A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  A gunman is firing shots from a tower on to the concrete of a Parisian thoroughfare. Suddenly you’ve got armed police in body armour: no choice but to become highly visible and ward any passers-by clear of the field. Suddenly you’ve got people inside the mosque hearing gunshots, seeing armed cops swarming around their place of worship. Suddenly you have panic, chaos, a global television audience and invaluable propaganda.

  The situation had rapidly become very clear to her. This was more than an evacuation protocol for aborting the cell. Syed had improvised a full-scale back-up plan, and it was in play.

  Unfortunately for Akim Hasan, however, the problem with improvisation is that it can be great in principle but lacking in the finer details. He didn’t look like he knew what to be doing with himself when the cops showed up. He’d just been hanging around the passageway outside the madrassa, then stood and watched everybody pile past. It was only when the armed cop had appeared that he took a hostage, despite Angelique hovering around and deliberately presenting herself to him for what she predicted would soon be his only option. It was like the magician getting the volunteer from the audience to pick precisely the card he needed him to. It was called a force. She’d learned this only a few miles from where she was now standing, but that was another story.

  Angelique speaks into her mike: concealed, like her earpiece, beneath the niqab. It had been through this mike – via a short relay up the chain and back down again – that she had let the armed officer know it was she who was being used as a human shield.

  ‘Hasan is neutralised, sir. A little too easily,’ she adds. ‘He was isolated. Something doesn’t smell right. Do we have the others?’

  Dougnac fails to respond. Instead she hears him fire off orders to officers outside the building, where it was chaos. There were people streaming out on to the boulevard, perfect cover for the remaining fugitives to slip away in the melee. He was trying to get them contained but beyond any potential field of fire; an undertaking involving armed policemen herding Muslims around the exterior of their place of worship in front of a host of television cameras. If she had to come up with a name for it, she’d have called it Operation Lose-Lose.

  ‘Do we have the others, sir?’ she repeats.

  Dougnac still doesn’t reply, but she garners some information from the rest of the chatter in her earpiece. They have one fugitive pinned down in the minaret; believed to be Jafir Khan. He had fired the shots but didn’t get down quickly enough. Now he was hemmed in, trapped in the tower but armed and with the benefit of an elevated position somewhere on the spiral staircase.

  ‘Nobody goes into the tower,’ Dougnac orders. ‘I don’t want to give them a siege, but I want even less to give Syed the propaganda coup of shooting dead a Muslim in a mosque. Where’s Souf? Do we have him yet? What about the Imam?’

  ‘Stay with the prisoner,’ Angelique tells Dumarque, then ventures through the far archway and into the madrassa.

  The iPod muezzin is still calling from on high, the schoolyard hubbub of over-wrought departing voices quietening as the mosque is cleared. That’s when she makes out the voices from somewhere above, the gallery level overlooking the haram. She hears a woman almost shouting through tears, indignation keeping her just the right side of hysterical; and a man’s voice, lower, appealing but insistent, the sound of restraint. Angelique runs through the madrassa, between tables bearing hurriedly abandoned Korans and open jotters.

  ‘First floor,’ she reports. ‘Possibly another hostage.’

  She climbs the stairs delicately, picking out her steps on light and quiet feet. She’s got her pistol holstered at her thigh, but she leaves it there for now. As before, the harmless irrelevance the niqab cloaks her in will offer the best protection while she assesses the situation. Her stealth is a wasted effort: the voices get louder as she draws nearer, oblivious to her approach and, it seems, to even the police incursion taking place all around. Angelique reaches the head of the stairs and sees them standing in the passage: it’s not Souf, but the Imam, his hands imploringly gripping the arms of a woman. Her back is to Angelique, so she can’t see her face, but she can see the small child clinging on to the woman’s leg.

  The woman is trying to push past, the Imam barring her progress, appealing for her to turn back. They are arguing in Arabic. The child is crying, distressed by the raised voices and the awful anxiety that is thick in the air between the adults.

  The Imam notices Angelique.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demands. ‘Get away, get out of here. It is not safe. Go to the police.’

