Dinky has done the shopping. He dressed smart as if to take part in City-type activities, then went out to collect the bomb-making materials which, you must understand, are not to be made into a bomb; only the makings of an explosive, galvanising, London-wide, media-led experience.
Enough adjectives for you to spot the difference?
And now they – the ingredients of the bomb that isn’t going to be one, are safely stowed in a capacious sports bag; while he – Dinky, the pseudo-suicide bomber, is on an escalator coming up from the Jubilee Line at Canary Wharf.
One among the stream of people flowing upwards to the mouth of the station. Walking
out of the gunmetal grey atrium and back into sunlight. Once again, it’s a bright, bonny day.
Turns right past Smollensky’s, then Carluccio’s (a couple of nervous customers on the
terrace, meeting there for the pre-meeting before the board meeting that might cost them their contract), and into one of many underground shopping malls.
Of course he’s on camera. On this estate, all the main thoroughfares are covered. But
there’s nothing to make a security guard look twice, even if he happened to be looking. Why would anyone have doubts about a slim young man, coffee-coloured, elegant, carrying a sports bag and an over-the-shoulder laptop case, wearing a pink shirt and a grey suit?
Nice camouflage, Dinky.
Good call, discarding that shirt with the cutaway collar: would have put you back in
2009; stuck out a mile.
An excellent choice, if I may say so, sir.
First stop, first drop. Where, where, where?
Promising, over there. It’s a bank branch closed for refurbishment – ‘we look forward to welcoming you to our new branch in December 2012’. With a hardboard partition at the front, extending out into the walkway, screening off the guys banging about inside. Except by the sound of it, there are no guys inside and no work going on right now.
Right ho!
So carry on walking. Don’t stop abruptly, then fumble finding a way in. Keep it smooth.
Walk on until there’s a crossroads between two shopping corridors, then circle round the square and come back. Good. Now you can see the doorway on this side, can’t you? Conveniently open, with a space inside that’s nicely secluded.
Silly idea: write an update of the Just William stories re-located to Docklands.
This could be the Outlaws’ den!
Back to business.
Call out, ‘Hello?’, as if expecting to meet someone in there. But no, just as you thought, there’s no one there. Move quickly, then: push laptop bag behind you, so it’s resting on your back, out of the way. Take camera out of jacket pocket with left hand, turn on, lens cover
opening – good. Sports bag on floor, unzip with right hand, remove the rectangular can containing one litre of acetone, place it on the floor near the entrance. Now move further in and turn around so that you are looking back through the opening. You should be able to see a row of shops, nicely framed, all the way down to Waitrose. Point the camera and just in the shot is a stack of those magazines they give away round here, Docklands Life, or something like that.
The point is that the picture will show where it’s been taken, right? Nice big tin of
Acetone (blue Helvetica letters, white background) set against Canary Wharf location,
identifiable as such. All in the frame, yes? So press the button, feel the shot (slightest vibration).
When the little light goes from red back to green – there you go, take it again. Now change the camera mode to check they came out all right. Fine. Both of them fine. Replace acetone can in sports bag. Camera turned off, returned to pocket.
What’s to hang around for? Let’s go.
And back into the stream of human traffic, gliding quietly along the polished floors.
Walking with measured purpose; not stridently so.
Put yourself in the shoes of the people around you. All of them doing a softly softly
shuffle, no kerfuffle: people to see, deals to do – best done cool. So take your time, Dinky, enjoy looking around, clocking that cherry red handbag (Rupa would like it), and the wiggle in the walk of the woman in front.
Nicey, nicey. Heh, heh, heh.
Now there’s a bench, no one sitting on it, and next to it a bin marked ‘dry recyclables’.
How convenient. Let’s be the first, shall we, and have a little sit down? This time I think we’ll have the contraband out of the sports bag first.
Sulphuric acid, bottle of, out of the bag into the bin (one seamless movement – very
good), which is thankfully almost full so the bottle can just rest on top of all the other stuff that’s in there. OK, now lean over the bin as if you’ve just dropped something into it that you didn’t mean to. Easily done. Happens all the time. Have a half-smile ready to play on your lips: my cufflink, my wedding ring (no, that’s overdoing it). O, what a fool I am. And while you’re peering in there for whatever it is, the camera should come to hand; and it should get turned on.
Wow, baby! You really turn me on.
What we want is close to a bird’s eye view, but not dead-on. Give it a bit of slant so you can see the bottle of acid in the centre of the top circle, and, on the side of the underlying cylinder – the bin, you idiot!, you should be able to read ‘dry recycl’.
Doesn’t matter if the other letters are out of shot.
It’s got the Canary Wharf colour scheme to clinch it.
You are shooting in colour, aren’t you? Sorry, just checking.
