When terrorists use a drone to bring down a plane on one of London’s busiest shopping centres, it ignites a chain of events that will draw in the innocent and guilty alike.
DC Max Wolfe finds himself caught in the crossfire in a city that seems increasingly dangerous and hostile.
But does the danger come from the murderous criminals that Max is tracking down? Or the people he’s trying to protect?
Or does the real threat to Max lie much closer to home?
Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and his first job in journalism was at the New Musical Express. His first journalism after leaving the NME was when he was embedded with the Vice Squad at 27 Savile Row, West End Central. The roots of the DC Max Wolfe series started here.
Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages. The Murder Bag, the first novel in the DC Max Wolfe series, went to number one on first publication in the UK. The Slaughter Man, The Hanging Club and Die Last were also Sunday Times top five bestsellers.
Tony lives in London with his wife, his daughter and their dog, Stan.
The Murder Bag
The Slaughter Man
The Hanging Club
Die Last
Digital Shorts
Dead Time
Fresh Blood
Tell Him He’s Dead
For Tim Rostron of Tufnell Park and Toronto
I woke up and the world was gone.
All was silent, all was black, the darkness so complete that it was as if all light had been drained from the world.
The dust was everywhere. The air was thick with it – hot and filthy, the dust of a freshly dug grave. And a strange rain was falling – a rain made of rocks and stones, the fragments and remains of smashed and broken things that I could not name. The destruction was everywhere, in my eyes, my mouth, my nose and the back of my throat.
I was flat on my back and suddenly the devastation was choking me.
I pushed myself up, coughing up the strange dust, feeling it on my hands and my face.
I stared into the pitch-black silence and felt a stab of pure terror because for the first time I was aware of the heat. There was a great fire nearby. I looked around and suddenly I saw it, blazing and flaring, the only light in the darkness. The heat increased. The fire was getting closer.
Move or die. These are your choices now.
Then I was on my hands and knees, scrambling away from the fire, gagging up the filth that filled the air. A wave of sickness was sweeping over me, and I was aware of a pain that was everywhere but seemed to radiate out from the inside of my right knee.
I fell on my side with a quiet curse and touched the slice of glass that was embedded in my leg. It was a small but thick chunk of a plate-glass window that was never meant to shatter. I felt it gingerly, my knee raging with pain, trying to make sense of it all.
Where had the old world gone?
What had happened?
I remembered that I had been in the Lake Meadows shopping centre in West London, buying a new backpack for my daughter, Scout. She wanted a plain and unadorned Kipling backpack now that, aged seven, she considered herself far too mature for the backpack she currently carried to school. It was only a year old but featured the female lead of last summer’s big blockbuster movie, The Angry Princess, a beautiful cartoon princess who looked fierce and threw thunderbolts from her elegant fingernails. And Scout was done with all that little kids’ stuff. She wanted me to buy her a big girl’s backpack. And that’s what I had been doing when it happened.
I remembered paying for the new grown-up rucksack and stepping out into the concourse wondering where I could get a decent triple espresso.
There had been people and lights and smiles, the smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls, the soft sounds of shopping centre music, some song from the last century. It was something other than a memory. It felt like a dream that I was forgetting upon waking.
And now the light ebbed and flowed because the darkness was broken up by the great fire but also by some weak grey light from the outside world creeping into the ruins through a shattered roof or wall.
Now I could see the bodies in what had been the shopping mall.
Some of them were unmoving. Some of them tried to sit up.
But this new world was silent.
Then I realised that the world was not silent. Not really. My hearing had gone the moment that everything went away.
There was a young security guard sitting on the ground nearby. His uniform was covered in the grey dust. He turned his face towards me and tried to speak.
No – he was speaking but I couldn’t hear him.
I pulled the broken glass from my knee, cried out with pain and crawled to his side.
His mouth moved again but his words were indistinct.
I stared at him, my eyes streaming in the dust, shaking my head.
He repeated his words and this time, above the ringing in my ears, I heard him.
‘A bomb,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Too big for a bomb.’
‘My arm,’ he said.
He was holding his arm, staring at it with confusion.
His right arm was missing below the right elbow.
I put the bag containing Scout’s new rucksack beneath his head.
Then I took off my leather jacket, pulled off my T-shirt and tore it into three pieces.
The security guard was trying to hold his injured arm in the air, using gravity to stem the flow. I nodded encouragement.
‘That’s good,’ I said.
People were slowly walking past us. They were not running. They were too dumbfounded to run. They staggered out of the swirling clouds of dust, some of them still carrying their shopping, too numb to drop it, too shocked to let go of their bags, as if none of this was possible. I placed a strip of T-shirt in the security guard’s wound and held it there.
