She was thinking that the ISWAP had gotten away with disguising the money trail and she had never been able to establish a proper link during her time at the ATU for Africa. Little did she know that not only her previous boss had been able to link the accounts with an advanced IT team that worked for the ATU but he had also been able to preempt attacks at various strategic locations. Following the money trail had enabled them to assess when a serious attack was being organized and work around the various terrorist cells to stop the attacks without any of the cells actually realizing that the units working against them had the relevant insight from following the money trail. Her previous boss was astute enough to let go some of the smaller attacks to concentrate only on those that would lead to the most massive casualties. Checking what the terrorists were buying from the account allowed them to assess whether it was going to be a nerve gas attack, a bomb or just firing into crowds of bystanders.
She pondered on the time she had also been able to link commercial invoices that she found out were actually matched by the sale of rocket launchers instead of the car spare parts that were indicated on the commercial invoice. Her previous boss had let go of that intel she had got from bribing the customs officer, without organizing raids but rather infiltrating the cell and ultimately new intel came up that the rocket launchers had been sold to a small Al Shabab unit that was operating in Cameroon on a freelance basis. The unit had decided to concentrate its pan-African attacks from Cameroon after a passage through Kenya where the local authorities were too good in identifying Al Shabab cells. She always wondered at why her previous boss chose to use certain intel and let go of other intel depending upon where the intel was and how he could get other intel. There seemed to be no logic in the strategy he used for dealing with the various types of intel and the various groups that intel led him to.
Her mind moved back to Manas. He was probably going to have a hard time ensuring that his part of the Boko Haram organization did not get pulled into what the freelance Al Shabab organization in Cameroon was doing. Manas knew from his operatives on the ground that this group pledged allegiance not to Boko Haram but to a few units of Al Qaeda operating through Qatar and Iraq. Ultimately, the branches of Daesh in Cameroon and Nigeria sought to control this freelance group as well as the Boko Haram unit in Cameroon. She knew that with all that was going on both in Africa and in the Middle East, Manas had to maneuver very carefully to convince the HQ in Nigeria that he was making Boko Haram a force to reckon with and stand as part of a united Islamic front against the kafir westerners. She also knew that his friendship with her was frowned upon by those that knew in his unit and in a couple of others where the rumours of his relationship with her had reached but nobody could do anything against it as very few knew she had worked with the ATU and he could easily argue that she was Muslim or partly Muslim and coming back to the way of God and the Sunnah. Her phone chimed and she saw that she had got two covert messages from Manas that two new attacks were on the radar in Green Park and in Bond Street. A third covert message forbade her from informing anyone as there was apparently a mole in the ATU and any attempt from her to inform the ATU would result in her being beheaded at her residence.
7 Seconds Away ~Youssou N'Dour & Neneh Cherry
Crescent moon
Glistens on treetops
Blowing winds
Change the skies
Cloudy landscapes meet our eyes
Decanting pearl drops
Humans rise
Multiple tasks shake
Their dark ribs
As they stir
Notions of a foregone Time
While the war bells chime
The ground spills
Red waters that slide
They know not
Colours’ calls
Crimson landscapes cut our falls
To touch, not divide
Reading of the poem:
Open wide
Ears for listening
The rumble
Awakes hearts
Residual motion parts
With bygone system
Clinging caste
Lonesome fire lights
While the hordes
Pick their fights
Kings and Queens suppressed their rights
On which Lords set sights
Giant strides
Multiply chances
A world ends
In stances
Measure of Fate that reckons
A New World beckons
Open wide
Ears, lips, Heart and Mind
Reach out slow
Beyond Grind
Feel the moon shiver and bind
The oncoming Tide
Reading of the poem:
I glimpsed once
An array of lights
They glittered
Like bright orbs
The border they rode absorbs
Impressions shattered
That World set
In the rising sun
As I whirled
Towards night
Within me consumed the fight
Of ages replayed
Count with me
The moons are seven
They revolve
Within Space
Spheres rotate towards Heaven
Places I rewind
My heart bears
The weight of old Tales
They come through
My lit eyes
Like a whisper their light flies
Towards southern skies
The songs beat
At my aged Temples
They give forth
Waning heat
Dying warmth makes me repeat
Litany of loss
They come through
Epiphany carved
On my chest
I control
In the City of Angels
They hone through me soul
Reading of the poem:
I had a will to survive
My hands rising in rebellion
I knew that I was alive
For my heart beat in unison
The will in me was so weak
