Spider's Web: A Collection of All-Action Short Stories by Stephen Leather Page A

to suppress news of the find. There would be gossip and reports in the local media, which he could monitor, whereas if he had hidden them in some remote glen in the mountains it would have been much easier for the authorities to conceal the news if they were discovered, and that would leave him liable to walk into a trap.
    It was a ten-hour drive back to London and he did not reach the city until the early afternoon of the following day. He parked near his rented terraced house in a dingy street in Kilburn, in the north-west of the city. He had chosen it deliberately, an area where almost all the population was both transient and foreign born, with no reason to look on the authorities as friends. It was a place where one more individual, arriving or leaving, even at irregular hours of the day or night, would arouse no comment or interest at all.
    By now Tchorek had not slept for almost forty-eight hours, but weary though he was, he then spent two hours observing his house before approaching it. When he let himself in, he at once checked the ‘tells’ he had set before leaving. He knew that professional intruders would look for things like hairs fixed across a door edge and carefully replace them. Tchorek had indeed left one across a door, but its purpose was not to reveal to him that an intruder had entered the house, but instead to reassure the same intruder that he had defeated the tells and stop him looking for other concealed devices. Tchorek did not even glance at itstiglance to see whether the hair was still in place, but instead he turned back the carpet in the entrance hall, revealing a few cornflakes he had placed underneath it when he left. Had anyone set foot in the hall in his absence, the pressure of their foot on the carpet would have reduced the cornflakes to crumbs.
    Reassured, he replaced the carpet and, stepping carefully around that area, then went into the bedroom, lay down and slept for an hour.
    As soon as he woke, he splashed some cold water on his face, and made a cup of black Russian tea. He then spread a plastic sheet on the table, put on a pair of surgical gloves and began assembling his explosive device. He took an empty two-litre plastic milk bottle, and packed into it some ANFO – a mixture of ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel oil and the terrorist’s weapon of choice, since the ingredients were so cheap and readily obtainable. He mixed it with a dark blue colourant powder, then added the det cord, which looked exactly like plastic clothesline, except that plastic clothesline does not contain a Pentrite explosive core. Lastly he connected the detonator and a thumb-sized piece of Semtex. The det cord was capable of being triggered remotely by an electric pulse and would be enough to trigger the IED on its own, but this was a belt-and-braces job and the Semtex would make absolutely sure that it went off with a bang. He did not want to cause a lot of damage, just make noise and smoke.
    When he had finished assembling the device, he folded the plastic sheet, destroyed his surgical gloves by holding them in the flame of a lighter, then put on a fresh pair of gloves and left the house, disposing of the burned gloves in a litter bin outside a takeaway pizza shop several streets away and dumping the plastic sheet in a wheelie bin at the side of a café another four hundred yards farther on.
    The next morning, Tchorek left the house wearing a hard hat and a worn and faded boiler suit over his other clothes and carrying the device in a toolbox bearing a Thames Water logo. Even the most eagle-eyed observer would have struggled to realise that the logo had been downloaded from the internet and printed on a home colour printer. He boarded a west-bound Central Line tube and rode it for a dozen stops across London before getting off at Bond Street.
    Had he placed his device during the previous night, his actions would have been picked up by at least one of the scores of security cameras in Bond Street,