A Fatal Game

by Nicholas Searle

  ‘What will we need?’ asked Rashid.

  ‘Simple things, easy to buy,’ said the man. ‘I will supply the rest. I will contact you again in the next few days. And – this is important. Always be looking out for the enemy. They will know you already. They may be looking at you. Be aware of them and be extra careful when you meet. But never show a sign of it. Go to work as normal. Be cheerful, rude, however you normally are. Blaspheme if you need to. Share the jokes. Socialize with these people. Pity them in your hearts if you must, but extend no sympathy to them. You are reaching the next stage, the final stage. But until the moment when I give the call, lead your lives as normal. Do not communicate with each other. No slips in the security precautions. You’ve been taught how to behave in this moment. You play a role, you’re a part of their world in their eyes. You are permitted to tell lies, be like them for now, because it’s for a greater cause. Soon you will be required for your holy mission. Then the pressure will be off. Is that clear?’

  They nodded. Rashid saw Bilal and Adnan glance at each other. They knew each other from sometime before, somewhere in the city.

  ‘Do you have any further questions?’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Abdullah.

  The man did not lose the serene smile. ‘I am no one. That’s all you need to know. You do not need to know my name. I am unimportant. I am simply a vessel. I carry your fate. I do not decide it. I’m not so presumptuous. I carry the message from afar. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course,’ said Abdullah, and Rashid saw that he was blushing. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize. It’s understandable. I could give you a name but I would have made it up. I’m not important. Certainly not as important as you fortunate boys at this moment. Now, back in the van.’

  3

  They travelled back in the same bumpy silence as before, but they knew better how to wedge themselves in the corners to prevent themselves being tipped over. It was a relearning of what had been second nature over there, in the heat of the metal container as they were transported to the next field or street of blood. Then, though, they’d been crammed in, twenty or so brothers in a fetid, dusty space, light and searing heat creeping in through the rusting carcasses of the vans, each grasping his weapon, his salvation, so close they couldn’t fall over anyway, so intensely focused that such trivialities as personal comfort wouldn’t even have occurred to them. That was life here, trivialities: worrying over what cereal to have for breakfast, what to wear, which music to have in your earphones. Adnan craved simplicity.

  He looked at the others in the dark but could make nothing out of their expressions. Bilal, the boy from the next block. He’d always struck Adnan as a kind of whining boy, always moaning. Unlike Adnan he’d not been sporty, though he’d liked to watch the game. They’d been to the match together once or twice, in a bigger group. When Adnan had gone to London to do economics Bilal had studied sociology at some provincial uni Adnan had never heard of. He’d say they’d lost touch, though in reality they’d never been in touch, just members of a loose-knit, wider group into which tighter alliances drifted and from which they emerged. Adnan would never have imagined Bilal to be one of those chosen, of all his associates and acquaintances; he wouldn’t have credited him with the strength, physical and mental, to carry it through. You could never tell. To be fair, Bilal, always religiously observant, might find it surprising that Adnan had trodden the path to this miraculous point. Adnan had liked the girls and the drink.

  Rashid was looking at him. He was a Pakistani boy. Unlike Adnan, whose parents had fled the First Gulf War, Rashid’s family, so he said, had lived here for generations. He was British and yet not British, serious and studious, a business graduate who went out by day suited and booted and by night sat with them as they prayed and watched the sermons and the slick productions on the widescreen in the room. Adnan liked Rashid, though he did not know him. He saw in him a kindred spirit.

  Abdullah was the boy to watch. He was the white boy. He’d been easy to spot when he’d appeared first at the mosque, it must have been three years before. He had ginger hair and he’d cultivated a luxuriant red beard. He worked at a local supermarket and Adnan had seen him there, with his little notebook, discussing stock levels or refrigerator temperatures. They’d never acknowledged each other and then, suddenly, they’d been out there together. It was practice to team up boys from the same place, possibly even with this, the return to carry out jihad in the heart of the West, in mind. He’d performed well, with a bloody relish that was almost unnerving. He’d been instructed to shave off the beard and to keep his hair shaved close. He looked more like a rugby league forward than a religious convert. He trusted all of them but Abdullah would be the one not to trust, if it came to it.

  The van came to a halt and a hand slapped against the partition between them and the driver’s compartment. They climbed out and Abdullah made to turn. ‘No,’ said Bilal quietly but with intensity. ‘He’ll not want us eyeballing his driver.’ The van pulled away and they stood by the door until the sound of its engine faded into the general hubbub of the city. Adnan opened the door.

  They took tea, black and sweet as usual, and sat on the cushions facing each other. It might have been a pause from the hostilities in some basement bunker piled with sandbags, had there not been the chill in the air that required the fan heater to be on full, had the rap music not been playing.

  ‘Put you in your place, didn’t he?’ said Abdullah, and Adnan had to look to determine that he wasn’t being caustic. Abdullah’s blue eyes looked back at him with sincerity. ‘Sorry, brother,’ he said.

  ‘No worries,’ said Adnan. ‘You’re right.’ In truth he had been riled when the man had spoken. Someone had to organize this. Someone, surely, had to direct.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ said Bilal.

