The Angel (7 page)

Chapter Fourteen

P
ope, McNair and Snow stepped out of the office. The street was shaded by the tall shoulders of the buildings on either side, but as they walked on, they passed into the sunshine that shimmered down onto Whitehall.

He had said too much. He had known that he would if they pressed the wrong buttons. He had promised himself that he would be diplomatic, hold his tongue and ignore all the provocation that he knew was coming his way, but he just couldn’t. He had no respect for any of those people. They pronounced and opined without any idea of what it was that the men and women under his command did for their country.

He had been an active member of the Group until his predecessor had gone rogue. He had more than his own share of kills, and the price he had paid for each one of them was high. He had always tried to take his own feelings out of the equation. He had been a weapon. Someone else chose the target and aimed the weapon. He simply carried out his orders and then went back to his family and tried to forget about them. That had been his policy, although, of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. He had probably handled it better than John Milton, but what did that say about him? Milton had wrestled with his demons for years, tried to drown them in drink, and eventually he had decided that the only way he could deal with them was to take himself as far away from London and his old life as he could. Milton was out, and good luck to him. Pope found that he wished he could join him.

They ambled down Whitehall. Snow was smoking a cigarette, his second, sucking down the tobacco with greedy gulps. He smoked compulsively, especially when he was irritated, and he certainly had grounds for irritation now.

‘Fuckers,’ McNair said.

‘I know,’ Pope said.

‘They have no idea. Not the first clue.’

‘It’s not over yet. Someone will see sense.’

He said it, but he didn’t really believe it. He knew that there would have to be a scapegoat for what had happened to Fèlix Rubió. A bloodletting was inevitable. It should have been the police and the spooks for the faulty intelligence, but Group Fifteen was an easier target. There would be an inquest to find out what had happened, and far better for the agency to be disbanded and dispersed, to forestall the possibility that a light might be shone on the murky, grubby world in which they operated. Similar steps were taken after Bloody Sunday. The men involved were scattered far and wide to prevent the truth from emerging. The playbook hadn’t changed in forty years. It was still the obvious response. It was as craven and short-sighted now as it had been then, but Pope was long enough in the tooth not to be surprised by such things.

He grimaced again and wished, for the second time, that he had held his tongue.

Snow noticed his expression. ‘Forget it, sir. You did what y
ou coul
d.’

‘At least they know how you feel about it now,’ McNair added.

Pope allowed himself a small smile in response.

They passed The Red Lion pub, Derby Gate and then
St Stephen’s
Tavern. Snow finished the cigarette and immediately lit a third. Pope found himself wondering what to do for the rest of the afternoon. He had never been suspended before, and he realised, with a rueful grin, he had no idea what that meant in practical terms. Should he go home?
No
, he thought. There were people with whom he needed to discuss the morning’s events. But where should he do that? What did suspension mean? Was he supposed to go back to their building on the river, make his calls and then wait for further orders? Was he supposed to go home?

They joined the scrum of pedestrians at the junction of Bridge Street and Whitehall. He looked up at Elizabeth Tower. It rose up with a stately rhythm, higher and higher, and then there came the iconic clock face, picked out as a giant rose, its petals fringed with gold. There were medieval windows above that and then the dark slate roof, its greyness relieved by delicate windows framed in gold leaf. Finally came a rush of gold to the higher roof that curved gracefully upwards to a fairy-tale spire topped with a crown, flowers and a cross.

It was a minute before midday. The traffic lights changed in their favour just as the minute hand ticked over to an upright position and the famous chimes pealed out. The tune was that of the Cambridge Chimes, based on violin phrases from Handel’s
Messiah
.

The Chimes finished, and Pope waited for the first strike of the hour bell.

The detonation came from Bridge Street, in the direction of the river. It was a deep, guttural boom, accompanied by a tremor that passed beneath his feet. Pope knew it was a bomb immediately. The blast had been very slightly muffled. It had come from the direction of the Underground station. He ran toward the entrance, Snow and McNair hard on his heels, just as a huge cloud of dust and smoke poured out and billowed up into the bright afternoon.

He saw the man on the other side of the street. Most people were standing around, confused and befuddled. They were slack-jawed, their eyes black and dazed. But this man was moving. He was dressed in black and carrying, with obvious effort, a rucksack that he wore on his back.

Pope knew how to spot a suicide bomber. He knew the
playbook
after an attack, too. He had served in theatres where
suicide
bombings were often a daily occurrence: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel. The first blast was often diversionary. Lethal, yes. Deadly. But it was designed to funnel as many targets as possible into a killing zone where they could be attacked by a bigger
secondary
explosion. The jihadis did it with IEDs, using one to herd soldiers and civilians into a position where the second bomb could do serious damage.

