A Week in December Read online

  Back in his room, he opened the pizza with extra sugar-dusted dough sticks, Italian dressing and a litre and a half of Coke. The smell of white dough and tomato paste made him salivate as he tore the first slice from the half-yard-wide disc. He’d gone for the Margherita, because although he pretended when in company to prefer the American Hot with extra chilli, he really still preferred the simple cheese and tomato he’d first encountered as a toddler. He wondered in his ravening, post-skunk hunger whether even a family-size pizza would be enough.

  Chewing avidly, he let his gaze drift to the screen. He fast-forwarded a bit, then hit the resume button and sat back. A new contestant had come on. He was a schizophrenic of about fifty, called Alan, who had spent twenty years in psychiatric hospitals but had been released into a ‘care in the community’ scheme when his asylum, one of the original Victorian ones, had been closed by the government, bought by a property developer and turned into ‘luxury apartments with state-of-the-art gym and sauna facilities’. The prospectus described the place as having won ‘two architectural design competitions’, Alan said, without mentioning that the first had been for a county lunatic asylum in 1858.

  For the last fifteen years, Alan had been without a permanent home. He said he hadn’t liked the hospital, it was loud and dirty, but at least he’d felt safe there.

  ‘So,’ said Terry O’Malley, ‘as far as your accommodation’s concerned, it seems you’re in two minds about it.’

  The audience laughed. ‘Schizophrenia ... in two minds ...’ O’Malley underlined his joke for the slower ones.

  ‘That’s not what schizophrenia means,’ said Alan. ‘That’s a misunderstanding. It’s nothing to do with a “split personality” or—’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Barry Levine. ‘Which one of you said that?’

  Finn drank some of the Coke. The huge bottle was unwieldy and some of it washed back over his chin and down his tee shirt.

  Beneath the knockabout surface, the programme got to grips with important issues. Its premium-rate phone lines allowed the public to interact democratically, their opinions counting every bit as much as those of the ‘self-proclaimed experts’. The climax of a series came when the contestants were dispatched to spend a weekend together in a remote but well-appointed one-storey house (the so-called Barking Bungalow) whose exact location was kept secret. Hidden cameras followed them, watching them sleep and eat and clothe themselves, scrutinising their attempts to communicate with one another.

  Alan, the schizophrenic, was losing his way as he tried to explain to Lisa how the voices in his head both mocked and instructed him.

  ‘It’s like being nagged, all the time, by four or five people,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t you just ignore them?’ said Lisa.

  ‘No, the voices are too loud.’

  ‘Blimey, love, you should try being in a girl band. It was like that all the time with Girls From Behind. Lee and Pamilla were the worst. Nag, nag, nag!’

  Finn relit the last inch of his spliff, not wanting to waste it. The pizza had done the business in the end, leaving him happily bloated. He left It’s Madness on in the background while he listened to some music he had downloaded on to his compact, gunmetal grey player. ‘A First Step in Dying’ by Shanghai Radio Gang came through the earpieces and fizzed across his cortex.

  Fetching his laptop from the window seat, Finn went to the Dream Team website to see how his virtual eleven were doing. He had read good reports online of a new Polish striker, Tadeusz ‘Spike’ Borowski, who had just joined one of the big London clubs, and wanted to register him before his price became prohibitive.

  One of his strikers had suffered a knee injury in the first match of the season, and although he was back in action he seemed to have lost his edge. This guy Borowski looked quick and lethal – like Carlton King with a first touch, the Buyers’ Guide said, or Gary Fowler with an IQ.

  Finn dragged the names of players from his subs’ bench on to the numbered icon on the pitch. It was time for a major rethink, a shake-up before the January window. The best players in his shadow team came from clubs that in reality he detested. When he watched Arsenal or Liverpool, he naturally wanted them to be whipped by the Turks or the Spanish in Europe; yet without the steady income of virtual points from their star players, his fantasy eleven would have dropped to Division Two of the Dream Team league.

