Battle Sight Zero

Chapter 7

He lay on his back, and his breath came in heavy spasms, asleep but suffering.

‘What problem, guys?’

‘You’re it. You’re the problem.’

Norm Clarke played it calm. He had been asked into the back room of a club close to the bus station. No music, and the grille down over the bar and the lights low, but a pall of tobacco smoke in the room, and the old gang were there – sitting, watching. Their younger people stood and a couple of the bigger men – likely enhanced with steroids – were behind him. They had the door. The back room’s one window was barred, with a steel shutter on the outside. Had all seemed good, and Norm was back in Swindon after a run across country to Bristol. Had come back all innocent: might have thought the sun shone sweetly on him… now wondered where he’d made the mistake.

‘Not that I know of, don’t see myself as a problem.’

‘We do, we see you as a problem.’

‘That’s just a laugh… I’m no problem.’

‘You’re a problem because you don’t stack right.’

There was no fast way into a group. Took time. Street corner selling, school gate trading, doing running and lookout for a dealer in Exeter, best part of a year of a life gone, and somebody must have said something about him to one of the boys, up the chain, who handled Class A. They might have taken a long slow look at him, and then small bits and pieces were put in his way, trivial jobs. Opportunities came rarely and were not to be missed. He had offered himself. Could do driving… did not say that he had been to prison because that was the fastest and easiest place to do a check on his history. The instructors said that advancement was never to be rushed, had to go with the flow and the tide. A long story, told short, a big flu virus went the rounds, guys dropped like flies hit by an aerosol spray. A supply chain of what came in from Spain on a Brittany Ferry to Plymouth staggered to a stop. Norm was around, people knew of him, talked of him, and nobody had gotten round to running a deep examination of his legend. A packet, a couple of kilos, perhaps less, and a location. It was done. Delivered to satisfaction. But the virus was stubborn and showed little sign of easing, and another run was needed. By the time the antibiotic did a good job on the virus, Norm had made himself useful, seemed – almost – a part of the furniture: he did not ask questions, had never been caught eavesdropping phone calls nor seen flicking through papers in the office. Easy to be with, and every trip he made seemed to get through, no hassle. The way they might have looked at it, ‘too good to be true’. Just took one guy to open his mouth and start questioning a newcomer’s credentials, and then an examination and more guys chipping in with anomalies, what did not fit, and the starting of a trade in them because no one wanted to be left high and dry and defending a casualty… and down the line, somewhere, was a mistake. When it went sour, it was always because of a mistake, and most times the Level One, skilled and trained and alert, never knew it. One of the ’tecs who had briefed him at the start had said of them, ‘Not idiots; foul and vicious and no education, but not idiots. Cunning, take the job seriously, don’t want to go back to gaol, and they have a sniff of who you are and we have to hope the cavalry and the guns come running and quick. They are hard little shits, our evaluation. Good luck, lad, good luck.’ Might be a trawling run, might be because Delia, one of the groupie girls with them, had taken a fancy and put another’s snout out of joint, might be because he had fucked up big. Only one of them did the talking. The son of the founding father of the group. Clever little shite. Big glasses and did the accountancy and when the hit came – which it would – then his mobile would do the work of a good prosecutor, would send them all down with the key thrown away. Didn’t hold anyone’s gaze, failed to confront at this early stage in the game.

‘I’d say talk is cheap. I’d say I am not a problem.’

‘A problem is a difficulty, a difficulty is something we care to avoid. A problem that becomes a difficulty is then a danger. We don’t want it, a danger to us.’

The father sat at his desk. The boy would have his say. In with them were the principal buyer, the main distributor, who looked furtive and unhappy and who would not have appreciated negative shit being talked, and there was a woman who had a reputation as a hard bitch and who did the contracts and was a law school drop-out, and a couple of enforcers, and two guys behind Norm. The voice of the boy was cold and quiet and dripping, and he’d have fancied himself as a Pacino clone, a poor man’s Scarface, and thought he was God’s fucking gift to forensic interrogation.

‘Is this some sort of therapy session? Don’t see where we’re going. I do my job, I get paid, I do my job satisfactorily, you all say so. I don’t appreciate this shit. Can we move on, what’s shifted tomorrow.’

‘About your face and about what you wear – Norm, if that’s your name.’

‘That is bigger shit. “About your face and about what you wear”, means what?’