  Angelique removes the niqab. ‘I am the police, sir,’ she says.

  The woman turns to look at Angelique, which is when she sees that it is Souf’s wife, Raziya. Her cheeks are tear-streaked, her expression gaunt and anguished. She looks back uncomprehendingly for a moment, her mind taking a while, in its shaken state, to put together why she knows Angelique’s face. Angelique braces herself for anger; instead Raziya appeals to her.

  ‘You must help me. Help me stop him.’

  Angelique looks to the Imam.

  ‘What is Souf’s wife doing here?’ she asks, for the benefit of her superiors listening in as well as the Imam.

  She hears two almost simultaneous replies, one in her earpiece and one from Raziya. The police hadn’t held her or Hasan’s wife after the raid, but had assigned officers to follow them in case their movements led to the suspects. Raziya had taken her son and left, well before the Imam made his call; thus when her destination became apparent, nobody had considered it particularly significant. She prayed there every day, and took her son to the madrassa several times a week.

  She had come seeking the Imam, not knowing her husband was in the building, but it was her husband she needed to talk to him about.

  ‘He made a videotape,’ Raziya tells Angelique.

  Oh shit.

  ‘Can anyone confirm Souf left a videotape?’ she asks.

  ‘Officers are still collating the evidence we found at this morning’s locations,’ Dougnac tells her.

  ‘I saw them,’ Raziya insists. ‘Two nights ago. They locked me out of the room when I...I told myself it wasn’t... then this morning... please, we must stop him.’

  ‘We already have, Raziya. We got the explosives,’ Angelique assures her. ‘Please tell me we got the explosives,’ she adds, under her breath.

  ‘We did,’ replies Dougnac, ‘and the detonators, but we cannot assume we got it all.’

  Fuck.

  ‘Where is he?’ Angelique asks the Imam. He closes his lips tight. He’s taking a beat to think what’s best to say, but he’s already confirmed to Angelique that he knows. He just doesn’t want to tell Raziya.

  ‘Imam, where is he?’

  ‘I will tell you. But only if Raziya takes herself and young Saadiq to safety.’

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ Raziya insists. ‘I don’t want him getting killed. I can make him listen to me, if only I can speak to him.’

  Angelique looks at the pair of them, decides Raziya offers a better chance of talking him into giving himself up than the Imam does.

  ‘She’s right,’ she tells the Imam. ‘You take the child.’

  ‘No,’ Raziya says, almost a scream. ‘He needs to see his son, needs to see what is better than this... this madness.’

  Angelique knows she’s got a point, but the feel of the handgun strapped to her leg tells her this is just not happening.

  ‘Imam, take the boy, and tell us where Souf is.’

  Raziya looks at the three other people in the passageway, then down to the haram, where she can see more police moving in. She steps away from the boy, taking his hand from her leg and giving it to the Imam.

  The Imam puts an arm reassuringly around the boy’s shoulders and nods to the door of his office, just along the passage.

  ‘There is a maqsura, a hidden sanctuary, adjacent to my personal chambers.’

  ‘Get the boy out of here.’

  ‘God be with
you,’ he says.

  Aye, right.

  Raziya is already running, tugging at Angelique’s robes as she passes.

  ‘Quickly, please, before the other police get up here. The ones with the guns.’

  Angelique turns and accelerates, as fast as her encumbering costume will allow, stopping Raziya’s hand before she can throw open the door.

  ‘Careful,’ she warns. ‘Slow. Don’t get yourself shot. Call to him first.’

  Angelique opens the door slightly and Raziya calls out her husband’s name.

  ‘Falik, please, it is Raziya.’

  There is no response. Angelique nudges the door ajar inch by inch and peers inside. The chamber is empty. Raziya all but barges past her into the room, calling out ‘Falik, please,’ her voice broken with sobs.

  They both stand just inside the Imam’s chamber. It is a long and spacious room, running maybe a third of the length of the first-floor passageway. There are bookshelves, cupboards, two desks, one bearing a leather-bound open copy of the Koran, the other a flat-panel monitor and a keyboard. Two arched windows afford a view of the adjacent tree-lined boulevard. The two women’s views are drawn not to the far wall of the room or the one abutting the passage, but to the wall in between. There is an ornate wooden screen, ostensibly ornamental upon first look, but closer inspection reveals the bottoms of two small wheels at its base. This is the maqsura.

