Free Sleeper Cell by Alan Porter

his years at SOAS both to get his degree and to rebel a little against his over-privileged Kuwaiti upbringing. Living in a run-down top floor flat that had mould in the bathroom and cockroaches in the kitchen was the most fun he’d had in his life.
    He had been unmoved by the bomb that morning. London was a big place; his flat in Tower Hamlets and the hotel in Kensington were in the same geographical city, but culturally they might as well have been on different continents.
    He had watched the video of the explosion with little interest; he’d watched the early evening news with even less. But what began to come through as evening fell was much harder to ignore.
    At eight o’clock the first twitter feeds had started. At first Faran ignored the chirrup of his phone. There had been a lot of talk about the bombing since noon and this seemed to be just more of the same.
    But the tweets kept coming, more and more frequently.
    Around nine, he scrolled down the list and felt a chill even in the stuffy atmosphere of his flat. People he knew – people he would have said were as emotionally disengaged from today’s events as he was – were starting to post some disturbing stuff.
    ‘#reclaim our streets. the fightback has started. youtube of #mosque gatherings.’ That was from Sarah Gerrard, a fellow IR student he knew vaguely, who had never been particularly political before. It was typical of a slew of some thirty tweets that had stacked up in the last ten minutes.
    ‘#enough-is-enough. We all stand together or we all fall apart. #reclaim our streets at your local mosque.’ David Corby-Arras, probably the most liberal (and gay) man Faran knew. He had either retweeted it by mistake or someone had hijacked his account. Or maybe the bombers really had gone too far this time.
    He felt his pulse beating hard in his neck.
    He clicked on the #reclaim hashtag and there were thousand of posts. Selfies of skinheads in S52 t-shirts standing in front of mosques; images of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Paris, Tunisia; sinister white text on black flags that read ‘Je Suis #Reclaim’; declarations of war that boiled with urgency and hate.
    For the first time, he became aware of voices down in the street. He couldn’t hear much, and the tingle in his spine may have had as much to do with what he had just read as with the voices themselves, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that these sounds were somehow more pressing, more immediate, than the usual background.
    He woke up his computer and logged into Facebook. If the twittersphere was hot, FB was on fire. There were hundreds of messages, links to videos, images of the bomb site, cartoons of obviously Muslim men with dynamite in their turbans or AKs sticking out of their robes like cold, skinny penises.
    He closed the computer’s lid. He needed to speak to someone, anyone. His phone whistled and he tapped the screen. A new image filled it. A photograph – faked, he assumed – of a person sitting, head back, on a bus. A shard of glass protruded from her neck and her shirt was a slick of glistening red. The woman’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the camera.
    What shocked him most was the caption that had been added at the foot of the image. In faux-arabic script, it said ‘This Is Islam’.
    As he scrolled through the contacts list on his phone he heard the screech of tyres in the distance. In a street where traffic noise was the norm, it took something special to stand out, and this did. He drew the net curtain aside as the blaring horn grew louder.
    Driving a high speed down the wrong side of the road was a white Ford Transit. A man sat half-out of the passenger window, two others stood just inside the open back doors. They were chanting something Faran could not make out and beating a rapid, heavy salvo on the van’s walls. It turned right at the end of the road and disappeared.
    Other vehicles followed. Groups of men in the familiar S52 t-shirts, some wearing Occupy masks, most