Silva had just a handful of letters left to deliver when heavy rain began to fall. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance as she passed a shop with televisions in the window display. Water streaked down the glass, blurring the TV images. She pulled her waterproof around her, fastened the hood, and made sure the flap of the postbag was closed. A few steps ahead, the boy she’d seen at the car park earlier smiled at her as his father dragged him from the wet street into the store. The pair stopped in the entrance and stared at a huge screen. A red bar ran along the bottom of the image, the word Breaking flashing on and off. The father shook his head, bent and said something to the boy, and then they were gone, deeper into the store.
Silva looked at the screen too and found herself moving forward. A wash of warmth from an air curtain greeted her as she stepped into the shop. There were others looking at the screen now. An elderly man. A young couple. A woman in a business suit.
‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’ the old man said to nobody in particular. ‘We need to wipe them off the surface of the earth.’
Chaos flashed on the screen. Blue lights strobing, soldiers running, ambulances lining the street. The camera panned and showed the remains of a cafe. The entire front had been destroyed in a fusillade of bullets, the street littered with tables and chairs and debris. A pool of red stained the pavement near a pile of something pink and raw, and the camera quickly panned away. Silva felt a drop of cold rain slip from the hood of her waterproof and fall onto her neck. She pushed through and stood at the front.
‘Where’s this?’ she said.
‘Tunisia,’ the businesswoman said. ‘Thank God.’
The cafe on the screen emerged from a recent memory. A cup and saucer and cinnamon sticks with the coffee. Fancy little biscuits. An evening spent in the fading heat of a day not more than three months ago. The next morning, hugs and kisses and a promise that they’d catch up soon. A flight back to the UK, Silva staring through the aircraft window as Europe glided below, wondering what it would have been like had her parents led normal lives. Had their wanderlust rubbed off? Was that why she never felt settled?
The camera moved to the right. Three body bags lay at the front of an office block where a plate glass window had crazed into a spiderweb pattern. Next to the window stood several police officers, sub-machine guns cradled in their arms. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolled to the left. The head of a British women’s aid charity had been assassinated in an attack on a cafe in Tunis. Other expats and tourists had also been targeted. Seventeen people injured, at least seven fatalities. The raindrop ran from Silva’s neck down to her chest and she shivered. She’d been to the cafe, she was sure of it. Then her phone rang and she was stepping away from the crowd, out into the street and the rain. She pulled the phone from her bag and saw the caller. He never rang her, not at work. In fact he never rang her at all. She realised her hand was shaking as she moved the phone to her ear.
‘Dad?’ she said.
‘It’s your mother.’ The voice hesitated, stumbled over words, muttered a series of broken phrases. Although good at barking orders, dealing with emotion had never been her father’s strong point. ‘She’s… well, she’s dead.’
‘I know,’ Silva said.
She ended the call and dropped the phone back into the postbag. She left the flap open and rain patted in among the letters as she began to walk. After a few strides an involuntary spasm ran through her and she started to jog. She ran away from the main shopping area and headed towards the seafront, her feet moving faster. Trotting, running, sprinting. At some point she lurched to a stop and looked down at the bag. Everything inside was sodden. She dropped the bag onto the pavement and removed her waterproof coat. The red and blue. The uniform. She folded the coat neatly and placed it on the pavement and ran up to the expanse of grass that overlooked Plymouth Sound. Out to sea, sheets of rain swept across the water, lashing down on a solitary grey warship moored in the centre of the bay. For a second a shaft of brightness shimmied across the sea but then it was gone as dark clouds rolled in from the west. Silva ran across to a nearby bench and slumped down, breathless, on the wet surface. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked herself back and forth as the rain continued to fall, not wanting to stop moving, not wanting to think.
Holm found a clean shirt but his suit lay crumpled where he’d thrown it when he’d arrived back from work. He pulled on the trousers and jacket and grabbed a couple of chocolate biscuits from a cupboard in the kitchen. A swig of milk straight from the carton in the fridge and his breakfast – at four fifteen in the afternoon – was done.
Half an hour later he was emerging from the depths of Victoria tube station and striding towards the river. He headed up Millbank, dodging people coming the other way. It was rush hour now and most folk were going home. Throngs of workers. Crowded buses. Nose-to-tail traffic. As Holm neared Thames House, he looked across at a couple of young mums with babies strapped to their fronts. Nearby a trio of city types shared office banter and a teacher led a group of foreign schoolchildren on a tour. This was the soft underbelly of the country, awash with easy targets. Many a time he’d discussed with colleagues how lucky they were that most terrorists were fairly stupid. How else to account for the relatively low number of attacks? Sure, the security services had had great success in foiling a number of plots, but it didn’t explain why there weren’t more.
