The Sanction

by Mark Sennen

  With that, Kadri bellowed another laugh and turned to embrace his brother.

  Taher leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  ‘Taher?’ Saabiq. Right in his face like an annoying little insect that needed to be swatted.

  ‘What?’ Taher blinked, pushed Saabiq away and climbed out of the minibus. He wanted to find somewhere to pray, have something to eat and get his head down.

  ‘I was wondering…’ Saabiq gestured across to the low brick building. He looked more nervous now than he had before the job. ‘Do you think Kadri would be offended if we skip the pussy?’

  Taher didn’t care one way or another. Offending Kadri was the least of his worries, but now the man was turning from his brother.

  ‘My brother’s farm,’ he said, boasting. He indicated the building with the heavy doors. ‘You like it? You want? Don’t worry, English boys, these girls are clean. And you no pay. Gratuit. Free.’

  ‘No.’ Taher waved Kadri off. ‘We’ll pray and eat and sleep.’

  Taher shepherded Latif and Saabiq away to their quarters, thankful they were in a small byre separate from the main dwelling.

  Hours later Taher woke in the darkness. A desert chill had descended and he was about to pull another blanket over himself when he heard the cries of a child. Saabiq and Latif lay alongside him, both fast asleep. Taher pushed himself up from the hard floor and made his way outside. A clear sky blazed with a million stars, and a dim light filtered through the ragged curtain that served as a door to the main building. He walked across and pulled aside the curtain. An oil lamp hanging from a roof truss illuminated the living space. Kadri sat slumped on a chair, his trousers by his ankles, a young girl with her face in his lap, Kadri’s paw of a hand on the back of her head.

  ‘So you do want, yes?’ Kadri said, looking up as Taher entered. The Tunisian laughed. ‘You can have this one when she’s finished or my brother will sort you out. Mansour?’

  Kadri shouted into the night as Taher strode across the room. He looked down at the girl. She was twelve or thirteen. No more. In one swift movement he reached for the Glock he’d stuffed in the back of his belt. He brought the gun round and jammed it in Kadri’s mouth. Kadri grabbed for the gun with both hands, the skin on his knuckles whitening as he gripped the barrel. Taher shook his head.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said. The girl looked up and Taher said to her gently: ‘No one is going to hurt you.’

  The girl wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and rose to her feet. She looked up at Kadri for a moment and then ran from the room.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Kadri mumbled as Taher forced the barrel deeper. ‘You… can’t…’

  ‘I can.’ Taher pulled the trigger and something on the far side of the room shattered as the bullet hit it. Kadri shuddered and slumped over. Taher wrenched the gun free and crossed to the back of the living area where a corridor led to several small rooms. He ran to the first one to find Kadri’s brother staggering out in a daze, a pistol in his hand. Taher fired once and the man crumpled to the floor.

  As Taher left the dwelling, Latif and Saabiq came out of the guest accommodation, woken by the gunshots.

  ‘Get your stuff,’ Taher said. He walked over to the brick building. There was a sliding metal door secured with two bolts. He slid the bolts and opened the door. In the darkness he could see nothing, but he could smell the urine and the shit and hear the low ululating.

  ‘You’re free to leave,’ he said. ‘Allez, allez.’

  Taher strode away. Latif had found the keys to the minibus and was in the driver’s seat. Saabiq piled their kit into the rear. Taher climbed up and then turned back. The young girl stood a few steps away, a pale ghost under the starlight. For a moment, as she met his gaze, he wondered about her fate and what would become of her. A child could be changed by events, choose to take a certain path depending on circumstance. Left, right, straight ahead. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life, little one, he whispered to himself. Choose wisely.

  He faced forward and tapped Latif on the shoulder.

  ‘Go,’ he said.

  Chapter Four

  It had been three months since Silva had last seen her. A quarter of a year. A fraction of the lifespan left for Silva. All of that remaining for her mother.

