The Angel Page 2

  He was still gazing out of the window when he saw the black BMW roll down the street and pull over next to the front gate. The glass was tinted, but the driver’s side window was rolled down, and he saw Hakeem looking out. His friend looked up at him in the window, smiled, then raised his arm and tapped a finger against his watch. Aamir nodded in return, pulled the curtains and looked around his bedroom for the last time. He saw the Playstation 4 he had saved so long to buy, the games scattered across the floor, the posters that he had stuck to the wall with Blu Tack. He felt another moment of reluctance before he remembered that Hakeem was waiting for him, and dismissed it. He had made a promise to him, and he couldn’t let him down.

  He crept through the door, stepped over the creaking floorboard and made his way down the stairs. Hakeem had said they would get some breakfast on the way. He took his coat from where he had slung it over the banister, unlocked the door and stepped outside. It was a clear day with an icy-blue sky.

  The engine of the BMW was still running. ‘All right, bruv?’ Hakeem said quietly through the open window as Aamir closed the gate and crossed the pavement.

  Aamir nodded.

  ‘In you get, then. We’re running a little late.’

  Aamir opened the rear door and slid inside the car. Bashir was in the passenger seat. He had a black beanie on his head. He turned and smiled as Aamir settled himself in the back. ‘All right?’ he asked.

  Aamir nodded.

  It was a cold morning, and Hakeem had the heater running on full blast. He put the car into first gear and pulled away. Aamir couldn’t help turning around in his seat and looking through the back window as the house slid out of view. He had never lived anywhere else. Nineteen years. It held a lot of memories for him. Some of them bad, but plenty of them were good. He thought of his mum and dad asleep in their bed. Would they be proud of him? Would they understand?

  He hoped so.

  Thinking about them made him wistful and sad, so he thought about something else.

  ‘Going to be a nice day,’ Hakeem said, looking through the front window at the sky. ‘Be warm later, that’s what they’ve been saying.’

  ‘Perfect. Lots of people out.’

  Aamir felt a shiver of nerves. ‘Have you heard from Mohammed?’

  Hakeem made an affirmative noise. ‘Going to meet us at the station, like he said. Everything is happening like he said it would. Today’s the day, bruv. Big day. Everything we’ve been working for is going to come to pass, if it pleases Allah.’

  Chapter Three

  The car was second-hand and had a musty smell to it. They had spent a lot of time inside it over the course of the last few months, just driving around the city. Hakeem had explained that it was the safest place to talk. Phones could be bugged, he’d said. The Internet, too – that wasn’t safe. Better to do it all face to face, where they could be sure they wouldn’t be overheard. Aamir didn’t mind. He liked being with Hakeem and Bashir.

  The one time he had met Mohammed had been in the back of the car, too. They had told him it would be like an interview. Mohammed was in charge of the operation, and he wanted to make sure that Aamir’s faith was strong enough for him to do what he needed to do. The other man, Asif, had been beaten up by a racist gang in Didsbury two weeks ago. His leg had been broken, and Mohammed had decided that there was no way he would be able to take part. They needed a replacement. Hakeem had suggested that Aamir would be perfect. He had been frightened, at first, but then he listened to what Mohammed said to him, and he realised that he had been given a gift. It was an honour to be chosen. He had said yes.

  Hakeem navigated carefully through the suburbs of Manchester. Aamir sat quietly in the back, gazing out of the window at streets that became less and less familiar as they drove on. Had the city really been so bad? School had been all right. He had friends here. There was racism, of course, but that was to be expected. There was racism everywhere, and all the young Muslim boys he hung around with had experienced it.

