It had been three months since Silva had last seen her. A quarter of a year. A fraction of the lifespan left for Silva. All of that remaining for her mother.
A Saturday in Tunisia. Carthage International Airport crowded with people, a seemingly never-ending column of tourists disgorging into the arrivals hall. As Silva walked out, she scanned the waiting crowd. Francisca da Silva stood among the taxi drivers, holding up her own piece of paper, the word BecBec scrawled on in marker pen. The pet name was from Silva’s childhood, from when she was just toddler and could only say her own name in a garbled approximation. Her mother smiled, her face framed by long dark hair just beginning to grey. Fine lines at the eyes and mouth. Lips adorned with a subtle shade of pink lipstick. As Silva approached she launched into French, matching the buzz of the language echoing all around.
‘Êtes-vous Mademoiselle BecBec?’
‘Mum.’ Silva blushed. Somehow, whatever the situation, her mother had the ability to make Silva laugh. ‘Stop it.’
‘You’re not BecBec or you’re no longer a mademoiselle? If it’s the latter then you might at least have invited me to the wedding.’
Silva dropped her bag and hugged her mother. They’d always been close, but the past couple of years had reinforced their bond, and Silva had come to depend on her mother throughout her court-martial and during her time in the military prison.
‘I’m still single, Mum. With my prospects I will be for a while, I reckon.’
‘Nonsense.’ Francisca bent and hefted Silva’s bag onto her shoulder. She turned and gestured towards the exits. ‘What about that nice American boy you were seeing?’
‘Were seeing is the operative phrase. He’s past tense.’
‘He dumped you?’
‘No. It was the other way around.’
‘Well.’ Francisca led Silva across the concourse and they emerged into harsh sunlight. She raised a hand at the queue of taxis, and quipped as she did so. ‘There’ll be another one along soon.’
A battered yellow minicab took them into the centre of Tunis along palm-lined roads, Francisca pointing out various sights including the National Bardo Museum, infamous now for the terrorist attack that had taken place there rather than for its collection of wondrous mosaics.
Her mother had ensconced herself in a couple of rooms at a small hotel on the edge of the Medina souk. The hotel’s colonial facade had seen better days but inside the place was clean and tidy, if a little spartan. Francisca apologised for the surroundings.
‘Not like when I was with The Times.’ She walked to the window and opened the shutters. The sounds of the busy street drifted in. ‘In those days my expense account was bottomless.’
‘It’s better than I’m used to,’ Silva said. ‘Home or abroad.’
For a moment the street noise was all there was, Francisca standing by the window before turning.
‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. About what happened. Sorry you’re not over it.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. I don’t think it’s something you can recover from. Perhaps it’s something you’re not supposed to recover from.’
Francisca slipped across the room and embraced her daughter. ‘Hush. What sort of talk is that?’
Silva shrugged. Her mother held her for a moment and then went over to the bed. She sat and patted the mattress. Silva moved across and sat beside her.
‘When you were little, when you were BecBec, you had a rabbit, remember?’
‘Twitch,’ Silva said. ‘He escaped and you said he’d gone to find some bunny friends. Later, when I was older, you told me what really happened: Twitch had been killed by the dog next door.’
‘I think you were eleven or twelve by then. Some of my friends said I was cruel, but I thought it was important to tell you the truth. I wanted you to understand that life could be unpalatable.’
‘The boy in Afghanistan was a kid, Mum, not a rabbit. And it wasn’t next door’s dog that killed him, it was me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to draw a parallel, merely illustrating that shit happens. It happens to people it shouldn’t happen to, people who’ve done nothing to deserve it. It even happens to pet rabbits. There’s not much we can do but face up to reality.’
‘It didn’t just happen though, I pulled the trigger.’
‘You pulled the trigger, but if al-Qaeda hadn’t carried out the 9/11 attacks you wouldn’t have been there in the first place. If the CIA hadn’t funded the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the eighties then perhaps Bin Laden wouldn’t have risen to prominence. And so on. How far back do you want to go?’
‘I pulled the trigger.’ Silva repeated the bare facts she’d mulled over so many times. Felt the tears coming yet again. ‘In the end it was down to me.’
‘Sweetheart.’ Her mother raised a hand and stroked Silva’s hair. It was as if Silva was a child once more. ‘It hurts me to see you like this. At some point you have to move on.’
