She struggles out of bed, washes, dresses, eats. She sets off for work but the morning sun doesn’t warm her. Instead she remembers the cold of a mountain pass thick with snow. The sounds of gunfire. The thud of a heavy retort as an explosion rips through a crowded market. The stench of charred flesh and the streets echoing with the screams of men and women and children. The never-ending racket of helicopters. The eerie silence that descends at sunset and the sleep which doesn’t come easily after witnessing so much death. She remembers the joshing and the horseplay and reading dog-eared paperbacks while lying on a bunk in the daytime heat. The boredom. The fear. And the screams again. Always the screams.
In her dreams the boy sometimes lives. But mostly he dies.
Plymouth’s main shopping street measured five hundred metres, give or take a couple of strides. The street sloped gently upwards and ran west to east as straight as an arrow. If you had an eye for such a thing you could find several good hide sites, but the standout one was at the top of the multistorey car park down at the western end. You could lie there with your weapon poking through the metal guardrail or alternatively place yourself in a vehicle, open the front passenger window, and sit in the back seat. With a small gel bag on the sill the window would provide the perfect rest. The trajectory of the bullet over a range of five hundred metres meant there’d be a drop to account for but the buildings rose, chasm like, either side of the street, so crosswinds were minimal. If the target was walking to the west, towards the car park, you’d have plenty of time to make the shot. If they went into a shop you could simply wait until they emerged. No doubt about it, the car park was a standout position.
Rebecca da Silva stared up at the multistorey. She didn’t have to think about such things any more, but she’d been in the army for eight years and situational awareness was in her blood. Quite literally, since her father had served in the army too. Back in the nineties he’d been with the special forces in the Gulf War. ‘You thought Afghanistan was tough?’ he’d sneer, as if patrolling the streets of Kabul was akin to taking a stroll in the English countryside. ‘You should have tried SCUD hunting in southern Iraq. That was tough.’ She would nod and pretend to listen, all the while wondering if it was genes or upbringing that had led to her following in his footsteps. Perhaps it was serendipity or divine intervention. Perhaps it was plain rotten luck.
Silva was twenty-eight years old. Her father was British through and through, but her mother was born of Portuguese immigrants. Her parents had divorced when she was ten and at some point in her teens she’d adopted her mother’s maiden name. Partly it had been an act of solidarity with her mother, partly a rejection of her father. Her Portuguese side was evident in her light coffee-coloured skin and her dark-brown hair. Her eyes were a mixture of her father’s and mother’s, a grey-green that was the shade of the sea after a fierce storm. She was small, but lithe, strong and agile. In Basic Training, her instructors had been surprised she’d come in the top ten per cent on the loaded march. Her heart, she knew, carried a good portion of her mother’s easy-going southern European attitude, combined with a dash of the fiery temper which had undoubtedly hastened her parents’ separation. What was inside her head came from her father: a calm, stubborn orderliness that she’d done resisting and now used to her advantage. In the army both sides of her character had been invaluable.
Nowadays it was all she could do to remind herself that the military part of her life had ended when the judge advocate had sentenced her to twelve months in prison and dismissal from the service. The charge was negligence and, as her lawyer had been keen to explain, her situation could have been very much worse since initially there’d been talk of manslaughter or even murder.
She blinked as something moved against the brightness of the sky. Someone. There was a kid up there in the car park, held up by his father so he could look down on the street. The boy wasn’t much older than a toddler and he pointed at Silva and waved. For a second she wondered if she knew the kid, but then she realised it was the uniform he was interested in. Silva forced herself to give a half smile and waved back. As the boy laughed with delight, emotion welled up in her stomach. Sadness, regret, self-disgust.
Stephen Holm wasn’t usually asleep at four in the afternoon, but then he didn’t often work a twenty-four-hour shift. When he’d stumbled back to his flat at seven that morning he’d tried to remain awake by fortifying himself with a cup of extra-strong coffee, but despite the caffeine boost he’d found his eyelids heavy. The long hours in the windowless situation room at MI5’s headquarters in Thames House had led to something akin to jet lag, and eventually he’d given up and gone to bed. For a few minutes he’d lain in the dark and tried to calm his mind and then he was out like a light bulb.
