Zero 22, p.34
Zero 22, page 34
part #8 of Danny Black Series
‘Hamoud! Hamoud!’
His hearing returned. The excited buzz of the crowd, and Rabia urgently saying his name and pulling at his sleeve.
‘What’s the matter? What’s going on? You look . . . you look terrible.’
He stared at her. She had tears in her eyes. He looked down at his children. They had stopped playing with the water. They were watching him, their adorable eyes so wide.
And all of a sudden everything made sense. The free holiday. The people watching him, taking his photograph. He hadn’t been imagining it. He wasn’t paranoid. He was seeing things as they were. Hamoud had been manipulated into being in this very place at this very time. His presence was being documented. Because then, when the horror happened, he would be the scapegoat. A former Guantanamo inmate, a man looking like him, at the site of a horrific terror attack. An accomplice to the crime. He thought of the presidential rally he had watched on TV: those white faces with their American flags and their fists punched in the air. Who among them would believe Hamoud was not involved? Not a single one. He was the perfect suspect, oven ready. And would they believe him when he declared that he had been set up? Of course they wouldn’t. A dead suicide bomber would soon be forgotten. But a live accomplice, dragged through a sensational trial and awarded a lifelong prison term or even a death sentence? Hamoud would become a symbol, a focus for their bile. Living, breathing proof that their hatred of outsiders was justified.
Hamoud looked at his watch. Ten past nine. The fireworks would start in five minutes.
He took Rabia’s hand. Held it between his. ‘You have to go,’ he said.
She frowned. ‘Hamoud . . .’
‘No,’ Hamoud said. ‘Do not talk. I beg you not to argue with me. Take the children and go. Now. Get out of the park. Get as far away from here as you can. Do not look back. Run if you can. Don’t stop running, even to look at the fireworks. Especially to look at the fireworks.’ He bent down to Malick and Melissa and embraced each of them with a fierce hug. ‘Look after your mother,’ he said. ‘And remember that I love you.’ He stood again. ‘Now go!’
Rabia obviously understood his urgency. He was grateful that she didn’t try to talk him round, or tell him he was paranoid or unwell. He could see his own panic in her face. She took the children, one in each hand, and squeezed back through the crowd, earning some shouts and unkind comments from those whose good humour did not extend to letting through this brown woman and her children. For once, the comments didn’t anger Hamoud. For once he was pleased that people didn’t want to be too close to his family. It meant they passed through the crowd more quickly. They were out of his sight within seconds.
Hamoud moved just as quickly. He half considered jumping into the fountain and splashing across its diameter, which was only about fifteen metres wide and so was the most direct route to the steps. It was not a possibility, of course. To do that would draw attention to himself, and that was the worst thing he could do. So he squeezed his way around the perimeter, ignoring the same comments and complaints that his family had received. He kept the man on the steps in his peripheral vision. Hamoud didn’t want him to see that he was under observation, nor did he want to lose sight of him. He saw the man take another step down towards the fountain.
Classical music filled the air, a tune that Hamoud recognised but couldn’t identify. He knew what it meant, though: the firework display was about to start.
He was sweating heavily. His palms were more irritated than they had ever been. He scratched them with his fingernails whenever he was not using his hands to clear a path around the fountain. The scratching brought no relief. It increased the irritation. By the time he had made a semicircle and was standing in front of the steps, his palms were burning. The sweat felt like blood.
There was a heart-thumping series of bangs. Hamoud felt them at his very core. He thought, for a sickening moment, that it had happened. Then the crowd oohed and aahed, and the sky lit up a multitude of different colours, and the fireworks continued with their squeals and cracks and techicolour explosions. Hamoud zoned it all out. He heard nothing but his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his lungs. And he focused in on the only other person in the vicinity whose eyes were not raised to heaven.
