Baptism Page 5

  It sounded like a pool cue striking a pillow. George looked around to see the trainee driver’s legs crumple beneath him as he fell sideways and a jet of blood pumped from a hole in the side of his head. As he landed on the floor of the cab, his legs kicked out in the death throes. Pilgrim looked down at him impassively, holding an automatic pistol with a silencer attachment from which there curled a wisp of smoke.

  “Oh Jesus!” George gasped, breathless and numb with shock.

  “Keep your hand on the handle, George.” Pilgrim’s voice betrayed some urgency for the first time before it resumed its confident purr. “Nice and steady, that’s it.”

  The trainee’s legs spasmed a couple more times and then he lay still, the blood from his head wound squirting across the cab floor, the trajectory of its arc decreasing with each dying pulse.

  George glanced down at the body; blood was lapping from side to side in the little gullies on the floor beneath the poor bastard’s head. He looked away. This was the second dead body he had been in close proximity to in the past two months. The one under and now this. But they could not have been more different. The one under was something he had been not exactly anticipating but something for which he was at least prepared. This wasn’t.

  His limbs felt as though they were made of rubber and it took all his strength to hold the dead man’s handle. He stared ahead through the glass into the tunnel. Colorful kaleidoscopic patterns danced in his peripheral vision; his head felt like it was way too big for his neck, which felt reedy and unsteady. As the train passed a green signal, CELIA’s now echoing voice announced: “The next station is Waterloo.” George’s head began to tip forward. The thought came to him that maybe he had been shot too. Perhaps these were his dying moments. Someone was holding his hand.

  Pilgrim stood beside him with his hand on top of his own, maintaining the pressure on the dead man’s handle. With his other hand, he slapped George on the cheek repeatedly while cradling his head in the crook of his arm.

  “I’m okay,” said George, his face stinging as the fog started to clear.

  “Don’t go passing out on me, George.”

  “I’m sorry.” An apology for his tormentor.

  The train pulled into Waterloo station and a crowded platform. George pulled the train up to the signal and opened the cab door to look back along the cars. The air that he sucked up was warm and metallic and offered little oxygen. As he stood there watching people embark and disembark, he thought it might be possible to step out of the cab and make a run for it. But the thought never made it past the planning stage. His legs were too shaky. He knew he would never make it.

  “This is Waterloo station, change here for the Jubilee Line, the Bakerloo Line and national rail services.”

  The platform was busy with tourists pulling suitcases on trolleys, commuters, day-trippers and backpackers, businessmen, schoolchildren and students, pensioners, women with babies.

  “Please stand clear of the doors, this train is ready to depart.”

  The signal cleared, and as George propelled the train into the tunnel once more, moving beneath the Thames toward Embankment station, he chanced a couple of glances at the man he knew as Pilgrim. There he stood still and stiff-backed—the pistol was nowhere to be seen—and he stared out of the front window, deep in thought, the corpse of the man he had so recently murdered at his feet.

  8:46 AM

  Northbound Northern Line platform, Leicester Square Tube Station

  Varick knew that in a little room somewhere he might be framed on a CCTV security monitor. If Tommy Denning didn’t come soon, someone would come for him. Impatience joined his other strained emotions. But the waiting had also given him time to think, and when he wasn’t contemplating Tommy’s arrival, he thought about his journey from New Orleans to the mountains of Snowdonia. It had been a trial, a test that Varick had finally passed. God had given him a task and he had carried it out. During those lawless days back in September 2005 after the levees had broken, it was as though the world had been turned upside down. He had done some things—firing on looters being one of them—which troubled him deeply. He had tried to justify it: society had broken down. What else were he and his colleagues in the New Orleans Police Department—those who hadn’t already deserted—expected to do? But however he tried to explain away his actions, they had continued to prey on his mind. After Katrina, his drug consumption had increased as though he were attempting to blot out what he had done and what he had seen.

  It was not long after he had last been here, in the West End of London, that Jesus had spoken to him and shown him the one true path. He had made the London trip with a girlfriend. Frieda, her name was. She was half-German. She loved to party. It was the first vacation he had been on since Katrina. It was meant to be a week’s sightseeing, although the only sights they really got to see were the inside of the hotel room, where they fornicated energetically, and the inside of numerous nightclub toilets in which they snorted lines of cocaine from the bag he had smuggled through customs up his ass.

  The devil had stalked him, waited for him in the shadows. Varick could see that now. But at the time it had felt as though it was how life was meant to be. A couple of months after he had returned from his trip to London with Frieda, Jesus had steered him toward Father Owen at Madoc Farm. There was no other explanation as to why he had found himself on the website of a sect of British evangelical Christians by the name of Cruor Christi. Despite thinking of himself as a Christian since birth, other than funerals and weddings he hadn’t been to church since he was a teenager. Yet there he was, late at night, sitting at his computer with a head full of cocaine, searching for something, searching for meaning and it was the simple reassuring words of Father Owen that had struck a chord in his heart. Owen was a man who genuinely wanted to help those less fortunate than himself. Here truly was a Good Samaritan and Varick felt that altruism that had made him want to serve his fellow man in the NOPD, that selflessness that had laid dormant for so long, stir once more beneath the corrosive effects of his debauchery.

