‘What about the millions that have died for your hatred?’
‘They will be forgotten in time. Even in America, business has returned to normal. People are going about their lives as they did before.’
‘Are you mad?’ How could I ever have loved you?’
‘I am not a madman. I am a genius, a freedom fighter. I was to be a saviour for my people.’
‘There are those who regard you as their saviour. They talk about you in the same manner as they do of Bin Laden. Are you proud of that?’
‘Not really. I was neither extreme nor fundamentalist. I was a Palestinian trying to help. I was a man who hated, a man who saw a solution.’
‘Enough of these lies. We will enjoy our remaining time together, and I will forget who and what you are. Is that agreed?’
‘And I will forget that you are an agent of my enemy.’
‘So, let us enjoy the food and talk of pleasant times.’ Yanny was content, yet she knew it was not to last.
Phil sat outside in the car, hungry and miserable while his colleague and the most dangerous man in the world ate pasta and drank an agreeable bottle of Chianti.
‘Why did you let her do that?’ Steve asked.
‘You agreed when we spoke about it before,’ replied Phil. ‘She knew what she was doing. We need to know if he has the virus and what his plans are. She wants till tomorrow morning and then he’s ours.’
‘He could kill her. Make a run for it.’
‘It’s possible, but Yanny’s armed. She’ll be more than a match for him. Ed’s already blocking the roads and anyone suspicious loitering in the city or going near the bungalow will be picked up straight away. One of his men has checked the bungalow, there’s no virus there. The cardboard boxes in the driveway are empty.’
‘We’ll need to leave it to Yanny.’ Steve reluctantly had to agree.
‘I’ll be watching all night,’ said Phil. ‘I’ll not let anything happen to her.’
‘I just hope you’re right. She’s got herself in too deep on this.’
‘What else could she do? We’ve never dealt with a person such as Haberman. The rules don’t apply here.’
‘I know, but it’s still too dangerous for her.’
‘They’re leaving. I must go.’ Phil hung up on Steve.
It was remarkable that Yanny and Samir could be so calm and relaxed. He was once again the Samir she had known while Yanny was the same impressionable woman who had fallen in love with him. The conversation was about nothing and everything and, as they reached the bungalow, she realised that she wanted to sleep with him, but would not.
Phil had followed at a discreet distance. Samir had seen him in the rear vision mirror, but chose not to comment. He knew he would not harm her, but he also knew he could not deviate from his plan.
It was four in the morning and, with Yanny still asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, he carefully and quietly crept out of the house. He could see Phil at the end of the driveway, as well as the man behind the trees up past the end of the garden. He could also see the boat in the marina, not two hundred yards distance. Always with a plan, he had ensured that the virus - it had always been on the boat - was on board, and the trip to Lincolnville further down the coast could be completed within thirty minutes. He knew he was becoming careless and that his path was not as concealed as it had been in the past. However, he quickly made his way to the boat, expecting to be apprehended at any moment.
He had been pleased to see Yanny again, to spend time with her. If the Islamic world wished him to be adopted as a saviour, then he would make sure he was worthy of such an accolade. The security at the United Nations would not be an issue, the release of the virus simple and the deaths of the majority of the world’s leaders, a triumphant moment.
He failed to see Yanny climbing onto the boat. ‘Samir, I cannot let you go.’
He looked up in shock to see her there. ‘I must fulfil my mission, my jihad. I hoped you would understand. It is for me, and me alone, to atone for my sins to Allah in the killing of his people.’
‘The virus, is it on this boat?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it is only me and the virus. That is all there is now.’
‘I love you, Samir. I always will.’
‘And I love you,’ he replied. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘Yes, I must. You know that.’
‘Yes, I do.’ He was aware that he would not do anything to harm her, not to draw the gun in his pocket.
With tears in her eyes, she pulled out the Glock pistol she carried in her pocket and shot him twice, the first time between the eyes, the second through the heart. She then walked to the side of the boat and threw the pistol into the water.
The End
The Vane-Martin Conundrum
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 1
Frederick Vane, tall, slender, with a pronounced beak of a nose and Andrew Martin, small, plumpish, verging on fat, had been work colleagues for forty years and friends for one week less. They were to be presented with a conundrum as to whether to allow the assassination of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, knowing full well that the wrong decision would be catastrophic for the country.
Vane, a retiring type of man with a whisper of a voice, preferred academia to a social life. He lived in a small apartment not far from Richmond and, given a collection of good books and an Internet connection, he would happily commit to research and writing, forgetting to eat or drink and even, on occasions, wash. Andrew Martin was his opposite – gregarious, life and soul of the party, ready with a story, and invariably with a glass of a good quality brandy in his hand at home with Margaret, his wife of thirty-five years.
