by Roger Pearce
Gemma checked the clock again. It had taken less than a minute to make her report but the second hand seemed to have gathered speed.
•••
Friday, 14 October, 12.22, Cheapside, City of London
The City’s Ring of Steel was actually made of concrete, an ugly network of chicanes on access roads designed to slow and photograph every vehicle entering the famous Square Mile. Installed in the nineties after catastrophic IRA bombs at the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate, its aim was to deter the wicked and dissuade the banks from deserting London for Frankfurt, Paris or Zurich. The police presence was relaxed after the IRA ceasefires but ramped up again the day after 9/11, when securocrats peered up at the City’s towers and saw Armageddon.
The legacy was a functioning, regularly tested machine that slipped into gear within fifteen seconds of Gemma Riley pressing Go. The Yard’s communications centre was awash with contingency plans, checklists and menus of options for everything from bombing to chemical attack, and all in alphabetical order. Crammed into blue plastic ring binders were threat levels, exercise scenarios, bikini states and army back-up protocols, with appendices of blood banks, body bag stores, emergency rooms and mortuaries.
On the ground, the location was all the frontline officers needed to hear. In the City’s crowded, narrow canyons their sirens bounced off the office towers from all directions, magnifying the pulling power of Topaz. Multiple patrol cars approached St Paul’s from the west and Bank station from the east as they forced a path through the congestion to isolate the threat area, splitting the pack to accelerate down the centre of the street or, if that proved impossible, scattering pedestrians as they bumped onto the pavement. Within six minutes a car had blocked off each end of Cheapside, while other crews set up pre-planned diversions.
•••
Friday, 14 October, 12.26, Dolphin and Drew Investment Bank, Cheapside, City of London
The security guard at Dolphin and Drew was a fiftyish Gulf War veteran known as Stan. His junior, a temp who had been shooting up in the underground garage when Fin delivered his bomb, was still on his break and ignored his radio when police called in the threat. Everyone higher up the chain was on voicemail, so Stan ordered an evacuation on his own initiative. ‘This is not a drill,’ he repeated three times over the system, his anxious voice rolling through every floor.
It was a controversial decision. Many on the bloated crisis management circuit said it was safer to shelter inside the building than flee into danger. But years ago Stan had faced a real-life crisis, a deranged accountant sacked for fraud and illicit sex who returned to shoot his boss dead. In Stan’s opinion, only flight gave anyone a chance against a hidden bomb or a nutter waving an automatic pistol, and he was already imagining the carnage of Rafal Eisner Capital in his own foyer. Last year’s practice drill had proved Dolphin and Drew could be emptied in ten minutes, so he looked at the clock, made his calculation and did what he thought was right.
A BMW patrol car screeched up just as Stan lifted the shiny leaf of a rubber plant and located the bag. Employees were streaming past him with their coats and phones, chatting and laughing, so he stood straight and yelled at them to get clear. There were two officers in the car but only the driver entered the bank. She was smart, in white shirt sleeve order and creased trousers, and spoke calmly into her radio as soon as she saw Stan pointing at the bag.
She glanced at his name badge and shook hands, gently pulling him clear of the bag. ‘Stan, I’m Mandy,’ she said, keeping a hand on his forearm. ‘How do we know when everyone’s out?’
‘A rep on each floor tells me.’
‘Have they?’
Stan shook his head as he watched her quickly circle the bag and take photographs on her iPhone. ‘Gives the bomb technician a heads-up,’ she said, pointing at the revolving door. ‘Can you fold that back? So we can get the robot in?’
Stan nodded.
‘Good. Thanks.’ She tapped something into her phone, murmured into the radio again and turned back to Stan. ‘Where’s your assembly point?’
‘Wood Street.’
‘Too close. Has to be two hundred metres, minimum,’ she said as her partner appeared alongside. ‘Think we may have another live one, Dee. Let’s send everyone down to St Paul’s.’ She peered through the window at the traffic still drifting slowly past and the clumps of pedestrians lingering at bus stops on each side of the street. ‘And that lot. And the retail on the other side.’
