‘Taken at your rally in Brixton, London.’ She pulled a second photograph from the envelope. ‘You were on the town hall balcony, he was in the crowd.’
‘Overlap,’ Wood reminded. He saw the ocular whiteness grow pinker, the shine of anger-moisture on the upper lip.
Azania clenched the paper tight, framed the image, eyed the face staring out. It was his Tiger, unaware, caught. Deep cover replaced by deep trouble. A tactical situation, a delicate scenario. He flicked the picture back to the Special Agent, wanted to shift the evidence, show clean hands. No trouble. He was too far advanced, the FBI too far behind. If they were in his study, requesting his support, they were in the camp of the hopeless merely hoping. Nobodies who were nowhere. But he had no doubt, no delusions, that the white woman and the black collaborator would have to be deleted eventually. His Tigers were operational; his Tigers remained at large.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a schedule to keep.’
* * *
The UK
Ante bellum, the conditioning phase. The market was busy, a Caribbean colony of stalls and shoppers bottle-necked and blended into Electric Avenue, the traders and traffickers dealing and stealing, overt or covert, shouting over piles of salt fish, ackee and yams or huddled in doorways to swap banknotes and paper wraps. The Tiger entered from the cut-through of Market Row. He had loitered beneath the rail arches in Atlantic Road, listened to hip-hop played loud and distorted from a shop-front radio, studied the unwelcoming iron-mesh façade of a budget carpet store. Killing time, examining the form. He was Blacka Don, he was untouchable. Further along, shining bright and optimistic, had been the M&S on the junction of Brixton Road. A nice touch of respectability, of sensible, ordered, middle-class values; trampled in the riots of ’81, reborn, rebuilt, to be trampled again when the moment arrived. He had whistled a tune, turned his attention to the windows and skyline stretching back towards Railton Road in a clutter of hoardings and boarded retail lots. CCTV-land, virtual policing. It was how the law chose to maintain a presence, scanning with cameras, playing safe, patrolling remote, retreating. Man, they were blind. Man, were they nervous. Their yellow incident boards, witness appeals, sprung up daily like gravestones across the city, were multiplying, a natural adjunct to urban life and urban death, and would lend the metropolis world cemetery status. Witness appeals – the police were close to begging. Arrive-panic-and-shoot had long since substituted for stop-and-search. Operation Swamp was in the past, Operation Surrender the Streets was in the present. And they wondered why violent crime grew by a third each year. Drug culture, gun culture, gang culture, sub-culture. It was an inalienable civil right to hold a knife to a throat, to fire a gun, in the name of boredom and social deprivation. He had witnessed it before, had propagated it, primed it ; he had carried the flame and the firebomb from the Jamaican slums of Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens, the shanty blocks of Braeton, intimidated and killed on Kingston’s Port Royal, Fleet and High Holborn streets, tortured and mutilated with abandon in the hardcore interior of Mandeville. Transplantation was underway. The black heart of Britain. He liked what he saw.
Safety in numbers and in colour. He kept close to the curve of the high red-brick terrace, pushing through the clamour and the blood clots blocking his path. There was a smell of sweat, urine and marijuana, of unwashed pavements and ripening fruit. A youth in dickey bow and Crombie jacket peddled copies of Black Panther, selling racist dogma as Afro-British enlightenment; an old drunk railed to himself and the world from a temporary stoop. Recurring characters, the usual suspects. It was a close community, a closed community. Bitches shopped, brothers idled, with intent. Another day of business for the posses. The authorities would not, could not, venture here; surveillance would be countered, raids thwarted. Officers in their ugly Brixton block on Gresham Avenue knew the meaning of caution, limitation, understood the definition of hands-tied, of hair-trigger. There was no better place for a rendezvous. He moved on, dodged a pensioner with flat leather cap and filthy jacket traversing to inspect pineapples, side-stepped a mother screaming invective and inarticulateness at a pushchair and four random offspring. Her eyes were narcotic, her face a blank cheque from welfare. Everyone feeling the heat, everyone feeling the pressure.