‘I know.’ Silva had told herself as much dozens of times, but the words refused to alter the reality of the situation. Still, her mother was correct, and invariably the advice she gave was the right course of action. ‘I’ll try to put it aside while I’m here.’
‘There’s no need to do that, we’ll give it a good talking over, right?’ Francisca smiled. ‘But perhaps leave it at the airport with the unclaimed baggage when you return to the UK, yes?’
Silva nodded and changed the subject. ‘What will we do?’
‘See the museum, go to the beach, visit the souks, eat, drink, and – this most important of all – laugh!’
They’d done all of that and, for the week she’d been there, Silva had almost forgotten about Afghanistan. When they parted in the departure hall at the airport, she’d kissed her mother and waved as she passed through to airside. She’d turned back to see her mother fumbling with a piece of paper, unfolding it, and waving it above her head. It was the sign she’d held up when Silva had arrived: BecBec.
‘Au revoir, BecBec,’ her mother shouted. And then, in Portuguese, ‘Até breve.’
See you soon…
The document Holm had cobbled together on the day of the attack hadn’t been received well, and Huxtable gave him two weeks to write a full report.
‘Something I can show to Thomas Gillan,’ she said. ‘Something he can show to the prime minister. Pretty pictures and pie graphs. Lots of confusing figures. Plenty of footnotes and appendices. You know the kind of thing.’
When he strolled across Vauxhall Bridge and met Palmer for lunch in a pub round the corner from the SIS building, Palmer reached out a hand and patted Holm on the shoulder.
‘Can’t win them all, mate,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be fair on the rest of us. We all like someone to blame. Makes us feel better.’
Brighter by the weekend. Finding a positive even when the chips were down. Palmer’s generous and optimistic nature was the opposite of Holm’s ‘glass half empty’ outlook on life.
‘The Belgian lead you gave me was bogus,’ Holm said as Palmer bought a couple of beers. ‘Without it I wouldn’t have advised Huxtable that an attack on UK soil was imminent.’
‘The bogus Belgian, yes.’ Palmer sipped his pint and made a face. ‘Eighty per cent was as far as I was prepared to go, remember? It was your call.’
‘Yes, but I expect an eighty per cent certainty to mean…’ Holm paused and glanced down at the froth on his beer. Palmer was right. The other side of eighty per cent was twenty. It was his call. ‘Didn’t you lot have an inkling about Tunisia? I mean, you’re head of the North Africa station, there must have been something?’
‘Gossip, but nothing substantial, nothing we could act on. Nothing as good as eighty per cent.’
‘No word on Mohid Latif?’
‘We don’t know where he is but according to the Border Force there’s no record he travelled to Tunisia.’
‘He’s in the bloody picture at the cafe, Harry. Of course he travelled to Tunisia.’
‘I know, but there’s nothing from Tunisian immigration or our contacts on the ground. The only sliver of intelligence is that the Tunisian authorities have identified another one of the attackers as Adnan Kadri, a well-known people trafficker. The bad news is that he’s dead.’
‘The Tunisians killed him?’
‘No. It appears he was taken out by rival traffickers.’ Palmer raised his hands in apology. ‘Sorry I can’t be more helpful.’
Holm didn’t really know what he’d been hoping for. Perhaps some reference to Latif which meant Six could take part of the blame. If not that then a miracle. At least the lunch had been good and Palmer had paid.
Holm slogged over the report for the next ten days and then attached the document to an email, pressed send, uttered a short prayer and waited for a response. It came the following afternoon as he was getting ready to leave for home. He trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor and slunk into Huxtable’s office, head down. When she told him to take a seat he sank into a high-backed chair in a vain attempt to disappear.
‘Right.’ Huxtable tapped a long-nailed finger on the desk, her voice soft but ominous. Silk laced with acid. ‘I thought we needed a talk about your performance. A review.’
‘Ma’am?’ Holm could see a copy of his report open on the desk. ‘I thought this meeting was to discuss my document on the Tunis attack?’
‘No.’ Huxtable made a point of closing the report and pushing it to one side. ‘I don’t want to pre-empt the investigation into what went wrong. However it’s obvious procedure was set aside for a period of – how shall I put this? – flying by the seat of your pants?’