  Initial e-mails to Father Owen had led to a series of phone calls and, within a couple of months, Varick had turned his back on drugs and alcohol, resigned his position with the New Orleans Police Department, and been on his way to Wales and Madoc Farm in Snowdonia. The rest was history, preordained just as surely as his immediate future was now as he set out on his mission to find Brother Thomas. Some things were meant to be.

  The first few months in Snowdonia had been tough. It was winter and the farm was in a terrible condition. He had set about rebuilding part of the roof himself and fixing the plumbing. Gradually, as God decreed, he and his fellow brothers had rebuilt Madoc Farm and Varick had allowed himself a little pride in his achievements.

  Madoc Farm in Snowdonia was now his true home. It was a home where he could go about the work that Jesus had seen fit to bless him with, the saving of troubled young men and women, prising them from the clutches of the devil and returning them to the path of righteousness. Many of those who made up Cruor Christi’s flock were from military backgrounds, like brothers Thomas and Simeon. Others were ex–drug addicts like Alistair. The world was full of casualties from the wars on drugs and terror. Cruor Christi, however, was there for them and would be forever. Those poor spiritual refugees were not alone—he would make sure of that—and he would do all in his power to stop Brother Thomas from destroying the special bond that united the brothers and sisters at Madoc Farm. Responsibility lay with him now and him alone. The authorities would have no cause to trouble the good people of Madoc Farm if the members of the church of Cruor Christi could be seen to have averted this potential cataclysm themselves. Father Owen’s death would not be in vain. Varick would ensure that his good work continued.

  He had had a bad feeling about Tommy right from the start. Tommy’s hotheaded, almost sociopathic charisma was something he had seen in other young men during his years working for the NOPD. The police often attracted that sort of
person. But there was something different about Tommy. It was as though he was just watching and waiting, biding his time. He only really came alive when he was talking about personal sacrifice.

  Tommy was fascinated by radical Islam and jihad. He believed that the promise of virgins in heaven supposedly given to would-be suicide bombers was all just propaganda by Western media, a way of trying to discredit their steadfast purpose and strength of will. These people knew what they were doing. Their vision should be admired. They were dying for what they believed in. Christianity did not have that strength. Christ had displayed it but his followers had failed him. Christians had always fallen far short of the example that Christ had set them. It needed someone to come along and show the way. To make a statement. To stand side by side with his Muslim brothers.

  Tommy often spoke about the values and commitment of the suicide bomber. Sometimes Varick decided to draw him out on the subject, but when he did the ex-soldier was reluctant to open up, and gradually Varick’s concerns faded as other more pressing day-to-day matters arose from everyday life on Madoc Farm. Then came Owen’s discovery of Tommy’s notebook. Much of what it contained was indecipherable, just rambling notes and ideas and quotations from the Bible. But alongside his plans for the train driver’s family and the occupants of the train, there was much mention of the river, which played such a part in his sick idea. One biblical quotation that appeared to refer to it had stuck in Varick’s mind. It was Revelation 22:1. “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” This was written out a number of times as though mention of the “pure river” in the scriptures seemed to offer Tommy some sort of divine confirmation that what he was doing was right.

  Another train pulled into the station. Varick watched it over the top of his newspaper, dreading a solitary driver. But this one was different. The driver was a large man with a serious, worried expression. Standing next to him was a younger man, wiry and muscular, leaning forward and peering out onto the platform. Even before the light caught his face and confirmed it, Varick knew that it was Tommy Denning. He didn’t like to think of him as Brother Thomas any more. He was no brother of his.

  The train stopped and the automated voice started up once more: “Please allow the passengers to leave the train first. This is a Northern Line train to Mill Hill East.” Varick had positioned himself in the middle of the platform so as to join the train well away from either end, which he knew from the plan would be occupied by Tommy and his team.

  As Varick entered the carriage, he felt a strange sensation of destiny unfolding. This was how it was meant to be. He might have become a man of God but he still knew how to use a revolver. Especially the one he had tucked in his belt beneath his shirt. He had used it thousands of times during target practice and he knew all its little nuances. It pulled to the right slightly and he knew exactly how much he would need to aim left to compensate. The Smith & Wesson was the only possession that he had kept from the old days back in Louisiana, from before he was born again. Smuggling it into the UK was easy; he had dismantled it and hidden its individual components throughout his possessions in the packing crate in which they were shipped. He wasn’t the only one who loved guns. Almost all the members of Cruor Christi had weapons. Some of them were more than just handguns. In the armory at Madoc Farm—where Father Owen insisted that all weapons were kept—there were semi-automatic assault rifles, most of which were now in Tommy’s possession. There was even a small quantity of plastic explosive. One of Cruor Christi’s members, “Big Bob” Wilcox, had been involved with ordnance and explosives in the army and had managed to “liberate” it—as he put it—from a depot where he worked. It did trouble Varick, all that firepower. But he concluded that among the members of his unique flock, paranoia often came with the territory, and if they felt safer with their weapons—and didn’t use them irresponsibly—then so be it. He was hardly in a position to preach on the subject what with his own background and firm belief in the right to bear arms.