The blood seeped through almost immediately.
I left the scrap of bloody T-shirt plugged into the wound and placed a second piece of the T-shirt on top. This bled through more slowly.
As gently as I could, I removed the guard’s tie, measured approximately four inches above the wound and tied a tourniquet on what remained of his right arm. Then I placed the final piece of T-shirt on the wound.
And this time no blood came through.
My hearing was back now and I could hear the screams and the sirens. I could see bodies scattered in the ruins. I could feel the great fire. The horror flooded over me and made it difficult to breathe.
I thought of my daughter and I didn’t want to die.
Objects began to rain harder from the sky. And now some of them were as small as pebbles while some of them were chunks of matter big enough to break your neck. The security guard and I flinched and cowered and tried to protect our eyes.
The sky was falling down on the living and the dead – great clumps of concrete bringing with it more clouds of dust, as if the sky itself had been made from these things, and now it was smashed for ever.
A piece of something struck me on the shoulder. I felt nothing, but the pain in my right knee made me clench my teeth until my jawbone ached.
I took the security guard’s left hand and guided it to the scraps of T-shirt stuffed into his wound. He was still attempting to hold his arm in the air. He was doing good.
‘You’re going to make it,’ I told him. ‘I’ll get help.’
Then I was on my feet, and I began to walk towards the sound of the sirens. But my right knee no longer worked the way it should.
I felt it buckle beneath me and suddenly I was down on my hands and knees again.
I slowly got up and walked on, favouring my left leg now, trying not to put too much weight on the right side.
I could feel the heat of the fire and I could smell the stink of the fire.
Kerosene?
But an ocean of the stuff, all of it ablaze, and that made no sense. Where would that much kerosene come from?
A man in a business suit walked by carrying a bag from the Apple store, every inch of him coated in the grey dust that filled the hot, fetid atmosphere. I spat out some filth and took a deep breath, inhaling the burning air. It seared my lungs.
The fire was getting closer.
Move or die.
A life-size puppet was hanging from what had once been the basement roof of the shopping mall. There were long thick straps of webbing attached to the puppet’s chair and they held him from the ceiling, as if waiting for some giant hand to move him. The puppet was close enough for me to see the expression on his unmarked face.
And I saw that this had been a man. The man had been a pilot. And some freak accident had prevented him from being smashed to a billion pieces after falling from the sky.
I had heard of this happening but I had never believed it.
But now I believed.
And now, finally, I began to understand.
That reeking, sickening smell was Jet A-1.
Aviation fuel.
Move or die!
‘Excuse me,’ an elderly woman said, her politeness heartbreaking in this new world. ‘Please stay with us.’
She was sitting on the floor, cradling the head of a man her own age who looked close to death. I knelt beside them, gasping as the pain in my knee surged through the rest of my body, and as I took her hand I saw what had brought this new world into being.
‘A bomb,’ the lady said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s too big for a bomb. A helicopter came down.’
And through the smoke and the dust and the twilight ruins I saw a smashed and crumpled Air Ambulance, its cockpit a ruined pulp of red aluminium and steel and glass, the four rotor blades twisted and bent yet somehow not broken.
It looked like a giant insect that had been swatted by some enraged god.
Behind it was a wake of wreckage that seemed to stretch on forever, twisted and burning and broken, a tangled mess of steel and glass and concrete, flesh and blood and bone, human beings and buildings. Everything smashed.
But there were new lights now, the red and blue lights of the first responders.
‘I’ll bring help,’ I promised.
And I left the old man and woman and started off towards the red and blue lights, but my knee went again and I fell flat on my face in what remained of that shopping centre.
So I got up and tried one more time, treading very carefully so as not to step on the bodies that were scattered all around, moving very slowly to protect my busted knee, as if everything that I thought I knew would have to be learned again.
And as the tears cleared the dust from my eyes, I saw this new world clearly.
I saw the men and women who came with the red and blue lights of the emergency services.
I saw the trail of total ruin that had been left in the wake of the fallen helicopter.
And the rage choked my throat when I saw the injured – that gentle little euphemism for those who now carried terrible wounds that would never heal, not in this lifetime.
Then I wiped my eyes with the back of my hands, sucked in some air and began to stumble towards the reds and blues of our lights.
I stood by the side of the low stage, sweating inside the stab-proof Kevlar jacket despite the chill of the hour before dawn, my right knee still pulsing with pain seven days after the Air Ambulance helicopter came down on Lake Meadows shopping centre, killing dozens of innocent people.
The current fatality list stood at forty-four, but the number crept higher every day as the emergency services continued the painstaking work of sifting through the crash site. Nobody knew for sure exactly how many had died and I suspected that we would never know with total certainty.