There were more sirens now, punching the air from both ends of Cheapside, and two more patrol cars skidded to a halt as her partner hurried out to brief the crews. The guard felt Mandy’s grip tighten against his arm but her voice was kind, as if she could sense the fear constricting his chest. ‘Listen, Stan, I want you to get on the loudspeaker and tell whoever’s still up there the threat is real, okay? Then you get away yourself, same as the others.’
Stan looked doubtful and nodded towards the lift lobby. ‘It’s my job to make sure, you know. There’s always a few take the piss.’
‘No time. Nothing more any of us can do till the experts get here.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Your job is done. I’m telling you to keep yourself safe. Is that clear?’
•••
Friday, 14 October, 12.27, SO15 Reserve, New Scotland Yard
As before, Gemma’s first call had been to Jack Langton so that he could immediately activate Starburst, the deployment of surveillance officers around Cheapside to look for unusual or suspicious activity. She was working down her notification list as a jacketless Kerr appeared on the other side of the glass partition, BlackBerry at his ear. He had a day’s growth of stubble and, beckoning him in, it occurred to Gemma she had not seen him since Wednesday evening.
‘What you got?’ said Kerr as soon as he was through the door. His pale blue shirt crumpled, the sleeves untidily rolled up, Kerr looked weary and unkempt, as if he had been hunkering down in the Fishbowl and forgotten to take a shower.
‘It’s a bank. Dolphin and Drew in Cheapside.’
Kerr rolled up a chair, tossing his phone on Gemma’s desk. ‘How long do we have?’
‘Twelve minutes max. Jack’s on the plot.’ The outside line began blinking at her again.
‘Yeah, we just spoke.’
‘They’ve found a bag in the Reception,’ she said, her hand reaching for the phone. ‘Still getting people away…Hang on…2715 good afternoon, please hold.’ She put a hand over the mouthpiece to finish her sentence for Kerr, then the voice on the line was pulling at her again, wiping everything else. She pressed the speaker button so Kerr could hear. ‘Come again?’
‘Bomb at Canary Wharf. Fifteen minutes. The word is Emerald.’
‘Where? Is that “at” or “in”? Inside a building? At the tube station? Please don’t hang up. You have to give us more.’
As the line clicked Gemma dialled central comms for the second time in less than six minutes. She was searching the computer as she relayed the threat information but Kerr checked her hand. ‘Tell them it’s no trace,’ he murmured.
Gemma look quizzical, then nodded. ‘Code word Emerald is a negative with us,’ she said, then rang off and turned to him.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Kerr, grabbing the mobile. ‘Let’s warn Jack.’
Then all the lines were flashing at once and the door swung open behind them. ‘Bomb gone,’ said a calm female voice, before either of them could react. ‘It’s Cheapside.’
•••
Friday, 14 October, 12.28, Dolphin and Drew Investment Bank, Cheapside, City of London
The Semtex in Fin’s bag detonated eleven minutes early, while Dolphin and Drew stragglers were still bumping into each other in their belated rush for safety.
A window of twenty minutes offered low odds to clear one of the City’s busiest streets; with a gap of nine, no-one stood a chance. The first officers on scene, élite fast response drivers like Mandy, had remained with their partners in the area long after it beca
me lethal, red mist clouding health and safety. One of them found a loudhailer; a couple of others pulled on hi-vis jackets and sprinted up and down Cheapside in a frantic race against the clock, barging into shops and offices and yelling at people to get clear.
For other professionals, their lives already peppered with contingency plans, emergency drills and actual disasters, the callout had been instantaneous. Fire crews scrambled from Shoreditch, Soho and Westminster at the press of a button, and paramedics, most already on the move, converged from every direction. With civilians, things moved more slowly, for atrocities were breaking news that happened to other people. As precious seconds dripped away, Mandy and the other cops had to break through complacency, disbelief and confusion as they ordered shoppers and suits to run for their lives.
