With Courage With Fear

by AD Davies

  With Courage

  With Fear

  by A. D. Davies

  Copyright © 2016 A.D. Davies

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  www.addavies.com

  ASIN: B01JW842A4

  Table of Contents

  MONDAY

  PROLOGUE

  TUESDAY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  THURSDAY

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FRIDAY

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  SATURDAY

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  SEVERAL DayS LATER

  Epilogue

  Novels by A. D. Davies

  Adam Park Thrillers:

  The Dead and the Missing

  A Desperate Paradise

  The Shadows of Empty Men

  Alicia Friend Investigations:

  His First His Second

  In Black In White

  With Courage With Fear

  Standalone:

  Three Years Dead

  Rite to Justice

  The Sublime Freedom

  Co-authored:

  Project Return Fire – with Joe Dinicola

  For my wife, for her patience and her support

  MONDAY

  PROLOGUE

  Omar Jafari never thought he would embrace the dark side of his religion. He considered himself equally British and Islamic, and saw no need for a distinction. He supported the England football and rugby teams, and even—to his Pakistani father’s dismay—English cricket. His community was devastated in recent years by child abuse scandals, horrific crimes carried out by men of Pakistani heritage, men who claimed to be Muslims, yet Omar and his friends and family did not recognise them as such; their sins excluded them from Paradise for all eternity. At college, he befriended Muslims more active in the political arena. They marched on Downing Street to demand politicians do more about extremist online propaganda, to push back on the brainwashing of mostly poor, young males, dragging them into the bastardisation of what had brought Omar nothing but comfort, and encouraged him to grow as a man. In the days that followed, though, he fumed as the demonstration barely made a blip in the British press.

  The headlines always seem to cry: Why do Muslims not condemn Islamic violence?

  Muslims reply: We do! Look!

  The headlines cry: See? We told you Muslims do not condemn Islamic violence!

  Muslims reply: But we just did, see?

  The headlines cry: Nah nah nah-nah nah. We can’t hear you…

  Or if they do hear the condemnation, they call Muslims liars, and demand more than words.

  Even with such setbacks, Omar continued to live as he always had. He educated himself, attended his gym four times a week, worked part time in a coffee shop, prayed at the mosque, donated a small percentage of his meagre salary to charity, and created memes using Photoshop which he hoped would go viral, such as his favourite.

  Upon the image of a multicultural crowd, he superimposed the legend:

  The murder of one innocent is the same as killing the entire universe.

  A paraphrase from the Koran, but as important to true Muslims as Thou shalt not kill is to Christians. And something he believed with all his heart for all twenty-one years of his life.

  Then he met someone.

  Someone who spoke little of religion and more about Omar.

  For months, back and forth, back and forth.

  About Omar Jafari.

  This person seemed to know Omar immediately. He—assuming it was a he—spoke online directly to Omar, digging deep into the young man’s frustration at loving his country but understanding great swathes of that country wished him gone. Dead, preferably. But deportation would suffice. And nothing Omar could say to these people would matter; he was brown, he faced Mecca to pray, and his beard was as long as his fist.

  But more than that.

  More than simply “understanding” Omar, this presence spoke to his need to be heard. It wasn’t the notion that a few passages of his religious text endorsed war. Those passages were written during a time of war, and demanded only that Muslims defend Islam, defend their families, defend … what is right.

  You do not defend Islam by raping and murdering, nor by destroying ancient temples or acts of genocide. You do not defend your family through beheading people who disagree with you. In other words, you do not stand up for what is right by doing evil. Any of those is enough to take a sharp turn to Hell upon your death.

  And yet.

  What if that sacrifice is worth it?

  What if, by condemning yourself to an eternity of pain, you usher in a better life for your brothers and sisters so oppressed by a mechanism too powerful to fight? What if, by giving up your place in Paradise, you allow more Muslims to live? To thrive?

  It took many months for Omar to even consider the stranger’s probing, but once he allowed it to worm inside him, to take root and force him to consider a new position, he could not shake that inkling.

  What if violence was the only way to start such a conversation?

  His march on Downing Street provoked only silence, or when someone shared a rare blog post on social media it attracted nothing but anger. His memes were roundly mocked for being “lies” or “propaganda” by those groups with whom he tried to hold a grownup conversation.

  It was all useless.

  It was why Omar Jafari parked a hired van on a flyover traversing the M1 motorway at 7:45 a.m. on a sunny Monday morning in August.

