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

but he knew that there was much less chance of being observed during the working day, when the street was packed with cars and vans and the pavements choked with people, blocking the sightlines of many of the security cameras and also giving the security personnel many other things to worry about than a boiler-suited Thames Water worker inspecting the rainwater drains in the gutters. Although there were more security personnel per square metre in Bond Street than almost anywhere else in the world, all of them were inside the shops, behind the locked doors, and their attention would be focused much more on people passing those doors or approaching them than on workmen carrying out menial tasks in the street.
    Tchorek made his unhurried way down Bond Street until he spotted a rainwater drain between two closely parked cars. It was then the work of a moment to lift the grate, kneel down and open his toolbox as if checking the drain. The well-off Londoners and foreign visitors passed him by without even a glance, their attention focused on the glittering window displays. He did not even look around before lowering the device into place. He had once seen rich Londoners stepping over an old woman who had collapsed in a Mayfair street, as if she were merely a kerb to be negotiated. None of them had so much as glanced at her, let alone offered help, and he was confident thatWatnfident such people would not even register a lowly workman as they strolled along. He replaced the grate, stood up and made his unhurried way off up the street.
    That afternoon he returned to Bond Street, but this time wearing the uniform of a traffic warden and carrying a hand-held machine that, to a casual glance, looked the same as the ones on which the wardens checked car tax details and printed out parking tickets. He moved slowly down the street, pretending to check cars, and at one point crossed to the far side and waited in a doorway to avoid another warden coming the opposite way. He then remained in the section of street from which he could observe the entrance to Sotheby’s. A Lebanese woman approached him, dripping diamonds and furs, and demanded to know why her car had been ticketed. He first told her to take her complaint to the police and, when that failed to move her, he leaned towards her and murmured something in her ear. None of the people passing by would have heard a word of it or seen anything untoward, but the woman turned as white as if she had seen a ghost and hurried away without another word, choking back her tears.
    After half an hour, the familiar stocky figure of Ilyushin emerged from Sotheby’s, flanked by his burly bodyguards, and began to wander down Bond Street, gazing into the shop windows. He saw Ilyushin take a cigar case from his jacket pocket, select a cigar and then light it. A little farther up the street, Tchorek saw the Rolls-Royce and the Mercedes pull out from the kerb and nose their way into the traffic. He pressed a button on his hand-held machine, initiating the device. He was already moving fast through the crowds towards Ilyushin as the bomb detonated.
    Ilyushin heard a deafening explosion behind him and, as he turned to look back, Bond Street disappeared in a cloud of dense blue smoke. Before he could even react himself, his bodyguards had leapt into action. They made no attempt to locate the source of the explosion, nor to identify any potential threat. Their first priority, drilled into them in hundreds of briefings and practice runs, was the protection of their principal, and at once they half-hustled and half-threw him into the nearest shop doorway and then lay on top of him, protecting him with their own bodies until they could transfer him to the Rolls-Royce and get him away. The shop, a world-famous jeweller’s and one that Ilyushin himself had visited on many occasions, would have provided a safer refuge still, but instead of offering him sanctuary the shop’s security guard reacted to the sound of