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  “I knew this would happen,” she said. Simeon still had his hands around her neck. He stared into her eyes. She said, “I love you Simeon.” There was a strange intensity to his gaze. His fingers dug into her flesh. She adored his physical strength. It felt as though he could crush the life out of her in a moment. She placed her hands on his and whispered, “We can do it again before, you know . . . But maybe now we should make ourselves known to the people on the train.” He let her pull his hands from her throat and she placed them on her breasts as she told him again, “I love you Simeon.”

  Dressing was difficult, the slick on their bodies made their clothes stick to them. She kissed him again before she picked up the walkie-talkie, raised it to her mouth and pressed the “speak” button: “Tommy? Can you hear me?”

  The walkie-talkie crackled into life: “Hi, Belle, what’s happening?”

  “The passengers are getting uppity. Shall I give them a scare?”

  “Hold on for the time being,” said Tommy. “I’ll get the driver to make the announcement.”

  Should he kill her now? Now would be as good a time as any, before anyone actually got hurt, before she could “give them a scare.” He would give her a double tap—two from the Browning 9mm—into that pretty face. She wouldn’t be giving anyone a scare after that. Then he would release the passengers and prepare for his debriefing. But the fear kept nagging away at him. Why had they gone a week early? Who was to blame for this? Or, more importantly, whom would they choose to blame for this? He should shoot her straight away, get it over and done with. He had had his fun. It was one of the most intense sexual experiences he had ever had. That was part of the problem he now faced. He knew he must kill her and put a stop to the madness but he also wanted to repeat the pleasure of lifting her up, pulling her legs around him, and relishing that sweet, runny feeling of having her slide down upon him. Could he not do both?

  “It’s going to get good now.” Raising the two Glocks, she aimed them at him. “Pow! Pow!” she said and giggled.

  There was a faint hum from the public address system before the driver said: “Right, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. The bad news is that the power to the train has slumped so we can’t proceed to Tottenham Court Road under our own steam, but the good news is that I’ve just had word that we’re going to be towed out of the tunnel by another train, which is going to be with us in a moment. Now, as a safety procedure, I’m afraid I need all those passengers in the first and last carriages to move down toward the center of the train because we need to evacuate them. I repeat, passengers need to evacuate the first and the sixth carriages and move toward the middle of the train.”

  On the other side of the door Simeon could hear movement. People were doing as they were told. But the man continued to shout despite the voices attempting to placate him. “Open the fucking door,” he kept shouting. There was a scuffle. It sounded like he was being restrained. Simeon watched Belle. She was excited, like a child waiting to go on a scary fairground ride. The thought of killing her didn’t bother him. He could live with it. Any pangs he might feel as he shot her would be as nothing to what he felt after he had killed the family in Helmand. Having sex with her again before he dispatched her was greedy, lustful. There would be other women, other times, other places. He had to do what he had come here to do. She might fuck like a porn star but she was also a murderer. Scum. He reached into his pocket and his fingers closed around the grip of the Browning. He clicked off the safety catch and watched her as she said, “I’m going to enjoy this.” She was intoxicated with the thought of shooting more people. Aside maybe from her brother, she was the sickest person he had ever met. Whatever childhood she might have had to endure, however much her mind might have been screwed up by religion, there was no excuse for this. She had to die. There was no alternative. Now was the time to bring all this to an end. He had the Browning out of his pocket in one fluid motion and placed the barrel only inches from her face.

  “I’m sorry, Belle.” He waited perhaps half a second while she turned to look at him, not enough time to allow her to raise up one of the Glocks, but enough time for him to see the flash of realization on her face that she was about to die. But it never came. She just stared back at the gun impassively. What the hell. He pulled the trigger. Two squeezes one after the other—a double tap—two clicks, metallic, inert, dead. Instead of the slurry of brain matter on the wall of the cab and the slumping body with that facial expression—that strange gasping expression that people wear as they die—there was silence as Belle continued to study him. He squeezed the trigger again, twice. But there were two more mute clicks.

  “I don’t know, Simeon. We have beautiful sex together and then you go and try and shoot me in the face. You really don’t know how to treat a lady.”

  Simeon frantically pulled the trigger over and over but Belle had a Glock in her right hand and pointed it at him. “I knew you’d feel the weight difference if I just left it empty so I disarmed the bullets myself.”

  When MI5 had come knocking after his return to the UK, he had had a bad feeling about the mission that he’d been assigned. But he couldn’t turn them down, not a man in his position.

  “Come on, Belle, I’m just messing with you.” It sounded pathetic and he knew it wouldn’t work. He knew she knew, and as though to confirm it, she said, “You’re a terrible actor, Sim. Me and Tommy knew about you all along.”

  She was glad she didn’t have to use the Pulverizer—the Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper’s rifle with the dum-dum bullets. She didn’t want to make a mess. Not that she would ever have shot him in the face. She needed his face. So she shot him in the heart. Twice. Double tap, just as Tommy had told her. Simeon slumped back against the driver’s console and then down onto the floor of the cab, staring into her eyes all the while just as she had hoped he would.

