It would be his last sight of the cloisters, the water tower, the treasury. He went past the garden where wild flowers grew out of the mortar binding the old stone walls. He had walked through the gravestones of men dead for centuries. Behind him was the building where once he would have been called “a chosen cherubim” or “that little angel”.
It had been, for Cammy, a pilgrimage before his main journey. Could not have gone, without it, to the place where he would attack, wreak – he believed – a fearful vengeance and give his name a resonance, would not be forgotten as were the men whose bones were lying beneath him. Other than in school holidays and occasional weekends, for two years the Choir House had been his home. He had worn a school uniform that would have singled him out from every other kid of his age on the estate above the village of Sturry; he would have known music that none of them knew; learned the basics of the Latin language that none of them would recognise. He came to the door of the boarding house and stopped. Why was he there? A fair enough question.
A woman came out. She glanced at him. She would have seen his scarred face and the stubble on his cheeks, and noticed the conservative jacket he wore and the anorak hooked over his shoulders, maybe seen a decent shirt and a sombre tie, and a pair of shoes that would have looked right at a bowls club committee meeting, and he was obviously loitering. She turned to face him, hands on her hips. Cammy turned away from her. He remembered the priest and the easy lie. The last time he had walked this path, around the cathedral’s outer walls, the tears had run on his face. His mother had carried his suitcase. Not much in it, a few books, a few games, and pyjamas. His school uniform, his robe and ruff, were left behind, would be allocated to another child. It was the last time he had cried.
Visitors to the cathedral had stopped and turned to stare at the child whose mother carried the case, and who marched him briskly towards an exit. One teacher had said to him that he should not feel any sense of guilt because his voice had suffered the inevitable changes of aging. Another had said that he was not “really cut out for this place, find somewhere that’ll make you happier”. A younger member of staff had remarked, “You’re not, frankly, your own best friend, Cameron, too full of argument.” His mother’s grip on his hand brooked no argument. They had almost reached the outer Christ Church Gate when she had jerked his arm.
She’d said, “Come on, get a grip and stop that bloody noise. They’re not worth it. Put them behind you . . . Those people that look down their long noses at us, they use the same hand as you when they wipe their bums. They’re no better than you . . .”
He had smeared an arm across his eyes, had blinked hard. Of course, then, had not known how but had made a promise that a price would be paid, and with interest.
He did not look back as he approached the gate. A price to be paid and a big one . . . would be done the following morning. He had all of them in his mind – Stanislau and Mikki and Tomas, Dwayne and Pieter, and Ulrike – and his stomach growled in hunger and the rain had come on heavier.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake . . .”
Dominic was at his car, a weight of gear dumped at his ankles, and his phone had beeped, and he’d checked the text.
“This is the bloody end . . .”
On the other side of the parking area, Babs had the boot of her car open and everything loaded in it that had not gone back into the armoury, and her phone had gone and she’d read her text.
“This is just bloody unreasonable,” he murmured.
“God! Do they not think we have the right to a life?” she snapped.
They walked towards each other.
“I was going to a movie.”
“We have a birthday next week and I’m due to make the cake.”
“It will be overtime, won’t it?”
“Bet your life it will be.”
Different ways, and different types, but both were wedded to the job. He had a new girlfriend who worked in a solicitor’s office and who was sorely tried by the hours he kept and his devotion to the work, and who just about hung in there, and would get a call in the next five minutes telling her to find a friend to take to the Cineworld. She had a husband, father of their kid, and he joked, pretended to, about being second in place, or third, even fourth, to her job; he’d get a call telling him to shove off down to the Co-op, and buy a cake and make sure he checked the “Use Before” date.
Rain was beating down on the tarmac, and on their kit, and starting to soak them. The call had not come as a surprise. They should have been released hours before but had been asked to hang around, something was in the wind. They were to get up to Canterbury . . . Why them? They were not entitled to see the duty roster, or to know where the armed response vehicles were tasked that evening. They were to get up to Canterbury, were to check in at the station there. Would be contacted by a Mr Merrick.
