Liberation Day

Chapter 57

The side of the warship loomed high above us. A rectangle of red light glowed at us from the top of a gangway, about six or seven yards above the waterline. At the bottom of it two shadows stood ready to receive the launch. Two black and businesslike RIBs (rigid inflatable boats), each with two huge outboards, bobbed up and down on the swell beside them.

The launch’s props powered down, and we came slowly alongside. The two guys grabbed our side rails. They were dressed in dry bags and black woolly hats, and had rolled-up life preservers around their necks. Venus got to her feet as they pulled us alongside. “Come with me.” She nodded down at the stretcher. “Where he’s headed, you don’t want to go.”

I left Goatee to his fate, and made my way up the gangway behind her. I was feeling weak and nauseous, and salt water gave the good news to my hands as I tried to get a grip on the guardrail.

Wrapping my arms around my chest like a cold child, I stepped into the red glow. There was a gentle hum of radio traffic, and murmured exchanges among the dozen or so bodies crouched in the small, steel-encased holding bay. They were all in dry bags, unzipped to let in some air. Next to each man, a Protect helmet, the sort canoeists wear, rested on top of a black nylon harness, holding magazines for the 10mm version of the Heckler & Koch MP5. All wore leg holsters with.45 Glocks. The red light was to protect their night vision; something was going to happen out there in the dark and, by the look of things, it was going to happen soon.

One of the bodies stood and spoke quietly to the woman. Her name wasn’t Venus, it was Nisha.

Then he turned back to the group. “White light, people. White light.”

Everybody closed their eyes and covered them with their hands as he threw the lock on a bulkhead door and pushed down the handle. White light poured in from the hallway, drowning the red. I followed Nisha; as the door closed, we stood blinking in a hallway lined with some sort of imitation wood veneer. There was complete silence, except for the gentle hum of air-conditioning from the ducts above us. Our rubber soles squeaked on the highly polished linoleum tiles as I followed Nisha along the hallway, expecting a squad of imperial storm troopers to appear at any moment.

I kept unwrapping an arm, checking the phone. The signal bars suddenly disappeared. “Stop!”

She spun around. “What’s the problem?”

“I can’t go any farther.” I started to turn back toward the red room. “I haven’t got a signal. The two guys in the van, they’re heading to Antibes — there’s a boat, we need to know where it is. I need a signal.”

“You talking Ninth of May?”

I nodded.

“We got it. Left Vauban a couple hours ago.”

“You’re already tracking it?”

“We’ll hit it just as soon as it crosses the line into international waters.” She turned back the way we were heading. “Come on. Someone is waiting to talk to you.”

We came to another veneer-covered steel door, with a stainless-steel entry system alongside it. She tapped in a code, there was a gentle buzz, and she pulled it open for me.

Banks of radar and computer screens glowed at us from three sides of the room. This had to be the ops center. Maybe a dozen people, all dressed in civilian clothes, talked quietly into radios and to each other as they studied the screens.

The room was small, maybe five yards by five, with wires ducttaped to the floor and wall; this wasn’t a permanent fixture. A large command desk dominated the center of the space. A gray-headed forty-something in a green polo shirt stood by it, poring over charts, mapping, and photography with two more serious-looking heads. All three grasped mugs of steaming brew, and none of them looked up.

As Nisha and I approached, I could make out satellite images of Vauban and BSM, and then an enlargement of my passport picture.

Grayhead finally acknowledged our presence. He raised a pale, overworked, acne-scarred face.

Nisha moved over to one of the computer screens. “You in command?” I asked.

He gave me the once-over. “You okay?”

I shrugged.

He nodded in the direction of Nisha, who was now holding a phone. “I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”

“Who?”

He didn’t answer, but I didn’t really need him to. As he turned and told someone to get me a medic, I dragged myself over to Nisha, eased myself down into a padded swivel chair, but couldn’t stop another spasm of coughing. Stuff came up, but there was nowhere to spit it, so I pulled out the neck of my sweatshirt and used the inside. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve before taking the phone. I put the cell phone on the desktop; there were two signal bars on the display.