I was in the briefing room of Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel, feeling the weight of history. Murder detectives hunted Jack the Ripper from this station. Today it is the base of SC&O19, the specialist firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police.
The briefing room was packed.
Rows of Specialist Firearms Officers in grey body armour worn over short-sleeve blue shirts were listening intently to the young female sergeant on stage. There was a lectern up there but she stood to one side, tall and athletic and affable, and I thought that she was young to be a sergeant in any part of the Met, let alone the firearms unit.
Specialist Firearms Officer DS Alice Stone.
She sounded far more relaxed than she had any right to be.
Behind her a large screen showed a photograph of a three-storey house.
It was a small, neat Victorian terrace on Borodino Street, London E1, its bay windows covered with net curtains. Only a postcode away. We believed it contained the men who had brought down the Air Ambulance helicopter.
The young sergeant touched the iPad she was holding and architectural plans appeared on screen. She began talking about the morning’s MOE – method of entry – and I felt the sweat trickle down my back.
It had nothing to do with the weight of the Kevlar jacket.
Someone always has to go in, I thought. After all the hours of surveillance and analysis of intelligence and briefings, somebody still has to go through a locked door and into the unknown.
‘The entry team for Operation Tolstoy will be breaching the front door of the target with Hatton rounds fired from a shotgun,’ DS Stone said, her voice calm and classless, just the hint of some affluent corner of the Home Counties in her accent. ‘Distraction stun grenades will be deployed immediately prior to entering the premises.’ She paused. ‘We have every reason to believe that the men inside are armed fanatics who would actively welcome a martyr’s death. So it’s CQC when we are inside.’
CQC is Close Quarter Combat, moving through a series of rooms and corridors until the inhabitants are subdued and dominated. Many SFOs either have military training or they have grown up around guns – shooting game with their family in some muddy field.
I wondered which one it was with young DS Stone.
Then she smiled. She had a good smile. It was wide, white and genuine. The trouble with most smiles is that they are not the real thing. This was the real thing.
‘And then we’re all going for breakfast,’ she said. ‘On me.’
The room full of SFOs in grey body armour all grinned with her.
Still smiling, she turned to the side of the stage.
‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘We’re ready for you now.’
I climbed the few steps up to the stage, shook her hand and took my place at the lectern where my laptop was waiting.
‘Our colleague DC Wolfe from West End Central is going to give you the background on today’s target,’ DS Stone told them.
She took a step back, giving me the floor.
‘As you know, we initially believed the Air Ambulance helicopter was brought down by some kind of surface-to-air missile,’ I began. ‘But overnight intelligence confirms that it was brought down by a UAV – an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.’ I paused to make it clear. ‘A drone,’ I said, and for just a moment I could taste the dust of that murderous day in the back of my throat. ‘Drones are legally allowed to fly up to four hundred feet,’ I said. ‘This one was at just under five thousand feet when it hit the helicopter. One mile high. Above the clouds and directly above Lake Meadows shopping centre.’ I paused, remembering exactly why we were here today. ‘Forty-four dead so far,’ I said, ‘including a crew who dedicated their lives to helping strangers. And you know the worst of it? The men who did this would consider Lake Meadows to be their lucky day. That Air Ambulance could have come down in some field. It came down on a shopping centre in the heart of West London.’ I took a breath and let it out. ‘Owners of UAVs do not need to register on any database but intelligence from Counter Terrorism Command has revealed it belonged to one of these men.’
I touched my laptop and two faces appeared on the screen behind me. They were the passport photographs of two young men so close in age and appearance that they could have been twins.
‘Asad and Adnan Khan,’ I said. ‘Twenty-six and twenty-eight years old. Returnees from Syria. Military trained. Battle-hardened. They came back to this country eighteen months ago. They were under surveillance for the first year but resources were diverted elsewhere because the brothers were keeping their noses clean. And now we believe we know why.’
I hit another button and a dozen receipts for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles appeared. They were all from different drone websites. They all had either Asad or Adnan Khan’s name and address on them.
‘There have been a number of near misses at Heathrow over the last year,’ I said. ‘Drones almost missing planes and helicopters that were landing or taking off. The assumption was always that it was just a few knobheads failing to control their new toy. Until now.’
The light from the screen had lit up the faces of the SFOs. As they studied the images of the Khan brothers, I realised with a shock of recognition that I knew one of the SFOs. I had grown up with him.
It was Jackson Rose.
