Masters of War (3 page)

Taff realised he was breathing in time with the patient. Slowly. The door opened. A female police officer who had been watching over Kyle appeared. She was holding the little boy’s hand and stood respectfully by the door while Taff finished his visit.

‘I don’t know if you can understand me, mucker,’ Taff said, loud enough for Kyle and the policewoman to hear, ‘but I hope you can. One of these days we’re going to find the bastard who did this to you. And when that happens, he’ll pay. That’s all. He’ll
fucking
pay.’

But Simon was in no state to answer. He continued to stare straight ahead of him. The machines keeping him alive continued to ping.

The newborn baby lay in a Perspex cot. He was tightly swaddled and fast asleep. Taff looked down at him. He remembered someone saying that babies always looked like their dads – nature’s way of stopping the father from running away. As far as Taff could see, the kid looked like neither his mother nor his father. He looked like a newborn baby, and they all looked the same.

Taff remembered the kid’s mother and his face darkened. He thought of Simon, lying there in a near-vegetative state. The image of his tattoo popped into Taff’s head.
Utrinque Paratus.

‘You’ll need to be, kiddo,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll need to be.’

TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER

ONE

‘
J’ai l’impression qu’on nous regarde
,’ Fatima said.
I feel like someone’s watching us.

At six o’clock on weekday evenings the old tenement building on rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris always smelled the same. It was the pungent stink of cheap cuts of meat, boiled long and slow so even the bones could be mashed with a fork, then mixed with North African spices. The meat itself was barely fit for animals, let alone humans. The spices went some way to masking the taste, and their aroma seemed engrained in the dirty brick walls. The building always
sounded
the same, too. Babies wailing. TVs blaring. Couples arguing. This evening was no exception.

Fatima looked around the single room that she shared with her husband Hakim and their twin daughters. It was about six metres by four and contained a double mattress on the floor, a wooden cot and a rickety Formica-topped table with two chairs. At one end was a kitchenette – little more than a sink, a water heater and a two-ring electric hob. To the right of the kitchenette, in an alcove, were a poky bath-cum-shower and a toilet. Neither worked properly, and both stank. Through some quirk of the plumbing, whatever went down the kitchen sink reappeared in the bath, where it festered. The babies were crying. They were always crying. From hunger, mostly. Sometimes Fatima felt like joining in. Hakim, in boxer shorts and a white vest, lay on the mattress staring at the ceiling. He made no attempt to acknowledge what she’d just said. Fatima wasn’t even sure he’d heard her.

She walked to the window. It looked on to a lightwell, open to the sky and about ten metres square. On each side of this were more cramped bedsits. The concrete walls were stained by years of exposure to the elements. All the grimy windows were open on account of the suffocating summer heat.

All except one. She stared at it carefully. Had she just seen a strange dot of red light in the darkness of the flat?

She pulled her threadbare cardigan a little tighter so it covered more of her breasts, then felt the heat of Hakim’s body behind her. His hands on her shoulders. She turned and managed to smile at him. He smiled back.

‘
Je pense que j’ai peut-être trouvé un boulot
,
’ he said over the sound of the twins’ crying.
I think I might have found a job.

‘Really?’ Fatima asked, her voice neutral and her French tinged, like her husband’s, with an Algerian accent. She stepped back to the hob, on which she was boiling up meat and bones for the family. It was a conversation they had three times a week, and she was running out of ways to make it sound like she believed him.

‘Yeah, this guy . . . sells old phones in the marketplace . . . said he maybe wanted . . .’ Hakim’s voice petered out.

‘That’s great!’ she said as she stirred the contents of the pot. She drew a deep breath. ‘Hakim, maybe we should go back.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To Algiers. We have family there, and—’

‘Don’t be
stupid
. You
know
I can’t go back there.’

Fatima turned to face him. ‘Maybe we can change our identities . . .’

But she could tell that Hakim was somewhere between panic and anger. ‘You want me to go to prison? Is that what you want? You know what they
do
to people in prison? Life has fucked me up the arse enough already.’

The babies’ wailing became louder. In one corner of her mind Fatima was aware that this evening
they
were at risk of becoming the arguing couple whose voices echoed around the whole block. She didn’t want that, and so she stepped across the room to her husband, took him by the hand and looked at him sincerely. ‘Of course not,’ she whispered. With a glance over at the steaming pot, she said, ‘I’m not so hungry tonight. We’ll feed the little ones, and then you have the . . .’

She stopped. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the red dot again, and inhaled sharply. ‘Did you see that?’

But Hakim was lying back down on the mattress, his chest rising and falling quickly as he calmed himself. ‘Nobody’s watching us,’ he said. ‘Nobody even knows we’re here. Give the kids some food. Their crying’s getting on my nerves.’

Fatima nodded. He was right. Of course he was.

So why had she just shivered, when it was so hot?

She turned her attention to her babies while her husband went back to staring at the ceiling.

The bedsit on the opposite side of the lightwell from Hakim and Fatima’s was in darkness, and almost unbearably hot since the window was closed. Two men occupied it, a squat, blond guy called Hector with a Union Jack tattoo on his forearm, and his lean, muscular companion, whose nickname was Skinner and whose real name even he himself had almost forgotten. Standing motionless, Hector was peering through binoculars mounted on a tripod into the bedsit opposite. ‘Fuckin’ Ada,’ he said. ‘I’m sweating like Jimmy Savile in a playground.’

There was a short silence, only broken by the faint crackling of Skinner’s Gitane as he dragged deeply on it.

‘Can’t you put that fucking cigarette out, mucker?’ Hector asked irritably. ‘It’s like waving a torch at them. I’m sure the bird just looked straight at us.’