Holm shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling. It was either that or forget the whole thing.’
‘You were chasing paper planes.’
‘What can I say? Everything had gone quiet. No chatter, nothing from the field. We weren’t able to verify the original source for the intel so I came to you.’ Holm leaned forward. It wasn’t a great shot, but at least he’d managed to get the ball back across the net. ‘You had my recommendation on raising the threat level and all the information.’
‘And then you did a runner?’
‘I didn’t leave the situation room until close to six in the morning. We’d done all we could and in the end, as you know, a joint decision was made that the intel was wrong. We had no idea of the target or the location. All we knew was a threat had been made. It could have been anywhere from Tottenham to Timbuktu. We contacted every agent we had but nobody had any info. GCHQ had nothing but the original intercept. SIS gave us a lead from Belgium but it turned out to be false. The Americans either had nothing or weren’t telling us anything.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know what it means. The Americans share intelligence with us when it suits them. If it doesn’t suit them they play their cards close to their chests.’
‘And the evidence for this?’
Holm shook his head. He had an old friend in the CIA who’d confirmed Holm’s suspicions years ago. ‘Strategy and tactics, old buddy,’ his friend had said. ‘Two separate things. Out in the field our countries play the game in very similar ways, but at the top of the tree the policy wonks are looking at it differently. Sometimes that means not telling our allies everything even if the end result is casualties on the ground.’
‘Well?’ Huxtable waited for a beat. ‘I’ll take your silence as an indication your allegation has no basis in fact. It’s similar to your obsession with Taher. Your excuse for not finding him is he has to be receiving tip-offs from inside the security services, yes? That we have a mole?’
‘Well, there’s—’
‘Absolutely no evidence to back up your claim.’ Huxtable rapped the table like a judge using a gavel to bring silence to a courtroom. ‘Now, let’s move on to the real reason I called you here.’
Holm let himself slump farther down into the chair, as if in doing so he might avoid the hammer blow that was surely coming.
‘As you know, JTAC has always recruited the brightest and best. We’re lucky to be able to draw personnel from many different branches. You came across to Five from Special Branch originally, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Holm nodded. The way Huxtable phrased it made his transfer to MI5 sound like a cold war defection, but Holm had been an obvious recruit and he’d felt he was coming to the end of his days in the police. When the call had come he’d jumped at the chance.
‘You had a lot to offer back then.’
Holm flinched. Huxtable was getting to the business end of the meeting.
‘Although you’ve had personal issues recently, I see.’ She indicated a printout on the desk in front of her. She looked up and gave a flat smile. ‘Still, it happens to nearly all of us from time to time.’
The inference being that nothing personal would ever happen to Huxtable.
‘My wife.’ Holm shrugged. There was no point in hiding anything. Huxtable was all-knowing and all-seeing. ‘She left me a couple of years ago. Demands of the job, I suppose.’
‘There was nothing else we should have been informed about, was there? No indiscretion on your part?’
‘No.’ If only there had been, he thought. ‘We broke up amicably.’
A straight-out lie. But then he was good at lying. To himself as much as anyone. The split had come out of the blue and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him. He’d spent his life playing detective and uncovering secrets and there was his wife carrying on with the next-door neighbour right under his nose. They’d been at it for months and if he hadn’t returned home from an overseas trip unexpectedly one day and caught them screwing on the living-room floor, they’d probably have continued to pull the wool over his eyes.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Huxtable said. ‘About a new role for you.’
‘I’m happy where I am.’
‘Sure, but your talents are wasted behind a desk. I’m looking for somebody to get out there and be proactive, to chase down leads.’
‘Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do?’
‘They don’t have time to develop anything these days. I’m talking about the bigger picture.’
Holm noted Huxtable’s use of the bigger picture. Noted, too, the euphemisms aplenty in her statement: wasted behind a desk – useless at analysis. Doing things the police don’t have time to develop meant investigating areas they didn’t feel were worthwhile. While get out there suggested, quite simply, that Huxtable wanted him gone from under her feet.
‘And this bigger picture? Where exactly am I to find it?’
‘You’re aware we get thousands of pieces of information a week, most of which are never followed up? Time and time again we have people who blip on our radar but are passed over because of lack of resources. Right-wingers, left-wingers, radicals of all types intent on getting their fifteen minutes of fame. There are snippets of intelligence which, as much as we try, we can’t jigsaw together. Even with AI and a bunch of algorithms we’re missing these at the moment. You might just get lucky.’