Jackson was the nearest thing I ever had to a brother but, like a lot of childhood friends, there was now an unknowable distance between us. I had no idea that he had even joined the Metropolitan Police. The last I heard he had ended up where so many ex-servicemen find themselves – sleeping on the streets. He had lived with me for a while but it had not worked out. He did not look at me now but stared straight ahead at the faces of the Khan brothers behind me.
I hit the laptop again.
A man’s face appeared, the blank-eyed image taken from his driving licence.
‘Ahmed – known as Arnold – is the father of Asad and Adnan Khan. Mr Khan is the long-term tenant at the Borodino Street address. He raised his family there. Fifty-nine years old. Looks older. All our surveillance and intelligence suggests that Mr Khan is not a person of interest.’ I turned and looked at his image. ‘He’s been a bus driver for more than thirty years. Also in the property are his wife, Mrs Azza Khan, sixty, and Layla, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a third brother, Aakil, who was the eldest and died fighting in Aleppo.’ Two more faces appeared next to the image of the old man – a stout, unsmiling woman in a hijab headscarf and a grinning teenage girl in a school portrait. ‘Like Mr Khan, Mrs Khan and Layla Khan are not persons of interest. They have had what the security services call innocent contact with our targets. Layla’s mother – Aakil’s wife – died of cancer ten years ago. We understand that Layla has been brought up by her grandparents.’
The room stirred uneasily. Our job is always more complicated when the guilty are under the same roof as the innocent.
DS Stone stepped to my side.
‘Questions?’ she said.
A few hands went up. Stone nodded at one of them.
‘If there are more civilians than villains in there,’ one of the SFOs said, ‘then why are we going in so hard, boss?’
‘It’s the call of the DSO,’ DS Stone said. ‘And in my opinion, it’s the only call she can make.’
The DSO was the Designated Senior Officer, the senior police officer taking ultimate responsibility for today’s operational decisions. This morning it was DCS Elizabeth Swire, who would be in contact from the main control room of New Scotland Yard.
‘Asad and Adnan Khan are unlikely to leave room for negotiations,’ Stone said.
She looked at me.
‘Now for the bad news,’ she said, not smiling now.
I hit the laptop and two hand grenades appeared on screen.
They looked like death – black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. You could clearly read the name of the manufacturer on the side. Cetinka, it said.
‘This make of Croatian hand grenade was believed to have been decommissioned twenty years ago at the end of the Balkans wars,’ I said. ‘But these were photographed in the evidence room of West End Central two days ago.’
I let that sink in for a moment.
‘Because an unknown number of these hand grenades – as is frequently the case with decommissioned ordnance – were never destroyed but stolen, stashed and sold. Some of them have found their way across from the Balkans to our streets. Three days ago a Criminal Informant told detectives from Homicide and Serious Crime Command at West End Central that a known weapons dealer had sold two of these grenades to two brothers in East London. And from the description of the men and CCTV images, we believe they were Asad and Adnan Khan.’
The room was totally silent now.
‘So we go in hard,’ DS Stone said. ‘And we dig them out. We subdue and control before they know what’s hit them. And then we go for the most important meal of the day. And the only thing you need to worry about is your cholesterol level.’
They grinned at her again.
Jackson Rose was grinning, too, and I saw that gap between his two front teeth that I knew so well. And now he looked at me and nodded.
‘If there are no more questions, then we will get cracking,’ DS Stone said. ‘I will be leading the entry team. We shall be making just one pass,’ she said, meaning that the lead vehicle would drive past the target address once before entry. ‘DC Wolfe will be riding with us for TI,’ she said, meaning target identification. ‘Let’s take care of each other out there,’ she said.
They applauded her. They loved her.
Jackson approached me as I came off the stage.
‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he said. ‘You’re walking all funny.’
‘I banged it,’ I said. ‘You join the Met and forget to tell me?’
I was aware that we sounded like an old married couple.
‘I was planning to,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk at breakfast.’
He briefly hugged me, Kevlar banging against Kevlar, and then followed his fellow SFOs to the weapons’ room where they signed out their firearms, scribbling their names on receipts as their kit was passed to them from the massive steel-mesh cage that enclosed the armoury.
They all had Glock 17 handguns, Sig Sauer MCX assault rifles – the Black Mamba, short and superlight, perfect for close quarter ops – and M26 Tasers.
And one of them signed out a shotgun – the Benelli M3 Super 90 that would be our front-door key. The SFO who checked it out was attempting to grow a wispy beard to cover the traces of acne that still clung to his youthful face. He stared at me without smiling.
‘Let’s go, Jesse,’ Jackson told him.
DS Stone signed out her weapons and we walked down to the basement car park where a convoy of Armed Response Vehicles and unmarked vans were all waiting with their engines running.
