A/N: In the audio commentary for this episode, Raza ponders how Zaf would have coped had he been forced to shoot Nazim Malek and I wanted to explore that.
"I didn't join this service to shoot innocent people."
He'd meant it, too. But today that was what the service asked of him, and Zaf flinched at the shot as if he couldn't quite believe he had been the one to fire it.
Nazim's body crumpled as if a puppeteer had released his grip on the strings, hands falling from the rifle, a slow crimson spread of blood masking his chest as his muscles melted into the concrete. Zaf didn't move from the spot where he stood but his eyes travelled over the man. He could have knocked him out, dragged him off the roof, but the risk was apparently too high and the President of the Algerian bank still could have gained a bullet. But what about Nazim? The risk had been high for him too.
A combination of 'Zaf' and 'Zafar' rung in his ears as Adam and Harry waited for him to respond. He spoke to his boss first as it seemed easier, giving the mechanical response of: "Target down."
"Zaf, you alright?" His friend sounded genuinely concerned so Zaf finally responded with a dismissive "yeah."
"The target?"
"What do you think, Adam?" Zaf snapped.
"Zaf, he was about to kill someone on British soil. Murder. You stopped him."
"By killing, so I'm no better than him. And his name was Nazim Malek, not just 'the target' or another casualty caught up in this. He was an innocent."
Zaf snapped his phone shut and pushed open the door leading back down from the roof, his gaze grazing Nazim's body once more over his shoulder. His eyes were still open, full of grief and pain and total abandonment.
He had died on the ground of a country that he hoped would provide a fresh start.
...
Adam sighed and rubbed a hand across his face as Zaf disconnected the call. Outside, he could hear Nazim's wife screaming for her son - Special Forces had killed Badrak Madjid but the boy had miraculously survived. Adam had speed-dialled Zaf as he was calling for his father, but Nazim hadn't spoken. The boy hadn't understood why his father didn't talk to him, why instead Zaf replied with 'target down'.
He felt Fi's gaze on his face and knew what she was thinking. One day, that little boy could be Wes, crying out for his parents and not hearing their voices in return.
Adam rang Harry instead of letting his mind wander, updating him briefly and tonelessly before heading outside. There wasn't time to think of himself now: there was a mother who had lost her husband and two young children who were fatherless.
...
Everyone had returned to the Grid for the debrief but Jo had stayed later, watching the news roll onto the telly and trying to focus her mind on the flat adverts she had found in the newspaper, although it was difficult to push aside the memory of the mother crying for the safety of her son and later crying for the loss her husband.
On top of that, the flirty, charming officer called Zaf whom she had met earlier today had been replaced by an expressionless shell, referred to as Zafar by Harry and subjected to something of a shouting match with Adam. She knew that he had been ordered to kill Malek, an order so difficult that she couldn't even begin to comprehend doing something similar and the very thought sent a shiver down her spine. But Zaf had presumably been a spy for a lot longer than her, and she wasn't sure if it was a good thing that he seemed so affected by the kill order - it had obviously been awful to carry out and probably even worse to keep replaying it in your mind afterwards, but at least he still had his humanity. Jo was somewhat terrified of Harry and imagined him to be the perfect assassin, cold and calculated. But Zaf? The flirt who had offered her a room in his flat and made her first day feel okay: a murderer? The two words didn't seem to slot together and even though she had only met him, she feared for his mental state.
She wanted the room in his flat, and her response would probably please him. But she couldn't crowd him like that tonight. Instead, she reached for her phone.
"Hey, it's Jo. Fancy a drink?"
...
The bar was distracting and the drink made his head feel hazy and Zaf was touched that Jo had thought to think of him. He was also thankful that she didn't talk to him about the operation, instead asking what he wanted ("Just a beer") and buying him one, even offering the next round but Zaf reached for his wallet instead, grateful but knowing that it'd pinch her purse, especially as she'd been struggling to find a decent job before joining Section D.
He was usually up for a chat with anyone but tonight Zaf felt numb and so he let Jo lead the conversation, which was easy and not too intrusive - just about family and friends and food and birthdays and all the nice stuff you learn about someone you first meet. When Jo looked at the turquoise watch buckled around her wrist and swore at the time, calling them a taxi, Zaf hadn't even realised that they had been there for almost three hours, just absorbing the atmosphere and drinking and talking - he dreaded to think of what his mind would have been pondering had he been alone in the flat for those three hours. Then again, maybe Jo would say yes to his offer. Maybe she'd move in one day and they could talk about operations like the one today, in time.