“Nick?” It was George. “Where are the—”

“The collectors? They’re dead. It’s not them on the boat, I reckon it’s—”

“Stop. I need two things right now. One: where’s the rest of the team?”

“Both dead. The police will have the bodies by now….”

“You sure they’re dead?”

I took a long, slow, painful breath. “I watched one die, and heard the other.”

“Good. Were you part of the incident in L’Ariane?”

“Yes.”

“Good, we can contain that.” I heard him turn away from the mouthpiece and speak to the people around him. This was a deniable operation: they were making sure every track that could lead to us had been blocked. Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba were no longer assets. They’d been written off George’s balance sheet.

I could hear murmurs of approval from the voices around George as he finished passing on the great news.

“Okay. Two: is the device still on board? Our people are going to intercept.”

“Listen, George, it’s not the collectors on board. I just told you, they’re dead. It’s the source and Ramsay. They got the team and the collectors killed, and they’ve taken the money.”

“We know, son, we found out yesterday. They won’t get to keep it for long.”

We found out yesterday? They knew? Why the fuck hadn’t we known?

“What? We could have done things differently…the other two could still be alive.”

“I keep telling you, son, I don’t tell even God everything. Now, is the goddamned device still in position? They don’t know it exists yet — they need to know if it’s still there.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “What’s happening? You lifting them?”

“All we want is the money.”

“You’re just letting them go? They got our guys killed—”

“Okay, son, this is how it goes down. It’s over. They go free, we get the money, we get the hawalladas, you get a medic, and a good night’s sleep.”

“My team is dead, George. You’re letting the fuckers go?”

He didn’t even pause to draw breath. “I have other plans for those two. Don’t mess up on me now. You have everything to lose, and nothing to back up with.”

I remained silent for a moment. I thought about the boys on the RIBs giving Greaseball and Curly a big kiss on both cheeks and waving as they disappeared into the night.

George seemed to be reading my mind. “Son, do I need to worry about you?”

“No, George,” I said. “I know what I’ve got to do.”

“Good. Tell them about the device. We’ll meet soon.”

The phone went dead and I gave Nisha back the receiver. “There’s an explosive device on board.”

She turned to Grayhead. “Simon, we definitely have a device on board.”

He looked up sharply from his desk.

“On the top deck, a plastic cylinder tucked into the couch behind the wheel. There’s no antihandling device…just twist the cylinder, take the two AA batteries out, and it’s safe. I’ll draw a picture.”

Nisha was already fetching me paper as the information was passed down to the red room via one of the radio operators.

One of the medics arrived as I started sketching a diagram of the device and its location, trying not to smear it with too much blood.

Grayhead had other things on his mind. “Stand to, the crews. The Ninth of May… Looks like they’ve stopped hugging the coast and are heading out to sea. Should be over the line in twenty-five.”

The red room would be a hive of activity now as the crews pulled on their chest harnesses, made ready their weapons, and finally put on their Protects and life-preservers.

As I sat there, trying to cut away from my anger, the theme tune to Mission Impossible struck up. Heads spun to see which shit-for-brains had brought a cell phone into the ops center.

I pressed the green button and immediately got Thackery hollering in my ear. “It’s gone, the boat left!” I heard the kids from the Lee in the background. “There were two on board, the guy who owns the boat, and his friend….”

I looked around me as things started getting more intense. The crews were in the boats, ready to go. “Stand down, mate, it’s all been taken care of.”

“What?”

“It’s all been taken care of, stand down. Thanks, mate, thanks.” I hit the end-of-call button, then finished the drawing and handed it to Nisha.

I sat in the swivel chair as Grayhead confirmed the crews were ready in their boats. As soon as they had the drawing, he’d give them the go. “Contact thirty-three minutes.” He wanted to make sure they were in international waters.