  “It’s all right, Sim, I know you can’t talk right now,”—the air was leaving his lungs in a long sigh—“but we’ll be together again soon enough. Wait for me and before you know it, I’ll be there with you.”

  When he stopped blinking and his final breath petered out into a gurgle, she bent down to him and kissed him on the lips. They were still warm, still sensual and alive, at least for a few moments more. She forced her tongue into his mouth and tasted him as he died.

  Today kept getting better and better, just as Tommy had promised. Today was the day she could do whatever she wanted. She put down the Glocks, picked up the Pulverizer and checked it over before she opened the door to the carriage.

  11:11 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, sixth carriage

  The flow of passengers from the sixth carriage into the fifth was stemmed by a group of men coming in the opposite direction. Hugh Taylor was not the only passenger at the rear of the train who thought that the information they were being given by the driver was suspect. Coming through the door from the fifth carriage was a group of five men who’d got talking. They’d had nothing else to do for the last two hours. Potential interpretations of the information they were getting from the driver had been analyzed and processed. Their suspicions had been aroused. They saw no reason for evacuating the sixth carriage. Why, if the train was going to be towed to Tottenham Court Road station, would they need to evacuate the first and last carriages of the train? It made no sense. They were coming to sort things out. No one was going to stop them. They were professionals. Two were in IT, one was a metals trader. One was on sabbatical from an insurance broker’s prior to joining another one. One was studying for a MBA at a private American college in London.

  The driver was clearly deluded or incompetent. He should be telling the authorities to get the passengers off the train before someone was taken ill. It was time to take matters into their own hands. There was no point fighting their way through the train to the driver’s cab. They would just go to the sixth carriage, open the door and make their way into the rear cab and from there down onto the track and off down the tunnel, m
aking sure to avoid the live rails as they went. They had missed meetings; their schedules were all messed up. But problem-solving was a key component of their busy lives. They found it challenging. They were born to it. There were five of them. Five men varying in age between twenty-seven—the MBA student—to fifty—the insurance broker. Their collective endeavor had provided them with an official air. Some of the passengers they asked to stand aside to make way for them found this reassuring. These men were here to help.

  At the other end of the carriage Adam was trying to pull Hugh away from the door when there were two loud bangs from behind the door to the rear cab. They didn’t register with Hugh and Adam, so absorbed were they in their difference of opinion.

  “I’m going to carry you, if you don’t move now,” said Adam.

  “Don’t fucking touch me,” shouted Hugh. “They’re lying to us. Can’t you see that? It’s all bullshit.”

  Adam had decided to try and carry Hugh in a fireman’s lift into the fifth carriage. If he tackled him hard enough—jabbed his shoulder into his solar plexus as he did so—he might leave him winded enough to prevent him struggling until they were safely there.

  As Adam bent down to carry out this maneuver, two things happened, one closely followed by the other. Firstly, the five men from the fourth carriage arrived at the door to the rear cab. Pumped up by the zeal and fervor of their mission, they were about to explain their intentions when the second event unfolded.

  The door to the rear cab was opened and in the doorway stood a pretty young woman holding a gun, an automatic rifle. To Hugh, this was unequivocal proof of his worst fears and suspicions. The five men were momentarily paralyzed by the sight of the armed woman. It looked so incongruous, almost as though she were an actress in an alternative theater production, in which the players mingled with the audience. The men were expecting London Underground bureaucracy; they were ready to puncture the petty laws of health and safety in order to get on with their busy lives. They were not expecting an attractive woman with a gun.

  Even as she turned the muzzle of the rifle toward them, it felt as though it was some sort of elaborate hoax, playacting, make-believe. A smile began to form on her lips. Two of the men in the group of five found themselves smiling back. She really was good-looking, after all. She looked great in her tight vest and black combat pants.

  Shooting from the hip, she opened fire.

  The sound the gun made was like a series of muffled thuds, as if the entire carriage was being squeezed in the tunnel. It was as though a piledriver was hammering chunks of flesh from bodies. Blood sprayed from gaping wounds. The five men on their mission were cut apart by the exploding lead, which tore through one body and into another. By the time the shooting stopped, of the seven men who had been crowded around the door, six of them were on the floor of the carriage. Five of them were dead or dying and one of them, Adam, was beginning to scream. His left leg was severed at the knee. His lower leg—what remained of it—had skidded in its own bloody lubricant along the floor of the carriage.

  “Now move,” shouted the woman in the doorway. She looked straight at Hugh and for a moment, as colors danced across his field of vision, he thought he might pass out. She raised the gun, pointed it at him, and with Adam’s screams reverberating around the carriage, he turned around. As he did so, he reached down—it was an instinctive action—and he grabbed hold of Adam’s arm and started to drag him along the carriage through his own blood and over what remained of his lower leg toward the door to the next carriage.

