Whatever, the effect was grotesque. The purple star eclipsed everything else.
Jane ran the animation twice. And then she read Nadia’s comments and conclusion:
Comment. There’s a crescendo. The size and speed of the stars increases over time. The ferry attack is a spectacular finale, particularly as there have been no new incidents for the past 24 hours.
Conclusion. It would seem that, unless there are a spate of new attacks, the NT cycle might be broken for now.
Jane ran the first animation two more times. It was like watching a fireworks display. Bang, bang … bang, …., bang, bang, …., bang, bang, bang, BANG! It was almost too perfect a sequence. You could have written a piece of music to the rhythm.
She watched the second animation. As soon as it started to roll she knew this was the original piece of work she’d asked for. And it was a much better and a much more informative than her paper map on the board in her office.
Well done, Nadia.
It followed the same logic and process as the first animation. Except this time there were no stars; just a red spot on the exact location of where the attack had taken place. And, once there’d been an attack on a country, that whole country colour changed from white to a mild pink. And once there’d been a second attack, the pink darkened to a rose colour. Then a light red. Then mid-red. Then blood red.
The final image was significant. Nearly every country in the world was at least mild pink. Most were rose pink. Many were darker still ....
… hang on.
She’d spotted a pattern at the end of the animation. Well, almost a pattern. She used her finger to trace over the completed map.
The blood red countries were … she mouthed them as her finger traced over them from west to east, ‘Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan.’
That’s the original G8 countries, less Italy, which was starkly uncoloured.
She had something.
She checked Nadia’s notes. Did she agree with her?
Yes. And she’d asked the same question: why no Italy?
It was an imperfect pattern.
Jane moved on.
What about mid-red countries?
Nadia had done the work for her. Her notes read: as above plus - Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey. And if you like, less Italy, the European Union.
That was the G20 countries?
Jane read Nadia’s conclusion:
Conclusion. The targets appear to be in first-world, wealthy nations. In order of GDP. The only anomaly is that Italy has suffered no attacks at all. This does break the premise.
Maybe, maybe not.
Where did that leave them?
For a start Italy wasn’t the only country left uncoloured by a red tinge. Leaving aside the smaller principalities, there were now only two other countries in Europe that had remained white: Switzerland and Sweden. If this were about targeting rich countries for the greatest impact, Jane would have planted a bomb or two in those. North America was covered, as was most of central America and all of South America. Mainland Asia was covered, except for Mongolia. Africa was more notable. Eritrea, Somalia and Libya had all remained white.
Eritrea? That was where Frank’s terrorist, Abir al-Rasheed, originated from. Is that a coincidence?
Australia and New Zealand had both been attacked a number of times, as had many of the Polynesian islands. The Southeast Asian island nations had a smattering of different shades of red. All in all, apart from six notable exceptions, the world was pretty much red of one shade or another.
Whilst she was convinced the final slide demonstrated the attacks were co-ordinated and aimed at creating as much chaos in the richer nations as possible, she couldn’t understand the anomalies. Unless it was just the way it was? Maybe the people planning this couldn’t get the right contacts in the ‘white’ countries? Perhaps it was as simple as that.
And then there’s the timing.
Could it all be over? The ferry attack had been the sum of all fears?
Jane was just about to rerun the first animation when she decided to turn up the TV. Currently BBC news was still focusing on the ferry attack. She switched to CNN. They were also dissecting the North Sea attack. There didn’t appear to be any new news.
She picked up her phone and pressed ‘#7’. It was Frank’s number.
He answered straight away.
‘Hi, Jane.’
‘Hi, Frank. Thanks for your note on the NaCTSO meeting. That’s clear. Look, have I missed something, or have there been no additional NT attacks since the Pride of Eastbourne?’
There was a pause. Frank must have been looking at something.
‘No, quiet as a mouse. Sorry, do you think they’re spent? Or, that they’re having an operational pause, as the military would call it?’
She didn’t know. She really hoped so.
But … there was part of her that wanted the attacks to continue. More attacks meant more intelligence. And more chances of the perpetrators making a mistake. If things stayed as they were they may never work out who was behind the terror.
‘Possibly. I’m not sure. Anyhow, thanks, Frank.’
Jane put the phone down.
Could this really be it?
Or was there going to be one final catastrophe?
Chapter 12
Dockside, Bari, Italy
Sam woke. Fish? No, the sea. Then cigarettes. She looked across to her driver and new best friend, Marius. He was framed by his window and the artificial glare of the port lights that was turning night into day outside the cab. They’d talked for no more than twenty minutes over the last, Sam checked the clock on the dash, six hours. For the remainder of the time she’d slept in the red Globetrotter’s very comfortable passenger seat.
Marius stuck up a thumb.
‘I was going to wake you on the outskirts of the city, but you were dead to the world.’
Sam smiled.
‘Thanks.’ She glanced out of the window. The main seafront, which was dominated by a very tall and very thin shaft of ageing white lighthouse, looked to be no more than a kilometre away. ‘That may have been better, but I can walk to the centre from here.’