‘This is us,’ she said, indicating a white florist’s van. Jackson Rose and the young man with the attempted beard and the shotgun were among those climbing into the back. There was a faded slogan on the side of the van.
‘BEAUTIFUL’ BLOOMS OF BARKING
DS Stone laughed. She really was unnaturally calm.
She held two PASGT helmets in one hand. She handed one to me. I strapped it on.
‘I love those inverted commas around “beautiful”, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Why do they do that?’
Then she saw that I was not laughing.
‘What’s the problem, Detective?’ she said.
I nodded as I put on the PASGT, tightening the strap of the combat helmet.
‘We’re using a florist’s delivery van for the entry team?’ I shook my head. ‘As I understand it, Borodino Street is in a very devout and poor neighbourhood. I wonder how many fancy bouquets of flowers get delivered to this neck of the woods.’ I indicated the van. ‘From Beautiful Blooms of Barking or anyone else.’
The car park was in the basement of Leman Street Police Station but you could see the first light of a beautiful summer’s day creeping into the entrance.
DS Stone was not laughing now. I watched her put on her PASGT helmet. She shrugged her shoulders, getting comfortable in the body armour as she held her assault rifle at a 45-degree angle, the business end pointing at the floor. The car park was filling with the fumes of all those engines. Then she smiled at me and it made me think that maybe I would like to sit next to her at breakfast.
‘We will be in and out before anyone gets a chance to wonder where the roses are,’ she said. ‘OK, Max?’
But it didn’t go down like that.
The back of the florist’s van smelled of old sweat and fresh gun oil.
The SFOs crammed inside were at home inside the restricted space. We call them a Tactical Support Team. They call themselves shots. I suspected that this wasn’t the first time these shots had used this van.
DS Alice Stone stood at the back doors, deftly shifting her weight to remain standing as we sped through the empty streets. The other nine SFOs in her team sat opposite each other on low benches, most of them giving their kit and weapons one final check. Jackson Rose sat there almost meditative, staring at nothing. The boy with the wispy beard – Jesse Tibbs, it said on his name tag – adjusted the position of the shotgun between his legs. He glared when he saw me watching him. In the front of the van were a driver and a radio dispatcher in the passenger’s seat, both in plain clothes.
‘Five minutes,’ the driver called over his shoulder.
DS Stone spoke into the radio attached to her left lapel.
‘All calls, this is Red One – ETA for entry team is five minutes,’ she said, raising her voice above the engine, but still professionally calm.
It was two miles from Leman Street Police Station to the target address on Borodino Street, a quiet residential road not far from Victoria Park.
Close to the back doors I crouched by a monitor relaying live images from the camera hidden in the roof of the van. The screen was black-and-white and split into the nine live CCTV images giving a 360-degree view of the outside. There were also two spyholes drilled into either side of the van.
It was not quite 5 a.m. Still one hour to sunrise. The city still washed in that half-light that precedes true dawn.
The streets looked empty. But the constant radio traffic coming from the front of the van told a different story.
These streets were teeming with our people.
The radio dispatcher in the passenger seat kept up a constant stream of communication. On the monitor I saw a line of Armed Response Vehicles parked just beyond Leman Street and as we got closer to the target address I saw vans of uniformed officers in riot gear, their stacks of ballistic shields by the vehicle making them look like a medieval army, parked up next to smaller vans of dog handlers with firearms and explosives search dogs.
And ambulances. We passed an entire convoy of ambulances in a derelict petrol station, waiting for disaster.
As we got closer to Borodino Street, there were undercover surveillance officers in observation posts, scattered across the neighbourhood – I saw a British Gas tent and two Thames Water vans that had nothing to do with gas and water.
There was a second response team on standby, a back-up Tactical Support Team of shots parked up a block away from the target address. Just one street away, an armoured Land Rover was double-parked, its big diesel engine idling. A helicopter whirred in the milky sky of early morning.
On Borodino Street itself, there were dark shadows on the rooftops – the snipers in their elevated close containment positions, the Heckler & Koch G36 carbines black matchsticks against the slowly shifting sky.
‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus out there this morning!’ Stone smiled, and her team laughed with wild relief.
We were an army.
But someone has to go in.
‘You OK, Raymond?’ DS Stone said.
She was addressing the shot who was sitting between Jackson Rose and Jesse Tibbs with his shotgun. This Raymond nodded, too quickly, his face shining with sweat as he again checked his weapon. He looked supremely fit but older than the other shots, as though he had lived some other life before this one. Maybe another ex-serviceman, I thought.
‘One pass,’ DS Stone called to the driver.
‘Copy that, ma’am,’ he called back.
We turned into Borodino Street.
