Baptism Read online

  George leaned forward and the gap between his hand and the gun closed even further.

  Do it now, George, do it now.

  He lunged forward, arm outstretched but, as his fingers approached the checkered grip of the stock, Denning stepped back and spun around. Before George could register the lack of anything solid within his hungry grasp, the end of the silencer was pressed against his forehead. All the nervous anxiety of the past five minutes was spontaneously evacuated from his lungs in a gasp.

  “Ssssshhhhh, George, keep it down,” said Denning, his voice steady and measured and betraying no sign of his sudden exertion. “We don’t want to alarm the passengers, do we? Now, on your knees.”

  George stood his ground. If he was going to get a bullet in the head there was no way that he was going to kneel for it. Denning pressed the gun harder against his skin.

  “Kneel, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.” There was no anger in his voice. It was calm and measured and George knew that if he allowed his natural cussedness and rebellious nature to get the better of him then he was a dead man. As he knelt, he felt the trainee driver’s still lukewarm blood soak into his standard-issue navy London Underground trousers. The end of the gun barrel remained pressed against his forehead.

  “You’ve got a nerve.” Denning’s tone of voice had changed. Though still hushed, it was more high-pitched, angry, as he forced the end of the silencer against George’s skin.

  “Did you read the scriptures when you were at school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember any?”

  “None in particular. I’ve never had much time for religion.”

  “Come on, you must remember something.”

  “The Lord’s Prayer, I suppose.”

  “Everyone knows the Lord’s Prayer. How about the psalms?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  Terror made George’s voice high-pitched too. It was a child’s voice. He was a boy again, frightened and alone in the playground as the bully approached. But whatever might happen to him in these next few moments, he was determined that he wouldn’t give this creep any satisfaction in seeing his fear.

  “Come on, everyone remembers Psalm 23.” Denning’s voice hissed with fury, although its volume level was still low enough that anyone on the other side of the door to the carriage would hear nothing more than a whisper. “Everyone knows it. Come on.”

  “The Lord is my shepherd? That one?”

  “The Lord is my shepherd, that’s right. Now say it.”

  “I don’t know it all the way through.”

  “Then say as much as you can remember.”

  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .”

  “Excellent, the King James version. That’s good, now keep going.”

  “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters . . . uh . . .”

  “Come on, George.”

  “I can’t remember any more.”

  “Try!” Denning’s breath blasted into George’s face. It smelled sour and earthy.

  “He saveth my soul?” It was something to do with soul. But Denning remained silent. So maybe this was it. He had got it wrong so now he must die. He thought of the trainee driver, how the life had gone out of him and the muscles in his body had relaxed as the first jet of blood pumped from his head and he dropped to the floor.

  “He restoreth my soul.” Denning had the voice of a petulant schoolmaster now.

  “He restoreth my soul . . .”

  “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Now you must remember the next bit, George, you must.”

  “Something to do with the valley of the shadow of death.”

  “Got it in one. How apt. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” He was into his stride now. His voice was back to its soft purring best. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Now George, I want you to say the next bit with me. Okay?”

  George was going to die. These would be the last moments of his life; his last glimpse would be the blood-caked interior of a 1995 stock Northern Line tube train. When it came, he wouldn’t even know he’d been shot; he’d be dead by the time his body hit the floor. Just like the trainee driver, blood spraying around the cab.

  “If you’re going to kill me, do it. Don’t make me recite all this shit.”

  “Shit, is it? Some of the most beautiful and poignant words ever committed to paper. You’re such a disappointment. Aren’t you going to beg me for your life?”

  “No.”

  “Right, well let’s finish the psalm.”

  “Not if you’re going to kill me at the end of it.”

  “I’ll definitely kill you if you don’t. So repeat after me: surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Say it.”

  “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

  “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

  “Just kill me if you’re going to.”

  “Say the words, George.”

  The end of the silencer broke the skin on George’s forehead and he felt warm blood mingle with sweat.

  “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Every nerve in his body was jangling, waiting for the bullet. For the first time all day, he felt cold. A ball of ice in his abdomen radiated a feverish chill through his body.

  “Do it,” said George. “Just fucking do it.”

  “You almost sound as though you want me to. Things not going well at home?” Denning took the end of the silencer from against George’s forehead. “The fact is I’m not going to kill you. You’re my accomplice, my man on the inside, my confidant.” His voice gave no hint of the violence that was to follow. Denning grabbed a handful of George’s hair and forced his head downward, crushing it cheek to cheek against the trainee driver’s bloody face. The skin was cold meat against George’s sweating face. He could smell the blood.

  “That’s what’ll happen to you if you try to stop me doing what I need to do. Take a long, hard look. I didn’t do this lightly. You think I can just drill a hole in a man’s head without batting an eyelid? It’s hard, George. I’m not a murderer. Have you ever considered the strength of will it takes to do this? Have you?” George’s cheekbone was grinding against the corpse’s beneath it. “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever stopped to think that perhaps the jihadis are the greatest embodiment of human endeavor and they are right to do what they do? Maybe America is the devil. Think about it. Shopping malls, happy meals, fat people, TV evangelists, Mickey Mouse with extra fries to go. The banality of evil in glorious Technicolor.”

