The glass steamed again and he wiped it once more. The desert was gone, London back. London. The capital of Great Britain. So-called Great Britain. Taher had to prevent himself from thumping his fist on the window and obliterating the image. He hadn’t known it all those years ago, but the devastation wrought that evening in the desert had come from a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a Royal Navy destroyer stationed three hundred miles away in the Persian Gulf. The new way of waging war. The modern way. Just like a computer game. Type a few letters and numbers. Hit the enter key. Wipe away half a dozen innocent lives in a targeting error. For the few people that bother to read the news reports the lives lost are dismissed in a phrase that brought bile to Taher’s throat: collateral damage.
He rubbed the area of old scar tissue on his right forearm and then looked through the dirty glass again, the city spread out before him. Cars spiralled along roads. People disappeared into a tube station. Aeroplanes hovered on the horizon on their final approach to Heathrow.
Well, there were other ways of fighting back, he thought. You didn’t need a million-pound missile fired from a billion-pound ship, you didn’t need to be a global military power. You just needed determination, a few trusted followers and the knowledge you were performing the will of God.
Yes, the day was surely coming when the good folk of London would experience collateral damage for themselves.
Silva was back in Plymouth. Walking the round. Delivering the letters. Thinking about the utter craziness of Fairchild’s suggestion.
When Karen Hope turns up you’re going to kill her.
She’d walked out on him after that, his voice echoing in her ears as she started her bike and rode away.
…you’re going to kill her.
Fairchild was living in a world of make-believe and movies where snipers took potshots and escaped by jumping from buildings or hanging on to a rope lowered from a helicopter.
…kill her.
Assassinate the future president of the United States? Straight up madness.
And yet as she trudged the streets in the warm summer rain, the story Fairchild had spun snagged at her thoughts and refused to lie buried. What if her mother had discovered something about the Hopes that was incriminating enough for them to consider murdering her? Although her mother had no interest in American domestic politics, she’d certainly had many assignments related to US foreign policy. The relationship with Israel, the funding of the Taliban, the two wars in Iraq, the war on terror. Fairchild wasn’t a back-room general either, and he’d served in several wars. Would such a man indulge in high fantasy? She didn’t know, but if it hadn’t been for the cryptic postcard her mother had written her she may well have dropped the whole thing.
…hidden secrets… definitely Hope…
There was something there but, try as she might, she couldn’t fathom it, and by the end of the week her head was so muddled she decided to clear it by going for a run. She rode her motorbike up onto the moor and ran under dark skies. She pushed through the pain barrier, her lungs bursting, her legs aching. After two hours of physical hell, she returned to the boat, exhausted. She took a shower in the toilet block and collapsed on her bunk, thinking her head was no clearer.
A while later, her mobile rang. She blinked and reached for the phone. Outside the sun was playing hide and seek with the rain clouds, the inside of the boat alternately a warm yellow or a cold grey. She peered at the screen. Didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello?’ She swivelled round and sat on the edge of the bunk.
‘It’s me, Becca. You OK?’ Beneath the American accent there was a hint of Irish. Like an aftertaste in a whiskey. Wood smoke, coffee, peach. ‘Because I just heard, sweetheart. About your mom.’
‘You just heard?’ Silva recognised the voice and felt her grip tighten on the phone. ‘It’s been weeks, Sean.’
‘I’ve been in-country. Sudan. It’s a long story, but the gist is I knew about the shooting but I didn’t get the names. I didn’t connect.’
‘You didn’t connect?’ She remembered the space between them. Geographical and emotional. No one to blame, no one at fault, just circumstances.
‘I’m so sorry, Becca. If only I could have been there with you. If only… well.’
She remembered the aftertaste. Burning and bitter and the warm glow seeping through to the tips of the fingers and making her whole body shiver. Her shadow stood black against the side of the cabin for a moment before fading as the sun disappeared once again. That was her and Sean. A warm glow fading to… to what?
Sean Connor, her sometime boyfriend, was thirty-three. An American of Irish descent out of Eastport, Maine. ‘As north and east as is possible and as close to you Brits as that,’ he’d said to her, holding up his thumb and finger an inch apart. ‘Just the Atlantic Ocean between us.’ The gesture had come with a wink and a raising of his glass as they’d sat in the bar on the base in Kabul. She’d first met him earlier in the day as the stars had twinkled in the predawn sky. Her patrol was making final preparations for an excursion into the mountains south of the city when the CO had turned up with Sean in tow. Plainly annoyed, the CO had introduced Sean and gruffly added ‘out of Langley’ as if that was all the explanation needed. Later, as they’d sat in the back of the Foxhound patrol vehicle taking them to their drop-off point, Sean had elaborated. He was a CIA intelligence officer, there to identify a particular terrorist leader believed to be in the area.
