Jake felt bad when that young kid with the green eyes and floppy fringe went down for the murder of Yaseen Nalawandi. Jake and Wilkins had stabbed the Muslim cleric three times each behind Deptford tube station and taken his wallet to make it look like a street mugging. But then the kid, on his way home from a kebab shop, had walked past Nalawandi bleeding out and stupidly picked up the bloodied knife Wilkins had dropped at the scene. The kid already had a record for affray, possession, and actual bodily harm—now the fringe would be grey and the green eyes hidden behind reading glasses by the time he got out again.
Wilkins called it collateral damage and told Jake to suck it up. He rubbed his hand over his freshly buzzed hair and repeated what they’d all told him that first day: What they were doing was right but yes, occasionally mistakes could happen. He kissed his teeth in that annoying way of his and said they’d get back on track with the next one. A kid had lost fifteen to twenty years of his life but Wilkins wasn’t about to let it throw their mission off course. That was the man’s nature.
Despite the gnawing at his conscience, Jake went along with it. Because that was his nature. He wanted to see this through; he wanted—needed—to believe that the four names he’d so far helped remove from the list were all justified.
The next name was Jeff Richards from The Base, an extreme right-wing militant group formed in Washington state and now operating in the UK. An ex-combat engineer or “sapper”, Richards was plotting an attack on a synagogue in East London. Every Sunday he’d meet with other members of The Base in a remote barn in Essex to shoot guns, assemble explosives and drink beer. He’d then stumble home along narrow country lanes late at night using his phone as a flashlight.
It was too easy.
Richards turned at the sound of the car only seconds before it hit him. Wilkins reversed over his body twice to make sure, crunching through gears and bones. It was all Jake could do not to throw up in the passenger seat.
Back in London the next morning, they heard the news at the JTAC II briefing. Jeffrey Richards’ real name was Colin Barber and he was an undercover Met officer who’d infiltrated The Base.
Jake couldn’t stop himself from throwing up this time.
He ran out of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and spewed bile into the gutter as traffic pumped along Uxbridge Road.
There was no way Wilkins could blithely dismiss this as “collateral damage.” They’d murdered one their own. This had to be the end; Jake would make sure of it.
When he went back in, Wilkins pulled him aside and told him there was a meeting that night, in the usual place. They’d all be there.
***
The usual place was the back room of a pub in Chiswick which had closed down during Covid and never reopened. Jake knocked on the back door a little before eight o’clock that evening. Kenway opened it, glass of whisky in hand. They were the first to arrive which gave them time to talk privately. Jake wondered if that had been the plan all along: have Kenway reason with him.
At a dusty leather booth in one corner, Kenway offered him a choice of four different whiskies, including one from India. “I bet you didn’t know the Indians made whisky,” he said. “And I bet you didn’t know it’s the best-selling whisky in the world. Although, that might have more to do with the size of their population than a reflection of quality.”
Kenway brought a selection of whisky to every meeting for the six of them to sample. He’d talk about the nose, the palate, how the flavors could open up with a splash of water. It was his way of making what they were doing seem normal, social even. And as always, he had the bottle of Balvenie Rare Marriages Thirty-Year-Old on the table, unopened. It was a two-grand bottle of single malt that he’d been teasing them for months about opening.
Jake would usually ask questions, compare the whiskies with interest. But he was in no mood tonight. “Wilkins told you what I think?” he said.
Kenway took a deep breath, irritated, and poured Jake two fingers of the Indian whiskey. He held the glass up to the light. It was alive with sediment dancing in the amber.
“Cloudy, see? You’d think that would be a bad thing. But taste how smooth that is. Smoky rather than peaty.”
Jake stared at the older man as he desperately tried to normalize something that could never be normal. They’d killed a policeman thinking he was a terrorist. A line had been forever crossed.
“But watch for the sweet after-taste. It’ll make you want to drink another. And that’s when the impurities will get you. More than one or two and it’ll give you the worst hangover ever.”
Kenway handed Jake the glass and he necked it in one, not even bothering to taste it.
Kenway understood the message. He sighed. “You came to me, Jake, remember?”
“That was before.”
“This is what you wanted.”
Jake shook his head.
“And you took a vow,” said Kenway.
“But what we did –”
“Can’t be undone.”