Jo had directed the taxi to his place first and when they were finally sitting silently, the only soundtrack being the wheels crunching across the remnants of snow, Jo asked if he was okay. Zaf attempted a smile and told her that he would be before hopping out of the taxi, but truthfully he didn't know. At least tonight she had given him a distraction, and at a time when he managed to get his head around things he would be sure to thank her for that.
...
The order hadn't been easy to give but it must have been harder for Zaf to hear, Harry knew that. He himself had been in the service for so long now, killed without thinking about it too much that he momentarily forgot that Zaf was still young and the kind of man whose mind would weigh on such a thing as murder, whereas Harry found it so much more convenient to just remember his reasons for joining the service and leave any pesky emotions behind.
He had ordered everyone to go home but feared for Zaf spending the long hours of a night with no-one to talk to. It hadn't been his first kill, no (part of the reason Harry had been so keen to recruit Zaf was his highly impressive record with Six, particularly Operation Lawrence in which Zaf helped to kill, arrest or turn a group of arms traffickers) but Zaf had talked frequently with Nazim Malek and he had been proven innocent of the terrorism charge under which his life had been crippled for the past two years. The man was terrified and broken and desperate to secure a future for himself and his family – but had the news got out that an important Algerian figure had been assassinated with an MI5 officer mere feet away, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
Annoyingly, Harry couldn't swat away the truth that this outcome would be catastrophic for Malek's wife and children. Unfortunately, they weren't the lives that had to be protected for public interest. Just collateral damage.
And after all these years, that feeling still made Harry seethe.
...
It wasn't his first sleepless night and it wouldn't be his last, but Zaf dragged himself from his luxuriously warm bed as usual in the ridiculously early hours of the morning, ate something tasteless for breakfast and took the tube to work. Today would probably just be a paperwork day and Zaf couldn't figure out whether he would be thankful for a mundane task or fearful of it allowing his mind to wander.
Jo brought him a mug of tea along with her own, and as Zaf took a sip he realised she remembered he had told her last night that he was a 'milk, two sugars' man.
When Ruth came through the pods, pulling her scarf off from around her shoulders and brushing the snowflakes from her coat, she gave Zaf a beam that was so bright he couldn't help but return it.
Nearly every day Zaf was sipping a cup of tea or coffee when Harry ordered everyone to gather for a morning briefing, leaving Zaf's drink stone-cold on his return. But today, Harry seemed to let the minutes stack up to allow a gentle start to the morning.
Adam and Fiona arrived last. She threw a grin at him so cheeky that it might even rival his own and said "I'll have a tea, Zaf. No sugar."
"You wouldn't need any anyway, such are your charms Fiona," Zaf replied instinctively, momentarily forgetting the cloud of terror that had been crowding him on his way to work.
Adam cornered him by the kettle. "You know, the fact that you just openly flirted with my wife suggests that you're gonna be okay." He poured himself a mug of coffee.
"I'm not too sure, mate," Zaf murmured.
"It's a good thing I am, then," said Adam solidly. "Although, me offering my extensive range of horrible anecdotes isn't what you need, nor is mollycoddling."
"That's true," said Zaf simply. "It just feels... wrong. For me to just move on. Nazim's wife and children won't ever move on."
"They will. It'll take time and a bit of talking to each other, but they will. Their hurt had already been caused when Paul Seymour and his cronies locked him up by mistake. You couldn't erase that, Zaf. Unfortunately, you had to be the one to end all of this, but that doesn't mean you're wrong or bad for doing so. You stopped an assassination."
"By carrying out one." That was the main issue preying on Zaf's mind.
"I know it's difficult to see the bigger picture right now, but Nazim was about to commit murder. You stopped him, and to do so you had to end his life. If he had shot the Algerian banker, then he'd have committed murder and spent the rest of his life locked away from his family. This whole section would have been looked into if they knew an MI5 officer was there holding a gun and able to prevent it, but didn't. We're here to stop stuff like that, Zaf. We kill when we have to, but also we save so many lives. Nazim was ready to pull the trigger and potentially send this country into chaos. You pulled the trigger to prevent that chaos."
It was weird how Adam could say something like that, nod and then just pace away, his coffee in one hand and his wife's tea in the other, placing a kiss on her cheek as he handed it over before settling at his desk. A spy giving a speech on his experiences, but also a husband and a father and a worker rubbing the fatigue from his eyes and swallowing coffee. Something about watching Adam and the team – Ruth, chewing her pen; Jo, arranging her hair around her shoulders and flicking through some files – felt so honest and human that when Zaf moved back to his desk he cleared his throat and sat up straighter in his chair. He lived to protect the brilliant people across the country but also inside this office, sipping coffee, waiting until the day was over to grab some sleep, just like everybody else.
An assassination would have caused the people of the city that he loved a great deal of terror – and he had prevented it.
For now, that was enough for Zaf.