No, Holm thought to himself, not even close.
There’d been whispers of a possible attack earlier in the week. Some vague intercepts from GCHQ. A person of interest making an unscheduled journey. A word from Palmer that he’d picked up a nugget from a deep-cover contact in Belgium. All these things suggested something might be about to happen, yet none pointed to an exact target or date. Nevertheless, Holm had a gut feeling of impending disaster but – as he often said to junior colleagues – you couldn’t go to the Spider and offer her a mere hunch. You needed a juicy morsel if you wanted her to bite.
He’d scuttled round all week trying to extract information from various sources, even tapping an informant he usually reserved for times when an attack was believed to be imminent. The informant, bribed with a cup of sweet black coffee and a fifty-pound donation to a local homeless charity, had mentioned a mosque he’d attended in west London. There’d been a visiting cleric from Palestine. A meeting of a youth group where pictures of atrocities committed by UK, American and Israeli forces had been passed round. Talk afterwards.
‘Hotheads and idiots,’ the informant, a moderate who had no truck with extremism, said as he bent to sip his coffee. ‘You want their names?’
Holm had nodded, but knew this wasn’t it. This was just lads being lads. For all the religious fervour a leader could drum up among young, impressionable minds, he doubted the bravado was any different from that found among young men who followed other creeds or even no creed at all. There were morons in any country, from any culture, of any colour. He’d taken the names anyway, cross-referenced them and drawn a blank.
When Thursday evening ticked over into Friday morning, the chatter died to nothing. Bleary-eyed junior analysts kept casting him glances, and at a little after four a.m. Holm called it safe and sent everyone home. He remained in the situation room for another couple of hours and then checked out himself.
Safe.
Stupid idiot.
Holm gave himself another squirt of deodorant for good measure and returned to the bedroom to get dressed.
Chapter Two
Silva had just a handful of letters left to deliver when heavy rain began to fall. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance as she passed a shop with televisions in the window display. Water streaked down the glass, blurring the TV images. She pulled her waterproof around her, fastened the hood, and made sure the flap of the postbag was closed. A few steps ahead, the boy she’d seen at the car park earlier smiled at her as his father dragged him from the wet street into the store. The pair stopped in the entrance and stared at a huge screen. A red bar ran along the bottom of the image, the word Breaking flashing on and off. The father shook his head, bent and said something to the boy, and then they were gone, deeper into the store.
Silva looked at the screen too and found herself moving forward. A wash of warmth from an air curtain greeted her as she stepped into the shop. There were others looking at the screen now. An elderly man. A young couple. A woman in a business suit.
‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’ the old man said to nobody in particular. ‘We need to wipe them off the surface of the earth.’
Chaos flashed on the screen. Blue lights strobing, soldiers running, ambulances lining the street. The camera panned and showed the remains of a cafe. The entire front had been destroyed in a fusillade of bullets, the street littered with tables and chairs and debris. A pool of red stained the pavement near a pile of something pink and raw, and the camera quickly panned away. Silva felt a drop of cold rain slip from the hood of her waterproof and fall onto her neck. She pushed through and stood at the front.
‘Where’s this?’ she said.
‘Tunisia,’ the businesswoman said. ‘Thank God.’
The cafe on the screen emerged from a recent memory. A cup and saucer and cinnamon sticks with the coffee. Fancy little biscuits. An evening spent in the fading heat of a day not more than three months ago. The next morning, hugs and kisses and a promise that they’d catch up soon. A flight back to the UK, Silva staring through the aircraft window as Europe glided below, wondering what it would have been like had her parents led normal lives. Had their wanderlust rubbed off? Was that why she never felt settled?
The camera moved to the right. Three body bags lay at the front of an office block where a plate glass window had crazed into a spiderweb pattern. Next to the window stood several police officers, sub-machine guns cradled in