“It has to stop now,” said Jake.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Come clean. Turn ourselves in.”
Kenway baulked at the idea. “The others would never agree to that.”
Before Jake could object, Kenway cut him off: “Wilkins made the mistake, why should all six of us pay for it?”
“We all vetted the names,” said Jake. “We all agreed. It may have been Wilkins who killed him, but we’re all as guilty.”
“And what good would it serve if we all went down for it? Discredit the service, empower every name on the list, make it open season for every crack-pot terrorist with an axe to grind? Think it through, Jake.”
“I have.”
“NO, YOU HAVEN’T!” Kenway’s roar made Jake flinch. He stared as Kenway took a breath and poured them each another whiskey. “You see how that sweet aftertaste replaces the smokiness on your lips?”
Jake didn’t answer. He couldn’t imagine ever being able to taste anything again.
Kenway took a sip then spoke, his voice calm but firm. “We put everything on hold for a few months, a year even. Reassess.” He took another sip. “And Wilkins takes the fall for the copper, that’s only right. He’s a loose cannon, anyway. Selby and Baptiste have been saying so for months.”
Jake started to shake his head again, but Kenway wasn’t about to be contradicted. This wasn’t a negotiation; this was how it was going to be. “It’s one of us,” said Kenway. “The man who did it. Or it’s none of us. Your choice.”
“And what if I blow the whistle on my own?”
It was Kenway who shook his head this time. “You’ve been in the service about five minutes. The rest of us have decades on the clock. Who are they gonna believe?”
More importantly, Jake thought, the four founders of the group—Kenway, Selby, Walker, and Baptiste—had the political connections and the power within MI5 to cover this up.
“I could go direct to the press,” said Jake.
“Don’t be a fool. Thames House gets even an inkling of that and you’d on a charge of breaching the Official Secrets Act. You’d never see daylight again, son. Neither would your dad. Or your sister.”
Jake knew he was right. The victims of the next road accident, the next street mugging, the next unfortunate overdose would be Jake and his family.
Jake clenched his jaw to stifle the anger creeping up the back of his throat like bile. He broke eye contact with Kenway only when he heard the back door open and close. The others were arriving. He glanced back at Kenway. The older man wanted an answer.
Jake had no choice but to give him the one he wanted.
***
Jake had been accepted into the security service training program straight from university. Patrick Kenway had taught one of the modules—ironically, one on ethics and the use of statutory powers. In Jake’s mind, Kenway was the quintessential security officer, a character from a modern spy novel, the antithesis of James Bond. He was usually unshaven, always overweight, and his ill-fitting suits hung from his shoulders like dust cloths over discarded furniture. He frequently stank of booze and his hands used to shake as he flicked through PowerPoint slides. But his classes were challenging and thought-provoking, and like the man himself, devoid of easy answers.
Jake immediately hit it off with Kenway and he became something of a mentor to him. He steered Jake into analysis, first at Thames House, then at the newly formed offshoot, JTAC II. It operated out of a building on Uxbridge Road disguised as the Shepherd’s Bush telephone exchange. Only the forest of antennas and dishes on the roof gave away it’s true purpose: a listening center. All forms of telecommunication in the United Kingdom—phone calls, emails, texts, instant messages—were covertly monitored from here. The data was then used to assess threats to national security and update the terrorist watchlist.
Jake’s first assignment was to answer phone calls from the public to MI5’s 0800 number. For the most part, the calls were well-meaning if a little xenophobic, usually someone worried about a neighbor or the suspicious activities of street gangs late at night. Others were more aggressively racist in nature. An outraged caller had reported a foreigner for some perceived slight and wanted to know why the security services hadn’t immediately scooped them off the street.
“When the government of the day pushes an anti-immigrant agenda,” Kenway had told him, “people feel empowered to behave badly. Remember, it wasn’t just bigots who voted for Brexit. Fucking idiots did, too.”
One of the calls Jake received on his first day on the job was from an elderly Muslim lady in Bristol. Her neighbor, one Salman Asif, had told her that suicide bombers were justified and that preaching against ISIS was wrong. She also overheard him vowing revenge for the murder of a family friend at the hands of a white street gang. She’d finally been prompted to call when she witnessed him carrying suspicious-looking packages into his house late at night.
