‘Two suspects down, exfil, exfil! One of the players was on the phone and I think we can expect company.’
He reached down and cut Mike and Hamed’s zip-ties with his pocket knife.
‘You okay, guys?’
‘Holy fuck! Jesus fucking Christ, those bastards were going to fucking ice us!’ said Mike. His eyes flashed with fear and his usual warm and easy smile was replaced with panic and alarm as he twisted to look at Tom, breathing heavily.
‘It’s all cool guys, but we can’t hang about.’ Tom managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
Both agents were shaken and disorientated, but their positions on the floor—face-down—had protected them from the worst effects of the grenade.
Tom quickly checked both insurgents. Long Hair was dead; most of his brain was decorating the wall behind them. Barcelona was still alive but it seemed unlikely he would stay that way for long, as he had two clean holes in his upper chest and was barely breathing.
Hamed said, in a panicked and trembling voice, ‘We gotta get out. He was calling for reinforcements to come get us. Let’s get the phones and weapons from them and fuck off.’
They searched the insurgents, retrieving their phones and pistols before leaving the building as calmly as they could manage. They walked to the parked Subaru and drove off, Tom behind the wheel.
‘Control from Alpha One Foot. Package secure, no injuries and we’re exfil in vehicle. All units will RVP back at the palace,’ said Tom.
‘Thanks, man. I thought we were toast,’ said Mike in between heavy breaths, the panic and shock still visible on his face.
2
Later
Basra Palace
Tom, Damien, and Buster met with Mike and Hamed back in the briefing room, all clutching large mugs of tea. The atmosphere was thick with a mixture of tension and relief. Both CIA agents seemed to have visibly aged since the pre-deployment briefing with the strain of their recent experience. Tom yawned as he leaned back in one of the cheap chairs.
‘So, what went wrong, then?’ Damien asked.
‘Al-Ahmed must have been compromised,’ said Mike, his blue eyes etched with a mixture of relief and regret. ‘He was terrified when we got there, saying that they were on to him and we must get him out. He wasn’t making much sense when the other two goons turned up; they iced Al-Ahmed without a word and, before we knew it, we were screwed,’
‘They were on the phone straight away to someone,’ added Hamed, ‘saying they had American kuffars, and telling someone to send people to come get us. They were delighted and clearly expecting plenty dollars for us. Thank fuck you got us out, Tom.’
‘Forget about it,’ said Tom with a half-smile.
‘Seriously, Tom,’ said Mike, ‘I’ve been a CIA agent for long enough to have seen some bad shit and seen some bad mother-fuckers do some bad stuff to bad guys, but I’ve never seen anyone as icy and calm as you. It was like you were just taking out the garbage, or something. Which I guess, in a way, you were!’
Tom shifted, feeling a little discomfort at the American’s words, his awkwardness made stronger by a snort of amusement from Buster.
Buster smiled. ‘They used to call Tom “the Balkan Psycho”, or “Bootneck Robot”, after he killed loads of Taliban when he was sniping in Afghan. He doesn’t show much emotion, does our Tom, and he’s not prone to panic.’
Tom gave a half-smile that he hoped hid his disquiet. It was true that he had killed many times over in Afghanistan as a sniper with the Royal Marines, and each time had not felt even a flicker of emotion. No revelling in the red mist of an exploded Taliban head from a thousand metres. No regret, no celebration, just… Nothing. It didn’t make him feel comfortable with himself. It was the reason he had quit being a sniper and moved to SRR. He wanted to be a door-watcher, not a door-knocker. He hadn’t wanted to confront that absence of emotion, the void he felt in spite of having just killed once again.
Buster continued, a look of embarrassment now in his grey eyes. ‘I’m sorry we took so long, guys. We were happily parked up nearby when a fuck-off big lorry blocked us in at the off-side and an SUV came right tight up our arses. I had to pull a bit of pavement-mounting action, pissing off lots of pedestrians.’
‘Our regular army reaction force got in pretty quickly and must have scared everyone else away,’ said Damien. ‘The two bodies are being tagged and bagged, and hopefully we can get an ID on them.’