Sam also needed to find a convenience store. She’d left her bag in the Station’s car at the Autogrill. Whilst she always carried her essentials on her - rule one on her SIS case officer training course at Portsmouth - she was now short of a change of clothes, and a toothbrush. Her hair would have to remain unkempt, a state it wouldn’t be surprised by.
‘Did you sleep well?’
That was an interesting question to which Sam answered ‘Yes, thank you.’, when the truth was definitely a ‘No. And don’t ask me to explain why.’.
Until about a year ago her nights had always been a mixture of cold sweats, irregular heartbeats and unpleasant imagery. She never dreamt of nice things; green fields, blue skies and loved ones. Hers were always violent and haphazard. She’d be falling, or running and not getting anywhere. Or she’d be facing a firing squad, the makeup of which was grotesque monsters with big guns that would blow your head through the backstop wall. Worse still, they’d find her old wounds and exploit them. Her patched-up stomach. Her dislocated shoulder. The hole in her calf.
And then there was Ralph Bell. Her nemesis. The man who, until Venezuela, had stalked both the still of her night and the corners of her day.
He’d died in the whitewashed cell in Puerto Ayacucho. She’d checked. There, on the spot. With two fingers on his carotid artery, pressing so hard she thought if Austin’s strangling hadn’t killed him she’d have cut off the blood supply to his head. She’d checked again. In the hangar at the end of the Caracas airstrip. He’d been in a green body bag. Cold and clammy. And still dead.
Bell, more recently, had started to slip from her dreams.
But he’d been replaced. By another man. The one that got away in Croatia.
Freddie
.
Sam shivered, even though the cab was warm as a winter duvet.
She had no idea what he looked like, so her warped, slumbering imagination made one up. He was white. In his forties. Slim - sometimes athletic. He was always well dressed and, whilst she could never make out his face, she thought he was attractive. He was in the shadows. Just off centre. Peripheral.
But he was there.
And he never attacked her - directly. That was someone else’s prerogative. But it was his fault. He was the conductor; the puppeteer.
He was mostly the one currently spoiling her nights. Making monsters, and then setting them loose. It was he who made her fear sleep; who always joined her. He was her constant companion.
And she hated him.
So, no, she hadn’t slept well.
Sam reached under her fleece for her tummy-bag. She pulled out 200 Euros and offered it to Marius.
‘No, thanks. You keep it.’ He put up a polite hand to reinforce his refusal.
‘No, I insist. Please.’ Sam tried to be kindly indignant. In a bastardisation of her second language she didn’t know if she’d pulled it off.
Marius shook his head.
‘You muttered in your sleep. Half-British, half-Russian. I picked up a few words. It seems to me you’re in a lot of pain. It was upsetting to listen to - and I am sorry. If I have helped in any way, maybe brought you closer to ending your suffering, then it has been my pleasure.’ He smiled a half-embarrassed smile.
Sam didn’t know what to say. For as long as she could remember there had been a paucity of kindness in her life. So much dark … and so little light. As a result her driver’s empathy took a knife to the grey blanket of torment that covered her and ripped out a huge hole. His accompanying smile filled the tobacco-scented cab. She wanted to hug him. To hold him close and soak up his warmth.
Instead she coughed - hiding her sense of confusion. Before she’d slipped into her nightmare-ridden sleep, he’d mentioned he was sailing to Greece to drop off and pick up some goods in the outskirts of Athens. And then he was heading home; Bucharest - overland. Now she was that close to asking him if she could join him. Surely it was going to be better than bungling around southern Italy in the vain hope she might help save the world?
As if?
Come on, who are you kidding?
It hit her then. That sense she’d felt before. The realisation that she wasn’t anyway near as effective as she thought she might be. That she was a tiny pawn on a chessboard the size of a football pitch. Intelligence agencies across the world were dealing with everything. They were coordinated … she was a taskforce of one. They were automated … she was manual. They were thousands … she was a singleton; an unwired and emotionally crushed individual.
What the hell am I doing?
The cab was warm. And safe. She was hidden. And not alone.
‘Can I …’ She stopped herself.
That compassionate smile again, from the angel in the Globetrotter.
‘No.’ He had read her thoughts. ‘You cannot run away from whatever it is that is haunting you. You must confront this. You have to exorcise it. I am a good Catholic with a mother who knows best. This is what she taught me. Face your demons. Fight them. It is the only way. And God will judge you kindly on that. Now go, Sam Green. And take your money. You may well need it.’ He put out a flat hand, pointing to her door.
Sam dithered and then she reached across and gave him the hug he so richly deserved. She held it for a few seconds.
‘Thank you. Thank you.’ She whispered.
She turned quickly so he couldn’t spot the wetness in her eyes. And then she opened the door, climbed down the steps of the cab, focused on the lighthouse in the distance and strode off into her future.
Headquarters SIS, Vauxhall, London
Frank was back in the ‘mood room’. This time he wasn’t after thinking space; he needed some time to stop his head spinning. He’d just left the meeting Jane had called for her staff and a wider group of the SIS team. The aim was to redirect their efforts after the ferry attack.
