Monday to Saturday she worked, but Sunday she was forced to take off, so on that day she ran. Wind or rain, she ran. Often she pounded the same streets she’d been walking the day before, but sometimes she took her motorbike out onto the moor and ran up there. From the vantage point of a rocky tor, she could see the city of Plymouth sprawled below, the ocean beyond. Warships lay anchored in the sheltered waters of the Sound or moored up alongside in the dockyards. This was the largest naval base in Western Europe. Nuclear submarines came here to be repaired and refuelled, and there was a huge armament facility on the far side of the river. The military had been inexorably bound up with the place for centuries, and conflict had shaped the city. She’d wandered here after prison, searching for a cheap place to moor her boat for a few nights while she was visiting Itchy, and ended up staying. Out here in the far west she was as anonymous and unloved as the city was, but like the city she bore the scars of war deep inside.
The Afghan boy, yes, but the others too.
She remembered her first kill as if it was yesterday. He was a figure rising from behind a wall, gun in hand. The four hundred metres between the end of her rifle and the man in the sights compressed until he was no longer a distant enemy soldier. The scope magnified his features and she could see he was somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s husband. She slipped her finger from the trigger and raised her head. Her perspective changed from a restricted view of the man to a vista that took in a tree-lined road leading to a small fort. An armoured vehicle headed down the road, a squad of men marching behind. If she didn’t take the shot the man behind the wall would shoot at the patrol. Lives were in her hands. During training, her instructor had cautioned her not to overthink it, not to dwell on the morality of the act. Still, she was aware she was, for that one moment, God.
She lowered her eye to the scope once more, pulled the trigger, and the man went down. A figure crumpling in the haze, a mirage blurring the air as he died. Was that his spirit departing his body or merely a spiral of dust kicked up as he fell? She didn’t know, but later, lying on her bunk at the base trying to get to sleep, she thought back to the moment of the man’s death and wept. Then the next day she tried not to think of it again. She stuck the memory in a little box and pushed it to the far recesses of her mind. It’s what soldiers did.
Silva could count the number of local friends she had on one hand: Itchy, also discharged from the army for his part in the death of the Afghan boy; a woman who was a doctor whom she’d met on a run; a girl at the Royal Mail who’d been in the navy. Life in the military provided a ready-made family, but once you left you were on your own, all of a sudden shorn of the common thread which had sustained friendships through the most horrific of circumstances. Civvy Street seemed mundane and trite after the streets of Kabul, everyday worries trivial or even offensive when you considered the situation in other parts of the world. When you had pulled a trigger and ended an innocent young life.
Away from Plymouth she had a few acquaintances scattered round the country, but they weren’t much more than numbers and faces on her phone. They weren’t people she could call up and talk to. Aside from her mother, there was really only one person who she’d ever been able to do that with and she had no idea where he was. She didn’t even know what country he was in. Besides, she’d burned her bridges with him. Ended it. Her decision, no regrets. None. At least that’s what she told herself every time he slipped into her thoughts.
More letters into letterboxes. Bills and court summonses and bad news. The occasional birthday card or a postcard from abroad. Somewhere hot and sunny where you didn’t have to stay behind hard cover or crap yourself when you walked down a street because your opposite number had found a standout position.
She came round the side of a block of flats and the car park loomed above her once again. The boy had gone and there was nobody up there now. Nothing but a mass of concrete and rows of cars and, above it all, a brooding grey sky the colour of gunmetal.
Holm stood by the sink for a moment longer. He examined himself in the mirror, trying to see beyond his reflected image, to somehow see the future. There was nothing but a creased brow and a face with a dozen craggy lines, lines which he knew had deepened in the past few years. Was that life and ageing or were the marks indicative of a more serious malaise? He wasn’t sure, but either way the job wasn’t helping and the current debacle marked a new low point in a career that had recently been short on highs. Perhaps he should just resign himself to the fact he was past it. His mind simply didn’t work in the same way as it once had. His creative juices had been sucked out by the constant stress of trying to stay on top of the latest threat. If you made a mistake, people died. And as Palmer had said, he’d fucked up on this one.
Big time.
He met his gaze in the mirror and wondered how in hell it had come to this.
Stephen Holm was a senior analyst at the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. Part of MI5, its
