Baptism

by Max Kinnings

  11:15 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, first carriage

  Terror follows no rules. It is anarchy, pure and simple. No one knows how they will react to it. Aside from a small number of specialist military personnel—a minute fraction of the population—no one is trained to deal with it. Scientific studies—other than those that deal with purely physiological manifestations of terror such as the secretion of pheromones—are pointless. Terror is impossible to simulate, roleplay is ineffective. Nothing can re-create terror other than terror itself. The passengers on train 037 out of Morden—the adults at least—felt terror. It passed along the length of the four carriages in which they were now gathered like an electrical charge.

  This was news transmission in its most basic human form—word of mouth—and all the more horrific for its immediacy. There had been shooting in the rear carriage of the train. Men had been killed. The train had been taken by terrorists. They were hostages, victims of a hijack.

  Some prayed to their gods; others cursed them. Some became silent, withdrawn; others talked, ranted, pleaded, wept.

  By the time the news swept through the train to the second carriage, which now contained the evacuees from the first carriage, a collective escape impulse was activated in the passengers. But before this could become a coherent surge back along the empty first carriage, the door to the cab was thrown open and a slim man in his twenties, Tommy Denning—Brother Thomas of Cruor Christi—stepped through it and walked purposefully between the empty seats to the adjoining doors to the second carriage. In his hand was an automatic pistol with a silencer attachment.

  A markets analyst, newly married—a really decent man—as the newspapers would subsequently describe him, was not alone in thinking that Tommy Denning was someone official, a member of special forces perhaps who had stormed the train and would now set about securing the passengers’ release.

  As the one nearest to Denning, he took it upon himself to speak to him, asking, “What the hell’s going on?” Denning raised the Browning automatic and shot him straight through the forehead, leaving a small perfectly round entrance wound in the middle of his well-moisturized skin, a neat wound in comparison to the gaping butchery of the exit wound, which distributed skull and brain matter across a wide radius of passengers. The screaming started as the man slumped to the floor and a tide of bodies recoiled from the horror.

  Denning slammed the two doors shut between the carriages and, taking a chain from his pocket, looped it around both handles and pulled it tight before securing it with a padlock just as he knew that Belle had done on the doors between the fifth and sixth carriages at the other end of the train. George was in the cab. He could make a run for it. He could open the door in the front of the train and set off down the track. Denning knew that, but he also knew that George wouldn’t try it.

  “Remember, George,” he had said to him before he left the cab, “if I don’t achieve what I’ve come here to do, then you’ll never see your family again. So it’s up to you.” It wasn’t necessary to say any more than that. Denning knew he would behave himself, and if he didn’t then Denning would shoot him. It wasn’t as though he was important any more. Although Tommy had to admit that he rather liked having someone speak for him, issue his demands. He liked the power.

  “George,” he shouted along the carriage, but the hubbub of voices—the shouts and screams—made it inaudible. “George!” he shouted louder this time and got a response.

  “Yes.”

  “Make the announcement to the passengers, just like I told you.”

  Tommy Denning turned back to the adjoining doors between the carriages. The man he had shot lay in an expanding pool of blood. Other passengers cowered further along the carriage. For a moment, Tommy thought he might shoot another one. Just for effect. But the moment passed. This wasn’t about senseless murder.

  The PA hummed and there was George’s voice. Good old George. He was glad it was George, someone spiritually empty. It made it easier somehow.

  “This is George, the driver. As some of you may have realized by now, I’ve been lying to you. The train has been hijacked by an armed gang and wired with explosives. But so long as everyone remains calm and makes no attempt to interfere with the hijackers then no one will be harmed. I’ve been told to tell you that anybody—including women and children—who attempts to escape will be killed. In the event of a sustained escape attempt, explosives will be detonated.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” said Denning. He didn’t need to shout, the people on the train were quiet as George switched off the PA. He knew that the passengers wouldn’t remain quiet for long. But for the time being they were cowed by the knowledge that their lives were in danger. Their self-survival instincts were being activated as they processed the unsettling news.

  Denning walked back along the first carriage toward the cab.

  “Come on, George,” he said as he stepped into the cab and slammed the door behind him. “We need to take a walk.”

  George watched Denning, whose excitement was almost childlike. But he didn’t seem to be mad, or psychopathic, or suffering from anything that would compel him to hijack a tube train for no apparent reason. And now he wanted to go for a walk in the tunnel. What could that mean? Was Denning going to kill him? If so, why not kill him here? Denning pulled a package from his canvas bag, opened the door in the front of the cab and gestured for George to go first.

  George climbed down from the cab, making sure not to stand on the trainee driver, who was lying where Denning had let him fall, his lifeless eyes staring up at the roof of the tunnel. George had never been in a tube tunnel outside a train before. Only scant light was thrown from the cab and, as he stared into the darkness up ahead, he wondered if there was anyone there, watching them, lining up their rifle scopes. Denning must have been thinking the same because he made George walk in front. They didn’t go far, ten yards at the most. Denning flashed on a torch and shone it at the wall. He found what he was looking for, a set of flimsy metal steps up the side of the curved wall, which disappeared inside a hole in the ceiling about two feet in diameter.