No panic button with him, and no gas in his coat or pepper spray, no knife and firearm. When he was on the way back down to Plymouth or up towards Swindon, he would go off the road halfway along and meet his handler and his control officer, and just seem to be sitting at a table and reading his newspaper, taking time off from eyeing the tits and bums, and his own people would sidle towards him and then sit down, and a full team for surveillance and protection would be deployed. The stresses ran in his mind, and the veins of his face filled with pumped blood, and he was scared: had reason to be. His face? Start with his face… the beard was crap, looked recent and was, might have looked designer grown, straggly with no body. And the clothes… The mistake could be with the clothes. He lived in a bedsit. The cover was a jobbing gardener. Wore those sort of clothes, and most of these guys were in the smart casual range, but what cost money. Stuff bought with cash. They didn’t touch Class A, none of them. If the kid had, the boss’s son, he would have been dismembered. He could not play the part of a dope addict with a concave chest and clothes hanging off him like he was a goddamn skeleton, but what Norm Clarke wore were the clothes that went with his gardening work, rejects from a charity shop, and it might have grated in comparison. Where was the mistake? The usual one, the one that did serious harm, was being ‘too eager’, too ready to do anything required, and it might have been what the boy – thinking himself Pacino/Scarface – had detected. The room was dim, and the smoke misted up around the neon, and nobody had offered Norm a fag, and it had taken a while before he had been able to see around the corners of the room and into the shadow. He saw a petrol-driven chain-saw, a whole big heap of plastic, and the sort of drill that would have a battery’s power and was big enough to make a decent Christmas present. Difficult to know how to react, because it was vague and did not demand specifics in his answers, but there was a hatred in the air: this was not the Crown Court and they’d not need sworn and tested evidence… it would be about what instinct told them. It happened too fast for him. A blow on the shoulder. Would have been a sign from the boss. Big boys, those behind him, and the steroids did well for their strength. One minute standing and the next disoriented, and the next sinking down and the pain welling and his arms wrenched behind him and cord binding him, and he was trying to duck his head and weave, but they had the hood over him and then he was down and in the black space.

He heard the scrape of a chair across the floor and the rustle as plastic was unwrapped. He was put in the chair.

‘What the fuck? Why the hell? What gives with you lot? What is the problem?’

He did not think he was heard and there was no response, but he heard the plastic being spread on the floor around the chair. He felt the piss welling in him… the instructors did it well, and the Marines in ‘Resistance to Interrogation’, and they had no comprehension of how it was.

And he still slept, hated it, but could not wake.

‘You watch him, Zeinab, watch him and closely.’

She was given the passport she would use. She flicked it open, saw the name, looked at the photograph, and with the glasses it was a good enough image – heavy and distinctive spectacles, with clear lenses. Among the pages of the passport were bank notes, euros and sterling. They were a hundred yards from the station and would have been short of the cameras that covered the front entrance. She opened her bag, slid it inside.

Krait, the snake with the venom in its tongue, repeated, ‘Watch him, always, and be prepared – you understand?’

Scorpion had turned to face her. ‘Be prepared, whatever is necessary.’

She came out of the car then leaned back in to collect her bag. Traffic edged past them, heading for the station. Luton, this time in the morning – close to dawn – was busy with office workers heading for the capital.

‘I trust him,’ she said.

Scorpion said, ‘If you suspect him, you act. What is to “act”, you know that?’

‘Whatever is “necessary”, what you said.’

‘You saw the boy in the car?’ from Scorpion.

‘He made suspicion, enough for us to “act”, do what was “necessary”,’ from Krait.

‘You think me weak, I am not.’

From Krait, ‘We take a gamble with him.’

‘He is infatuated. I think, almost, he loves me. He just wants to be with me. He is what makes our chain strongest.’

From Scorpion, ‘The ability of the chain to survive stress is not the strongest link, it is the weakest. The weakest link.’

‘He is not that, the weakest.’

‘If you doubted him, Zeinab, then…’

‘I do not.’

She lifted her bag and started to walk. There was no call after her from either of them. She did not know how they had killed the boy who had attracted their suspicion but she had seen the bruises and scrapes on his face and the wild glimmer in his eyes, supposed it was a measure of the pain inflicted, did not know which of them – Krait or Scorpion – had done it. Neither called after her to wish her luck, to give encouragement. Had either of them been in Syria, or escaped in the last hours of the defence of Mosul? She did not know. If she brought back one weapon, she did not know which of them would use it: the one who was spindly and tall, the other who was squat and heavy at the gut and the hips. If she failed them, if it imploded, then they would rot in cells for near to the rest of their adult lives: if she failed badly, so would she… She walked and started to see the image. Four young men, twelve years earlier, rucksacks heavy on their backs, strolling towards the open doors of Luton station, and less than two hours of their lives left to be lived, and the bombs they carried primed… and their targets were in London where she now headed, and they were from her streets, from among her people. They had shown, on the cameras that watched them, no fear, their hands in their pockets, nothing furtive, simply going about their business. She walked in their footsteps… Zeinab had read that the names of the men were forgotten, they had been consigned to statistics… walked where they had been. Went boldly.

