Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Her jeans and trainers and sweater and T-shirt came off, and she barely took the time to feel the cold: one stifled shiver only. She opened the rucksack, and took out a black jilbab , heaved it up over her head, wriggled her arms into it, and felt it slide down over her skin, and the cold seemed to snatch her again. All that she had discarded was screwed up and stuffed into the bottom of the rucksack. The outer door opened. A woman coughed, announcing her arrival. Next on was the niqab . She flushed the toilet and checked the floor, hoisted the rucksack, and unlocked the door. A white-skinned woman with bottle-blonde hair and a rolling stomach and tight multi-coloured trousers gave her a look of withering contempt, and the mutual contempt she felt for this sad creature was hidden because only her eyes could be seen through the niqab ’s eye slit. Even if provoked, the girl would not have risen to a challenge. It had been drilled into her by those who now shaped her life that she should not indulge the temptation to retaliate. She ducked her head, a servile gesture, and left the toilet, walked across the platform, gave her ticket to the machine, and went out into the dark.

She was from the Savile Town district, lived in the shadow of the Merkazi mosque, was a former pupil of the Madni Muslim High School for Girls on Scarborough Street, and her father made a minimal living doing car repairs – increasingly hard with the new electronic functions – and her mother stayed at home and had few relations and fewer friends. Zeinab was their only child, had been pushed by her teachers as a possible university entrant (the school benefited from such an accolade) and others, also, had urged that route on her. She went down the hill into the town and past the Poundland Store and the businesses offering Big Discounts, and the lights blazed to welcome late shoppers.

Near to the bus station, in a shadowed street where the boys usually met her and where there were no elevated cameras, she would wait for them. Always, when she came back to the town and knew they would be in the car and there to meet her, she felt a cold chill on her skin, whatever clothing she wore, not fear but excitement, and she would know that the blood coursed in her veins. She lived a lie, and relished it… and later would be back in Manchester and with the boyfriend, and to herself, and soundlessly, she chuckled, the noise from her throat swallowed by the material drawn tight across her face. She was always early; the boys said it was a crime to be late for a meeting they had fixed. She was satisfied with her precautions, what the boys called ‘tradecraft’; they lectured her that danger was always close by, that around all of them was extreme threat. She waited.

‘Have you done him before?’ He had asked her the same question eighteen minutes earlier and fifteen minutes before that.

She gave him the same answer. ‘I’ve not done him before.’

‘So, we don’t know whether he’s a punctual little creature.’

Both were from the North West Counter Terrorist Unit. Both were detective constables and both would have said there were better things to be done at the desk screens where they worked in the city of Manchester than being parked up in a place used by bird-watchers and dog-walkers in daylight, and assorted perverts after dark.

‘No, don’t know.’

‘He’s an hour late.’

They were out of the city towards Greenfield, just short of the moor at Saddleworth. Both were well beyond the first flushes of enthusiasm, both would have said that experience had taught them when a rendezvous would not be kept.

‘Don’t want to labour it, but I can read the time.’

‘He’s late and I’m not happy sat here.’

They had been half an hour early, and they had sat in the car, kept the engine ticking over and the windows were misted; he had left the car once to head off to a corner to piss, and she had been out twice to steal a cigarette. The CHIS had stood them up. Not that they knew much about him. This particular Covert Human Intelligence Source was newly recruited and not yet bedded down into the system. He should have been at a meeting point the previous evening farther south on the Glossop road where there was a late evening coffee and snack truck, but had not shown and they were tasked for the fall-back option, this car park out by Saddleworth. They had been told that he’d come in an old blue Vauxhall saloon, and they’d waited, had waited some more, and each had risen in their seats when a vehicle had turned into the car park. A guy had come with three plastic bags of stripped off wallpaper that he dumped by a filled bin; another had pulled in and eaten a sandwich and drank from a thermos and then taken ten minutes’ doze. Two men together, in the unmarked police car, would have stood out, but the man and the woman would have seemed just like any other couple and there for a few minutes of squeeze on the way home from the office. It went unsaid, but was mutual between them: it was a rotten old life being a ‘CHIS’ and on the books of NWCTU: Christmas came round rarely and a goody bag was hard to come by, and likely also that the individuals they targeted would not take well to the intrusion. Enough, for these two detectives, to feel a frisson of anxiety for the wellbeing of the source.

‘Time to call it?’

‘Call it a day, yes. We’ll catch the traffic all the way back… expect he’ll get a serious bollocking whoever sees him next.’

‘Yes, a serious one.’

She drove. He reported in… Twice an informant had failed to show.

They did it turn and turn about at that time in the afternoon. Their office was in the London district of Vauxhall, not on the river but close to it. The building was off a narrow street and hemmed in by offices and yards. There was the civilisation of one public house and not much else. It was an address that a stranger would have needed exact directions for, or would have had no chance of finding it. Discreet, sensibly located. It had been Gough’s duty to slip out to the nearest café, old fashioned and treasured, to collect two beakers of tea, his with sugar but not hers, and excessively large slices – that day – of carrot cake. The cake and the tea were an improvement to what came round on the trolley, and both would have indignantly claimed it was deserved because of the long hours they worked. Most in that office were there early at the start of a day, and would not shrug into coats and go out to face the evening until well after the streets had cleared of the conventional rush-hour. Gough had to do the full rigmarole of his ID at the outer door. Short cuts were not tolerated. Janice who sat there in a cubicle, and Baz who was perched behind her, had known Gough in excess of nineteen years, and had known his assistant – Pegs – for fifteen years, but they showed their ID and would not have taken a liberty… Not actually ever mentioned, but Gough assumed that Baz wore a jacket every day, warm or cold and sometimes with a cooling fan and often with a two-bar heater, because it would better obscure a shoulder holster and a Glock 9mm. The security was necessary because of their work, all that messy sort of stuff that dealt with agents who needed handling and informants who needed comforting. The work area contained a few of the juniors at a central octagonal table at the centre of the first floor but off to the side were four cubicles with walls of misted glass.

Gough crossed the room, edged around the main table and chairs, was confronted with his own closed door and slopped some of the tea in contorting to open it, and went in, shutting the door with a kick from his heel. He could not have remembered which was his and which was hers but the counter staff had sussed him years back and the beaker with the inked tick would be for Pegs. He was a veteran, never used his rank, but was senior. Had he gone higher, he would have of necessity given up fieldwork, so he had stayed on the plateau. It would see him out, another two years or three… But the threat was worse, had steadily racheted while he had been in the office off Wyvill Road. Worse now that the kids were drifting back from having their arses kicked in Syria and Iraq, and then there was the home-grown crowd who had not made it abroad and were looking to catch up, climb the ladder fast, do their bit for the cause. Gough would have said, deadpan and serious, that life in an anti-terror environment was only tolerable if there was a generous slice of carrot cake on offer in the late afternoon.