The explosion cracked the air, lifted the whole building and scorched the killing zone in white heat as the bank’s frontage disappeared, its glass shards scything everybody within forty paces.
A white Transit van left the street, collected by an invisible giant hand whose fingers crushed the sides before hurling it like a toy through a bookseller’s window. Its petrol tank exploded in a ball of orange flame, just as the glass canopy above the row of shops shattered onto a string of people running for safety, killing three adults and two children. The blast caught birds in mid-flight, triggered alarms and mangled a line of parked bicycles into deadly shrapnel, rocketing a set of handlebars into the clock face above St Mary-le-Bow. Smashed windows from a hundred offices swamped Cheapside in a sea of glass: lopsided cars lay adrift with shoes, chairs, strollers and other flotsam, but its choppy surface sparkled in the midday sunshine. Disfigured corpses lay scattered like victims of an air crash, their limbs buried or blown away, stripped to their underwear as if they had fallen from the sky. Others, terribly mutilated, too traumatised to scream, moaned quietly as paper and detritus sucked from the offices above floated to the ground. A few, short of time, had tried to cheat the bomb by taking refuge in a side alley, but the shock wave found them and shredded their bodies into bloodied lumps of flesh.
The blast showed no mercy to its seventeen victims. It charged glass, brick and metal with lethal energy, then pulverised any human its missiles did not slice, pierce or burn. Stan had been adapting the revolving door when the bomb exploded and ended up on the other side of the street, his severed trunk still in the circular frame like a prisoner in some weird time capsule.
The bomb left many with ‘life changing injuries,’ the post-Iraq euphemism for dismemberment, brain damage and everlasting trauma. Among the dead was Mandy, decapitated as she paused to call in the robot, a roll of Police Line-Do Not Cross tape in her hand, its tail fluttering in the breeze.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Friday, 14 October, 12.47, Room 1830, New Scotland Yard
To officers in John Kerr’s profession, every terrorist success was an intelligence failure. That had been lesson number one on the Special Branch course, straight after the coffee and welcome BS, and it lay at the core of Kerr’s professional life. Derek Finch used it as a personal rebuke against Bill Ritchie, even when things were going well and yet another deranged plot had been thwarted. It was always the secret intelligence from Ritchie’s team and MI5 that uncovered global jihad’s newest recruits, urban kids unhinged in cyberspace, arrested in their bedrooms and banged up in Paddington Green. But in Finch’s eyes victory was always impaired by shortfall, the source unreliable, its product too late or incomplete.
According to Gemma, the two bosses were with the Commissioner right now, updating her on Monday’s attacks. As he left Reserve and made his way up to Room 1830, Kerr feared the worst. A year ago, the Bull had wanted his own placeman as commander of the SO15 intelligence unit and had never forgiven Ritchie for outmanoeuvring him. In the heat of this crisis, Kerr guessed he would exploit two breakdowns in five days to exact revenge: for a schemer as vain, self-serving and tribal as Derek Finch, even tragedy had an upside.
Despite the gruelling pace of the past twenty-four hours Kerr felt energised by the emergency at home, catching Dodge’s voicemail for the third time as he raced up the fire escape stairs. His night flight from Washington had caught a strong tailwind over the Atlantic only to be held in the morning skies above Heathrow. He had not cleared immigration at Terminal Five until well after ten, too late to hurry home for a shower and change of clothes, so had driven straight to the Yard.
Entering Room 1830 he felt another rush of adrenaline. It was a full house, the whole place buzzing as Alan Fargo’s team of six played catch-up to the clamour of sirens in the streets below. Two giant wall screens showed Sky and BBC News at low volume, both repeating amateur footage of the scene while the professionals organised themselves. Through the window looking east Fargo’s officers had their own view, a spiral of black smoke decomposing as it drifted towards them.
