planted on trains coming into Waterloo, St Pancras, Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street. We give you this warning to show that we are prepared to negotiate.’
‘And what is it you want?’ asked Julie Peters breathlessly, but Wolf had already ended the call. He switched off the phone and removed the SIM card, which he flung out of the open window. By the time it was found it would be of no use whatsoever.
Fox knew that Wolf had given the
And it would be all for nothing. There were no more bombs on trains. They weren’t needed.
Their real target was somewhere else entirely.
Thirteen
‘WHAT WAS THAT, Mom?’
‘I don’t know, honey,’ said Abby Levinson, giving her son a reassuring smile as they walked back towards the hotel. ‘Probably nothing.’
But the heavy bang had unnerved her. She looked across at her father, who was walking next to the road on the other side of Ethan, and now it was his turn to give her a reassuring look – the sort of look he’d been giving her all her life. As always, he was a strong, calming presence.
‘Definitely nothing,’ he said, ruffling Ethan’s hair. ‘You always hear stuff like this in big cities. New York’s much noisier than London.’
‘Is New York nicer?’ asked Ethan.
His grandpa laughed. ‘I’m biased. I grew up there. But I like both. Although maybe we should have come to London at a different time of year.’
He pushed his hat down over his head as a gust of wind threatened to send it flying. It was beginning to rain again, and Abby contemplated pulling out her umbrella for the last fifty yards of the journey, before deciding against it and increasing her pace.
It had been a fun, if exhausting, day. A visit to the London Dungeon, lunch at McDonald’s, the London Eye, and finally the Aquarium. Ethan had had a great time, and in the end, that was what counted. It had been almost a year to the day since his father left the family home to supposedly ‘find himself’, having concluded that, actually, parenthood and its attendant responsibilities wasn’t for him, and Ethan had taken his absence hard. This trip, combining the Thanksgiving holiday with his seventh birthday, was a way of taking his mind off his father and having some fun. Although Abby had to admit she was amazed at how expensive London was. And how grey and cold. She should have expected it, of course. After all, the UK had never been known for its fine weather. But maybe she’d just got too used to Florida’s blue skies and its warm sunshine on her back. Tomorrow she was going to do some Christmas shopping in the West End on her own – a little bit of much-needed ‘me’ time before they flew home on Saturday morning – while her dad took Ethan to the Natural History Museum. The two of them loved spending time together, and it was important that Ethan had a strong male role model in his life now that Daniel was gone.
The second bang stopped her dead in her tracks. It was louder than the first. Other passers-by had stopped too, and they were now looking in the direction the noise had come from. One man looked at her and raised his eyebrows, before turning away.
‘And what do you think
Abby didn’t answer her son. She was watching a thin plume of smoke rising up through the rain and gathering dusk, somewhere beyond the other side of Hyde Park. She suddenly felt very vulnerable out here in the cold and gloom of this sprawling foreign city far from home.
A police car raced through the traffic past Marble Arch with sirens blaring. It was heading in the direction of the smoke.
‘Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with us,’ Ethan’s grandpa replied over the noise of the siren. ‘And I’m getting wet out here. Come on, let’s get inside.’
He put a protective arm round both their shoulders, steering them towards home, and even though he was barely as tall as her and almost seventy-five years old, his touch made her feel a little safer.
Trying hard not to grip her son’s hand too hard, Abby hurried past the tall concierge – a guy who’d smiled mischievously at her every time she’d seen him before but who was now frowning anxiously – and into the warmth and security of the Stanhope Hotel.
Fourteen
NEWLY PROMOTED DEPUTY Assistant Commissioner Arley Dale was bored and restless. She was chairing a meeting between community leaders and senior officers from Operation Trident, the unit that dealt with so-called black on black gun crime in the city. The meeting had dragged on for close to two hours now and absolutely nothing of any substance had been achieved. The community leaders were demanding action after a series of shootings in Brixton over the previous six months, while the Trident officers were demanding more cooperation from the community itself, and everyone seemed to be going round in circles, mouthing the same old platitudes. Arley, who had a reputation for banging heads together and getting things done, had tried her best to move things along but had now all but given up. She knew they had to have these meetings so that the Met could demonstrate its new, more caring attitude to minority groups, but as a DAC in one of the biggest police forces in the world she genuinely believed there were better ways of allocating her time.
She was also distracted. Twenty minutes earlier, her secretary, Ann, had interrupted the meeting to inform her that there’d been an explosion in the underground car park of the Westfield Shopping Centre. There’d been no further details available at the time, and Arley had asked to be kept informed as they came in. If the explosion turned out to be suspicious, then as the most senior officer of the Met’s Specialist Crime Directorate on duty she’d be heavily involved in implementing the Major Incident Plan in response.
The prospect of suddenly being flung into a major operation had Arley in two minds. On the one hand she relished getting her teeth into challenges, especially fast-moving ones, and it would be an excellent opportunity to prove her worth, having only been in the job less than a month. But on the other, she badly wanted to go home. She’d been away Monday and Tuesday on a residential course, had put in thirteen hours the previous day, and quite frankly, she was exhausted.
Surreptitiously, she looked at her watch as Genson Smith, a veteran Lambeth councillor with a longstanding grievance against the police, and a man who never tired of hearing his own voice, launched into another of his polemics. 4.35. If she could wrap this meeting up quickly she could be out of here by five and relaxing in a hot bath with a much-needed glass of Sauvignon Blanc by six.
The knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.
It was Ann, her secretary, again, and her expression was concerned. ‘Ma’am, you’re needed urgently.’
‘I’m afraid I have to go,’ Arley announced to the attendees, pleased at least to be leaving the room. ‘I’ll leave you in the capable hands of DCS Russell.’
Genson Smith looked extremely irritated, but Arley was out of the door before he could actually say anything.
‘The explosion at the Westfield has been confirmed as a bomb,’ said Ann when they were out in the corridor.
‘What do we know about casualties?’
‘So far we’ve got reports of six people injured, but no fatalities.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘That’s not all,’ Ann continued.
Arley felt her heart sink.
‘There have been two more explosions at Paddington Station. Initial reports say they’re both bombs. The
