Killing for the Company

‘ Ken behekhlet,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Damn right it did.’

Maya Bloom walked out of the bedroom, descended the stairs and stepped out into the cold night air, closing the front door quietly behind her.

PART THREE

Ten years later, 2013.

FIFTEEN

5 December.

Reg Parker, the driver of the soon-to-depart 16.55 train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington, was deeply engrossed in his Daily Express. He had a thing for Kate Middleton and was glad to be alone in the driver’s compartment to lech over the double-page spread plastered with paparazzi shots of her on a beach in Antigua. No sign in the pictures of that chinless wonder Wills, thank God. Just Kate, the sea, the sand and, in his imagination, Reg himself — rubbing factor eight into her back. He looked up in irritation when he heard a tap on the platform-side window.

Some bloody foreigner was standing there, grinning like an idiot. He wore a baseball cap and dark glasses, so Reg couldn’t tell what nationality he might be. Chink, perhaps? He had a camera round his neck, so Reg reckoned he was a trainspotter. Bloody weirdos, the lot of them. He shook his head with irritation, pointed back towards the passenger carriages and went back to his paper.

But the trainspotter didn’t give up. He tapped louder. Reg, irritated now, threw Kate and her sun-kissed skin to one side, and lowered the window.

‘Look, mate, you need to step back from the…’ he said.

He drew breath rapidly. The trainspotter wasn’t smiling any more. And he obviously wasn’t a trainspotter either. As soon as Reg had dropped the window he’d stuck his right hand through the opening. He was holding a gun.

‘You’ve got five seconds to open up.’ The gunman’s accent was heavy and unknown to Reg, who started to tremble.

‘Three seconds.’

Reg fumbled desperately as he opened the driver’s door. The gunman stepped in immediately, pulled the door shut and slid down, with his back against the lower section of the door so he couldn’t be seen from outside.

‘Raise the alarm,’ he said, ‘and I’ll kill you. Do anything except drive off on time and I’ll kill you.’

Reg swallowed hard. He didn’t reply. He couldn’t do anything but stare, petrified, at the weapon in the foreigner’s fist. His own fist scrunched Kate Middleton’s midriff. He was weak with fear and not altogether sure that he wasn’t about to piss himself.

It had puzzled Hussam Hayek, in the weeks leading up to this moment, that trains were not more common targets. Yes, to bring down an aircraft was dramatic. But trains were easy to board and had none of the security restrictions that came with air travel. Unless you were unfortunate enough to encounter a sniffer dog, you’d be practically untraceable on any railway station in the world. And once the train was in motion and between stations, there was little anybody could do to stop you.

The 16.55 to Paddington was in motion and between stations now. One of Hussam’s accomplices, if everything had gone according to plan, had the driver under his control. Surely there was no way anybody could prevent this from happening now.

The train’s five carriages held about thirty passengers each. Men in grey suits and cheap shoes making the journey up to town sat alongside pensioners, mums and a few schoolkids. One blind man had his guide dog sitting in the aisle by his side, his white stick lying at an angle on the table in front of him. The guard had announced just a minute after the train had left the station that no refreshments would be served on this journey, before warning the passengers to be on the lookout for unattended bags or suspicious packages. Hardly anybody listened. They were too wrapped up in their own activities: doing sudokus, texting, listening to iPods.

In addition to the young man who had the driver at gunpoint, there were four accomplices, all male, all nervous, all sweating. Their clean-shaven skin was dark and their eyes brown, but it would be difficult for anyone to tell that they were lifelong residents not of Bristol, nor of London, but of Gaza, that long, thin strip of land sandwiched between Israel, Egypt and the deep blue of the Mediterranean. War-torn. Blood-spattered. Bomb-shattered. Hell by the sea.

Of these four men, Hussam and one other stood at the end of the front carriage, next to the toilets; the other two stood in the same position at the opposite end of the train. All four had known tragedy. Two were orphans before they reached the age of ten, their parents killed by Israeli bombs launched into Gaza from screaming F-16s on the pretext of self-defence. A third had more physical scars: the side of his body bore the lurid traces of a mess of inexpert stitching where a piece of shrapnel had entered. It had been removed, and the wound repaired, without the luxury of anaesthetic or painkillers. He still carried pain with him every waking second, and it was even worse when he tried to piss.