The message to the car, and they were out on foot instantly. The car pulled away, the blue lights behind the front grille flashing. No siren. The surveillance team leader came to them, his baseball cap already on. They’d put theirs on too. Before they moved off, Jon spoke into his mouthpiece. ‘Confirming we’re going for a hard stop.’
‘Confirmed,’ said the voice of his ops room supervisor. ‘Take up a standby position and await further orders.’
He signalled to his team that they should not yet take out their weapons. The surveillance team leader led them past her own people. As she did so she pointed them out silently. There was no one else in sight. They stopped suddenly and she pointed. From an angle they could see Romeo about fifty yards ahead. They waited for a moment and Jon told them to take out their weapons. All safetys were removed and they nodded to each other. Romeo was moving forward, and still the final order hadn’t been given. They had to move. The road dog-legged at the point where Romeo was now walking and he swerved to the left at the same pace, moving out of view. Jon knew the topography. There was an alternate, via a footpath that ran parallel and came out on to the next street.
‘Come on, come on, give the order,’ he muttered as he and his team sprinted in their rubber-soled boots. He signalled to one of his men to follow Romeo from the back while he and the third member of the team ran up the alleyway and turned sharp left into another, skirting the large plastic recycling bins. It was close to completely dark now. They stopped in the shadows near the end of the alleyway and took up position, listening to the running commentary of Romeo’s approach in their earpieces. ‘Come on, come on,’ thought Jon, or whispered it.
‘Handover of control to you,’ came the dry message from the ops room. All this would be recorded on hard disk for the audit afterwards. Force Internal Standards. Firearms Team Performance Review. IOPC, if it came to it. ‘Go.’
He spoke to his team quietly: ‘Go, go, go.’
‘Why?’ she wondered aloud as she watched the deployment, transfixed. George just looked at her. The images showed Rashid approaching the point where the officers waited. She couldn’t see them but knew they were there. Another officer was coming up fast behind him but he was oblivious, it seemed. She could see the automatic weapon the officer held. It would be a matter of seconds now. On the other screens similar flurries of action could be seen but she was interested only in Rashid.
She hoped. All she had now was hope that throbbed like a muscle, pulsing in her brain, pounding in her chest. It was pared down to this: bare, sinewy, desperate hope. The alternative was panic. She hoped she’d see Rashid again shortly and knew she’d somehow have to control her emotion when – if – she did. She hoped Rashid would do all he’d been told, that he wouldn’t forget something in the heat of the moment. She hoped the officers wouldn’t be precipitate. She hoped she’d been clear enough with the officer she’d spoken to – his name had been Jon – to convey the right sense of Rashid. She hoped that Rashid was, in the end, not one of the bad guys.
Across the city, like the other three converging on the stadium, Abdullah trudged intently. He muttered to himself as he walked, knew he was muttering, did not even try to stop himself. He stared ahead at the ground as he gathered pace. Almost there. His head was bursting with ecstatic terror.
He heard a noise directly in front of him and raised his eyes to the world, as if he were newborn and had only just discovered its existence. The sky was a luminous deep blue, punctuated with the glitter of the lights. He could hear the roar of the football crowd. In front of him stood a man wearing a cap with POLICE emblazoned on it, shouting at him, holding a gun with a flashlight attached to it, dazzling him.
The realization was a slow burn with a sudden, abrupt arrival. A smile seeped on to his face and he reached inside his jacket. This was his moment. It’d been forbidden, he knew, but he’d had to. The knife had been his grandfather’s, a trophy from the war: a dagger as keen as the day it had been manufactured, its point lethally sharp, protected in its metal scabbard, a gunmetal grey swastika crafted on its hilt. He would have blood, even as this man screamed. Then, just as he felt the metal of the handle and before he’d begun to withdraw the knife, he felt an impact above his left eye and slumped.
He heard the pops nearby. His path to the stadium took him within fifty yards of Abdullah’s and he understood immediately what was happening. It was not something he’d rehearsed, even in his head, even in his worst imaginings.
