by Lee Child
Rukshana was still there. She was just very, very angry.
RUKSHANA DIDN’T DO anything the following day because she was still too angry; she wanted a clear head when she decided what to do next. Twenty-four hours later she was still too angry but had decided to ring a couple of lawyers anyway to see if she had a case against the bank. They were a bit skeptical but thought she might be able to do something on discrimination grounds. They were less sure about Kelly’s preferred option, that Rukshana sue Jeff for being a lying, cheating, disloyal, fat ugly bastard who’d taken her job away. Rukshana was glad the lawyers didn’t advise that. She didn’t want to sue anyone; that wasn’t what she was after.
She couldn’t relax. The only person in the house during the day was her granddad. He was in his eighties. He got a little confused sometimes, but on other occasions he was very sharp. Whatever—she didn’t feel like chatting. She tried doing a little housework to calm down. That didn’t help, but she did it anyway. In Farah’s room, she picked up the clothes her sister had scattered around after she’d come in from a party the previous night. Rukshana held a miniskirt against her hips; it really was immodestly short. A few months ago, their cousin had come from Pakistan to visit and had shared a room with Farah; what a culture shock it must have been for her. Their cousin refused to leave the house without wearing a burka, so when she went out, she was covered in black, only her eyes visible to the outside world. When she returned to Pakistan, she’d left one of her burkas behind, and it was still sitting on a shelf, possibly meant to serve as a reproach to her wayward cousin. Rukshana picked it up.
From the bedroom window, she could see the towers of the City, London’s financial district, looming over the rooftops; down below those towers was the bank where Jeff and Sarah were having a good laugh at her expense. She looked at the clothes in her hands and then out over the city, and she bit her lip.
Rukshana knew what she was considering was a serious criminal offense and that she’d go to prison for several years if she was caught. She’d have to get everything right and not make any mistakes. There were a lot of things that could go wrong, and there was her family to think about. Then she thought about Jeff appearing from his office and telling her how outrageous her sacking was and how he wasn’t putting up with it. She gripped the clothes tightly in her hand. Every single day she spent staring out the barred windows of a prison cell would be worth it. Jeff was going to pay. She smiled and whispered to herself:
“It’s on.”
IT WAS A Thursday. Rukshana had everything prepared and all the timing worked out. She was wearing one of her sister’s short skirts, a low-cut top, and ballet shoes on her feet. In her shoulder bag were silver high heels, a pair of fashionably outsize Jackie O. sunglasses, and her cousin’s burka. Out in the hall was the family bike that she’d oiled and left ready. And she’d picked the day very carefully.
Her grandfather was a cricket fanatic. He was already in his armchair with various fruit juices and nibbles in easy reach, getting ready for the first day of the England-Pakistan match being played in London. Every ball would be shown on the TV, along with the replays and analyses. Rukshana knew her grandfather; he wouldn’t be moving from that spot all day. He might briefly go upstairs for a call of nature, but even that wasn’t certain. Where cricket was concerned, he had very firm bladder control. And there was a house rule—no one disturbed Granddad when the cricket was on. Knocks on the door went unanswered, the phone was left to ring, and any attempt to start a conversation was ignored.
When the first ball of the match was bowled, Rukshana looked up at the clock on the wall. It was half past eleven. She had thirty minutes to complete the first part of her plan.
“I’m just going upstairs to read a book.”
She was met with silence. Out in the hall she put on her cousin’s burka and wheeled the bike out onto the street. Very, very gently, she pulled the front door shut. She mounted the bike and began pedaling, the burka wrapped around her, only her eyes visible. She rode to the end of her street and turned onto the main road that led to the City.
On a typical day in London, you could see almost anyone dressed almost any way, but even so, a woman cycling in a burka was unusual. Truant schoolkids laughed as she flew by. Some drivers did double takes when they saw her, which were quickly followed by contemptuous stares directed not at her but at her burka. Rukshana almost wobbled on her bike, she was so shaken by the response to her clothing. She’d heard women in her family talk about how they were sometimes insulted and verbally abused on the street when they wore their burkas, but Rukshana hadn’t thought it was as bad as this. And—perhaps it was inevitable—one guy leaned out of the window of his van and yelled “Terrorist!” when she stopped at a traffic light. She threw off her shock. She began to feel mad and bad. She felt like an outlaw.