The man with the long face was still scanning the crowd. He had reached the fountain and was looking across it. He was only four metres from where Hamoud was standing, and as a red firework burst overhead, Hamoud saw beads of sweat on his forehead, reflecting the glow. Thanks to the curve of the circular fountain wall, Hamoud saw that he was muttering to himself. Although no lipreader, he could make out what the man was saying.
Allahu Akbar.
Allahu Akbar.
Allahu Akbar.
Hamoud hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment.
A moment in which he thought about his family. His children. How he knew that they would always bear the stigma of their father’s imprisonment. How they would always be under suspicion. The children of a man everybody thought was a terrorist, even though he was not.
But what if he could alter the story for them? What if, instead of being the children of a pariah, they grew up as the children of a hero. What if he gave them the one thing Hamoud had looked for but never found: a new life.
He raised his eyes. The fireworks bloomed above him and he felt, for the first time since the camp, serene. His palms had stopped itching. His breathing was steady. His heart beat at its usual rate. He kept gazing up, but edged around the perimeter of the fountain, keeping the man in view. His awareness had never felt so heightened. He saw and heard everyone and everything with complete clarity. An elderly couple, hand in hand. A baby cooing in a stroller. Twin girls, no more than ten years old, in identical outfits. All these people unaware of the threat in their midst.
He was only two metres away now. The music swelled. The man with the long face turned so that his back was facing the fountain. Hamoud realised what that meant. The blast would come from his front and he didn’t want the deserted area over the fountain to take the brunt of it.
There was no point being a suicide bomber if you didn’t take as many people with you as possible.
Hamoud could see his right hand. It was clenched, as though he was grasping something. The pad of his thumb was circling. It looked like he was preparing to press a button.
Hamoud took another step towards him.
They were just a metre apart.
The man with the long face closed his eyes. Hamoud hesitated. He saw the crowd, a blanket of raised heads spread out around the fountain and far beyond it. He saw the sky, a riot of light and colour and smoke. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the glowing fairy-tale castle, and he made a wish: that what he was about to do would make his children’s dreams come true.
And then he did it.
Hamoud stepped in front of the bomber, facing him. He wrapped his arms around the bomber’s abdomen, as tightly as if he was holding on to his own children. He was aware of rapid sequence of firework explosions overhead, and of someone shouting nearby, and of the bomber roaring in frustration as Hamoud forced them both over the edge of the fountain. He was aware of a splash as they hit the water and a muffled cry of anger as he twisted hard, so that the bomber was lying face down in the water, and Hamoud was beneath him, face up, submerged.
And then he was never aware of anything, ever again.
The fireworks were loud, but the explosion of the suicide bomber’s homemade device was louder. The kind of deep boom that vibrates the core and deadens the hearing. The kind of shock that paralyses the muscles and the senses, for a few seconds, until the panic starts.
The panic started.
There were screams, of course. They mingled with the fireworks and the classical music, and were a catalyst for more screaming, which radiated through the crowd from the epicentre of the suicide bomber. Within seconds people were screaming and running without knowing what they were screaming about or running from.
Even the people in the vicinity of the steps could not know it all.
Some of them, distracted from the firework display by the sudden movement, had seen Hamoud grapple the bomber into the fountain. They had seen, as well as heard, the explosion. It was a sight that would remain with them as long as they lived. Hamoud’s body had taken the force of the blast. He could not absorb it all, of course. The force of the explosion had thrown the bomber himself up into the air in a shower of blood, water and shrapnel. Those closest to the blast were thrown outwards from it, their skin burned, their hair scorched. A nail flew into the shoulder of the black man with the kid on his shoulders. Another pierced the leg of a young woman. Yet another blinded an old man in his left eye.
But they could not know, amid the panic and the chaos and the injury and the blood, that the bulk of the shrapnel in the bomber’s jacket had torn into the flesh of Hamoud’s thorax and abdomen.