She was Zeinab, 22 years of age, a student at a prestigious university, from a small house in a Leeds satellite town – once vibrant, now dying, and she took the first steps of the journey taking her to war, but needed first to gather the necessary weapons for combat. She was jostled, pushed, and men and women surged past her for the barriers and the platforms, and they were her enemy, and she floated among them and was a ‘clean skin’ and went unnoticed. She revelled in her anonymity… and hated. She did not – never had – analyse the loathing she felt for the flow of society around her, whether in the mall at Manchester that they had paced out, or at this station near to London… It did not matter to her whether those who might be maimed, killed, bereaved, were Christians or Jews or Muslims, not important whether they were old and frail like the woman who sheltered close to a wall, clinging to a walking frame and letting the crush pass her, or whether they were young and ambitious and hopeful like the kids on her corridor in the Hall of Residence. She could not have pointed to a particular slight, or an insult. She had never suffered humiliation because of her faith, her dress, her appearance, her intellect. She was ignored. She detested those, pushing past her, who did not see her, never had and never would – unless she brought back the weapon and it was used.

She queued, bought a ticket. Wondered where he was, and wondered whether she should have boasted to them about her control of Andy Knight – where he was, sweet boy and stupid and loving – but realised she had developed a growing degree of softness for the boy – and spat from her mind talk of suspicion and acting and necessity… Zeinab waited on the platform for the next train south, and the start. Did not know where it would take her, how far beyond anything in her experience.

The first light of the day peeped over the rim of the hillside above La Castellane, and feeble shadows were thrown from the blocks and settled on the ground where the rubbish bins had not been emptied and the trees were snapped off and bushes collected garbage and plastic. Few had work that necessitated them rising early to take the 25 bus down the hill and past the old suburbs and the ferry port and into the city of Marseille. Karym’s sister was among the few. She would leave the project, cross the road, climb the rough ground and go into the shopping mall across the valley via its empty car park. She said to him that she hated the ‘fucking place, everything about it’, and he had turned his back on her, then followed her out.

It was Karym’s home.

Had once been his father’s home until he had packed one suitcase, gone with a promise of sending back money, a lie, and returned to Tunisia. Once was his mother’s but she now lived down the coast and worked there and said her children were scum. Was still the nominal home of Karym’s brother, except that Hamid slept in another block where he had an apartment littered with the trappings of his wealth and with complicated gadgetry that he could not make to function unless Karym came, and fiddled with it. He had not slept well. He walked in the alleyways between the buildings, alone. Was disturbed, and fidgeted and scratched his head.

Two sounds had lingered in his mind, neither good or easily dispersed. The mother of the boy had come out on to her balcony, had cried to the moon, to the stars and to the gulls, had made the sound of an animal in pain, and the cry was piercing. A true lament, that seemed to rip at the very heart of her intestines, as if a part of her soul burned. There was a dog that had been hit by a car on the Boulevard Henri Barnier, both legs broken, and it had screamed, and no one could get close to it with a club or an iron bar, and it had been shot with an AK which had released it from its pain, and had also allowed a degree of quiet to settle over La Castellane which made traders happier. Her son had screamed, that was the other sound that had knifed into Karym. The kid had reason to scream; the gag had worked loose and the gasoline would have been in his nostrils and the flaming rag had come close to the open window, then been tossed inside. He had screamed even after the crowd had lost sight of him behind the flames, had screamed until the tank – more fumes than fuel – had exploded and his efforts to kick his way out were curtailed. Two sounds, mother and son, both sharp. It was always that way, cries and screams, each time there was a barbecue in La Castellane. Sometimes Karym thought himself indifferent to the noises, a few times he shrugged them off: it was rare that they slashed at him, as they had that night. He had not been close to the car but it had seemed that the smoke of the burning tyres, and the flesh, had come to rest on his clothing, impregnated it. The smell was worse than the crying or the screaming. He walked in the estate. He would have been observed though he saw nobody except isolated workers hurrying to the project’s exits, escaping for the day with a coveted reward of poor wages.

The flames had long died. Wisps of smoke climbed above the scorched car. He went near enough to see the shape of the boy, but could not distinguish the head or the arms or the torso. The barbecue was part of the life of the project, so Karym neither supported it nor criticised it. The barbecue happened, and nothing would stop it, not the noise and not the smell. A new sound intruded. Sirens came from down the hill.

The day was not yet advanced, and the lights of the convoy showed up well. That the police would come, with the fire team, and in force, was built into the schedule his brother had set. They would come to a halt short of the entrance to the project, would then take a coffee and a sandwich or a piece of pie, and they would have announced their intention and then would come in when they were expected. That way, as the choreography played out, there would be no aggravation and the weapons would be left in the safe houses. It was good, Karym thought, to have understandings in place. He turned away from the burned car. No one would talk: in the newspaper, La Provence, they called it a wall of silence. No tongues would murmur in the ears of investigators. His brother was safe, Karym was certain. He saw a girl running, late for her bus, and he smiled at her, good-looking bitch and good hips, and she broke her stride to spit in the mud, then went on running. He was the brother of Hamid. He had protection but was without a friend. The police, now forming up at the side of the road, would come in force into the project and would hope to find an idiot or a lunatic or some person of any age with a death wish who would describe the barbecue and tell the name of the organiser; would find no one. Not even the mother…

In the world of Karym, in La Castellane, no one spoke to the police, gave them evidence. It would be a crime on the scale of blasphemy.

