Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘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.