They saw dismembered body parts, flying through the air and lying on the ground, mangled, wet, cauterised and smoking, and the sight revolted them. It revolted them not only because the limbs were gruesome to behold, but because they were the limbs of an extremist. A fanatic. A killer who wished harm on them and their families.
But they could not know, as they gathered their weeping children into their arms to protect them from the vision of these body parts, that the body parts floating in the fountain belonged to a man who had sacrificed himself to save them.
They could smell the rank, acrid stench of burning flesh and it made some of them sick.
But they could not know, as the fireworks continued to flower in the sky, and the music continued its inappropriate counterpoint to the screams, that a woman holding hands with her two children had suddenly stopped hurrying to the exit, and the sickness in her stomach was more profound than any of theirs. The screams had reached her ears. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there were tears, and her children were looking up at her. She bent down to hug them each in turn, and drew some comfort from the warmth of their bodies and the way they wrapped their little arms around her and held tight.
Then she said: ‘We must do what your father asked.’ She took them by the hand again and led them to the exit.
TWENTY-SIX
For the first time that night, Danny was thankful for the rain. It offered cover from the police officers behind him. And he had to outrun them.
The alleyway extended for another thirty metres. Danny sprinted along it, ignoring the pain in his right arm where Bethany’s bullet had grazed him, his feet splashing heavily in the flood of water on the ground. The cops would be following, forty metres distant, perhaps less. He didn’t need to check behind him to be certain of that. If they got close enough, there was every chance that they would take a shot. Distance was essential.
At the end of the alleyway he could turn left or right. Both led to busy streets, with the hazy glare of car headlamps moving through the rain. There was nothing to choose between his two options. Bethany could have gone in either direction, but she was not his primary concern now. She no longer had the memory stick. The footage was lost. His attempt to stop the President’s conspiracy had failed. He turned left at random and emerged, soaked and panting, on to the busy road.
A police car screamed past. Danny pulled his wet hood further over his face and hurried in the opposite direction. There were still no pedestrians out in the rain. He was a lone figure as he pounded the path, and although his head was down and his weapon concealed, he knew he had to hide. The police were everywhere, and there were no crowds in which to lose himself. It was impossible to be the grey man when you were sprinting alone along deserted pathways.
He soon came across a right-hand turn which led down a side street filled with large commercial rubbish bins. It was dark, dingy, unwelcoming and stank of debris. The places nobody wanted to go were the perfect places to hide. He ducked down the lane and secreted himself behind one of the huge plastic bins. There was rotting litter on the ground and rain streaked down the wall behind him. He crouched in shadow, his wet clothing clinging to him, and removed his weapon, ready should he need to use it. He listened hard through the rain. The distant sound of sirens came and went. He thought perhaps he heard the sound of voices shouting. But the rain washed away these fragments of sound, and Danny remained undisturbed and undiscovered.
Defeat did not sit well with Danny Black. He had the mindset of a Regiment man. A mindset that valued operational success at all costs. Bethany White had denied him that success. Thwarted his operation. There was a part of him that wanted to hunt her down and finish the job the head shed had given him. Another part of him, however, felt as much anger with the head shed as with Bethany. They’d killed her boy. He hadn’t deserved that, whatever his mother might have done. Danny didn’t know what made him feel more bitter: that he was in some way complicit in the death of a child, or that they’d kept him in the dark about it while he carried out their instructions. Either way, they’d been playing Danny as well as Bethany. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised after all these years. He was just a soldier, after all, there to do a job and not ask too many questions. But the head shed’s deception had an unintended consequence. Despite everything, Danny felt a strange complicity with Bethany. He was not going to go looking for her. She could be anywhere in Washington DC already, in any case. She was somebody else’s problem now.
The rain continued to fall. Danny stayed where he was. His body temperature was dropping. His arm was in pain. He was cramped and wet and uncomfortable. But he could wait here, hidden in the darkness, for as long as he needed while the police moved on and he worked out his next move.