Jake cross-referenced his name and found that Salman Asif had already been reported by four other people, including the cleric of a mosque that had seen fit to ban him from attending.
Recognizing the potential implications of the lady’s call, Jake passed his details up the chain of command. Rather than instigating a flurry of activity in response, though, nothing happened. Jake followed up with his immediate boss every day for several weeks to no avail. Eventually, his boss called him into his office and showed him the current MI5 watchlist.
It contained nearly twenty-five thousand names, far more than MI5 officers could ever effectively monitor. Most were merely flagged. If they did anything out of the ordinary—traveled to Syria or got arrested, for example—they’d be looked at more closely. Otherwise, they were left to simply live their lives.
Of the twenty-five thousand names on the main watchlist, about three thousand were under regular surveillance, watched all or most of the time. While Asif was on the broader list, he wasn’t deemed a high enough risk to be one of the three thousand. And nothing an officer of Jake’s standing did was ever going to change that. In other words, his boss needed Jake to let it go.
A month later, Salman Asif detonated a bomb on a packed bus, killing himself and twenty-three commuters, schoolkids and pensioners as they traveled into Bristol city center.
For weeks afterwards, Jake didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. The sense of guilt was paralyzing. He’d known, he’d been warned. And yet he’d let it go.
He started drinking more, turning up late for work, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation. After a dressing down from his superiors, who told him over and over that no-one was to blame for the Asif situation, he finally reached out to Kenway.
As he should’ve expected, Kenway’s reaction was very different. He understood the guilt, the anger, the sense of frustration. He knew what Jake was experiencing because he’d experienced it, too. Kenway had been in the British security services for nearly thirty years—how could he not?
They took long walks around The Scrubs, grassy scrubland in West London, nipping whiskey from a hipflask and talking. Kenway helped Jake gain perspective, find the resolve to carry on in the job, to carry on with his life. But still, Jake couldn’t find a sense of peace. He wanted justice for the twenty-three innocents who lost their lives that morning and the others who’d suffered life-altering injuries. For hours every day he’d scroll through the watchlist, staring at the unbroken catalogue of names, thousands and thousands of them. And he’d wonder which of them would be next to strike, how many lives would be ripped apart when they did, and at the sheer absurdity of the system that was supposed to offer protection.
When Kenway saw that there was no placating Jake, that his outrage could not be quelled, he started talking to him about the alternative. It wasn’t something that could be broached in a single conversation, but rather required Kenway to tread carefully, to gauge Jake’s reactions as he gradually revealed more and more over a few dozen different drams of whisky.
There was an alternative.
It may not be legal, it may not be moral. And it was certainly not politically correct. But it was an alternative. And it was justice.
***
Jake had already known Wilkins from JTAC II; he’d first met the others in the same Chiswick pub after hours one night. Baptiste, Selby and Walker. They hadn’t adopted a name for their group—it was nothing that formal or sinister. It was just men sitting around a table in an empty pub drinking whisky and deciding who lived and who died. Like Kenway’s unopened bottle of Balvenie single malt, it was a rare marriage.
They’d each put forward names of people they thought should be removed from the watchlist, permanently. They’d pass around copies of the suspect’s security files, detail why they constituted such a prominent risk, and then vote. There was just one rule: to act, the vote had to be unanimous. Just one of them dissented, it didn’t happen. No argument, no persuasion, just the facts and a simple vote: Yes or no. If it was a no, they moved on to the next name. Yes, and they’d plan the where and the how.
The first name Jake voted yes on had been proposed by Wilkins. Jofil Faran, a Somali immigrant and convicted child molester who was running a people smuggling operation with a group of Montenegrin gangsters. When he started smuggling Jihadi terrorists into the country, he found himself on the broader watchlist. Since Wilkins had photographic evidence of Faran ushering a nine-year-old Polish girl into a massage parlor in East Ham, it was an easy yes vote for Jake. Whatever they risked being wrong about, they weren’t wrong about the man’s sexual tastes.
Three of them broke into Faran’s flat one night. Wilkins and Baptiste held him down in bed while Jake punched a syringe of nerve agent into his neck. Kenway had lifted a vial of Novichok from the murder scene of a Russian GRU Colonel in Kent the summer before. Death wasn’t instant—the three of them had to hover over Faran’s bed breathing through gas masks while he puked up his stomach lining and evacuated his bowels, bathing his legs in a tsunami of shit and blood. Finally, he asphyxiated to death.