  “You stay here. I’ll hear you if you try and make a run for it. We’re friends now, so don’t make me kill you.”

  Denning looked at him and smiled, like a boy who has watched some violent gangster movie that he shouldn’t have and wants to act out the dialogue for the benefit of a friend. But behind the juvenile posturing there was a violent unpredictable energy.

  “Okay?”

  George returned Denning’s stare and nodded.

  With the agility and precision of a gymnast, Denning was up the ladder and swallowed by the narrow hole. His ascent was accompanied by the creaking of the old metal struts. George looked up the tunnel and then back at the train. Whatever escape plan he could conjure up, he knew he wouldn’t put it into practice. He had to believe that what Denning had told him was true, that if he did exactly as he was told then he would see his family again. He had to cling to that. Without it, he knew he would go to pieces. Just like it sounded some passengers on the train were doing. There were loud voices, most of them male. One man was shouting something that sounded like a biblical incantation, a prayer perhaps, and another man was shrieking a string of obscenities. A baby was crying. A woman screamed, then a man.

  The ladder started creaking as Denning descended.

  “All done, George,” he said. “It’s out of our hands now.” As he jumped down onto the track, George noticed that he was unraveling a reel of red wire that led up into the bolt hole. They walked the few yards to the train with the wire trailing behind them. As they climbed up into the cab, Denning passed the reel through the window in the cab door, before closing the door behind him and pulling up the window, leaving an inch gap at the top for the wire.

  “You might want to cover your ears and open your mouth,” he said as he fiddled with a large powerpack battery. George looked confused. “It’ll protect your ears.” George felt a sense of
rising panic and as Denning said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he covered his ears and opened his mouth. Denning touched the wires against the electrodes on the battery and there was an explosion in the tunnel that cracked the glass in the cab windows. Even with his hands over his ears, George could feel the air displacement punch his eardrums as the sound of eviscerated brickwork and masonry raged in the confined space. As a gritty wind blew down the tunnel followed by wafts of dust, the passengers remained silent for a moment as a pulse of fear was transmitted through the carriages. Then the shouting—more urgent and frantic than ever—started up once again. But as George took his hands away from his ears, he heard something else, something wholly unexpected. It was the sound of running water.

  11:16 AM

  Network Control center, St. James’s

  “All messages and web activity can be directed into a cache which we can analyze,” said Laura. “But what concerns me is if the hijackers realize that we’re tampering with their web access.”

  “I doubt they will,” said Ed. “They’ll have more important things on their minds, like staying alive long enough to get out their message.”

  “But if they do realize, Ed, they might start killing hostages.”

  “We should only revise our negotiation if we have intel that proves conclusively they’re killing people. Without that, we keep negotiating. How long have we got until the deadline?”

  “Twelve minutes,” said White.

  “And the router is in place in the tunnel?”

  “Yes. Just needs turning on.”

  “Okay, well I guess we’re going to have to let them speak. Without any communication whatsoever, there’s no way of resolving this. We give them this. We get them talking and we take it from there.”

  “How long after the deadline do we leave it?” asked White.

  “Let’s leave it forty-five seconds.”

  “You’re sure about that, Ed?” asked Laura.

  “Absolutely,” replied Ed. “We have to use every opportunity we can to claw back some control, however minute. When they see the time go to exactly eleven-thirty and there’s no wireless, they’re going to be afraid. Yes, they can kill a hostage but they’re not going to straight away. Like everyone else on the planet who has ever used a personal computer, they’re going to think that there’s something wrong with their connection. They’re also going to have a niggling doubt in the back of their minds that we’re not going to be as compliant as they want us to be. We inject a little drip of fear into their brains. We unsettle them.”

  “Okay, okay . . .”

  Ed could hear the indecision in Laura’s voice. “Laura, this is the only way we can play it. We have to start chipping away at them from the start. We have to make out that everything they want is a problem and it’s going to take time. We own time, they don’t.”

  “All right, Ed, I don’t need a lesson in hostage negotiation. I’ll see what can be done.”

  Ed turned to Laura, attempting a fix on her exact location and directing the lenses of his Ray-Bans at it. “You mean to tell me that we haven’t actually got clearance to switch on the wireless connection yet?”

  “No, I need to phone it through to Commander Boise. Only she can sign off on this.”

  “Laura, you’d better do that fast. We’ve got—how long have we got?”

  “Nine minutes thirty seconds,” said White.

  “Okay, let me make the call.”

  Ed balked at the old negotiating maxim that “the negotiators negotiate and the deciders decide.” He wanted to be closer to the sharp end of the decision-making process. He knew standard procedure dictated that in a negotiating cell everyone had one specific job and there should be little overlap but, while he could see the reasoning behind this, he also found it frustrating.