George was right, of course. This was going to be a long war, and Greaseball would be even more useful in future. Now they’d stolen from al-Qaeda, George had both of them tightly by the balls, and could point them in whatever direction he pleased, as long as HIV didn’t get them first.

“Contact twenty-nine minutes,” a voice called out from the radar screen.

I wondered what was happening on the Ninth of May. Curly would probably be doing the driving, leaving Greaseball to pull the cork on a bottle of good champagne. Next stop, maybe, some boy-town Greek island and the start of their own big-bang theory.

The ops room continued to follow the progress of their two crews.

“Same heading. Contact twenty-one minutes.”

But then my smile disappeared. So what if they lost the money? They’d still be alive: they’d still get to go wherever it was they were heading.

As the medic lifted my sweatshirt and started to have a good look at what was left of my rib cage, I pictured Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba in their Rubbermaids at the safe house, having a good laugh as I gave them my jester impression. They had saved my life, and kept their promise to each other. Now it was time for me to keep mine to them.

I started pressing the buttons with my right thumb as the medic dug into his bag. A gentle beep sounded each time I hit another digit of the pager number, willing it still to be in range.

Suddenly the answering service was yammering off to me in French. I didn’t understand a word it was saying, but I knew what it meant: “Wait for the tone, then tap in the number that you want the pager to display. After that just hit the star button.”

I waited for the tone, and did exactly that, just hitting the eight button a few times, then the star. I pushed the phone against my ear and held my breath.

We had done our job, and done it well; so fuck George, and fuck everything he had for me.

A few seconds later the answering service came back to me, and this time I understood every word.

“Message bien reçu.”

Epilogue

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 10:28 HRS.

The coast road north ran parallel with the train track out of Boston. I watched from the train as it cut through the icy marshland. The day was dull and gray, the only burst of color a huge Stars and Stripes in the distance, fluttering from a flagpole at the point where the earth met the sky. I wondered how cold my reception was going to be at Wonderland — or if I was going to get one at all.

The other passengers on the silver commuter train still looked at me as if I’d just escaped from the local nuthouse, maybe because I was in the same greasy, unshaven state as last time, maybe because I still had traces of bruising, and the cuts on my hands and head had not yet healed. I was too exhausted to worry.

The front pages of their papers still carried pictures of troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were now on the run. “Inside the Manhunt” read the cover of Time magazine, and Bin Laden’s face stared out at me through the crosshairs of the art department’s sniper rifle.

I hadn’t seen George yet, and still didn’t know what was going to happen to me. My big hope was that I’d find a passport in my Christmas stocking, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

The train rattled on across Revere. Every time I did this journey I felt as though I was in the middle of an American history lesson: everywhere you looked there was something to remind you that the Brits had had their asses kicked here a couple of hundred years ago. I remembered telling Carrie, “We’ll be back as soon as the lease runs out.” It had seemed quite funny at the time, but I couldn’t raise much of a smile right now: I was too busy wondering how much Brit ass was going to get kicked today.

The warship had weighed anchor within hours of the Ninth of May exploding, after Grayhead’s boat teams had finished trying to make sense of the fireball they’d seen in the distance as they closed in. Once we were within reach of the western Italian coast, I was shoved on a helicopter.

The headquarters of the U.S. 16th Air Force, based at Aviano, was about an hour and a half from Venice, but I missed out on the sightseeing. My three days there were spent in a featureless office building, getting debriefed by two men and a woman to the roar of F-16 fighters and a coffeemaker whose power kept going off. At least the coffee was hotter on the flight back to the States, courtesy of the USAF.

They told me George had gone ballistic about Greaseball getting the good news. I spent a bit of time describing how the device worked, but couldn’t for the life of me explain what had caused the detonation. Maybe a wrong number? That had always been a worry.

They nodded, then moved on, but I wondered how long it would be before George took a long, hard look at Thackery’s phone records. Whatever, I would just have to play dumb: it was one of the things I was really good at.