Dominic rang through to his sergeant. “Are we part of a big team?”
“Don’t think so, Dom. They’ve asked for a bit of muscle for the ride, and we’re sending you and Babs, and you take all your artillery. You might be wondering about Merrick? He’s the Box. He’s a spook. Merrick says that it will all be over by the morning. Part of it is that we are thin as a fag paper, and part of it is that you were on the beach this morning and were in there at the start. Anything more will expose my ignorance . . . Enjoy.”
He said to Babs, “I don’t want to go rash, like jump off the end of the pier, but this might just be interesting . . .”
Together they went back inside and drew out their firearms and their ammunition and their grenades again. Had enough stuff, the armourer observed, to start a small-scale war.
She said, “Could be a lot better than interesting if it’s that guy on the beach. Serious and interesting.”
The busker had a traditional guitar and strummed vigorously and sang without amplification. The rain was soaking into his woollen hat and into his sweater and he seemed not to notice. In front of him was a plastic plate with a rim to it that would protect the coins thrown into it. Cammy was his sole audience. Recognised him.
Thought the sweater was the same, and the beanie, but his beard was longer and the flecks of grey more pronounced. Sitting in the same place with his back to a war memorial, topped by a small Celtic cross. He had been there the day Cammy had gone, taken the flight that would lift him into fighting alongside the black flags. He had walked past the war memorial on his way to the bank on the main drag and the busker had been playing. Perhaps he noticed the guy with the weird face and the clothes that did not match his age, and might have wondered whether the attention shown him meant that he was going to get a generous pocketful of loose change. “Out of luck, friend.”
He stayed and listened and wondered . . . Cammy had been in Raqqa and in Deir Ezzor and in Kobane and in Barghuz, and plenty of other places that barely figured on most maps. The busker had been here with his guitar; Cammy went on to have his assault rifle and the use of the 81mm mortar tube, and the RPG-7 launcher and had the support of his brothers. The busker still played alone. Cammy had been with the people he loved: and now, he, too, was alone. The busker would be playing through that week, and Cammy would be gone. Their eyes met, a brief exchange . . . The guy finished and realised that he’d get no coins off the man who watched him. Shook his head and flicked the rain off his beanie, and put the guitar into its case. Cammy watched as he started to walk away.
He said to the man’s back, “I don’t know your name. You don’t know mine, but you will tomorrow.”
He had been given the number of a psychologist, employed by the military until retirement four months before. Jonas explained why he called, what he needed to know.
“Kami al-Britani. We knew him quite well, able to form a decent profile of him.”
He did not interrupt, had no need to. Jonas gazed at the photograph on his wall.
“You’ve told me about the confrontation with an experienced NCO, a sergeant in SBS. Implied that some sense of nobility, or patrioti
c sentiment, saved the sergeant’s life. You indicated that this young Briton declined to kill a fellow countryman . . . Mr Merrick, from what I hear of you, you are unlikely to be gullible. I would lay odds – my shirt, my vest, my underpants, perhaps even my Marylebone tie – that the weapon jammed. This is not some Robin Hood figure who patrols the desert and seeks to right the wrongs inflicted by the Assad regime, or the Iranians and Hezbollah, or the UK and the Americans, by the rest of the known world. We can assume him and his coterie are in love with the business and pursuit of warfare. Some people play golf, some stand on the end of a platform and jot down the numbers on the sides of locomotives, some want to have a loaded weapon in their hands. He led a group. It was a talisman to other units. They were believed to be invincible. They attacked against ludicrously uneven odds and seemed to come through unscathed. That bit is important.”
Jonas seldom took notes, relied on his memory.
