by Tony Salter
Nadia
‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you very much.’
Nadia put her phone back in her pocket and turned to Ed. ‘That was the girl from the cafe. She just remembered Snowflake told her he was going to the Natural History Museum.’ As the adrenaline kicked back in, the jolt almost lifted her off her feet. ‘That’s it! That’s our target. The main hall at the Natural History Museum.’
Nadia could tell Ed was struggling to catch up, but there was no time.
‘You call it in,’ she said. ‘Then follow me. You’ll never keep up, anyway.’ Then she turned and started to run, ignoring his protesting voice fading behind her.
How far was it? A bit less than a mile? She should be there in five or six minutes. It was going to be tight.
As she threaded her way between hooting cars on Kensington Gore and started down Exhibition Road, she remembered the missing link which had been bugging her. When Hassan’s mother had told her about his dad throwing books in the fire, it hadn’t been just any books. The actual words replayed in her mind in Hi-Fi quality – ‘The bitter old man threw his dinosaur book in the fire. My poor little Haso. He loved his dinosaurs. Fascinated by them, he were.’
Of course. It was a great target for them. High profile, low security and plenty of international tourists. If only she’d figured it out twenty minutes earlier.
Nadia settled into her stride. She could maintain a steady eight and half miles an hour for a couple of miles without overexerting herself – there was no point in getting there and being too out of breath to think straight. In an ideal world, SCO19 would have an armed response vehicle there before her, but there were roadblocks everywhere and traffic was jammed up. At least she was on foot.
Although finding opportunities to exercise while she’d been working at the mosque had been challenging, she’d worked out a routine she could do in her tiny bedroom; one hour’s cardiovascular, morning and night. In any case, she’d needed the endorphins to keep her sane.
Nadia felt bad about the way she’d jumped down Ed’s throat. He’d done nothing to deserve it and she would definitely need to consider some suitable grovelling later.
It had been telling Snowflake’s story of thwarted love which had tipped her over the edge. The more she’d learned about him, the more she’d started to like him and to feel sorry for him. It was easy to forget how many normal lives were filled with tragedies of Shakespearean proportions. Even so, only a tiny minority of those ordinary people were prepared to give their lives for a cause, and even fewer were ready to kill and maim others in the process. Snowflake wasn’t one of them. She was sure of it.
Her feet pounded rhythmically on the hard paving and she could feel the Glock bouncing against her left breast. Would she need to use it? Would she be forced to shoot Snowflake? She hoped not, but she wouldn’t hesitate if she had to. Hesitation cost lives.
She was already almost halfway there, and she started to run through the protocols in her mind. She would need to identify herself to security; those valuable seconds were necessary to avoid interference coming from behind. Standard procedure also mandated a final check of her authority status; she’d been given the authority to take her own autonomous decisions, including using proportionate force, but that could change at any moment. There might be hostages or additional targets and co-ordination was key.
Only then would she be ready to move forward, fully assess the situation on the ground and use the remaining seconds to do whatever she could to prevent a disaster. If Ed and GCHQ were right about the timing, it was going to be very tight. Snowflake would already be past security and she’d have one or two minutes to spare at most. But she would make it in time - insha’Allah.
Despite Nadia’s uncompromising secularism, she’d retained her childhood habit of saying insha’Allah, if God wills it; the words had replaced ‘hopefully’ and ‘maybe’ in her daily vocabulary. During the last six months, when she was actually supposed to be a practising Moslem, she hadn’t said much else on most days. ‘Will the imam’s office be cleaned before he returns?’ – ‘insha’Allah’; ‘are you going to be here to make coffee on Saturday?’ – ‘insha’Allah’.
It was almost like saying ‘yes’ although it allowed for uncertainty and could also be used to avoid saying ‘no’ if that was uncomfortable. There was also an implicit abdication of responsibility. It didn’t necessarily mean that the speaker wouldn’t try their hardest, although it did imply that it wouldn’t be their fault if things didn’t work out as planned.
Those were the last words her mother had said to her, before Nadia started running. Running as she was running now. Running against the clock.
They’d been on holiday in Brittany, near the village where her father had grown up. He’d borrowed her grandfather’s old Mercedes and the three of them spent a wonderful day by the sea, Nadia dashing back and forth collecting shells from the beach while her parents sat in a small restaurant on the edge of the sand, working their way through a towering seafood platter.
Maybe her father had drunk too much wine, maybe a tyre had blown out – Nadia would never know. She was only ten years old and was much more interested in the pile of beautiful sea shells glistening in her lap. She remembered feeling a sudden lurch and hearing the harsh shriek of metal grinding against metal. And then a frozen, almost-magical instant as the shells hung weightless in the air. The car was rolling, over and over, Nadia tumbling like so much laundry as they crashed down the rocks to the edge of the sea.
The Mercedes had ended up on its side with Nadia lying against the door, the window handle digging into her back. She could see her father in the drivers seat, hanging motionless from his seatbelt. She couldn’t see her mother.
‘Mama!’ she’d cried, as she struggled to pull herself upright. ‘Mama!’
