Adi had approached the table, opened his aqueous cream and was slathering it onto his neck. ‘Did you ask him?’ he said quietly.
‘Ask him what?’
Adi wiped the surplus cream from his fingers onto his faded black jeans. ‘You know. Did you ask him?’
Narinder did know, of course. The three of them had talked of little else. They had watched the news of the Lion’s death on the television like everybody else. Unlike most people, however, they had not rejoiced.
Osama bin Laden – the Lion, the Sheikh al-Mujahid, the Director – had been in hiding for as long as these three young men had known who he was. And yet Narinder felt a strong bond with him, and he was sure Rakesh and Adi did too. It was a bond that had been forged when, in his early teens, he had looked up to the older kids at the mosque who talked openly about the evils of the Great Satan America, and Little Satan Britain. Who had hinted of their allegiance to, and recruitment by, Islamist cells. And of course there was one Islamist movement that they all wanted to be associated with. When Narinder was nineteen, and doing Islamic Studies at Thames Valley University, he was given the chance to travel to Pakistan. Nobody mentioned the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ until he was actually there, one of twenty men of a similar age, spending a summer at a training camp thirty miles south-west of Quetta where they learned how to strip down an AK-47, how to make a serviceable detonator, and how to hate – really hate – the West. If the War on Terror truly was a war, he learned, then it needed soldiers on both sides. When Narinder returned to the UK he didn’t look or sound any different, but he certainly felt it. On the outside, an unremarkable young man of British-Asian descent. On the inside, a soldier waiting for the chance to fight.
But what now? That was the question these three young Al-Qaeda recruits had been asking each other. The Lion was gone. What did it mean for Al-Qaeda? What did it mean for them? Had they backed the wrong horse? When the young men at the mosque who were affiliated to other groups – the Muslim Brotherhood or the Young Muslim Organization – gave them superior looks the day after the news broke, were they right to do so? Narinder, Rakesh and Adi knew they were waiting here for somebody who was much higher in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy than they were. Surely this Mr Ashe would be able to tell them what the future held.
‘No, I didn’t ask him,’ Narinder muttered. ‘He only just got here. Guy don’t want us—’
‘Ask me what?’
Narinder, Rakesh and Adi looked suddenly round. None of them had heard the door open, nor seen Mr Ashe standing there. He was no longer wearing his raincoat, but an elegant grey suit.
They blinked stupidly at him.
‘We was just, you know, thinking, Mr Ashe,’ said Narinder. ‘With the Director being, you know—’
‘Our struggle,’ Mr Ashe interrupted, ‘continues.’
He looked at each of them in turn. His face, Narinder thought to himself, was much softer than those of the fiery-eyed teachers he’d had in Pakistan. But he had authority. No doubt about that.
Mr Ashe stepped into the room. His gaze fell on the contents of the table, and he nodded appreciatively for a moment. ‘When this’ – he stretched out his arm to indicate the Semtex – ‘comes to fruition, they will understand that they cannot defeat us simply by killing one man.’ He smiled at them and pulled out a book from the pocket of his jacket. It was smaller than an ordinary book, bound in leather and fastened with a strap. Narinder caught sight of the words ‘Holy Koran’ written on the front cover in gold lettering. ‘We shall pray together,’ said Mr Ashe.
Narinder glanced at the other two. The truth was that they were more interested in action than prayer. Back in the training camp, he had knelt towards Mecca because he’d been told to; his trips to the mosque were more social than religious. But he sensed that they were as unwilling as he was to disobey this strange, quiet man. And so all three knelt with him as he read in Arabic from his Koran, before intoning a familiar prayer. And once he had left the room, each went silently about his business, carefully cutting the slabs of Semtex as they had been taught into smaller, flatter rectangles, ready to accept a charge, ready to pack them into whatever housing they were eventually given.
It was an hour later when Narinder suddenly scraped back his chair and got to his feet. Rakesh and Adi both looked up at him.
‘I need a slash, all right?’ he said.
He left the room.
The toilet was separate from the bathroom, and situated next to the locked bedroom. A piece of worn, grey vinyl flooring, curled at the edges, was covered with sticky yellow piss stains around the pan. Rakesh, Narinder had observed, was bastard filthy and couldn’t aim properly. He loosened himself from his fly and was about to empty his bladder when he heard something unusual. It came from his left, from the other side of the wall that separated the toilet from the locked bedroom. Narinder edged towards it, put his ear to the wall and held his breath so that he could hear better. It was white noise, like an untuned old-fashioned TV set. It meant nothing to Narinder, who just shrugged, stepped back to the toilet and pissed noisily into the water. Once he’d flushed, he waited for the cistern to refill before listening against the wall again. The noise was still there.
Back out on the landing he stopped outside Mr Ashe’s door. He could hear the white noise more clearly from here. Again he wanted to knock, but there was something about Mr Ashe that made him feel nervous. His instructors at the camp in Pakistan had been brutal, and Narinder had been scared of them, but Mr Ashe didn’t need to threaten any of them with violence for them to do what he said.
And so Narinder almost surprised himself when he found himself rapping his knuckles against the door.
‘Do come in.’
Narinder opened up, and stepped inside.
He hadn’t really known what to expect, it was true, but the room that had been locked these past three days was disappointingly bland. The curtains were closed and the light switched off. There was a camp bed, just like the ones the three of them had been sleeping on. Mr Ashe was sitting at what looked like an IKEA table. A laptop was open in front of him, and his face was bathed in the glow from its screen. Next to it was a handheld digital radio – it was this that was making the white noise – and his copy of the Koran, open about halfway through, and face downwards.
‘I’m glad you knocked, Narinder.’ Mr Ashe smiled, and Narinder flashed his yellow teeth at him in return.
‘Wicked,’ Narinder said, but his mouth was suddenly dry.
‘Please tell the others to stop work. You are needed elsewhere.’
‘What?’ Narinder shook his head in confusion. ‘But…’
‘Please, Narinder. I’ll explain everything when we’re all together.’ He gave him a meaningful look. ‘I can rely on you to organize the others?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Yeah, course. I’ll just…’ He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder and stepped backwards out of the room, closing the door as he went. He sniffed, then turned and re-entered the bedroom he shared with the others. They didn’t even look up as he walked in – they were too busy cutting out their rectangles of explosive. ‘OK, you two. On your feet.’
Rakesh and Adi looked at him with scorn.
‘Whatever,’ Narinder shrugged. ‘If you don’t want to do what Mr Ashe says, that’s your bastard decision.’
It was enough. The other two stood up with obvious reluctance. ‘What we doing?’ Rakesh asked.
Narinder gave him what he hoped was an enigmatic smile. ‘Ah, you’ll find out, man,’ he said. ‘Mr Ashe, he’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.’
Before they could ask any more questions, Narinder left the room and stood in the hallway, waiting for the others to join him.
Mr Ashe watched Narinder leave the room, and he continued to stare at the closed door for a full ten seconds after he was alone. Only then did he turn his attention back to the laptop.
He was looking at a black and white image, rather grainy, of an ordinary street. Anybody would be able to tell from a glance that it was in the UK – there was a pillar box on the right, and the blur of a BT van driving out of the shot. Mr Ashe, however, knew a bit more than that. He knew, for example, the name of the road – Lancing Way – and that the street was located in the border town of Hereford. In the bottom-right corner of the screen was a time code. It read ‘10:58’, and indicated that this was the final frame in a stop-motion video lasting ten minutes and fifty-eight seconds. He pressed the laptop’s mouse button with his right thumb and, keeping it down,