  A Saturday in Tunisia. Carthage International Airport crowded with people, a seemingly never-ending column of tourists disgorging into the arrivals hall. As Silva walked out, she scanned the waiting crowd. Francisca da Silva stood among the taxi drivers, holding up her own piece of paper, the word BecBec scrawled on in marker pen. The pet name was from Silva’s childhood, from when she was just toddler and could only say her own name in a garbled approximation. Her mother smiled, her face framed by long dark hair just beginning to grey. Fine lines at the eyes and mouth. Lips adorned with a subtle shade of pink lipstick. As Silva approached she launched into French, matching the buzz of the language echoing all around.

  ‘Êtes-vous Mademoiselle BecBec?’

  ‘Mum.’ Silva blushed. Somehow, whatever the situation, her mother had the ability to make Silva laugh. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You’re not BecBec or you’re no longer a mademoiselle? If it’s the latter then you might at least have invited me to the wedding.’

  Silva dropped her bag and hugged her mother. They’d always been close, but the past couple of years had reinforced their bond, and Silva had come to depend on her mother throughout her court-martial and during her time in the military prison.

  ‘I’m still single, Mum. With my prospects I will be for a while, I reckon.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Francisca bent and hefted Silva’s bag onto her shoulder. She turned and gestured towards the exits. ‘What about that nice American boy you were seeing?’

  ‘Were seeing is the operative phrase. He’s past tense.’

  ‘He dumped you?’

  ‘No. It was the other way around.’

  ‘Well.’ Francisca led Silva across the concourse and they emerged into harsh sunlight. She raised a hand at the queue of taxis, and quipped as she did so. ‘There’ll be another one along soon.’

  A battered yellow minicab took them into the centre of Tunis along palm-lined roads, Francisca pointing out various sights including the National Bardo Museum, infamous now for the terrorist attack that had taken place there rather than for its collection of wondrous mosaics.

  Her mother had ensconced herself in a couple of rooms at a small hotel on the edge of the Medina souk. The hotel’s colonial facade had seen better days but inside the place was clean and tidy, if a little spartan. Francisca apologised for the surroundings.

  ‘Not like when I was with The Times.’ She walked to the window and opened the shutters. The sounds of the busy street drifted in. ‘In those days my expense account was bottomless.’

  ‘It’s better than I’m used to,’ Silva said. ‘Home or abroad.’

  For a moment the street noise was all there was, Francisca standing by the window before turning.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. About what happened. Sorry you’re not over it.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. I don’t think it’s something you can recover from. Perhaps it’s something you’re not supposed to recover from.’

  Francisca slipped across the room and embraced her daughter. ‘Hush. What sort of talk is that?’

  Silva shrugged. Her mother held her for a moment and then went over to the bed. She sat and patted the mattress. Silva moved across and sat beside her.

  ‘When you were little, when you were BecBec, you had a rabbit, remember?’

  ‘Twitch,’ Silva said. ‘He escaped and you said he’d gone to find some bunny friends. Later, when I was older, you told me what really happened: Twitch had been killed by the dog next door.’

  ‘I think you were eleven or twelve by then. Some of my friends said I was cruel, but I thought it was important to tell you the truth. I wanted you to understand that life could be unpalatable.’

 
; ‘The boy in Afghanistan was a kid, Mum, not a rabbit. And it wasn’t next door’s dog that killed him, it was me.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to draw a parallel, merely illustrating that shit happens. It happens to people it shouldn’t happen to, people who’ve done nothing to deserve it. It even happens to pet rabbits. There’s not much we can do but face up to reality.’

  ‘It didn’t just happen though, I pulled the trigger.’

  ‘You pulled the trigger, but if al-Qaeda hadn’t carried out the 9/11 attacks you wouldn’t have been there in the first place. If the CIA hadn’t funded the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the eighties then perhaps Bin Laden wouldn’t have risen to prominence. And so on. How far back do you want to go?’

  ‘I pulled the trigger.’ Silva repeated the bare facts she’d mulled over so many times. Felt the tears coming yet again. ‘In the end it was down to me.’

  ‘Sweetheart.’ Her mother raised a hand and stroked Silva’s hair. It was as if Silva was a child once more. ‘It hurts me to see you like this. At some point you have to move on.’