He went back to the apartment. It was his turn to clean it. Why should he be bothered? He would lie on his unmade bed, and would look at his books, study the Avtomat Kalashnikova obraztsa 1947 goda, although he could almost recite by heart, would wait for the day when, in spite of the weakness of his arm, he was allowed to hold one, fire it, blast with it, turn the selector to automatic and loose off a full magazine over a range fit for Battle Sight Zero, close up, and smell the cordite and hear the crash of the firing and the tinkling landing of ejected cartridges…

A policeman shouted at him, told him to come closer. He kept on walking.

The Major insisted that the forensic team came with him.

There was an ambulance, unnecessary for the carbonised corpse, close to the burned vehicle, and a plain-sided dark van, and all those who went close wore plastic overshoes as if the chance of preserving evidence was necessary, and had heavy gloves, and masks over their mouths and noses to counter the smell. Samson watched the mass of identical windows, and the flat roofs, and the corners of the walkways through the magnification of his rifle sight, and he had slept well before being called out and was wary. It was sensible to bring the ambulance. It might be that one of them – uniformed, a plain-clothes investigator, the doctor, the prosecutor, a photographer, an imam – would be hit if a kid fired off an assault rifle.

The police presence was now monitored by a network of calls between PayAsYouGo phones and by coded texts, and by the signs of moving hands, fingers at high windows. Samson wore his balaclava, would have been a marked man. He held his rifle ready but did not strike a pose that threatened. A woman, middle-aged and swathed in black clothing, worn loose, had approached and spoken briefly to an officer, had not been permitted near the car, had been questioned and had shaken her head vigorously, then had turned away, had gone. He thought of himself, here, as an intruder… the project, this one and all of the others in the half crescent on the north side of Marseille, lived in a differing authority and culture to the rest of the city. Own codes of conduct, own ‘judiciary’, own penalties for those who broke the singular rules of behaviour. There were many at L’Évêché, who gathered in the corridors of the city’s police headquarters and railed against the lack of a big stick to bring the traders into the orbit of the courts… But Samson remained relaxed at the divisions of the society. He was no crusader, had no great desire to find targets, zero on them, squeeze the trigger stick of his rifle: when he did he felt no remorse, no pain, was any other man who had finished a shift of his day-job. He assumed he was watched, recognised by the balaclava, and that half a dozen Kalashnikovs were aimed in the general direction of the forensics. The police would not linger. The photographs would be taken, the remnant of the blackened body would be gingerly removed, a school teacher or a social worker would come forward and condemn the barbarism of the perpetrators. The Major was at his side.

‘We have an identity.’

‘And…?’

‘Sixteen years old. A juvenile court conviction, wounding with a knife at school, expelled, no qualifications, no employment.’

Samson nodded, could have written it himself. ‘And…?’

‘The woman was his mother. They came for him yesterday. A dispute.’

‘And…?’ Muffled questions through the balaclava and his eyes roved over the windows, and the roofing.

‘The mother says that she did not know which group her son worked for. Nor does she know who came for him. Nor the extent of the ‘‘crime’’ of which he was accused… What else would she say? She has to live here. We will not offer her full witness protection, guard her for the rest of her life. She is sensible… I cannot criticise her. It is the same as the last time, will be the same the next time. Not more than a quarter of an hour.’

He was alone again. He thought of the return of the vehicles to L’Évêché, and the canteen meal that would be served there… he saw the mother, very calm, surrounded by a group of older women and the communal grief suppressed, saw a boy with a withered arm who gazed at him from a clear 100 metres away, saw a man leave the project astride a Ducati Monster, saw a flatbed with a crane hoist up the burned car, saw the body driven away, saw the watchers grow bored.

Many weapons would be aimed at him. He doubted any of the kids would have the balls between their legs, sufficient courage, to aim, target him, and fire. He backed away.

The start of another day in his life, few were different. He climbed into the truck and the plated door slammed shut: it was a place where death came easily, where the assault rifle ruled.

September 1972

The boys watched, entranced.

They sat in a building of plywood walls and corrugated iron roofing. Some were sitting on the floor, concrete and covered by old rugs, some had chairs, more stood.

The transmission came from Beirut and the signal in the Tibnine area was poor and interruptions were frequent, but the flickering picture did nothing to lessen their enthusiasm – it welled and they shouted defiance.