  11:13 AM

  Network Control center, St. James’s

  Who was he? What did he want? Presuming that it was a he. The few whispered words that Ed had heard over the radio from the train sounded as though they were spoken by a man. His motivation had to be terrorism. He was employing terror as a tactic in a negotiation. By anyone’s definition he was a terrorist. He hadn’t put a foot wrong so far. His planning and reconnaissance were meticulous. He had accomplices, which hinted at a common cause. At this moment in time he had the upper hand.

  Ed listened to the setting up of the makeshift negotiating cell all around him. The voice of Laura, the cell’s coordinator, was a constant as she ensured that everyone in the room had what they needed. Ed had asked for fans and air conditioning. The heat was intense and, due to his heightened heart rate, he was feeling it more than he might otherwise have done. Excessive sweat had a tendency to irritate the scar tissue on his face.

  “Ed, I’ve got Howard Berriman for you,” said Mark Hooper. His voice was devoid of its earlier surfeit of emotion; it was subdued as though attempting a sort of intimacy. Ed had managed to compartmentalize his concerns regarding the involvement of MI5 in the negotiation but this development dragged it into his conscious thoughts once more. What did Howard Berriman want with him? It would have been understandable if he had wanted to speak with the incident commander, Serina Boise, but why would he want to speak to the number one negotiator? Ed didn’t have the time to ponder on this before a BlackBerry was pressed into his hand.

  “This is Ed Mallory.”

  “Hi, Ed. This is Howard Berriman.”

  “Hi. What can I do for you?”

  “You’re no doubt aware that we’re involved in this?”

  “Everyone seems to want me to know that.”

  “I’m sorry if it’s creating any problems, it’s just we’ve had some recent intelligence.”

  “Anything that you want to share with us?”

  “It’s nothing that’s going to help you with any ongoing negotiation so it’s probably not worth discussing at this stage.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Ed didn’t care if he sounded difficult. There was no reason for this heavy-handedness from MI5 and he didn’t like the way that Scotland Yard and his superiors appeared to be groveling. If he was going to attempt to talk to the perpetrators of this scenario and try to find a solution then he could do without the politics.

  “It’s nothing that’s going to help you in any way, but I wanted to get an update from you personally as I know you’ve been speaking to the driver of the train. What’s the current situation?”

  Standard negotiation protocol was being bulldozed on all sides. This was a bizarre situation by anyone’s estimation but this added layer of weirdness compounded it.

  “The driver’s just been on the radio issuing statements from an unknown party. He says the two CO19 officers we sent into the tunnel are dead and if anyone else approaches the train, explosives will be detonated. A demand has also been made for Wi-Fi access to the train with an accompanying threat to kill passengers if it’s not in place by 11:30 a.m. But I’m guessing you know all this.”

  “And still no demands other than the wireless connection?”

  There was no reason why Berriman would need to get this information from Ed but he played along with the charade. “No, no demands as yet other than we keep away from the train.”

  “And you think that allowing them Wi-Fi is a good idea?”

  “It works in our favor as much as theirs. We can gather intel from the passengers and possibly initiate their mobilization if required.”

  “Do you think it might be al-Qaeda?”

  “It’s not exactly their MO.”

  “Home-grown crazies like 7/7?”

  “Could be—it’s too early to say.”

  “Listen, Ed,” said Berriman. “I realize that the last thing you need at this stage is further pressure but I want to ask that, either directly or through Mark Hooper, you keep me informed of what is occurring at all times. We cannot allow anything to happen to the people on the train. Whoever it is who is holding them, we cannot allow them to threaten our freedoms.” Berriman sounded like he was rehearsing a sound bite.

  “Right you are, Howard,” said Ed.

  “I’m told you’re the best negotiator we’ve got.”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment on that,” said Ed with enough mock seriousness to make Berriman chuckle.
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br />   “Bye, Ed.”

  Ed’s day was getting stranger. Now he had the head of MI5 phoning him up and treating him as though he was going to be on his Christmas card list. There was no apparent reason for it. Berriman’s and Hooper’s motives were difficult to read but they both clearly had an agenda. Of that there was no doubt. But Ed had more important things to think about. As a blind man, he couldn’t be provided with relevant research and intel in written form and it would take too long to have the material transcribed into Braille. So all he could do was ask questions. A lot of questions.

  “What sort of exclusion zone have we got around the command center?”

  It was Nick Calvert, now Ed’s operational number two, who answered. “We’ve got two inner perimeters containing Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square tube stations and then the outer perimeter takes in an area that extends approximately one hundred yards either side of Charing Cross Road and an area of the same distance radius around each respective station. The evacuation is now complete and there is an SAS unit on standby at each station.”

  “Is Laura here?”

  “Yes, Ed.”

  “What’s the situation with communications from the command center?”

  “We’re trying to get visual and audio from the tunnel but everyone’s jumpy after what happened with CO19 earlier.”

  “Do we have a rapid intervention plan in place?”

  “They’re working on it,” she replied. “You know they like to work on a simulation first before attempting anything real world so it might take some time. Boise will be speaking to the relevant coordinator.”

  Whereas at other times and in other places, special forces backup might have made Ed feel reassured, now it gave him little comfort.