Three Hours(72)
‘Everyone’s doing their damnedest,’ Lysander says.
‘The significance of belonging to a terrorist organization isn’t only in the way the two gunmen are going to behave and whether or not we can negotiate,’ Stuart Dingwall says. ‘It’s that belonging to this group means they have a terrorist organization behind them, one that we believe is highly efficient and skilled. We’ve just seen that in their sophisticated use of bots on Twitter. It’s likely that if they have a drone, it’s of military grade so can withstand these conditions, and is being operated by someone away from the campus.’
This makes sense to Rose; they’ve had reports of Victor’s footsteps walking up and down almost continuously, so although Victor would probably enjoy using a surveillance drone, it would be hard to do so at the same time as terrorizing everyone in Old School.
‘Belonging to a terror group also makes it more likely that there’s another gunman on the school grounds,’ Stuart says.
‘Deakin and Alton are part of the conspiracy to keep him secret?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘If he exists, yes,’ Stuart replies.
‘Any sign of a third gunman?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘Surveillance UAVs and helicopters haven’t found anything,’ an officer reports. ‘But in conditions like this, and with a campus this size, that doesn’t mean very much.’
‘If there is another gunman,’ Stuart says, ‘he’s likely to be a senior member with paramilitary training; he would know how to keep out of sight.’
‘Do we know the whereabouts of Rafi and Basi Bukhari?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘We think Basi is in the Junior School building and I’m pretty sure Rafi went to find him,’ Rose says.
The briefing ends.
A few moments of hush in the room and they can hear the storm outside the open door.
Rose tries to ring Rafi, but he doesn’t answer.
*
The vicious icy wind whips against Rafi’s face. He’s running through bracken up to his thighs, heavy with snow, but he may be running in the wrong direction. It’s snowing more heavily and he still cannot find the path, cannot orientate himself.
He remembers clinging on to Basi’s T-shirt on the beach in Egypt so they wouldn’t be separated. Next to them a little girl’s father blew up armbands as if she was going in a swimming pool. Hours later, they’d had to wade through the sea in the dark to get to the boat. Basi was quickly out of his depth. Rafi tried to hold him up above the waves so that they could reach the boat, but he wasn’t strong enough or tall enough, and it was getting too deep to keep Basi’s face above the water.
*
The door creaks like someone is pushing it, but it’s the wind, Ratty, just the wind, that’s all, and there’s nothing to be frightened of, and when Rafi gets here he’ll make them laugh, really he will.
When they were near to Italy, men wearing big white hoods got on to their boat with masks over their faces and white suits and gloves, and he thought they were exterminators, and started crying, just like he is now, all crouched down in a boat just like now, but Rafi said: ‘Look, Little Monkey! They’ve sent astronauts from Planet Almiriykh to welcome us!’ And then they really did look like astronauts.
Creaks are closer to him, but it’s just the canoes on their hooks because the wind has got in through the door and is pushing them, that’s all it is. Not the man in the dark.
There was this other time, they were all really cold and wet, even colder than he is now, and a man had got on to the boat and given them thin metal crumply blankets and he’d wanted a real blanket, soft and heavy, with Mama tucking it around him, and then Rafi said, ‘Basi, we’re a box of chocolates,’ and that’s what they looked like, all crammed into their boat with the gold wrappers around them.
16.
11.16 a.m.
Rose pulls Thandie’s jacket around her as she walks from the command and control vehicle towards the Portakabin; squalling wind tunnels of snow between the lines of parked emergency vehicles. Now they know that it’s a terrorist attack, the government will be involved and potentially the military. COBRA, a crisis response committee headed by the prime minister, will be convened. This event is again escalating and expanding.
And she thinks there are others involved too, secret and hidden, because when Bronze Commander asked Lysander if he could access the terrorists’ encrypted material on the dark net, Lysander had said, ‘Everyone’s doing their damnedest’; she doesn’t think he was only referring to his computer forensics team. There’s a rumour that Lysander used to work for GhostSec, an offshoot of Anonymous, which attacks ISIS websites on the dark net and is believed to have thwarted several potential terrorist attacks; the rumour also goes that Lysander was personally responsible for replacing an ISIS website with an advert for Prozac; she’s never heard him joke so thinks it unlikely. She does believe that he took down close to a hundred child pornography sites. And she’s heard that some people living in totalitarian regimes, who use the dark net to publish and read uncensored news, track child abusers and terrorist organizations. She imagines them all hunting in the dark net to help the children and staff at the school. Victor Deakin won’t have taken into account Lysander and his army of ghosts.
She opens the door of the Portakabin. There’s a young negotiator sitting with Beth Alton, one of Dannisha’s team who will advise Beth on what to say to Jamie, but Jamie still hasn’t answered Beth’s calls. Rose sits down next to Beth, but Beth looks away from her and presses a number, one button because Jamie is in her favourites, top of the list. Rose wonders how many times she’s tried to phone him now.