  It came in many different forms. The local white boys with their snarling dogs who chased them out of the park. A taxi driver who, it was said, was a member of the EDF and refused to take ‘ethnics’ in the back of his car. The police, more likely to stop and search brothers like Hakeem because how was a boy like him driving a car like this if he wasn’t involved in drugs? They had all experienced it, and Mohammed had used it as another example of why what they were doing was just. But Aamir couldn’t forget the white boys in school who had stuck up for him against racist bullies, the owner of the corner shop who had always put a little extra in his bag of sweets, the lollypop lady who had always given him a cheeky wink as he crossed the road under her watch. Mohammed said it was black and white, no room for ambivalence, but Aamir had never really accepted that.

  And then Mohammed had brought up what had happened to his mother, and Aamir had allowed himself to be persuaded.

  They followed the M56 to the M6, and then drove south to Rugby. They changed to the M1 at Junction 19. It was 49 miles south to Luton.

  ‘You want some music?’ Hakeem said as he settled back and accelerated gently up to seventy.

  ‘Sure,’ Aamir said.

  Bashir took out his phone and plugged it into the car stereo. He scrolled through the memory and found the track he wanted. Aamir recognised the song immediately. It was ‘Dawlat al-Islam Qamat.’ He had listened to it a hundred times on YouTube before Hakeem had told him that he needed to be careful with the sites he was visiting. It was a beautiful song. It started out as an Arabic chant, and the singer’s voice was so relaxing that it almost sounded like a lullaby. Aamir had studied history at school, and he thought that the song was something that could have been from a thousand years ago. The melody had a gentle swing, nice and easy, and then the voice was copied and layered, one atop the other, almost sounding like a choir. The song became more strident and impactful.

  Hakeem started to sing.

  Sound effects dropped in. A sword was unsheathed, then there came the stomp of soldiers’ feet and, finally, stuttering gunfire. The name of the song, translated, meant ‘My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared.’ It was the most popular song in the Islamic State.

  It was, Hakeem argued when he played it for the first time, the world’s newest national anthem.

  Bashir started to sing, too.

  Aamir had written the Arabic down and translated the words himself. ‘The Islamic State has arisen by the blood of the righteous,’ the song said. ‘The Islamic State has arisen by the jihad of the pious.’

  Hakeem turned and looked into the back. His face was alight with an infectious smile. ‘Come on, bruv! Let’s have it!’

  Aamir smiled, too, and started to sing. Quietly at first and then, as the song built up to its crescendo, louder and louder until the three of them were singing at the top of their lungs. They raced south at seventy miles an hour, passing signs for Stoke-on-Trent and Leicester and Rugby.

  They would be in Luton by eight.

  Chapter Four

  The Firm had buildings across London. Its headquarters in Whitehall was in the Old War Office building. It had been denied the largesse that had been lavished on those buildings nearby that accommodated other governmental departments. It was in an alleyway off Horse Guards Avenue, a backwater that was easily missed and where the men and women who went to work there could be easily forgotten. Each of the ten floors was low ceilinged and dusty, crammed with steel filing cabinets and ancient furniture. The Firm had taken up residence after the war and had never moved. It was a collection of narrow alleyways and corridors, each as anonymous as the next. Its denizens had dubbed it ‘the Warren’, and the name had stuck.

  The waiting room was on the seventh floor. It had a single small window that looked onto a parapet. Beyond the parapet was a narrow street that accommodated government functionaries insufficiently grand to warrant an office on Whitehall itself. There were faded prints on a wall that was painted the same municipal green found in hospitals and t
own halls. Another wall was shelved, each shelf bearing a row of leather-bound volumes that filled the room with their dusty scent. There were two doors. One led to the lobby, where an old-fashioned lift wheezed and groaned as it carried people up and down between the floors. The other led to the conference room.

  Michael Pope looked around. The waiting room was small, and the three men waiting inside it were large. It felt cramped. The atmosphere was tense. It could have been in a doctor’s surgery, or the room where the parents of a misbehaving child are summoned to see the headmaster of an exclusive school. Pope tried to maintain his sense of equilibrium. He got up and went to the window. He looked outside, into a bright blue sky, a warm summer’s day. The view was restricted, showing just the cold stone flanks of the building opposite.

