Osama

SIX

Bristol, UK. The following day, 0900 hours.

‘Bastard Coke’s gone flat.’

‘I can’t believe you want to drink Coke first thing in the morning, man,’ said a drowsy voice, barely awake. ‘That’s sick, you know? Sick, man.’

‘Who left the top off ? Was it you, Rak? It was you! I can’t believe you left the bastard top off.’ Narinder Kalil, whose yellow teeth made him look like his mother had lactated Coke, slammed the two-litre bottle down on the grubby carpet by his camp bed, emerged fully dressed out of his sleeping bag, sat up and looked around the room.

It was gloomy in the first-floor bedroom. The thick curtains were drawn, and only a little light peeped through from a tiny triangle where the corners met the rail. It shone a beam onto the table in the middle of the room and last night’s KFC Bargain Bucket – Narinder, Rakesh and Adi could put one of those away in a matter of minutes. Next to it was Adi’s pot of aqueous cream that he rubbed into the eczema on his neck half a dozen times an hour, and enough orange Semtex to turn not only this one but all the terraced houses in the street into a pile of rubble. Narinder stood up and glanced hopefully into the KFC bucket. Nothing but a mess of chicken bones, soiled napkins and empty ketchup sachets. He’d finished the Cheerios yesterday morning, and nobody had been to the shops since. ‘I’m going for a cigarette,’ he announced. No reply from Rak or Adi. ‘Bastard lazy, you two,’ he muttered as he walked to the door. And then, a little more loudly: ‘Don’t touch the shit, OK? OK?’

Snores. Narinder shook his head in disgust and left the room.

The three of them had been living in this house for just two days, and had met for the first time the day before that. None of them knew who owned the place, only that the key Narinder had received at his gran’s house had fitted the lock, and that the sea of pizza delivery slips behind the door suggested nobody had been here for some weeks. It had the air of rented accommodation: threadbare carpets, no furniture except the old brown sofa downstairs and the table and three camp beds in their room, a cooker that didn’t work and a kettle that tripped the fusebox for the whole house if you tried to make a cup of tea.

The door of the only other bedroom upstairs was locked. They’d tried to look through the keyhole, but someone had stuck a piece of tape over the other side, and something told them it wouldn’t be a good idea to puncture it with a pencil – which had been Rakesh’s first suggestion. Now Narinder padded downstairs in bare feet, opened the front door and sat down on the step before rolling a cigarette and lighting up. Of the three of them, he was the only one who smoked, but he hadn’t left the bedroom out of consideration. He’d left it because although he didn’t think a flick of cigarette ash could detonate the plastic explosive, he wasn’t sure and this was not, he decided, a good area for experimentation.

The house was in Easton, one of Bristol’s dingier inner districts. Narinder, who had lived in the city for all of his twenty-three years, had never been here. At first he’d worried that keeping the bedroom curtains closed day and night would attract attention, but you didn’t have to spend more than a few hours in Crown Street to realize that at least half the windows in the road were permanently covered. The house opposite was derelict, with boarded-up windows and a steel security door. The squatters had still got in, however. Narinder had realized this on the first night, when he’d seen light seeping from cracks in the boards, and he couldn’t help wondering why the house he and his companions were in hadn’t been taken over. Maybe the squatters knew something about the person who owned it. Certainly nobody had given Narinder any aggro. Apart from an old lady who walked past three times a day with a shopping trolley, everyone else he had seen had been black or Asian. That suited him fine. It meant he, Rak and Adi were just three more faces. Nobody even questioned their presence.

It took him no more than a minute to suck down his first roll-up, stub it out under his Reeboks and roll a second. It was just as he was licking the Rizla that he noticed he was being watched.

He started, and jumped up to his feet. A tall man with a slight stoop was standing three metres away, where the pavement met the litter-strewn front yard. He wore a waxed green raincoat – the sort of garment, Narinder thought, that an English country gentleman might put on for a day’s shooting. But this was no English gent. He had dark skin and thin, floppy black hair. He was staring at Narinder with an expression that was impossible to read.

‘Who the bastard hell are you?’ Narinder demanded, silently cursing himself for taking a step backwards.