Being holed up at Aviano at least gave me time to rest my two broken ribs, with some help from a truckload of codeine and sleeping upright on a couch.

Gumaa and Goatee hadn’t been so lucky. They’d wasted no time in telling the interrogation team who their contacts were in the U.S., and a bunch of six-man ASUs, one living in the Detroit area, had already been covertly rendered. There would be more to come: the two hawallada were giving out information faster than Bloomberg.

The Detroit ASU had planned to drive to the Mall of America in Minnesota. Seven times larger than a baseball stadium, with more than forty-two million visitors every year, it was the perfect target for a dirty-bomb attack. Their plan was pretty much along the lines George had feared. All six were going to move into the mall at different times, through different entrances, onto different floors in different sections. They had aimed to detonate themselves at exactly two P.M. on December 24. The place would have been filled with tens of thousands of shoppers, kids in line for Santa, all that sort of Christmas stuff.

I thought Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba would have been pretty pleased to have gotten in the way of that. I just wished they’d been here to celebrate.

Their bodies were probably still in a morgue in Nice. No one was going to come forward to claim them; they’d probably be burned, or buried by the French in paupers’ graves. I hoped that they’d both be getting their little bit of the Paradise Lotfi had spent so much time talking to God about, and that they’d been able to look down on the Ninth of May with a big smile on their faces as it got its own.

I thought about the three of us messing around with the hats in the safe house, and Hubba-Hubba with that evil eye thing around his neck, and couldn’t help but smile. Then, from nowhere, I could hear his voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to me: “He hates this. He says I will not go to Paradise…But he is wrong, I think. I hope…”

I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about their sister, Khalisah. What would she and their families do now? They’d be needing money. I didn’t know how these things were done: would George see to it that they were looked after? He’d have to, surely — he’d have a hell of a job recruiting more Lotfis and Hubba-Hubbas if they discovered their families wouldn’t be taken care of if everything went to rat shit. But there was no way I could trust him, even if he said he would. I’d do something about it myself. The Mégane would have been towed from the square in Antibes by now, but with luck the money we’d taken off Gumaa would still be under the seat. It wouldn’t be much, but it would be a start….

The bridge over the Saugus River took us into Lynn. We were nearly at Wonderland. Last time I’d come up this track I’d looked forward to a new job, a new life. But what now?

I didn’t even know if she was going to take the day off work to meet me. But if she didn’t, I’d just go and sit on the doorstep until she came home. There were some things I needed to say, and thought she needed to hear.

Hubba-Hubba had helped make my mind up.

He’d been sitting in the front of the Scudo, repairing his evil eye.

“We are a family first, no matter what disagreements we may have, no matter what pain we may suffer…. We learned long ago to meet in the middle, because otherwise the family is lost.”

I couldn’t be a student or a bartender — or anything else, for that matter. I couldn’t do anything other than what I did. Sure, I didn’t much like a lot of the stuff that went with it. But she had once said to me that she didn’t care what I did, as long as I was good at it. Well, this was what I did, and I was good at it. And, thanks to my two friends with the Rubbermaids and the shower cap fetish, I’d realized I was working for something I believed in. The people I cared for lived in the country I had played a small part in protecting, and for once in my life I felt good about what I had done. And if the angels did come down and weigh my book of destiny for a laugh, then maybe there’d be a page or two of good stuff for them to read.

Maybe Carrie would read it too. Maybe I could tell her about Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba and Khalisah, and we could take a few steps toward the middle. People can stay together if they really want to, even if there’s a whole lot of shit going on around them. I knew that now: I’d seen it happen.

The train came to a halt and people stood and reached for their hats and coats, and gathered up their bags of Christmas shopping. The automatic doors drew back to reveal the signs for Wonderland station.

I stepped out of the train. It was as cold as it ever was, and the wind was bitter. I zipped up my fleece jacket, and joined the throng heading for the barrier.