He is sweating now; pale and thin-lipped, like the ugly guy in Dog Day Afternoon.
Unusual for Dinky, who is normally plumped up and ready for kissing.
(Of course, Al Pacino – that’s who Dinky usually looks like. But a bit darker, and – not hard – taller).
Anyway, the colour comes back into his cheeks as he rejoins the irregular army:
patrolling the malls, avoiding eye contact, scanning each other occasionally, constantly checking their phones.
You,re doing all right, Dinky. You,re doing all right. Only one more to go and you can sail away.
Whoops! Where’s he gone? OK, we can see him again, now. He’s turned left off the mall
into a white-tiled corridor. Sign above the swing doors says Exit and Parking, with a little squiggle next to Parking.
Corridor goes straight for 10 metres, before a right turn, and a left shortly after; then a short stretch to the exit. Press Here to Exit, it says on a square pad next to a single door.
Dinky presses it, the door opens, he doesn’t go through. (At least he knows it’s working –
clever.) Instead he retraces his steps back to the right turn in the corridor (though now, for him coming back, it’s a left), where there is some sort of vending machine.
Now we’re getting it. You put money in here to pay for car parking tickets or tokens.
Something, anyhow, to swipe your vehicle through the barrier and out of the underground car park. But you don’t get to the actual car park this way, and it looks like this machine is rarely used, which means the corridor it’s situated in, is not much travelled, either.
Well done, Dinky, another good location!
With your nose for it, maybe a future for you in covert operations. Apply to MI5.
You’d have to forget the arty farty stuff, though.
He’s already three-quarters of the way through the routine; this time with hydrogen
peroxide as the featured object, posed tellingly alongside the Docklands car parking ticket machine. Photos OK –
check; returns camera to pocket. Might have been better to replace the hydrogen peroxide first: every second it’s in plain view is another moment of liability; but still, this is good work.
Impressive. And we’re off.
Except he isn’t. Instead of moving on, Dinky is getting more things out of the sports bag, and lining them up on the polished floor, in th
e space between the ticket machine and the left-hand sides of the corridor, where they intersect at the corner.
Very discreet. With Dinky squatted down in front of them, it’s hard to make out what
they are.
But it doesn’t matter what they are. They shouldn’t be there, you shouldn’t be here, you bloody maniac!
(5) Stir it up
Dinky has got the two other containers (acetone, sulphuric acid) back out of the bag, plus the hydrogen peroxide which never went back in, and alongside these, a large glass cooking dish.
One of those ovenproof ones, with a lid on top. Now he’s putting this into an even larger bucket
– an ice bucket; and from the ice bucket he’s scooping out enough of the crushed stuff to allow the ovenproof dish to fit into it.
If it were Stir Up Sunday, you could mix your Christmas Pudding in the ovenproof dish
(though I bet even Heston Thingummy hasn’t yet thought of Figgie pudding on ice). But it isn’t a Sunday, and Dinky’s mixing something else.
First, hydrogen peroxide, poured steadily into the bowl. Then the acetone. He’s stirring them together with a swizzle stick. Now, the final element in the cocktail: slowly, carefully sulphuric acid, H2S04.
Do you remember it from the locked cupboard in your school chemistry lab? Since that
time, if you were bold enough, you might have used it to clean a blocked drain.
Very carefully, very slowly, and with long gaps in between. So long that the pulse of heat which screen 167
Games Makers: a London Satire marks the entry of each new droplet into the bowl, has
time to dissipate before the next one goes in.
By the end of this protracted process, in the mixing bowl there are three colourless liquids of different density. More use of the swizzle stick (good wrist action, Dinky), swirling them together – gently, though; and taking care not to inhale the fumes.
Dinky keeps stirring (gently, though) for a full five minutes, timing it with the watch his father gave him on his eighteenth birthday. In these few minutes he finds greater peace of mind than he has known since childhood. For years the orchestra in his head has been sawing away; but now, for once, he is not crowded by memories or pressured by his own desires.
This is it. It is what it is.
It is time to stop stirring. He puts the swizzle stick down on the tiled floor. Puts the glass lid on top of the dish with the mixture in it, then tapes the two of them together, criss-crossing from top to bottom, up and down the sides of the dish. It’s not exactly sealed – you wouldn’t turn it upside down (you wouldn’t, anyway, if you knew anything about the mixture inside), but the lid’s not coming off in a hurry.
Everything goes back in the bag, including the swizzle stick. The bag is zipped up.
(6) It’s the way you walk
The bag is in my hand and I am walking along the corridor to the exit. I press the pad, the door opens. Now I am coming out onto the street that runs between Cabot Square and Canary Wharf DLR station.
It’s called South Colonnade – just seen the sign.
I turn left and continue walking along the pavement.
