The Fall of Night

Chapter Five: Sleepers

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

“Welcome to Edinburgh,” Hazel said, as the new prospective lodgers arrived. She took a moment to check out their appearance; one man, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and one woman, her eyes faintly desperate. The Scottish Parliament might have issued grandiose proclamations on how it intended to create new housing in the city, but in a fit of typical brilliance, the Parliament had managed to build houses that were too expensive for most buyers. “I understand that you are living together?”

“Yes, thank you,” the man said, his voice clearly from the Highlands. He held out a hand. It felt limp and sweaty to her touch. “We were recently offered a transfer to Edinburgh and… well, it was the sort of transfer that you take or you leave permanently.”

Hazel nodded in sympathy, reappraising them. She had assumed that they were lovers, at least, not merely colleagues; they had to be desperate to be sharing a flat. She had no objections to them sharing a room, but they would definitely be sharing a double bed, unless one of them had a sleeping bag. Her husband had a spare one if it were to be needed; she would go the extra mile for them if she could.

“The rent is three hundred pounds a month,” she said. In theory, she could accept Euros instead, but she had no real trust in European money. It just didn’t look real. “If you are sharing a room, I assume that you will be sharing the cost?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I’m Shelia and this is Grant Murdock.”

“Pleased to meet you both,” Hazel said, leading them up the stairs. “There are two floors to the building; the flats are all on the second floor. There are no real restrictions on what you can do here, except smoking; smoking is firmly banned in this building. If you bring anyone home, you are responsible for any damage they might do, and if you do break one of the rules, your possessions will be seized until you pay up. How long do you think you’ll be staying?”

Shelia seemed to be doing most of the talking. “We honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “The way things are these days, we just don’t know what to expect; the damned boss gets the golden handshake, we get the door and a kick in the arse if we don’t move fast enough to suit them. We hope to be here for at least a year, but…”

Hazel nodded. She understood; her husband shared her concerns about the job market these days. They all had debts to pay off, debts and endless taxes and red tape complicating their lives; there were times when she wanted to just go up to the IRS and detonate a really large car bomb right in front of the building.

“This is the main living room,” she said. She noticed Rashid Ustinov sitting on the sofa, probably waiting for his friend to come out of his room; the Russian wore simple labourer’s clothes. He worked on a building site somewhere; it was probably how the pair had met. He waved absently at the pair of them and turned his attention back to the book in his hand. “You’ll notice a fridge, for cold and frozen items, and a microwave, along with a computer port and a television. There’s a computer port in the room itself; the shower is just at the end of the building. It’s shared, I’m afraid.”

She showed them the room itself and knew instantly that they weren’t intending to rent it. It was smaller than they had expected, even if it did have a large bed; she had hoped that there would be more married couples moving into the house. She went through the entire explanation anyway, pointing out how the designer had hidden drawers and other units in the room, including a larger wardrobe than seemed possible. There was a sink for their basic needs; she even pointed out the washing machine that the two Russians used for their own washing. It wasn’t as if they had many clothes, after all; she’d only seen them in their basic labourers outfits.

“I think that it is a little small for the pair of us,” Shelia said finally. Hazel nodded in grim understanding; it wasn’t as if Stuart and her were short of money, but she knew better than to assume anything. The Government might just decide that her husband was no longer needed in the army. “We will keep it in mind, but…”

“I quite understand,” Hazel said, keeping her face blank through determined effort. “You do know that if someone else comes with an offer, I am going to have to accept it…?”

“Yes, thank you,” Shelia said. “We do understand.”

Hazel showed them both out, sighed, and headed back upstairs to the living room. “You can count them out,” she informed Ustinov, who shrugged. The Russian was a man of few words; he’d only unbent far enough to tell her that he had committed a political indiscretion that had resulted in him being chased out of the country. Her husband had once commented that Ustinov was as fit as a soldier, something he had explained as being due to the Russian program of conscription. “You won’t get them as flatmates unless they change their minds.”

“That’s bad, I guess,” Ustinov said. He glanced back down the corridor. “We’d pay more if we could.”

“It’s not the money,” Hazel assured him. “It’s the fact that this place is meant to be full of life and it… isn’t. If Stuart and I ever have children, then perhaps there will be little feet running around, but…”

Ustinov grinned. “Perhaps,” he agreed, as the sound of a door opening echoed down the corridor. “Ah, here he is.”