  ‘Falik, there are police coming, they have many guns. Please, don’t let them hurt you. Saadiq is here too. He’s with the Imam. He needs you.’

  At last, this elicits a response from the hidden chamber behind the intricately carved screen.

  ‘Why did you bring Saadiq? Get him away from this place.’

  In her earpiece, Angelique can hear that her colleagues are taking position in the passage outside. Very softly, she tells Dougnac to keep them back from the Imam’s office.

  ‘I brought him here to show you what is important, to waken you from this madness.’

  While Raziya talks, Angelique approaches the screen. She can’t see light or movement behind it. There is white-painted wood behind the carvery work. Raziya makes to move forward, but Angelique holds up a palm to tell her to stay where she is. This is partly so that she doesn’t get desperate and rush the screen, but mostly so that, with Angelique’s back to her, Raziya doesn’t see her unholster her pistol from her calf and conceal it in the folds of her robe.

  ‘I am doing God’s work. Wajib, Raziya. The only madness is in the minds of those who would oppose His will.’

  His voice is edgy, breathless, wavering. Sounds like his heart-rate is off the scale. It is, worryingly, a little more anxious than she’d expect in somebody merely digging in for a stand-off.

  ‘Falik, listen to your wife,’ Angelique says, watching the screen for a response to this new voice. She sees nothing, but can hear movement behind the panel. ‘There are armed police all over the building; they are right outside the Imam’s chamber. You can’t hide from them and you can’t defeat them. Think of your family. Do you want your son to see you carried out of here? Think about Saadiq, think about the wife you have, look what she’s been prepared to do for you, how brave, how much she loves you.’

  ‘Please, Falik,’ his wife implores.

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ Angelique continues. ‘I can lead you out of here, in my custody, and nobody has to get shot. Please, Falik. You can’t serve God or your family if you’re dead.’

  ‘You know nothing of my family,’ he retorts, shouting, overwrought, almost hyperventilating. ‘And you know nothing of serving God. But I will teach you.’

  Angelique doesn’t like the sound of this and feels herself change her stance reflexively. She takes a step back, legs slightly apart, and brings the gun up to eye-level, held in both hands.

  As she does so, the screen rolls back.

  ‘Nooooo!’

  Raziya half moans, half screams, horror and despair, her worst fear, her greatest dread, the death of her hope.

  Falik stands in the alcove, a backpack strapped in front of him. There are cables emerging from it on either side, snaking their way to his hands, which are held apart at arm’s length, each curled around a thick, solid, metal cylinder. He is bathed in sweat, like the maqsura was concealing a sauna. His breath is rapid, his eyes bulging, as though he’s in some state of hyper-consciousness. He stares at Angelique, moving his hands slightly closer, then stopping them. He’s letting her know: the cylinders touch, he completes the circuit.

  Dougnac’s voice is in her ear, asking what’s going on.

  ‘He’s got a bomb,’ she reports, as steadily as she can. ‘Pull everybody back. Get everyone out, now.’

  Raziya drops to her knees, wailing, hands clasped.

  ‘If you’ve got the shot,’ Dougnac orders, ‘take him. Immediately.’

  Raziya is pleading with both of them, her words now a babble, distilling finally to one: ‘Please. Please. Please.’

  Angelique has the shot, but she disobeys. She’s not going to shoot this man in front of his pleading wife until she absolutely needs to.

  ‘Put down the detonators, Falik.’

  ‘Take him, now,’ Dougnac commands.

  ‘You’re not going to blow up a mosque,’ she states, her appeal a simultaneous explanation to Dougnac: she still thinks she can talk him down.

  ‘What about a mosque with twenty crusader cops inside, who have “violated its sanctity”,’ Dougnac responds. ‘He blows the place up and the militants can make up any lie they like. Say we blew the place up. Anything.’

  Fuck.

