The Vincent hit the pavement in a shower of sparks and rolled end over end before stopping. Cabrillo tossed Amad to the ground; he bounced across the pavement like a crash dummy dropped off a table. Reaching for the clutch, he took the Ural out of gear and applied the brakes. The motorcycle rolled to a stop near the line of vendors.
Cabrillo looked over at the timer. The countdown had just passed two minutes. He only hoped it was regular time and not metric time.
Truitt had made all of twenty yards into the crowd when he realized the mask had to go. As Prince Charles, everyone wanted to touch him—once he’d peeled the mask off, people backed away.
“Mr. Cabrillo has control of the bomb at the Queen Victoria Memorial,” Lincoln reported over the radio.
Whooping sounds filled the air as the MI5 teams in the decoy cars attached their portable lights and sirens and raced toward the memorial. Blockers moved into place to stop traffic and an air-raid siren started to blare. Truitt ran across the road to Cabrillo just as he was snipping the wire.
“She’s still active,” Cabrillo shouted as soon as he saw Truitt.
Truitt glanced up quickly. There was a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream truck alongside the road. He ran over and opened the rear door. The attendant started to say something but in a second Truitt was in the rear. Grabbing a block of dry ice in his gloved hands, he ran back across the street to where Cabrillo was rapidly taking apart the nose cone with a pair of Leatherman pliers.
Cabrillo had just pulled back the panel when Truitt arrived.
“Let’s try freezing the firing mechanism,” Truitt said.
The timer was at one minute twelve.
“Go,” Cabrillo yelled.
Truitt’s gloves were frozen to the block of dry ice and he could not feel his hands. He tossed the block, gloves and all, onto the nose cone and then slid his gray hands under his armpits. The timer clicked a few more times then stopped cold.
Cabrillo looked over at Truitt and smiled. “I’m surprised that worked,” he said.
“Necessity,” Truitt said through gritted teeth, “is the mother of invention.”
Cabrillo nodded and reached for the voice microphone at his throat. “I need the bomb guys at the Queen Victoria Memorial ASAP.”
Fireworks erupted over the park and throughout London as the New Year came.
Two minutes later a car pulled up and a British officer climbed out. Soon another car arrived containing an expert from the U.S. Air Force. Five minutes later the two men had the firing mechanism removed and stowed. Now the bomb was just a housing for an orb of enriched uranium.
Its heart was ripped from its body, and with it went the life force that could bring death.
WHILE THE BOMB experts were rendering the device inert, Cabrillo and Truitt walked over to Amad’s body, which was lying in a pool of blood on the pavement. The radio had reported that Lababiti had been detained and was now being brought back to London by helicopter. Elton John was still singing and the sound filled the air. The scene around the motorcycle was being cordoned off by British military and intelligence officials, and most at the concert were unaware of what had happened.
“Nothing but a kid,” Cabrillo said, looking down.
Truitt nodded.
“Let’s get you to the medic to look at your hands.”
Kasim and Ross, who had arrived a few minutes after the timer was stopped, were wheeling the smashed Black Shadow over toward Cabrillo. The classic motorcycle was a mess. The tanks and side panels were scratched, the handlebars bent and one tire was flat. A perfect specimen of motorcycle history had been destroyed. Cabrillo looked at the motorcycle and shook his head.
“I want you two to go back to the dealership,” he said to Ross and Kasim, “and pay the man whatever his asking price was. Then I want you to ask him where to send it to be restored again.”
“You’re keeping it, boss?” Ross asked.
“Damn straight,” Cabrillo said.
Right then Fleming appeared and Cabrillo walked over to brief him. Lababiti was being brought back to downtown London, but it would be weeks before he filled in the pieces.
PART TWO
42
ON BOARD THE U.S. Navy guided-missile frigate, Scott Thompson and his team from the
In the pilothouse, Commander Timothy Gant was awaiting the arrival of a helicopter from shore. The sky was black and the wind was whipping the seas into a white froth. On the radar scope a blip indicating the incoming helicopter moved nearer.
“She’s on final, sir,” the helmsman said, “winds twenty to thirty from the north and northwest.”
Gant reached for his radio. “Get her secured to the deck the minute she touches down,” he said to the head of his deck operations.
“Roger that, sir,” the man answered.