Frederick Vane had only one friend and that was Andrew Martin, whereas Andrew Martin had many, although only one who he saw as his intellectual equal and that was Frederick Vane. As different as they were in appearance, manner and personalities, they shared one love – the love of numbers, statistics, and how they impacted on the environment, global warming and, more recently, world events.
They shared a little cubicle of an office in a nondescript offshoot of a government department, the Office of National Statistics, hidden in a back street not far from Whitehall in London. They were both academic and both esoteric in their approach to speculative statistical evaluation.
They had seen the problems with mad cow disease and how to prevent its transmission, the rise in terrorism and areas of impact and possible countermeasures, even how global warming would transform countries and regions and continents from dry to wet, warm to hot and back to cold and where desertification would advance and where it would ebb. They had even predicted that the Gulf stream, which flowed from the Caribbean up off the coast of North America and gave the warming effect to the United Kingdom and Ireland, would stop in another ninety years if atmospheric pollution was not halted and reversed. That particular report had been ignored: it was too costly, too controversial, and the government in an election year was not willing to buy into anything that sounded remotely like a restriction on business. They knew their analysis was right, and yet they had become used to being ignored until it was too late, and then being asked what could
be done. With global warming, the answer would be nothing.
Frederick Vane had two years, three at most, before the cancer that he had long ignored claimed him. Andrew Martin had twenty years if he was lucky, due to his expanding girth and clogging arteries. The slowing of the Gulf Stream would not become apparent for at least thirty years and neither of them would be around to see the validation of their analysis. The report they had submitted would have been filed deep in the recesses of the basement of the building they occupied, long forgotten.
In time, other academics might come up with similar conclusions, but it would be too late, and both Vane and Martin were glad that they had not been responsible for burdening the planet with more unnecessary mouths to feed.
Frederick Vane, a lifelong devotee of the academic pursuit, had no time for the pleasures of the flesh, although there had been a student at University, a freckle-faced, red-haired girl from somewhere in Ireland who had caught his eye, but she had soon been taken up by a strapping, sporty type with a way with words and a limited IQ. At least he thought his IQ was suspect, but it may have been jealousy on his part as the strapping, sporty type was now the head of his college at Oxford University, and the freckle-faced, red-haired girl, his wife, and as round as she was tall.
Andrew Martin would have had children were it not for a genetic trait in his family towards dwarfism. It had bypassed him, but he had an uncle and two aunts which it had not, and the three of them had made a good career at Christmas in the various pantomimes around the country. His Uncle Bob had even been in a movie remake of the Wizard of Oz as a Munchkin.
It was his wife – or, as she was then, his future wife – Margaret, who had made the decision for him.
‘We will not have children,’ she said and what she said went. He loved her dearly, even if she was domineering and bossy and smelt of disinfectant from the fastidious cleaning that she committed their small cottage, with its thatched roof and antiquated kitchen, to every second day.
‘You’ll need to get yourself seen to,’ she said the first day she met Uncle Bob and Aunties Patricia and Beverley. A practical woman, she saw no reason not to marry Andrew and she had never been particularly maternal.
‘What do you mean?’ Andrew replied. They were only engaged then, and there was to be no intimacy until the wedding night. She had been clear on that.
‘Snip, snip. Do you want me to spell it out?’
‘No, I know what you mean.’ It did not concern him greatly.
‘Then get it done before the wedding, or there’ll be no wedding night. You understand?’
‘Yes, I understand.’ He was hen-pecked, pushed from pillar to post by a dominant woman and he would not have it any other way. He was free to devote himself to his work and her to cleaning the house and weeding the garden.
***
In the ten years since the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as a military force, global terrorism had reached hitherto unforeseen heights. The influx of disillusioned and isolated Muslim youths from the Western democracies into the ranks of the extremist organisation had fuelled the proponents of Islamic fundamentalism with an educated elite. No longer was Islamic extremism the misguided aspiration of a one-eyed Mullah, or an extremist Wahhabi Arab surrounded by a disorganised, uneducated rabble of villagers and peasants located in the valleys and mountains of Afghanistan. Now, it was an army with discipline and rules and regulations.
It was not the army of a country, but an army of belief and it was more dangerous. It had one defining advantage over a Western or Westernised military. Its soldiers were prepared to die for their cause, not because they necessarily chose death, but because it came with benefits ‒ martyrdom in a holy cause came with seventy-two willing virgins. Religion was a powerful weapon, and the Islamic State had it in plenty. The more rational, more pragmatic in the elite of the Islamic State may have seen through some of the fallacies, but if they did, they certainly did not state them openly. Dissension, criticism, even the hint of less than total dedication to the cause was instant death without martyrdom.