Jake had to recall the photograph of the little girl being dragged into the brothel by Faran to hold himself together and remind himself why such a brutal method was necessary. It was a natural step for the investigating detectives to attribute Faran’s murder to the Montenegro gangsters he was in business with. Even now, the case was still open, but not active.
Jake had taken a life, and there was a price to be paid, a price charged in the currency of sleepless nights. But whatever remorse and guilt he felt at killing Faran, it was nothing compared to the pain of his failure of the twenty-three bus passengers in Bristol. And the sad aspect of human nature meant that having done it once, a second time hardly added any further weight to his conscience. Once the darkness of your deeds made it impossible to sleep at night, robbing your days of more light didn’t make any difference.
Until the line was crossed. There was always a line, even for a wayward soul like Jake.
***
Wilkins was the last to arrive in the Chiswick Arms the night after he’d killed Colin Barber, the undercover Met officer. That allowed Kenway the opportunity to sketch out his plan to the others. Baptiste, Selby and Walker didn’t like the idea of sacrificing Wilkins to appease Jake, loose cannon or not. But Kenway convinced them it was the only way forward.
By the time Wilkins finally pushed open the rain-warped door to the pub and helped himself to two fingers of Kenway’s Indian whiskey, his fate had been sealed. They agreed to meet again in three days—at the Chiswick Arms as usual so as not to arouse Wilkins’ suspicions. But Kenway would have a couple of his detective friends there waiting. Kenway was sure they’d cut Wilkins a favorable deal in return for keeping quiet about the group. Instead of murder, he’d be charged with vehicular manslaughter. It would be framed as a simple road accident but Wilkins’ career in the service would be over. And Jake’s involvement in the group would be over, too.
Jake fought for more, but the others made it clear he was in a losing corner. It was the only deal he was going to get—not even close to what he wanted to happen, but at least the dead copper would have some sliver of justice.
It was raining hard that Thursday evening when Jake banged on the back door to the Chiswick Arms for the final time. He could feel water seeping down his neck, soaking his shirt collar. Kenway opened the door to him whisky in hand. He was alone. No waiting cops for Wilkins.
“They’ll be here soon,” said Kenway anticipating his question.
The bottle of Rare Marriages sat open on the dusty corner table, a second glass already poured. Kenway handed it to Jake.
“There’s a way of doing these things,” he said. “It’s the last time we’ll be together. I figured it was time.”
Jake took the glass.
“Plus,” said Kenway. “This has always been more of a marriage-ender for me. I’ve toasted each of my ex-wives with a bottle of Balvenie.”
Jake sipped it. It tasted dusty rather than smooth like the Indian stuff they had last time. Then the aftertaste hit him. Metallic. He couldn’t hide his reaction from Kenway.
“What? That’s a two-grand bottle, don’t you dare tell me you don’t like it.”
“Just . . . not what I was expecting.”
Kenway scowled, added a drop of water from the jug to Jake’s glass. Then swilled it around a few times before handing it back. “Try it now,” he said. “Should open up the flavor.”
Jake took another, larger sip, rolled the liquid over his tongue and then swallowed. He savored the heat warming his rain-soaked body. Then the aftertaste hit again.
“Still?” said Kenway, reading his expression.
Jake nodded, checked his watch.
“Relax, they’ll be here,” said Kenway.
Jake necked the rest of the whiskey, avoiding the metallic burn this time.
“Another?” said Kenway, offering the bottle.
“Two grand or not, it doesn’t do it for me.”
Kenway poured three fingers into a clean glass. “Now try it.”
“No thanks, really.”
“Jake.”
Jake leaned against the booth to keep his balance.
“Try it,” said Kenway. “It’ll taste much better this time.”
Jake took a sip.
“No aftertaste from the powder this time, right?”
Jake slid down into the seat of the booth, the world around him narrowing to a point. But Kenway was right. There was no aftertaste now, just the bite of a perfectly aged single malt. And a wave of darkness that threatened to cover everything.
[Image Credit : Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash ]
by 
RL Hadley
Latest posts by RL Hadley (see all)
- The Watch List - April 16, 2024
Well written and ended. When one doesn’t stand behind commitments made the price can be steep.