A frown of disapproval flickered across the stranger’s face. Narinder found himself stammering. ‘I mean… who… who are… ’

‘You must be Narinder,’ said the stranger. He opened the gate and started walking towards the door. ‘You’ve made yourself at home, I hope?’

Narinder nodded.

‘I’m pleased.’

He stopped. Narinder didn’t move.

‘Well?’ said the stranger. He was standing just half a metre away. ‘Are you going to let me in, Narinder? It’s a crisp morning, and I’d rather not spend it standing outside.’

Narinder shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I ain’t supposed to let anyone…’

The stranger smiled. ‘Your grandmother is in good health?’

Narinder’s eyes widened as he recognized the pass phrase by which he would know the man they were waiting for. He nodded, as though the newcomer was really interested in the well-being of his relations, hastily shoved his unlit roll-up behind his ear, and kicked the door open with his heel before standing aside to let him enter. Once he was inside, Narinder walked in too and closed the door behind him. He followed the man along the hallway, suddenly full of questions. ‘What’s your name, mister? This your place, is it? I don’t want to make a fuss or nothing, but you could have left us some bog roll. We had to use the Daily Mirror first day we got here.’ They were walking up the stairs now, Narinder three steps behind the man. ‘They’re still asleep, Rakesh and Adi. Bastard lazy, them two. Dunno where you found them, mister. What you say your name was again?’

They had reached the landing now. The older man stopped and turned. He had a patient look on his face. ‘My name is Mr Ashe,’ he said quietly. ‘Narinder, have you and the others started work?’

‘Course. We’ve been here three days.’

‘So you have.’ He glanced towards the door of the locked bedroom. ‘You’ll excuse me, I hope? I’ll be pleased to meet the others when they’ve caught up on their well-deserved sleep.’ He turned and, pulling a key from the pocket of his coat, approached the door. ‘You’re happy with their abilities? Rakesh and Adi, I mean.’

Narinder was surprised by the question. ‘I guess,’ he said. He gave a grin that Mr Ashe couldn’t see with his back to him. ‘Y’know, bastard lazy and everything…’

‘If you have any concerns, you’ll come to me? I need good people like you that I can trust, Narinder.’

‘Er, yeah. Course.’ He stood on the landing while Mr Ashe let himself into the room and closed the door.

The house was silent again. Somewhere outside, in the distance, Narinder heard a police siren, but it faded away after five seconds. He took a step towards Mr Ashe’s door, raised one fist as though to knock, then thought better of it and returned to the bedroom he shared with the others. It was still dark in there, and they were still asleep. He flicked on the light – a pendant with a spherical paper shade that was covered in cobwebs and as yellow as his teeth. ‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘Mr Ashe is here. Told him you was bastard lazy. You’re lucky he sent me to wake you up.’ He walked round the table, first to Rak’s bed, then to Adi’s, kicking each one of them in turn. ‘You think these things are going to make themselves while you’re sleeping, do you? We got to get to work.’

‘Who’s Mr Ashe, man?’ Rakesh stood up. Like Narinder he was still wearing last night’s clothes, and he too cast a hopeful glance into the KFC bucket. ‘He give you the password?’

‘What you think I am? Stupid?’

‘Yeah,’ Rakesh said, as if it was an obvious answer to an obvious question.

‘You want to watch it, mate. Hey, Adi, man, you got to do that in front of us?’

Adi had approached the table, opened his aqueous cream and was slathering it onto his neck. ‘Did you ask him?’ he said quietly.

‘Ask him what?’

Adi wiped the surplus cream from his fingers onto his faded black jeans. ‘You know. Did you ask him?’

Narinder did know, of course. The three of them had talked of little else. They had watched the news of the Lion’s death on the television like everybody else. Unlike most people, however, they had not rejoiced.

