Group one: 61476. Group two ...'
When the taped message had come full circle, I switched off the phone, put it away and transferred the groups onto paper. I'd never been up to doing the math on the Psion, and by the time I'd got the hang of it I would have been up for retirement.
The rain was coming down in earnest. Keeping my eyes on the house, I pulled the hood up around my neck to cut out what was pouring through the cam net. I couldn't cover my head, however, because that would degrade my hearing.
Armed with the number groups, I was now going to do the reverse of what I'd done earlier: look for the recognition group on the one-time pad, then subtract each group from the ones that I had on my OTP.
Once I'd done that, I put the flash card back in my jeans pocket and got out the one that held the codes. They came up on the screen and I worked out the message. The first lot of groups were the introduction-date, time groups, all that sort of stuff. Then I got to the meat of the message:
61476 EXTRACT
97641 TARGET
02345 BY ANY MEANS
98562 CUT OFF TIME
47624 DTG (date time group, times local)
82624 APRIL 27
47382 0500HRS (times local)
42399 FOR
42682 T104
15662 ACKNOWLEDGE
88765 02442
'Extract target' was easy enough to understand: they wanted me to remove Sarah from the house by 5 a.m. tomorrow morning. Fair enough.
It was the next bit I couldn't believe: 'T104.'
'T' plus a numeral is a code within a code, for brevity. There are quite a few T commands, and they have to be learned parrot fashion, as nothing about them is ever written down by anyone, anywhere. They don't officially exist, and the reason is simple. T is a command to kill.
They wanted me to kill Sarah.
Not only that, but 104 meant without trace: the body must never be discovered.
Elizabeth must have been more pissed off at being summoned to Northolt on a Sunday than I'd thought. Either that, or they'd told me even less about the operation than I suspected they had.
The wind gusted and the heavens opened, as if to confirm my feeling about the T104.
redialed.
The recorded voice said, 'You have no new messages.' There was a pause, then she started to give out the introduction for the groups already sent. I checked them against the ones I'd written down, and went through all the codes again.
As I protected the 3C from the rain I knew there was no mistake. I took a deep breath and let it go slowly, wiping away some water that had splashed down my cheek.
I'd been a young infantryman when I'd killed my first man, an IRA terrorist.
I'd felt good about it. I thought that was how you were supposed to feel. After all, it was what the Army did for a living. Later, I got more satisfaction from stopping death than causing it. However, if the task was to kill, it didn't particularly worry me. I didn't celebrate the fact, but neither did I complain. I understood that they had sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, but they were players like everybody else, including me. And at its most basic level, if somebody had to die, I'd rather it was them than me. My only concern was to try to make it as quick as possible--not so much for their benefit, but to make it safer for me.
This T104 was different. This was the second time I'd had to kill someone I'd been close to. Considering there was only Josh left who resembled anything like a friend, I couldn't help wondering what the fuck was going on in my life. Euan had been my best mate for as long as I could remember, but he'd used me--worse than that, he'd used Kelly. Now the only woman I'd ever felt really involved with had got herself into a world of
shit that I had to wipe clean. I was starting to feel sorry for myself, and realized it. I had to cut out of this; I needed to get real.
I deleted from the flash card the groups that had been used for the two messages, and ate the small piece of paper I had used. No one would ever be using that combination again--that was why it was called a onetime pad-- and no evidence of any T104 would ever be seen, since all details are destroyed once used. I put the two flash cards back into separate pockets in my jeans and turned off the 3C, getting it out of the rain.
Everything that Elizabeth and Lynn had said was making sense to me here on the ground. They knew the big picture, I was sure of it; maybe the imagery I'd Mac'd down to them had confirmed their fears. Was there a connection with what she'd got up to in Syria? I didn't even bother to think that much about it. I didn't really give a fuck. Even if, say, this group was planning to hit Netanyahu, Arafat, Clinton or even the whole job lot--so what? I remembered the footage after Rabin had been assassinated, and sure, I saw his niece, or whoever it was, speaking at his funeral.
I understood that it must be sad, but I wasn't personally affected. To me, it was just one more dead person amongst the thousands on both sides in Israel who'd been bombed and shot over the years. I didn't get worked up about political murders, even when they were closer to home, which usually meant Northern Ireland. Fuck 'em, we all have to die sometime. Live by the sword, and all that. They were all as bad as each other.
For all I knew, there could be massive ramifications to whatever Sarah was involved in. This crew could be plotting the murder of thousands of people. Maybe the U.S.A.'s fear of chemical or biological weapons being used in their backyard was becoming a reality here and now, in a holiday home in North Carolina. It would be quite easy to contaminate, say, the entire water supply of D.C. Even if it were partial contamination, the right sort of disease would quickly spread itself around. Making one person history can often mean saving many others; it was simplistic, but I always saw such Ts in terms of putting a round into Hitler's skull in 1939.
I knew I was trying to keep emotions out by looking at it logically.
Maybe the Americans had now been told what was going on, and would be hitting the target as soon as they got sorted? In which case, it stood to reason that Elizabeth wouldn't want Sarah to be found on target.
So extract her, drop her, make sure she's never found. Who knows?
I forced myself to cut away from conjecture; it had no bearing on the order I'd received, and I'd probably come to the wrong conclusion anyway.
Either way, I just didn't want the job.
I was watching the house through the misty rain in a sort of daydream.
I gripped myself again. Fuck it! If I carried on thinking like this, I'd end up howling at the moon and dancing around the maypole or whatever tree huggers do. Maybe I'd been reading too many books about kids and their emotions; maybe all the touchy-feely crap was getting to me. I decided to bin it; get the tree-hugging cassette out of my head and put the work one back in. Sarah might have lots of plans, but as far as I was concerned long life wasn't going to be one of them.
The rain was bucketing down. I pulled on the hood string, trying to stop the water running down my neck. I was getting very cold. I forced myself to focus on a mission analysis, and to look at the factors that could affect it; only then could I carry out the task and have a chance of getting away with it. If I wanted to kill the president of the United States, nobody could stop me, but getting away with it would be the hard bit.
The first thing I had to do was understand my mission. What was required of me? It broke down into just two parts: first, I had to get her out of the target area by 0500 hours tomorrow morning; the second part, the T104, wasn't important at the moment. Besides, I already knew how I was going to do it.
I broke down the first part of the job into five phases: one, approach the house; two, make entry; three, locate Sarah; four, lift and exfil from the house; five, exfil the area.
Next I had to look at what might stop me carrying out those five phases. The first obstacle was obviously the men with her. There were far too many of them for comfort, and for all I knew there could be even more inside who hadn't poked their heads out yet. What were their intentions?
Fuck knows. It was a safe bet, though, that they weren't there for the canoeing.
