London had been Taher’s base for a number of years. The city was filled with people from a hundred different countries and they practised a dozen different religions. It offered instant anonymity. He owned a small flat high up in a grotty tower block far to the west of the centre where nobody bothered him, nobody asked what he was up to and nobody cared.
His journey back to the UK after the Tunisian mission had been a convoluted one. The trip took several days, but the route was well tested and allowed him to come and go without the risk of capture. On his return to the flat he prayed, unpacked, and ate a meal. That done, he stood at the window and looked out as the daylight faded. He caught sight of himself in the glass and moved closer to the window in order to banish his reflection. Lights blazed at the heart of the capital and he could imagine the night unfolding. It was a tableau that played out each evening, but he doubted the scenes were much different in Paris or New York or Sydney. The same type of people doing the same type of things. Alcohol and drugs leading to sex and violence. It was, he thought, a debasement of what it meant to be human. A dismal waste.
In front of his face the glass blurred and distorted as his breath misted the pane. He brushed the window with the tips of his fingers and wiped the mist clear. Peering out again, he saw not the bright lights of London, but a tiny settlement on the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A small concrete dwelling surrounded by a number of billowing tents. A young boy running errands for his parents.
He is twelve years old. Not nearly twelve, not twelve and a bit, but twelve exactly. Nothing is planned for the day of his birth – his father explains to him the celebration of anniversaries and birthdays is the way of disbelievers. Still, his mother has given thanks to God and asked that Taher should live long and be humble. Taher has given thanks too and when, in the late afternoon, his mother asks him to tend to the goats in the paddock, instead of moaning he nods and goes out the back to collect some fodder.
It’s hot outside and Taher sweats as he carries the food to the goats. He can hear laughter from inside the house. His little brothers and sisters playing happily, too young to lend a hand, too young to understand the hardship. After he’s fed and watered the animals he kicks a rusty tin can round the yard. The sun is touching the horizon now, the heat slipping away as the stars rise in the east. A majestic spread of brilliance in the heavens over the desert. Taher imagines the stars are the glittering floodlights above a football stadium. It’s the World Cup final and he’s the best player on the pitch. He flicks the can up and over his shoulder and then boots it against a wall. ‘Goal!’ he shouts as his mother’s voice floats out into the night air. It’s dinner time. He looks over, seeing her silhouetted in the door to the house, his father behind carrying bread to the low table, his little sister Kaya on the floor at his mother’s heels.
Then the world explodes, a fireball erupting from behind his mother, a heat hotter than a thousand suns searing through the air. Night turns to day and the scene imprints itself, scorching deep into his memories like a brand burned into the side of an ox.
His mother is torn into three pieces, her chest and head slamming against the wall, her legs and lower torso spiralling into the air, one arm flailing to the ground and rolling into the distance. He sees Kaya run out into the yard, for a moment thinking she might be saved but then realising her flesh is melting before him, peeling away in layers as she burns, her screams mercifully dying with her in a few seconds. From inside the house nothing but the roar of flame, his father and three other siblings in there somewhere. Dead or dying. Gone.
Taher runs towards the house but the heat is intense. He raises his arm to protect his face, the wash of flame scorching his skin. He staggers forward one step, two, three, but it’s no good. He can’t get any closer and even if he could there’s nothing he can do. Everyone he knows and loves is already in the hands of God. He falls to the floor and crawls away through the dirt, passing out among the goats, their frantic bleating the last thing he remembers from that awful day.
The glass steamed again and he wiped it once more. The desert was gone, London back. London. The capital of Great Britain. So-called Great Britain. Taher had to prevent himself from thumping his fist on the window and obliterating the image. He hadn’t known it all those years ago, but the devastation wrought that evening in the desert had come from a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a Royal Navy destroyer stationed three hundred miles away in the Persian Gulf. The new way of waging war. The modern way. Just like a computer game. Type a few letters and numbers. Hit the enter key. Wipe away half a dozen innocent lives in a targeting error. For the few people that bother to read the news reports the lives lost are dismissed in a phrase that brought bile to Taher’s throat: collateral damage.
He rubbed the area of old scar tissue on his right forearm and then looked through the dirty glass again, the city spread out before him. Cars spiralled along roads. People disappeared into a tube station. Aeroplanes hovered on the horizon on their final approach to Heathrow.