  Finn closed his eyes for a moment as Shanghai Radio Gang sang the dreamy, robotic start to ‘People of the New Frontier’ before the Alternative smash-and-grab began. The skunk had sharpened his deep appreciation of the sound. The synapses in his brain were charged with electronic joy and solitude. He fell asleep, leaning back against the bed, his face adopting the seraphic look his mother had so loved when he was two or three years old, watched over in his cot by toy bears and monkeys.

  In the background, now unseen by him, the first night at the Barking Bungalow was being played out on the plasma screen.

  Somebody was crying.

  Two

  Monday, December 17

  I

  At about nine o’clock, after the morning rush had subsided, Hassan al-Rashid took the Piccadilly Line to Manor House. He had received an address on a piece of paper sent from Salim, the head of his group, Muslim Youth Coalition, which was based in Bethnal Green. Salim believed the post was a safer way of contacting the members of the cell than e-mail. ‘You might just as well write a letter to the local newspaper,’ he told them. ‘The spooks intercept all that stuff. Also, they can get your computer IP number from the websites you visit and they can track down your phone line and then your address, so if any of you have visited jihadist sites you’d better ditch your hard drive right now. If that means getting a new computer that stays completely clean, so be it. I have funds. I’ll show you how to get rid of the old one.’

  Following Salim’s instructions, Hassan first downloaded some software called Drive+Nuke and selected ‘Total’ from the ‘Level of Erasure’ menu. He then took a hammer to the casing of his computer and extracted the hard disk. Rather to his surprise, it really was a disc, like a shiny CD and about the same size. In his father’s shed he mixed fine-powdered iron oxide and aluminium, both of which he had taken from the lab at college, poured them through a funnel into an empty drinks can, then stuck a magnesium strip in the top. He took this, along with the hard drive, up on to the common at night, put the can on the disk, lit the magnesium strip and retreated. The drive was eliminated, as was the earth to a depth of more than a foot below it. Thermite, Salim told them, could reach a temperature of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Hassan kicked some loose earth over the hole in the ground and made for home. Salim certainly didn’t like to take chances.

  His new machine, unfouled by Internet and e-mail history, remained in its box for a week. He couldn’t find any legitimate use for it. Eventually, he thought he’d better download some songs, go on YourPlace or do a few of the things young people were supposed to do, so that if the police did come calling it would look normal. YourPlace was one of the most boring things he had ever seen. Pictures of millions of grinning kafirs whose lives were so empty it was fun for them to know that someone had ‘jabbed’ their photograph. Dear oh dear. It was almost a relief to know that the main practical use of the site was for sex; at least it had some function – for paedophiles to cruise, for teenage boys to rope in likely-looking girls for sex parties or for older kafirs to find ‘fuck buddies’. Hassan visited the site daily, but left the room while his Internet record clocked up some plausible hours in this parody of a human world.

  Today, he was going to meet for the first time the people with whom he was to wage jihad. The most famous group at this level of activity, boasting that it had precipitated coups in African states as well as fighting in Bosnia and Kuwait, was Hizb ut-Tahrir; but the alliance to which Hassan now belonged claimed to talk less than Hizb and to bomb more. It was called Husam Nar (which translated roughly, he knew from Arabic studies, as Burning Sword), though it rarely referred
to itself by this or any other name; it was an organisation with no headquarters and no records. What it did have was money, and this, Salim told Hassan, came mostly from Saudi Arabia. This news was comforting to Hassan; to know that the money came from the country of Mecca and Medina reassured him in his new identity. Hassan’s gradual progress from local mosque through youth organisations of gradually increasing extremism had been typical enough. The distinctive factor had been the single mentor, Salim. Most young men left behind their early guides in the course of their ascent, but Salim had been with Hassan from the beginning, like a wise uncle.

  Having looked up the street name in the A to Z, Hassan memorised the route from the Tube station and ten minutes later found himself turning into a street with rusty Japanese cars along the kerb and a busy outdoor life – children, men and women of all ages talking in their front gardens, despite the cold, or smoking on the pavement. The house he was directed to looked as shabby as the rest, with one windowpane boarded up and thick grey net curtains on the ground floor. There were three bells by the front door, each with its own wire drilled through the jamb. Hassan pressed ‘Ashaf’, as instructed, and heard heavy footsteps on the uncarpeted hall. It was Salim.