  He returned to his seat.

  He was sitting next to Sergeant Thomas Snow and Sergeant Paddy McNair.

  Snow was from the 22nd SAS, but he had served in B Squadron before he was moved to the Revolutionary Warfare Ring, an elite cadre of hand-picked SAS operators tasked with supporting Secret Intelligence Service operations. The RWR carried out special operations as directed by the Foreign Office, including bodyguarding and backup for SIS operatives, extraction of SIS personnel and ‘black ops’, including fomenting unrest and causing uprisings in foreign countries.

  Snow was not doing such a good job of hiding his nerves. That was a reasonable reaction to the prospect of the meeting that they were here to attend. Pope didn’t know the precise make-up of the panel that had convened to discuss the events at Liverpool Street station last month, but he knew it would include luminaries from the security services, the police and the politicians to whom they answered.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Bit nervous, Control,’ Snow replied.

  ‘Nerves are good. Keep you sharp.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  Snow was wearing a suit that looked new, and the caps of his shoes had been polished to a high sheen. Force of habit, Pope thought. Ten years in the military did that to a man. The soldier had been in the Group for three months. Pope had selected him personally. He selected all the new recruits to the Group himself. The events in Russia, the conclusion of a series of incidents that had been set in motion by the treachery of his predecessor, had led to the deaths of the agents who had needed to be replaced. Snow had been the latest replacement. He was Number Twelve.

  ‘I’m not going to hang you out to dry. I’m on your side.’

  ‘Appreciate that, sir.’

  Paddy McNair, on the other hand, was more relaxed. He was in his early forties and had been in the army for most of his adult life. He had been in Group Fifteen for five years. He looked like a soldier, with a solid build and big, weather-beaten hands. His face, too, had been scoured by the elements until the lines had been etched deeply. He was originally from Liverpool, and his broad accent confirmed his nickname, ‘Scouse’. Not much flustered McNair, but as he had confided to Pope as they had shared a drink last night, he wasn’t looking forward to the carpeting he knew that they were about to receive.

  The operation that had led to them being summoned to this office had been Snow’s first in the field. He couldn’t have wished for a more inauspicious beginning to his new career. One of the watchwords – the watchword – of Group Fifteen was secrecy. Operations were supposed to proceed in such a fashion that the agent carried out his or her task without attracting attention. But this operation had led to Snow’s image being plastered over the front pages of all the national newspapers. The Ministry of Defence had issued a D Notice requiring all speculation as to his identity to be curtailed, and they had managed to insist that his face be pixelated. But those undoctored images were out there. They would surface, tomorrow or the next day or sometime in the future. That probably meant that Snow’s first mission would be his last. McNair and Pope knew that. Snow did, too. He also knew that it would mean a change of identity and a life spent watching his back.

  They made up time on the drive south and pulled into the car park of Luton railway station at a little before eight. It was the height of rush hour, and it was almost full, with just a handful of spaces left. Hakeem drove all the way to the far end of the car park. He slid the BMW into the first of two spaces between a Range Rover and an Audi, and turned off the engine. The music died and the car suddenly felt very different. The atmosphere changed and Aamir felt a twist of apprehension in his stomach.

  Hakeem turned. ‘Everything all right?’

  Bashir nodded.

  ‘Aamir?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m cool.’

  Bashir looked at his watch. ‘We made good time. He’ll be here soon.’

  Aamir watched as a train left the station and rumbled along the side of the car park, slowly picking up speed. It was packed. He could see passengers standing in the aisles, some of them looking out of the windows with blank expressions on their faces.

  ‘He’s here.’

  A Mazda slowed and pulled into the space next to them. Aamir looked over and saw Mohammed behind the wheel. He reached down to switch off the engine and got out. He was tall and slender, with a tanned complexion and a growth of clipped stubble on his chin.