  After finding Owen dead the night before, Varick had checked the armory and it was all but empty. What guns had not been taken had been rendered inoperable by having their firing pins removed. Tommy had obviously expected Varick to come after him. But Varick had his Smith & Wesson with him and it was all he would need. He knew that he could finish this when the time came. Just so long as he could get within range, Tommy Denning would be—as he might have described it in his former life when he wore the powder blue shirt of the New Orleans Police Department—a dead man walking.

  8:54 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, driver’s cab

  George had to do something, not just for his family and the hundreds of people on the train, but for himself. If he died and did nothing then his life was a waste. It wasn’t as though he was a religious man. If pushed, he would have claimed agnosticism as his faith. Some people called that a cop-out. If you’re going to deny God then at least have the guts to be an atheist; agnosticism is spineless, nothing more than sitting on the fence. It was usually the religious types that came out with stuff like that. Like a taunt. To George, agnosticism was the only rational reaction to religion: I don’t know. I don’t know because no one can know. Some things are unknowable. But it wasn’t something that he had ever given much thought to. He and Maggie had been married in a church; the children were christened. If there was a God then they were covered. It was insurance. George thought it was like that for most people. What he did feel, however, was a sense of destiny, regardless of whether there was or wasn’t a God, and he could feel that destiny now compelling him to act. He would have to try and stop these people. Never before had he felt so protective toward others, but never before had he felt so afraid that his own emotional frailty would let him down.

  “Oh Jesus.” He said it so softly under his breath it was inaudible. Blasphemy was a constant in his life. George was a hardened blasphemer. Bang his toe: Jesus Christ. Slam his finger in a door: fucking Jesus. And far lesser sources of grievance, everything from the sub-standard driving of his fellow road-users to the poor state of the weather he greeted with blasphemous profanity. Today was no exception. But today, during those moments when the emotion and fear became too much for him and he needed some form of release, he found his muttered blasphemies were altogether more pleading, as though attempting a dialogue with a God whose existence he doubted.

  George was no stranger to panic. He was one of life’s worriers. And often that worry manifested itself as panic. Usually it was late at night, when he woke up consumed with the fear that he was wasting his life. All his great heroes, all the writers and musicians who informed his outlook, were people who had a handle on existence, who knew who they wanted to be—or seemed to. He had considered therapy, but felt squeamish at the thought of opening up to a stranger. Besides, there were more important things to be spending his money on. More benefit might be derived from a few drinks and the odd joint here and there. At least then he could look at life and laugh at the absurdity of it all. At least then the panic would lift, or be reduced to a vague sense of unease. But even on those rare occasions when he did manage to attain a state approaching contentment, his mind would conjure up some image for him, some bold and incontrovertible fact about the state of humanity and the nature of the world that would cast him back into the gloom. Somewhere a child was being abused; somewhere an unspeakable act of cruelty was being committed and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The horror never went away.

  A song was playing in George’s mind, continually repeating on his psycho-jukebox. It was “London Calling” by the Clash. The band’s front man, Joe Strummer, was one of his heroes, and when he was a boy he had been lucky enough to see him play live. Strummer was passionate and uncompromising, everything that George aspired to be and feared he wasn’t.

  George and his best friend, Dougie, another lifelong Clash fan, had a private expression between the two of them for when a situation
appeared desperate: “What would Joe Strummer do?” It came to him now as “London Calling” repeated once again in his mind.

  When Joe Strummer died, George and Dougie had met for a drink, and every so often during the evening they would break off their conversation to raise a glass to Joe. By closing time, they both had tears in their eyes.

  What would Joe Strummer do? What would he do now? Driving a busy tube train into a tunnel with an armed hijacker in the cab with him. What would he do?

  The only comfort that George could manage to derive from the situation was that this man he knew only as Pilgrim didn’t look like an Islamic fundamentalist. He was white Caucasian for a start. That had to mean something. Didn’t it? But any hope this shoddy racial profile might have offered was immediately snuffed out by his awareness of the dead body on the floor of the cab. Whatever else this man was, he was also a killer.

  As he sat in the train cab moving through the warm air in the tunnel, George wavered between déjà vu and jamais vu—everything was strangely familiar one moment and terrifyingly new and hyper real the next. When he had pressed the buttons at Leicester Square to open the doors, it was as though he had never seen them before. He once dropped some acid when he was at college. Objects that he had looked at and handled a million times in his life felt new and vibrant. As now. But when he looked at the hijacker it was as though that face had loomed in his subconscious all of his life. It was like an ugly spirit made flesh.

  When George had shut the doors at Leicester Square, checked the pilot light, and driven into the tunnel, the train was carrying a little over half its passenger capacity. Not far out of the station, George was told to “Slow down now.” George did so. Now was not the time for heroics. He needed to choose his moment.