“They were survivors, winners. We might have imagined that they had, collectively, no great sense of the burning injustice of the day. Nor would they have concerned themselves with the hideous atrocities that were the daily practice of the black flag movement. They proceeded with the combat, with the killing, and they soaked up the praise. Had a sense of enduring excitement rather than anger . . . But it started to go wrong. Where I started out, Mr Merrick, we go back to a wall. Go back to the bricks that have been removed. The wall is now unstable, its strength is unpredictable. It will create mayhem when it falls. The bricks are the people involved in that group. I was privileged to sit in on security assessments. They were intact when they left the enclave at Barghuz. A coherent unit, but a small one. Keep thinking of the bricks, Mr Merrick.”
He thought of them but continued to stare at the mouth of the crocodile, its jaws and its teeth.
“They were multi-national. All significant misfits in the society they came from. Cameron Jilkes – I did not have that name, only that of Kami al-Britani. British. There was a German woman and we had identified a young Estonian boy, and a white South African, a Ukrainian, a Canadian and a Belarus man. They had stayed untouched, were celebrities. Like the fighter aces over the trenches in the First World War. A peculiar irony, but once they quit the main war theatre and were looking to drift away, go to ground, they began to take casualties. What we learned, the Estonian was first. He was followed by the Ukrainian, and more. I suppose that only one is still active . . . From your interest I assume that the one we call Kami al-Britani survived, has returned. He has lost the stability that came from his colleagues. He will be alone. People may seek to use his combat skills but he has no friend to take on the burden of decision making. His mind-set will dictate just one ambition. Maximum havoc and revenge. What he knew has been destroyed, and bloodily. That makes a powerful anger . . . He will want to find a target that he can equate to the value of his colleagues. His weakness? He will need to get his hands on a weapon that can deliver the Valhalla moment, a decent bang for the buck . . .”
Jonas arched an eyebrow. “Meaning . . .?”
“Military explosive, a heavy machine-gun, an 81mm mortar, or an armour-piercing grenade projectile from an RPG . . .”
“He could use that?”
“Of course, yes. Has been at war in a savage theatre for more than two years. This is heavy lifting, continous fighting. He can use anything. An RPG would be difficult to get his hands on but would be an ideal weapon . . . My conclusions, Mr Merrick? Very capable, physically brave, determined to hurt, to avenge those colleagues. If he can find the weapon, then he’ll go out with drama. They are one-dimensional people and with a quite colossal sense of grievance. But you know that, Mr Merrick . . . My final observation. You do not get to Valhalla by holding up a handkerchief, waving it at the guns and having your hands high above your head. Much worse than death is the idea of imprisonment. A lifetime in a cell, behind bars, unheard and unknown and uncared for, is a true torture for such people. Hope I have been of help. Good luck.”
It was always a matter of having the skill to join the dots, Jonas believed . . . A vehicle had been lost while apparently heading for a ferry port from which regular sailings went to the UK. And the cargo was believed to be a Ruchnoy Protivotankoviy Granatomyot weapon, doubtless serviceable.
He cleared his desk, locked everything away other than the file on Cameron Jilkes which he slid into his bag. He left it neat, looked a last time at the crocodile, and a last time at the photograph of a young man, smiling and with a ring of ice-cream smeared around his mouth.
Chapter 9
He felt he was going to war, not with bands playing and crowds cheering, but in stealth and unheralded. The building seemed deserted as Jonas Merrick locked the outer door of 3/S/12 and set off down the corridor towards the bank of lifts.
He went by rooms that showed no light under their doors, and along silent corridors, passed the coffee machines that did no trade at that time of the evening. The ceiling lights were dimmed because that was the new edict in support of a Save the Climate campaign. He carried his bag, pitifully light because it contained so little . . . and just the one file, the name of “JILKES, Cameron” scrawled across the cardboard in his painful handwriting. In his pocket was that awkward-shaped and necessary item of equipment that he had, last minute, decided he should bring with him.
Jonas reckoned that it was neither family holidays or sickness that had emptied the floors of Thames House. He thought the quiet and the ghostly still of the place was because of the stretch factor. No way around it, and “all hands to the pump” as they would have said in former times. Stretched to snapping point, and any man or woman working there who had even half of the necessary ability was sitting in an unmarked car, loitering in a shop doorway, travelling on a bus or train. Those who were not press-ganged into being on the ground were probably huddled over a desk top, staring at screens and trying to find patterns of behaviour without which the Service might as well accept it was blindfolded.
