The
Mission
Standing there, sightless, he let his mind drift. It was such a
shame that it should all have ended like this. He wasn't really sure
how he had managed to get himself into this situation in the first
place. His wife would have called it a bit of a pickle; she was
always good at understatement. Then again, she didn't know about
this because he had not been in touch with her for some months, ever
since he had embarked on this journey and probably if she had known
about it she would have called him a bloody idiot or worse.
He had kissed her gently so as not to wake her and left her in the
middle of the night. He had walked the 5 miles to the rendezvous
point where he had been picked up and driven silently to a bus stop
at the edge of the city. He had caught the bus and walked the half
mile to the house. He was expecting the house to be in some beat up
area of town, but was surprised to find it was in one of the better
parts of town. He had let himself in to the gate at the back of the
house with a key left in a drain in the wall and on entering the back
garden had been confronted by a huge house, four stories high, and
detached from its neighbours. He had slipped round the garden
keeping as close as possible to the perimeter wall until he had
reached the steps to the basement. Descended the stairs he had input
the code into the digital lock.
The house had been silent and unoccupied, but he had wasted no time
in exploring, that would have been to risk the mission as well as
pointless. Instead he had made his way to the room to the front of
the house in the basement, which in different times could have been
the butler's pantry, but was now not much more than a storeroom.
There was a simple bed, a chair and on the bed, a mobile phone and
charger. He had made sure the phone was switched on and charged,
written a draft email and before he lay down on the bed to sleep, he
had checked that all the equipment he needed had been left for him.
He had slept surprisingly well and when he woke, he had checked the
drafts folder on the email and found that his draft had been deleted
and a new one saying simply “tonight” had been substituted.
The mission was simple and almost risk free provided that security
had not been breached or someone had not been sloppy. It was highly
unlikely that there would be much security on the target as it was
not considered vulnerable to attack; in fact it was not really
considered worth attacking. At the time that the mission was to be
completed, there should also be very little loss of life. What was
significant was that they would know that nothing was safe from
attack.
He had walked half a mile to the bus stop and caught a bus to within
a mile of the target and walked the rest of the way, pausing to
window shop and weaving round back streets to make sure that no one
was following him. On reaching the target he had lifted the manhole
cover and dropped the small explosive device into the sewer below.
If everyone had done their job properly, the hexane should have been
generated in the sewer by the time the device exploded, wrecking a
good few miles of sewers and flipping manhole covers into the air for
miles around.
He had returned to the house the way he had come and had just keyed
in the code to the lock when he was seized from behind and placed in
handcuffs. It had all been over in seconds. He had been taken to
the police station where he had been locked in a room on his own for
what seemed hours. Eventually, a nicely dressed and spoken policeman
had come into the room and interrogated him. The policeman seemed to
know more about the organisation than he did, so had not been
bothered about the extent of any confession.
So here he was standing against a wall with a hood over his head
reflecting on the futility and shortness of life.
“Take aim. FIRE”
