“Let him walk straight into a trap? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly, Prime Minister. He won’t be hard to miss. He’ll be overdressed for the summer weather, and the detonator will be visible in one of his hands. He’ll probably be sweating with nerves and reciting prayers. He might even be suffering from radiation sickness. And when he walks past a Geiger counter,” said Gabriel in conclusion, “he’ll light it up. Just make sure the firearms officer who goes after him has the nerve and experience to do what’s necessary.”
“Any candidates?” asked the prime minister.
“Only two,” said Gabriel.
69
Parliament Square, London
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Or the end of one.”
“Why are you always so fatalistic?” asked Keller. “We’re not in the Sahara anymore. We’re in the middle of London.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel, looking around. “What could possibly go wrong here?”
They were seated on a bench at the western edge of Parliament Square. It was a fine summer’s morning, cool and soft, with a promise of rain later in the day. Directly behind them was the Supreme Court, the highest court in the realm. To their right were Westminster Abbey and the medieval St. Margaret’s Church. And directly before them, across the green lawn of the square, was the Palace of Westminster. The clock in the iconic bell tower read five minutes to nine o’clock. Rush-hour traffic was flowing across Westminster Bridge and up and down Whitehall, past Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defense, and the entrance to Downing Street, official residence of the prime minister. Yes, thought Gabriel again. What could possibly go wrong?
He wore a radio earpiece in his right ear and a gun at the small of his back. The gun was a 9mm Glock 17, the standard-issue sidearm of SCO19, the tactical firearms unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. The radio was connected to the Met’s secure communications network. The head of SO15, the Counter Terrorism Command, was running the show, with assistance from Amanda Wallace of MI5. Thus far, they had identified two potential suspects approaching Westminster. One was coming across the bridge from Lambeth. The other was making his way along Victoria Street. In fact, at that very instant, he was walking past New Scotland Yard. Both men were carrying backpacks, hardly unusual in London, and both were Middle Eastern or South Asian in appearance, also not unusual. The man coming across the bridge had started his journey in the borough of Tower Hamlets in East London. The one walking past New Scotland Yard had come from the Edgware Road section of North London. He was warmly dressed and looked to be suffering from the flu.
“Sounds like our man,” said Gabriel. “I’m betting on Edgware and influenza.”
“We’ll know in a minute.” Keller was leafing through that morning’s edition of the Times. It was filled with news of Saladin’s death.
“Can’t you at least—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The man from Tower Hamlets had reached the Westminster side of the bridge. He passed a Caffè Nero coffeehouse and the entrance to the Westminster Tube stop. Then he passed an undercover CBRN team and two tactical firearms officers in plain clothes. No trace of radioactivity, no detonator in the hand, no sign of emotional distress. Wrong man. He crossed the street to Parliament Square and joined a small, sad protest having something to do with the war in Afghanistan. Was it still going on? Even Gabriel found it hard to imagine.
He turned his head a few degrees to the right to watch the second man—the man from the Edgware Road section of North London—walking along Broad Sanctuary, past the North Tower of the Abbey. Keller was pretending to read the sporting news.
“How does he look?”
“Sick as a dog.”
“Something he ate?”
“Or something he’s wearing. He looks like he would glow in the dark.”
A CBRN team was on the north lawn of the Abbey, posing for photos like ordinary tourists, along with another SCO19 unit. The CBRN team had already begun to detect elevated levels of radiation, but as the man from Edgware approached, the levels spiked dramatically.
“Fucking Chernobyl,” said Keller. “We’ve got him.”
A commotion erupted over the radio, several voices shouting at once. Gabriel forced himself to look away.
“What are the odds?” he asked calmly.
“Of what?”
“That he chooses us?”
“I’d say they’re getting better by the minute.”
The man crossed Broad Sanctuary to the Supreme Court building and entered Parliament Square at the southwest corner. A few seconds later, sweating, lips moving, pale as death, he was approaching the bench on which Gabriel and Keller sat.
“Someone needs to put that poor bloke out of his misery,” said Keller.
“Not without an order from the prime minister.”
The man walked past the bench.
“What level of exposure did we just suffer?” asked Keller.
“Ten thousand X-rays.”
“How many have you had?”
“Eleven thousand,” said Gabriel. Then he said quietly, “Look at the left hand.”
Keller did. It was clutching a detonator.
“Look at his thumb,” said Gabriel. “He’s already putting pressure on the trigger. Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah,” said Keller. “It means he’s got a dirty bomb with a dead man’s switch.”
Big Ben was tolling nine o’clock when the martyr-in-waiting reached the eastern flank of the square. He paused for a moment to watch the protest and, it seemed to Gabriel, to consider his options—the Palace of Westminster, which was directly before him, or Whitehall, which was to his left. The prime minister and his security aides were considering their options as well. At this point, there was only one. Someone had to grant the man the death he so badly wanted while someone else held his thumb tightly to the detonator switch. Otherwise, several people would die, and the seat of British power and history would be a radioactive wasteland for the foreseeable future.