No one can bear witness to this
My tongue cuts me as I speak
The blood of my blood wore such bliss
In vain the pursuit of sense
The pupil my pupil dilates
View of my rivers so dense
Leading mind that flood celebrates
I have a will to survive
The teacher brands me a lesson
Into the essence I dive
Like angels falling from Heaven
Reading of the poem:
She knew she had to alert the Terrorist unit that had been hers for so many years. She picked up her other mobile and called the head of the unit. After an exchange of salutations and a few pleasantries, he asked her what the purpose of her call was as she had been excluded from the unit by her boss who had asked the head of the unit to refrain from speaking with her anymore and to ensure other members of the unit also did not exchange with her. She answered that an attack might be imminent in Westminster but she did not know for sure there would be trouble. She explained that it was expected that individual cells from Boko Haram and ISWAP would meet at the station and perhaps things could go awry from there. He asked her for a few other details and finally told her not to worry and that the unit would be ready for them the whole day and the couple of days after that if they did not arrest them the same day.
After hanging up, she wondered whether it was really the best choice. She had no idea whether Manas would also join the Boko Haram cell. After all he was the head of Boko Haram in Cameroon and he might need to prove his value to the headquarters in Nigeria. She wondered whether she should call him and tell him not to join the meeting but she had already broken her burner sim and she was not sure she would have enough time to get a new sim so she just typed ATU coming on her phone and hoped that Manas would see it in time to avoid the Westminster meeting. After that she ran to the shop to purchase another sim which she used to call the other number for Manas. The phone rang several times but nobody picked up. She kept calling, all the time worried that something happened to him. Suddenly she saw a message flashing on her normal mobile. It said “OK, out”. She felt so relieved that he was no longer in any danger.
She wondered what was happening with the other members of the two cells. She tuned into the frequency that the members of her old unit used to use. The satellite phone she had was able to link into the frequency and she heard everything her old team was saying. Funny that they had not changed the frequency after her departure, she thought. The head of the unit probably thought she would not remember it but he visibly did not realise how good with numbers she was and underestimated her incredible capacity to learn strings of numbers without any problem. She was not just a tactical part of the team, her ability to leverage a person’s psychological issues in order to turn them away from what she wanted them to stop doing was considerable and had made her boss interested in deploying her in the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU).
When she was in the ATU for Africa, she had been able to decipher several transfers of money using her pattern-matching capacities. It was thanks to this that she had been able to establish that several transfers coming from high-ranking officials in Qatar were funneled into an Islamic organization that professed to be a non-profit for building mosques and then routed through the disguise of Sadaqah, or charity towards the poor, to reach a similar organization in Nigeria and be distributed to what looked like ISWAP’s accounts in Nigeria. It was difficult in practice to establish that these accounts were indeed ISWAP’s accounts because the front was a non-profit that looked like a charitable organization but when you linked all the entities with the payments made and you realized that the individuals who received the payments were indeed suspected ISWAP members, you knew that these had to be ISWAP accounts. The only problem was that they could not establish for certain that these individuals were ISWAP members because they were perceived as God-fearing individuals who were devout Muslims and there was no actual proof of wrongdoing. In the time she worked with the ATU, she had never established a clear link and her unit was never able to bring the ISWAP down through the money trail as they had to proceed with caution, owing to local cultural and religious sensitivities
Enigma - The Rivers Of Belief
After a period of interrogation, the anti-terrorist team released her as they didn’t have anything against her and they could no longer retrieve her to the US as an asset given she was no longer part of the team. They let her go with a sneer and a jeer though and inferred that if they found her with him, they would not hesitate to shoot her down to serve as an example. She merely scoffed and took her belongings before leaving the US embassy in London. She could see that the two who had caught her at the London eye were following her discreetly. They were not so discreet though as to evade her trained eyes. She stuck up her middle finger backwards towards them, showing them she was aware of their presence. She went straight to her flat and decided to sleep for a few hours.
