She asked the driver to go to Edgware road as he seemed to be taking a different route. She told him curtly that she would prefer if he would take the normal route to Edgware road as she did not think changing the route would get them there faster. The driver simply looked at her in the rear view mirror and said nothing. She started feeling a cold shiver going down her back and her heart started beating faster in her chest. She tried to act like she was not affected at all by his mutism and asked him again pointedly to go through the other route. He just stared at her again without saying a word. She told him she would report him to the station and started typing the number. In one sweeping movement he turned around grabbed her phone and put it in the glove box.
Her heart was beating really fast now. She was not sure whether this was the terrorists taking her away to kill her or whether this was Manas trying to get her to him without the police noticing. After a few minutes settling her racing thoughts, she realized that it was probably Manas trying to get her to him rather than the terrorists kidnapping her as the man could have hit her but just took away the phone instead. She decided that if they wanted her dead she would probably already been dead so she dug her heels into the fabric of the back seat and sat back against the cushion. She was clearly not going to get any information from the driver so she thought it better to save her breath.
The cab drove onwards into small lanes in Westham and then further out into some dingy neighbourhood. It came to a standstill in front of a weather-beaten house with broken windows that seemed on the brink of collapsing. He came around the car, opened her door and then gruffly asked her to come out as he held her arm. As she shrank away from him, he seized her arm stronger and pulled her out unceremoniously. She fell to the ground and he picked her up with both arms under her armpits. He half carried half dragged her into the house which seemed pitch black at first. He then pushed her onto a chair that was at the middle of what seemed to be a living room. In front of her, far from the chair, there was a black man who was looking at her intently.
What do you want from me, she said, attempting to sound self-assured while she was shaking inwards. This was not Manas and she could not identify him as a member of the team who had tortured her when she was in Cameroon. The man just looked at her without answering her question.
- Where is Manas, she said.
- What do you want with Manas, he said
- I want to know where is, whether he is safe
- It is not for you to ensure his safety or query his location
- Please, I just want to know that he is alright. I want to speak to him
- You are a burden, a terrible burden and you are not a Muslim
- I am a Muslim
- No, you are not. You say words that Muslims say but you are not. Look at how you dress. No decency and your hair is for everyone to look at. You would be a disgrace to Muslims if you really professed to be one.
- Have it your way. In any case I just want to speak to Manas
- Forget about him. You must never answer his calls again. You will make no further contact with him. If you attempt to contact him or if I hear that you were with him, that will be the end for you. Do you understand?
- …
- Do you understand I said, he was suddenly so close to her, seizing her by the hair
- Yes I understand
- Now the driver will take you back near your place and you will forget everything about Manas and about us and beware not to tell Manas anything about this encounter.
She nodded and slowly got up. She felt dejected. The perspective of not ever seeing Manas again was so painful that tears welled in her eyes. She heard someone talking softly to the man who had threatened her and it seemed that he was called Abdelkader. The person talking to him seemed to be called Younes and he was talking very respectfully to Abdelkader so he probably was high up in Boko Haram. Perhaps not the faction in Cameroon but possibly Nigeria. She tried to get a good look at him but it was too dark even though her eyes had gotten used to the bad light in the room.
Younes gave her a baleful look after he finished talking to Abdelkader. It seemed like none of them had noticed that she had gotten their names. She was indeed very skilled at finding out what was being whispered and this had helped her a lot when she was in the ATU. Younes came towards her, grabbed her arm and handed her over to the driver. She was totally compliant as she did not want to end up dead here in this god forsaken place. She eyed Younes again to be sure to recognize him. They thought they had had the better of her but she would make them pay when she would reunite with Manas…
Lil Wayne - Drop The World ft. Eminem (Official Music Video) ft. Eminem
Before she could finish thinking about a solution to her predicament, she felt the ground shake. She thought it was an earthquake and peeked out of her flat to see whether she should stay indoors or go out. She could see the tube station which seemed to have caved in with large pieces of metal and rock protruding from the hole that had once been the ceiling of the tube station. She looked all around and there seemed to be no sign of an earthquake. She retreated from the window, slowing realizing that this was a terrorist attack. She could not figure out why there was one in her neighbourhood of Canada Water while Manas had only spoken about Green Park and Bond Street.