The man with the rucksack wasn’t standing still. He wasn’t confused. He was walking with a determined stride, right into the middle of the crowd.

‘No!’ Pope yelled.

The man reached into his pocket.

‘Bomb! Run!’

Chapter Fifteen

A
bright yellow light, seemingly everywhere, and then Pope was lifted, twisted and flung to the ground. There was the deafening crack of a hideous explosion, and Pope
was pum
melled by a bolt of boiling air which dented his cheeks and stomach as if they had been made of cardboard. He felt the fierce lashing of debris, hot slugs that scored burning tracks across his cheeks and forehead and the back of his hands. He stayed there on his back, the breath sucked out of his lungs by the retreating pressure. He opened his eyes, blinking hard. The sun seemed to quiver overhead, and then it disappeared in a cloud of black smoke.

There was a moment of unearthly silence, broken only by the music of broken glass, the creaking of metal, the patter of falling debris.

Then the screaming started.

He looked and tried to clear his head. The blast had thrown him fully fifteen feet and deposited him against the side of a black cab that had stopped in the middle of the road. The mass of people who had retreated from the first blast inside the station were not there any longer. He felt something fall on his face, and when he yanked it away, he found it was a piece of yellow fabric, a dress maybe, now soaked in blood. A gory shower of flesh and more bloody clothing fell on him and around him, mingled with fragments of glass and concrete. Last of all came pieces of paper sucked from the offices in the buildings above the station, falling gently to Earth like graceful autumn leaves. There came the unmistakeable smell of roast pork. Once you had experienced it, you could never forget it. It was the smell of burning flesh.

The road was ruined for fifty yards in both directions. There were hundreds of windows in the sand-coloured limestone walls of the Palace, and they had all been blown in. Glass rained down. A man bumped into him and fell to the ground. People were running all around him, screaming and crying. A bus that had been passing had swerved and crashed into the railings. A dump truck had slammed into the back of the bus. The trees that stood between the high railings and the flanks of the building had all been denuded of their leaves and now they stood naked and at crooked angles. The road itself was no more than a smoking crater. There were red smears on the tarmac and the pavements and the walls of the buildings. An inky black cloud mushroomed overhead, obscuring the clock tower and the buildings that faced it. The smell of cordite was everywhere. And it
was
cordite, Pope knew. This wasn’t a homemade bomb. This wasn’t hydrogen peroxide from boiled-down hair products. It wasn’t HMTD from hexamine tablets and citrus acid. This smelled like military-grade explosive.

‘Control?’

It was Snow.

‘I’m here.’

Number Twelve emerged from the smoke. He was covered in ash and soot. He had been a little closer to the seat of the explosion than Pope, and the blast had ripped his jacket from his back and torn his shirt. He wore his pistol in a shoulder holster, and Pope watched as his hand flicked up to it and yanked it free. It made him think of his own Sig Sauer, and he was grateful as his fingers found that it was still there, too.

‘Two explosions,’ Pope said, although he knew that Snow would be aware of that. ‘First one in the station, second one just outside it.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Snow said.

‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Cuts and bruises.’

‘Number Three?’

‘I’m here,’ McNair said. He was on the ground, ten feet away, carefully pushing to his feet.

‘Hurt?’

‘Scratches. Nothing. We were lucky.’

Pope looked around, trying to focus. There were dozens of
bodies
on the ground. Many of them had been torn apart. The bomb had been laced with shrapnel, and the metal debris would have lacerated the flesh of anyone who was within twenty yards. He took in the bloody devastation with as clinical an eye as he could:
dismembered
limbs, a torso impaled on the railings, the
disembodied
head of a man, his expression of open-mouthed surprise starting to set as the muscles stiffened.

There were moans and cries for help.

In the distance, there came the sound of sirens.

And then, closer to hand, a sound he recognised immediately.

Gunfire.

It was coming from his four o’clock. Pope spun.

The Palace.

Chapter Sixteen

T
he man they called Mohammed was waiting inside the empty warehouse. His name was not really Mohammed. He had been given many names, and it had been so long since he had been referred to by the one his mother had given him
that he
had almost forgotten it. His earliest years had been lived
on th
e streets of the Gaza Strip. He had been wild and unruly then, and
the Isr
aeli
soldiers
had called him
‘Arabush’
, or rat. When he arrived in
Afghanistan
to fight the Soviets, aged just seventeen, the
mujahideen
had called him ‘Kid’. The jihadists in the Sudanese al-Qaeda cell had called him the ‘
Engineer’,
because his bombs and martyrdom vests were the most effective that they had ever seen. Now, his brothers in the caliphate called him
‘Iblis’
. In Islam,
Iblis
is a jinn born from fire who refused to bow for Adam. The literal translation was ‘Devil’.