DS Stone crouched by my side, steadying herself with a hand on my shoulder as she stared at the monitor.
The florist’s van passed the house without slowing down.
One screen out of nine showed the front of the house.
There was no sign of movement.
I could feel Stone’s wound-tight anticipation as she stood up and leaned against the back doors. She quickly checked the spyhole.
A female voice came from the radio on her lapel. It was DCS Elizabeth Swire, the Designated Senior Officer running the show from New Scotland Yard. All other radio chatter was suddenly silenced.
‘Red One, can we have your sit-rep, please?’ DCS Swire said.
‘No movement at the target address, ma’am,’ replied Stone. ‘Red One requesting permission for attack run.’
A pause. We waited. All of the shots stared at their leader.
‘Red One awaiting instructions,’ DS Stone said calmly.
‘Permission granted,’ came the response. ‘Proceed with attack run.’
Stone gave her team the nod.
‘We’re going in,’ she said calmly. ‘Standby.’
The van had turned right at the end of the street, and now it made another right and then turned right again.
No one was checking their kit now. They all waited, their eyes on their team leader as Stone picked up her Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle. I stared at the monitor, aware that I had stopped blinking. The monitor told me nothing.
‘All calls, entry team is in final assault position,’ DS Stone said above me.
All eyes were on her. The van slowed but did not quite stop.
‘Remember your training, look after each other and watch out for those grenades,’ she said.
She hefted her assault rifle.
‘On my command,’ she said.
There was a moment when we did not breathe.
‘Go!’ Stone said. ‘Go! Go! Go!’
‘Wait,’ I said.
The front door was opening.
It was happening very slowly.
Whoever was leaving the house was taking their time.
DS Stone was kneeling by my side.
‘Someone’s coming out,’ she said into her radio.
A beat.
Our van was crawling now.
‘Establish ID and hold,’ said DCS Swire.
A large woman in a black niqab was shuffling from the house. She adjusted her headscarf as she turned to the street, only her eyes showing above the veil.
‘Is that Mrs Khan?’ DS Stone said.
I stared hard at the monitor. The photographs I had seen of Mrs Azza Khan revealed a sturdy, fierce-faced woman. I could not see the face of the person leaving the house but they had feet like landing craft. And those feet were wearing Doctor Martens boots.
‘That’s a man,’ I said.
Then DS Stone kicked the back doors open and she was jumping out the back of the van.
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still! Show me your hands!’
The figure in the niqab brought his hands out from inside the billowing niqab. He was holding some kind of assault rifle.
And he shot DS Alice Stone in the head.
The SFOs were all screaming the same thing as they piled from the van.
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
‘Shots fired! Officer down!’
The burst of automatic gunfire seemed to crack the day wide open.
All of the firearms used by the Metropolitan Police are configured to not fire on semi-automatic, meaning every single trigger pull fires only one single shot and later that shot has to be justified to people who never heard a shot fired in anger in their life, except possibly on the grouse moor.
So that unbroken burst of automatic gunfire from the figure wearing the niqab was not merely deafening.
It froze the blood and scrambled the senses.
Because police gunfire never sounds like that.
Only enemy gunfire sounds like that.
Then the last of the shots were barging past me as I climbed from the back of the van.
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’
‘Stop! Armed—’
One of the shots banged into me so hard that I tumbled from the pavement to the gutter and almost fell. Then I looked up. The veil had fallen away and I was staring at the bearded face of Asad Khan, the older of the two brothers.
I watched him raise his assault rifle, a fifty-year-old Heckler & Koch G3. He pointed it at the nearest SFO and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He stared at his elderly weapon. People were screaming. I looked down and saw the lifeless body of DS Alice Stone crumpled half on the pavement and half in the road. A halo of blood was growing around her PASGT helmet.
Khan fired again.
And this time the sound split the sky, made your ears ring, and promised death. The burst of gunfire made a ferocious tattoo on the side of our van. I looked at it and saw the holes punched in the metal all along the legend ‘Beautiful’ Blooms of Barking.
‘Armed police!’ Jackson was shouting. ‘Drop the weapon and show me your hands!’
I looked up and watched Jackson Rose aim his Heckler & Koch at Asad Khan.
The gunman’s rifle was held almost casually at his side, as if he had injured his arm or was in a state of disbelief at what was happening.
He started to raise his G3 and Jackson shot him.
SFOs are trained to aim at the centre of mass – the largest part of the body, the torso, the centre of the chest, the largest target. They are not trained to kill. They are trained to hit the target. Jackson’s single shot threw its target backwards, the muzzle blast flashing yellow.
The old assault rifle clattered in the gutter next to Asad Khan.
‘Suspect down!’ somebody screamed.