She put on the TV and saw gory pictures of what remained from the stations of Green Park and West Minster. It seemed that they had changed their mind about Bond Street. The police were asking witnesses to give their recount of anything suspicious they had seen. Apparently the most deadly hit had been at Green Park. They had not only bombed both sides of the station but they had also bombed some of the neighbouring buildings at Green Park. They had come very close to Buckingham Palace as one of the ISWAP members was working on a building site nearby and had been able to plant a bomb there. The police found two guards who had been taken down at the site and it was obvious that the terrorists had put a trigger there. It was not clear whether the terrorist who activated the trigger had survived.
She felt sick and almost threw up. This was all her fault as she had not alerted the ATU in time. She watched other images of the Westminster massacre and realized that the small dark blots were bodies covered up and it seemed like BBC did not want to show the full extent of the horror that had hit both Green Park and Westminster stations. She knew it was Manas’s men who had triggered this horror in London. His men were probably elated at how much terror they had struck into the hearts of Londoners. That day was going to remain for years in the hearts and minds of not only Londoners but all the English people as well. Boko Haram claimed the terrorist attacks as their own and broadcasted the set-up of the operations, boasting about their ability to trump British intelligence. They had used two terrorists who had been working under cover as Electricians with a black card access to the Tube so they had been able to practically go anywhere.
She looked out of the window again. There was absolutely no reason for them to bomb Canada Water station. Could it have been a warning to her so that she stopped seeing Manas? Was Boko Haram sending a message to Manas so that he would stop seeing her? She could not bear just sitting at her flat so decided to dress up and leave in search of Manas. There was always a code blue that she could use if she needed to see him at all costs. She needed to get to Edgware road so that she could use one of the burner phones that was linked to Manas and type in the code. She decided it was better to get a cab than use the tube as it would be in shambles and with stations on high alert as it wasn’t clear if the terrorist attacks were over. She buckled her belt and looked at the driver. There was something odd about him…
Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence [Official Music Video]
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
Fed with constant realities
their idle waves of intent
breaking through my fears
I bear fruit to a sullen morrow
I fixate beyond the edge of myself
on the anticipated remembrance
of the snow-white place in me
where I fail to see you no more
Your face grows stark and steady
In a solitary place I keep hidden
between collar bone and chest
bubbling with the residue of unrest
My brain will build tall citadels
where your name will reiterate
like a broken disk hitting my skull
one dull thud after another drops
There are fleeting looks encircled
by the morosity of frozen cheeks
They bask in the sunlit shadows
born to the eye that blinks never
Tomorrow I will bear no weight
Like a maiden before her sunset
I will tear away my shaking limbs
in offering to the beasts that pray
Reading of the poem:
Ming-Hoa’s sight was darkening as he felt the pressure of Chow’s hands around his neck strengthen. Soon he would be reunited with Cuifen he thought for an eternity or at least until only their bones were left. Ming-Hoa believed that once the flesh was gone, the consciousness of the person was also gone unlike the other villagers who believed that the life energy ceased to exist once the breath had gone. He could feel the blood beat at his temples as he mechanically gasped for breath. Suddenly he felt himself freed from Chow’s clutch. Those restraining Ju-Long had come to his rescue and pulled her off him. The women came over to try and reason with Chow so that she would stop trying to go back and strangle Ming-Hoa.
Slowly it would seem that Chow had been reasoned into passivity, so the men returned to their rolling of the coffin on the platform. Somehow none of them felt it was safe enough to directly haul the coffin over their shoulders like they would normally do. Besides, with all the marble of the coffin it was easier to roll it to the graveyard than carry it. Ming-Hoa who was now freed from Chow’s vice-like grip was wailing and following Cuifen’s coffin, uttering from time to time nonsensical whimpers that sounded like muffled words. Eu-Meh thought she could hear something like “Three drops of blood”… “One minute you were”… “body so pure “… “why did you tear” “my ponytail”. She wondered whether Ming-Hoa had attempted to abuse Cuifen and subsequently murdered her when she refused. It all seemed so logical. She should remember to mention that to the police when they would come.