It took her twenty minutes to arrive at her destination, a quiet side street two blocks away from the bank where she’d worked. She parked the bike, locked it up, and checked the street. There was no one looking. She pulled the burka off over her head and put it in her bag before swapping her slippers for the high heels. She put on sunglasses. She used a mirror to apply some makeup and arrange her long raven-black hair so that it waved and flowed around her face. She smiled at her image. She looked fantastic, nothing like her normal headscarf-wearing self. She couldn’t help thinking that she could give her sister a run for her money in the looks department.
Unsteadily at first, but with growing confidence, she clip-clopped down the street on her heels and then turned onto the main road. With her new look, she might as well have been in a different country. The same sort of male drivers who had given her dirty looks when she’d been on her bike were now slowing down to admire her bronzed legs. When a man leaned out of a van’s window and shouted, “Oi, oi! Do you fancy a portion, sweetheart?” Rukshana avoided eye contact and kept walking. She wondered if it was the same man who’d shouted “Terrorist!” at her fifteen minutes earlier.
She walked the two blocks. On the left was the bank, and on the right was a small park where the staff sometimes went to eat their lunches. Rukshana took a seat on a bench that gave her a view of the entrance to the bank. She crossed her long bare legs and looked at her watch. It was 11:55 a.m. She’d made it. A bicycle courier walked past her wheeling his bike; he clocked her legs, and she heard him whisper “Asian babe” as he went by. She smiled and looked at her watch. It was noon. She looked over to the entrance and sure enough, just as Kelly had foretold, Jeff emerged from the bank and walked down the steps. He adjusted his tie and ran his fingers through his hair a few times before trotting off and turning down a side street.
Five minutes after that, Sarah too came out of the bank. She turned and walked down the same side street Jeff had. Rukshana shook her head and whispered, “Bastards.” Then she stood up, adjusted her hair again, and walked across the road. There were hundreds and hundreds of employees in this building, so she was sure she would get away with it. On the steps of the bank, she took a deep breath and said to herself, “This is it,” before walking into the lobby.
In front of her was a security gate that you needed a swipe card to pass through. To the left of it sat Mark, a security guard, a big barrel of a man in a peaked cap. She fished around in her shoulder bag and took out her now-invalidated employee swipe card along with another one that she used for her local library. She wriggled her shoulders like her sister and giggled at Mark; he smiled back. When she got to the gate, she used her library card to try to get through. A red light flashed and the machine honked at her. She tried again. Another red light and another honk. She looked at Mark helplessly and waved her swipe card at him. Like a middle-aged knight, he got out of his chair and came over to help.
The bank had strict procedures about access. Mark’s role was to examine her card and see whether there was a problem and, if necessary, refer her to the security office. But Rukshana knew Mark well. His view was that strict procedures didn’t apply to
ditzy, sexy women with long legs. And today, Rukshana was a very ditzy, very sexy woman with very long legs. Mark towered over her.
“Is there a problem, miss?”
“Oh, yes, Mark,” she breathed. “My card is always letting me down.”
Mark slipped his own security card into the machine, and there was a green light, a ping, and the gate swung open. She squeezed his arm.
“Oh, Mark, you’re such a sweetie…”
Mark saluted and Rukshana walked through with the almost physical sensation of his eyes drilling into her backside. She walked to the elevator and went up to the fifth floor, taking out her sister’s blue leather gloves and putting them on. When the doors slid open, she was face-to-face with Renata, a colleague who knew Rukshana as well as Rukshana knew her. Rukshana stiffened; everyone who might have recognized her, with or without her headscarf, should have been out at lunch. Renata smiled at her.