He looked at the man who had appeared almost magically in front of him, shouting in English, which now seemed a language he could not understand. No doubt he showed his confusion. He sensed rather than comprehended what the man wanted and raised his hands before noticing the weapon pointing at him. He turned and began to run and felt a pain in the back of his head. But nothing more.
He was trying to work out what the score was from the noise of the crowd but it was an impossible task. The sheer sound gave him that thrill, but he’d have to wait until he mingled with the departing crowd to find out what had gone on. Pity: there was nothing better than a game under the floodlights. The all-red Liverpool kit and the all-blue of City’s, on the bright green of the turf, all lit up. Cold night sky on which your breath formed clouds. Sparkle. Tension. Excitement. He dug his hands deeper into the pockets of the expensive leather jacket he always wore to matches.
He’d have liked to be able to claim that he saw it coming. But he didn’t. Must have been Abdullah who sold them, was his first thought as the police officer faced him, tensed and ready, the weapon aimed at his head. He could sense there were two others, at least, dancing round him and probably more.
‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ the man screamed.
Now was as good a time as ever. It’d been a shit life, anyway. He shrugged, smirked and kept his hands where they were.
In the ops room she maintained outward composure, with difficulty. Calls would already be being made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct so that their investigations into three fatal shootings by police could commence. Would it be four? The SIO was furiously dictating his policy log into a voice recorder. The Chief Constable looked broken but would have to rouse himself for media conferences.
George touched her arm. She turned to him, barely recognizing him.
This was the end of it. This was the opposite of success. Three boys were dead and Rashid would be too, in a few moments. This was for sure: no one could risk letting him run now. Last time’s fuck-up was already in all their minds. So it had been supplanted by another fuck-up, just one that was more amenable to media spinning. Her certainty that Rashid was carrying neither explosive nor weapon, her faith in him, counted for nothing. What had happened? Had the police suddenly become twitchy for no good reason? Had one of the boys done something that raised the temperature beyond tolerable limits? Had new information, contradicting Rashid’s, been received? Was Rashid, after all, way beyond her belief, bad?
They would now never discover the man orchestrating this, the sheikh. They would be no closer to him. Sooner or later this drama, on a different stage, would be repeated.
This was the moment. Jon led as they ran towards the subject and everything from here was on automatic pilot. They knew each other’s movements so well. They circled the subject and kept moving. Jon was directly in front of him and gave the challenge and instructions.
This was Romeo. Rashid was his name. Christ, he was young in the flesh. He looked terrified, but who wouldn’t? Jon adjusted his position backwards ever so slightly while the other two danced on their toes, keeping mobile, alert, their focus on Romeo. ‘Look into my eyes,’ he said, and the boy tried to. The flashlight mounted on his weapon bore into the boy’s face, but he looked into Romeo’s eyes, to try to divine what was there. This harmless-looking boy. What was it Leila had said? The words from the briefings and manuals scrolled through his mind with supreme irrelevance: lethality, court proceedings, ethics, public safety, self-defence, justified homicide, double-tap, unreasonable force, preservation of human life, collateral damage. The instructions had been clear: the precautionary principle. We won’t let any of you be hung out to dry. We know how fine the balances are. We’ve lived it. We’ll back you all the way. That’s what the senior officers always said. For all he knew they might actually mean it.
He fell back on training and instinct: the instinct that was trained and the instinct he felt for this fellow human being. He, Jon Brough the person, not Jon Brough the police officer and former SAS trooper accustomed to dispatching the enemy on the battlefield.
Less than half a second could pass between the first challenge and the decision that had to be made, while the shock reflex took time to form in Romeo that would dissolve into his response. Yield or fight. Surrender or press an initiator. Jon Brough did not need half a second to decide.
It happened so quickly he couldn’t piece it together. He didn’t see them until they were there, three of them, circling like crows. They weren’t in uniform but they wore caps with POLICE across the front. They were carrying guns and a light shone into his eyes.
‘Armed police,’ shouted one. ‘Hands away from your body, in the air. Look into my eyes. Keep looking into my eyes.’
He raised his hands but he couldn’t look into the man’s eyes. The light was too bright. This was not how it was supposed to end.