Siege by Simon Kernick Page B

hard. This trip, combining the Thanksgiving holiday with his seventh birthday, was a way of taking his mind off his father and having some fun. Although Abby had to admit she was amazed at how expensive London was. And how grey and cold. She should have expected it, of course. After all, the UK had never been known for its fine weather. But maybe she’d just got too used to Florida’s blue skies and its warm sunshine on her back. Tomorrow she was going to do some Christmas shopping in the West End on her own – a little bit of much-needed ‘me’ time before they flew home on Saturday morning – while her dad took Ethan to the Natural History Museum. The two of them loved spending time together, and it was important that Ethan had a strong male role model in his life now that Daniel was gone.
    The second bang stopped her dead in her tracks. It was louder than the first. Other passers-by had stopped too, and they were now looking in the direction the noise had come from. One man looked at her and raised his eyebrows, before turning away.
    ‘And what do you think that was, Mom?’
    Abby didn’t answer her son. She was watching a thin plume of smoke rising up through the rain and gathering dusk, somewhere beyond the other side of Hyde Park. She suddenly felt very vulnerable out here in the cold and gloom of this sprawling foreign city far from home.
    A police car raced through the traffic past Marble Arch with sirens blaring. It was heading in the direction of the smoke.
    ‘Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with us,’ Ethan’s grandpa replied over the noise of the siren. ‘And I’m getting wet out here. Come on, let’s get inside.’
    He put a protective arm round both their shoulders, steering them towards home, and even though he was barely as tall as her and almost seventy-five years old, his touch made her feel a little safer.
    Trying hard not to grip her son’s hand too hard, Abby hurried past the tall concierge – a guy who’d smiled mischievously at her every time she’d seen him before but who was now frowning anxiously – and into the warmth and security of the Stanhope Hotel.

14
    NEWLY PROMOTED DEPUTY Assistant Commissioner Arley Dale was bored and restless. She was chairing a meeting between community leaders and senior officers from Operation Trident, the unit that dealt with so-called black on black gun crime in the city. The meeting had dragged on for close to two hours now and absolutely nothing of any substance had been achieved. The community leaders were demanding action after a series of shootings in Brixton over the previous six months, while the Trident officers were demanding more cooperation from the community itself, and everyone seemed to be going round in circles, mouthing the same old platitudes. Arley, who had a reputation for banging heads together and getting things done, had tried her best to move things along but had now all but given up. She knew they had to have these meetings so that the Met could demonstrate its new, more caring attitude to minority groups, but as a DAC in one of the biggest police forces in the world she genuinely believed there were better ways of allocating her time.
    She was also distracted. Twenty minutes earlier, her secretary, Ann, had interrupted the meeting to inform her that there’d been an explosion in the underground car park of the Westfield Shopping Centre. There’d been no further details available at the time, and Arley had asked to be kept informed as they came in. If the explosion turned out to be suspicious, then as the most senior officer of the Met’s Specialist Crime Directorate on duty she’d be heavily involved in implementing the Major Incident Plan in response.
    The prospect of suddenly being flung into a major operation had Arley in two minds. On the one hand she relished getting her teeth into challenges, especially fast-moving ones, and it would be an excellent opportunity to prove her worth, having only been in the job