  ‘What did you reckon?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Him. The robes, the headdress, the beard, the “keep-your-distance-brother” act.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rashid. ‘Like “I’m the sheikh, man”.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Adnan. ‘The sheikh. I like it.’ He leaned backwards and laughed. He noticed Abdullah looking at him. ‘Chill out. It’s all good.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s been sent by the tabloids, do you?’ said Rashid. ‘The Fake Sheikh?’

  They all laughed, then stopped.

  Bilal switched on the computer and went through the lengthy security protocols. Soon they were watching the latest production, professionally filmed, slickly edited, HD quality, riveting, moving.

  There was music, interspersed with the muezzin’s dawn call and funeral ululations and a frantic high-pitched commentary. None of them could speak more than rudimentary Arabic so they watched the English subtitles that exhorted them towards their destination. Adnan found it hypnotic in the room, where the lights had been dimmed, the mixture of anger and peace he felt, the sense of revulsion and joy, the visions of horror and beauty. All these things, he understood, must exist in the same space, the same moment, the same action.

  Later, back home, Adnan could relax. He crept in; his flatmates, it appeared, were already in bed. The next morning he’d have to allude to an especially amorous encounter. Having gone to his stash under one of the floorboards in his bedroom, he went into the lounge and swept seven beer cans off the coffee table before putting his stockinged feet on it. It was sticky to the touch. Disgusting.

  He needed this blow, to take the edge off. As he inhaled deep and long, savouring the astringent rich fullness of it, he switched on the TV with the remote and scanned the channels idly. Fucking need to kick back, know what I mean? he muttered to himself as he slouched there. He looked at the clock. One fifteen in the morning. Sheesh. It was a crock of shit, he thought. All of it, even this crap. Pursed-up Bilal. Fucking Paki Rashid. Fat white wannabe boy Abdullah. It was all shit. But at least soon it would all be over, in a blaze of glory.

  It was gett
ing through, now. More mellow. He might just crash on the sofa.

  They sat in their living room, Mr Masoud and his wife. They had been to bed but could not sleep. He had been first up, and moved carefully through the dark, thinking that his wife must have taken some of the tablets the doctor had given her. As he sat in his chair looking at the family album he heard her come down. She brought his dressing gown and slippers. What’s the point? he thought. I might as well freeze to death.

  ‘I’ll turn the heating up,’ she said, ‘and put the kettle on.’

  She was the strong one. She knew how to carry on. He had little notion of where things had stopped, let alone where to pick them up again. It was commonplace, he knew, this grief thing. A nation’s grief, they said in the papers, but that didn’t magnify it. It stole something from him. My tears for Aisha and Samir are mine and my family’s, he thought, these people are sincere and sorrowful and well intentioned, but this is my loss, my pain, not theirs. They did not know my lovely ones. This suffering was not theirs to own.

  He realized he was being ungracious, and he was known to be a gracious individual. This did not stop him wishing he could jealously guard his grief and keep it for himself.

  What he could disguise no longer, from himself or his wife, was his fury. Externally, Mr Masoud was the same self-deprecating moderate soul who went about his business quietly and prayed devoutly at the mosque on Fridays, demanding no more from the world than that it should afford him the freedom to run his small business, practise his religion and enjoy family life. Now he realized the rage he felt had been there for a long while. Possibly always. Anger at this country of his birth for the disadvantages it had so obviously bestowed on his family. Anger at this city with its squalor and its spiteful people whom he was obliged to treat as esteemed customers. Anger at not feeling anchored here, despite never having lived elsewhere. Anger at his own self-deprecating modesty. Anger at not belonging any more.

  The attack that had taken his son and granddaughter had changed everything. He was now consumed by a fury that could find no satisfaction.

  The media. Those vultures, those reptiles. It didn’t matter whether they represented the outlets he respected, they hadn’t taken long to find out where he lived and to bombard him with requests for interviews. ‘This is your chance to put your side of the story, Mr Masoud,’ one note, torn from a spiral notebook and thrust through the letterbox, had said. My side, he’d thought: what other side is there than the terrorists’? And this scrap: they hadn’t even bothered to write neatly on a decent piece of paper. It was the dismissiveness of it, as if his family was merely an accessory to the news. Which, he supposed, was the way they looked at it.

  He knew them. Before this, he would sit on his stool behind the till once the morning rush was past and work his way through the papers, his spectacles perched near the end of his nose so that he could look over them to see new customers entering the shop, and the odd potential shoplifter. He worked methodically, the tabloid trash first, so that towards his eleven o’clock tea break he could begin to savour the broadsheets. He’d never been sure whether he was more a Guardian or a Telegraph man. Now it was simpler: a plague on all your houses, he thought. I can see how it works. Truth dies in the scramble for stories. You all have it all wrong.

  He was boiling. ‘Calm down,’ his wife insisted as she set the tea down carefully on the coaster on the side table next to his chair. She settled in her own chair. ‘Nothing will make it better. Simply time. And then it will not become better, only more distant.’