  Tommy let go of George’s hair and George pulled himself into a kneeling position once again, clawing at the blood smeared on his cheek.

  “Now I want you to get back on the radio and speak to the passengers. They are still your responsibility, I believe. Are they not?”

  “Yes they are.” George stood up and looked down at his blood-soaked clothes. “What do you want me to say?”

  Denning opened up the M door set into the front of the train and maneuvered the trainee driver’s body through, letting it drop onto the track outside. As he slammed the door shut again, he said, “Let’s give them a lift. They’ve been very good, very patient. Let’s tell them you’ve had the all-clear to proceed to Tottenham Court Road station from where they will be able to make alternative travel arrangements. And on behalf of London Underground, you’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

  “Even though it’s not true?”

  “Even though it’s not true.”

  “What if they don’t believe me?”

  “Oh, come on. You know as well as I do that people will believe anything if they want to badly enough. Now hurry
up and put them out of their misery. For the time being at least.”

  George picked up the handset and held it to his mouth. Denning watched him, smiling.

  10:10 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, rear cab

  There was no turning back after Belle had killed the two men in the tunnel. The thud of the shots and the crimson mist that hung in the air for a few seconds after the two bodies had fallen felt like a demarcation line. Simeon watched her as she sat back down in the driver’s seat of the rear cab after her expedition to retrieve the two Glock pistols from the bodies.

  “Seventeen 9mm rounds in the handle,” she said, admiring the guns.

  “I know.”

  He did know. He liked guns. Not as much as Belle did, of course. Although it was more than like with Belle. It was love. She was obsessed.

  “A brace of Glocks,” she said and smiled. “Like a brace of pheasant and brand new by the looks of them.”

  She didn’t look disturbed. She didn’t look as though she could kill two men as easily as that and then sit there and smile about it. Her dark hair was tied back. Earlier on, when they took the driver’s wife and children, she had worn a black woolen skullcap but she had taken it off as they entered the rear cab of the train at Morden. She was pretty, almost elf-like. He liked petite women. They accentuated his masculinity, made him feel more in control. He had suspected that all her gung-ho assurances that she was ready for this mission were just false bravado and, when it came time, she would bottle it. But he was wrong. She had maintained her composure throughout and had shot the two men in the tunnel and then gone to fetch their guns with all the excitement of a child on a shopping trip for a new toy.

  It had been a tough few months. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, prison would have been preferable to his time at Madoc Farm with the brothers and sisters of Cruor Christi. But it was a deal that he had struck. He was working for British Intelligence now. It sounded grand. He had even told his mother—told her to keep her mouth shut about it—and she had been impressed. She thought it was like James Bond, poor mad cow. It was the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Maybe if it went well today, her final few coherent memories might be of him as a hero. But it was a fragile hope. He had a bad feeling about all this.

  Say what you like about Tommy Denning. Extremist nut job maybe, but he was clever. The kid was forever reading. There was the Internet as well during the hours when the generator was up and running. There was an unspoken rule that Tommy would get priority when using the single desktop PC that catered to Madoc Farm’s IT needs. It was as though the others realized that it was a form of release for him and without it he would become even more high strung and opinionated than usual. That ramshackle old farmhouse on the side of a mountain was bad enough without Tommy Denning being upset.

  Some of the brothers seemed to enjoy the spartan existence. It was all in the name of God and therefore all part of the deal. What do you need nice food for when you’ve got God? Why bother with hot water to wash in when you’ve got God? What use home comforts when you’ve got bone-chilling drafts, fluttering candles, and God? God lived among the brothers and sisters of Cruor Christi as surely as the rats did. Sometimes he was everlasting and almighty, sometimes gentle and all-knowing, but he was always there.

  When she had raised up the Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper’s rifle she had fitted with a homemade silencer, he hoped she was just using the telescopic sight to see who was approaching. She had a name for the gun. She called it the Pulverizer because of what the high-velocity dum-dum bullets—which she customized herself by filing a cross into the end of each lead cap—could do to the pumpkins that she used for target practice around the farm. And the men she shot might as well have been vegetables for all the remorse she showed for having shot them.

  When she opened fire, it sent Simeon’s rising sense of panic off the scale. He was frozen to the spot as she calmly muttered, “Bingo!” and then resighted on the only remaining shadow in the tunnel and fired the second shot, congratulating herself on her marksmanship with a whispered, “Gotcha!” It would all be worth it—he had to keep telling himself that—it would all be worth it in the end. Besides, what choice did he have?

  “So go on,” she said with a Glock in each hand. “Tell me about Helmand.”

  “I’ve told you loads of times.”

  “Tell me again. I need to hear it again today.”

  There was no point denying her. If he did, she would become agitated and it was essential that she remained calm. Until the time came. Maybe telling the story might help him stay calm too. He looked down at the floor, at the bloody footprints that Belle had left there after she had collected the guns from the tunnel, and he cast his mind back to Afghanistan.

