able to flog as ‘furnished’ but without frills. It would have been expected that a tenant would bring with him the keepsakes and mementoes and pictures and ornaments that anyone collected, the debris of life. Andy had not brought such baggage with him, had come only with a sack, and a basic clock radio, and his one book had been a bound street map of the city of Manchester with environs. He had not taken the girlfriend through the front door, and up the staircase that led to the bedsit on the first floor. He had not brought her here, nor had he tried to. The room might have confused her . . . it represented nothing, was as anonymous as a hotel of boxrooms beside a busy rail terminal where men and women did their sleeping, cared not a fig for decoration or anything sparking homeliness. No pictures on the walls, not even a fading print of a Lake District view, or a cheap Lowry reproduction. No fruit bowl in the middle of the table that served for eating meals from or writing out reports at and doing his time sheets. He washed up in a sink that was separate from the basin and small shower cubicle in another corner, and beside the sink there was no towel that might have given a clue of a previous holiday destination. The room seemed to show a conscious effort had been made to eradicate any history of the current occupant. Nothing about the room, to Andy, was strange; all was as intended.

  He sat on the bed, hitched his feet up, and stretched himself out. He triggered the alarm on the clock radio, had enough time to sleep, at least a doze. It was a part of Andy Knight’s discipline that he took rest when the chance was offered it. He was tired from a long day and had another starting at dawn the next morning. He always reckoned that when he met someone who was outside his immediate circle of confidants – as Zed was – that rest helped to steel his focus.

  He had not brought her here. He’d reckoned there had been a few evenings since they had met when her control might have dipped, and she might have come. He had not invited her, had not tugged at her wrist, had not played a trick and told her there was something back in his room that he wanted to show her. He thought that if he had pushed her, gone heavy, then he might have induced her to come through the front door, and held tight on her waist as he’d steered her up the stairs, but he had not tried to.

  His eyes were closed. Always he needed to rest, and always he must hold the focus . . .

  Car headlights flashed in the darkened street.

  Zeinab was sheltered by a shop window overhang. In the last half hour the rain had switched from light drizzle to blustered snowflakes. She was dutiful. She had waited, had not cursed, had controlled her impatience. Some of the snow crusted on her shoulders. The light came on inside the car as a door was opened. She gazed right, left, made certain she was not watched, then hurried with a skipping step across the pavement and into the warmth of the car.

  They talked and she listened. There was no apology for having left her to wait for their arrival in the street close to the bus station. She was not expected to contribute, but it was explained to her. The passenger, who was younger, talked most, and the driver chipped in with greater detail. It was what had been decided by the group they were part of: she had been chosen for a defining role. The talk was of fire power, of a strike that would seize the attention of the whole of the country. She heard the two voices; one was wheezy from a chest cold and the other was shrill with excitement, and neither had a poet’s language or a leader’s call, but the message was clear. They drove down narrow streets, did not crawl and therefore attract attention, did not push at traffic lights. She had known that a time would come when they would want her, would value her . . . They had crossed the bridge over the Calder river and then up the long hill past Savile Town and at the top they had turned towards the Teaching Centre and then the old factory where blankets had been made when Dewsbury promised high employment and the immigrants had been rushed in from Pakistan and a new life had seemed rose-tinted. The factory was shut, the mines were closed, the quarries went unworked; a sullen anger had replaced the optimism, and the mood had changed. Where was the greatest anger? In the area to which this girl, Zeinab, had been recruited. It was about an attack and about a supply line . . . One voice was interspersed with hacked coughing and the other with brief moments of giggling as if stress were gripping him. The more they talked, the longer, and the farther, the car was driven, and she sensed a growing anxiety among them.

  ‘Why me, why am I chosen for this?’

  She was chosen because she was a clean skin.

  ‘There are many who are not monitored. Why me?’

  Because of who she was, what she was.

  ‘Who am I, what am I?’

  Their breath reeking of the scent of cooking spices, both spat back the answer: she was a woman. So few in the struggle were female. They did not look for women, the detectives in the North West and North East Counter Terrorist Unit. They looked for boys. She was not listed, was not under surveillance . . .

  ‘And that is enough?’

  And she had a friend, and the remark was left to hang.

  A hesitation. ‘I don’t know whether he would . . .’

  One said she should make him, and the other said that she should manipulate him. They came into the long street where her parents lived, where the small back bedroom was hers. The driver pulled over, and the two men whispered to each other. It was usual for them to contact her, and although she had been given what they called a dead letter drop address, it was to be used in extreme emergency, not as routine. To reach her they used occasional email links from internet shops, or there would be a folded piece of cigarette paper, covered in minute handwriting and fastened with an adhesive into a deep corner of a locker in the Students’ Union: two keys, one for her. Street lamps lit a part of the road but they had chosen shadow. She was told to get out. It would be a five-minute walk to her home. She stood and the snow swirled close to her and she struggled to open her umbrella. Both of them were out. One took her arm and propelled her towards the car’s rear. She sensed the change in their breathing. She was pushed. A zapper opened the boot, and a dull light came on inside.

  She saw the face.

  The light pierced the clear plastic that wrapped the head and it reflected back from the pallor of the skin which had no lustre to it, and the eyes stared wide open and the mouth gaped as if the final motion had been a gasp or a cry, and there were marks across the cheeks where sticky tape had been pulled off and a sparse moustache ripped away. Blood had run from the nose and the mouth and had congealed and there was bruising round the eyes. There was a stink, the same as when a dog had done its business on the pavement and she had stepped in it and it was on her shoe. Zeinab was sick. Never in her life had she been sick in a street. There was a neatly trimmed hedge separating a small ga
rden from the pavement, and she vomited into it.

  Did she know the face?

  She retched phlegm from deep in her throat, and coughed and spat . . . She did not know the face. She was told he was an informer. She repeated that she did not know him. He was a police informer and had started recently to try to get close to the boys, had asked too much and too often, and had been questioned, and had been . . . and had died. He was an informer. She said again that she had not known him, not seen him.

  And she was lectured in hissed whispers. She should understand that the death of an informer was inevitable. A betrayer, a traitor. An informer could not extricate himself with untruths. This was how an informer died. She heard them out. She supposed it was a warning. The boot was slammed shut. She was told where she would next see them, what response was expected from her, and for a moment, unexpectedly, the face of the boyfriend, the lorry driver, flickered in her memory. She walked away from them. All she knew of them were their code names: Krait and Scorpion. She heard the car start up, and the lights spun as it turned sharply in the width of the street. She went on down the sloping road and could see a light by the door of her home – her father would have switched it on as a welcome to her. She spat once more and cleared a little more of the taste of vomit from behind her teeth. For a moment she trembled, seemed to feel danger and weakness – spat again, then walked more briskly towards her home. There, nothing was known of her secondary life, with whom she mixed, and what she sought to achieve.