Two SFOs were on their knees by the side of DS Stone. Her blood soaked the grey leggings of their body armour.
Jackson took two paces forward and leaned over Asad Khan.
I called his name. ‘Jackson!’
And then Jackson shot him again.
Another muzzle flare.
He looked at me calmly.
The front door was open and SFOs were pouring inside.
‘Armed police!’
‘Armed police!’
‘Armed police!’
Then Jackson barged past me, his mouth twisted with rage.
‘Let them stick that in their report,’ he said.
An ambulance was already hurtling down the street, blue lights blazing and siren howling.
A female SFO was crouched by the body of Asad Khan, attempting to stop the blood pouring from his chest. They try to kill and then we shoot them, but after that we try to save their lives. This is what we do, I thought.
This is who we are.
I looked at the face of DS Alice Stone and I felt my throat close tight.
The two SFOs with DS Stone were talking to her but I realised with a jolt of shock that they were administering to the dead.
And then I went inside the house.
The light immediately went out in the narrow hallway and I could hear SFOs screaming in the dark. I banged my bad knee against a box and winced with pain. I realised the hallway had one of those lights that go out automatically, the kind they have in cheap property where someone who doesn’t live there is worried about the energy bills. I fumbled on the wall, found the round switch and hit it. The musty yellow light came back on and I could not understand what I was looking at.
There were boxes all the way down the dingy hallway.
Drones.
Dozens of them. Some of them unopened. Some of them scuffed with dirt and grass, the metal scarred from repeated crash landings.
The SFOs seemed to be above me now, on the first and second floors.
I walked to the end of the corridor and opened the kitchen door.
A child screamed.
Shrill, high-pitched, full of terror.
No, not quite a child. But not yet fully grown. A teenage girl of about sixteen was cowering on the floor by the oven with a woman and a man around sixty. The woman and girl were in their pyjamas. The man, his hair grey and thinning, was in a London Transport uniform.
They were, I realised, Ahmed ‘Arnold’ and Azza Khan, the parents of the brothers, and Layla, their granddaughter, the daughter of their third son who had died in Aleppo.
‘Papa-Papa!’ Layla cried, and at first I fought she was calling for her dead father. ‘Papa-Papa! Papa-Papa!’
But she turned her terrified face to her grandfather and I saw that she was talking to him.
‘Don’t kill us!’ Mrs Khan begged me as she clung to her granddaughter and they both closed their eyes.
At their feet there was a pink and purple rucksack with The Angry Princess on the side. It was exactly the same as the one I had been sent to the shopping centre to replace.
‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘You’re safe now. But you must go – go immediately.’ I helped them to their feet. ‘And when you come out of the front door – this is very important – hold your hands above your head with the palms showing.’ I demonstrated. ‘Like this. It’s very important that they can see the palms of your hands, OK? Then nobody will hurt you.’
They copied me. The woman snatched up her granddaughter’s Angry Princess rucksack and threw it over her shoulder.
And then they ran, their hands in the air before they were out of the kitchen, palms forward as I had shown them.
I walked from the kitchen, my balance off from what the gunfire had done to my inner ear, and I noticed for the first time that there was a basement door facing the entrance to the kitchen. From the bottom of the stairs, a dim light was shining.
I went down the stairs, shouting my name and rank.
In the basement there was an SFO with his assault rifle at his shoulder. It was the shot who DS Stone had addressed in the back of the van.
You OK, Raymond?
And before him there was a man on his knees.
It was the other brother, the youngest one. Adnan Khan, with his hands in the air. I looked at his palms expecting to see hand grenades but his hands were empty. The SFO glanced at me and then back at the brother on his knees. Adnan Khan was surrendering.
Nobody moved.
We all waited.
‘Raymond?’ I said. ‘Ray? You prefer Ray or Raymond?’
He did not look at me. But I saw something inside him react as I said his name.
‘What’s your full name and rank, Officer?’ I said, my voice harder now.
‘Vann,’ he said. ‘SFO DC Raymond Vann, sir.’
The shots had been a blur of grey body armour, PASGT helmets and firepower. In my mind, they had been an inseparable, indivisible group. Even Jackson Rose, my oldest friend, had looked like just one part of a band of brothers and sisters. It was only now that I saw DS Stone had sought out this one man to make sure he was ready for what was coming.
You OK, Raymond?
But now DC Raymond Vann aimed his assault rifle at the man before him and he seemed totally on his own.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘DC Vann. Raymond. Ray. Don’t do it.’
But he did it.
One single shot.
So loud in the small subterranean room it felt like the last sound I would ever hear. The muzzle blast dazzling in the twilight of the basement as Adnan Khan was thrown backwards, the death wound in his chest already blooming.