  They thought they had arrived when, five years before, they’d bought this detached house on the prosperous west side of the city, looking over green fields. It was a large house, unnecessary for the two of them, but perfect for family get-togethers or when the grandchildren came to stay. For years they’d lived – literally – above the shop, and liked it there, but Mr Masoud had saved assiduously and invested wisely. His nephew, with his young wife, had taken over the flat together with the running of the shop. Now Mr Masoud might as well, for all he cared, be living in the gutter and begging in the town where his grandfather was born, rather than owning a place with two en suites and a private drive.

  ‘These people,’ he said.

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘These security people. They disgust me.’

  They’d attended the inquiry diligently since its opening, and had formed friendships with several of the other families. Some had distanced themselves from the Masouds, and the reasons – their Muslim faith and the colour of their skin – were clear.

  Matters had commenced with the counsel to the inquiry reading, slowly and without emotion, the names of the victims: the dead first and then the injured. It had been strange to hear Aisha and Samir’s names called out, as if in a school register. The Chair had made some sombre comments about the gravity of his task and explained who the four other members of the panel were. Mr Masoud made notes in the notebook he’d brought for the purpose. It had then been time for the first recess. It seemed as if the process was to get the emotion and the regrets out of the way first, before moving on to the dissection of events and the inevitable eventual apportioning of blame. He’d been maintaining that notebook diligently ever since and reviewed it regularly. It never told him any truths, or even lies that might help.

  They’d listened carefully to the introductory statements of the various counsel and just about established what was going on. Each interested party, including the victims and their families, had been granted representation as it was a full judicial inquiry. There was also a counsel to the inquiry who, with her team, led the questioning of witnesses.

  They’d paid attention as the witnesses spoke. The first forensic expert took them through the composition of the explosive, the open question as to how it was initiated, the spread of the blast, the kind of shrapnel that had been packed. A medical expert detailed the broad nature of the injuries, the likely speed of death and its cause in most cases, and the likely recovery rates of survivors. Each of the experts brought photographs which were displayed on the large screen. The families were given the option of being seated without sight of the screen but despite the horror Mr and Mrs Masoud wanted to look, squinting and peering in the hope of finding the meaning of it all in these lurid colour pictures. It all seemed so disconnected from Aisha and Samir.

  The police came next, an inspector talking them through the video footage of the station concourse from various vantage points, including the static CCTV at the station and that taken by the surveillance team following the attackers. Mr Masoud learned that fourteen police and intelligence officers from the team were among the dead. The films were timed to run concurrently on different screens and the inspector paused proceedings every so often to point out salient facts. It was a slick production but nowhere did Mr Masoud catch sight of Aisha or Samir.

  Eventually, Abu Omar walked on to the scene in his brilliant white trainers as if on to a stage, the blue rucksack on his back. There were gasps in the audience. He looked so young, and at the same time so cocky. Mr Masoud had known the boy, years ago. He could only have been eleven, twelve max. He’d been a bright boy, polite and respectful too, and would come into the shop to buy sweets with his friends. Mr Masoud knew his father, who worked at the garage where he’d serviced his car, and they used to nod at each other at the mosque. Still the same boy, Khalid he was called, still gawky, head down as he gangled towards his fate, and that of Aisha and Samir too.

  The inspector froze the frame just before the explosion took place. ‘I don’t propose to continue,’ he said.

  No, I want to see, thought Mr Masoud.

  The next witness, the police senior investigating officer, began his evidence by explaining the decision-making process, as recorded in detail. He said that the authorities had come to know of a plot to carry out an attack in the city and that the intelligence agencies had provided details of the probable sole attacker, Abu Omar. Counsel for the inquiry asked why no ac
tion was taken at the time. The officer explained that no prosecution would have been possible and that the intelligence needed to be developed. While there was reporting of his intent, there was nothing that could be adduced as evidence.

  ‘Where, then, did the information come from?’

  ‘From Abu Omar himself,’ said the officer with a cough.

  ‘Did you know that yourself at the time?’

  ‘Yes, a very small number of us knew. I needed to know as I was in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Then why wasn’t this conspiracy nipped in the bud?’

  ‘I see your point,’ said the officer, ‘of course I do. But there were said to be others involved in the plot whom we hadn’t identified. We needed to do so in order to prevent future plots. Abu Omar, according to what we knew, was simply to be the carrier of the device.’

  ‘The mule, so to speak. Or the putz.’

  ‘If you like. We didn’t just know this from Abu Omar. We had corroboration from technical. Things like microphones and what have you.’

  ‘So you’d found the others.’

  ‘That’s right. We worked with other agencies to identify them.’

  ‘So why didn’t it stop there?’

  ‘We considered it. We’d have had enough evidence to mount a prosecution with a reasonable chance of success. With lesser charges, probably, than if we arrested these men in possession of weaponry. And we believed there was at least one more person involved, possibly pivotally.’

  The counsel asked the officer to describe the day of the explosion. A dry run had, according to the reporting, been planned. The terrorists would prepare a blue rucksack identical to the one actually to be used and Abu Omar would carry it through the station at five fifteen to see what the security reaction might be. A low-risk, for them, run-through.