There was no policeman in their village, just one in the nearby village and it would take a day or two for him to come over. She knew that the inquest would have to be handled by more than just that policeman so he would need to wait for the other ones to arrive from the city. This could take another two or three days so the inquest would only start around a week from then. She wondered whether it was wise to already bury Cuifen and have her dug out when the inquest started. There had been one other murder a long time ago and although the murderer had been known, the inquest had still decided that the body must be dug up to corroborate the way the murder had been carried out and the murderer who had been responsible for that murder. She wondered whether she should ask the villagers to stop the burial but realized that everybody seemed to want to be rid of the sight of Cuifen dead.
Chow who had now been relatively quietened by the women was now following Eu-Meh. This latter slowed down so Chow could catch up with her. Without a word Eu-Meh put a reassuring arm around Chow sustaining her frame as she could see that the normally stoic Chow was very near to collapsing.
I think I know who killed Cuifen, she said in a hoarse whisper, but promise me you will not do anything if I tell you.
The news kept coming in, one recount more alarming and shocking than the other. It had all started the day before in Kerman in Iran where an Earthquake with the magnitude of 7.7 had caused several thousands of deaths and several thousands were left injured. Shortly after that followed an Earthquake with the magnitude of 9.3 in Shiraz, the deadliest ever in Iran, taking the death tolls to several hundreds of thousands. The Earth had opened up at Sabzposhan and severe landslides together with the Earthquake had taken their toll on the region. The Earthquake then hit the region of Bandar Abbas, causing tidal waves along the coast.
In Dubai, the tremors were felt by the inhabitants although the radio signaled that there was nothing to fear. Shortly after this news came out, Dubai residents felt tremors shake the city. It seemed like the Earthquake that had started in Kerman was following a zig-zag pattern as the radio announced that another Earthquake had occurred in the capital, Abu Dhabi. The tremors were slight at first with perhaps a magnitude of less than 4 but soon the Dubai residents felt the city shaking with increasing tremors building up another larger Earthquake.
Slowly but surely the tremors increased. It all seemed as if the fault that had opened up in Iran was now continuing its way under the sea. The Dubai residents had run out of their homes as the tremors increased but with the havoc happening outside they wondered if they should go back to the safety of their homes. The skies were filled with helicopters that were taking the ruling family to safety. One wondered where that would be however as everywhere in the city there were recounts of buildings collapsing and the Earth opening up.
A news crew was busy filming the disaster in the air using a helicopter they had hired for the occasion. The level of destruction caused by the Earthquake was unimaginable. Several towers had simply caved in, some others had tilted over and some were split in the middle with the top parts falling off like a peeled orange. Several fires had been ignited everywhere as a result of the falling buildings and badly protected wirings. As the journalists watched, the beautiful Burj Khalifa’s external glass structure shattered into thousands of shards before the top of the building started toppling over.
It seemed like this was not the last of the problems though as they could see a tidal wave forming at the coastline. They watched horror-struck as residents across the coastline clambered to the top of their houses in a desperate move to be saved from the oncoming wave. Some of the journalists shut their eyes in prayer as the wave crashed on the shore, wiping out the entire areas of Jumeirah, Um Suqueim and Dubai Marina as it swept along the coast and made its way to the middle of Sheikh Zayed road. Hundreds of cars that had been jammed in the residents’ desperate attempt to flee the area were soon overpowered by the seething water that rocked them to and fro before casting them against the buildings that were toppling over.
The journalists in the helicopter cried helplessly although they were normally hardened men. They thought of some of their relatives down there whom they would never see again. Some had wives and children who had surely perished, if not drowning in the waters then probably under the falling towers as so many of them had fallen like a series of lego. They thought of how they had come up here to report on what they expected to be minor issues and get at least some sensationalist recounts. Nothing had prepared them for the extent of the disaster which had ensued.
When the tremors of the Earthquake and its aftershock had finally subsided, the center of the city was a lagoon with portions of buildings protruding here and there. The outskirts were reduced to a pile of rubble and in between lay a slushy landscape of debris. The towers had disappeared and the Burj Al Arab structure was leaning more than the tower of Pisa, with only its top part emerging from the waters. The Burj Khalifa looked similar to what it had looked like during its construction several years ago. The top of the building had fallen to the ground, a large part of the middle had caved in and all the glass windows had been shattered leaving it akin to a giant colosseum…
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