  * * *

  Peter Maxwell hated his commute. He rose shortly after dawn in summer and if he was lucky he could prepare his four year-old son a bowl of cereal, throw some down his own throat if he had time, and enjoy a quick cuddle on the couch before setting a coffee on his wife’s bedside table and heading out. His Peugeot 407 was a piece of junk, but it ran decent air-con, and carried all the samples he needed, and since his leads for selling shower and plumbing equipment to the building industry were set up the day before, all he had to do was drive.

  And today’s drive north up the M1’s third lane flowed faster than usual.

  Today, as the speedo needle scooted up above eighty mph, unusual for this time in the morning, Peter sang along to the Vanilla Ice classic Ice Ice B
aby.

  But an unusual movement gave him pause.

  A quarter of a mile ahead stood a van on the flyover, and a man waited beside it, resting what looked like a box on the guardrail.

  What is he up to?

  Peter’s foot relaxed off the accelerator, dropping his speed to seventy, one eye alert for brake lights, the other curious about the person with the box. It was as if he was preparing to tip something over the side.

  Into this lane.

  Worried it was a prank or some idiot fly tipper, he signalled to pull in to the middle lane, but an articulated lorry prevented him.

  The man on the bridge dropped the object.

  Peter shifted his foot to slam on the brake, but it was too late. The breezeblock crashed through his windshield in a shower of tiny fragments, slammed into his chest, and crushed his breastbone, literally ripping his heart in two. He remained conscious long enough to sense his vehicle’s momentum flip the breezeblock into his face, where it ripped his nose clean off, and cleaved a fissure two inches wide through his skull, and an inch deep into his brain.

  * * *

  By the time Peter’s body ceased responding to his flickering, confused thoughts, his car veered into the truck, which in turn swerved into the nearside lane, folding a Mini Cooper in half and killing its occupant—a nurse called Sandy—instantly.

  A second breezeblock dropped, this time on the middle lane, tearing into a bus driver, who fought the wheel, but ultimately tipped his vehicle over, destroying four other cars along the way. Another breezeblock into the third lane crashed into a Jaguar’s bonnet. The luxury car screeched, rammed into the central barrier, and jack-knifed to a halt in time for a Range Rover to hurtle into it at eighty mph. A Ford Focus rear-ended the crashed Range Rover, and a chain-reaction of motor vehicles colliding with one another filled the air with rending metal and screaming people.

  Then it was the southbound route’s turn.

  It took Omar Jafari five breezeblocks to complete the pile up on the other side, and when he finished, the M1 motorway was a smoking, twisted mass of metal, rubber, and blood.

  And twenty-seven people were dead. Not quite the whole universe, but close enough for God’s wrath.

  Omar just hoped his sacrifice would all be worth it.

  TUESDAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Detective Sergeant Alicia Friend used to bounce. She once radiated that weird aspect, seemingly in constant motion even when holding perfectly still, as she was right now, on the dark side of a two-way mirror staring into the interview room at who the press had dubbed “The Breezeblock Jihadi.” But with her only a week away from commencing her maternity leave, the additional weight kept her anchored. Much to her clear annoyance.

  DCI Murphy could not resist a smile as she first waddled towards him that morning across reception to where he held open a door for her. Shoulders back, stomach out. “I’m a shade over five foot tall,” she told him. “Now look at me! Five foot wide too.”

  He hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, communicating only via phone and Facebook, and even back then she looked huge. Today, she scowled and told him to stop bloody staring or she’d pull his moustache out one hair at a time.

  “Doubt you’d be able to reach,” he said, standing a foot and a half taller than her.

  “I’ll get a stepladder.”

  “In your condition? I’ll report you to health and safety.”

  “Don’t talk to me about health and safety. That’s the first department up against the wall when I’m emperor of the world.”

  They caught up over a herbal tea for her, a coffee for him, where she regaled him with tales of resistance and conflict against her superiors over the union-mandated desk duty to which she was now bound. As soon as a British copper informs her commanding officer of an impending new life within, that British copper is immediately shackled, swathed in bubble wrap, and prevented from being a copper until she returns to work having expelled the infant and passed a medical.

  But Murphy hadn’t asked her to drive all the way from Wakefield for social reasons.

  The terror attack on the M1 would normally fall to Counter Terrorism Command, or even to the security service MI5, but in this case the suspect walked into Sheerton Station a mere two hours after causing the deaths of twenty-seven people, and surrendered. DCI Murphy had recently come on-shift, so rather than leave it to a junior detective he arrested Omar Jafari, cautioned him, and he and DS Cleaver spent the afternoon face-to-face with one of the worst human beings Murphy had ever encountered. The young Muslim stated everything in a matter-of-fact way. Clinically. Like he was observing it on TV rather than reliving mass murder. On the third run-through of the same incident, though, Murphy picked up a line that gave him a chill. Not the sort of chill caused by assessing the slaughter of sixteen men, seven women, and four children, or when the suspect smirks at a detective’s mention of dead children. This was the sort of chill a policeman feels when he’s got something wrong. When that error might result in more than a quick bollocking.