In the road beside me, a security guard whirs past in an electric patrol vehicle. Sees me.
Sees somebody else three metres ahead of me. Carries on.
I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He does not give me a second look.
Mr Gonads is my name. All the time I was taking pictures in the three locations, it felt like my balls were trying to shrink back into my body.
But now they are out and proud! Carrying what I’m carrying, everything about me is
expansive. I’m having to walk with legs apart to give my testicles room to dangle down. My cock isn’t stiff, but even in its flaccid state, I could confidently slap it down on the table and insist that you get a load of that.
Time isn’t thickening, though. Just the opposite; it’s thinning out towards one single moment. My past and my future are all zipped up into the here and now. Highly compressed.
You have worked it out, haven’t you? I’m walking through Docklands with a cocktail of carnage in my bag. The unholy trinity of hydrogen peroxide, acetone and sulphuric acid will be crystallising into acetone peroxide, even as we speak. And since the process is not refrigerated, it’s occurring...
This, Nessa, is what’s occurring.
...at a temperature which makes both the crystals and the liquid into two of the most
dangerously volatile substances in the whole wide world.
Bump into me and I might bump you off. Show me a naked flame and I will explode. I’ve
set myself to blow up in two shakes of a sports bag (one would do it, actually). Or it could just go up at any time. No reason. Well, of course, there is a scientific explanation for the chemical reaction entailed in the explosion. But no one would have to do anything to make it happen. It might just happen that way.
On the other hand, I could still make it home. Maybe I’ll even make it as a writer. You see, I’m also going ahead with the things Tony asked me to do: upload the pictures and send him the osamaobama email from my laptop, and if there’s been no explosion before then, if I haven’t by chance been killed, I’m going to offload the computer, camera and all the ingredients, lowering them gently into Old Father Thames.
That ol’ man river is deep enough to cool them off.
If I get that far. Nobody knows how far I’ll get.
There is no way of knowing, and that’s the beauty of it.
(7) In the lap of the gods
On South Strand, Canary Wharf, Dinky Dutta happens to be walking past a shop
advertising ‘the gift of Bang and Olufsen’. He avoids the smokers clustered next to a sign saying
‘it is illegal to smoke here’, and continues west towards the Clipper pier (Thames commuter boats), situated alongside the Four Seasons Hotel.
You see, even the seasons have been corporatised.
Whoa! Almost a collision with another pedestrian coming at him from the left. Manages
to move aside, though; and, just as important, succeeds in lifting the sports bag smoothly out of the way, without jerking it or allowing it to bang against his thigh or the other guy’s luggage.
Crosses his mind that it constitutes cheating, this taking care to avoid friction and
flammables. But he refuses to dwell on it. Won’t allow that much circumspection. He’s finally managing to live in the moment, and he doesn’t want anything to spoil it –
however long it lasts.
Sky’s clouding over. Earlier this morning there were chinks of light dancing on the water, but right now, Dinky thinks, the Thames is a fat brown bastard.
He walks slowly down the long slope to the pier.
Sits in the glass-walled waiting room and logs on, taking care that his sports bag is not directly underneath the laptop.
Uploading photos to Pictures folder – done. Connect to Wi-Fi and Compose New Mail:
Dear Mr Skance, you will be interested to see how the attached photographs illustrate London,s vulnerability to 'terrorist' attack. Best wishes, osamaobama.
Attach, no need to go Back to Message, just press Send. Already confirmed: your
message has been sent.
Let the Games commence!
Now let’s get on the Clipper. Like Tony said, any Clipper, going either way.
Having come this far without fateful mishap, Dinky is starting to think that maybe life’s too good for him to risk blowing himself up. At last, you might say, an end to the idiocy of youth. About bloody time! But just as he’s making friends with himself again, coming round to the idea that his life should not be cut tragically short, news comes up on the message display board that boats in both directions are subject to a 15-minute delay.
Jesus Christ! The bloody bag could blow at any moment.
Having put his whole existence on the line, whether Dinky lives or dies may now be
determi
ned by an unexplained delay in riverboat traffic!
Dinky marches across to the ticket office to demand an answer. Of course, the young man behind the screen doesn’t know. He says he can try and find out, but adds, cautiously, that ‘we are usually the last to know.’ Dinky remains polite. Says he knows it’s not your fault that the boat is delayed and the information is lacking, but, really, there’s no need to bother. And the young man remembers to advise Dinky that it’s advisable to buy a ticket now, prior to boarding.
He sits back down. Now he desperately wants to get rid of the bag. He thinks about
walking to the edge of the pier and dropping it into the river, then walking quietly away. But the straps might catch on something. There may be all sorts of things sticking out of the pier, and the wash of the next boat coming in could cause enough of a bump to blow the whole thing. How much would go up in the explosion?
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