Syria and Iraq were both firmly under the control of the Islamic state. Bashir Assad, the former President of Syria, had held out for a few years until he was forced to flee and his former, most ardent critic, the United States of America, had granted him and his family political asylum along with four Airbuses loaded with as much loot and priceless artworks as they could carry. They had fleeced the country for years. Now, it was the fundamentalists’ turn to either fleece it some more, restore it to its former glory, or destroy it. The most optimistic in the West would probably say destroy. The devastation of that one country was almost complete: electricity was infrequent, two hours a day at most, the roads mainly potholed or reduced to tracks and, with a total embargo enforced by America and its allies, there was no air traffic and no economy.
In Iraq, the Kurds held out the longest, but even they capitulated with the inevitable beheadings and the raping of young girls that signified the more barbaric elements of the Islamic State as it moved from country to country. Iran still maintained some control of its own future, but it was Shia. The Islamic State, Sunni and Wahhabi, would show it no mercy. It would only be a matter of time before it fell and even the ‘Great Satan’, as Iran referred to the United States of America, had a significant military presence in the country aiming to protect it. Jordan was gone, as was Lebanon and most of Israel apart from a small area in the South.
There were many Arabs, silently, who would admit that the Israeli Jews were a preferred occupier of Palestine, than the Wahhabi-inspired extremists who called themselves the Liberators of the Muslim world against the imperial yoke of the infidel crusaders and their Zionist allies. Turkey, once tolerant, democratic and Muslim, was gone. Greece had at most six to nine months and then there would be a move by the armies of the Islamic State up through Europe. It was inevitable and unstoppable. All of Europe was experiencing frequent and almost impossible to stop wanton acts of terrorism from the disillusioned and disenfranchised Muslim youth who had been born in those countries.
Europe appeared doomed, the Middle East was virtually back in the dark ages and Africa, especially the Muslim areas, was becoming more extreme, more violent, and crueller. There had been some attempts by the West to enter into discussions with the leaders of the marauding armies of Islam, but they had come to nothing.
It was against this backdrop that Frederick Vane and Andrew Martin found themselves thrust from their cubicle of an office, largely ignored, into prominence. The government, desperate for a solution, needed to know where this was heading, what they could do, and whether there was any hope. It was to be the latest attack on a shopping centre, one hundred and twenty kilometres to the west of London, that had prompted the Director of the Office of National Statistics, Bill Gardner, a verbose loud-speaking career government servant and sycophant, to suggest that he had two men who may be able to help.
***
A shopping centre on any Saturday in the United Kingdom was invariably full of people either spending money on necessities or looking in the shop windows, or just keeping clear of the weather outside. Old George Mall in Salisbury was no different to all the others, although takings had been down by at least twenty percent for the last couple of weeks. Sixty-five people had been killed two Saturdays previous, forty kilometres to the south in Bournemouth, by a car bomb in the middle of a tourist walkway down towards the beach. Paul Marston, one of the shop owners in the mall in Salisbury, was confident that it was only temporary and that the money and the number of customers would be back to normal within a short period of time.
‘It’s going to be a good day,’ he said as he stood outside the bookshop he had owned for as many years as he could remember. Approaching his sixtieth year, he was looking forward to taking it easier, maybe travel a bit. He had read most of the travel books in his shop and, apart from the occasional trip to the continent, he had seen nothing of the world. There had been a solid offer on the
business, but the recent downturn in takings and the fear that another shopping centre in the country would be targeted had turned the offer from keen to lukewarm, to non-existent.
‘They’ll be another offer soon. It’s Salisbury, nothing ever happens here,’ he said to his wife.
His elder brother, Mike, had gone off to Australia, made a fortune buying up old properties to renovate - even offered him a half-share in the company twenty years previous. He had declined the offer - the shop was doing well, the eldest kids were in school and even the weather was better than in his childhood. He’d never regretted the decision and, whereas his brother had prospered, it had not prevented him from being knocked over and killed by a drunken youth one night as he strolled across the road to pick up a newspaper from the corner store.
***
Duraid Wassef, educated, articulate, and from a wealthy family, had been born in London. His father, Farid, was a prominent doctor in a prominent hospital and highly respected. Farid had made the journey to the United Kingdom in his youth and he loved England, especially London, with a passion. He was a walker and each and every weekend he would walk for miles through the back streets, the parks and the places that most people would only drive past.
He marvelled at the beauty, the organisation and the fact that he, a Syrian Muslim with an obviously Arab complexion and features, could rise so high without any discernible prejudice. There had been some when he first came to the country: his English had been limited, his look Middle Eastern. Attired now in English clothes and acting as if was a native-born Englishman, he saw himself as a model English citizen. His inadequacy in the English language had been resolved by intensive evening classes and the accent by a speech therapist.
Farid Wassef always attended Friday prayers at the local Mosque, always fasted for Ramadan, but apart from that, he maintained a pragmatic, moderate view of Islam. He certainly did not hold with those who committed acts of senseless violence in the name of Allah.
Terrorist: Three Book Boxed Set Page 35