  ‘I know.’ Silva had told herself as much dozens of times, but the words refused to alter the reality of the situation. Still, her mother was correct, and invariably the advice she gave was the right course of action. ‘I’ll try to put it aside while I’m here.’

  ‘There’s no need to do that, we’ll give it a good talking over, right?’ Francisca smiled. ‘But perhaps leave it at the airport with the unclaimed baggage when you return to the UK, yes?’

  Silva nodded and changed the subject. ‘What will we do?’

  ‘See the museum, go to the beach, visit the souks, eat, drink, and – this most important of all – laugh!’

  They’d done all of that and, for the week she’d been there, Silva had almost forgotten about Afghanistan. When they parted in the departure hall at the airport, she’d kissed her mother and waved as she passed through to airside. She’d turned back to see her mother fumbling with a piece of paper, unfolding it, and waving it above her head. It was the sign she’d held up when Silva had arrived: BecBec.

  ‘Au revoir, BecBec,’ her mother shouted. And then, in Portuguese, ‘Até breve.’

  See you soon…

  * * *

  The document Holm had cobbled together on the day of the attack hadn’t been received well, and Huxtable gave him two weeks to write a full report.

  ‘Something I can show to Thomas Gillan,’ she said. ‘Something he can show to the prime minister. Pretty pictures and pie graphs. Lots of confusing figures. Plenty of footnotes and appendices. You know the kind of thing.’

  When he strolled across Vauxhall Bridge and met Palmer for lunch in a pub round the corner from the SIS building, Palmer reached out a hand and patted Holm on the shoulder.

  ‘Can’t win them all, mate,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be fair on the rest of us. We all like someone to blame. Makes us feel better.’

  Brighter by the weekend. Finding a positive even when the chips were down. Palmer’s generous and optimistic nature was the opposite of Holm’s ‘glass half empty’ outlook on life.

  ‘The Belgian lead you gave me was bogus,’ Holm said as Palmer bought a couple of beers. ‘Without it I wouldn’t have advised Huxtable that an attack on UK soil was imminent.’

  ‘The bogus Belgian, yes.’ Palmer sipped his pint and made a face. ‘Eighty per cent was as far as I was prepared to go, remember? It was your call.’

  ‘Yes, but I expect an eighty per cent certainty to mean…’ Holm paused and glanced down at the froth on his beer. Palmer was right. The other side of eighty per cent was twenty. It was his call. ‘Didn’t you lot have an inkling about Tunisia? I mean, you’re head of the North Africa station, there must have been something?’

  ‘Gossip, but nothing substantial, nothing we could act on. Nothing as good as eighty per cent.’

  ‘No word on Mohid Latif?’

  ‘We don’t know where he is but according to the Border Force there’s no record he travelled to Tunisia.’

  ‘He’s in the bloody picture at the cafe, Harry. Of course he travelled to Tunisia.’

  ‘I know, but there’s nothing from Tunisian immigration or our contacts on the ground. The only sliver of intelligence is that the Tunisian authorities have identified another one of the attackers as Adnan Kadri, a well-known people trafficker. The bad news is that he’s dead.’

  ‘The Tunisians killed him?’

  ‘No. It appears he was taken out by rival traffickers.’ Palmer raised his hands in apology. ‘Sorry I can’t be more helpful.’

  Holm didn’t really know what he’d been hoping for. Perhaps some reference to Latif which meant Six could take part of the blame. If not that then a miracle. At least the lunch had been good and Palmer had paid.

  Holm slogged over the report for the next ten days and then attached the document to an email, pressed send, uttered a short prayer and waited for a response. It came the following afternoon as he was getting ready to leave for home. He trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor and slunk into Huxtable’s office, head down. When she told him to take a seat he sank into a high-backed chair in a vain attempt to disappear.

  ‘Right.’ Huxtable tapped a long-nailed finger on the desk, her voice soft but ominous. Silk laced with acid. ‘I thought we needed a talk about your performance. A review.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ Holm could see a copy of his report open on the desk. ‘I thought this meeting was to discuss my document on the Tunis attack?’