The boys, all dressed in the camouflage now generally available to the splinter parties under the vague umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, had gathered in the ramshackle building when word had spread, a wildfire of fact and rumour, that the fedayeen had attacked the Zionist warmonger team in the Olympic Village of Munich. Only those, not many of them, with more than basic educational skills knew where Munich was, but all were loaded with the skills of how to handle, strip, reassemble and fire the AK-47 assault rifles that lay across their knees, or rested on their shoulders. They had been watching ever since the Lebanese state broadcaster had first come on air, two days before, to show flaky pictures of the Village. Each time that a member of the ‘brothers’ had been shown on the screen – small and set in an elderly wooden frame – they had cheered, raised their weapons above their heads: they had seen members of the team face off the German so-called negotiators. To have fought their way inside a heavily guarded compound, to have broken into the Israeli house, was a triumph. The commentary was at times exuberant, at other times a recital of what had already happened, the novelty fading. It was said, again and again, that a deal would be done and that many Palestinian fighters imprisoned in Israeli gaols would be freed in exchange for the athletes captured by these heroes. They had sat and stood in their places all through that day, and their mothers or sisters had brought them food in the early evening because none would willingly abandon the opportunity to watch the triumph for their people play out. Each one of them was armed. There were many weapons available now to the fighters in this camp. Most were shiny, well painted, clean, without chips or scrapes, and had been nowhere other than on an occasional hillside where it was safe to fire and on the rare exercises that were organised for them, and they were used for parade ground drills… Only one looked as though it might have been retrieved from a rubbish heap, and it stood out because it was so obviously a veteran weapon – tried, perhaps tested, one with its own history – and it was held with a degree of reverence by a slightly built young man who had only recently started to grow the first shadows of a moustache. They had sat there through the first evening, had debated how many prisoners the Zionists would need to clear from their gaols to get back their precious athletes, had calculated the scale of the victory… and had watched late at night, had wept, had cursed the deceit and treachery of the German negotiators. Had sat numbed and silent, with lips bitten in anger as the spokesman for the Olympics had told of an ambush, five heroes slaughtered, three brave men captured, an attack of extraordinary amateurishness.

They had gathered the next morning, taken their places. Little to see, but had heard that the bodies of the fallen were to be shipped back to Tripoli, the Libyan capital. They watched the TV and felt glowing pride in the sacrifice of the martyrs. The pictures now came from Libya, where dense crowds filled streets and squares. The hurdles on which the bodies lay, decorated by the host country’s flag, or the Palestinian one, were carried above the heads of the teeming mourners. The cameras were high up in buildings and looked down on to the fervour of the masses. They saw devotion, saw the worship that was accorded only to the bravest. At moments, when the camera zoomed on to a particular hurdle and showed the shallow shape of a fighter hidden by a flag, they would dive outside the building and fire off shots into the air. They would drown out the commentary of the Lebanese broadcaster with their own slogans and yells to denounce the Zionist state, the deceit of the Germans, the treachery of the United States. Their voices would rise to a hoarse frenzy, then they’d return indoors and swelter again in the heat that burned the hillsides round the camp. The transmission closed. All in the room were converts to the message of war and sacrifice. They started to disperse, and one and all would have sworn they would perform in training with more enthusiasm than ever before.

A man waited outside, seemed not to notice the heat. He picked out the boy with the old weapon, beckoned him.

He was asked, curtly, if he were prepared to volunteer for special duties. Immaterial whether he could have refused. He had stammered acceptance. The man who had waited wore old and dirt-stained clothing, fatigues, and his eyes seemed keen but tired and he squinted as if the sunlight of years’ exposure on the hillsides had damaged them. No surplus weight ringed his stomach. What was most noticeable about him was the scar that ran from his ear almost to the side of his mouth, bisecting his cheek; the wound had been inexpertly sealed and ran like a ploughed furrow. The boy would have recognised him as a fighting man, and his assessment was well placed. An experienced fighting man… Did the boy, when he came for ‘special duties’, wish for a new weapon, a replacement, one recently off a production line?

The boy grasped his rifle. His knuckles whitened. He held it tightly, proudly. The boy assumed that good words of him had been said or he would not have been approached. A hand reached towards him. The boy loosened his grip. The rifle was examined and a slow smile spread on the older man’s face. He looked for its identification. He spoke the last of the numbers, 16751, then laughed, deep and growling from his throat.

Did he know when this weapon was manufactured? The boy did not. He was told. The factory was at the industrial complex of Izhevsk which was in central USSR, a friend of the Palestinian people, and the manufacture was in the year of 1956, and there were more modern versions of the same, better built, milled and not pressed steel, but the boy was adamant. A shrug, a little sadness in the eyes of the older man, but the boy would not have noticed that, nor considered the consequences of ‘special duties’, and where he would be taken, and what task given him.

He held the weapon proudly and his shoulder was cuffed, and he was told what time in the morning transport would collect him and that he – and his rifle – would be gone from the camp a long time, many months, and he would not be home soon to see his mother… The pride bloomed in him, and he was pleased that he had not given up his rifle, which was a part of him, treasured.

Sleeping, dreaming, crystal-sharp recall and unable to wake.

‘My nose can see a copper, and hear a copper, and smell a copper. My nose can.’

