Hawthorn and Child (28 page)

I said nothing for a while. But Will said nothing either, and I wanted to hear more about amoral, intelligent evil.

– Evil?

– Evil, he snapped. It’s the only word as fits. They’re
rehabilitated
now of course. They have the suits now and the cars and the drivers and the offices and all that shite. And that’s better than having the fields and the guns and the bombs. That’s progress, I grant you. But evil … I don’t think that’s inaccurate, Clive. People here on the mainland, you forget it. You forget what it was like. Not that you ever knew what it was like. But now you’ve forgotten that you … that you never knew what it was like … now you don’t know … what it was like. The terror.

He poured himself another Scotch.

– And I’ll tell you, he went on, rolling slightly in his armchair. I’ll tell you this. Let me ask you this. Does evil get put away? Just like that? In a bottom drawer? Does it?

He shook his head solemnly.

– What’s the long game here? What’s the
really
long game? A shift from war to fucking tedium Clive. From violence to boredom. You put away the bomb and you embrace the ballot box and after a while the people who were exhausted, who were exhausted by the violence, will be exhausted by the peace. That’s what it’s about. You change your strategy Clive. From the spectacular to the mundane. The take over continues, except now it’s not a bomb, it’s a bunch of suits. With an electoral fucking mandate. And the mundane is as cynical as the spectacular. Believe you me Clive. Evil bastards.

– What spectacular?

– The Spectacular, oh yes. They had this logic. An evil Catholic logic. The logic of the mass. Put on a show, prove the faith. We only have to be lucky once, they’d say, but you have to be lucky all the time. If we can pull off one big job, one big massive spectacular hit,
then
we’ve got you. They could murder RUC men all year long and nothing would come of it. They knew that. We knew it too. But if they wiped out Thatcher’s cabinet in Brighton … if they mortared Downing Street or Heathrow Airport or got a Royal. The Spectacular, they called it. They wanted a spectacular. They wanted 9/11, that’s the truth of it Clive. That’s what they fucking wanted. And if the priests hadn’t drawn their stupid line at suicide that’s what we would have got. Stop the world in its tracks.

He nodded at me furiously.

– Get themselves a bit of an audience, Clive, you know? Cynical, murderous, evil fuckers.

I nodded back at him.

– A spectacular, I said. A 9/11. Impossible to ignore.

– Or sex, he shouted.

– What?

– If the priests hadn’t drawn the line at sex, maybe all those young Catholic bastards would have been too busy fucking to have murdered three thousand people.

He laughed, but I was elsewhere.

– That’s evil, isn’t it Clive?

– I suppose so, I said.

– You can’t kill yourself. And you can’t touch yourself.

He fell back in his chair.

– No wonder they blew things up.

I stared at him. Everything swayed.

It took me hours to get home. I looked down over London from the heights of Crouch Hill. I looked down on the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and The City. I looked down on the dark houses and the blocks of unknowable flats, on the points of light, on the glow and the hum, on the roads and railways that connected everything and made it work. I looked down on the organization disguised as chaos and knew that the truth was the other way around. I looked down on a fragile organism, a delicate system, contingent on goodwill and good luck and good people. I looked down on everything.

I was suddenly in love with terrorism.

The Spectacular. It was both means and end. For what was it I was looking for if not a spectacular? What had my campaign of earnest, un-showy literature achieved? Nothing. Here I stood, in the drunken middle of my life, with no money, no wife, no children, no achievements – apart from the mild respect of a tiny group of critics and reviewers and writers conducting a conversation that no one was listening to but themselves. I needed to plant a bomb. I needed to explode.

A literary device.

There would be no pseudonym. This was something I should own. That was the point. Something to which my name was affixed. Clive Drayton. The man whose success – whose spectacular success – drew the world to his previously overlooked writing, which connected him, explosively, to a readership. Globally.

