Baptism

by Max Kinnings

  The woman’s voice on the other end crackled back: “Yeah, Tommy?”

  “Everything’s as it should be. I’m going to make my speech at twelve noon, so sit tight, not long now.”

  “Okay, Tommy. Oh and Tommy, Simeon’s dead.”

  “You did what you had to do. Remember, today is the day. This is our time.”

  “I love you, Tommy.”

  “I love you, Belle.”

  As Denning pocketed the walkie-talkie, George caught his eye. “She your girlfriend?”

  “Sister.”

  “She’s at the other end of the train, right?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “Who’s Simeon?”

  “He was a false friend.”

  “So he had to die?” Denning said nothing, just nodded while watching George, who decided to capitalize on this moment of openness to question him further: “So what now?”

  “We wait.”

  “You haven’t really wired the train with explosives, have you?”

  Denning’s expression changed.

  “What is it with you? Doesn’t it worry you now I’ve made myself known and established my link with the outside world that I might not need you any more? That maybe you could be surplus to requirements.”

  George knew it might sound desperate but he didn’t care. “You promised that so long as I did as I was told you would spare me and my family. That’s the truth, right?”

  Denning nodded thoughtfully. “Of course it’s the truth. Why would I lie to you? You’re my friend. But now you’re going to have to keep quiet because I’ve got a speech to rehearse.” He took some sheets of legal-size paper from his canvas bag and flicked through them.

  George returned his gaze to the water in the tunnel up ahead, avoiding the handset and the piece of chewing gum. With sideways glances, he watched Denning as he pored over the sheets of paper, reading the words written in blue ballpoint. The handwriting was small and neat and there were numerous crossings out and words underlined. Denning muttered to himself as he read, pacing in the confined space.

  His guard was down. Both his hands were on the pieces of paper and the gun was in his pocket. If George hit him as hard as he could, smashed his fist into his face, he would be debilitated for at least a few seconds. Enough time perhaps to land some more punches and prevent him reaching for his gun. Enough time possibly for George to get his hands around his neck and squeeze the life out of him. As the thought came to him, he clenched his fists, his fingernails digging into his palms. His murderous thoughts kept his claustrophobia at bay. There he was, a man who had never thrown a fist in anger, not since he was a child, and yet he knew with a cold dispassionate certainty that if he got the chance, he would kill this man and feel nothing, no remorse, nothing. It would feel good. It would feel liberating.

  11:39 AM

  Network Control center, St. James’s

  “So, what’s with the water?”

  As soon as Ed heard the train driver, George Wakeham, say the words—they were faint but clearly audible through his headphones—he knew it was significant. Wakeham had managed to keep the radio channel open.

  Everyone in the negotiating cell—White, Calvert, Hooper, and Ed Mallory—listened to it and behind it there was that sound. It was unmistakable now. Flowing water. Falling water. “What’s with the water?”

  “Think of it as an egg timer,” said Denning. His voice sounded different. The tone was more subdued, more conversational. This was how he spoke when he wasn’t grandstanding and Ed could tell straight away that he had no idea that he was being listened to.

  Ed willed George to ask another question, and he did. “So you’re trying to drown us by flooding the tunnel, is that it?”

  Ed winced. Was that too exclamatory? Would Denning realize that he was being steered?

  “It’s not a matter of drowning, George. This is much more important than drowning. This is a blessing.”

  A blessing? What the hell did that mean?

  “It’s so damned hot.” George Wakeham sounded nervy, he was speaking too loudly. Was his ruse about to be discovered?

  “Do you w—”

  The radio cut out. It was the start of a question; what was George about to ask him?

  “Can you play it back?” asked Ed. “The bit about flooding the tunnel.”

  White clicked away on a computer nearby and there were George’s words again: “So you’re trying to drown us by flooding the tunnel, is that it?”

  “Again,” said Ed.

  “So you’re trying to drown us by flooding the tunnel, is that it?”