At Thames House he went through the rigmarole of passing through security and made his way to the situation room. When he’d left in the early hours there’d been empty chairs and blank monitors, but now every screen was ablaze and nearly every chair taken. People talked into phones, fingers clattered across keyboards and a buzz of half a dozen different languages filled the air.
To one side of the room a junior operative, Farakh Javed, hunched over a laptop staring at some black and white images. Javed was an analyst in Holm’s department who’d unfathomably latched onto Holm as some kind of intelligence guru. Javed had a bouncy shock of black hair and an engaging smile. He was very bright and very gay – a fact, he’d told Holm, his second-generation Pakistani parents weren’t happy with. Holm secretly sympathised with them. Live and let live was a motto he tried to abide by, but he had to admit he was slightly uncomfortable with Javed’s overt sexuality. He put it down to his age, lumping Javed in with a jumble of things he found difficult that included smartphones, self-scan supermarket checkouts and music streaming.
‘This is good,’ Javed said without looking up, somehow sensing it was Holm at his shoulder. ‘CCTV from a building near the scene. We’ve already got a match on one of the attackers.’
‘Really?’ Holm began to feel a glimmer of hope. He glanced down at the screen where Javed had zoomed in on an image. A young man stood with an automatic rifle in his hands. He wore a chequered shemagh round his head, but part of the covering had slipped away to reveal his face. The man had a beard and his features were indistinct, but Holm knew only a few data points were needed for the facial recognition software to pick a match. ‘Who is he?’
‘Mohid Latif.’ Javed half turned to Holm. ‘And he’s British.’
‘British?’ Holm looked closer. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. A British citizen carrying out an attack on foreign soil and we missed him. The Spider’s going to blow her top.’
‘Is Latif on our radar?’
‘He’s on a long list. A very long list. Three years ago he was questioned by police regarding the distribution of some pamphlets.’
‘And we did nothing?’
Javed didn’t answer, merely made a face and shrugged.
‘Where’s Huxtable?’ Holm said. He couldn’t see the deputy director anywhere in the room.
‘Prowling.’ Javed raised his hand, palm down, and wiggled his fingers. A spider creeping forward. ‘And hungry. I hope you’ve got something for her.’
‘Christ.’ Holm felt his knees weaken and moved to a spare workstation. He slumped down in the chair and logged in using a fingerprint scanner. ‘There was nothing, Farakh, nothing.’
‘Sure.’ Javed held his hands up. ‘You don’t have to convince me, sir. You couldn’t have done any more.’
You. Holm noted the word. Javed was distancing himself. He didn’t want to be caught in the sticky web that was awaiting Holm.
Javed got up from his station and walked off, and Holm turned to the far wall where a towering bank of screens showed news reports, live operation maps, stock prices and currency rates. A glance at one of the screens told Holm the Tunisian dinar was under pressure. The markets were spooked. Tourists had only just begun to return to the country after the atrocities a few years back at the Bardo National Museum and the resort of Sousse. Now they would stop coming once more and the foreign exchange the country needed would dry up.
Holm refocused on his own screen. He needed to rustle up some kind of supporting document. Bullet points. A graphic or two. Concluding remarks. He bent to the keyboard and flicked his fingers over the keys.
‘Stephen.’ His name sounded cold and harsh, an icicle spiking into his right ear. He turned to see Fiona Huxtable beside him. ‘Nice of you to join us.’
Holm had more than ten years on Huxtable but he couldn’t help thinking of his boss as a stern headmistress, him as the naughty schoolboy. The image was one he was sure she cultivated. Her stick-thin body was always bulked out by a thick tweed jacket and skirt, but whatever she wore did little to disguise her angular figure. Bony, a colleague of Holm’s had described her as, and he hadn’t only been talking about Huxtable’s appearance.
‘I came as soon as I heard.’ Holm began to rise out of politeness, but Huxtable’s hand pressed down on his shoulder and held him in his seat. ‘Seven dead. Not good.’
He didn’t know why he’d said that. The casualty numbers only served to compound his error and that it was not good was bloody obvious.
‘The latest figure is nine.’ Huxtable’s gaze flicked to a nearby screen and then back at Holm’s monitor. She appeared to be reading the three bullet points Holm had managed to think up. ‘Unsubstantiated reports? Is that the best you can do, Stephen?’
Holm opened his mouth to say something. He was aware of Huxtable’s hand still resting on his shoulder. A reminder she was in control. That he was in her grasp.
‘My office in one hour with something better than this crap.’ She removed her hand. ‘And don’t even think of mentioning you-know-who, OK?’
With that she was gone, leaving Holm in a sweat as he struggled to add something meaningful to his document. Something that didn’t involve you-know-who.