Mike nodded. ‘The phones are hopefully going to give us some leads on who ordered this. The intel will be valuable … but, fuck, that was too close. I had visions of us in some video in orange boiler suits getting our heads cut off.’
‘We have to get back to the Embassy,’ said Hamed. ‘Everyone is jumping up and down and wants to know what happened. The President wants updating,’ he added, with a trace of nervousness.
The group stood and there were handshakes all round.
Mike gripped Tom in a hug, the emotion detectable in the tension of his muscles. ‘Tom, I’ll never be able to repay you for what you just did. You saved our lives, man. You ever need anything—I mean anything—you call me. I’ll always owe you.’ He handed Tom a business card on which was listed two phone numbers and an email address.
‘No worries,’ grinned Tom. ‘Orange wouldn’t have suited you two.’
‘I mean it, Tom: I’ll never forget this.’ And with a nod they left.
Buster smiled at his friend. ‘Good work, Borat. But can we try and have a week or two now where you don’t kill anyone?’
‘Buster,’ Tom said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Fuck off.’ Tom smiled as he delivered the insult. Buster was a piss-taker, but he was a good man, a good operator, and a very good friend. He clapped Buster on the back and left the room to search for a phone.
It was a familiar urge he had after every violent contact he was involved in: he just wanted to hear his foster father, Cameron’s, voice.
The piss-taking that Tom received from comrades about his lack of emotions had caused him some reflection over the years. Tom would laugh along with his friends, but it concerned him enough to make him google the traits of a psychopath. Ticking off these traits didn’t make things any clearer, though: he wasn’t cruel, he had morals, and he believed he always wanted to protect the innocent, but he still felt nothing. Maybe all those good things were just learnt behaviours; after all, he had always followed Cameron’s mantra: ‘Always do right, boy.’
He soon found the troops’ welfare phone, a secure mobile phone that was cleared for use for personal calls, with each soldier given a limited allocation of minutes to use.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Cameron, it’s Tom,’ he said in a cheery voice. ‘Just checking in.’
He hadn’t spoken to his foster parents, Cameron and Shona Ferguson, for a few weeks, given the humdrum chaos of deployment without action. But at that moment, with Buster’s words still ringing in his ears, it was the only thing he wanted to do.
‘Hey, son, how’s it going?’ Tom could imagine the big grin splitting his foster father’s rugged face.
‘All a bit boring here, to be honest,’ Tom said. Cameron knew not to press: an ex-bootneck himself, he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.
They talked about nothing in particular for about ten minutes, with Cameron boasting about some enormous trout he’d allegedly recently caught. As always, discussions were a front for the comfort of hearing each other’s voices. Tom rang off and stepped out into the cool air
He thought about Cameron and Shona and when they had taken him in, a scared twelve-year-old boy from Bosnia. They lived in a beautiful little farm cottage on the edge of the Cairngorm mountain range. On arrival he had felt like he’d arrived home after the fog of the city, and was happy to have left that sense of claustrophobia behind.
Life had been wonderful and, sometimes, Tom had managed to forget the pain of losing his parents that still sat deep in his chest. Life went on, as always, and Cameron
had known that keeping Tom busy and active was the only way to keep the boy moving forwards.
Tom shook his head and cleared the moment of reflection. He was hungry and needed something to eat. It wouldn’t be long before they were back out on the Basra streets once again.
3
14 years later
London
Tom drove his anonymous hatchback along Kilburn High Road, following a Friday late-shift as Duty Detective Sergeant. It had been a busy night with two stabbings and a raft of domestic assaults, meaning that by the end of the night every cell in the nick at Kilburn was full. He was supposed to finish at 10pm but it had been closer to midnight before he managed to get the decks cleared and handed over to the next Duty DS. It had been frustrating and for a moment he once again cursed his decision to take the promotion.