Her phone buzzed for a while before she got up and grabbed it. She had hoped to see Manas but it was someone else who was clad with the same clothing that she had seen Manas wear. He pointed towards a picture next to his face. It was very small and she had a hard time identifying what it was. He then sent her a picture and deleted it after he saw that she had identified it. It was a burner phone and he spoke in Arabic telling her to get something similar. He told her to get the yellow one and she put on her computer and activated the private network application so that nobody could follow her search on the internet if they were hacking her computer. She almost felt like a terrorist herself now that she was trying to avoid the US anti-terrorist unit dedicated to African terrorism that had been hers. He also sent another picture and she quickly took a photograph of it before he could delete it. It was a number in what was now considered as Arabic numerals and she realised it was a UK number to call.
She kept the application on throughout her research and purchased the yellow burner phone. Instead of having it delivered to her, thereby leaving her address, she marked it for collection at the store. She was glad she had got this small payment card that she had used as it could not lead back to her at all and had sufficient money in it to purchase anything else she would need to make her encounters with Manas as safe as possible. Later that afternoon she went and picked up the phone and bought two prepaid sims which she paid with cash rather than the debit card even though it was deemed to keep her untraceable. She walked towards Southwark park and sat on a bench before bringing her phone out. She put in one of the prepaid sims and called the number that Manas’s man had sent her. The phone did not have whatsapp on it and she realized that it would not be possible to put that application on this phone. She heard Manas on the line and her heart skipped a beat.
- How are you, she said
- I am fine Angel. How are you?
- I was so scared for you but I feel better now knowing that you got away.
- Angel, I need you to do something for me
- Anything my love
- Don’t take any tube today that passes by Westminster
- Why, what is going to happen in Westminster?
She felt a cold sweat running down her back. Was there going to be a terrorist attack in Westminster? She could not possibly suspect it and do nothing. So many people could die if she did not report it to the authorities. Manas was not answering her question. He appeared hesitant but then said
- I don’t want you to get hurt. Two opposing factions of Boko Haram are meeting at the station. I really don’t want you to get hurt
- What about the other innocent bystanders?
- They risk less. You risk a lot because your face is now known to the two factions. You could be used to bring me down or as a tool to make me lose control at the leadership level of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
- Understood. I will not go there today
- Today and the following two days might be better actually.
- Yes, okay. I will do as you say
She hung up feeling a pit in her stomach. At the same time, her mind was racing. Should she report this to the authorities or not? If she did report it then the two factions might suspect Manas and she did not want to get him killed. Was he telling her the truth? She knew that Boko Haram wanted to reignite its fame and be counted as a force to reckon with outside of its territory and this might mean that they could have wired up the station to take down westerners together with the other faction that called itself the Islamic State West Africa Province (to be known as ISWAP). Boko Haram could easily send only suicide bombers to the meeting with the ISWAP group and then bomb the whole of the Westminster station. This would cause huge disruptions in the life of thousands of westerners and block all logistics around that area for days if not weeks as well as send a stark message to Islamic State abroad. She felt stuck, incapable of making a decision for several minutes. Then all of a sudden she stood up and went back home after throwing the sim card in a dustbin. She knew what to do.