  ‘No.’ Huxtable made a point of closing the report and pushing it to one side. ‘I don’t want to pre-empt the investigation into what went wrong. However it’s obvious procedure was set aside for a period of – how shall I put this? – flying by the seat of your pants?’

  Holm shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling. It was either that or forget the whole thing.’

  ‘You were chasing paper planes.’

  ‘What can I say? Everything had gone quiet. No chatter, nothing from the field. We weren’t able to verify the original source for the intel so I came to you.’ Holm leaned forward. It wasn’t a great shot, but at least he’d managed to get the ball back across the net. ‘You had my recommendation on raising the threat level and all the information.’

  ‘And then you did a runner?’

  ‘I didn’t leave the situation room until close to six in the morning. We’d done all we could and in the end, as you know, a joint decision was made that the intel was wrong. We had no idea of the target or the location. All we knew was a threat had been made. It could have been anywhere from Tottenham to Timbuktu. We contacted every agent we had but nobody had any info. GCHQ had nothing but the original intercept. SIS gave us a lead from Belgium but it turned out to be false. The Americans either had nothing or weren’t telling us anything.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know what it means. The Americans share intelligence with us when it suits them. If it doesn’t suit them they play their cards close to their chests.’

  ‘And the evidence for this?’

  Holm shook his head. He had an old friend in the CIA who’d confirmed Holm’s suspicions years ago. ‘Strategy and tactics, old buddy,’ his friend had said. ‘Two separate things. Out in the field our countries play the game in very similar ways, but at the top of the tree the policy wonks are looking at it differently. Sometimes that means not telling our allies everything even if the end result is casualties on the ground.’

  ‘Well?’ Huxtable waited for a beat. ‘I’ll take your silence as an indication your allegation has no basis in fact. It’s similar to your obsession with Taher. Your excuse for not finding him is he has to be receiving tip-offs from inside the security services, yes? That we have a mole?’

  ‘Well, there’s—’

  ‘Absolutely no evidence to back up your claim.’ Huxtable rapped the table like a judge using a gavel to bring silence to a courtroom. ‘Now, let’s move on to
the real reason I called you here.’

  Holm let himself slump farther down into the chair, as if in doing so he might avoid the hammer blow that was surely coming.

  ‘As you know, JTAC has always recruited the brightest and best. We’re lucky to be able to draw personnel from many different branches. You came across to Five from Special Branch originally, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Holm nodded. The way Huxtable phrased it made his transfer to MI5 sound like a cold war defection, but Holm had been an obvious recruit and he’d felt he was coming to the end of his days in the police. When the call had come he’d jumped at the chance.

  ‘You had a lot to offer back then.’

  Holm flinched. Huxtable was getting to the business end of the meeting.

  ‘Although you’ve had personal issues recently, I see.’ She indicated a printout on the desk in front of her. She looked up and gave a flat smile. ‘Still, it happens to nearly all of us from time to time.’

  The inference being that nothing personal would ever happen to Huxtable.

  ‘My wife.’ Holm shrugged. There was no point in hiding anything. Huxtable was all-knowing and all-seeing. ‘She left me a couple of years ago. Demands of the job, I suppose.’

  ‘There was nothing else we should have been informed about, was there? No indiscretion on your part?’

  ‘No.’ If only there had been, he thought. ‘We broke up amicably.’

  A straight-out lie. But then he was good at lying. To himself as much as anyone. The split had come out of the blue and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him. He’d spent his life playing detective and uncovering secrets and there was his wife carrying on with the next-door neighbour right under his nose. They’d been at it for months and if he hadn’t returned home from an overseas trip unexpectedly one day and caught them screwing on the living-room floor, they’d probably have continued to pull the wool over his eyes.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Huxtable said. ‘About a new role for you.’

  ‘I’m happy where I am.’

  ‘Sure, but your talents are wasted behind a desk. I’m looking for somebody to get out there and be proactive, to chase down leads.’