“Do you really need those sunglasses in here, dear?” For a few seconds Rukshana thought it was all over. Renata held the elevator door open for her and said, “If you don’t get out, you’re going back down.” Rukshana got out, fingered the sunglasses, and stammered, “G-got to look cool…”
Renata got in the elevator, smiled, and said, “You look very cool, darling. You’d better watch out or you’ll have that sleazy lecher Jeff after you.”
The elevator doors closed. Rukshana hurried down the corridor to Jeff’s office and peered in the window. It was empty. With her gloved hands she pulled the handle and went inside. She sat at his computer. On the screen was a website featuring romantic breaks for two in Paris: The city of love… a weekend of amour… for that special person in your life…
Rukshana had the feeling it wasn’t Jeff’s wife who would be going. She took a list out of her handbag and began typing in the web addresses of radical Islamic websites, one after another, so that a casual observer of Jeff’s computer history might think Jeff spent all his time looking up death-to-the-infidel!, death-to-the-great-Satan!, death-to—well, death-to-pretty-much-everyone-really! websites. Then she changed his screen saver from a sugary snapshot of Jeff’s wife and kids to a photo of a radical Islamic cleric.
She decided to skip the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby. Mark didn’t wait for her to try her card this time; he jumped up smartly and opened the gate for her, assuming her card still wasn’t working. She gave him a long, sultry look with the promise of the East in it—a look her sister had perfected—and with that she was back out on the street.
She walked the two blocks to her bike and changed into her burka and ballet shoes. She checked her watch. It was 12:40 p.m. She had to move. She pedaled furiously away from the glass and glitz of London’s financial district to a poorer quarter of town and parked her bike in the yard of a disused workshop. Over her loomed a minaret. She walked a couple of streets until she was standing in the shadow of the tower.
Al-Nutjobs Mosque. That wasn’t its real name, of course. It was called Al-Nutjobs by the British newspapers; they claimed that every Muslim extremist in London was a regular there, but the members of the Muslim community weren’t so sure. Their view was that most of the people who hung out at Al-Nutjobs were undercover newspaper reporters, police spies, and operatives from various Western intelligence agencies. Whatever the case, Rukshana knew the street was plastered with CCTVs and other forms of surveillance and that all the local public phones were bugged. She had to be very, very careful.
She walked up to the pay phone opposite the mosque. She checked that her gloves were on and then went inside. She picked up the phone, put some coins in, and called the special police antiterrorist hotline. When she got through, she faked an Indian accent, the sort that had been thought very amusing on British comedy shows in the 1970s but that in these more liberal times wasn’t considered funny anymore.
“Please, please, this afternoon, bombs, bombs! Bombs!”
Rukshana explained in her accent that she’d overheard a campaign being planned in Al-Nutjobs, and the ringleader was an undercover white convert who worked at—and she gave them all Jeff’s details. As the operator desperately tried to keep her on the line, Rukshana shouted, “Please, please, this afternoon, bombs, bombs! Bombs!”
She hung up and walked smartly down the street. Rukshana collected her bike from the disused workshop and checked her watch. It was 1:15 p.m. Time was short. As she jumped on the bike to pedal back to the bank, a siren wailed through the air. Shit—she hadn’t expected the cops to move that quickly. A police car screamed down the street heading toward the mosque. Rukshana didn’t look back as she cycled to the bank. Once there, she parked her bike in the same spot as before, took off her burka, and slipped into her heels.
Her old bench opposite the bank was still available, and she sat down and checked her watch. It was 1:55 p.m. She was just in time. At 2:00 p.m. precisely, just as Kelly had said he would, Jeff appeared and walked back into the bank. Five minutes later, Sarah arrived, looking a little red-faced and with her clothes askew, and followed him in. Now Rukshana just had to wait.
If you reported any ordinary crime, the police would assess the evidence and decide what, if anything, to do. If you reported a terrorist bombing from a pay phone outside Al-Nutjobs, the police couldn’t wait. They couldn’t investigate the threat to see if it was serious; they couldn’t weigh things up. They had to act fast and worry about it later.