Bethany White did not know where she was. She had run, and run, and run. Everything was a blur. She was clutching her right forearm with her left hand. There was blood and it hurt, but she didn’t care about that. Rain streamed into her face, but she didn’t care about that either. There had been tears for a while, washed away by the downpour, but now there was just a hot, burning mass of pain in her chest. A desperation and an anger like she had never known. They had intended to take her life. She could cope with that. She could even understand it. But to take the one thing that meant more to her than that? She could never forgive them for it.
She stopped running. She was breathing heavily. Her surroundings came into focus. She was outside a liquor store in a small street with barely any traffic. She had no phone and no money, but these things were not so hard to come by, especially if you had a Glock 17 in your fist. She looked through the window of the store. There was just one customer: a lanky young guy with a ponytail and a thin raincoat, wet from the weather and slightly unsteady on his feet, buying beer. The cashier was putting the beers into a brown paper bag while the young guy placed some bills on the counter. Moments later, he was heading to the exit. Bethany could tell he was drunk. She gripped her handgun behind her back, checked to see that the street was empty, then stood to one side of the store and waited for him to step outside.
The young man paused for a moment in the doorway, looking out at the rain with a bleary expression of distaste. Then he shrugged, stepped out into it and walked in Bethany’s direction. He didn’t even appear to notice her until she was standing right in front of him, her weapon raised and inches from his chest.
He stopped. His jaw dropped.
‘Give me your cell phone,’ Bethany said.
He stared at the gun. Then at Bethany. He shook his head, emboldened perhaps by the booze in his system, which she could smell.
She didn’t have time for this. She pulled the trigger. There was a sharp recoil as she discharged a round, but the bullet drilled directly into the young man’s chest and he crashed heavily to the ground. Bethany felt nothing. No compassion for the victim, no fear that the gunshot would attract attention. She found his phone in ten seconds and took his wallet while she was at it. The phone required facial recognition to unlock it. She held the screen over the young man’s dead face then swiped it up and she was in. She disabled the locking function, then heard sirens in the distance.
She pocketed the phone and the wallet, and then she started running again.
Danny had made a plan. He would head to the British Embassy. It was the only place he would be safe. There he’d demand to see the defence attaché and the suits could do the rest of the work. He checked the location of the embassy on his phone. Memorised the route. Then he stood up. His joints were tight, his limbs numb. Pain radiated from the bullet graze. He hadn’t heard a siren or a voice for twenty minutes, however, so he was ready to risk moving.
He slowly emerged from behind the bin and wiped rain from his eyes. There was nobody about, so he moved to the end of the side street where it met the busier road. The traffic had died down a little but there were still no other pedestrians in this torrential rain. He had to force his aching legs into action. He had the uncomfortable sensation of his body letting him down.
His route took him north. He estimated that he’d need an hour, plus any time required to put in surveillance on the entrance to the embassy to check the US authorities weren’t lying in wait for him. He’d only been moving for ten minutes, however, when two police cars appeared up ahead, screaming down in his direction, forcing him to change his strategy. He was just passing a sports bar: green neon signage and a cartoonish decal of an American football player on the window. He quickly entered.
It was a relief to be out of the rain. It was warm inside. It made his soaked clothes feel even more clammy. There was a staircase leading down into the basement where the bar was. He could hear the regular thrum of music from below. Here on the ground floor were toilets. He entered the gents. Two of the cubicles were occupied, but he was able to check himself in the mirror without anybody watching. He was a mess. His hair and clothes and stubble were soaked. There were dark bags under his eyes. His main concern, though, was his sleeve. There was a tear in his jacket where the bullet had grazed it, but any blood had been soaked up by his hoodie. He looked scruffy, but he didn’t look as though he’d been shot. If the police cars had passed, he’d leave. If necessary, though, and in the dim light of a bar, he could pass as a loser who’d got caught in the rain. He put one hand through his hair, then exited the gents before the cubicle occupants emerged.
