bedroom, put on the leather jacket and picked up the helmet and gloves. He shrugged the haversack on to his back, snapped off all the lights except the low-wattage bulb in his hallway, and walked to the main door of his apartment. For just over a minute he peered through the spyhole out into the hallway on his floor, then pulled out the Smith and cautiously unbolted and pulled open the apartment door.
Looking down from the head of the stairs, Richter saw and heard nothing. The locks on the building doors were good enough to keep casual thieves out, but he doubted that the people who had wired the explosive to the Escort’s ignition system came into that category.
Satisfied, he pressed the call button for the lift and waited. When it arrived, he slid inside and pressed the button for the garage floor and watched as the numbers unwound. The garage lights were activated by motion detectors, and were out when the lift doors slid open and Richter emerged. Nevertheless, he checked carefully around the perimeter before walking across to the far side of the parking area, where a bulky shape lurked under a green tarpaulin.
When he’d first arrived in London, Richter had come in a car. Within a month he’d realized that four- wheeled vehicles were much less use than he’d anticipated, and he’d returned to his first love – motorcycles. At the place he still called home – a ramshackle cottage on the east side of the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall – he kept an immaculate Vincent Black Shadow and a Velocette Venom Thruxton in a securely locked prefabricated garage.
Wonderful though these bikes were, they were useless in London, being too valuable, too attractive and simply too unreliable to be practical forms of transport. In London, Richter rode Japanese. Cheap, old, fast Japanese.
He pulled the tarpaulin off the Honda 500–4 and tossed it on to the garage floor, swung his leg over the saddle, stuck the key in the ignition, turned it and pressed the starter button. As always, the engine burst instantly into life, then settled down to a steady, even tickover. Used to a long series of British-built motorcycles, it had taken Richter a long time to come to terms with the total reliability that characterized most Oriental machines, but now he just accepted it as normal.
He settled the haversack more comfortably on his back, pulled in the clutch, snicked the gear lever into first and moved quickly away towards the door. Richter stopped by a pillar, reached out a gloved hand to press a button, waited as the electric motors swung the double doors open, then switched on the Honda’s lights and accelerated up the ramp and away into the silent streets, heading for Aldgate and London Bridge.
The email from Hassan Abbas, which contained the complete transcript of Dmitri Trushenko’s analysis of the implications of the American over-flight of the weapon test site, plus Abbas’ own comments, pretty much confirmed what Sadoun Khamil had already deduced. As soon as he’d been told about the flight of the spy-plane, Khamil had copied Abbas’ email, added his own take on the incident, encrypted it and had sent it to his contact with the al-Qaeda leadership, Tariq Rahmani, a dour, secretive man even by Arabic standards, who remained almost permanently in the background. Although Khamil had explicit instructions to contact only this one man, he had actually met Rahmani only twice in his life.
He knew little about him, not even which country he lived in, as he used a web-based email service and a mobile phone registered in Saudi Arabia. What Khamil did know was that Rahmani was very close to the top of the al-Qaeda leadership, and that his decisions had the force of law within the organization. And that made Khamil tread very carefully around him.
Now, with Abbas’ very detailed and explanatory email on the screen in front of him, Khamil thought carefully before composing his own message. Like Abbas, he didn’t see what practical difference the American overflight of Russia made to their own, secret, operation, the part of the plan that al-Qaeda had named
Finally, he shrugged. He wouldn’t, he decided, say anything at all. He’d just forward the message from Abbas in its entirety and leave it at that.
Richter pulled into the kerb in Fenchurch Street and checked carefully that no other vehicles stopped anywhere near him. He’d watched the mirrors of the Honda constantly since he’d ridden it out of the garage, and had seen no obvious signs of pursuit, possibly because the watchers – and there would definitely have been watchers – would probably have been looking for a man in a suit, not a black-clad figure on a motorcycle.
Satisfied, Richter pulled out his cell phone and rang the Duty Officer. Using the vague and woolly double-talk necessary when speaking about a highly sensitive matter on an open line, Richter finally managed to acquaint him with the essential details, and also told him that he would be telling Simpson about it.
‘It is after one o’clock, you know,’ the Duty Officer reminded him.
‘I know.’
‘He won’t like being woken up.’
‘That’s my problem, not yours. Just tell the Pool and you’d better have a chat with the Met as well.’
Simpson, predictably enough, was a bachelor and lived in a service flat in Battersea, and the Duty Officer had been quite right. Richter had tried to call him immediately after he rang off from Hammersmith, but just got the ansaphone. When he arrived at the building, it took the better part of five minutes to get Simpson to respond to the entry phone before Richter even got into the building. Simpson’s face, as he edged his apartment door cautiously open, was puffy and full of sleep, and his greeting was notably lacking in warmth. ‘What do you want? Do you know what time it is? And what the hell are you dressed like that for?’
‘Yes,’ Richter said, ‘I do own a watch. I want to come in. I’m in a hurry, and I’ve got some bad news for you.’
Simpson stared at him suspiciously. ‘What kind of bad news?’
‘The kind I don’t want to talk about out here in the hallway.’ Richter pushed the door open impatiently and walked in.
Simpson slammed it shut behind him. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
Richter told him the night’s events in clipped tones. Simpson thought for a second and walked over to the telephone. He dialled, switched in the scrambler, held a very brief and subdued conversation, replaced the receiver and walked back. ‘The driver was Brian Jackson,’ he said. ‘They had to do a run down to Manor Park, and decided to collect the Escort on the way back. He’d only been married three months.’
Richter nodded. Simpson got up again and walked over to the drinks’ cabinet. He pulled out a bottle of malt whisky and splashed a generous three fingers into a tumbler. He held the bottle up towards Richter.
‘I know you don’t normally, but—’
‘I don’t ever,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll make myself a coffee.’ The kitchen area was small but well equipped. Richter spooned instant coffee into a mug and switched on the electric kettle. While he waited for it to boil, he went back into the lounge. Simpson was sitting in his armchair, looking old and tired. He took a long swallow of his Scotch and looked up.
‘This has got to stop,’ Simpson said. His eyes were like black coals in his pink face. Richter nodded. For the moment they were in complete agreement, but Richter doubted if they would be when he told him what he was going to do. The kettle emitted a high-pitched scream, and Richter returned to the kitchen and poured water into the mug. He added milk from the fridge and sat down in a chair.
‘What’s going on?’ Simpson asked, for the second time that night.
‘I think I’ve worked most of it out, now,’ Richter said.
His Excellency Mr Stanislav Nikolai Karasin, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Embassy of the Confederation of Independent States, sat somewhat stiffly in the leather armchair and looked over at the President of the United States of America.
‘Mr President,’ he began formally, ‘I thank you for agreeing to see me this evening at such short notice, for the matter is grave.’
The grey-haired man opposite him smiled slightly. ‘It is always a pleasure to see you, Mr Ambassador. How
