A Fatal Game Read online

  Nicholas Searle

  * * *

  A FATAL GAME

  Contents

  DECEMBER

  MARCH Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Author’s Note

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nicholas Searle is the author of three novels. His first novel, The Good Liar, was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger for the best debut crime novel. Before becoming a writer, Nicholas worked in British intelligence for more than twenty-five years. He lives in Yorkshire.

  By the same author

  The Good Liar

  A Traitor in the Family

  For C, always

  DECEMBER

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, 17:00

  Abu Omar paused as he left the truck by the rear door, looked around, then replaced his baseball cap and continued on his way. The surveillance teams noted his darting eyes and the tenseness of his frame. Jake rushed back to the ops room.

  The powder-blue rucksack containing the books was readily visible on Abu Omar’s back as, glancing at the neat terraced houses, he strolled down Melwood Avenue, lined with wintry trees, weaved between parked cars, and crossed the road, while invisible cameras panned and tilted and zoomed and handed on to the next relay. The surveillance crews thought his calmness seemed forced, and distances were carefully maintained by using the meticulously rehearsed alternates, ready to pick up the follow if he diverted from his route. They knew Abu Omar’s associates would be close by, too, to ensure he wasn’t tailed. Each of them had his own covert retinue, whispering to each other, listening intently through earpieces, deconflicting, avoiding the blue-on-blue.

  Jake watched him on the screen, his boy now, more heavily invested than he had been. Abu Omar’s shoulders swayed with youthful arrogance. As he left one screen he appeared on the next. As he turned into the park opposite the railway station Jake could see his face, indifferent, glassy-eyed as ever. He was chewing gum slowly. An analyst said, ‘Message!’ and almost at the same moment Abu Omar reached into his pocket for his phone. The fact that Abu Omar wasn’t supposed to be carrying a phone registered somewhere in the periphery of Jake’s consciousness but remained there as everyone watched. Abu Omar stopped to read the message and everything stopped with him. ‘It’s on the app,’ said the analyst, meaning it could not be decrypted. A hasty consultation took place on the ops room floor between the SIO, George and Jake.

  ‘Any idea?’

  ‘None. He should phone it through.’

  But Abu Omar didn’t. He paused a moment – it was measured later at 13.2 seconds – seemed to smile and then walked on.

  ‘Call it?’ asked George.

  ‘Not just yet,’ said the SIO. ‘It’s contained.’

  ‘Put a stop to it,’ said Jake, not loudly, but was ignored.

  At this point Abu Omar disappeared from the screen. The camera pulled back at a speed that evoked a nauseous feeling in Jake’s stomach. Or possibly, viewed afterwards, it was fearful premonition. But it couldn’t have been premonition since he didn’t do anything other than gulp down the gobbet of bile that washed on to the back of his tongue. Presentiment of the end of life, perhaps. Presentiment was all. This, however, was the clear vision of hindsight.

  The wider picture showed Abu Omar going into the men’s lavatory. The surveillance coordinator was shouting, ‘Eyes on! Eyes on! Now!’ and on other screens Jake could see a flurry of bodies surging forwards. The firearms commander ordered his officers forward, ready. The helicopter was called up.

  A shaky image from the body-borne of the lead surveillance officer came up on a different screen. Bill, his name had been, Jake recalled later. He ran towards the entrance to the lavatory and slowed to a casual stroll as he went in. It couldn’t have taken him more than ten seconds or so after the command. The camera adjusted quickly to the dark interior and the autofocus closed in on Abu Omar’s back as he stood at the urinal. The flow could be heard and the blue rucksack could be seen clearly on his back. As the surveillance operative took his place at a urinal three places down, Abu Omar zipped up his jeans and disappeared from view. Bill whispered, ‘Washing his hands,’ and the sound of the tap running could be heard, followed quickly by that of the electric hand-dryer. The picture swivelled disconcertingly again and it, too, was making for the exit.

  Abu Omar resumed his nonchalant walk and the surveillance re-formed carefully. The other four had not yet appeared but were under control, converging on the railway station from different directions. The distant surveillance cameras picked up the story once more, as it had been written and rehearsed, and something approaching calm returned to the room. He was thirty seconds from the station. It was rush hour. Twenty-five seconds. The 16:58 London train had just come in and those arriving had to contend with the tide of those heading for their trains to the small affluent feeder towns, home to many workers in the financial services firms housed in the glossy glass-sided buildings that provided much of the city’s prosperity. In their expensive clothes they must have looked alien to Abu Omar and the other boys, who had scratched an existence in the sullen, crumbling, neglected parts of the east side of the town. Ten seconds.

  Almost as an afterthought, the coordinator hollered, ‘Someone check out that bloody toilet. Get it sealed off pronto!’ Two officers were deputed on this sideshow. They would survive. Abu Omar had entered the concourse by now and the cameras had him, in his nice new white £200 trainers, making his way towards the ticket office, his associates coming through the other entrances. Armed police watched from above and edged out of commandeered offices in the station, their hands on their weapons, held covertly under coats and in bags. This was the provision against the bad eventuality.

