At last, the martyr-in-waiting turned to the left toward Whitehall, with Gabriel and Keller trailing a few steps behind. A gentle breeze blew from the north directly into their faces—a breeze that would disperse the radioactivity all over Westminster and Victoria if the bomb detonated. The CBRN team that had been at Caffè Nero was now standing outside the Revenue and Customs building; their readings were off the charts as the man walked past them. It was all the proof the prime minister needed. “Take him down,” he said, and the head of the Counter Terrorism Command repeated the order to Gabriel and Keller. Then he added quietly, “And may God be with you both.”
But on whose side, thought Gabriel, was God on that morning? On the side of the fanatic with a weapon of mass destruction strapped to his body, or the two men who would try to prevent him from detonating it? The first move was Keller’s to make. He had to seize the left hand of the martyr in an iron-lock grip before Gabriel fired the kill shot. Otherwise, the martyr’s thumb would weaken on the detonator switch and the bomb would explode.
They passed the archway of King Charles Street and the entrance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The traffic along Whitehall dwindled. Evidently, the police had blocked it off at Parliament Square to the south and Trafalgar Square to the north. The martyr-in-waiting seemed not to notice. He was walking toward destiny, walking toward death. Gabriel drew the Glock pistol from the small of his back and quickened his pace while Keller, a blur in his peripheral vision, drew a few deep breaths.
Before them, the sweating, radiation-sickened martyr passed unseeing through a knot of tourists and started toward the security gate of Downing Street, his apparent target. He slowed to a stop, however, when he saw the black-uniformed police officers standing on the pavement. At once, he noticed the peculiar absence of cars in the normally busy street. Then, turning, he saw the two men walking toward him, one with a gun in his hand. The eyes widened, the arms rose and stretched shoulder-width from each side.
Keller rushed forward while Gabriel raised the Glock. He waited until the instant Keller grabbed the bomber’s left hand before squeezing the trigger. The first two shots obliterated the bomber’s face. The rest he fired after the man was on the pavement. He fired until his gun was empty. He fired as though he were trying to drive the man deep underground and all the way to the gates of hell.
Suddenly, there were police and bomb-disposal technicians rushing toward them from all directions. A car pulled up in the street, the rear door opened. Gabriel hurled himself into the backseat, and into the arms of Chiara. The last thing he saw as the car drove away was Christopher Keller holding a dead man’s thumb to a detonator switch.
Part Four
Gallery of Memories
70
London
The evacuation of Westminster and Whitehall was far shorter in duration than Saladin might have hoped, but traumatic all the same. For nine long days, the beating heart of British politics, the religious and political epicenter of a once-glorious civilization and empire, was cordoned off from the rest of the realm and closed for business. The dead zone stretched from Trafalgar Square in the north to Milbank in the south, and eastward into Victoria to New Scotland Yard. The great ministries sat empty, as did the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Prime Minister Lancaster and his staff left 10 Downing Street and relocated to an undisclosed country house. The Queen, against her wishes, was moved to Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Only the CBRN teams were allowed to enter the restricted area, and only for limited periods. They moved about the deserted streets and squares in their lime-green hazmat suits, sniffing the air for any lingering traces of radioactivity, while the mournful tolling of Big Ben marked the passage of time.
The reopening was a joyless affair. The prime minister and his wife, Diana, stole into Number 10 as though they were breaking into their own home, while up and down the length of Whitehall civil servants and permanent secretaries returned quietly to their desks. In the House of Commons there was a moment of silence; in the Abbey, a prayer service. London’s mayor claimed the city would emerge stronger as a result of the near disaster, though he offered no explanation as to why that was the case. A headline of a leading conservative tabloid read welcome to the new normal.
It was a Wednesday, which meant the prime minister was obliged to rise before the Commons at noon and field questions from the political opposition. They were deferential at first, but not for long. Mainly, they wanted to know how it was possible that, just six months after the devastating attack in the West End, ISIS had managed to smuggle the makings of a dirty bomb into the United Kingdom. And how, given the elevated threat level, the security services had been unable to identify the bomber before the morning of the planned attack. The prime minister was tempted to say that the near-impossible security situation confronting Britain was the result of mistakes made by a generation of leaders—mistakes that had turned the land of Shakespeare, Locke, Hume, and Burke into the world’s preeminent center of Salafist-jihadi ideology. But he did not rise to the bait. “The enemy is determined,” he declared, “but so are we.”
“And the manner in which the suspect was neutralized?” wondered the MP from the Washwood Heath section of Birmingham, a heavily Muslim city in the British West Midlands that had produced numerous terrorists and plots.
“He wasn’t a suspect,” interjected the prime minister. “He was a terrorist armed with a bomb and several grams of radioactive cesium chloride.”
“But was there really no other way to deal with him other than a cold-blooded execution?” the MP persisted.
“It was no such thing.”