Hazel smiled at Sergey Ossetia as he entered the living room. She had never gotten a gay vibe from him, not in the sense that some gaysexuals dressed in a feminine fashion, often comically exaggerated for effect, but she presumed that that was because Russia had a dim attitude to homosexuals. She had been looked at by enough men to know the difference between lust and dispassion… and Ossetia had shown no interest in her body whatsoever.

“Sorry about the delay,” Ossetia said. He spoke perfect English; neither of them had much in the way of an accent. “I was just emailing home and lost track of time.”

Ustinov glowered at him. “We’re late,” he said. “Come on; we’ll see you later, Mrs Robinson.”

“I assume that you don’t want your rooms cleared?” Hazel asked, teasing them. “I can do it for a small charge…”

“No, thank you,” Ustinov said, with great dignity. “You have a break while we go to work to earn the money to keep you in house and home.”

Hazel laughed and waved at them as they headed down the stairs and out onto the streets, and then got back to work. The house didn’t clean itself, after all.

Ustinov, who was a Captain in the FSB Commando detachments, checked around them out of habit as the two men strolled onwards through the Meadows, heading towards the other side of the city. The Meadows made a good place for them to have a private chat; it was somewhere where the British security services would have real problems spying on them, even though there was no sign that the British had even noticed them as more than the simple labourers they appeared to be.

Ossetia, who was a Lieutenant and technically Ustinov’s subordinate, frowned as he carefully hunted for signs of pursuit. “Are you sure that the items are safe?”

Ustinov nodded. “She hasn’t gone into our rooms since we took them,” he said. He had taken the precaution of scattering a handful of portable sensors around since the first week they had spent in the building; Hazel hadn’t even poked her head in, let alone anything else. “In any case, we have them all secure, don’t we?”

“More or less,” Ossetia agreed. They had moved beyond the ordinary relationship between a Captain and a Lieutenant; there was little point in maintaining the formalities when it was just the two of them. They knew that there was at least one other officer in Edinburgh, their superior, but they knew nothing about him… or about the others they assumed would exist within the city. Neither of them had been assigned to specific targets; both of them knew enough to know that some targets in the city would not have been left alone. “The boxes should remain secure, short of someone actually managing to burn through the casing, triggering the self-destruct system.”

“One hopes that that won’t happen,” Ustinov said shortly. They were almost at the university. “The blast would vaporise the entire house and hopefully be blamed on Islamic terrorists.”

They kept their mouths closed as they passed the university library, noticing the protesters protesting against the American deployment to Korea without showing their disdain, and headed towards the Mosque. It was a building that was a little piece of Arabia in Edinburgh, built by money supplied by Saudi Arabia before it collapsed into chaos; the two Russians kept their faces blank as they passed it. Once they had completed their first mission, perhaps the Mosque would make a good second target for chaos. The streets were packed with cars, despite the limited supplies of oil from the Middle East; it was easy to get into the crowds, lose themselves within the swarm of humanity, and finally reach a nondescript building near Arthur’s Seat. Every base had been covered; if anyone had asked, they had been called to the building and paid minimum wage to perform some basic repairs.

Control was waiting for them in a shabby room.

Neither of them knew his real name, nor did they know anything useful about him that the security services could use to track him down. They assumed that he was a deep-cover agent, working somewhere within Edinburgh, perhaps within the entire United Kingdom, to touch base with all of the Russian operatives within the country. They had been given some specific instructions concerning him; they were to tell him nothing about their positions, or where they stayed or…

The planners had tried to plan for everything.

“Boris and Boris, pleased to meet you,” Control said. The name Boris was a private joke; anything else would have kicked off alarms in their heads. If Control had called them Ivan, he had been captured and turned and they would have to run for their lives. “Take a seat; events are moving faster than we had anticipated.”

Ustinov nodded. They had privately expected to be called back to Moscow; they had run plenty of dry-runs before and nothing had ever come of it. When they had been inserted into Britain this time, they had expected nothing else; they would be just a pawn in Moscow’s endless power games with Europe. The acts they had planned and prepared, ever since they had come out of Chechnya with a burning hatred of all things European, Islamic or both, had seemed meaningless on their own. In the context of some much larger operation, however…

They seated themselves on the floor. “This building has been checked carefully,” Control said. “You have some work to do afterwards, but for the moment, the agency has ensured that we had some time together. I assume that you have a secure base and have placed your weapons somewhere where you can lay claim to them?”

Ustinov nodded again. “Yes, sir,” he said. That was as far as he was prepared to go when it came to sharing details. If something happened and they lost Control, there were contingency plans for himself and Ossetia to either launch attacks on their own, or flee the country. “Everything is as safe as it could reasonably be.”