His previous job on the Homicide Task Force, part of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, had been far more interesting and, he had to admit, a damn sight sexier. Lots of surveillance work against some very bad people: covert operations and man-hunts for murderers. But his attitude towards the job had been tainted thanks to some of the managers he’d worked for, who were ambitious just for the sake of ambition. They would use any situation simply as another means of furthering their career, and as another addition to their portfolios. Tom found all that self-serving to be so different from the military, and not in a good way. So, as he couldn’t beat them, he decided to seek promotion so that, maybe, he could balance the careerists out by being the best DS he could. In essence, he wanted to make a difference. But he was quickly finding that he’d wasted his bloody time.
In the name of ambition, he’d given it all up for the chance to manage a ridiculous case-load with insufficient resources. His team consisted of just him and a handful of DCs and trainees, all trying—and barely managing—to handle crime in a very busy London borough. It was the same all over in the age of austerity. Sod-all cops, rising crime, and forever shifting priorities from virtue-signalling senior officers. It was hard not to get cynical and jaded.
In spite of all that, he’d grown to enjoy living in London. He liked that he was close to work and didn’t have to commute. He actually enjoyed the contrast with his earlier life in Scotland and Bosnia before that. He’d kept a foothold in Scotland with a small bothy he’d bought cheaply years ago that was perched on the side of a Munro in the Cairngorms, and which he loved dearly, spending his precious leave up there shooting and fishing with Cameron.
As he drove, he continued to listen to the Airwave radio he always took home with him. He switched to the Camden channel as he left Brent. He’d been accused on many occasions of being job-pissed: Met vernacular for being a little over-keen. It was probably a fair comment, he conceded to himself. He’d never grown tired of locking up bad guys during his eight years in the Met and couldn’t really understand those that had.
As he drove along West End Lane, he heard the Camden radio channel spark up with a fairly stressed-sounding transmission from an old colleague, Sergeant Dale Rogers, calling for assistance. It seemed that he was having difficulty arresting Tony O’Reilley, who was wanted on a recall-to-prison order. Tom knew O’Reilley well: an absolute monster of a man with a long criminal history almost exclusively for violence. ‘Ten Man Tony’ was his nickname, owing to the fact that ten officers could be needed to nick him if he wasn’t being cooperative. Tom had had dealings with him when in uniform at Camden and later as a Detective Constable and had always managed to get through to him. From the radio chatter, it became clear that no backup was imminent, and he could hear an unusual note of concern in Dale’s voice. Tom picked up the radio.
‘Echo Kilo from DS Novak. I’m close by: show me assisting.’
A minute later, Tom pulled up outside a drab terraced house on a side street just off Haverstock Hill.
A response car was pulled up outside, its blue lights strobing. Tom walked up the path to the door, where he met Dale.
‘Anything I can help with, Dale?’
‘Blimey, Tom, what are you doing here?’ He was a stocky Londoner with a cheerful smile and receding hair. At his side was an impossibly young-looking PC who looked like he was going to faint through fear.
‘This is Steve, my newest probationer,’ said Dale. ‘Ten Man Tony is inside and refusing to come without a tear-up. You know what he’s like. There’s only me and Steve; everyone’s tucked-up at a huge fight in Camden Town.’
Tom smiled. ‘I’ve not seen Tony for ages; want me to have a word?’
‘Be my guest, but he’s in a right fucking mood tonight. He’s probably looking at another year inside, minimum, and I reckon he doesn’t fancy it.’
‘Turn the blues off then, Dale; no need to up the ante. I’ll go and have a word with him. He knows me.’
The front door was slightly ajar, so Tom rapped lightly on it, noting that it bore all the hallmarks of previous damage: probably the result of a police battering ram.
A loud, aggressive ‘Fuck off!’ bawled from within in a familiar cockney/Irish brogue. Tom smiled to himself, gently pushed the door open, and walked casually inside. O’Reilley sat in the kitchen with a scowl on his face, stripped to the waist to show off his torso, an assortment of badly-worked tattoos across his arms and chest. The layer of flab on display couldn’t disguise the power that lurked within his huge physique.
‘Hey, Tony. Long time no see.’
O’Reilley’s scowl immediately softened, replaced by uncertainty.
‘Mr Novak, what you doin’ here? I thought this weren’t your manor no more.’ His face turned puzzled and slightly introspective at the sight of Tom.