  ‘Come in, brother. You’re the last to arrive.’

  The others were gathered in the back room on the first floor. First, they knelt on the bare floorboards and prayed, facing Walthamstow.

  One of them, Hassan noticed, seemed ill at ease. Although he bent low, he didn’t seem to know the words of the prayers.

  ‘All right, brothers,’ said Salim. ‘This house is ours for as long as we need it. We will all leave at different times, just as we arrived at twenty-minute intervals today. Don’t speak to anyone in the street as you walk away, but don’t be unfriendly. If someone asks you for a light or says hello, just smile vaguely. Do nothing anyone might remember. Now, I want you to introduce yourselves to one another and pick a kafir name that will be yours from now on. When you pick a name, it must be something easy to remember, something that’s connected with where you come from. For instance, I’m from the East End so I’ll call myself Alfie. It’s an old cockney name.’

  He nodded at a boy of about Hassan’s age with the remains of acne showing through his sparse beard. He cleared his throat, but his voice caught nervously. ‘My name is Akbar,’ he said. ‘As you can probably tell, I’m from Yorkshire.’

  ‘Aye. ’appen.’ This was said, in imitation of the Yorkshire accent, by the man who seemed not to know how to say his prayers properly; he was tall, about twenty-five, with a yellowish skin colour and a gold tooth. ‘’appen we’ll call thee Seth, lad,’ he said.

  Salim looked at the youth. ‘Is that all right? Seth?’

  The boy nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Hassan asked the man with the gold tooth.

  ‘My name is Ravi. I’m from Leicester.’ He looked at them challengingly.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a Muslim name,’ said Hassan.

  ‘I was born a Hindu. I converted,’ said Ravi. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

  Hassan shook his head. It did seem odd to him that someone not born Muslim should be engaged on jihad, but he couldn’t explain why. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you can think of anyone famous from Leicester, can you?’ said Ravi.

  ‘Gary,’ said Hassan.

  ‘Who’s Gary then?’

  ‘A footballer,’ said Hassan. ‘Their most famous ever player.’

  ‘Gary’s good,’ said Salim. ‘Now you.’ He nodded at Hassan.

  ‘My name is Hassan,’ he said. ‘And I’m from—’

  ‘Och aye,’ said Gary, né Ravi. ‘I think we all know where ye’re frae, MacTavish.’

  ‘There’s a name that I was called once and it really angered me,’ said Hassan. ‘Someone called me “Jock”. If I’m going to die, I’d like to take that name down with me.’

  Salim nodded. ‘All right. We’ll call you Jock.’

  The last of the five said, ‘My name’s Hanif and I’m from Watford.’ He was bald and thickset, unlike the others, all of whom looked hungry. ‘I bet you can’t name a footballer from Watford.’

  ‘Bet I could,’ said Hassan, ‘but why don’t we call you Elton?’

  ‘Elton?’

  ‘Elton. He’s the chairman. Or he was.’

  ‘It’s good,’ said Salim.

  ‘You seem to know a lot,’ said Elton.

  ‘He’s the brains,’ said Salim. ‘He’s our college boy.’

  Gary the Gold Tooth Hindu, thought Hassan. Seth the Shy One. And Bald Elton. It was easy enough. What would be harder was to remember to call Salim ‘Alfie’ from now on.

  Hassan had a sudden and terrible desire to laugh – at the thought of roly-poly Elton John with his diamanté glasses and his boyfriend and his platform heels having unwittingly given his name to a solemn would-be terrorist ... Salim had occasionally had cause to rebuke him for his descent into laughter: it showed spiritual immaturity, he said. Hassan did believe in purity and truth with all his might; but he had been brought up in a godless country where television and newspapers mocked the social structures night and day ...

  ‘And we’ll call this place “the pub”,’ Salim was saying. ‘So if you hear someone say, “I’m meeting Alfie down the pub” it couldn’t sound more normal, more everyday kafir.’

