this one.
‘Shit,’ said Rod down the phone, interrupting her thoughts.
Elena frowned. ‘What is it?’
‘They’re saying on the TV that there’s been an explosion at the Westfield. It sounds like it might be a bomb. Have you heard anything over there?’
The Westfield was barely a mile from where they lived, and she and Rod had been shopping there the other week.
‘No, nothing. But I haven’t been past a TV in the last twenty minutes. Has anyone been hurt?’
‘I don’t think they know yet. It’s only just happened, but they’re saying it’s in the underground car park. Blimey, it’s all going on today, isn’t it? Maybe you ought to come home. Call Siobhan and tell her you’ve been traumatized by your experience with that Arab bloke and get back here for a bit of R and R.’
Elena sighed. ‘I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll take tomorrow off, but I’m the only DM on today so I need to stay put.’
As she spoke, she heard someone talking on the steps above her. Looking up, she saw a young room service waiter on the phone by the third-floor doors. His tray was on the floor in front of him. She’d never met Armin before, but she’d have bet a week’s wages it was him.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Rod. ‘I’ll talk to you later, OK?’
Without waiting for an answer, Elena ended the call and marched up to the waiter.
He quickly ended his own call and replaced the phone in his pocket.
‘Armin,’ she snapped, reading his nametag. ‘Where have you been? Rooms 422 and 608 haven’t received their food orders.’ She looked down at the full tray at his feet. ‘I assume that’s them.’
Armin was lean and wiry, and would have been quite good-looking if it hadn’t been for the pinched, aggressive expression he wore. He looked her up and down dismissively. ‘Sorry,’ he said in heavily accented English, sounding like he didn’t mean it. ‘I got held up.’
‘You left the kitchen more than twenty minutes ago. How held up can you be?’
‘I was on the phone.’
‘Who to?’
He hesitated before answering. ‘A friend.’
Elena considered herself a fair boss, and one who didn’t lose her temper easily, but Armin’s bizarrely unapologetic attitude was infuriating her. ‘You shouldn’t be calling your friends in office hours. Especially when you’re in the middle of delivering room service orders. What were you thinking about? Don’t you want this job? Because there are plenty of people out there who do.’
She stopped, realizing that she’d raised her voice, something she’d always been taught to avoid doing since all it showed was that you were losing control of the situation.
Armin looked her right in the eye, and there was such naked rage in his expression that she took a step back. ‘I said I was sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll deliver the order now.’ He picked up the tray and continued up the stairs, leaving Elena staring after him.
She took a deep breath and ran a hand over her face. The confrontation, short as it was, had really shaken her. Partly it was because she was still in shock from what had happened earlier, but it was more than that. It was because she could tell from the way he’d spoken that he despised her. Yet she’d never even met him before.
Beginning to wonder whether it might actually be quite a good idea to pull a sickie, as Rod had suggested, she turned and started back down the stairs, determined to have a word with Rav and get him to sack Armin the moment his shift was finished.
Ten
16.17
THEY LEFT THE warehouse in a white Transit van with Andrews Maintenance Services written on the side, beneath which was an out-of-service 0207 number. The van had been bought with cash at an auction in Kent two weeks earlier and it was completely clean. Fox was driving, with Wolf in the passenger seat next to him, while the other four were hidden away in the back behind a grimy curtain, along with the bulk of the weaponry.
As Fox turned on to the A40 heading eastbound he could see a pall of smoke over the buildings to the south-east, where the bomb had struck. By the time they reached East Acton and the Westway flyover a steady stream of emergency services vehicles – police, fire and ambulance – were approaching from the other direction. Fox counted seventeen of them altogether in the space of three minutes, and there’d be others coming from different directions as well, severely stretching their resources, as had been the plan.
They turned off the A40 just before the start of the flyover, heading south on the A3220, then taking a left on to Holland Park Avenue, where the traffic suddenly became more clogged. An ambulance drove down the middle of the road coming towards them, its blue lights flashing, and Fox was forced to mount the pavement to let it through.
The atmosphere in the van was tense, and Fox could hear the men shuffling about in the back. Everyone was jumpy. Not just because of what they were about to do but because all of them, except him, had snorted a generous line of speed before they’d left the warehouse. The drug would keep them awake and alert, and lower their inhibitions, making it easier for them to kill people when the time came. It would also dull their natural fear. But for Fox, who’d never taken illicit drugs in his life and wasn’t prepared to start now, two cups of strong coffee had had to suffice.
Wolf’s phone rang. He answered it, identified himself by code-name, then paused while he listened to the person on the other end of the phone. ‘You know what to do,’ he said at last, and ended the call, exchanging looks with Fox.
Fox tightened his fingers round the steering wheel. It was time to put the next stage of the plan into action.
Eleven
16.28
THE FIRST GREAT Western from Bristol Temple Meads crawled snake-like into Paddington Station, two minutes behind schedule.
The young man was one of the first to his feet, picking up his rucksack from the floor in front of him. He hauled it over his shoulders, making sure the detonation cord was out of sight but within easy reach, and headed for the exit door at the end of the carriage, stopping to let out a couple of other passengers en route, wondering idly whether or not he was saving their lives by doing so or merely prolonging them for a few minutes. Most of his fellow passengers were business people heading back to town from their meetings in the provinces, or middle-aged theatregoers. He saw no children, God be praised. The young man was ready to do what he had to do, but he had no desire for kids to be caught up in it. He was, after all, a soldier not a butcher.
There was a bottleneck forming as the tiny corridor between carriages became thronged with passengers, and he was forced to stop next to the luggage rack, only feet from the trolley suitcase containing five kilos of explosives rigged up to a battery pack and mobile phone. No one had noticed him bringing it on earlier, and by the time anyone realized that it had been left behind it would be too late. He tried not to look at it, but couldn’t help giving it a glance out of the corner of his eye, wondering what damage it would do, and to whom, when it exploded.
The train came to a stop, its brakes emitting a long metallic shriek, and the doors opened. Immediately, the bottleneck eased as the passengers exited one at a time. When it came to the young man’s turn, he took a quick look up the platform at the wall of people pouring down the platform towards him from the rear coaches, then stepped down and joined them.
This was it. The time. He’d been building up to it for months now. Ever since the cowardly dogs of NATO had