‘You’re kicking me out of JTAC.’
‘We’re supposed to be the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, Stephen. The problem is your recent analysis has been wide of the mark.’ That flat smile again. ‘And I’m not kicking you out. I prefer to think of it as moving you sideways, OK?’
‘Sideways?’
‘Yes. You’ll remain under the JTAC umbrella, but you’ll have an office of your own, a budget and a free hand to pursue whatever leads you want within reason.’ Huxtable smiled, but the look wasn’t a good one. ‘Take some time off to think about it, OK?’
Huxtable reached for Holm’s report. She glanced at the cover before sliding the document into her out-tray. He’d been dealt with. Rubber-stamped. Filed. Her gaze moved to Holm, a quizzical expression on her face as if she was surprised to see him still there.
He struggled out of the armchair and got to his feet.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
The funeral for Silva’s mother took place fifteen days after the attack. Francisca da Silva had had a wide circle of friends and colleagues and, since she’d split with Silva’s father, several lovers. She’d never remarried though, and it was Silva and her father who’d dealt with the arrangements. Silva had been an emotional wreck and near useless, but her father approached the situation much as he’d have tackled a military problem. He created checklists, delegated various tasks to friends and family, drew up contingency plans and imposed strict deadlines. Now though, as they sat in a car following the hearse, Silva could see the effort involved had worn away at him. His hair had greyed years ago, but there were other signs of ageing that seemed more recent.
‘Friday,’ he said, aware Silva was looking at him. ‘Not a good day for a burial, but it was the only slot available. Fully booked, see? Damn good business to be in, funerals. There’s an endless supply of clients and they don’t answer back.’
Silva wasn’t sure if the reference to Friday was religious. She didn’t think so. Her father had never done God and she couldn’t see him starting now.
‘Are you OK?’ she said. He hadn’t asked her the same question. Not once in the past two weeks. ‘I mean, I know you and Mum were—’
‘Estranged is the word,’ her father said. He didn’t turn to face her. Rather he appeared to be studying the back of the chauffeur’s head. As if there was something there that might explain everything. ‘It was her choice, you know. That we separated all those years back. She wanted something more, someone else.’
‘Do you blame her? She’d had enough of the worry, Dad.’
‘That’s a bit rich. I reckon she was always more concerned about you than she ever was about me.’
‘That’s different. Parents are always worried about their children.’
‘She could never understand what drove you to sign up. She hated you being in the military. I think she felt by you choosing the army that somehow I’d won and she’d lost. She wanted something quite different for you, something more noble, as if fighting for what you believe in wasn’t noble enough.’
‘Dad, don’t. This isn’t the time.’
Her father fell silent, but what he’d said about her mother wanting something different for Silva was true. She’d wanted Silva to go to university, but Silva had struggled at school. She was clever but not studious; she excelled at sports, but not in examinations. At the behest of her father she’d taken up shooting at an early age, and at sixteen she’d won a gold medal in a junior class at the world championships. As a child she’d never associated what she did on the range with the military, but looking back she could see there was an inevitability about her future linked to her prowess with her rifle. When, at a careers fair, she’d come across an armed forces stand, she’d tried to hurry on past, but the female recruiting officer had caught her eye. Almost unwillingly she found herself drawn to the displays. The officer explained about the opportunities which were opening up for women now the UK was finally allowing them to serve in combat roles. ‘You could make a difference,’ she’d said, pointing to a picture of British soldiers alongside smiling Afghan children. ‘We’re building schools, providing sanitation, protecting the local population from those who want to impose their barbaric ideologies on them.’
Back home the notion had festered. She knew her mother would be against it. Since her parents had divorced her mother’s world view had changed. She’d emerged from the domineering influence of Silva’s father like a butterfly breaking free of a cocoon. Her politics were increasingly left wing and she’d recently moved from a secure, well-paid job with The Times’s foreign desk to a position with a news agency that specialised in covering the Middle East and Africa. However when, after several weeks of considering the options, Silva told her mother she was thinking of a military career, she’d been surprised by the reaction. Rather than dismissing the idea out of hand, her mother encouraged her to do some research and make up her own mind. If Silva was happy, then she’d be happy, she said. Silva never kidded herself her mother had been wholeheartedly in favour of her career choice, especially after all that had happened to her, but she never realised she’d hated it.
