showed the elevator going to Lababiti’s floor, and then it started down. The elevator stopped on the second floor.
The MI5 agent whispered the information over the radio, then quickly walked from the lobby. Everyone who was listening tensed up—the time was now and this was the place.
THE FOOD AND beer and fun had not been diminished by the cold and scattered snow. The areas around Hyde and Green Parks were crowded with tens of thousands of holiday partygoers. Backstage, a liaison from MI5 was explaining to a rock star the cold reality.
“You should have warned us,” his agent said loudly, “so we could have canceled.”
“He explained that,” Elton John said. “That would have alerted the terrorists.”
Dressed in a yellow sequined jumpsuit, jeweled sunglasses and black platform boots with lights in the soles, it would be easy to dismiss John as just another spoiled and overindulged musician used to a life of pampered elegance. The truth was far from that. Reginald Dwight had clawed his way up from a hardscrabble existence with strength, perseverance and decades of hard work. No one can dominate the pop charts for decade after decade if they’re not both tough and realistic. Elton John was a survivor.
“The royal family has been evacuated, right?” he asked.
“Come in here, Mr. Truitt,” the MI5 agent shouted outside the trailer.
Truitt opened the door and stepped inside.
“This is the stand-in for Prince Charles,” the agent said.
John glanced at Truitt and grinned. “Looks just like him,” he said.
“Sir,” Truitt said, “I want you to know we’re going to recover the bomb and disable it before anything happens. We appreciate you going along with this.”
“I have faith in MI5,” John said.
“He’s with MI5,” Truitt said. “I’m with a group named the Corporation.”
“The Corporation?” John said. “What’s that?”
“We’re private spies,” Truitt said.
“Private spies,” John said, shaking his head, “imagine that. You guys any good?”
“We have a one hundred percent success record.”
John rose from his chair—it was time to go backstage. “Do me a favor,” he said, “give this one a hundred and ten percent.”
Truitt nodded.
John was at the door but he stopped. “Tell the cameraman not to do close-ups on Prince Charles—the bad guys might be watching.”
“You’re going out there?” the agent asked incredulously.
“Damn straight,” John said, “that’s a crowd of my countrymen and they came to see a show. Either these men”—he swept his hand at Truitt and the MI5 agent—“handle this problem, or I’m going out singing.”
Truitt smiled and followed John out the door.
THERE ARE SIX ways to enter a room. Four walls, the floor, or through the ceiling. Amad was using the latter. At the end of the second floor of Lababiti’s apartment building there was a utility closet. Two months prior, Lababiti had carefully sawed the four corners of the wood-planked floor and removed it, revealing the sub-floor. Then, using a two-foot-diameter round hole saw, he’d bored a hole into the lower shop. Between the sub-floor and the wood hatch above he’d hidden a rope ladder. After cleaning up the dust below, he retrieved the round section of floor and reattached it above with twin plates. Next he filled the edges around the wall in the closet with wood putty so it could not be detected. The hatch had been left alone until now.
Amad opened the utility closet using a key Lababiti had copied.
With the door open and the hallway empty, he pried off the hatch with a screwdriver. Setting the wood-planked section against the wall, Amad entered the closet and shut the door behind him. He took a pair of hooks from his pocket and screwed them into a wall, then attached the rope ladder. After removing the plates holding the round section of floor in place, Amad pulled it up into the closet and tossed it to the side.
He dropped the ladder into the hole and climbed down.
EVERY MI5 AGENT on the rooftops nearby had their scopes trained on the second floor.
“Nothing,” they called in one by one.
The MI5 agent who had walked through the lobby then out again reentered the building. Walking over to the elevator, he saw the indicator light still on number two.
“Still on two,” he radioed to Fleming.
In the hotel across the street, Fleming was staring at his watch. Four minutes had passed since the principal had stopped the elevator on the second floor. “Go up the stairs,” he ordered the agent.
AMAD STARED AT his instructions written in Arabic, then flipped back the hinged panel over the arming mechanism. The symbols were Cyrillic but his diagram was easy to follow. Amad turned a toggle switch up and an LED light began to flash. Turning a knob, he adjusted the time to five.
Then he climbed on the Ural and kicked the engine to life. Once it started, he reached for a garage door opener duct-taped to the handlebars, and pushed the button. He shifted into first and was doing nearly ten miles an hour as the door rose six feet in the air and continued up.
Everything began to happen at once.
THE AGENT REACHED the second floor and reported it empty at the same instant the garage door began to open. “We have a door opening,” Fleming said into the radio as he raced through the lobby for the door.
He was just at the inner glass doors when the motorcycle appeared and drove onto the street. Amad was at the corner crossing onto the Strand in a second.
