A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  She had been amazed at how unguarded some of her surveillance targets could be, the candid matters they had talked about while she and other similarly (similarly? – that would be identically) attired women were in earshot. It was as though these guys thought they spoke a different language, or were discussing matters the women couldn’t possibly understand, but just as likely their simple assumption was that the women knew it was none of their concern and would obediently disbar it from entering their heads.

  It was a phenomenon far from unique to radical Muslim culture. Her mum had once sat in the same train compartment while four suits discussed the finer points of the boardroom coup they were planning. It didn’t occur to any of them that she might be on her way to the same AGM and annual conference as themselves. But when the radical philosophy you had taken it upon yourself to impose upon the entire world ascribed women a role somewhere between indentured servant and dumb but faithful family pet, the effect could be a little more pronounced. Plus, in the world of the niqab and the burqa, you could pitch up anywhere without fear of someone saying, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen your face round here before.’

  In many ways, it had been the easiest surveillance work she’d ever done. The hardest part had been immersing herself in another religious culture, having spent enough years trying to scrub off the emotional detritus of the one she was brought up in. It was depressing to think how much time she must have spent hanging around mosques, considering she was already bitterly mourning every last second of her life that had been wasted inside Catholic churches. All those dreary Sunday mornings throughout childhood, surrounded by equally miserable people too inured to the mindless tedium of it to be asking themselves whether what they were doing made any sense or why they were there at all when the experience gave them nothing in return except the odd skelf in their arses. It was only when you stepped outside of it that you could truly take in the scale of the absurdity. The few times she had returned to a church service in the years since had been for weddings and funerals, and what she had seen from this refreshed perspective would have been funny if it didn’t have such disturbing ramifications. Watching this host of adults, supposedly intelligent, autonomous beings, behaving like remotely controlled mindless automatons: all simultaneously standing up, sitting down, now to their knees but resting their bums, now forward on their knees, back on their feet, knees again, now line up, close your eyes, eat a wafer, back to your knees; and throughout, chanting, chanting, all in unison, monotonal, expressionless, zombie-like. Heads nodding, Pavlovian ingrained involuntary response whenever they or someone else said the word ‘Jesus’.

  She had seen it week-in, week-out as she grew up and thought little of it other than ‘I’m bored’ and ‘This means nothing to me’. Coming back to it as an adult, however, it was just scary. She was looking at mind control. Human beings reduced to puppets by sheer indoctrination, force of habit and a kind of cultural inertia: we do this because we’ve always done it. But as Voltaire put it: once you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to perform atrocities. Once people have allowed themselves to become puppets, never questioning what they find themselves doing or why they are doing it, then they have arrived at a dangerously negligent level of intellectual abdication, and there are some very evil people poised to exploit that.

  Thus she was thoroughly fed up hearing apologists saying, ‘It’s not religion that makes them do it.’

  Wearing her two-piece mobile gazebo, she had personally overheard Akim Hasan, the would-be jihadi, propose bombing a nightclub on the grounds that ‘the whores dancing around almost naked are an affront to God and deserve to burn in Hell’. Another, Falik Souf, had opined that any Muslims who died in the same planned attack would also deserve their fate because they had forfeited the right to call themselves such, having insulted Islam by partaking in this western decadence. And for an encore, between them they assured each other that any ‘good’ Muslims who happened to find themselves passing the building at the wrong time and thus end up as collateral damage ought to be grateful, because they would go directly to heaven, involuntary martyrs but martyrs nonetheless.

  Any candidates for what could lie at the root of this kind of mangled logic or homicidally censorious morality? Listening to death metal, perhaps? Playing too many nasty computer games? The decline of the nuclear family? Choice of aftershave? Or how about an utterly irrational belief system that prizes faith over logic, dogma over compassion and slavish obedience over rational self-analysis?

  Just a thought.

  She: Angelique de Xavia. Ugandan Asian Glaswegian Poliswuman, lately operating out of Paris as part of an antiterrorism task force for which she had been head-hunted by its chief, Commander Gilles Dougnac. She had just what he needed: intelligence training, Interpol contacts, several languages, a varied and resourceful facility for inflicting physical harm using both ballistic and manual methods, plus hard, wet, in-the-field experience, having identified and taken down no less a figure than the notorious Black Spirit.

  Dougnac had impressed upon her the importance of all of these attributes, as well as the depth of his professional appreciation for them, which helped him sell her the job. His remarks had been in contrast to the attitude of her superiors back home, whose appreciation of her efforts at Dubh Ardrain was rather disproportionately (in her opinion) tempered by the fact that, as well as accounting for the Black Spirit and his team of mercenaries, she had also accounted for a couple of hundred million euros’ worth of hydroelectric power station. Thus Dougnac’s job hadn’t actually required much selling.

  Retrospectively, she had come to understand that a further reason for his stressing what qualities she could bring to the job was in order to politely de-emphasise a more sensitive but even more crucial attribute: being that she looked a lot like the people she’d be up against. La petite bombe noire, as she became nicknamed: a formidable agent of infiltration, even without a burqa.