He had been given the name of Mohammed Shalmalak when he arrived in the United Kingdom. His false passport and driver’s licence bore that name, and it was the one he used as he set up a home for himself in the north of the country. It was the name he had used when speaking to the young suicide bombers that the imam, Alam Hussain, had provided. For a man who did not care for names, it was as good as any.

Weeks ago, Mohammed had been provided with the address of this warehouse and a key to open the padlocked front door. He had not questioned its provision, but he had been scrupulous in ensuring that it was vacant. The warehouse had seemed derelict and had obviously been empty for months. There were two offices and a bathroom on the first floor. All had borne the evidence of squatters. There was graffiti on the walls, the radiators had been removed for scrap and what little furniture had been left behind was broken and useless. It had been the same downstairs, too. The small kitchen had been filthy and the large warehouse space was a wreck, with clinker from an unswept chimney gathered in a dirty grate. The only piece of furniture had been a two-seater sofa, the fabric covering ripped so that the yellowed stuffing was poking out.

Mohammed had not concerned himself with the state of the property. It was empty, it could be secured and the windows had been covered by metal sheeting that meant that it was impossible to see inside. It had been the perfect spot to build his bombs.

He was wearing a pair of latex gloves and overshoes and a
hairnet
. He had dropped his bag on the sofa. He opened it, took out a silenced 9mm Berretta and placed it on the floor. He went back to the bag, took out an iPad, saw that he had a strong 4G signal and opened the BBC’s iPlayer app. He navigated to BBC Parliament.

Prime Minister’s Questions
was held in the main chamber of the House of Commons every Wednesday at midday. It was an unruly bear pit, and tickets in the public gallery were sought after by foreign visitors, who found the occasion both fascinating and appalling. The baying, rude loutishness of it all was so different from
proceedings
in their own countries. Mohammed found it distasteful, although he admired the adroitness of the combatants. Not many political leaders could cope with quick-fire exchanges that required detailed knowledge of a Barnsley bypass one minute and the finer points of a UN resolution the next.

Attendance was strongly encouraged for MPs of all persuasions, and that usually meant that both the government and opposition benches were full. Most debates in the Commons were dry and dull affairs, with the green benches mostly empty, but Mohammed knew that this would be different. He had watched it on television, and of course he had secured one of those public gallery seats for himself when he conducted his reconnaissance. It was, to borrow a term that the Americans used, ‘target rich’. And security, although improved since the day when two protestors had lobbed condoms stuffed with purple flour at Tony Blair, was still unimpressive.

He was confident that they would be able to surmount it.

The ticker along the bottom of the screen announced an item of breaking news.

‘REPORTS OF EXPLOSION AT WESTMINSTER UNDER
GROUND STATION’

A moment later, Mohammed saw a man in a traditional black suit with knee-length britches and a sword at his side approach the Speaker’s Chair and speak quietly into the occupant’s ear. The Speaker asked a question, received the answer and then gave a nod that he understood. He called for order.

‘Honourable Friends, I have just been informed that there has been an explosion at Westminster Underground station. I’m afraid
I ha
ve no further details, but the police are requesting that we remain in the chamber until they can confirm that there is no threat to us.’

The camera jerked to the familiar view over the dispatch box, then to the prime minister and the front bench of the government. Another man in a dark suit was leaning over the seated prime minister. The politician rose and followed the man out of shot. Others followed: the leader of the opposition, the front bench.

Mohammed grimaced. They were being taken somewhere
else. Th
at was annoying, but it was not unexpected. He had assumed that standard procedure would be to remove the leaders to a panic room, and that appeared to be what was happening. No matter.

The camera pulled back to a wide shot. The parliamentarians were conferring anxiously, a hubbub of noise that provided a backdrop for the sombre tones of the presenter as she explained that sources were now confirming that the explosion had been caused by a bomb.

Mohammed was expecting what would come next, but when it happened, the payoff was better than he could possibly have imagined. The detonation of what he took to be the third bomb was only five hundred feet from the House of Commons. The blast,
separated
from the House only by the open space of New Palace Yard, was close enough to be audible as a loud detonation,
easily
picked up by the microphones in the chamber. There were six
windows
on the east and west sides of the House, each filled with rich stained glass. The pressure wave shattered the westward-facing
windows
, casting fragments of glass down onto the benches below. The presenter swore, and screams went up from the chamber.

The feed remained live for a moment, men and women standing and hurrying to the aisles, and then it cut to black. When the picture resumed, the feed had been switched to the BBC News Channel. The presenter looked flustered and panicked.

‘You join me now as we hear the breaking news that there has been a series of explosions near the Houses of Parliament. Police sources are reporting that an explosion at Westminster Underground station was most likely a bomb. We can only assume that what you are about to see, filmed from inside the House of
Commons
, is the moment a second bomb exploded . . .’