  “Laura?”

  Laura spoke to him from the direction of the doorway. “Yes, Ed?”

  “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. We need to put a whole new strategy in operation. And we need to move fast.”

  11:43 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, driver’s cab

  Father Owen had turned toward him as he had approached with the knife the night before. It had felt as though God’s hands were guiding him as he pushed Owen back into the bath and pressed the tip of the blade against his throat.

  “What . . . what are you doing?” Stripped from Owen’s voice was the assured confidence that he employed for his interminable sermons, preachings that had become so tiresome of late. What did he know about washing away the sins of the world, about rebirth?

  Like everyone whom God had seen fit to accompany him on this journey, Father Owen was a prophet. Tommy’s was the task of beginning the End Time but others were to play their part in the great unfolding of the end of days. He felt a strange sense of love for them. It was God’s love shining through him.

  When he had sacrificed the old man, he had stood so close to him that he could smell the whiskey on his breath. As the arthritic old hands struggled with his in a vain attempt to prevent the inevitable, Tommy leaned forward against the knife. It burst through Owen’s throat, squirting blood as the gristle crackled.

  It was a line that Tommy had heard the old man use many times before, a line taken from the Book of Revelation, although Owen and all the other members of Cruor Christi had mistaken its significance and meaning. Their foreheads were touching, sweat mingling; they were so close that Tommy’s words as he had spoken them were inhaled by the old man as he breathed his last: “And the waters shall rise.”

  And now was Tommy’s final opportunity to get all those other precious words straight in his mind. There would be no notes when he went live. Christ didn’t have notes. Great words, great speeches, came from the soul. God would guide him. Just as he had guided him here. Everything came from the Almighty Father and he had never felt so close to him as he did now. God had always been with him, even on that day all those years before. Especially on that day. Although it had not been possible to know it at the time. How was he to know that what he felt was God’s presence in the room when his father picked up the bread knife off the chopping board and pushed it into his mother’s stomach right up to the handle?

  At first it had felt like a joke. Time stopped. Everyone in the room looked at the wooden handle of the knife sticking out of his mother’s floral-patterned apron. It looked absurd. He was about to laugh. But before the laughter could reach his lips, his mother started gasping and slumped to the floor, where she whimpered and then lay still. He remembered when they used to play cowboys and Indians. His dad never joined in but his mother, who had been interested in amateur dramatics as a younger woman, had thrown herself into the childish roleplay with a vengeance. Tommy had killed her. He had drawn his gun, shot her, and she had rolled onto the carpet and pretended to die. Her dying when they played cowboys and Indians and her dying on the floor of the kitchen as her family watched—it felt the same. It always felt the same every time he thought of it, and he thought of it a lot.

  The feeling was there then and it had never really gone away again since. The feeling was God and God had stayed with Tommy and Belle in the kitchen when their father walked calml
y out of the room as their mother’s blood pooled on the cracked linoleum by the breakfast table.

  They could hear him banging about in the garage next door, then it went quiet. When Tommy went through after a few minutes—he wanted to know whether he should call an ambulance—he found his father hanging from a metal roof beam, the cord from the power drill around his neck. Remembering it now, God was there in everything, from the urine that dripped from his father’s trouser leg into the puddle on the floor to the faint rubbery creak of the cord as the body slowly turned a quarter circle and then back again. Before they dialed 999, Tommy and Belle watched The Terminator, which their dad had taped a couple of nights before when it was on television but their mother had said they were too young to watch. The film gave Belle nightmares for weeks.

  Tommy opened the door to the first carriage. At the other end of it there was movement on either side of the train. Despite the public executions he had carried out earlier and the threat of detonating explosives, people were trying to escape again. They wanted to take their chances. Tommy raised up his pistol and emptied the magazine in two bursts, the first at one side of the carriage and the second at the other. There were cries, screams, the splashing of bodies into water. That would give the others pause for thought and it would buy him some more time.