If that was the truth then her mother had hidden it well. Even after Afghanistan, when Silva had been in the military prison, her mother had been nothing but supportive and there’d never been a word of criticism. Perhaps, Silva thought, unconditional love and support was what being a parent was all about. What it was supposed to be about.
She turned to look at her father. He sat rigid, staring forward, unaware how much his words had hurt. It was precisely because she’d wanted to help people in the same way her mother had done that she’d joined up. Sure, she’d been a muddle-headed, idealistic teenager, but the sentiment had been genuine. To know the truth about her mother’s feelings was a bittersweet agony. Bitter on account of the disapproval, sweet because it highlighted the unconditional love. And her mother had been wrong about who’d won: she’d joined up in spite of her father, not because of him.
Until the incident in Kabul, Silva had never regretted her career choice. The army had meant she could continue to shoot and they’d given her time off to compete. In return she became a poster girl for the recruiting officers, highlighting the very things that had attracted her when she herself had signed up. That effect was magnified when she won a bronze medal at the Olympics. Overnight she was transformed into a minor celebrity. Her picture appeared on the news, there were offers for product endorsements and speaking engagements, and she was shortlisted for awards. Of course the fact she’d been successful and in the public eye meant when the time came, the fall was much harder. Still, through all the chaos, the ups and downs, her mother had stood by her.
Silva remembered the day of her release from prison. Sharp words, a pile of civvy clothes, an officer handing her the letter announcing her formal dismissal from the army. She’d been marched to the gates and had stepped into another life. As she’d trudged away towards the main road, not really knowing what the hell to do next, she’d heard a familiar voice call out her name.
Rebecca!
She’d turned and there, a few paces away, stood her mother. Silva had collapsed in her arms, all the hardness and bravado of the past year gone, nothing but tears left.
‘You know what?’ Her father’s words cut into her thoughts. He’d turned from his study of the chauffeur’s head. ‘The ironic thing is she’s the one who’s dead in a military conflict and we’re still alive. You get how that works, because I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘I don’t get anything much at the moment.’
‘She was a journalist, for God’s sake.’ Her father shook his head. ‘Bloody wrong place. Bloody wrong time. If it was down to me I’d bomb the fuck out of the bastards and be done with it.’
‘We tried that. I was there, remember? And anyway, who exactly do you bomb?’
Her father said nothing for a few minutes. They drove through winding country lanes between hedges bloated with thick summer greenery. A church spire in the distance seemed to get no closer.
‘Are you going to carry on working as a postie?’
‘I’m on sick leave.’
‘You mean on account of your mother’s death? Compassionate leave?’
‘No, Dad. Sick leave.’ Silva tapped her head even though her father was now looking forwards again. ‘Mental health. Any sign of stress and they sign you off. Like you might contaminate the letters or something.’
‘And are you mental?’
‘I don’t know yet. I was pretty sure I was, but then I thought about what happened to me. Considering the circumstances I’m probably verging on being almost normal.’
‘That’s good to hear, Rebecca. Normal. Good to hear. Your grandmother was nutty, remember? Very difficult to deal with.’
‘She had dementia, Dad.’
‘Whatever you want to call it, she annoyed the hell out of me.’
They rounded a corner and the church was there. A thin spire touching a blue sky. A grassy bank surrounding an acre of graveyard. Cars parked on the verges. People waiting.
They climbed from the car and heads nodded and there were half smiles intended to show sympathy. Silva spotted a government minister, tried to put a name to the face but failed. There was a local MP and a large group of her mother’s friends and co-workers from Third Eye News, the agency she worked for. Neil Milligan, the proprietor and chief editor of the agency, raised a hand. The poor man looked abject. Standing at a discreet distance were several photographers and a TV crew.
Silva began to greet some of the mourners before turning to see what had happened to her father. He stood by the limousine talking to the driver as if he had nothing better to do than pass the time in idle chit-chat. He shook the man’s hand and came across to Silva.
‘Colour Sergeant Wilkins. Gulf War,’ he said. ‘I knew I recognised him from somewhere. Top bloke.’