Fargo was working the computer, sleeves rolled up, shirt stark white against Mercury’s red glow as he explored its forest of secret databases. Evidently expecting company he had already pulled up another chair and threw Kerr a watery glance. Since his attachment to Gemma he had been experimenting with contact lenses, though his nose still carried indentations from the specs he had worn for decades.
‘Rough night,’ said Kerr, rubbing his chin as Fargo’s eyes lingered a second longer than necessary. Kerr was mildly surprised to see a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie lying on the desk, for everyone knew Fargo followed a strict diet these days. But it was ‘Salisbury Patisserie’ on the white paper bag that really grabbed his attention, in ornate script above a drawing of the Cathedral.
Fargo blinked a couple of times and slid him a single sheet of paper. ‘Emerald.’
‘Bombs on the beaches?’ said Kerr as he sat down, barely glancing at the note. ‘Nineteen eighty-seven?’
‘Eight-five,’ nodded Fargo. ‘Devices hidden in the sand all along the south coast aimed at the bucket and spaders.’
‘And this was the name for our joint op with Garda Crime and Security. I remember the briefing.’
‘Correct. Topaz and Emerald are both Special Branch operational codes.’
‘Which boshes the coincidence theory.’
‘And secret. Never released outside the eighteenth floor. So the bombers also demonstrate a security breach here. It’s neat,’ he said as their eyes drifted to the TV.
Kerr jabbed his index finger at the screen. ‘And now we know for sure this is directed at banks, not transport. It’s Rafal Eisner rather than Victoria station. Dolphin and Drew, not, I dunno, any other soft target you can think of.’
‘Both of them have form in the financial crash,’ said Fargo, working the computer again. ‘Rafal Eisner is based in Munich with branches here and in Amsterdam. Heavily criticised by the Bundesbank for unethical practices prior to 07, through massively risky and complex financial products. There’s a technical summary from the Financial Conduct Authority, if you’re interested.’
Kerr shrugged.
Fargo switched to another database. ‘This is a Mercury zipscan on Dolphin and Drew in the last ten minutes, but there’s plenty more open source stuff to plough through, plus regulators’ reports. Dolphin is headquartered in Boston, with offices here and in Paris. A low profile, high-end investment house for heavy rollers. More hedge fund than bank. Dodgy, incomprehensible loan practices, “credit default swaps on steroids,” according to a pointy-head in the Fed Reserve. Everything’s on the charge sheet except toxic mortgages, but Dolphin rode the fiscal stimulus and survived. It was recently censured again because of its European Realignment Programme, which is even nastier than it sounds.’
‘Was this the calling in of loans?’
‘At extortionate interest rates, putting a lot of diligent people out of business here and in France. Marriages destroyed along the way and quite a few suicides.’
‘Dolphin was caught up in that?’
‘They took cover behind the British defaulters. But just as guilty, it says here.’
>
‘Have they been targeted before?’
‘Only by regulators.’
‘But the Real IRA have attacked banks in the North. Ulster Bank, three, four years ago?’
‘And Santander, bombed twice. But nothing on this scale. Noone here even noticed.’
‘So are you telling me this is Irish dissident, too?’
Fargo began to say something, then turned away as his computer beeped with incoming. ‘We should wait for Melanie.’
‘You what?’
‘She’s on her way,’ he said, staring at the screen again. ‘Heads-up. Suspicious device found at Canary Wharf. Waitrose bag with a plastic food carton inside.’
‘And?’
‘It’s got the explosive dog excited.’
‘Which bank?’
‘None of them,’ frowned Fargo. ‘Just outside the station arch, to the left. Looks like it was kicked beneath a hedge. Dumped. Maybe whoever just panicked and got out. They’re doing the usual at the station, clearing the area to send in the wheelbarrow.’ This was Fargo’s term for the explosives officers’ robot.
‘It’ll be a hoax.’
Fargo peered at the clock on the computer, then double-checked his watch. ‘Yeah, we know their timing’s shit but it should have gone by now.’