they’d need to secure the area, finish the evacuation of any civilian within a hundred yards, then make a risk assessment, before even thinking of trying to get into the flat where the dead woman lay with the bomb and the phone on top of her. The whole thing would take hours. The man smiled. He knew this would happen, which was why there was a second bomb in the boot of one of the cars in the parking area directly in front of the building. The device contained twenty kilos of PETN explosives in two large bags, surrounded by a further twenty kilos of assorted shrapnel – and, like the bomb on Mika, it was timed to go off in two minutes exactly.
So far no one seemed to be taking any notice of the parked cars, although the senior officers on the scene would get round to checking them fairly soon. They’d probably already blocked the mobile phone signal in the immediate area to prevent any booby-trap bombs being set off remotely. Secondary devices were a known hallmark of Islamic terrorists. At the moment, though, the situation on the ground was still in its early semi-chaotic stages.
The man looked at his watch. One minute to detonation.
He took a cheap mobile phone from the outer pocket of his jacket and speed-dialled the single number stored on it. ‘This is the Islamic Command,’ he announced into the voice disguiser as the man on the
Evening Standard
news desk picked up. ‘Two more bombs are about to explode. There will be no further attacks if our demands are met.’ He ended the call and switched off the phone, throwing it out of the window into some bushes.
The Sky News Copter was still filming the scene when there was a huge flash of light, accompanied by a very loud bang, from among the parked cars, followed moments later by a second blast from inside one of the flats. The camera shook and the helicopter banked, temporarily losing its view of the scene as the programme suddenly went to split screen, showing a visibly shaken anchorwoman with her hand on her mouth as it became clear to her that she’d just witnessed a second bomb attack.
The man shut the iPad case, and pulled away from the kerb.
It was time to meet their new recruit.
Twelve
10.40
HMP WESTMOOR WAS a very big, very bland-looking modern prison set slap bang in the middle of glorious rolling Hertfordshire countryside. It was, Tina thought, like some kind of immense fortified municipal library, and it had been an act of architectural barbarism to put it in such a beautiful place.
As she walked towards the reception area, it struck her that she could very easily have ended up in a place like this. It was only a little over a year since she’d killed a man with a single blow to the head. The fact that the man in question, twenty-one-year-old Liam Roy Shetland, had been one of the terrorists involved in the Stanhope siege and was about to murder two kidnapped children was still not perceived as sufficient justification for what she’d done.
Although she and Shetland had been fighting, and Tina had sustained a number of injuries herself, he’d had his back to her when she’d hit him with a piece of piping, and for weeks afterwards charges had been hanging over her head. She’d been lucky. Public and political pressure had helped her, as had the fact that Shetland was going for a gun at the time. Tina was a hero in some people’s eyes, the kind of tough, no-nonsense cop that the UK was sorely lacking these days. ‘Dirty Harriet’ the
Daily Mail
had called her, which was far more preferable than ‘The Black Widow’ moniker that had haunted her ever since one of her colleagues had been killed on a job they were both working on. Politicians, sniffing an opportunity as always, had also got involved, singing her praises (but with plenty of caveats, of course), several of them pushing for her reinstatement in the force, which was how she’d finally ended up in Westminster CID.
Westmoor was a maximum-security prison, housing only Category A
So far no one seemed to be taking any notice of the parked cars, although the senior officers on the scene would get round to checking them fairly soon. They’d probably already blocked the mobile phone signal in the immediate area to prevent any booby-trap bombs being set off remotely. Secondary devices were a known hallmark of Islamic terrorists. At the moment, though, the situation on the ground was still in its early semi-chaotic stages.
The man looked at his watch. One minute to detonation.
He took a cheap mobile phone from the outer pocket of his jacket and speed-dialled the single number stored on it. ‘This is the Islamic Command,’ he announced into the voice disguiser as the man on the
Evening Standard
news desk picked up. ‘Two more bombs are about to explode. There will be no further attacks if our demands are met.’ He ended the call and switched off the phone, throwing it out of the window into some bushes.
The Sky News Copter was still filming the scene when there was a huge flash of light, accompanied by a very loud bang, from among the parked cars, followed moments later by a second blast from inside one of the flats. The camera shook and the helicopter banked, temporarily losing its view of the scene as the programme suddenly went to split screen, showing a visibly shaken anchorwoman with her hand on her mouth as it became clear to her that she’d just witnessed a second bomb attack.
The man shut the iPad case, and pulled away from the kerb.
It was time to meet their new recruit.
Twelve
10.40
HMP WESTMOOR WAS a very big, very bland-looking modern prison set slap bang in the middle of glorious rolling Hertfordshire countryside. It was, Tina thought, like some kind of immense fortified municipal library, and it had been an act of architectural barbarism to put it in such a beautiful place.
As she walked towards the reception area, it struck her that she could very easily have ended up in a place like this. It was only a little over a year since she’d killed a man with a single blow to the head. The fact that the man in question, twenty-one-year-old Liam Roy Shetland, had been one of the terrorists involved in the Stanhope siege and was about to murder two kidnapped children was still not perceived as sufficient justification for what she’d done.
Although she and Shetland had been fighting, and Tina had sustained a number of injuries herself, he’d had his back to her when she’d hit him with a piece of piping, and for weeks afterwards charges had been hanging over her head. She’d been lucky. Public and political pressure had helped her, as had the fact that Shetland was going for a gun at the time. Tina was a hero in some people’s eyes, the kind of tough, no-nonsense cop that the UK was sorely lacking these days. ‘Dirty Harriet’ the
Daily Mail
had called her, which was far more preferable than ‘The Black Widow’ moniker that had haunted her ever since one of her colleagues had been killed on a job they were both working on. Politicians, sniffing an opportunity as always, had also got involved, singing her praises (but with plenty of caveats, of course), several of them pushing for her reinstatement in the force, which was how she’d finally ended up in Westminster CID.
Westmoor was a maximum-security prison, housing only Category A
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