He found the door, inserted the key and entered. The hallway was a corridor, uncarpeted, unlit – cheapness and claustrophobia steeped in post-daylight gloom and the faded odour blends of curried goat, close living and Marlboro Light. He checked the spyhole – force of habit, force of circumstance. The sounds and sights were distant, swam alien-like across the fish-eye. He had the inside, would always do so. The pensioner was turning over a hand of bananas, the mother had disappeared from shot. On a wall opposite, a torn poster requested donations for the family of the teenage victim plucked from the Hackney riot estate and cut to pieces by the racist serial murderer. Nothing odd in the street, at odds with the flow of a trading day. Satisfied, he double-locked, slid the bolt and started up the stairs.
‘Look what England’s green and pleasant land threw up. You’re late.’ The voice was South African, antagonistic, its owner square-jawed and brickhouse-built. He leant against a far wall of the spartan room, eyes a frigid blue behind wire spectacles, hair close and dyed a dark mud-to-coal, stocky torso clad in denim, desert boots and short-sleeved non-crease. Unshowy, uncompromising. ‘Bin doin’ ragga wid bredren, hangin’ at ends wid mandebs, gonna cotch n’ bun at yard?’ Patois mimicry messaging contempt.
The Tiger slumped sideways into a worn armchair, his legs sprawled, body casual and signalling indifference. A glance towards the white man, informally warning. ‘Me orders come from LA.’
‘Ja. Whose orders, funding, come from us. We expect cooperation, not improvisation.’
‘What ya mean?’
‘You let that woman live.’
‘So?’
‘Why didn’t you finish her off like the rest of her guests, her family?’
‘Didn’t make no difference, man. You think she could ID me?’ A derisive cough. ‘We decide the tactics.’
‘And you’ve made some good calls. The gun you used for the dinner party and the cop shootings? It was dirty.’
‘Lie. Howd’ya know?’
‘It’s my business, you fokken poes. But it’s not my business to divert resources, clean up your mistakes, travel to Skelmersdale and rub out the armourer and car ringer you chose to trade with.’
‘Could ’ave left ’im to me.’
‘Ag man, risk a screw-up?’
‘So, what ya do?’
‘Cut and shut him, like his vehicles.’
The head was shaking. ‘You’re somethin.’
‘You’re a serious fokken liability. There’s a lot riding on this, on maintaining security. You stupid bastard blacks are all the same. I don’t want excuses, I don’t want blame-shifting, I don’t want denials.’
‘I don’t want ya pussy preachin’, colonialist.’
‘I’ve more important things, houtcop. We’re up against the British Security Service. They’re not virgins.’
‘Me fucks ’em, anyways.’
‘Unless they fuck you. I’ve already had to take counter-actions against them in Germany. They sent out an officer, tried to spy on the UK racial multimedia-smuggling enterprise.’
‘Enterprise.’ The word was savoured slowly. ‘Don’t care ’bout no white man’s enterprise. Me ’appy doin’ ma thing.’
‘Try not to let me down, try not to underestimate.’
‘Ya try not to criticize.’
‘Kak, man. Aids? It’s the West’s fault, it’s not because the Africans rape and arse-fuck like pigs. Poverty? It’s western governments and greedy bankers, it’s not because kaffirs couldn’t run a fucking braai, are too busy stealing and fighting to build societies. Have you seen anything in south London to impress you?’
The automatic pistol, heavy-calibre, large magazine, was pointing at his head. ‘Finished?’
‘I trust that gun is clean, has no previous users?’
‘Whitey, this nigger kills.’ Safety thumbed to off.
‘Proves a point. In my world you earn respect.’
‘Mine, ya take it. Me’s gon’ta use ya brain to paint walls.’ Given the Glock 9-mm pistol’s patented low-recoil, flip-dampening port compensation system, it was a close-range possibility. Pure artistry. Absolute intent.
A time lapse of several seconds, a distance between gun-barrel and forehead of several feet. The South African’s voice, demeanour, remained unchanged by the interval. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? If you take me down, the press won’t even mention it. If I whack you, they’ll swear from every paper stand you were a perfect citizen, a credit to your community, an A-grade student who only ever wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.’
