Mumtaz put her hand in her pocket and checked whether her phone was still on. It seemed to be. When she’d heard the glass break, she’d dropped her phone on the floor. But then she’d picked it up. With any luck Lee was listening. What he’d do, she didn’t know. But she felt better in the knowledge that he was there, somewhere.
‘Is he dead?’ Umm Khaled asked.
‘Yes.’
He said it with such lack of emotion, it made Mumtaz gasp. That was his father!
The woman said, ‘Good.’
Mumtaz looked at her eyes. They were cold and green and, for a moment, Mumtaz had a feeling she’d seen them before. But then he, Abu Imad, clicked his fingers in front of her face.
‘So, my lovely wife,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’
She couldn’t speak. She needed to, but the words wouldn’t come.
‘Mishal?’
And now he was smiling and it made her flesh crawl. His own father was dead!
‘You know who this is?’ he asked.
She just about managed to shake her head.
‘No? It’s my father,’ he said. ‘An infidel. What can you do, eh?’
The taxi driver came in from the hall and said, ‘You OK?’
Abu Imad said, ‘Fine.’
‘And you?’ he looked at the woman.
‘I’m fine too,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
He shrugged and then he left.
Abu Imad pushed the body of his father out of his way with his foot and sat down.
‘So why don’t you come to me, Mishal?’ he said.
Abbas must have gone mad! He hadn’t even tried to be discreet. He’d just smashed his way in. Lee had started to follow him, but boy, could he move! If anything had stayed in his mind from his service in Iraq, apart from the horror, it was the sight of Abbas al’Barri racing low to the ground, moving on his knees like a ninja.
But where was he now? Lee had heard breaking glass followed by shouting but then the house had become silent. Was Abbas dead? Or was he wounded? And where was Mumtaz?
He took his phone out and put it to his ear but it was dead. He’d heard her voice and then the glass and then nothing. So what now?
A man in his early twenties arrived. He was thickset and had a shaved head.
He said, ‘We’ll need a glazier.’
‘Why?’
Abu Imad had his arm around ‘Mishal’ while his feet rested on his dead father’s body. Mumtaz was having trouble breathing.
‘Because my dad’ll lose his mind if he sees it.’
Abu Imad shrugged. ‘I don’t know why you’re bothered,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘Yeah. But what if I want to come back?’
‘Come back?’ He addressed himself to Mumtaz. ‘You hear this, sweetheart, Fazil wants to come back! From the Caliphate!’
‘If it doesn’t work out or—’
‘Go into it with that bad attitude and it won’t,’ Abu Imad said.
The woman came into the room.
‘Umm Khaled,’ Abu Imad said, ‘did you know that the man you think is a true sword of Islam is in fact a doubting snake?’
She stood in the doorway, frozen. ‘Fazil?’
‘No, I’m not!’ the young man said. ‘I just think that if we leave this place with a broken window and the police are in the area, or the neighbours notice, they might follow us!’
‘Or, in case it doesn’t “work out”, your daddy will be upset with you.’
No one said a word.
He heard a car engine start. He couldn’t see where it was but no vehicle had entered the lane in front of the house as far as he could tell. It sounded as if it came from the vicinity of the house. Mumtaz had told him that the taxi she’d ridden in had been driven by ‘one of them’. Was the fake taxi driver preparing to take someone somewhere?
Lee looked at his phone. He couldn’t go in there on his own. Those inside could have guns and he was unarmed. Abbas or Mumtaz or both could be wounded or even dead. He had no choice.
He began to dial when he felt something hard dig into his back.
As soon as the woman took off her burqa, Mumtaz knew her. It was the young woman she’d bought the T-shirts from in Harrods.
Abu Imad held her tightly against his side. Mumtaz felt sick. If that was the woman from Harrods then she had seen her credit card.
The young man was still standing in the middle of the room, but now he was sweating. He said, ‘Look, let’s just go, shall we? Murad has brought the car round.’