Osama bin Laden – the Lion, the Sheikh al-Mujahid, the Director – had been in hiding for as long as these three young men had known who he was. And yet Narinder felt a strong bond with him, and he was sure Rakesh and Adi did too. It was a bond that had been forged when, in his early teens, he had looked up to the older kids at the mosque who talked openly about the evils of the Great Satan America, and Little Satan Britain. Who had hinted of their allegiance to, and recruitment by, Islamist cells. And of course there was one Islamist movement that they all wanted to be associated with. When Narinder was nineteen, and doing Islamic Studies at Thames Valley University, he was given the chance to travel to Pakistan. Nobody mentioned the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ until he was actually there, one of twenty men of a similar age, spending a summer at a training camp thirty miles south-west of Quetta where they learned how to strip down an AK-47, how to make a serviceable detonator, and how to hate – really hate – the West. If the War on Terror truly was a war, he learned, then it needed soldiers on both sides. When Narinder returned to the UK he didn’t look or sound any different, but he certainly felt it. On the outside, an unremarkable young man of British-Asian descent. On the inside, a soldier waiting for the chance to fight.

But what now? That was the question these three young Al-Qaeda recruits had been asking each other. The Lion was gone. What did it mean for Al-Qaeda? What did it mean for them? Had they backed the wrong horse? When the young men at the mosque who were affiliated to other groups – the Muslim Brotherhood or the Young Muslim Organization – gave them superior looks the day after the news broke, were they right to do so? Narinder, Rakesh and Adi knew they were waiting here for somebody who was much higher in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy than they were. Surely this Mr Ashe would be able to tell them what the future held.

‘No, I didn’t ask him,’ Narinder muttered. ‘He only just got here. Guy don’t want us—’

‘Ask me what?’

Narinder, Rakesh and Adi looked suddenly round. None of them had heard the door open, nor seen Mr Ashe standing there. He was no longer wearing his raincoat, but an elegant grey suit.

They blinked stupidly at him.

‘We was just, you know, thinking, Mr Ashe,’ said Narinder. ‘With the Director being, you know—’

‘Our struggle,’ Mr Ashe interrupted, ‘continues.’

He looked at each of them in turn. His face, Narinder thought to himself, was much softer than those of the fiery-eyed teachers he’d had in Pakistan. But he had authority. No doubt about that.

Mr Ashe stepped into the room. His gaze fell on the contents of the table, and he nodded appreciatively for a moment. ‘When this’ – he stretched out his arm to indicate the Semtex – ‘comes to fruition, they will understand that they cannot defeat us simply by killing one man.’ He smiled at them and pulled out a book from the pocket of his jacket. It was smaller than an ordinary book, bound in leather and fastened with a strap. Narinder caught sight of the words ‘Holy Koran’ written on the front cover in gold lettering. ‘We shall pray together,’ said Mr Ashe.

Narinder glanced at the other two. The truth was that they were more interested in action than prayer. Back in the training camp, he had knelt towards Mecca because he’d been told to; his trips to the mosque were more social than religious. But he sensed that they were as unwilling as he was to disobey this strange, quiet man. And so all three knelt with him as he read in Arabic from his Koran, before intoning a familiar prayer. And once he had left the room, each went silently about his business, carefully cutting the slabs of Semtex as they had been taught into smaller, flatter rectangles, ready to accept a charge, ready to pack them into whatever housing they were eventually given.

It was an hour later when Narinder suddenly scraped back his chair and got to his feet. Rakesh and Adi both looked up at him.

‘I need a slash, all right?’ he said.

He left the room.

The toilet was separate from the bathroom, and situated next to the locked bedroom. A piece of worn, grey vinyl flooring, curled at the edges, was covered with sticky yellow piss stains around the pan. Rakesh, Narinder had observed, was bastard filthy and couldn’t aim properly. He loosened himself from his fly and was about to empty his bladder when he heard something unusual. It came from his left, from the other side of the wall that separated the toilet from the locked bedroom. Narinder edged towards it, put his ear to the wall and held his breath so that he could hear better. It was white noise, like an untuned old-fashioned TV set. It meant nothing to Narinder, who just shrugged, stepped back to the toilet and pissed noisily into the water. Once he’d flushed, he waited for the cistern to refill before listening against the wall again. The noise was still there.

Back out on the landing he stopped outside Mr Ashe’s door. He could hear the white noise more clearly from here. Again he wanted to knock, but there was something about Mr Ashe that made him feel nervous. His instructors at the camp in Pakistan had been brutal, and Narinder had been scared of them, but Mr Ashe didn’t need to threaten any of them with violence for them to do what he said.

And so Narinder almost surprised himself when he found himself rapping his knuckles against the door.

‘Do come in.’

Narinder opened up, and stepped inside.