  ‘Think of your son, Falik. Saadiq is downstairs. Do you want to kill him, and your wife?’

  With the mention of Saadiq, Raziya collapses like an abandoned puppet, bawling in anguish. Souf looks to her, then to Angelique.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says, swallowing, his voice a hoarse dry whisper. ‘You will not lose Saadiq. In mere moments we will all be together. In paradise.’

  Angelique breathes in, remembers the other things she’s heard him say, knows he believes it. He brings his hands together. She shoots him, drilling four shots through his brain in less than a second.

  Raziya screams.

  ‘Suspect down,’ Angelique reports, getting the words out before her voice chokes.

  Souf’s body slumps into a sitting position, his back against a chair inside the concealed sanctuary. His hands drop limp by his sides, and out of each rolls a twelve-volt torch battery. The cables dangle loose now from the backpack. To the right of the body Angelique can see a standard lamp, a short, frayed stump of flex jutting from the bottom, and a discarded plug-top close by on the floor.

  His wife runs towards him. Angelique can’t bring herself to intervene. Raziya kneels down and throws herself around her dead husband, wailing in grief.

  The plan was...

  Syed had got his martyr, got a Muslim killed in a mosque by the kuffar. What an obscene waste of a human life. But, let’s all say it together, religion wasn’t to blame.

  Angelique sees armed cops approach the doorway. She waves them back. ‘There’s no bomb,’ she reports. ‘There was never a bomb.’ Her vision blurs, which she suddenly realises is because she is crying.

  Raziya looks up at her from the body. There is no anger, no accusation, just a lost, hopeless incomprehension. Asking why. Why did this happen to her, to her husband. To her son.

  Angelique looks down at the gun she is holding, looks long at the device and the hand that wielded it. A thought briefly strays into her head that she does not want to admit to. It passes. She breathes out, flips the safety, holsters the weapon. Then she looks at the mother on the floor.

  A mother: that’s what a woman is supposed to be. Women are meant to create and nurture lives. All she’s done is end them. Saved a few, but the goalkeeper’s contribution never registers in the annals, does it?

  The siege, such as it is, ends quickly after that, or maybe it just seems that way in Angelique’s numbe
d condition. Her actions having popped the Parisian cherry on in-mosque shootings, Dougnac has no further reason for entertaining Jafir Khan in a stand-off. The minaret gets stormed and he is taken down by two shots below the waist. He’ll live.

  There are paramedics hurrying into the courtyard as Angelique exits the mosque. She sees the Imam standing behind a cordon in the company of several uniformed officers, his arm still around the shoulders of the boy. Angelique averts her eyes before the Imam can catch them, and in greater fear of meeting those of the child. She is aware they don’t know yet. She feels as if she could convey everything with just a glance. It’s only one of so many reasons she can’t look either of them in the face.

  She slips away through the gathering crowds, past the cameras, to a phalanx of police vans around the corner. She takes off the jilbab and squats down beside the rear left wheel of one of the vehicles. Somebody hands her a bottle of water and she drinks from it, staring ahead, seeing nothing. She sits there motionless with the open bottle in one hand, the lid in her other, like she’s in stasis, a machine broken down.

  ‘How you doing?’ asks a voice beside her. She looks up and sees the silver-haired figure of Gilles Dougnac.

  At last, she is reanimated. She has another drink from the bottle and climbs back to her feet. She takes her time swallowing the water, all the time looking him in the eye as she does so. She wipes her mouth.

  ‘I quit, is how I’m doing.’

  Glitterball shards (ii)

  The magician’s hands suddenly spasm as he grips the pack. The cards explode from the collapsing cradle of his fingers, spraying, spinning, fluttering about the stage like crisp autumn leaves stirred from the gutter by a sudden gust. It is not a flourish, but a fumble, a moment of startlement. A trick derailed, an unscripted incompetence. Some members of the audience gasp, others fail to stifle giggles. The muted laughter is horrible: a cringing combination of being embarrassed on the faltering magician’s behalf and being embarrassed by being present at such a tawdry spectacle. But can he recover, that’s the question? Does he have an out?