  The laptop was in position on the makeshift hammock slung between the handrails. Another few minutes and he would stand in front of it and address the world.

  With the pistol reloaded and holstered in his pocket, he closed the door to the cab and turned his attention to the speech once again while George, the driver, sat in the driver’s seat and stared out into the tunnel. But however hard Tommy tried to concentrate, thoughts kept forcing themselves into his mind, memories from childhood, and one memory in particular, of his father telling him about the River Lime.

  His dad might have been a hard bastard but he told a good story. He had worked on the London Underground in the early seventies before he met Tommy’s mother. An engineer was what he said he was, but knowing how he exaggerated, he was probably involved in little more than track maintenance. He regaled Tommy with stories of secret tunnels and forgotten stations, and one of the stories that he told him was about London’s underground rivers, tributaries of the Thames like the Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn and the Lime, that had once flowed on the surface but had been boxed into culverts by the encroachment of the city. It was the story of the River Lime that particularly interested little Tommy. Rising from the same springs on Hampstead Heath as the Fleet River, it flowed down through Camden Town and under the easternmost section of the West End to rejoin the Fleet in Holborn and from there into the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. When the Charing Cross, Euston, and Hampstead Railway—later to become the westerly branch of the Northern Line—was being built in the late 1890s and early 1900s, it was necessary to house the River Lime in a tunnel for a two-mile section from Goodge Street in the north to Covent Garden in the south to prevent flooding in the newly constructed underground railway line. It was a major feat of engineering. The flow of the river could not be described as fast but still constituted thousands of gallons per hour.

  Following a major survey of the London Underground carried out in the early seventies, it was decided that the tunnel housing the River Lime should be shored up to prevent any danger of leakage. One area in particular was considered to be most at risk and that was the section beneath Charing Cross Road, where the Lime ran very close to a section of train tunnel, which was itself in a low-level area between the stations either side of it—Tottenham Court Road to the north and Leicester Square to the south. The survey report had said that in the event of the River Lime flooding in this section, the Northern Line tunnel would fill with water in a matter of hours.

  Tommy’s dad was part of the engineering team that reinforced the tunnel carrying the water, and he had told Tommy how he and his fellow workers had joked that if someone like the IRA—the main purveyors of terrorism to Londoners in the seventies—wanted to pull off a spectacular attack, they could flood the northbound Northern Line tunnel and any train that happened to be in it. And there it was, a seed in little Tommy Denning’s mind. Almost exactly halfway between the two stations in the northbound tunnel—that’s what his dad had told him. A flight of metal steps. A maintenance access shaft to all that remained of the River Lime, the forgotten river. Tommy never forgot.

  After his father died and Tommy grew older, this random piece of information took on greater significance. It was secret knowledge. It was a gift. When he found Christ and was born again, the gift became more precious and significant as did other events in his life. Like the attacks on the Twin Towers.

  He watched it all on television, right from the moment when United Airlines Flight 175 went into the South Tower. At the age of fourteen, suddenly his life had meaning. The lines were drawn. The army was his only option. He was going on a crusade. But then came Afghanistan and everything got confused. It wasn’t the crusade he had hoped for. The Afghans weren’t the enemy. For a time even his faith in Christ was shaken but he did what he had to do. Even when his friend, Jed, was blown up by a roadside bomb, he could not bring himself to hate, as so many of the men he fought alongside did. He bided his time and he got out when he could. During his time in Afghanistan, he managed to avoid killing anyone. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t see people get killed—he did, plenty—but God had decided that it wasn’t right for him to kill. Not yet.

  When he came home, Belle was living in Wales, in Snowdonia, in an old farm that was now the monastic headquarters of an evangelical sect called Cruor Christi. Typical Belle. She never did things by half. Bored and frustrated after years in foster homes around London, she had written to him to tell him she wanted to move to the country. But he never expected a farm converted into a monastery on the side of a mountain.