Abu Imad shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said. Now he was bright and breezy. In person his unpredictability was even more frightening than it was online.
The woman said ‘OK’ too. But Mumtaz could see her watching her. Was she imagining it or was there a smirk behind her anodyne smile?
‘Fazil,’ she said to the young man, ‘do you want to go and get my bags?’
‘Yes.’
He left the room so fast, he almost ran.
When he’d gone the woman said, ‘Is everything ready?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘So shall I call Murad in?’
‘Yes.’
She left the room.
Mumtaz felt his hot breath on her cheek. He said, ‘You know that we are married now, don’t you, my little Mishal?’
That couldn’t be. For a nikah ceremony to be lawful she had to consent.
‘No …’
‘Our qadi performed it,’ he said. ‘A brother from Damascus, a true emir of the Caliphate declared the responses on your behalf.’
That wasn’t lawful!
‘No!’
He threw his entire weight on top of her, pinning her arms behind her back. Mumtaz knew that it was pointless to scream but she did it anyway. He laughed. Then he put his hand up her shirt and grabbed her breast.
‘Nice titties.’
‘Leave me!’
‘Me? Your husband?’ He slapped her face. Mumtaz briefly saw shards of light flash across her field of vision. ‘No, you give me pleasure, that’s what you do, that is your purpose.’
He pulled her trousers and pants down and got his cock out.
Mumtaz crossed her legs, but he punched her in the chest until she stopped.
‘Whore!’
‘I thought I was your princess! I thought that you treated your wives with respect!’
‘Respect?’
Her resistance was turning him on. He pulled her legs apart and she felt his penis touch her thigh. Then he said, ‘Tell me you want me, bitch!’
She heard footsteps. Then she heard the woman say, ‘Oh, can’t you do that later? Come on, we have to go.’
For a moment, Mumtaz thought that he wasn’t going to stop, but then as quickly as he’d come on to her, he stopped. He put his penis back in his shalwar khameez and said to her, ‘Make yourself decent, you look like a whore.’
She tried, but her hands were so shaky it was difficult. Also her face and her chest hurt so much she had to really concentrate so that she didn’t cry.
‘Come on! Come on!’
She saw the woman watching her. She had to know that she wasn’t who she claimed to be and yet, as far as Mumtaz could tell, she hadn’t told Abu Imad. Why not? Was she some kind of fifth columnist planted by the police? But how?
There were five of them in the room. Abu Imad, Umm Khaled, the young man Fazil and the driver who was called Murad. Only Mumtaz was sitting down. The driver was on his phone.
Afterwards, Mumtaz wasn’t sure whether Umm Khaled had looked at Abu Imad briefly first, but some sort of signal passed between them. Because they both started shooting at exactly the same time. She screamed.
‘Put this on, there’s a good boy,’ Vi said.
She handed Lee a Kevlar vest.
He’d just had a couple of seconds to, figuratively, shit himself when he’d been poked in the back by a sub-machine gun. Then Vi had come along, complaining about how the ‘fucking countryside’ brought he
r allergies on.
He’d only seen two of the ten SO15 Counter Terrorism Command officers deployed alongside DI Vi Collins. But one of them had stuck a gun in his back and so he felt they, at least, had a bond.
As he put the vest on, Lee said, ‘What the fuck is going on, Vi?’
‘Could ask you the same thing,’ she said.
They were inside the ruined barn in the field behind the house.
Then they heard a scream.
‘But don’t think we’ve got time,’ Vi said.
When weapons are fired using a silencer, the noises made by those wounded or killed take on an eerie, disconnected quality. What sound like innocuous thuds produce noises of fear and pain and bodies twist in shapes not natural for human beings. Then, as the two men, the young one and the driver, lay on the ground, their attackers advanced upon them and put bullets in their heads. Mumtaz felt tears burst down her bruised cheeks and soak her shirt. Neither Abu Imad nor Umm Khaled showed any kind of emotion. Were they going to kill her too?