‘I’m just passing and fancied a chat, as I’ve not seen you for ages. So, what’s the problem, Tony?’ Tom said in a soft, steady voice. ‘There’s a warrant, fellah: no point taking it out on these two officers.’
He paused as he faced Tony, taking care to appear unthreatening and projecting no emotion. Tony O’Reilley was like a dog: he could smell fear. They stayed like that for a full two minutes. Tom never feared a long pause in a conversation, remembering his foster father’s words: ‘Don’t let someone else’s discomfort in a silence encourage you to say something unwise, my boy.’
‘It was that fucking child-in-uniform, Mr Novak,’ O’Reilley spat. ‘I promise you, if he tries to lay his hands on me again, I’m gonna knock the fucker right out. I’m not getting nicked by him, not even for you, Mr Novak.’ He was still fuming, but Tom thought he could detect some of the man’s anger beginning to ebb away.
Tom didn’t reply, instead picking up an upturned kitchen chair, placing it back down the right way up and sitting down with a sigh, his arms folded in front of him. He crossed his legs and fixed O’Reilley with a calm and even stare, his face relaxed and calm.
O’Reilley spoke once again, still angry but the fight starting to dissipate from him. ‘He was taking a right fucking liberty, thinking he could lay hands on me like that. Nearly shit himself, mind.’
‘Tony, I’m tired. It’s been really busy and all I want is to go home and have a whisky. Are you really going to keep this up?’ Tom spoke quietly but firmly, with a half-smile on his face.
O’Reilley puffed out his cheeks in exasperation. ‘Fuck’s sake. I don’t want to go to jail again, not now.’
Tom fixed O’Reilley with a direct stare for another full minute.
‘Right, Tony, here’s the deal. You’re going to go outside, quietly, let that young officer cuff you, and you’re going to have to go to the nick. There’s no alternative, fellah: there’s a warrant. If you play the big fight-and-roll-around game, then they’re just going to call all sorts of cavalry with tasers and CS gas. You’ll get hurt, and no doubt some of them will too, but you’ll still end up in the nick. The only difference will be that you’ll be facing all sorts of assault charges, and your six-month recall to Pentonville will end up as two years, pal.’ Tom spoke in almost mesmeric tones.
O’Reilley sighed and paused for a further f
ull minute. ‘You always talked sense, Mr Novak. I guess you’re right; I can’t be arsed with another two years in the nick.’ His shoulders sagged a little before he hauled himself up and pulled his sweatshirt back on.
‘Come on, then. Let’s fuck off,’ he said, resignation in his voice.
They left the house together and O’Reilley walked up to the young constable, his arms held out passively in front of him.
‘Sorry, officer. I can be a bit of a dick sometimes.’
The young, quaking officer snapped handcuffs on O’Reilley, only just managing to encircle them round his thick wrists. O’Reilley then meekly clambered into the rear of the police Astra, the officer joining him in the back before formally arresting and cautioning him.
‘Cheers, Tom,’ said Dale. ‘You ever considered a career as a lion tamer, or hypnotist?’
Tom laughed. ‘He’ll be fine now. You okay if I bugger off? I’m on my way home.’
‘Yeah, no bother mate. Meet for a pint next week?’
Tom nodded with a smile, got back into his own car, and drove off.
In the police Astra, the probationary officer turned to his superior. ‘Jesus, Sarge, who was that and how did he manage what I just saw?’
His supervisor grinned. ‘Son, DS Tom Novak could talk anyone down. He’s apparently a hard man but no one’s ever seen him in action; he always talks people into the car with a smile. He’s a really cold fish, though. I could never work him out.’ They carried on to Kentish Town Station, with O’Reilley silent in the rear.
4
Tom walked past the Wilsons Sheet Metal sign at the entrance to the converted warehouse, the sole reminder of the building’s former life, and let himself into the ground-floor apartment. The sheet metal door clanged shut with a satisfying solidity as he keyed the code into the keypad. The alarm system was much more sophisticated than any of his neighbours’ and that, combined with the industrial door and barred windows, formed his very own Fort Knox: his sanctuary from all the London stink and crime.
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