Clearly it was considered important as the Chief had made the opening remarks.
‘You are the brightest and the best. But you were selected to work here because you’re more than that. You are oblique thinkers. Fertile minds that can outsmart any opponent. Wherever you were before you came into the room, ignore that place. Do away with any preconceptions. Avoid any precedent. Let’s look at NT from every angle. Any angle. You choose. Unless and until we get new directional intelligence, I don’t care where you search, what you look at, or to whom you speak. We have - as at now - to start to piece this together as quickly as possible from as many directions as we can. Jane … over to you.’
The Chief had left at that point and Jane had taken over.
She’d shown them two animations. One was of the escalation of attacks around the world, culminating in the ferry disaster. And the second showed that this was indeed, save a couple of countries, a worldwide phenomenon. Finally she’d asked the question, ‘Why was a British ferry attacked at the end of this frenetic build-up of activity? And why have there been no new incidents in the past 36 hours?’
She then threw up a simple chart with side-by-side double bars covering the last 243 days. Each day had a blue and a red bar. Blue denoted an attack; red the number of casualties. In this case Jane had gone for actual casualties, rather than expected casualties which her animations had used. It surprised no one that the number of attacks and the corresponding number of casualties grew exponentially, the right hand side of the graph as busy as hell. But that wasn’t her point.
Her point was the tiny but significant white gap at the end of the chart. It was only 36 hours, but it was an empty 36 hours. It was as if the ferry attack was it. The end. At which point the stats had fallen off a cliff.
Jane had used a laser pointer to highlight the gap.
‘Every second that passes, this area becomes more and more crucial to the investigation. Why has it stopped? What’s next, if anything? And what’s the point?’
There had been murmuring around the room, but everyone realised that Jane’s questions were rhetorical.
She then asked people for an update.
Carla had given them five minutes on the unnamed Brit billionaire. New news was GCHQ had established his wealth was distributed among 296 separate overseas accounts, the largest of which was a bank in Switzerland, AfH International, based just outside Lausanne. Getting more information was proving to be difficult, but GCHQ was on the case.
Frank had been asked to talk through where they were on the men from Eritrea. He didn’t have much. SIS’s in-country agent had been pushed hard. The senior policeman had come back with a provisional response: Abir al-Rasheed’s details were not on the police database, so there was no record of any infringements. The policeman had taken away the mugshots provided by Frank of the two other men and the women on the ferry. He’d promised to look over police records and see if he could establish their details.
However, there was one significant new piece of intelligence. It had been uncovered by an SIS analyst in Asmara whose job it was to constantly scan Eritrean news. Mersa Fatma had recently come into some investment, which was unusual. The new-build warehouses on the waterfront had made page seven of Alhaditha, the Eritrean Ministry of Information’s major newspaper. Details were scant, but what the analyst had found was that international investment had paid for the development of a small fishing factory. It had been hailed as ‘good news’ by the government, but there was nothing about who had fronted the cash to make it happen. Frank had asked the Asmara team to establish the link.
Finally he’d taken the opportunity to describe the route taken by Abir al-Rasheed and the two other men from Mersa Fatma to the UK. He’d mentioned the Mafia links to their Italian port of entry, Gioia Touro, but there had been no supplementaries from anyone at the meeting. He’d finished noting the Met had yet to find where the four terrorists had
based themselves, although there was a lead they’d rented somewhere in Lewisham. As Lewisham had a population of over a quarter of a million people, that was hardly helpful. But it was a start. The ‘Ferry Four’, as they’d now been coined by the press, were still remaining shtum.
The Met LO at the meeting had not added much to Frank’s summary. He’d gone on to briefly outline the #enoughisenough protests arranged for the weekend. London expected close to one million on the streets - and police forces from around the country were being bussed in to help. Similar, smaller events were planned for Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Jane had added that these protests were being mirrored across the world.
With no more updates, Jane had called the meeting to a close.
‘OK, everyone. You heard the Chief. There is no box to think outside of. We’ll reconvene same time tomorrow. I know it’s a Sunday, but that’s the way it is.’
Frank had gone from the meeting straight to the mood room. He’d made himself a camomile tea, plumped himself in his favourite soft chair and opened up Twitter.
He flicked through a mixture of rock and news hashtags. The memes were the same as they’d been for the last 24 hours. He followed most of Rolling Stones’ trends and ‘artists to watch’. He did his best to keep up where music was going. The latest was Justin Timberlake was back in vogue. He didn’t think that was a bad thing.
The news was a mixture of the ferry attack, the mobilisation of the world’s population against NT and the state of the global economy. There was one report about a conspiracy theory that the attacks were all orchestrated by a single government. The title was ‘10 nations that could be behind the attacks’. Frank opened the link. And quickly closed it when the UK was third on the list.
What a load of rubbish.
He reached for his mug which was on the coffee table, whilst still scrolling with his free hand. And then he stopped. He scrolled back.
Two Twitter winners in the current terror climate.
He didn’t need to click on the link, because the tweet told him all he needed to know. It read:
On the Back Foot to Hell Page 24