And the means too had come courtesy of Will’s surprising ferocity. He had altered not just my thoughts about what it was that I was trying to do, but how I could go about doing it. I would not waste my time with mere crime. With serial killers and their awful, dreary, masturbatory killings. With the
identikit
men who track them down. Why add to that miserable pile? I needed to think on a larger scale. I would not kill one or two, I would kill hundreds, thousands. I would show no fear, I would have no compunction. I would be – in an
abdication
of Englishness, a subversion of my own nature – merciless.

My thoughts – like hijacked planes – flew in many
directions
at once.

The change in me was startling. I became organized. I decided to stop drinking. I plotted out my days, dividing them up into the hours I needed for The Spectacular, and sleep. There would be nothing else.

Reverse engineer it. What does the terrorist want to do? Not achieve,
do
. The target. Decide on it, then obscure it. Sleeper cell. Fundamentalist. Cut-out. Rogue. Mercenary. Special ops, black ops, renegade. Deep fold. Al Qaeda. Russia. North Korea. Iran. American corporate interests. Oil. Halliburton. C.I.A. Downing Street. MI5. MI6. It didn’t really matter. A nebulous conspiracy of malign human agency involving all of them, each of them playing the other, none of them recognizing the subtleties of the plot as the techniques of fiction until it is too late. The fear.

I sat in the British Library and read my way through the intricate structures of protection and paranoia created since 9/11. Since 7/7. I read the awkwardly ill-fitting testimony of the principals and saw the harder truth – that they were not at the centre of things. Where the real tangled evil lurked was in the trail of emails and phone calls to and from Pakistan, or Indonesia; the labyrinthine progress of certain sums of dirty money over virtual space and real time; the erratic, often
inexplicable
movements of men known only by a letter or a playground nickname, from Sudan to Somalia, to Frankfurt or Marseilles, from Islamabad to Bradford.

Imagine it. Three men, say. A recondite and fragmented conversation crackling across untraceable phones and between fleeting, temporary nodes of the internet. This conversation – impenetrable even to aspects of the mens’ own psychology – influenced and affected both deliberately and accidentally and who-the-hell-knows by outside parties, eavesdroppers, the devil – turns its sum focus on that fragile packet of humanity self-importantly buzzing its way over the rolling ground beneath Crouch Hill.

I began to think about what it was I should blow up.

God it was fun. Bombs in suitcases on densely packed tube trains. Airports and bridges and underground railways. I studied these things. How much fertilizer would it take to collapse Piccadilly Circus station? How did you make it? What was that hairspray that they all seemed to buy in bulk? What could you do with it? Where could you go in London with several heavy cases? Pretty much anywhere. Where were the busiest places, when were they busy, with what sorts of people?

Something was bothering me. Something in the periphery of my vision. I looked around the British Library, Parliament Square, Waterloo. I sat on trains and buses and read the
security
notices and clicked my camera-phone at policemen and barriers and supporting beams. There was something I was missing. And it was only in front of the television – blender of thought – that I remembered. Another tired evening at Mr Malik’s desk, the television at my back, and the presenter annoying me as she intoned for the umpteenth time the officially bright and positive message about the regeneration of the east end, and the building of the magnificent stadium, and the wonder of the athlete’s village. I had heard it so often that I had forgotten it. The Olympics were coming to London.

The Olympics. London. 2012. The bloody Olympics.

The Bloody Olympics.

A conversation. In a small house in Cairo. One man sips lemon tea, the other fidgets nervously. They speak of
patience, resilience, strength.
Of
making the necessary alignments,
of putting into place
the delicate cogs of a complicated, sophisticated machine.
The tea drinker is calm. He carefully watches the twitches of the other man, who is not.

Beijing. 2008. The body of the International Olympic Committee’s Deputy Security Consultant Björn Arnfeldt is found hanging in his room on the 38th floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel. It looks like suicide, but an observant policeman detects signs of a struggle, and
a look of terror
on the face of the dead Swede which suggest otherwise. But the Olympics have been a triumph. There can be no room for intrigue or scandal. China’s reputation is at stake. Murder is impossible. Suicide is the immediate, official verdict.