At 2:15 p.m., the police acted. In the distance Rukshana heard sirens, and then more sirens as other police vehicles joined the chorus, and then they all came around the corner, brakes squealing, lights flashing, careering down the street. A police van mounted the pavement and juddered to a halt; it was followed by police cars and motorbikes. The doors to the van flew open and a half a dozen cops in black-and-white-checkered baseball caps, submachine guns slung over their shoulders, jumped out. Pistols were pulled from holsters; safety catches were disabled. The police raced up the stairs and into the bank. Other vehicles arrived, and soon there were so many flashing blue lights, you might have thought you were at a carnival.
Five minutes later, Rukshana rose to her feet to enjoy the view. Jeff was dragged down the steps, being frog-marched by two burly cops. He was thrown to the ground and spread-eagled; one cop kept a pistol to his head while the other cop pressed his knee into Jeff’s back and handcuffed him. Down the steps came another officer holding Jeff’s computer. Then the doors to the bank flew open as two policemen tried to stop Sarah from running after Jeff. She screamed, “Leave him alone, he hasn’t done anything, what’s the matter with you?”
Rukshana winced as Sarah punched one of the policemen in the face, after which Sarah was bundled to the ground, long legs akimbo, and thrown into the back of a van. Then the two suspects were driven away.
Rukshana sat back down. An old teacher of hers had once quoted a French saying: Revenge was a dish you ate cold. Perhaps that was true. But it certainly filled up the belly.
“OH, RUKSHANA, YOU should have been there!” Kelly rang that evening to tell Rukshana about the day’s events. “The cops turned up and nicked Jeff. And they took Sarah away too, it was so funny.”
Rukshana put on her best sympathy voice. “Poor Jeff…”
Kelly couldn’t believe it. “Poor Jeff? After what he did to you?”
The following evening Kelly updated Rukshana. “It was all a hoax! The police released Jeff in the small hours without charge. Now we’ve had a team of detectives in all day trying to find the hoaxer. They’re drawing up a list of suspects. It’ll be pretty heavy for the guy who did it. The police don’t take too kindly to that sort of thing—the cops say it’ll mean jail time for the culprit. That won’t help Jeff, of course, now that it’s all out about him and Sarah. The bank’s really embarrassed. Word is that when it’s all calmed down, they’re going to sack him. And Sarah.”
“Poor Jeff.”
“Poor Jeff? You have more reason to hate him than anyone…” There was a long pause before Kelly added,
“I don’t want to worry you, Rukshana, but I think you might be on the list of suspects, what with being let go.” There was another long pause and then Kelly asked, “It wasn’t you, was it?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s what I told the police! A nice inoffensive Muslim girl like Rukshana—no way was it her. The thing is, though… I’m not sure they believed me.”
IT WAS THE following Tuesday, the last day of the cricket match between England and Pakistan. The commentators agreed it was going to be a thrilling finish, and Rukshana’s grandfather was in position in his armchair for it. Rukshana was jumpy. Every time she heard a noise outside, she got up and looked through the window. Then at about noon it happened. A silver sedan pulled up outside her house and a man got out and walked up the garden path. There was a knock on the door.
Rukshana’s grandfather snapped, “Ignore it.”
Instead Rukshana ignored him and went to the door. She opened it to a man with a flashy suit, sunglasses, and slicked-back blond hair. He’d obviously modeled himself on a character from an American cop show. He showed her some ID.
“Rukshana Malik?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Constable John Martin, Metropolitan Police. I’m investigating a very serious crime and I’d like to ask you some questions.”
She looked into his eyes. He knew. And what’s more, he knew that she knew that he knew—but could he prove it? Rukshana had been ultra careful. She’d made sure she was unrecognizable in the burka and in her sister’s clothes. She’d burned all the evidence and left the bike on the High Street, where some kids had promptly stolen it. She’d worn gloves. She had a story worked out and she was sticking to it. She knew what to do; she watched the same American cop shows as DC John Martin.