‘I’m here, Cheri,’ came her mother’s voice from behind the passenger seat. ‘Are you hurt?’
Nadia managed to pull herself upright and leant forward to see her mother. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so,’ said her mother, ‘but I can’t move and your father’s unconscious. Can you open the window?’
‘I can try,’ said Nadia, hearing the shiver in her voice. Although the handle was stiffer than usual, she managed to open the window above her, letting in the wind, the salt spray and the booming of the waves.
‘Good girl,’ said her mother. ‘Now I want you to listen very carefully. The tide is coming in and you need to get help. Climb up to the road, turn left and run as fast as you can to the next village. There’s a garage there. Tell them what’s happened and tell them to come quickly.’
Nadia hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the car. She hadn’t wanted to go off on her own, but she’d known it was important and so she’d climbed up and managed to squeeze out of the window. She’d looked back into the car one more time.
‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘Insha’Allah,’ said her mother, as Nadia jumped down.
She’d been a podgy, unathletic child, always last to be picked for any team, but she’d tried so hard. She’d dragged herself up the rocky cliffs and onto the road and then she’d run as fast as she could, her breath rasping, the blood pumping in her head and her feet rubbed red raw in her light beach shoes.
Running against time … as she was once again. This time she would get there before it was too late – and the will of God would have no say in the matter.
11:54
Jim
It wasn’t hard for Jim to stir up a minor thunderstorm of rage if he thought about what had happened to his life. He only needed to look around him. To look at the stupid, plastic dinosaur and the idiot tourists who visited the museum because it was on the list of things to do in London.
Tourists were fine when you could see them as walking taxi fares, each one an opportunity for exploitation; once they were in the back of the cab – your cab – they belonged to you. They would l
isten to you, smile and laugh at your stories, however exaggerated and untrue, and then, best of all, they’d pay you for the privilege and give you a massive tip often as not.
There’d been an informal monthly competition amongst the cabbies for who could get away with the most outrageous story and Jim was disappointed if he wasn’t shortlisted. Some foreigners were so gullible, it was like taking candy from a baby.
In the museum it was different. Here, they just cluttered up the place.
Jim wasn’t particularly racist – a few of his mates had pretty good tans when it came down to it – but he had no problem with racial stereotyping.
It made sense after all. If someone grew up somewhere hot like Cyprus, it was natural they’d end up lazy and, if they came from somewhere poor like Africa, why should anyone be surprised if they had light fingers? It was about survival after all. Human nature.
It was the Chinese who really got up his nose though. It had been bad enough when they kept themselves to themselves – living illegally, ten-to-a-room above restaurants and food shops in Soho. Back then, there were hardly any Chinese tourists, they’d almost never take a cab and they would never, ever leave a tip.
The other thing was that there was always this sneering expression on their faces, like they were looking down on you. That’s what really got Jim’s goat. Whose bloody country were they living in, after all?
Thinking about those superior looks had been enough to wind him up every time he’d worked the West End, but at least the facts had been clear. The UK was First World and China was Third World. There might have been billions of them but, with an average wage of a couple of quid a week, they weren’t in a position to look down on anybody.
After the idiot government gave Hong Kong back, it had all changed. Everyone started kowtowing to them rather than the other way around. Even the Americans. The world was different. And it wasn’t going to change back in a hurry.
These days, it wasn’t just the odd diplomat or businessman. Chinese tourists were everywhere, busloads of them: shouting and squawking at each other, wearing dressing-up-box clothes and stupid floppy hats, and taking photos of themselves with those bloody ridiculous selfie sticks. If all they wanted to do was to take pictures of themselves, why didn’t they do it at home?
They were in the museum all the time. There’d been about forty in earlier that morning. Still wearing stupid floppy clothes, still taking bloody selfies and still not actually interested in anything apart from saying that they’d been there.
He leant back in his chair with a grunt. What difference did it make to him? Museum guards didn’t get tips, anyway.
The hall was almost empty. A brief lull before the lunchtime rush. That creepy bloke had finally disappeared, the old couple hadn’t moved from their bench and the schoolgirls were back, giggling in the corner. Jim noticed a young guy who had just come in. He wasn’t an Arab – he might have been a Paki, or maybe an Indian – and he was standing just inside the hall looking at the dinosaur with his mouth sagging open and wide eyes glistening. He must have been in his late twenties, but he was behaving like an eight-year-old school kid, come up to the big city for the first time and impressed by everything.
Looking at the open childish joy on the young man’s face washed away the righteous anger which Jim had worked so hard to stoke up only moments before. He was almost jealous of the lad. Was it too late to find a bit of wonder and awe in his own life? If he wasn’t careful, the time that he had left would be completely filled with cynical bitterness and resentment. He didn’t want that scratched on his gravestone.
As he watched the young man walking slowly around the huge skeleton, Jim made a silent pledge – not for the first time – to find a way to change, to forgive and forget, and to find happiness in being a good husband, father, grandfather and friend. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it?