  “What you’ve got to bear in mind is that our softly-softly approach with the locals had all been forgotten—there was none of that hearts-and-minds bollocks.”

  “Bollocks, yeah,” said Belle, like she knew.

  “We were on a routine patrol. One minute there we are, two Land Rovers, a few kids playing on a dirt track, everything nice and calm. I’m in the second vehicle, sitting in the back, and I’m miles away, thinking about my little boy, Josh—he was just two then—and thinking about what I’m going to get him for Christmas. Something from Hamleys—you know, the big toy shop in London.”

  There was no hint of recognition on Belle’s face and she looked as though she found this diversion from the narrative annoying.

  “Anyway, suddenly there’s a bang up ahead. The first Land Rover had taken an RPG . . .”

  “Oh yeah, er, erm, a prop . . . a, prop . . .”

  “A rocket-propelled grenade.”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve read about them.”

  Maybe she had; he had seen her reading some old military hardware magazines that her brother had given her. She had coveted them as though they were religious texts.

  “Two of the guys were dead. One of them was a bloke called Jakey from Tyneside. We were quite close. Another guy lost an arm and the rest of them had blast injuries, burns and stuff.”

  “You could smell it, yeah?” asked Belle.

  Once when he was telling the story, he had mentioned the smell of cordite and burning flesh after the explosion, and ever since then she liked to have this detail included and would remind him if need be.

  “That’s right, you could smell it,” he said. “It was disgusting.”

  “Yeah, disgusting,” she confirmed. “Horrible.”

  “It was obvious where the RPG had come from. There were some houses off to one side. Someone said they could still see the smoke from the launcher. So we went for it—we could have called in an air strike and flattened the place—but we were so fired up we thought we’d just go straight in.”

  “You’d never seen action before, had you?” She was keen to prevent any attempts he might make to abridge the story.

  “That’s right, and I was scared. I was the first through the door into the house. Everyone was shouting—we were going to kill the bastards—and there was this old woman standing in the doorway to one of the rooms. She was shouting something. I didn’t know what it was. I shot her in the chest. She dropped to the floor and didn’t move. Then we were in the front room and I just stuck her on automatic . . .”

  “You were using an SA80, right?” The type of gun was important to Belle.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Did ’em up good and proper, yeah?”

  She watched him, relishing the story.

  “There were about six of them in the room. An old man, a couple of women, and some kids. So I’m standing there, firing.”

  “Took out the lot of them,” said Belle with satisfaction.

  He took a deep breath. The cathartic effect he had hoped for by telling the story had not materialized. If anything, the telling of it had made him feel worse.

  “Belle, you know what happens from here on in.” It was a lame attempt to bring the story to a close. Of course
she knew what happened and that was why she wanted him to tell her. It was her favorite story.

  “Come on, Sim, I want to hear it today. It’s important.”

  The way she spoke, he could tell that if he refused, she’d become upset. So he continued with the story and told her how he couldn’t cope with what he had done, about the investigation that was launched into what was now being described as a massacre; and he told her about the patrol they went on the following day and how he had managed to separate himself from the other men in a street market and had spoken to a local man, a community leader who he had met a few days previously, and how he had pleaded with the man to help him escape.

  “Obviously I didn’t tell him I was involved in killing that family. I just told him I was sickened by it and couldn’t go on. He said he would help me. It wasn’t as though I was turning against my country, I was just turning against my country’s government. I had seen with my own eyes that what we were doing there was wrong. I had been part of the problem and now I wanted to be part of the solution.”

  Simeon didn’t expect her to understand—and didn’t care whether she did or not. It was just that whenever he told the story he needed to reassure himself that what he had done by deserting was somehow noble and not the behavior of a man who felt guilt for an atrocity of which he was the primary architect.

  As he had told Belle so many times before, his Middle Eastern appearance, inherited from his mother who was Egyptian, made it possible for him to pass himself off as an Afghan and join a group of refugees who were fleeing the country. Once in Pakistan, he managed to make his way through the Middle East, Europe, and finally back to the UK.

  “I needed to get home. I needed to see my boy. That was all that mattered to me. I didn’t really care if they arrested me and put me in prison for what I’d done. I just needed to see my boy first.”

  As Simeon looked through the window into the tunnel, he questioned his own motives in prolonging this situation. Why didn’t he just shoot Belle and get it over and done with? Perhaps it was because, despite thinking she was a psychopath, there was no getting away from the fact that he found her attractive and it was an attraction that he knew was mutual. There had been a few opportunities in the past to consummate the lust they felt for each other but each time fear had made him draw back. If they had started sleeping together at Madoc Farm, she would have found it impossible to keep it secret and that might have opened him up to reprisals from Tommy. It was much easier to enjoy the flirtation and bide his time. But today was the last day they would ever spend together. He knew what he was meant to do—and he would do it—but the sight of her watching him made him realize that before he killed her he wanted to have her, and if it had to be on a tube train with only a thin door between him and the hundreds of hostages for whom he would soon be a hero, then so be it.