He hadn’t really known what to expect, it was true, but the room that had been locked these past three days was disappointingly bland. The curtains were closed and the light switched off. There was a camp bed, just like the ones the three of them had been sleeping on. Mr Ashe was sitting at what looked like an IKEA table. A laptop was open in front of him, and his face was bathed in the glow from its screen. Next to it was a handheld digital radio – it was this that was making the white noise – and his copy of the Koran, open about halfway through, and face downwards.

‘I’m glad you knocked, Narinder.’ Mr Ashe smiled, and Narinder flashed his yellow teeth at him in return.

‘Wicked,’ Narinder said, but his mouth was suddenly dry.

‘Please tell the others to stop work. You are needed elsewhere.’

‘What?’ Narinder shook his head in confusion. ‘But…’

‘Please, Narinder. I’ll explain everything when we’re all together.’ He gave him a meaningful look. ‘I can rely on you to organize the others?’

‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Yeah, course. I’ll just…’ He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder and stepped backwards out of the room, closing the door as he went. He sniffed, then turned and re-entered the bedroom he shared with the others. They didn’t even look up as he walked in – they were too busy cutting out their rectangles of explosive. ‘OK, you two. On your feet.’

Rakesh and Adi looked at him with scorn.

‘Whatever,’ Narinder shrugged. ‘If you don’t want to do what Mr Ashe says, that’s your bastard decision.’

It was enough. The other two stood up with obvious reluctance. ‘What we doing?’ Rakesh asked.

Narinder gave him what he hoped was an enigmatic smile. ‘Ah, you’ll find out, man,’ he said. ‘Mr Ashe, he’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.’

Before they could ask any more questions, Narinder left the room and stood in the hallway, waiting for the others to join him.

Mr Ashe watched Narinder leave the room, and he continued to stare at the closed door for a full ten seconds after he was alone. Only then did he turn his attention back to the laptop.

He was looking at a black and white image, rather grainy, of an ordinary street. Anybody would be able to tell from a glance that it was in the UK – there was a pillar box on the right, and the blur of a BT van driving out of the shot. Mr Ashe, however, knew a bit more than that. He knew, for example, the name of the road – Lancing Way – and that the street was located in the border town of Hereford. In the bottom-right corner of the screen was a time code. It read ‘10:58’, and indicated that this was the final frame in a stop-motion video lasting ten minutes and fifty-eight seconds. He pressed the laptop’s mouse button with his right thumb and, keeping it down, swiped the trackpad with a long-nailed forefinger. The video restarted and Mr Ashe watched it all through again.

Time code 00:00: nothing but Lancing Way. No cars parked on either side, the pavements lined with temporary barriers indicating that roadworks were to take place soon.

01:20: a man walks towards the camera with a black Labrador on a lead.

05:26: a harassed mother ushers two children along the pavement in the opposite direction.

08:41: a black Land Rover Discovery trundles slowly along the street towards the camera. It stops about fifty metres away in the middle of the road. The driver climbs out and opens the rear passenger door. A second man appears. He is wearing jeans and a hooded grey top, and has a black North Face bag slung over his right shoulder. He is half a head taller than the driver and has an unkempt black beard. Even with this low-quality footage, Mr Ashe can make out the dark rings around his eyes, and he observes the heavy slump in the man’s gait as he squeezes between two of the roadworks barriers separating the road from the pavement. The driver watches him go. When it becomes clear that he’s not going to get any acknowledgement from his passenger, he shrugs, climbs back into the Discovery and drives off out of view.

08:44: the bearded passenger stops outside one of the houses. It has a neatly trimmed hedge at the front. He stares at the house for a minute before walking up to the front door and ringing the bell. Almost a minute passes.

08:45: the door opens. Mr Ashe cannot see who is there, but he can sense the awkwardness as he or she stands back to let this bearded man enter. The door closes, and now the only thing moving on the screen is the time code, ticking down to the end of the video.

A knock on the door. ‘Do come in,’ he said for the second time.

It was Narinder.

‘They’re ready, Mr Ashe.’

Mr Ashe smiled. ‘Do come in, all of you,’ he said. With a last glance at the screen, he shut the lid of the laptop, then looked up at his three young recruits. They seemed nervous, but eager to do well.

Just the men for the job.