Control smiled. “Good,” he said. “The start day of the operation has been set; the 1^st of June, local morning. You have been assigned to target set A; I assume that you have scouted out possible locations?”

“Yes, sir,” Ustinov said. Again, he couldn’t share details; men who shared information knew that sooner or later, accidentally or otherwise, they would be betrayed. They had, as it happened, found the perfect place for their actions. The only real danger was running into another team with similar ideas. “We also have the equipment that we need.”

“Good,” Control said. He leaned forwards. “Are you sure that you can carry out the mission without problems?”

Ustinov nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. There were questions he wanted to ask and didn’t dare. “Once we carry out the mission, we should be able to escape without serious problems.”

“We need you to continue attacks,” Control said. Ustinov nodded slowly; he had expected that much. “There is a mighty storm coming and we will need all the help that you can muster to make certain that we win. I won’t give you a list of secondary targets, some of which may be hit by other teams” — both men drew in their breath at the vague confirmation that there were other teams — “but you are ordered to hit as many targets as you can with the aim of causing disruption and chaos in the streets. Keep watching your email; we’ll send you a message if we want you to end the attacks and come out.”

Ustinov scowled. He would have been much happier only using email, but the Americans had refined their techniques for tracking and decrypting emails, and while the Americans and the Europeans seemed to be permanently divorced these days, it was folly to assume that the Americans wouldn’t tip off the Europeans if they knew that there was something big going down. Pre-planned messages had their uses, but there were only a limited number of possible messages that they could agree upon… and one certainty of the universe, as far as Ustinov knew, was that anything they planned for wouldn’t happen as they planned it. Friction was worked into every good plan, but the smaller the plan, the more chance for friction to terminate operations with extreme prejudice.

On the plus side, at least they’d be choosing their own targets.

Control stood up. “There will be no further contact,” he said, tapping a small case in the centre of the room with his shoe. “You have some details in there of other arms caches, but there were obvious limits as to what we could emplace in the city; the British are rather paranoid after Glasgow and Blackburn. You both know where to find some specific stocks that you can use for terror if you need them, so… all I can really say is good luck, and I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

Ossetia looked up at him. There was almost a nervous tone in his voice; anticipation mixed with concern about how he would perform when it all went into action. Ustinov knew the feeling; he had had it himself on his first mission in Chechnya.

“Something really big is about to happen, isn’t it?”

Ustinov smiled inwardly. “Yes,” Control said flatly. Ustinov wondered just how much control knew about what was coming; it didn’t seem likely that he would know everything, but at the same time, he wouldn’t be completely in the dark. “Your task is to sow random terror.”

Until we are either killed or run out of weapons, Ustinov thought. He knew better than to assume that the British police would just let them get on with it. The British SAS were almost as good as the Spetsnaz… and Ustinov knew that neither of them were trained to the peak of Spetsnaz perfection. Their skills lay in infiltration, not commando shootouts in the middle of schools and government buildings. He would have been delighted to have had some Spetsnaz helping out, but few of them could pass for harmless foreign slaves or stupid British people. It was up to them, he reflected; this could get very interesting; nasty, brutish and short.

“Good luck,” Control said shortly, assuming the face of the capitalist exploiter again. The Russian immigrants were exploited, Ustinov had found; both of them had been worked to the bone more than once, just because their position was so precarious. He had studied British politics enough to be certain that the ruling party was going to lose the next general election, putting in a Conservative Government with a mandate to, among other things, evict all immigrants. Or, perhaps, they would just move right to the British National Front; the European laws against hate speech hadn’t managed to put the BNP out of business… and they had even some MPs in Parliament. “I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

He strode out of the building, looking to all the world as if he had just given two downtrodden lackeys their orders. Ustinov checked the building quickly, then transferred the contents of the case into their own bags; money and some documents. The documents would be memorised at night, and then shredded; both men had near-perfect memories. There was a great deal of work to do in the building, mainly the plumbing; neither of them complained as they got to work. They needed to work to prove they’d earned their money legitimately.

Ossetia coughed. “Lunch at Euro-Burger?”

Ustinov smiled. Euro-Burger had been set up in direct competition to McDonalds and had been winning the struggle for dominance. He didn’t really understand it; both of them tasted like crap. They had moved some of their operations into Russia, where they were ruining the taste buds of countless Russian youngsters; Ustinov would have quite happily bombed either of them if he had thought that it would have managed to achieve something. It wouldn’t; they would need a bigger target to really shock the British public.

An aircraft flew high overhead.

He shuddered. He knew what it portended.