it was never dull. Tierney would have hated a nine-to-five job in a factory or office. Not that he’d ever tried one. He’d joined the army from school, and trained as a medic. He’d done ten years in uniform and served in Iraq, then decided that if he didn’t leave before he was thirty he never would. The Ambulance Service had snapped him up and sent him to work in South London where his skill in patching up bullet wounds was a welcome bonus.
Today Tierney had started work at two and it was only four fifteen but already he had dealt with two heroin overdoses and a toddler who had been knocked out of her push-chair by a bus driver who had the dilated pupils of a drug-user. The police had taken the man for a blood test and the little girl was in intensive care with head injuries.
The fourth call of the day was to a man lying face down in the street. That was all the information they had. He could be drunk, on drugs, or dead. The driver had the siren and lights flashing but the traffic was heavy and there was no room for the cars ahead to pull to the side, so they had to wait it out.
The ambulance crawled along the road. Eventually Tierney saw a small crowd of onlookers and a police car with its blue light flashing. He grabbed his resuscitation kit, opened the door and ran down the street. As he got closer to the police car he slowed. The body was on the pavement, close to the road. One uniformed officer was holding back the onlookers, the other was on the radio. Tierney could see why neither was attending to the man on the ground. There was a large pool of blood around him: a body couldn’t lose that much and still be alive.
Tierney knelt down beside the body, taking care to avoid the blood. He couldn’t see a wound, but there was no doubt that the man had been stabbed or shot. There were no cartridge cases on the pavement and the local gang-bangers tended to use semiautomatics because that was what they used in the movies. The man had probably been stabbed.
Tierney put a hand on his back, preparing to turn him over.
‘CID’s on the way,’ said one of the officers. ‘Best leave the body where it is.’
‘I’ve got to confirm that it
‘Waste of time,’ said the officer.
‘Them’s the rules,’ said Tierney, although he knew the officer was right. He felt something hard and oblong under the coat, and frowned. He moved his hand round the body and felt another object, the same shape as the first. He sat back on his heels. His first inclination had been to turn the man over, but now he was having second thoughts. Something was not right – something that was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
He remembered a poster he’d seen in Iraq, one of many produced by the Americans. It warned of the dangers of suicide bombers, and on it was a photograph of a vest with pockets that held tubes of dynamite – not oblong blocks like Tierney had felt but tubes like Blackpool rock. Tierney craned his neck and looked at the man’s face. It was pale but definitely Middle Eastern.
‘Get those people back,’ Tierney said quietly.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked the officer.
‘Just move them back, get everybody as far away from here as you can.’
Tierney reached for the bottom of the man’s coat and pulled it slowly up his legs. Then he rolled it up to the man’s waist. He saw grey canvas and knew his hunch had been right. A few more inches and he could see three pockets, each containing something oblong. Tierney swallowed. His mouth was bone dry.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked the officer, his voice a harsh whisper.
Tierney didn’t reply. He eased the coat higher. It snagged on something and he cursed. He couldn’t reach the coat buttons without turning the body over, and he didn’t want to risk that. It was something for the bomb-disposal experts. But Tierney wanted to be sure. He eased the coat from side to side, then pulled it further up the body. He saw wires. Red and blue. Now he was sure.
Major Allan Gannon enjoyed his monthly meetings with the head of the Met’s Anti-terrorist Squad. Commander Ronnie Roberts was a career cop who’d worked his way up from the beat in South London, with stints in Special Branch and the Robbery Squad. His office on the eleventh floor of New Scotland Yard overlooked Broadway, and as Gannon stood at the window and looked through the bomb-proof curtains he saw a group of Japanese tourists photographing themselves in front of the famous triangular rotating sign.
‘How does it feel to be a tourist attraction?’ asked Gannon.
‘It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?’ said Roberts. ‘On the one hand we’re supposed to be
‘I blame TV,’ said Gannon. ‘Newspapers make do with words but TV needs pictures and sound. The Iranian embassy siege did it for us. Once they saw us in action they wanted to know everything. Next thing we know there’s movies about us, kill-and-tell books, the works.’
‘I don’t know who thought openness was a good thing,’ said Roberts, ‘but they should have slapped a D Notice on anything connected with you guys. Now every man and his dog knows what weapons you have and how you train.’
‘And everyone in the world knows where MI6 is,’ agreed Gannon.‘Never understood that. They’re supposed to be the Secret Service but they allow their HQ to be featured in a James Bond movie. And they act all surprised when the IRA takes a pot-shot at them with an RPG.’
There was a knock on the door and a secretary showed in Greig Mulhern, number three at Special Branch. He shook hands with Gannon and Roberts and sat on a sofa in the corner of the room. He was a bulky man, almost square, with a thick neck and bullet-shaped head.
‘Coffee’s on the way,’ said Roberts. The meeting had no agenda and no notes were taken. It was just an opportunity to share information without having to go through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
‘Martin not here yet?’ asked Mulhern. Martin Jackson was the fourth member of the group and as he had furthest to travel he was, more often than not, the last to arrive. He worked for GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping facility that monitored phone, satellite and Internet traffic around the world.
‘On his way,’ said Roberts. ‘How’s business?’
‘We’ve got the Yanks on our back, big-time,’ said Mulhern. ‘They want us to put undercover guys in the London mosques. They’re picking up intel that al-Qaeda’s planning a big one in the UK.’
‘That’s just them wanting to keep us on side,’ said Gannon. ‘Every time public opinion swings against what they’re doing in Iraq, they crack on that the whole world’s in danger. Remember what Bush said? You’re either with us or against us.’
Mulhern scratched at his shirt collar. He had short arms and he always had trouble finding shirts that fitted. Either the sleeves were too long or the collars too tight.‘They’re not talking specifics,but they rarely do in case they give away their sources. But they say there’s a big one being planned and that they’ll be using Muslims with British passports. Invisibles.’
‘That narrows it down to – what? About a million?’ Gannon laughed.
‘Thing is, do you know how many Arabs we have in Special Branch? Or how many could even pass for Arab or Pakistani? The answer is a big fat zero.’
‘Five’s the same,’ said Roberts. ‘They’ve got Oxbridge graduates who can speak the languages and who know everything there is to know about the culture, but they’re all whiter than white, so undercover operations are out of the question. We’re only just getting black officers into our undercover units. We don’t have a single Arab we could put into play.’
‘What’s the nature of the London threat?’ asked Gannon.
Mulhern shrugged. ‘No details. But there’s been heavy selling short of the UK market through New York from clients out in the Middle East. That much is a fact. Someone reckons the London stock market is going to plunge.’
‘Not all terrorists play the market,’ said Gannon, drily.
‘Agreed, but there was a lot of selling short of shares in the airlines whose planes crashed into the World Trade Center,’ said Mulhern. ‘But it’s not just the trading, there’s been phone traffic in which British Muslims were referred to.’
‘Do you think they’ve got intel they’re not telling you about?’ asked Roberts.
Mulhern frowned. ‘It’s possible, but if they have they’re playing it close to their chest. They might well have an undercover agent somewhere in the al-Qaeda network and don’t want to expose him by giving us the full details.’