Well, there were other ways of fighting back, he thought. You didn’t need a million-pound missile fired from a billion-pound ship, you didn’t need to be a global military power. You just needed determination, a few trusted followers and the knowledge you were performing the will of God.
Yes, the day was surely coming when the good folk of London would experience collateral damage for themselves.
Silva was back in Plymouth. Walking the round. Delivering the letters. Thinking about the utter craziness of Fairchild’s suggestion.
When Karen Hope turns up you’re going to kill her.
She’d walked out on him after that, his voice echoing in her ears as she started her bike and rode away.
…you’re going to kill her.
Fairchild was living in a world of make-believe and movies where snipers took potshots and escaped by jumping from buildings or hanging on to a rope lowered from a helicopter.
…kill her.
Assassinate the future president of the United States? Straight up madness.
And yet as she trudged the streets in the warm summer rain, the story Fairchild had spun snagged at her thoughts and refused to lie buried. What if her mother had discovered something about the Hopes that was incriminating enough for them to consider murdering her? Although her mother had no interest in American domestic politics, she’d certainly had many assignments related to US foreign policy. The relationship with Israel, the funding of the Taliban, the two wars in Iraq, the war on terror. Fairchild wasn’t a back-room general either, and he’d served in several wars. Would such a man indulge in high fantasy? She didn’t know, but if it hadn’t been for the cryptic postcard her mother had written her she may well have dropped the whole thing.
…hidden secrets… definitely Hope…
There was something there but, try as she might, she couldn’t fathom it, and by the end of the week her head was so muddled she decided to clear it by going for a run. She rode her motorbike up onto the moor and ran under dark skies. She pushed through the pain barrier, her lungs bursting, her legs aching. After two hours of physical hell, she returned to the boat, exhausted. She took a shower in the toilet block and collapsed on her bunk, thinking her head was no clearer.
A while later, her mobile rang. She blinked and reached for the phone. Outside the sun was playing hide and seek with the rain clouds, the inside of the boat alternately a warm yellow or a cold grey. She peered at the screen. Didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello?’ She swivelled round and sat on the edge of the bunk.
‘It’s me, Becca. You OK?’ Beneath the American accent there was a hint of Irish. Like an aftertaste in a whiskey. Wood smoke, coffee, peach. ‘Because I just heard, sweetheart. About your mom.’
‘You just heard?’ Silva recognised the voice and felt her grip tighten on the phone. ‘It’s been weeks, Sean.’
‘I’ve been in-country. Sudan. It’s a long story, but the gist is I knew about the shooting but I didn’t get the names. I didn’t connect.’
‘You didn’t connect?’ She remembered the space between them. Geographical and emotional. No one to blame, no one at fault, just circumstances.
‘I’m so sorry, Becca. If only I could have been there with you. If only… well.’
She remembered the aftertaste. Burning and bitter and the warm glow seeping through to the tips of the fingers and making her whole body shiver. Her shadow stood black against the side of the cabin for a moment before fading as the sun disappeared once again. That was her and Sean. A warm glow fading to… to what?
Sean Connor, her sometime boyfriend, was thirty-three. An American of Irish descent out of Eastport, Maine. ‘As north and east as is possible and as close to you Brits as that,’ he’d said to her, holding up his thumb and finger an inch apart. ‘Just the Atlantic Ocean between us.’ The gesture had come with a wink and a raising of his glass as they’d sat in the bar on the base in Kabul. She’d first met him earlier in the day as the stars had twinkled in the predawn sky. Her patrol was making final preparations for an excursion into the mountains south of the city when the CO had turned up with Sean in tow. Plainly annoyed, the CO had introduced Sean and gruffly added ‘out of Langley’ as if that was all the explanation needed. Later, as they’d sat in the back of the Foxhound patrol vehicle taking them to their drop-off point, Sean had elaborated. He was a CIA intelligence officer, there to identify a particular terrorist leader believed to be in the area. Silva had spent the rest of the day with Sean, hunkered down in a makeshift bunker with only Itchy for company. Sean had watched as Silva had dispatched a fighter who’d made the mistake of venturing forth and then nearly crapped himself when the one man had turned into twenty and they’d had to do a rapid exfil down a steep gully.
Back in the Foxhound, speeding along the dirt road towards the base, Silva had ribbed him. ‘I thought you were a spy. James Bond, Jason Bourne, derring-do and all.’