  When Laura returned, she said, “They’re calling back.” Ed could tell that she shared his frustration about this from the way that she said it and he couldn’t prevent himself from feeling a flash of anger.

  “This is fucking ridiculous.” Ed didn’t raise his voice, didn’t give any indication that he was angry aside from his choice of words. “We should have more autonomy to make strategic decisions related to the negotiation. If they don’t give us the go-ahead, we might as well pack up and go home. What was the point of getting all the Wi-Fi equipment down there in the first place?”

  “Ed, there are enormous implications here. We’ve got an armed gang with hundreds of hostages and they want a media link to the world. Politically, this is extremely sensitive.”

  “So we wait.”

  “Everyone knows the time frame.”

  They sat and waited. Ed thought about throwing out some deflective chatter in an attempt to diffuse the tension but his mind kept racing elsewhere. They had to allow the connection. It would be madness to deny it, although nothing would surprise him now, as the usual rules of the game seemed to no longer apply. On the positive side, however, the setting up of the negotiating cell was complete. All the equipment was in place. They all had their headsets, their coffee, and water. A fan had been set up on the desk in front of Ed and cool air was blowing across his scarred face.

  At three minutes to the deadline, Ed heard the door open and a whispered conversation between Laura and one of the support staff.

  “Okay, Ed,” said Laura. “We’ve got the go-ahead.”

  “Good, so when we get to deadline plus forty-five seconds, we switch on the juice. Not a second before.”

  11:17 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, driver’s cab

  “What’s that sound?” asked George.

  Denning smiled. He pulled down the window in the M door in the front of the cab and cupped his ear theatrically. “That, my friend, is holy water.”

  “What do you mean, holy water?”

  “Have you ever been baptized?”

  George’s mind flashed to the framed photograph that his parents had on the table in their hallway, a picture that despite his protestations, remained there to this day. It showed a one-year-old George wearing what looked like some sort of white silk shroud. It was taken at his christening and his mother always said he looked like a little angel in it. But George had never shared his mother’s religion, much preferring his father’s strong religious skepticism. This didn’t, however, stop him getting confirmed when he was fifteen. All his friends were doing it and there were presents, so he was told, although all he received was a book called Words for Worship, which ended up in the back of a closet somewhere. It wasn’t really the sort of present that he’d had in mind.

  “Yeah, I was christened,” he said.

  “Good,” said Denning but his mind was elsewhere, focused on the sound of footsteps in the tunnel. Pulling down the window in the N door in the side of the cab, he leaned out. He saw something further up the train and, drawing his gun and grabbing his bag, he said, “Come on, follow me.” Denning opened the door and George followed him into the first carriage, where a man in his forties, red faced and sweating, was trying to make his way down the outside of the train. As soon as he saw Denning move toward him, he pitched forward to try and get below the level of the window but a 9mm bullet was already on its way toward him and, having punched a hole in the window, it struck him in the left ear, exiting in a crimson flower-like wound on the right side of his neck. As the man slumped dead against the side of the train, Denning was on the move again, walking toward the end of the carriage.

  “There goes another one,” he shouted. He stood at the door and looked through the window at the terrified passengers. “I’ve got a lot of bullets. I’ve got enough for every one of you if need be. So if you want to die like this, then keep on coming.” He turned away from the door and walked back along the carriage opening up his canvas bag and taking out a laptop computer. Then he took out extra batteries wrapped in clear plastic. In the middle of the carriage, between the two handrails set into the ceiling of the train, he stretched a piece of doubled-over bed sheet and p
ulled it tight, using a staple gun to secure it. In the middle of the sheet, he placed the laptop and opened it up.

  George watched Denning as he worked. He could tell this was something he had rehearsed many times. Once the laptop was up and running on the makeshift hammock, he connected a webcam to it and after tapping on the keyboard for a few moments, a window appeared on the screen in which there was a real-time image of him. He smiled when he saw himself.

  “Isn’t technology miraculous, George?”

  11:30 AM

  Northern Line Train 037

  At exactly forty-five seconds past the deadline, a miniature symphony of pings, chimes and other electronic alerts greeted the switching on of the wireless signal. The compulsion to communicate would not be denied. The tension and fear had to be relayed above ground to friends, family, and loved ones. Social networking, e-mails, web-based phone and video calls, the communication stream began to flow from Train Number 037 and soon the flow became a torrent and doubled back on itself in a swirling parabola of news. This was media of the masses, naked expressions of human emotion, unedited, uncensored, the raw material over which the media industry could now scavenge for highlights, moments of drama and narrative continuity. This was an unfolding tragedy brought to the people of the world in the international language of the day’s top story.

  There were journalists on the train, two freelancers and a features editor for the London Evening Standard, but their professional status meant little; there were amateur journalists all along the train, reporting from the front line of their own experience. The images and film footage radiated from the stricken train, to be consumed by a hungry global audience eager for an opinion to take.

  Militants seize London tube train.

  Terrorists attack London.

  Tube hijack: terrorists take commuter train.

  Hundreds of hostages on the London Underground.