Killing for the Company (27 page)

They could weep, though. And they did.

Hussam didn’t shoot them from a distance because he didn’t want to risk hitting his accomplices who were on the other side of these final passengers. Instead he strode towards them until he was just a metre away. Their screams grew louder and merged with the sound of the wind rushing through the broken window. The air was thick with their terror.

Hussam downed them with a single burst. The screaming stopped as the rounds ripped into the meat of the passengers’ bodies, mashing the teenage boy’s face and bursting the jugular vein of one of the women. The group fell as a single unit, and their dead bodies propped each other up like martyrs at a stake.

Only now did Hussam look back. Only now did he pause to contemplate their handiwork: the blood and the gore and the gruesome look of absolute terror on the faces of those victims where the bullets had entered below the neck. It neither pleased him nor appalled him. It was what it was. It was what it had to be.

The four men faced each other, two on either side of the propped-up corpses. Hussam felt a trickle run down his forehead and over his thick, black eyebrows. He blinked hard as a mixture of sweat and blood stung his eyes. He nodded at the others, and they placed their 74s on the ground. Those weapons were finished with. It was time now for the Mother of Satan to do its work.

‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ He announced the Takbir in a loud voice so that it could be heard over the noise of the train and the wind from the broken window.

The others opened their mouths to return the incantation, but they were interrupted for a few seconds as another train hurtled past them in the opposite direction.

Hussam’s eyes glowed. ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ he repeated, and this time his prayer was met with a response.

‘
Allahu Akbar!
’

The eyes of his compatriots were also burning, their bloodied bodies trembling. All four of them held their left hands aloft, ready to flick the switches that would transport them to paradise. Hussam closed his eyes. For a brief moment he saw his wife and child as they should be.

Smiling at him.

Waiting.

He opened them again, and nodded.

That nod was the sign. All four men flicked their switches, and detonated.

SIXTEEN

19.28 hrs.

It had taken two hours for the images to circle the earth.

The gnarled wreckage of the train, its two middle carriages blown skywards, the front and two rear carriages lying at an angle to the rails and crumpled into the sidings, lay still. Great floodlights had been erected in the field adjacent to the crash site, illuminating the scene of devastation as brightly as a night-time football match, and supplemented by the spots from two choppers circling overhead. There was a constant hum from aircraft and the electricity generators on the ground, and a flash of neon-blue emergency lights from vehicles approaching off-road. Three air ambulances were on standby. As the paramedics combed through the debris, it became increasingly clear that the ambulances would not be required to evacuate the casualties; they would be required to transport the dead.

Fifty metres from the blast site, a luminous-orange cordon had been erected, guarded by uniformed police officers to keep the small crowd of journalists at bay. They were a hard-bitten lot. Like the doctors and policemen, they were used to scenes of trauma. Such sights were their bread and butter, but even they, tonight, were sickened. They remembered 9/11 – some of them had been there – and the uneasy sensation everyone had that day that the world was about to change. They had that sensation again now, and these usually pushy professionals were restrained. Their cameras did not deviate from the crash site, where a plume of smoke still rose into the air, disturbed occasionally by a gust of wind but otherwise eerily straight.

One of these journalists was younger than the others. His name was Andy Carrington and he was just twenty-three. So far in his life he had seen three dead bodies. One was a tramp who’d died of exposure when Andy was on the night shift of his local paper back home in Norfolk. One was a car crash victim who’d been hit by a drunk-driver just after chucking-out time, and Andy had been surprised by how little blood there had been. The third had been his grandfather, lying on a bier in the funeral home, as cold as ice but immaculately presented, his skin shiny and his thin hair neatly combed.

None of these corpses had prepared him for the sight of the bodies being taken to the air ambulances that evening.

He’d run over to the point, about thirty metres from the throng of other journalists, where two policemen were holding up the cordon to allow a stretcher carried by two paramedics to pass. As he ran in that direction he was vaguely aware that none of his colleagues was doing the same. He put that down to his own hunger – his determination to show his mettle as a journalist. The previous night he’d been reporting on a film premiere from Leicester Square, and now he wanted to show his quality at reporting serious news rather than tittle-tattle about Angelina Jolie to be printed alongside a shiny picture of her, all lips and tits.

‘Stay away, son,’ one of the coppers called when they saw him approaching. It didn’t sound so much like an instruction as a piece of advice, and it was advice this young man was quick to ignore. The stretcher had passed the cordon now and the policemen had lowered it again.

‘Honest, mate, it’s not something you want to . . .’

Andy stopped.

He was about two metres from the stretcher when he saw the corpse in its entirety. It was a woman. He could tell that from the remnants of her clothes rather than her features, and this was because she no longer
had
any features. Her face was no longer a face. It was just a canvas of bloodied pap and shattered bone. There were two indentations where the eyes had once been, and a vague protrusion for the nose. Her left jawbone had been shattered and was now hanging from the right-hand side of her face, as though attached by the flimsiest of hinges. Her neck and chest were darkly stained, as if she had vomited blood.

But it was none of this that chilled Andy’s soul and made him want to retch. It was what he saw further down the woman’s body. She had obviously been pregnant. Her abdomen had spilled open and he could quite clearly see – bloodied and contorted but quite distinct – the figure of her unborn child.

It took a split second for Andy to take all this in. A split second to yank his gaze away as a terrible nausea suddenly overcame him, accompanied by a curious sense of shame, as though he had looked at something that should never be looked at. He realised why none of the older hands from the press corps had joined him.

‘If you’re going to chuck up,’ the same policeman who had warned him away from the stretcher called to him, ‘don’t do it near us, eh?’