  Then he thought he could see it as it really was, proceeding to plan. The thing with the toilet had been the usual last-minute scare. Abu Omar had just needed a pee. Jake walked across the room, thinking of later that evening: the debrief, the decompression, the reconfirmation of optimism for the future, the quiet laughter over pizza. He allowed himself the millisecond preparation to smile and to reflect that good old Bill had done a good job. This was when it happened.

  MARCH

  * * *

  1

  MONDAY

  ‘And your feelings, at that moment and subsequently?’

  That moment. The moment when everything fell silent. All those people, up to now busy-busy, talking loudly into telephone handsets, microphones, walkie-talkies, others’ ears, getting the business done, transactions here there and everywhere quick as you like, quick as the busiest trading floor, move your team into position four-nine-niner, hold your people back, get the chopper up, pan the view, extend the angle, chop-chop, people moving from here to there and then elsewhere and then back again to take up their stations, all that noise. Outgoing voices with a rich, reassuring calmness; incoming reduced by the electronics to a reedy thinness that went well with the normal, carefully restrained undertone of operational panic. Static. On the air. That self-consciously serious, TV-show-mimicking ops room nonsense he’d never relished, unlike many of the others. All gone quiet. The vibration under the floor and the distant boom had provided the critical information. The screens told him everything he already knew, at that moment.r />
  The moment when he understood his life had ceased. Might as well have, at any rate. The point, though, was that their lives had ceased, with a literal finality. Sixty-three of them. He hadn’t known the number, not until later; it’d taken a couple of days or more to do the calculation, to include those who didn’t pull through in hospital and the unaccounted-fors, and to count and calculate the limbs, but he knew it was bad. People. Not numbers. Numbers were numbers; they numbed the reality. Real lives. That was the point.

  Each of them was reduced now to fatality or casualty, for the media to pick over and harvest for stories. Harrowing personal-interest stories, accompanied by cheerful holiday snaps cajoled from relatives or gleaned from Facebook that somehow sucked out the personal interest and reclaimed the people as public possessions, owned by all – but mainly the press and TV and social media – complex souls reinvented and remarketed as mawkish one-dimensional symbols of our diverse mortality. As if somehow designed to reassure and unsettle at the same time.

  Close call for some surviving victims whether it would have been preferable to have died there, in close vicinity; instantly, more or less. What could the quality of life afterwards be, physically or emotionally?

  For him it wasn’t a close call by any stretch. He’d much rather have exchanged his meagre self-satisfied existence for any of theirs – all of them, preferably – in a ghoulish trade-off, as he’d watched the screens and become part of the collective shock and awe of the thing. Easy to say. Easy to think.

  Staring blankly over the head of the counsel at the white wall beyond him, he placed his right hand in his jacket pocket, reaching for his keys, as if the familiar feel of the cool metal might settle him back to the present.

  The covert surveillance cameras nearby had continued to operate for a moment or so before their own fates became evident, like chickens whose lives have ended but they don’t know it. Those with a more distant vantage had showed, then, falling dust and debris that, if he were fanciful, might have conferred a certain balletic, grotesque grace on the scene. He was not fanciful; never had been, wasn’t now.

  Later. The TV images had kicked in, as they always did: the chain reaction of endless, pointlessly bleating burglar alarms triggered across the city; sprinting, stumbling people captured on shaky mobile phone images by those who recognized a media event in motion; emergency service vehicles accelerating across the scene with apparent purpose, sirens blaring, blue lights cutting ice through the evening; then the cordons of police tape in front of which reporters were reduced to repeating, over and over, the banalities that had been uttered in Nice and London and Brussels and Barcelona and Berlin; the scrum of those reporters and their cameramen jostling for the prime vantage points and vying vainly for new things to say. Suddenly everything had been at one remove: fictional. The awful reality had been subjugated to the viewer figures and social media hits that could be squeezed out of the emotion of these events.

  The moment when his stomach hadn’t so much lurched as vanished, drawing bile into the vacuum before projecting it bitterly into his mouth as he urged involuntarily, emptily. Some in the ops room had actually vomited on to their workstations, souring the calm, subdued-lighting, air-conditioned atmosphere where orders were issued coolly and logs maintained.

  The meaning he’d known – all of it, every fragment – had vaporized and he’d known it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He didn’t matter. His life and loves and career and foibles and strengths and weaknesses didn’t matter.

  Because it was his mistake. Because without knowing it those sixty-three and the countless others condemned to life had relied upon him. They had trusted him. He had betrayed them and failed them.

  He withdrew his hand from his pocket. He couldn’t see anyone in the room other than his inquisitor, the other legal people and the Chair. He knew they were there, the real people, beyond the carefully installed panels.