"Desolation" - Adam Hurst
A heavy jute bag
lifted mountains of sorrow
etched within his ribs
Slices of lifetime
hiccupped their way through his lips
bitterness gushing
Back bent itself curved
under years of misery
it rewrote its shape
He breathed in the skies
his breath the salt of horizons
burning through his lungs
Wrinkles carved within
his face a mausoleum
written by dark fate
Reading of the poem:
Awake, awake, awake
Awake in Peace
Flower in Beauty
Lady of offering
Rise in Beauty
Goddess of Life
Beautiful in Heaven
Heaven is in Peace
Earth is in Peace
Goddess daughter of Nut
Daughter of Geb
Beloved of Osiris
Goddess rich in names
All praise to you
I adore you
Lady Isis
Transliteration
Nehes Nehes Nehes
Nehes em hotep
Nehem em neferu
Nebet hotepet
Weben em neferu
Nutjert en ankh
Nefer em pet
Pet em hotep
Ta em hotep
Nutjert sat Nut
Sat Geb
Mert Ausar
Nutjert asha renu
Anet hrak Anet hrak
Tu a atu Tu a atu
Neb Aset
An Aset
Tua Aset
Reading of the Transliteration:
Elixir part 4 – Hope for a new way of life27 July 2022
Courtesy pinterest.com
Amelia took leave of the young Melancholists after making them swear that none of them would give up their life before she had returned. The young ones swore and though she was not certain whether they would indeed keep that promise, she had to go as there was so much to do. She also realized that the minute she left Melancholy she would not be under the protection of the Melancholists anymore and would have to find how to evade General Stein. She wondered if he was out there, waiting for her to come out of Melancholy. He probably knew that there were two exits to Melancholy and must have posted one of his acolytes on one side while he watched another. She would need to be creative in order to escape them.
Amelia stood near one of the exits and watched closely to see whether General Stein was there. It looked like he was not there and so she decided to take this exit instead of the other. She would not take it normally and be subjected to Stein’s men but she would play with her ability to go through the Earth. She stomped with one foot trying to make the least noise possible and immediately sank into Earth where she rode a large slab of rock, just beneath the dirt path outside Melancholy. She did not stop her sailing on the rock until she was sure that there were several hundred meters between her and Stein’s men. She bent her knees channeling the rock upwards and soon emerged from the Earth and started running. She wanted to put the maximum distance between her and General Stein and his men. She needed to be able to work in the greatest secrecy.
Amelia reached her second home shortly after midnight and went about her house preparing everything she needed for large quantities of Elixir of a special nature. Normally she used a basic version of the Elixir from which each vial was only fit to serve one person and grant them quasi eternal life. This time, she would be creating a type of Elixir so strong in its content that it would serve a large number of people, all at once. It only had to be sprayed in the vicinity of a large group and would be successful in extending their lives to a degree of quasi eternity. The secret of this type of Elixir was that she used the higher soul’s gift of eternal life, locking it into the bloodstream of the person sacrificing a certain number of years. In the other, more basic type of Elixir she only had the sacrifice of the person giving up the remaining years of their existence.
While one may wonder how this transformed into a quasi-eternity for the person receiving the Elixir this produced, it would just show that one was not aware of the deeper meaning of sacrifice and how it rooted itself into cosmic giving. It was this cosmic giving that Amanda tapped into and acted as a conduit of to develop the Elixir as a mixture of the life force of blood together with the expanse of cosmic giving. This made Elixir a sort of eternity in a bottle as it encompassed the vast nature of the cosmic giving Universe and the quality of mercy that ran through the blood of the ones sacrificing their remaining life.
She worked throughout a large part of the remaining hours of the night and dawn had her finally stretching out like a cat, happy with the result of her work, although quite tired from all the events of the night before and the great number of hours spent making the special type of Elixir. She called a member of the Supreme Guard of the Melancholists telling them that she had concocted a solution for the problem of Despair that affected the youngsters of Melancholy and that made them commit suicide. The Supreme Guard held a secret meeting with the Council of the Elders of Melancholy and they decided together that this must be kept secret until it was tried on a group of youngsters from Melancholy. All of them were quite thrilled with the prospect of being able to have their youngsters experience hope again. They looked at each other and smiled. Their hearts beat quicker and louder than they had ever beaten before. This was indeed a Hope for a new way of life.
Khamsa - Dhafer Youssef
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