The woman, looking at the body of the young, shaven-headed man, said, ‘What kind of warrior trusts his girlfriend to buy his airline ticket, eh? Didn’t even want to see it. Didn’t want to go. He would have been useless to the Caliphate.’
‘He served his purpose,’ Abu Imad said. ‘They both did.’
He shoved his weapon in the waistband of his shalwar khameez while the woman put hers down on top of a magazine on the coffee table. Mumtaz tried not to look at either them or their guns. She also tried hard not to wet herself.
‘So,’ she heard Abu Imad say, ‘what do we do with you now, then, Mumtaz?’
Of course the woman had seen her credit card. If in fact that made any difference. These two knew each other and so it was possible the whole thing had been a set up, right from the start. But to what purpose?
When she found her voice, she said, ‘You sent the Tooth of Jonah to your parents.’
‘Who got Lee Arnold to try and smoke me out,’ he said. ‘I knew he’d do something.’
‘Which has cost him his life.’ Her heart was beating what felt like irregularly. She thought about Shazia – and her parents. What with the business over Ali, they would just fall apart when they were told she’d died.
Abu Imad sighed. ‘I’m not going to go into why I’m doing what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘You know that. More to the point, why is a woman like you working to try and destroy the Caliphate?’
‘You’re wasting time,’ Umm Khaled said to him. ‘Just get it over with.’
Heavily armed men converged on the house. They moved quickly, silently and low to the ground. A roadblock had been erected at the entrance to the lane, but no vehicles had approached and the whole area was eerily soundless.
Until Vi spoke into her phone, Lee felt as if he could be in a silent film.
‘Thanks, Tone,’ she said.
Usually her DS, Tony Bracci, was with her, people said they were joined at the hip. But he was clearly elsewhere.
She spoke into her radio. ‘Ally McBeal secure?’
Lee recognised this as code for someone, probably someone with legal connections.
The two SO15 officers in the barn with them began to move out.
Vi’s radio crackled. She said, ‘Yeah. Thirty-four, IC4, black hair, black trousers, red blouse.’
That was Mumtaz. Had the scream he’d heard been her?
‘Vi—’
‘They can see her,’ Vi said. ‘Now we wait.’
‘What for?’
Vi said nothing.
Lee felt his mouth go dry.
TWENTY-ONE
They both aimed at her face. Mumtaz had a vision of her father trying to formally identify her body. But she said nothing. Abu Imad and the woman clearly enjoyed provoking terror. She didn’t want to give them even the slightest satisfaction. What would be, would be. She just hoped that, some day, her family would be able to forgive her.
Whether Abu Imad’s eyes moved in response to a sound or a movement, Mumtaz didn’t know. But for just a second he looked away. Then he looked back again.
Umm Khaled kicked the body of the man they’d called Fazil and tutted impatiently.
‘Come on,’ she said to Abu Imad. ‘We agreed, hit them on their home ground. She dies.’
Mumtaz saw him smile. ‘OK,’ he said. She watched him take the silencer off his weapon. Why? Who knew? Maybe he enjoyed the noise?
Mumtaz closed her eyes.
The sound, when it came, was deafening.
It all happened at once. Screamed words she couldn’t understand. There was smoke, liquid splashed onto her face and there was pain. It was unlike any pain she’d ever felt before. She couldn’t even scream. Was this what it was like to be shot? Mumtaz hoped she’d pass out, even die, anything. Only when the smoke cleared did she realise that someone was pinning her to the ground. A body was on top of her and the muzzle of a gun was in her face.
A rough voice yelled, ‘Get up!’
She began to say, ‘I can’t …’
But then the body on top of her began to move.
‘Hands where I can see them!’
She thought she saw Abu Imad stand over her and raise his arms above his head. But she was in too much pain to be sure of anything.
Lee hadn’t seen Fayyad al’Barri in the flesh for five years. He was taller and bigger than he had remembered. The first time he’d ever seen Fayyad he’d been a skinny kid.