  It reduced, almost mathematically, to before and after. Before, he’d been cheerful enough, almost relentlessly positive. Mind you, memory might well be as mangled and twisted as everything else inside his head. One comment in an annual appraisal years before stuck in his mind: ‘What Jake Winter lacks in charisma he certainly makes up for in enthusiasm and work rate.’ He’d thought it hurtful, had no conception that his sour supervisor might be trying to be helpful.

  The product of half an upbringing in a fifteen-shack settlement in rural New Zealand and half in this city he now called home, child of a mixed marriage between an Englishwoman and a Maori man, he knew he was a strange person to be among Her Majesty’s secret sentinels. But somehow he had found his way here, on the road to his failure.

  He knew his mind was wandering and time was passing. His hand went back into his pocket and found once more the familiar profile of his front-door key. He stabbed himself gently in the palm with it, for some perverse comfort, some relief of the deadening. He struggled to deliver himself back to the air-conditioned room in City Hall where the inquiry was taking place.

  Disbelief. That’s what he’d felt. But with it the acknowledgement that it was always going to end up in a room just like this one, here and now, despite all the inner bravado.

  The silence sat for another moment or two.

  ‘In your own time,’ said Mr Kerr, counsel for the victims and families, pursing his lips.

  ‘Can you repeat the question please?’ said Jake Winter.

  Mr Kerr looked at him testily. ‘We’ve established that you were in the operations room when the explosion took place. How did you feel when it happened?’

  ‘Feel?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Feel.’

  The members of the panel, the Chair, the inquiry’s counsel, the Service’s legal representatives and his own lawyer were, like Mr Kerr, watching him keenly. The other people couldn’t see him behind the screen, the families or the survivors. But no one really survived something like this. He wished they could see him. He wanted, at last, to say it all. But he was not an unreliable person. As ever, he would be dutiful.

  ‘I felt terrible,’ he said eventually. ‘Of course I felt terrible.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Kerr. And then, after a moment’s consideration, ‘Can you elucidate?’

  ‘I’m not sure. How does anyone feel at a moment like that?’

  ‘The inquiry is not interested in how anyone should feel at a moment like that, Mr, erm …’

  It occurred to Jake that it must be difficult for them, questioning someone with a witness number rather than a name. None of those tiny gaps that the repeating of a name would afford, allowing you to hone the next sentence.

  ‘… we are interested in what you felt, no one else.’

  ‘I felt shattered. Numbed. At the same time I felt that my feelings were beside the point.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It didn’t matter what you felt. What had happened was more important. It overrode everything else.’

  ‘Did you feel guilt?’

  Duncan Blakeley, his own lawyer, stirred. ‘I don’t know what this line of questioning is seeking to achieve,’ he said. ‘Undoubtedly the witness experienced a range of emotions at the time. None of which may be relevant to the actual state of affairs.’

  The counsel for the inquiry looked at the Chair and raised her eyebrows.

  The Chair said, ‘Subjective it may be, but we have to remind ourselves that this is not a court of law. We’re not here to apportion individual blame. We’re here to examine the sequence of events and to diagnose what, if anything, could have been done better. So I think the line of questioning is legitimate. Unless, that is, you would rather your client not respond, in order to avoid the risk of self-incrimination in subsequent proceedings?’

  Mr Blakeley shook his head.

  ‘Mr Kerr, please carry on.’

  ‘So,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘Guilt?’

  ‘I felt … responsible.’

  ‘I should imagine so. Responsible. Would you care to explain precisely why?
’

  ‘I should have thought it was obvious,’ he said dully.

  ‘Well, to my clients little seems to be obvious. They’re trying to make sense of this, as are most of the rest of us. Anything you may deign to share with us would no doubt be appreciated.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I feel responsible because Abu Omar was my agent.’

  ‘Abu Omar, the suicide bomber.’

  ‘So far as I know that’s not clear. The forensic examinations couldn’t establish firmly whether the device was initiated by him, by someone else, whether there was a timing device of which he was unaware or whether it went off by accident. The force of the explosion …’

  ‘All right. Let’s be punctilious. It’s important to be punctilious. But your … agent … was carrying the rucksack?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We were trying to prevent the attack that was being planned. Abu Omar was working for us.’

  ‘In what way, “working for you”?’

  ‘As a covert human intelligence source, to use the technical expression. A CHIS.’

  ‘And how did you first meet?’

  Was it hot in the room? thought Jake Winter. No, the air conditioning was functioning, but he felt hot.

  ‘Abu Omar was a British national. He grew up here and moved to London at the age of eighteen, to study. He dropped out of university at the age of twenty. He married and he and his wife had a son before they came back home to live with his parents. At that stage his views started to become more extreme. They’d always been an observant Muslim family but he began attending private prayer sessions with a group about which the local imam had expressed concern. This group expressed extreme Salafi views and caused trouble at the mosque. Several of them, among them Abu Omar, went overseas to join the fighting against what they considered kafir forces. He returned to the UK about six months ago and that was when I first met him.’