That was Bazzer who had now taken over from the father and son. Bazzer had thick lenses held in tortoiseshell frames, and one of the side arms was held in place with Elastoplast. His eyesight was grimly impaired but they all accepted that his suspicions were as good as any dog’s. When they dealt in skunk, any of the hashish family, he could tell the quality of what was on offer. Also credited to him was an ability to identify chancers and tossers, liars and frauds. They would not have moved against Norm Clarke if Bazzer had not called it.

‘I’m saying he’s a copper: what my nose tells me.’

He was on the floor. They had dragged him off the chair, pushed it away, and he was down on the plastic sheeting. They had torn off his clothes, had done some slapping and used their toes to nudge him, and questions had been thrown, and they’d tried to catch him on the detail of his legend – what school, how long there, what class, what name his best mate had – where he had lived then, what his dad did, what his mum did… Norm Clarke had gone through the background as worked out with his Control who operated out of the headquarters of Avon and Somerset police. Why had he never been picked up, done time? That would have been the killer, where he had been – what landing, what cell block. Easiest thing they could check out. He was the newest member of the group who was not a blood relative or a marriage relative, had come to them off the street and worked, insinuated, wormed and wriggled his way towards a position of trust. High-risk stuff. He thought they were not sure. Bollock naked, supposed to further humiliate, weaken him. Had had to speed up the process of acceptance, and might have pushed too hard. Always there, always ready, nothing too much trouble. Had to be like that, but was the sure route to the mistake… always was going to be a mistake. Could not place it… They had a chain-saw revving up, and he’d also heard the whine that a power drill made, the sort that DIY people used when screwing up home improvements, and the plastic was cold under his buttocks, and control of his bowels and bladder was difficult.

‘I’m saying he is. Take it or leave it, my reckoning. What I’m telling you, what my nose sees, he’s a cop.’

The instructors always said that the copper-bottom guarantee was that backup was in position, ready to go. Through twenty-four hours and through seven days a week, the backup was armed, alert, had the fix on his location, would get the call, would come. But he was stark naked and had no wire to record the threats and denunciations, and no wristwatch that could do a code-alarm if the button for the hands was shifted to a certain degree and then… didn’t matter, didn’t have it. The time they were looking at, scratching for evidence of guilt, was a stop he had done on the run back from Plymouth, on the M5 motorway, services near to Taunton, a chat with his Control, a half-hour break, and he had not made the call to say that he was good, had the shipment, was making decent time. They had done their mathematics, and had reckoned he’d be through the Bridgwater junction at a particular time, but he had not checked in. They’d have put a vehicle and a spotter on the bridge and would have looked and waited for him to sail through, middle lane, and not going fast, and would have checked out that he had no tail, and likely would have done the same procedure at the Chippenham exit for the M4 motorway. He had in the bag a consignment worth, street prices, a million and a quarter. His mistake was not to realise the extent of the precautions and therefore the importance of the schedule. Norm Clarke, country and western music loud on the speakers, had come through both checks around a half-hour after he was expected… enough to set off the juices of the miserable little bastard who was half-blind, Bazzer.

‘I’m saying he is. Get to work on him, he’ll tell you.’

Bound at the ankles and at the wrists, but no blindfold and no gag. They had trouble keeping the chain-saw engine going. Started it up, and it should have ticked over, given up a sound as menacing as any in the limited experience of Norm Clarke, but it had coughed each time and then died, and one guy was heaving, grunting, and yanking the cord. The drill was steady enough, no trouble with the power, and the whine getting shriller. No one would stand his corner. None of them would sing his praises… the boys supposed to be – ‘copper-bottomed’ and a guarantee – alert and ready to go, and firearms loaded, were likely in the canteen and queuing for more tea, more cake, more overtime, and were in ignorance. How well would he last? Not difficult. If the goddamn chain-saw came close to his groin, if they brought the drill near to his eyes, either, then it was curtains. Began to see it different – only a few kilos of good-grade hashish, and when one shipment was lifted and one gang taken off the street then the importation chain would be disrupted for a week and fresh faces would be on the plot: the customers would hardly know that there had been an interruption in supply. He was thinking about the sanctity of his testicles and the integrity of his eyesight, and starting to weigh an equation, and his buttocks moved on the plastic and crunched it and the noise of the drill pounded in his ears.

‘He’s a cop. I’m telling you. Ask him who he met on the route, where he stopped. Ask him… I’m Bazzer, I’m never wrong.’

The sounds rang in his ears, and the shouts buffeted him. The chain-saw was up and running, coughing and then going sweet… and, with the power drill, was being carried closer… Remembered the guy who had been Phil Williams. Bad times then but not as bad as now. He was yelling, screaming, and no one would have heard him in the back annexe of the club. Shouted and hoped, and Bazzer’s voice was the drumbeat in his head. Always because of a mistake. The hood was off his head, like they wanted him to see the saw and the drill.

A cacophony in his mind, but not enough to wake him.

‘That shite…’ Pegs looked away from her screen, glowered towards the door.