Peering through smoke and the barrels of semi-automatic weapons he could see that there was a tangle of bodies on the floor. All were bloodied. None moved. But as his eyes adjusted to the conditions, he recognised Abbas al’Barri. He started to move towards him but Vi held his arm.
‘Leave it,’ she said.
And then real fear stabbed him. ‘Where’s Mumtaz?’
Vi pulled him away from the carnage and into the hall.
‘You know the score,’ she said. ‘Leave them to it.’
And yet she’d brought him into that house.
‘The bloke standing up, was that Fayyad al’Barri?’ she asked.
The face belonged to the man he’d seen on Mumtaz’s computer screen. ‘Yes …’
Vi signalled to one of the SO15 officers. Then she took him out of the house and into the garden.
‘Mumtaz …’
‘Let ’em sort it out,’ Vi said.
She couldn’t sit up. It hurt too much.
‘Lee …’
She thought she’d heard his voice. But she couldn’t see him.
‘You alright, love?’
Weirdly, putting the pain to one side, she was. Mumtaz looked up into a pair of blue eyes.
‘Am I shot?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I need to check. I’m gonna touch you. Is that alright?’
He was very young but he was also confident.
‘Yes.’
As he touched her, she cringed. It was completely different to the way Abu Imad had touched her but it was still an ordeal.
He said, ‘Sorry …’
Other officers moved around them. Abu Imad had disappeared.
‘It’s OK,’ she said.
When he’d finished the young officer said, ‘I think you’ve got a couple of cracked ribs. Can’t find anything else, but we’ll get a doctor to you. Just lay as still as you can.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You Mrs Hakim?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How do you know my name?’
He smiled. ‘You’re gonna be OK.’
Maybe. But even with the limited view she had of that room from the floor, Mumtaz knew she was laying amongst the dead. She couldn’t hear one groan, not one voice raised in pain or pleading. Just policemen carefully negotiating a crime scene of corpses.
She couldn’t fathom why she wasn’t dead. It didn’t make sense. Abu Imad and the woman from Harrods had raised their weapons to kill her. What had happened and where was the woman now?
Was she safe?
Vi put her radio back in her pocket. ‘Mumtaz is alive but she’s got a couple of cracked ribs,’ she said.
Lee felt his legs become weak. He sat down on the carefully manicured lawn and hugged himself. Suddenly cold with shock. Vi put her jacket round his shoulders.
‘You know someone’s gonna have to interview the both of you about this?’ she said.
He said nothing.
‘Left field even by your standards, Arnold.’
‘But you knew,’ he said.
‘Oh, yeah. I even knew that it was very possible we’d end up here.’
‘Which is … Where the fuck are we, Vi?’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘this very nice gaff here is the weekend cottage of a Mr Ibrahim Dorman.’
‘Don’t know him.’
‘Turkish carpet dealer,’ she said. ‘Very successful. His son, Fazil, has been seeing Djamila al’Barri for almost a year. She radicalised him.’
Lee looked up at her. Djamila al’Barri had been a bright spark ever since she was a little kid. A clubber with a taste for high fashion, Djamila had been a party girl.
‘That can’t be right.’ He shook his head.
‘Well, it is.’
‘Djamila?’
‘And she radicalised her brother too,’ Vi said. ‘We’ve had the whole family under surveillance for almost two years.’
Lee had to let that sink in. He found himself wanting to say stupid things like You never told me. We slept together! But he knew that was irrelevant. She’d done her job. That was all that mattered, not just to Vi’s superiors but to her as well.
When he did finally speak, all Lee managed to say was, ‘You could’ve warned me.’
‘And alerted your mate Abbas?’
What of Abbas? Lee had seen him in that room. He’d looked dead.
An ambulance drew up outside the house.
‘I want you checked out by a doctor,’ Vi said.
Lee looked down at the ground. Fuck that.
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