New York. Present day. The morning commuter train from New Haven, due at Grand Central at 8:24, is running two minutes late. On it, in the last carriage, there is a woman and her three children, returning from a visit to her sister’s place upstate. Her eldest, Molly, aged 8, stares at the sweating man who is standing by the luggage rack. The man keeps on looking at his suitcase. Molly nudges her mother, points at the man. But her mother scolds her. It’s rude to stare. Further up the train there are similar sweating men in charge of similar, bulky, heavy suitcases. One of them looks repeatedly at his watch. Another, in the first carriage, sits with his eyes closed and his lips almost imperceptibly moving, the suitcase at his back. He is surrounded by businessmen and women making the first calls of the day, checking the markets in London, putting the finishing touches to PowerPoint presentations and last month’s sales figures.

As the train pulls into the station, Molly notices that the sweating man, unlike everyone else, makes no preparations to disembark. In the centre of the train the other sweating man suddenly kicks at the door. He is panicked. He is terrified. He has changed his mind.
Hey. Hey buddy! Easy! What you trying to do?
It’s then, in the look he gives his fellow passengers, in the glance he can’t help directing towards the suitcase, that people begin to realize that something is wrong. Very wrong. Molly hears the shouting from further up the train. She turns to her mother, determined to make her listen. A flicker of dark silence. All three bombs detonate simultaneously. The power of the explosion is enough to pulverize the train completely and to collapse the pillars along the length of the platform. Above, the shape of Grand Central Station changes. The famous windows shatter. The floor ruptures. The 59 storey Met Life building shakes and sways overhead. People on the top levels are convinced that it’s about to fall. It doesn’t. There is a pock-marked quiet. A plume of smoke rises from the heart of Manhattan.

London. Afternoon. A journalist sits in a café, writing on a laptop. She glances at the news on the television. Something’s happened in New York. Again. She rushes to the office. On her mobile she calls her boyfriend. The policeman.

Boyfriend? Or husband?

I wasn’t sure.

A marvellous tunnel vision stretched in front of me. At a stationery shop I bought index cards and a large white board on a tripod. I rearranged the furniture in the flat. I was no longer bothered by Rosemary’s existence, except that it provided a possible route to a policeman. I forgot about Stanley, and money. I forgot about the rent and Mr Malik and the morose Namjeev. I forgot about the clatter from upstairs, the music from downstairs. I worked through it. I worked through everything. There was a single focus to my days. It was, I noted with satisfaction, a state of mind not unlike that of being engrossed, as a reader, in a good book.

There was, to my surprise, a fantastic amount of
information
freely available online about the Olympic site and the construction process. I studied all of it, looking for a way in. And then I emailed them, asking for one. There was some sort of cultural liaison division within the public relations
department
of the Olympics infrastructure. I received an automated reply telling me that they required references, accreditation of some sort, a reason for my curiosity. I made a couple of nagging phone calls to Stanley and procured a simple letter of introduction, stating my ‘considerable reputation’, and listing the three awards I have managed to win – two in Japan that nobody understands, and one in Portugal that I still suspect was a case of mistaken identity. Three nagging emails eventually produced something similar from my last editor at Jackson & Pile, who rounded off her appeals for me to be granted the access and attention due any serious writer with a rather, I felt, pointed and legalistic declaration that I was not currently under contract with them and that whatever I was working on was not a commission, and that they had no legal, moral or business responsibility for me whatsoever. But it seemed to do the trick. The next day I had a phone call from an ebullient Sally who asked me what it was I was working on.

– A novel.

– Oh lovely. Set at the Olympics?

– Yes. Well, yes.

– What sort of novel?

Something in her tone gave me pause.

– It’s the story of a local Stratford family and their athletic son, and his dream of competing at the Olympics, and his … about how his dream … against the odds … comes true. A sort of heart-warming comedy.

– Oh what a marvellous idea!

Sally told me they had one of their regular site tours the coming Saturday at 8am. Journalists, for the most part. Would I be interested in coming along?