  ‘When do we get our instructions then?’ asked Seth.

  Salim coughed and walked round the unfurnished room. ‘In a couple of days. For security reasons, it’s best if you don’t know in advance.’

  ‘Why?’ said Gary. ‘It’s not as if we’re going to—’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, didn’t you learn anything in Pakistan?’ Hassan hadn’t seen Salim impose himself like this before. ‘It’s rudimentary. All knowledge is potentially a leak. You are told only what you need to know and not one thing more. The only reason you’re meeting together today is that you’ll need to recognise one another. I also think it’s a good idea to form a bond. But this is as far as it goes. I don’t even know the real name of my superior. I meet him in different places – cafés, parks, even in a pub one time. I just know him as Steve.’

  ‘And what are we going to do on the day?’ said Elton.

  ‘We are going to wage jihad. Each of you has a task. Jock is doing the shopping. Seth and Elton will assemble the ingredients. Gary will help me plan the route and the timing. We’ll all plant the bombs. Today is Monday. We need Jock to have brought everything here by Thursday morning so that Seth and Elton can put it all together.’

  ‘Do we know where we’re going?’ said Gary.

  ‘Yes. I’ve already been there and had a good look. But I won’t be telling you until we meet on Friday.’

  ‘What time on Friday?’ said Hassan.

  ‘I’ll let you know the day before. Why?’

  ‘It’s just ...’ Hassan stopped. ‘It’s difficult to explain. My father is ... is ...’ He felt his throat constrict. He was frightened of Salim’s anger.

  ‘What is it?’ said Salim.

  ‘My father is going to Buckingham Palace to get the OBE,’ said Hassan. ‘And my mother and I have to go with him.’

  There was silence in the little upstairs room. Hassan sensed that the others were not sure whether they should laugh or be indignant. They looked to Salim for a lead.

  He spoke very quietly. ‘The work of the Prophet will take place at its appointed time. And you will be there. I shall give you the exact timings on Thursday, not a moment before.’

  Hassan nodded. He quickly considered the various excuses he could offer to his parents. ‘Sickness’ wouldn’t work: his father would compel him to come, however ill he claimed to be. He would simply have to go out the night before to Pudding Mill Lane and not return. He would later have to claim a loss of memory, an accident with a car or something. His parents would be so pleased that he was safe that they’d forget their d
isappointment at his absence from the palace.

  ‘How will you be in touch? Still post?’ said Elton.

  ‘Have you heard of steganography?’ said Salim.

  Elton shook his head.

  ‘It’s a way of embedding text in a computer file so that it can’t be seen unless you have the right kit for decoding it. I’m going to give you an Internet link and I need you to check it daily. As you know I’ve preferred the post till now, but it could be that in the last forty-eight hours things will move too fast for the Royal Mail. So we need a fallback. There’s a kafir porn site called babesdelight.co.uk. It’s not hard filth like most of them. It’s just naked girls, that’s all, the kind of thing they sell in their most famous high-street family stationer. You get a choice of lots of pictures – sets of pictures in fact. There’s a box called “Search for your girl” and in that you type “Olya”. She’s some Russian hooker. Anyway, the main picture of her, the big money shot, is the tenth, the last on the page. Click and open it up big. Embedded in that, in a particularly intimate place, will be any last-minute instructions. You’ll need to check it hourly from Wednesday at noon. It’s the last place the spooks would expect people like us to be communicating.’

  ‘How do we get to read the hidden message?’ said Seth.

  ‘You can download the tools. Dead simple. The program you want – and you must remember this – is called Stegwriter. You need the Gamma version 16. Got that? Some of the instructions for encoding are in German, but that’s OK. I can handle that. Of course it’s more complicated using an image already on the Web rather than one from my own photo collection, but I have a great little geek to help me. Anyway, decoding is easy for you guys. You download your program. What’s it called again? Seth?’

  ‘Stegwriter, Gamma version 16.’

  ‘Good man. Then basically, you follow the prompts. Open the photo of the girl on – what’s the site, Elton?’

  ‘Babesdelight.co.uk.’ Elton didn’t relish saying the words.