  It was good at first. They seemed like decent people. But as Tommy’s faith grew stronger, it also changed, and he found it difficult to share his new brothers’ and sisters’ convictions, grew tired of their blinkered attitudes, particularly those of Father Owen. To Owen, Christ was the only way, and all other religions—even those who interpreted Christ differently—were wrong, sinful. The strength of the old man’s faith was admirable but it was misguided. The same went for Brother Varick. They were fighting the wrong battle. The lines were drawn but not where they thought. 9/11 was a call to arms but not for believers to fight one another as some deluded souls believed. It was a rallying cry.

  The Muslim brothers and sisters were in pain but no one was listening to them. God allowed 9/11 to happen because he wanted to send a message to the world. But mankind, as always, and particularly in the West, misunderstood the symbolism and poured oil on the flames.

  9/11 was like a diamond bullet. The strength of will that it required, its pure crystalline simplicity. The World Trade Center became an epic metaphor beamed into homes across the globe. So too the Pentagon and, as for United Airlines Flight 93 going down in that field in Pennsylvania, this offered humanity hope. Destiny can be changed. Man can make a difference.

  And the more he thought about 9/11 and what it meant, particularly after the lunacy of Helmand, the more he thought about the River Lime and his secret knowledge. He knew it was no accident that he had been given this information. The hand of God was guiding him. It felt as though everything was coming to a head. The pressure was building. When Simeon Fisher arrived at Madoc Farm and his true identity became apparent, it was a sign to begin preparations.

  Like Mohammed Atta before him, Tommy decided he would utilize existing hardware and infrastructure and turn it against the enemy. It was what God wanted, he could feel it, and the true gold of this psychic alchemy was the discovery that a great battle had once taken place on an ancient bridge over the River Lime between Boudicca and the Romans. Before the battle, the river was blessed by one of the first Christian missionaries to visit Britain, Matthew of Parnassus, an old man who when he was a child
had met Jesus. All of which meant one thing. The River Lime flowed with holy water.

  11:44 AM

  Morden Tube Station parking lot

  The heat was intense as Brother Alistair retraced his steps yet again between the rows of cars. It didn’t feel like England. It felt tropical. When he closed his eyes, the sun beat down on him, coming through his eyelids in a reddish brown. Opening them slightly, he looked away from the sun into the blue sky streaked with the vapor trails of airliners. Then he looked at the cars all around him. What were the odds of him finding the children? If he was a betting man, which he supposed he probably was being a former junkie, then he might have thought it was about a ten-to-one shot. Those were good enough odds for him. And the likelihood of his finding them was in direct proportion to the amount of time that he spent looking. The trouble was the number of cars. After living in the countryside for so long, it was almost too much for his mind to compute that there could be so many people and so many cars all crammed together in one place.

  But as time dragged on, he could feel the odds of finding the children safe and sound lengthen. He had been in the parking lot since just after nine o’clock, and apart from a short break when he had gone to the shop to buy a bottle of water, he had wandered between the cars, both in the parking lot and in the streets surrounding the station.

  It bothered Alistair more than anything else, more than the hijack of the tube train, more than what Tommy Denning intended to do to the passengers. It was the unthinking cruelty of it that was so much more shocking than all the other aspects of his sick plan. In the car that morning, as they made their way along the motorway toward London in the milky early morning light, Varick had told him about the contents of the notebook Father Owen had found in Tommy’s room. Varick had looked for the notebook before they left but he couldn’t find it. Tommy must have taken it back before he had driven the carving knife through the old man’s neck. But Varick could remember the contents and, as he had told Alistair what the plan entailed, he mentioned the children only in passing. Clearly, their part in the whole thing was just one atrocity out of many, but Alistair couldn’t get the image out of his head, just as he couldn’t banish the memory of how he had found Owen thrashing around in the bath with his neck impaled on the knife’s blade.