  He opened the back door and slid in next to Aamir.

  ‘Good morning, brothers. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, Mohammed,’ Bashir said. ‘We did everything as you said.’

  ‘Very good. This is a wonderful day.’ He turned to Aamir. ‘Hello, brother. Are you feeling well?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, unable to hide his nerves.

  Mohammed had a cruel mouth with thin lips. He had heavy brows and dark eyes. Aamir remembered what it was like to be pinned in his lizard stare.

  ‘You remember what is next?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And you remember why this is necessary?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

  Aamir knew that Mohammed could see he was nervous. ‘We have to do this. You understand that, I know. We can talk and talk and talk, but our words have no impact on them. They will keep ignoring us. We are going to talk to them in a language that they will understand. Remember what Muhammad said. “Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.”’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I remember.’

  Mohammed fixed him in his powerful gaze. ‘Thousands of people like us are forsaking everything for what they believe. We are not doing it for worldly things, are we? We do not care about that, about them, about the tangible things that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God, Allah. We follow in the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Muhammad.’

  ‘Praise be to God,’ Bashir intoned.

  ‘I just . . . I just . . .’

  ‘I can see you are nervous. That is all right. I understand. It is normal. But you need to consider why we are doing what we are doing. This country is not our friend, Aamir. The government perpetuates atrocities against our people, and the people’s support of it makes them responsible, just as we are directly responsible for protecting and avenging our Muslim brothers and sisters.’

  Aamir nodded his head, mumbling his agreement. Bashir and Hakeem nodded more vociferously.

  ‘We have to take the fight to them. Until we feel security, they must be our target. Until they stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of our people, we will not stop this fight. We are at war, Aamir, and we are soldiers. And today, Allah willing, the infidels will taste the reality of this situation. They will feel the edge of our blade. You understand me, Aamir? You must tell me you understand.’

  Aamir found himself unable to speak.

  ‘He understands,’ Hakeem said for him.

  ‘I need to hear it from him.’

  Aamir nodded.

  ‘I need you to say it.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Mohammed clasped his shoulder and squeezed. ‘Good. When you get to London, there will
be no time for second thoughts. You want to stop, you just say so now. You can get on a train and be back in Manchester in time for lunch. But I know you will not do that. I know you are a good soldier. I know, when you feel doubt, you think about your mother and what happened to her. You keep that close to your heart, Aamir. That is where your strength comes from. That is where you will find the certainty when you feel doubt.’

  Aamir frowned. He hated it when others suggested that he was weak. He wasn’t weak. He was just as strong as Hakeem and Bashir. ‘I don’t feel doubt,’ he said. ‘I’m not going home. I’m a soldier. I’ve got a job to do.’

  Hakeem grinned at him and held up his hand. Aamir clasped it.

  Mohammed nodded his satisfaction. ‘If anything happens during the morning that means you are unable to carry out the operation, you must not go home. It will be too dangerous. You must come to me. There is a safe house in London. I will be there. You must come to me, and I will take care of you.’

  They said that they understood. Mohammed gave them an address and made them repeat it to him three times. It was a road in Bethnal Green. They satisfied him that they remembered it, and then he led them in prayer. Aamir closed his eyes and intoned the familiar words. The cadence was almost hypnotic, and he felt himself beginning to calm.

  When they were finished, Mohammed opened the door. ‘I have the bags,’ he said. ‘They are in the back of my car.’

  They went around to the rear of the Mazda, and Mohammed opened the boot. There were three rucksacks nestled inside. He reached down, lifted the first one out and set it on the ground. It looked heavy. He took the second and third rucksacks and put them on the ground, too. Aamir looked inside the boot and saw a large leather-bound case, the sort of case that a musician might use to carry his instrument. He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t feel that he could ask. Mohammed shut and locked the boot, and then stooped to collect one of the rucksacks. He hefted it up and slung the strap over Aamir’s shoulder. The rucksack was heavy.