  So here she was. Alicia Friend. Criminal analyst and profiler from the Serious Crime Agency, a police branch that cropped up in response to the increasing prominence of organised crime, currently sitting under the auspices of the police and crime commissioner for West Yorkshire, but likely to be absorbed by MI5 sometime in the next two years.

  “The Breezeblock Jihadi,” Alicia said.

  Omar Jafari kept his hair tightly-clipped, and his beard long. “Fist-length” was the guideline for certain Muslim castes, and Omar appeared to comply. They’d taken his clothes for forensic analysis and he sat there now in grey sweatpants and a grey flannel pullover, hands cuffed to the bar on his side of the metal table. Murphy was unsure of what Alicia hoped to glean from watching him.

  She said, “Seriously? That’s the best name you could come up with?”

  “You think I came up with it?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. They extracted your imagination gene since the promotion.”

  “I do not lack imagination,” Murphy said.

  Standing in the darkness, light from the interview room highlighted Alicia’s face, the shadows cast by her features making her eyes seem bigger. Her hair was longer now, too, tied into a smart ponytail. Although she was almost thirty-three, she could pass for mid-to-late-twenties most days. She was more cute than pretty, but Murphy still found her somewhat asexual. Cute like a puppy. Could be because he was over twenty years her senior, but even though she’d never make it to a Milan catwalk, he’d seen men drool once she made her presence felt. Before the bump, anyway.

  Alicia said, “Well, I guess if you’ve asked for a consult on this, you must be imagining something.”

  “Yeah. And I need to know if I’m mad.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go in.”

  They stepped out of the observation suite and once the two armed officers checked Alicia’s ID, Murphy led the way into the interview room. Omar looked up, flicked his attention to Alicia as she entered, but returned quickly to Murphy, eyes hooded, perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps simple disgust at the infidels before him. Murphy didn’t care what it was. He just wanted to be sure he was—yes—imagining things before signing off on the Crown Prosecution Service’s paperwork.

  Alicia lowered herself to a chair and Murphy commenced recording. He spoke the standard spiel confirming Omar had been cautioned and waived his right to legal counsel, and declared the presence of DS Alicia Friend and himself.

  She said, “You’ve been naughty, haven’t you?”

  Omar sighed.

  “Okay,” Alicia said. “Now why don’t we start with what you did?”

  Omar sat forward, elbows on the table. “I struck a blow for jihad. I showed you how vulnerable you are. I showed you that if Muslims really were such a danger to you scared, lily-white middle class idiots, we could do what I did every day of the week.”

  “Who organised it?”

  “I did.”

 
Alicia leaned back in the chair, stretching. She pulled her blouse tight over her belly. “Watch this, Murphy.”

  Murphy focused on the near-perfect roundness of her, the white cotton taut. A three-inch wide lump bulged and he nearly yelped in surprise.

  “Oh yeah,” Alicia said. “Little bugger’s trying to beat the crap out of me from the inside out. You know, he bruised my gut the other day. A bruise.”

  Murphy said, “Are we doing this here?”

  She remained in place but lasered in on Omar. “All the evidence points to what we call a ‘lone wolf’ attack…” She puffed a couple of times. “And all our intelligence suggests you have no affiliations with groups under surveillance.”

  “I am not part of any group,” Omar said.

  “No, you…” She slowly eased back into a normal sitting position and checked a piece of paper. “You are demonstrating the Muslim threat is exaggerated by becoming a genuine threat.”

  “Correct.”

  “So you’re not ISIS?”

  “No. Nor Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, or any of those evil nutters. I’m just a guy doing my bit for the cause of jihad.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “To protect Islam from enemies who will see it destroyed.”

  Alicia nodded. “Tell me about your parents.”

  Omar frowned and stared at the table. “They knew nothing of this. They are good Muslims. They would not take a life.”

  “But you did. Twenty-seven lives, actually. How do you feel about that?”

  He sighed again.

  Murphy observed every tic, every gesture. He was nowhere near as good as Alicia at reading deception or little tells, but his thirty-three years’ experience meant he recognised a great deal. And mention of Omar’s parents struck a nerve close to the young man’s surface.