Julie was slowly beginning to come around. The last year had been terrible, but things were getting better. He’d take her somewhere. Somewhere where they could spend a bit of time just the two of them, away from the museum and away from bad memories and the ugly words which were still hanging in the air at home. Maybe they could go back to Cyprus?
There was no point in pretending nothing had happened and they’d both said a lot of things that would have been better unsaid, but it was his responsibility to find a way to move past that.
Megan and Brooke would always take their mum’s side, but if he squared things away with Julie, they’d come around. As for the grandkids, Kaylee was at the age when she wasn’t talking to anyone anyway and little Josie was only three and she loved her Gramps.
It wasn’t too late. Jim squeezed his eyes tightly closed and clenched his fists. It wasn’t too late. There had been too much nonsense. He would fix everything.
He smiled as he opened his eyes. It felt good.
And then he saw her.
It was her. He hadn’t been wrong.
She was facing away from him, but he could see her kids behind her and he would always recognise her from the way she was standing, anyway; her head would usually tip over slightly to one side and she would drop her left hip when she stood still.
She looked over her shoulder and he was certain. Shuna was staring right at him and he knew she’d recognised him too. Jim didn’t know what to do. He toyed again with the idea of running away, but realised that there was no chance. His legs wouldn’t have obeyed him.
She was having some kind of argument with her daughters. He couldn’t hear anything, but her arms and hands were waving around like a crazy orchestra conductor. It went on until the oldest girl shook her head violently, grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her away, leaving Shuna standing alone, watching them leave.
Then she turned around slowly and their eyes met across the hall. She started to walk towards him.
Hassan
‘Could I see your ticket please?’ The girl at the security desk was smiling at Hassan; he could have sworn that the girls in London were looking at him differently? Of course his overstimulated mind was playing tricks, but then again, there had been that waitress. Had something about him changed during his time away? It had been a transformational year, but could it be that now, of all times, he’d become attractive to women? Wouldn’t that add a final ironic twist to his short life?
‘Here you go,’ he said, handing her his ticket. She was pretty, and her friendly smile was definitely directed at him. Hassan stretched a little taller and pulled back his shoulders.
What was he playing at? These delusions were almost certainly a combination of absence and isolation messing with his head. He’d only been back in the country for two weeks and, while he’d been away, he’d met dozens of young guys with even more delusional ideas about women. No actual experience. No means of knowing any better. No idea.
The worst had been at the beginning when one of the other teachers – who’d travelled abroad and who was supposed to be wise – was sharing some Western realities with a few young students.
Hassan had stood open-mouthed while the teacher explained that eighty-five per cent of girls in the UK lost their virginity before they were thirteen years old and that, on average, they would have more than forty sexual partners before they were twenty; the majority of those would be as a result of drunken one-night-stands.
The teenage audience – mostly sixteen-year-olds – lapped it up, none of them questioning for a second the truth of the statistics. The problem was that it was what the boys wanted to believe, but not for the reasons the teacher intended. He was hoping to demonstrate the decadence of Western culture; the young lads were only thinking of the scantily dressed girls, softened by one drink too many, offering themselves willingly one by one.
Hassan suspected that, after a year away, that type of thinking had worked its way into his own subconscious as well – a bit like one of those nasty river worms which managed to wiggle through cracks in your feet and spent years slithering their way through your body to y
our eyes, where they eventually laid their eggs. He hadn’t been blinded but was happy to accept that he might have become somewhat short-sighted.
‘Here you go.’ Her fingers brushed his lightly as she handed back his ticket. ‘Enjoy your visit.’
‘Thank you.’ The sensation of their fingertips touching stayed with Hassan as he walked slowly past the security desk and into the hall. He shivered.
What did it matter, anyway? The girl had smiled. Nothing more. She had smiled, he had smiled in return, and then he had walked on.
He’d always known the diplodocus at the National History Museum was a replica, but it hadn’t bothered him and it was the only one of his “one day” childhood ambitions which had endured. Just to stand there and look up at that majesty would be enough. There had never been enough time or money though; even when he’d been at Oxford, the opportunity to go to London had never come up.
And standing there looking up at “Dippy” really was enough, even after all those years.
He still didn’t care that the skeleton was a copy; it was pure magic to be so close. He’d needed to fight hard to convince them that this was a good target, but it had been worth the effort. Being here made everything easier and there was an elegance and tidiness about the way that his circle was closing. He had no choice. He’d never had a choice.
Hassan didn’t have many memories of the two years which followed his departure from Oxford. The university authorities had such a predictably snooty word for dropping out. As his ability to function on any level evaporated, the powers-that-be decided he should be “rusticated” – an archaic concept where the basic idea was that a temporary rest in the countryside would be enough for a sick or struggling student to recover and return.
Hassan didn’t have a country estate to be rusticated to, he didn’t actually want to recover, and he had no intention of returning. All he wanted was to find a dark corner to creep into, preferably one where his uncle wouldn’t think to look. From the few memories which surfaced from time to time, he’d found plenty of dark corners and, either his uncle hadn’t been able to find him or – more likely – he hadn’t bothered to try.