It had never been this bad before, not even in the dark times when the Irish had tried to bomb the city into political capitulation. Not at any time in his Cold War experience, not during the previous years of the jihadi emergency.
He waited for the lift and the shape pressed against his hip, hard and uncomfortable. The lift came.
“All good, Jonas?” he was asked by the AssDepDG. There were lines on his forehead, bags beneath his eyes and damn near a shake in his hands.
“Everything’s good,” he said, his face impassive.
“If it gets more than you and the allocated resources can manage, then shout and . . .”
They travelled down two floors. “I doubt I will.”
“I’ll come running with what I can muster, tea ladies and God knows who else.”
“I think I understand, thank you.”
He was alone again descending to the ground floor. The building operated “a need to know” culture, but few had more need to understand the pressures for the commitment of trained personnel. Jonas assumed that some 500 investigations were underway at any one time. He rarely smiled, not even to himself in private moments of humour, but he enjoyed the image of AssDepDG leading a platoon of the women who used to push the tea and biscuit trolleys, and those who shuffled around delivering and retrieving post items, and chauffeurs, and the sweepings off front desk reception. The doors opened.
He saw Lily. She greeted him, shyly, perhaps admired him and perhaps knew of the gong in Vera’s knicker drawer.
“You’re late this evening, Mr Merrick.”
“Am I? I suppose I am.”
He hurried towards the desk. There was an elderly security man there, would have been a company sergeant major from the old Irish days, now eking out time until his pension could be drawn, and a woman – thin as a rake – beside him. Lily, from the Archive, would be whispering to the colleagues around her that it was extraordinary for him, quite bizarre, for old Jonas still to be in the building this late. He thought he saw a nod and an understanding w
ink from the pale, thin little creature in her chair and the heavy built man sitting beside her. “Good God, shouldn’t he have been long gone? Gone before we came on shift?” Fat chance that he would not be noticed
He reached the internal gate. He was slow going through and his coat caught, and a red light flashed . . . Struggling with the damn thing did not help free him. Security approached. A button was pressed. The coat came away from the clamp that had held it. And there was a clatter of metal on the hard floor.
Handcuffs shivered on the surface, rattled, then fell still. Shiny ones, looking as new as the day they had come off a production line.
Jonas Merrick had been issued with the handcuffs nineteen years before. They had stayed wrapped in tissue paper from the day he had received them. Astonishment on their faces . . . what in the good Lord’s name was Jonas Merrick doing with a pair of handcuffs? Security maintained a poker face, and went down on one knee to pick up the handcuffs and give them to Jonas. Then, bent again and retrieved from the base of the gate a pair of small keys on a split ring, straightened up stiffly and handed them to Jonas.
“Best to be able to open them, Mr Merrick, don’t you think? Helps to be able to unlock them if they’re not going to be just an ornament. Goodnight, sir.”
This time they went into his bag, joining his sponge bag and his pyjamas, his socks, underwear and folded shirt. He went out of the main entrance and stood on the steps. He had mapped out his route, would walk past the open space with the statue of the Burghers of Calais, past the bench he had shared with Winston Gunn, and then the Palace of Westminster – the building he was credited with saving – then would take the underground train north, one change, to get to the mainline station. He hesitated on the pavement. Two armed police faced him. He knew them well enough, and thought them always close to the limits of bonhomie, verging on the impertinent. They should have been gazing up and down the street, watching for a bomber or a gunman or a grenade thrower, but instead they stared at him. Had he been certain of his lip-reading skills, he’d have sworn on the Book that one whispered, “Fuck me, I’ve seen everything now”, and would have been asnwered. “Never thought it, the Eternal Flame gone out.” And, “I’m not bloody messing, Kev, but if Eternal Flame goes out, then we face serious times.” And, “Too right, Leroy, too right, or times that are more than serious.”
The Crocodile Hunter Page 20