  It was alarming how well suited she had been to her undercover work; alarming if, in moments of harsh self-analysis, unsurprising. The semblance of fitting in where she didn’t really belong was a skill Angelique had lived by all her life; a social subterfuge mastered before she could read or write. She was born in Glasgow but her parents (and, strictly speaking, her older brother James) were Ugandan Asian refugees. She had been ‘the wee darkie lassie with the funny name’ at west-of-Scotland Catholic schools where having a granny from Ireland was the closest anyone had previously got to ethnic diversity. And she had been a woman – a dark-skinned woman – in the phalocentric, white-bread world of the Glesca Polis. Aye, she could write the manual for pretending to assimilate within a hostile culture.

  This skill also had its inverse, however: she didn’t fit in where she was meant to belong – her school, her town, her church – so she had found herself trying to belong where she didn’t fit in. Hence the wee darkie lassie from the Catholic school had spent her teenage Saturdays watching Rangers, in the ranks of a support who had traditionally revelled in a triumphalist white Protestant supremacism. It had started via the logic that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’: everybody who hates me hates Rangers too. But in time she had begun to ask herself whether she merely found a paradoxical comfort in defiant isolation: that she never felt quite right unless she was somehow apart from the crowd.

  All of which had ultimately led to one final relevant attribute: relationship status single. Dougnac hadn’t made a big issue of asking, but checked cursorily, almost as an afterthought; or worse, merely confirming a foregone safe assumption. Foregone, safe, but it had to be checked. It carried with it a lot of assurances; for him, not her. Nobody to get resentful over you not being there for days or weeks, disappearing at zero notice, too alienated to speak when you did show up; and that only if you weren’t anyway legally bound not to discuss anything. Nobody to miss you and feel neglected. Nobody to worry that you were in danger. Nobody for you to be thinking of enough to alter your priorities when the lead started f
lying.

  In her professional life, the closest she had come to something she could call love had been with a bank robber, a fugitive from both the law and the underworld by the name of Zal Innez. If there was a starker example of seeking a sense of belonging in a place where she didn’t fit in, she’d love to hear it. That had been five years ago, however, and his words on the last night they’d spent together still cast a grave doubt on what she really thought she’d been doing.

  ‘When I called you on the phone, did you figure: “I know, I’ll hook up with a bank robber – me being a cop, that sounds like a stable long-term relationship in the making”? You knew it couldn’t last – maybe that was the attraction.’

  Maybe. Maybe. It sure felt like something more at the time, but even then, she couldn’t trust herself to know if what she was feeling was real, or merely what he had skilfully manipulated her to feel. He had been, after all, a master of illusion, thus there was no way of knowing whether he had merely fooled her like he’d fooled everybody else; and worse, used her as a part of the illusion that had ultimately ended with his disappearance.

  All of which left her very single and, having failed to belong where she didn’t fit in, singularly suited once again to fake fitting in where she didn’t belong. She’d spent so much of her life concealing who she was that, in hiding her face too, the niqab was the only thing required to complete the effect: the ideal costume for Angel X, the superhero whose power lay in having no identity.

  They had been tracking the cell – or constituent parts of it, at least – for almost a year. This had involved operations in Marseille, Toulon, Milan and Barcelona, as well as some vital intel from Islamabad, where several disparate members had been brought together for hardline indoctrination before being relocated to Paris. Angelique, in her Millet’s camouflage outfit, had been able to plant a variety of surveillance devices in their meeting places and even their clothes and belongings. She liked to think she had more to offer undercover work than sneaking around under a shapeless black sheet, but there would have been little for her to glean under any other pretence. There were no double-agent or middle-woman roles for her to play. These people didn’t talk to women; not about their jihad anyway. She knew this because she had been able to engage in talking to certain of their wives. She had a name and a cover story, and had even been seen without burqa or niqab while performing ablutions in the women’s wudu.

  Part of her cover was that she spoke no Arabic, which allowed her to eavesdrop on conversations intended to exclude her, another situation assisted by one’s facial expressions being conveniently obscured. Her conclusion was that these women were either the coldest and most loyal sleeper-ops the Islamists could possibly pray to recruit, or they knew nothing whatsoever about what their husbands – the fathers of their children – were neck-deep in. Angelique’s observations strongly suggested she lean towards the latter. The most common sentiment she heard made about any of the suspects by their wives was that they seemed preoccupied to the point of disinterest – in them or their kids – and consequently paid them precious little attention, far less confided about anything important. There was no chance, for instance, of them discussing with their women the issue of household finance, otherwise their spouses might be asking why anyone who lived in a third-floor apartment might require to purchase two dozen gallons of fertiliser.

  Dougnac’s unit had known about the nightclub plan for some time, but they were waiting – like the cell itself – for the arrival from Pakistan of their mentor and facilitator, Abu Syed, who was required to sanction their scheme and to procure them a source of reliable detonators. The unit wanted to trace this source and monitor subsequent traffic, and it desperately wanted Syed tied to something they could nail him for.

