London Twist: A Delilah Novella

slightly. “You don’t look like a Bertha.”
    “What do I call you?”
    “Kent, actually.”
    “You don’t look like a Kent.”
    He cocked an eyebrow. “What does a Kent look like?”
    “I’m kidding, Kent.”
    There was a long pause, and then he laughed. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
    “I was also kidding about the name. Call me Delilah.”
    He lifted his drink. “All right, Delilah. Sorry we got off to a bad start. Cheers.”
    They touched glasses and drank. The drink was lovely—cold, crisp, and strong.
    “Right,” Kent said. “Down to business, then. How much have they told you?”
    “Very little.”
    “Well, regrettably, there’s not all that much to tell. Our target is named Fatima Zaheer. Nationality, British; extraction, Pakistani; age, thirty; politics, radical.”
    “And she’s of interest because… ”
    “She’s the oldest of four siblings—three brothers, one of whom, named Imran, is her fraternal twin. The two younger brothers were killed five years ago outside the family home in Peshawar in an American drone strike.”
    Delilah’s own brother, her only sibling, had been killed in Lebanon when Delilah was sixteen. Her parents had never recovered from it.
    “That’s terrible,” she heard herself say.
    Kent nodded. “Fatima and Imran were living in London at the time. After the death of their brothers, the two of them returned to Pakistan to care for their parents, who, as you can imagine, were devastated by the loss of their two children. Eventually, Fatima returned to London. Imran never did. There are indications he’s become a leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and is currently in hiding somewhere in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The Americans have been hunting him with drones for years, so far without success. We believe Fatima knows where he is, or at least that she might inadvertently fix him. If we can acquire something actionable from her, we can pass it along to the Americans, who ought to be able to use it.”
    “But the TTP is mostly a Pakistani problem. Why are the Americans so interested?”
    “Ah, that. It turns out our man Imran is somewhat special. Before answering the call of jihad, he received a degree in chemical engineering at the University College London. After that, a promising few years in a research lab at INEOS, a British-headquartered chemical multinational. His expertise lies in aerosols.”
    “Aerosols.”
    “Yes. A very dangerous expertise when combined with, say, anthrax. Or cyanide. Or sarin. The sorts of matériel al Qaeda is known to traffic in, but has hitherto been unable to transform into a means of achieving mass casualties.”
    “So he’s wanted for his knowledge? But you can learn these things on the Internet.”
    “Some you can, yes, and half of what you find will get you killed. In fact, we believe Internet information is responsible for eliminating a not insignificant percentage of our potential problems, by blowing up the idiots who try to make their pipe bombs based on diagrams they find on jihadist blogs.” He smiled. “It’s even possible the unreliable information on some of those blogs was planted there by certain Western intelligence organizations. But don’t quote me on that.”
    She wasn’t surprised. Mossad ran similar operations, with similar results. “The worry is that Imran is graduating a higher percentage of his students?”
    “Precisely. And equipping them with advanced degrees in very unhelpful subjects.”
    She took a sip of her martini and considered. “The two brothers. They were terrorists?”
    He shifted in his chair. “According to the Americans, yes.”
    “The Americans count as a terrorist every military-age male killed in a drone strike.”
    “Yes, I know. You have to admire the Americans for their creativity. They’ve certainly come up with a convenient metric to reduce civilian casualties.”
    He took a sip of his drink. “But candidly? No. No evidence they were terrorists, just two kids in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their deaths were tragic, not least because the tragedy really did radicalize the surviving brother and sister. It’s like all those prisoners the Yanks mistakenly ‘detained’ in Guantanamo. Were they innocent? Yes. And after a decade of abuse and encagement, how many of them could be counted on to return to their innocent civilian lives upon release? If they weren’t terrorists when they went in, they certainly would be