Skinner sniffed, then took another drag before he answered. ‘We’re wasting our time here anyway,’ he said, his cockney accent strong, though not quite as strong as Hector’s. ‘We can sort this Algerian fuck-knuckles in our sleep.’

Hector pulled back from the binos and inclined his head. Skinner had a point. As far as terrorists went, the Algerian kid they had under surveillance was hardly Carlos the Jackal. Carlos the Jackass more like.

‘The sooner we make contact,’ Skinner said, ‘the sooner we can be out of this shithole. I say we do it in the morning.’

Hector looked over his shoulder. He could just make out Skinner’s silhouette slumped lazily in a chair by the door, and the red dot of his cigarette as he put it to his mouth. As he dragged on the cigarette, the glow illuminated his features. Shaved head, pronounced Adam’s apple, tattoos above the neckline of his T-shirt.

Skinner was right. The job was straightforward. And Hector sure as hell wouldn’t miss being cooped up in the sweltering room. Surveillance was always the worst part. He stepped back from the binoculars again. ‘Chuck us a tab,’ he said. Skinner threw him a cigarette. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ Hector announced. ‘Happy now?’

Skinner sniffed for a second time, and dragged once more on his cigarette.

At a quarter past eight the following morning, Hakim left his wife and children in the bedsit. The kids were still crying; they had been all night. He had to get out of there. He descended one flight of stairs and paid a visit to the communal toilet. It was just a tiny cubicle with a hole in the floor and there was no light. A good thing too, because it was never cleaned, and the walls and floor were covered with dried excrement. He added to it before heading down to the ground floor and out into rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The morning was already hot, but the crowded pavements and traffic made it feel even hotter. He headed towards Bastille, not because he had any business in that direction, but because he had to walk somewhere. It was a tired part of Paris, full of immigrant stores and faces. For that reason he liked it. It meant his Algerian features were unremarkable. He passed a little café where his countrymen were in the habit of gathering to drink small cups of strong coffee and talk about the old days. Maybe in time he could make friends here. For now, he had to remain anonymous.

So instead he stepped into another café, where the coffee was cheap so long as he stood at the bar. He handed over a single euro – the last of the money he had hidden from Fatima. He was halfway through his drink before he sensed the man standing behind him.

Hakim stared over the brim of his cup into the window behind the bar. The man was squat and tanned, with bleached blond hair, freckles and the remnants of a cut on his lower lip. He carried a grey rucksack over his right shoulder. He placed a gentle hand on Hakim’s left shoulder. Hakim jabbed it away, as if he’d been electrified. His coffee sloshed over his hand.

‘Hakim?’ the man said. His voice had an accent. British? Hakim wasn’t sure.

He turned round slowly.

And then he bolted for the door.

He might have made it out into the street had a second man sitting by the door not been waiting for him to run. This man had a shaved head, sunburned skin and a pronounced Adam’s apple. As he grabbed hold of Hakim’s arm with a tattooed hand, his strength was apparent. Hakim wasn’t going anywhere so long as this guy held on to him.

‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ said the blond man in serviceable French. ‘Not unless you try to run away – in which case my friend Skinner here will break both your fucking legs.’

Skinner said nothing. He just looked at Hakim with unconcealed contempt.

‘Let’s walk,’ said the blond man. He nodded at Skinner, who manhandled Hakim out of the café and into the street. They turned right, back up towards, and then past, Hakim’s block. Skinner didn’t let go of his arm and although they attracted a few strange looks, nobody tried to help him. After a couple of hundred metres they came to a small park. Two tramps sat over on the far side sharing a bottle of unlabelled alcohol. The remaining wooden benches were vacant. Skinner forced Hakim on to one of them and, still gripping his arm, sat down to his right. The blond man sat on Hakim’s left. He rested his rucksack on his lap and, staring straight ahead, continued speaking in French.

‘Your name is Hakim al-Ashaba. Algerian. You entered France illegally with your wife Fatima and your two daughters via Marseilles three months ago. A week prior to that you were arrested parking a Toyota Corolla in front of a government building in Algiers with a boot full of plastic explosive. When an intelligence officer tried to restrain you, you punched him. He fell and hit his head on the kerb. Fatally, as it turned out, but giving you the opportunity to escape.’

The blond man’s words were sledgehammers. Each one of them was true. Hakim realised that his skin had gone clammy. He started to shake. ‘I didn’t
mean
to kill him,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ said the blond man. ‘You hear that, Skinner? He didn’t
mean
to kill him. So that’s all right.’ A pause. ‘Don’t worry, Hakim, we’re not here to turn you in. Not unless . . .’ His voice trailed away and he turned his attention back to the rucksack. He opened it.

The rucksack’s contents caused Hakim to catch his breath. It was filled to the brim with fifty-euro notes. The man lifted one of the bundles, to reveal more below.

‘Can’t be easy,’ he said. ‘You’re damaged goods for your terrorist mates back in Algiers, so they don’t want anything to do with you. You’ve got no job. A family.’

Hakim stared into the middle distance.

The man slowly closed the rucksack. ‘This is yours,’ he said. ‘But only if you do something for us.’

Hakim blinked.

‘What?’ he asked. His voice was hoarse. ‘
What?
’

The blond man looked straight ahead again. ‘Do you know how to use a handgun?’ he asked.

Hakim shook his head.

‘It’s very easy. You’ll only need one shot. And then, all this’ – he patted the rucksack again – ‘is yours.’

‘I’m not a killer,’ Hakim whispered.

‘Yes you are, Hakim. That’s why you’re stuck in a stinking room with a starving family. But if you’re not interested . . .’ The man shrugged and stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said to his companion in English. ‘Let’s go.’

For the first time since the café, Skinner let go of Hakim’s arm. He stood up and the two men walked away.

‘Wait,’ Hakim called after them. And when they didn’t stop, he said it louder. ‘
Wait!
’