‘Fuck that.’ Sean had given her a grin and tapped his head. ‘I’m an intelligence officer and my brain tells me to steer clear of bullets.’
‘Right.’
‘Forgive me for saying so, but force alone never wins the battle.’ Sean nodded at Silva’s rifle. ‘Analysis of the situation leading to the formation of a specific strategy for victory will.’
‘And what’s your strategy for victory?’
Sean smiled, his intent now obvious from his flirtatious look. ‘To ask you to have a drink with me tonight when we get back to the base.’
It had started there and ended, at Silva’s behest, three years later. Their relationship had been conducted on Skype and WhatsApp and in the short periods of leave they could arrange to coincide. Silva had been in Afghanistan, then back to the UK, and then to Afghanistan again on what would be her final tour before she was court-martialled. Sean had flitted between Baghdad, Kabul, London and the US. He’d visited her once when she’d been in the glasshouse and she’d told him not to come again. When she’d been released she’d met him in London during one of his stopovers and that was the last time she’d seen him.
‘Where are you, Sean?’ Silva asked. From the delay and crackle on the line she suspected he was using a satellite phone and calling from somewhere remote. She felt her defences rise as if she needed to protect herself from something. Almost unconsciously she hardened the tone of her voice. ‘And what do you want?’
‘I’m in Plymouth, Becca. And I want to see you.’
The first week of Holm’s pretend investigation panned out pretty much as he expected. Colleagues poked their heads round the door of the little office to see what he was up to, Huxtable nodded with approval when she saw the fake brief Holm had written on animal rights groups, and Javed continued to slurp his coffee, crunch his biscuits and clip his nails in a way that annoyed Holm immensely.
The two of them monitored the Twitter account of the mysterious user known as TCXGP1505, while Holm set up the dummy animal rights operation. He phoned his contacts and let them know what he was up to and made requests for information from various agencies. A policy book was created and a budget drawn up. Javed scoured the internet for extreme material and organised everything in a database.
The initial excitement Holm had felt when Javed had shown him the tweet slowly ebbed away though. TCXGP1505 remained silent. The account followed nobody and had no followers. The sole tweet was the one in Arabic that referenced the innocent one.
‘I don’t get it,’ Holm said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if our source, if that’s what it was, has been compromised.’
Javed looked up from his screen, horrified. ‘You mean taken out?’
‘It figures. What else can explain the lack of a follow-up?’
Javed shrugged. ‘If it’s somebody close to Taher then the risk must be enormous. Perhaps they got cold feet.’
‘Perhaps.’ But Holm didn’t think so. They’d sent one message. The tease. The wake-up call. The bait. If the source was still alive there had to be another one along at some point.
And so it proved.
On Friday afternoon, as Holm was deciding whether to take up Palmer’s offer of a couple of jars after work, Javed lurched back in his chair.
‘We’re on!’ The chair rocked violently as Javed changed direction and hunched forward, his face inches from the screen. ‘What the…?’
Holm stood and moved over. The tweet was a sequence of numbers, seventeen in all.
‘18, 18, 14, 0, 21, 11…’ Javed began to read them. He turned from the screen. ‘Another code.’
‘Makes sense, after all, it’s what we spooks do, isn’t it? Codes and dead-letter drops and listening to phone conversations. Least that’s what I believed before I signed on. More fool me.’
Holm read the numbers back to himself and tried several simple substitution ciphers in his head. The first three tries were gobbledygook so he went across to his desk and grabbed a few sheets of paper and a couple of pencils. He handed a sheet and a pencil to Javed. ‘Let’s see what that brain of yours can do.’
Holm wrote the numbers out large. Then small. Then in a scrawl. Then neatly. He tried placing them in a clock face, moving round the dial in a random fashion. He multiplied the numbers together. Divided them. Added them.
‘You got something, boss?’ Javed said. He appeared to have a similar idea to Holm as he was using the calculator on his phone to perform some kind of complicated transformation. ‘Because it’s beyond me.’
‘Nothing, and we can’t very well give it to the bods at GCHQ. We have to work this out ourselves.’
‘They want us to get this,’ Javed said. ‘Else why bother?’
Holm read through the numbers once more. There were, of course, certain codes that couldn’t be deciphered. They were uncrackable and offered perfect secrecy even against the most powerful supercomputer.
‘I’ve got it,’ Holm said, realising what the cipher was. ‘These numbers are from a one-time pad.’