Gough grimaced. ‘Enough of them, which?’

‘Three zero eight, which else? Banker for top of the league in the “shite” stakes.’ In Room 308, down the corridor, was the officer – senior rank – who controlled them. He would have thought himself careful, and unkind towards cowboys, and always eager that matters stayed on ‘an even keel’. Rarely dished out praise but had a goading, wounding touch in his fingers when on a keyboard. Room 308’s occupant was seldom seen, kept himself behind a closed door, dealt in electronic communication. It was not considered sporting to criticise his lack of personal appearance as a third of his face had been removed by a flying length of four-inch builder’s nail enclosed in an Improvised Explosive Device detonated in County Tyrone: the operation to patch up the damage had been cursory and the end result not pretty.

‘And suggesting what?’

‘Suggesting, beauty and value of hindsight, that we have lost little Miss Zeinab, do not have identities and addresses for her boys, that our own asset is out of touch with her, that we have a considered but unproven assessment of what they are looking for in the south of France, and we are under-resourced… Our fault, implied, that we did not stand and shout, stamp our fucking feet and demand more. Throw toys out of the pram, scream for another sack of dosh. Should have upgraded the fuss.’

Still not dawn. The heating not yet on. He was at his desk, still wrapped in his winter anorak; she was at her place and cocooned in her overcoat. Nothing eaten, the coffee machine doing only black because she had not bought milk on the way.

Gough said, ‘We are a minor investigation, probably down below a figure of one hundred in terms of priority. Lucky to have the boy, Andy or whatever he calls himself, amazing that we were able to lay hands on him. Had I gone in with a request for a three-shift surveillance of her, of her boys, probably fifty in all, that number of bodies on the ground, I’d have been laughed out. A ludicrous suggestion.’

‘And there’s a sting.’

‘Is he already in?’

‘Was in ten minutes before us, or stayed the night. The sting in the tail – the one that is impossible to bloody answer. Should you, Gough, have argued for pulling them in?’

‘I have nothing to go to court with.’

Pegs said, ‘It’s a cheap blow, a low one, it’s a kick in the privates, but Three Zero Eight has that talent. Only a query. Would we have been better off if they were lifted, maybe a ‘‘conspiracy’’ charge cobbled together? The usual – some lies and some innuendo, and some nods and some winks. We have our backs to the wall.’

Gough’s teeth ground together, always did that when stress scratched him. What to say? It was fouled up. The surveillance had been inadequate. The computers would be scrambling to get a match for the registration recognition. Any arrest swoop would have been laughed out of the magistrate’s court, if it had reached that far down the line… It was what he lived with, the stress of the work and the shortage of trained men and women, and the skill of the damn adversary, and it was never-ending and would last another decade as a minimum, and his ID would have been long shredded before any tide bloody turned. The ray of light in his life, often thought but never spoken of, was that Pegs – hard, brutal, pragmatic and moderately attractive – shared the workload with him.

‘We could not have pulled them in.’

‘And it is not a time for a blame game…’ She was hitting the keys. Pegs was the only woman Gough knew who typed with two fingers, fast and with the delicacy of stamped feet. She was responding to Three Zero Eight, and her message would be signed off as Three One Nine. ‘And the attendant shortages of support are what we endure every day, week, month… which is so boring. We remain confident of the quality of our boy in the field – are not yet ready to run up a white flag…’

She grinned at him. The neon on the ceiling caught the mischief. She might have typed that, might just have been teasing him, was capable of typing it into the reply.

‘…we hope for better than the apprehension of a few foot soldiers, look for strategists and controllers and leaders, and remain hopeful. France tomorrow, contact already established and cooperation guaranteed, or the day after at the latest. Gough… How does that seem?’

Where was she? The girl who appeared so innocent, who believed she had entrapped a boy with whom she could play marionette games, an experienced Undercover, a Level One. Had lost her. Pegs said something about going for milk, and hit her send key. Bad to lose a key player.

The train pulled away from Luton.

Passengers crushed, body to body, against her. Still dark outside. Around Zeinab were phone calls, ring tones and messages from the self-important as to what they wanted done in the office before they arrived. And eating, even a bulging burger, oozing stuff out, and others on sandwiches and some on flaky croissants. Sound in her ears and spilled food on her shoulder, and the warmth of the bodies pressed hard on her hips or her backside. She went to war. She caught the eye of a young man, perhaps her age. Seemed to have a new suit and a new shirt and a new tie that was not secured at the collar and his laptop bag was wedged against her stomach, and he smiled at her, apologetic because it must have seemed obvious that she was unfamiliar with the daily grind into central London. A nice smile, but she did not return it, but stared hard and through him, and saw darkness and street-lights flit past the window. And debated.

The weakest link, or the strongest, in the chain?