  The detonators arrived from Marseille the day before Syed flew in from Islamabad. Members of the group were followed and filmed performing a test detonation at a disused quarry, under instruction from Syed, while Angelique’s bugs picked up coded discussion, to which Syed was party, of the target location and the planned date of the attack, two months hence. As soon as they had that, Dougnac was satisfied it was enough, and ordered simultaneous overnight raids at seven addresses. These had taken place at zero four hundred hours that morning.

  The day before a raid, you keep tabs on the suspects to make damn sure they’re where you’re expecting them to be. Then you go in under darkness, during the early hours, late enough for nobody to still be up, too early for the sharpest riser to be awake. Nobody gets time to react; they usually don’t even get time to dress. It’s standard procedure. Everybody knows this. But the reason it’s so effective is that the subjects never realise they’re under surveillance, far less have any inkling that you’re planning a swoop.

  So how come she ended up at the mosque six hours later, trying to lock down three fugitives before they could turn their place of worship into a televised siege and thus a worldwide propaganda coup?

  There were explanations she couldn’t begin to contemplate, such as a leak from the police side. There was plain old bad luck: one of the subjects gets up for a pee in the night and happens to look out the window just in time to glimpse a team of armed cops taking position outside; or an unrelated siren (as was heard in earshot of two of the locations) spooks a light sleeper enough for him to check the window, giving the same result: a vital head start to phone his buddies and bail. But most relevant, in Angelique’s opinion, was the arrival of Syed.

  The cell had given no indication they had any suspicion of surveillance, but he may have told them to assume it. A lucky break might have given one suspect a brief warning, but it would have made little difference to a simultaneously staged snatch operation unless they had a procedure in place. Upon Syed’s advice, as well as an emergency escape protocol, they may even have had a look-out roster. One of the detainees’ mobile phones showed multiple messages having been sent approximately two minutes before the squads went in, while the personnel were still mustering at points around the various locations. Despite the snatch teams operating in synchronous coordination, with stealth and maximum rapidity, three suspects managed to escape from two of the seven addresses: Akim Hasan, his brother-inlaw Jafir Khan, and Falik Souf.

  Cars were stopped, streets were blocked off, buildings evacuated, but to no avail. Sometimes two minutes is enough to vanish, especially in a city like Paris.

  It was embarrassing, but not a disaster. The police had the explosives, they had averted a horrific bombing and, best of all, they had Syed. No need to panic: they’d get the others in time.

  And lo, only a few hours later, the tip came in, from the Imam at the mosque on Boulevard Aristide Bruant. They had turned up there around nine a.m. seeking sanctuary, which the Imam was obliged to offer. He had intended to talk them into giving themselves up, but soon realised that wasn’t going to happen: they were all armed, and he heard talk of something they had previously hidden in the building. He didn’t know what it was, but assumed the worst. The mosque was already busy with classes in the madrassa and morning prayer was due to commence. He wanted to evacuate the place, but realised this could lead to an escalation of the situation, and he didn’t want these fugitives in an even greater state of panic. Dougnac concurred.

  The Imam was told to carry on as normal, while Angelique was told to suit up. That used to just mean Kevlar. At least on this occasion, the need for freedom of movement dictated the jilbab and niqab combo rather than the burqa.

  Her job was to get in as close as possible to the suspects and monitor the situation, providing an ongoing sit-rep while the rest of the unit remained in a holding pattern out of direct sight of the building. The plan was to wait until morning prayers were over and the madrassa classes dispersed, then further personnel would infiltrate, dressed as worshippers. They would take the trio down without anybody hearing a thing, and, with any luck, without any of the faithful even knowing it had happened.

  The plan was...

  How many debriefs �
�� formal or even inside one’s own head – began with those three words? None describing ops that went right. No need to recall your intentions if your actions delivered the desired result.

  Angelique had only located the first of the fugitives when the plan went out the window; or, more accurately, off the minaret.

  The initial indication that the situation might be ‘fluid’, as the code euphemism had it, came through her earpiece with the report that several outside broadcast vans had begun appearing at speed, each pulling up on the nearside of the boulevard, and the optimistic possibility of it being a coincidence evaporated with the confirmation that the vehicles bore the logos of different networks: TF1, France2, BBC, CNN.

  So it wasn’t only the police who got a tip-off, but the broadcasters hadn’t got theirs from the Imam. He was a Sufist, a vocal critic of the Islamists who had acted to prevent the likes of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jamaat-e-Islami from poking their insidious tentacles directly into his mosque. To the Wahhabist Nazis, he was kuffar, not a real Muslim; indeed, anybody who disagreed with them was not a real Muslim. He had stood in their way and this was where they got their revenge. They knew he would play it straight, call in the cops, and they knew a mosque synonymous with moderate, western-friendly Islam would be the ideal setting for what they had in mind. The Imam, Angelique rapidly understood, had merely been used to set in motion something that she was already caught up in and unable to stop.

  The networks had been tipped off by the fugitives themselves. Angelique deduced this because it was only once all the TV cameras were set up that one of them leaned out of the minaret and began firing a pistol into the pavement directly in front of the news crews. It’s doubtful any of the cameramen would have been fast enough to get that shot, but they’d have missed none of what happened next.