Javed nodded, understanding immediately. ‘So we’re stuffed?’
‘Unless we can find the key, yes.’
A code created with a one-time pad used a sequence of letters or numbers to encrypt the message. Without the source material, decryption was impossible.
Holm screwed up his piece of paper and lobbed it towards the filing cabinet where it bounced off the front and fell into the waste paper bin. He shook his head.
They want us to get this… Javed had said.
He stared at the filing cabinet for a few seconds and walked over and opened the top drawer. The drawer held various documents relating to the fake animal rights investigation, but Holm rummaged behind them and pulled out the index card he’d discovered when they’d first moved in to the office.
‘Christ.’ He read the name on the card. Robert Gerard Sands. The full name of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who’d died way back in the nineteen eighties. There were seventeen letters in the name and there were seventeen numbers in the tweet. He jabbed a finger at the name, not quite believing what he was seeing. ‘This is the key. This is the one-time pad.’
‘How the—?’
‘I’ve no bloody idea.’
‘A is zero, right?’ Javed was at his shoulder now, the lad’s face creased in concentration. ‘At least that’s what I was taught.’
‘Yes, let’s start with that.’ Holm began to do the calculations himself. He wrote out the full code sequence, below that the name, and below that an A to Z scale numbered zero to twenty-five.
18, 18, 14, 0, 21, 11, 25, 8, 8, 13, 9, 23, 23, 5, 1, 14, 2
Robert Gerard Sands
A/0 B/1 C/2 D/3 E/4 F/5 G/6 H/7 I/8 J/9 K/10 L/11 M/12 N/13 O/14 P/15 Q/16 R/17 S/18 T/19 U/20 V/21 W/22 X/23 Y/24 Z/25
The first number in the code was 18, while the first letter in the one-time pad sequence was R. The position of R on Holm’s scale was 17 so he took that from 18, which left 1. Letter 1 on the same scale was B, so B was the answer. He moved on to the second number, which was also 18. However, the second letter on the pad was O which was 14 on the scale. 18 minus 14 was 4 so that became E. The third number was 14 and the third letter B. 14 minus… before he got any further Javed had it.
‘Ben Western Suffolk.’ Javed smiled and moved back to his chair. ‘Whoever the hell that is.’
‘Search it.’
‘I am.’ Javed’s fingers were already tapping his keyboard. He ran his eyes down a screen of search results. ‘There’s a number of newspaper reports from last week. A man called Ben Western went missing in Suffolk. Doesn’t appear to be anything particularly interesting about the case.’
‘A misper?’ Holm used his old police shorthand. ‘That’s it?’
Javed peered at the screen again. ‘Well it can’t be a coincidence.’
Holm slumped back and tried to get his head round the information. How could it have anything to do with the master terrorist he’d been hunting for years?
‘Do you want me to look him up?’ Javed had closed the browser and opened MI5’s internal database. It held huge amounts of information and cross-referenced the Police National Computer, material held at GCHQ and MI6, as well as international databases from foreign agencies and police forces. Javed began to type. ‘Might be a chance—’
‘No!’ Holm swung his chair round. ‘There could be a flag on the record.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Think about it. Whoever sent us the information on this Ben Western guy must be in MI5 or have some sort of access. That could have been any one of hundreds, even thousands, of people.’ Holm glanced at the filing cabinet. ‘Nobody else would have been able to get the index card in there.’
‘But why the subterfuge?’
‘I’m not sure, but whoever it is can’t want Huxtable or anyone else to know what we’re up to. They must realise Taher has a contact in the security services. It’s what I’ve been saying for ages.’ Holm held up a finger and thumb and squeezed them together. ‘Every time I’ve been close to catching Taher he’s slipped away. I’m not risking that again.’
‘So what do we do?’
Holm thought for a moment. ‘Animal rights. Start searching the PNC for crimes suspected of being committed by animal liberation groups. That will bring up dozens of records spread across the country. Pick a few from the Suffolk area we can use as decoys.’
‘And then?’
‘We follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.’ Holm waited for a quip back from Javed but there was nothing. He shook his head, wondering if the lad’s cultural references bore any relation to his own. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of The Wizard of Oz?’
‘Of course I’ve heard of it. I’ve dreamed of being Dorothy for half my life.’ Javed pouted and laughed as Holm reddened. ‘But you, I imagine, would be better suited to playing the scarecrow.’