Andy took a deep breath and tried to settle himself. ‘They, er . . . they found any survivors?’ he asked, more to keep his mind off the sickness than anything else.

The two policemen glanced at each other. ‘They’ll brief you when there’s anything to know,’ the copper replied, before looking back over the cordon. ‘You might want to move along now. There’s another stretcher coming.’

Andy looked over towards it. Two more paramedics, one more body. He could see its outline, but he couldn’t bear to look any closer. He nodded at the policemen and started staggering back towards the press pack. The image of that woman and her unborn baby was burned into his mind. He knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

As he approached the others, his cameraman came running up to him. ‘TX in two, Andy. Jesus, mate . . . you all right?’

Andy didn’t answer. He had to get his head together. Formulate the words of his upcoming broadcast in his mind. Settle himself.

Easier said than done.

He was still pale and nauseous as he stood between the cameraman and the cordon, a radio mike clipped to his lapel. The words he had cobbled together tumbled from his wind-bitten lips.

‘At approximately twenty past five this afternoon, an explosion is thought to have taken place here on the Bristol to London line.’

The image of the baby flashed in front of his mind, and he stumbled. The cameraman made a rolling gesture with his right arm to encourage him to keep talking. Andy took a deep breath.

‘Although the authorities have yet to make a statement regarding the source of the explosion, there seems little doubt that it is linked to almost identical events that occurred at the same time on the outskirts of Washington DC, Paris and Delhi.’

He paused, so that live feeds showing scenes of similar devastation across the globe could be transmitted into the living rooms of the country: daytime in Washington, still night everywhere else, but chaos and calamity and weeping no matter what the hour. In Paris, the camera cut to the sight of a screaming young child being restrained by her tear-sodden mother, clearly howling for a loved one – perhaps her father – on the wrecked train. The journalist could only hear the sounds through his earpiece, and not see the images. He was thankful for that.

‘Paramedics have been combing through the wreckage for a little more than an hour,’ the young journalist continued, his voice wavering a little. ‘So far, the only passengers I have seen have been . . . have been dead.’

He paused.

‘As we stand here,’ he continued, his voice a little quieter than before, ‘relatives of the passengers on the 16.55 are beginning to gather in a neighbouring field, anxious for news of their . . .’

He felt his voice cracking.

He turned, and looked back towards the train. The floodlights. The neon blue. The smoke.

The woman.

The child.

He tried again. ‘Anxious for news of their loved . . .’

But his voice failed him once more, and to his horror he realised he was breaking down live on camera. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before putting one hand to his forehead. ‘
I’m very sorry . . .
’

With these words Andy Carrington walked out of shot, pulling his mike from his lapel. The camera didn’t follow him. Instead it kept itself firmly focused on the train. The cameraman could see that Andy was not in a state to talk to the nation, and some sights, after all, need no words to accompany them.

20.00 hrs.

Albany Manor was a grand estate in rural Buckinghamshire, surrounded by acres of woodland and boasting its own chapel, paddocks and enough outbuildings to house a small village. The phone calls had started a minute after the blast and were still continuing. Alistair Stratton had declined to take any of them.

Stratton’s PA, Christopher Wheatly, was an eager young man who hoped one day to go into politics himself. This was why he was willing, despite his trust fund and his lofty sense of entitlement, to suck up to the one-time British PM turned Middle East peace envoy. The outside world saw in Alistair Stratton a man of charm, a man whose conviction was obvious even to those who disagreed with him. Wheatly knew a different person: a person of quick temper and obstinacy, small-minded in many ways and a difficult man to like. When the White House came on the line at 20.10 hrs UK time, Wheatly knocked on the door of his boss’s office.

‘Come.’

Stratton was standing in front of a painting to which an entire wall of the office was devoted. Wheatly knew nothing about art – it wasn’t his thing – but he did know that this particular painting, a hellish scene of burning buildings and dead bodies, was by Hieronymus Bosch and had been acquired anonymously at a Berlin auction for the sum of twelve million euros.

Stratton gave the young PA a crushing look when he announced that Washington wanted to speak to him. ‘I said no calls. You do understand what “no calls” means?’

Wheatly felt himself blushing. ‘I just thought you . . . you might want to speak to the White House . . . they’re jolly keen to . . .’

But Stratton just walked over to his desk, took a seat and picked up a folder. Wheatly caught sight of an ornate, monogrammed ‘G’ on the front of the folder as he stood there awkwardly. After a few seconds, Stratton looked up, seemingly surprised that he was still there. ‘No calls,’ he said.

Wheatly was learning fast. Not only that the private personas of the powerful were very different to their public images, but also that the powerful were not always the first people to get their hands on the choicest information. He was astonished when, just after nine o’clock, the TV coverage had been interrupted for breaking news, delivered by a breathless reporter standing at the crash site.

‘
The BBC has learned that a small militant Palestinian group, the Union for Free Palestine, has claimed responsibility for the attacks. The UFP is loyal to the Palestinian administration, Hamas. So far Hamas have declined comment.
’

How had the press had this information before Stratton, the Middle East peace envoy?

As the evening wore on, Wheatly grew increasingly ragged – not on account of the TV footage of the train attacks – but from the long hours of refusing phone calls from the most powerful people in the world. He was no shrinking violet, but the aides in Washington, London and Tel Aviv gave such withering responses to his inability to put his boss on the line that it was starting to get him down. That and Stratton’s steadfast silence. With the exception of the short statement he dictated for Wheatly to release to the press wires when the news about the UFP came through, it almost felt as if Stratton was cocooning himself away from the outside world.