She had said he was the strongest. Pictured him. The grin, that seemed impossible to hide or suppress, the laughter that cracked open his mouth, the arms that were strong and muscled and that she sometimes wrapped round her waist, and the hands that were often dirtied from engine oil and calloused and that she allowed to rest on her cheeks, squeeze them, and the tongue that groped hesitantly into her mouth, and the eyes that stared into hers and were strong, uncomplicated, and did not blink. The strongest in the chain, of course. She imagined how it would be for him, coming off the ferry and slotting into the designated lane and approaching the customs check, and he would be in ignorance and would have no fear and would smile at the world around him, and would have an arm around her shoulder, and she’d have put her head under his chin. And she felt now, on the rolling rocking train with the body smells seeping at her, so alone.

The strongest link in the chain, and she had chosen him. Her tongue smeared over her lips. Some of the women around her were pale, with scrubbed cheeks and clean eyelids and had not yet bothered to apply cosmetics, and some were already painted and scented. She wore no makeup, not even a slick of lipstick. She remembered the taste of his mouth… She took her phone from her bag. Pay As You Go. Untraceable calls, Krait said. Did not register location nor recipient of a call, Scorpion said. She had to wriggle to manoeuvre the laptop away from her arms, and the young man smiled at her again. It would have been a train like this, same time of day, on which the boys had come with their rucksacks, and she wondered if they had stayed as a group, exchanged words, or were already walking dead.

She needed to speak to him. Herself, she might be the weakest link. Among the heat and sweat and in the motion of the train, Zeinab shivered. She pressed the keys.

Sleeping, but a phone ringing. Still clinging to the dream but its focus slipping.

Norm Clarke shouting, ‘Check the fucking tyre. Front fucking tyre. New tyre. Check it. Fucking puncture. A puncture, not what that fucking half-eyed cripple says.’

Bawling loud enough to push his voice over the volume of the chain-saw and the motion of it blowing aside the hair above his privates, and his eyes aware of the fine drill bit inserted in the head of the power unit. A moment of hesitation… saw that, and the blade wavered and the drill was pulled a yard back.

‘Go check the fucking tyre… okay, not new, retread, check it. The blind bastard, could he change a tyre in half an hour? All I fucking do for you, and you treat me…’

Would have been the fury in his voice that pulled them back. The cough of the saw as it was switched off, and the whine dying, and soft voices, and someone sent to look at his van. His mum – the real mum who did not figure in the life of Phil Williams or Norm Clarke – used to say that it was always sensible to store something for a rainy day. Torrential rain, flooded roads, rivers rising, that sort of day, and there had been a puncture and he’d not mentioned it because it was only a nail gone through and there was a chap he did drops-offs for who ran a used tyre market, and they’d put a new one on, had not seemed a big deal, and it was just enough for a drink, or three, that he’d paid for the tyre. If the saw or the drill had touched him he would have been yelling the phone numbers of SC&O10. They stood back from him. He felt the cold on his body. Cigarettes were lit. Bazzer must have lined up something to say but he was told to shut his mouth. If they were not happy with the tyre then they might take off his testicles and might drill through an eyeball, but most likely they’d just throttle him with a rope or beat his skull in with a bar, then wrap him in the plastic and pick up a couple of decent spades. They’d drive out to Savernake, the forest, fifteen miles away. Pretty much anywhere was good for digging a hole and losing him, and the plastic would keep the smell down and would prevent the foxes digging him up. None of these boys would split on the others: look at the ceiling, mouth a ‘no comment’, keep doing it. Might not be found, not for months, or years, not before a whole lot of rainy days had spoiled his mum’s washing… One of their phones was ringing… Yes, his van had a new retread tyre, left side, front, passenger.

And the phone kept ringing… No one said, not one of them, that they were sorry. The ropes were untied, his hands needed rubbing to restore circulation. He picked up his clothing, dressed without help, shaking, trembling, would take days to overcome the trauma… managed it. Lost it…

The same room of the same club. Wearing a wire, and not going to be searched, and the loot was being divided for different markets and the cash was being heaped in separate piles for the share-out. The heavy team had come in, bashing down doors, bringing firearms. No handcuffs for Norm Clarke but a warm congratulation. The last word had been from Bazzer, before they’d been led to the wagons.

‘I told you, you didn’t listen. My nose can see a cop.’

His sleep was broken, his dream over.

Not Phil Williams and not Norm Clarke, but Andy Knight – who might have made a mistake already and might not, but who would make a mistake, as clear as day follows night, and had twice evaded the penalty for a mistake. Reached for it while it pealed, lifted it and flicked the button.

‘Andy?’

‘Me, hi.’

‘You good?’

‘Better for hearing you – was dreaming, a horrible dream, won’t bore you. Thanks for waking me. Really brilliant to hear you. Missing you, Zed. Where are you?’

‘Oh, you know, just, just… Just that I wanted to hear your voice.’

A few words, nothing special, and the call ended. He understood loneliness, thought she was learning it – and thought about mistakes and where they’d lead. The first light of day came through the window, rose over the roofs and the chimneys.