Wednesday 27 July 2016

The Mission

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”