Then I was stumbling back up the basement’s short flight of rickety steps and down the corridor piled high with boxes of drones and towards the front door. I bounced off the walls, keeping going, wanting to be far away from that basement. It was light outside now. The day had begun while we were inside the house.
The pain in my ears was so intense that I touched them and looked at my fingertips, expecting blood. But there was nothing there. It felt like there should be blood.
I staggered out of the house and into the dazzling light of the new day. Police tape was already going up at both ends of the street. The helicopter seemed much lower and louder. The second response team was piling out of the back of their van and pouring into the house where everyone was either dead or gone.
And paramedics were putting DS Alice Stone into a Human Remains Pouch. We don’t call them body bags and they are not black, like the movies. This one was white with a long black zip. They had cleaned up her face and it looked like her. The young always look like themselves when they die fifty years too soon. Two paramedics were easing her inside with the tenderness of parents putting a sleeping child to their rest.
I could hear radio chatter and someone sobbing.
Jackson sat dry-eyed in the open doors of the florist van, still holding his weapon. An exhibits officer was meant to take it from him, but it was still too soon and too chaotic for formal procedures to kick in. Right now there was only the numb disbelieving shock that follows action. I sat by his side. He pulled off his PASGT helmet and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he gently patted my back. We did not speak.
The Specialist Search Team had arrived and was waiting for the nod to tear the place apart. No grenades, I thought. Not yet. At the far end of the street I could see the CSIs getting into their white Tyvek suits and blue nitrile gloves. The gang’s all here, I thought.
Then a senior uniformed officer stood before Jackson and me, shouting and waving his arms. Jackson looked away and yawned. The officer was silver-haired, fifty-something and his shoulder badge showed the red-and-silver crown of a superintendent.
I stared at his lips. My hearing was still off but I could make out his question. I could understand what he was asking us. And he was asking it again and again and again.
‘What the hell happened here?’
I blinked at him and said nothing.
The image of the muzzle blast in the basement was burned black on the back of my eyes.
And now it would be there for ever.
By the time I got to West End Central an hour later, a crowd was gathering in Savile Row.
Under the big blue lamp outside number 27, a young uniformed officer was keeping a watchful eye. There was a sky-blue ribbon on his jacket pinned just above the patch that said METROPOLITAN POLICE. You were seeing these ribbons everywhere, in memory of those who had died when the helicopter came down. In normal times, any adornment to a Met uniform was strictly against all SOP regulations.
But these were not normal times.
The young copper nodded in recognition and stood aside to let me pass.
I turned back to look at the crowd. They were builders from construction sites and office workers passing by. In hard hats or sharp suits, they were mostly young men. The mood was subdued as they talked quietly among themselves, but their number seemed to be growing by the second.
‘What’s this lot want?’ I said to the young uniform.
He nodded to the glass doors of West End Central.
‘They’ve got one of the drone bastards locked up inside, sir.’
I stared at him.
‘But I just watched them die.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s what I heard, sir.’ He hesitated, and then indicated the crowd. ‘And I think they want to remember the forty-five dead,’ he said. ‘They want to mourn, they want to grieve, but they don’t know where to go. Lake Meadows is still a crime scene.’
‘There are forty-four dead,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘They found another one.’ His eyes flooded with tears and I watched him fight to regain control. ‘A little kid. So it’s forty-five now.’
I lightly touched his arm.
‘Are you all right out here on your lonesome?’
He grinned. ‘As long as they stay like this, sir.’
I rode the lift up to the top floor.
Edie Wren was alone in Major Incident Room One.
‘Hey,’ she said, and handed me a triple espresso from Bar Italia before turning back to the big HDTV.
They were showing Borodino Street, filmed from a news channel helicopter. The street was taped off at either end and the lights of the CSIs surrounded the house, brighter than daylight. The white-suited teams were everywhere.
In the left-hand corner of the screen there was another helicopter shot, a view of Lake Meadows that had become horribly familiar over the last seven days, the shopping centre a charred and blackened scar on the face of the shining city, closed to the public but crowded with bulldozers and cranes and white tents, at once a crime scene and a mass grave.
And in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, there was a blacked-out head and shoulders silhouette.
Edie turned to me. ‘They haven’t told her next of kin yet,’ she said. ‘That’s why they’re not showing her face. They must be trying to reach her husband.’ Edie pushed back her tangled mop of red hair and shook her head with disbelief. ‘I met her once. Alice. DS Alice Stone. When I was in uniform. She was a team leader even then. And she shone, Max. She was like the cool kid at school that everyone wants to be friends with. And she was nice. A decent human being and a real high-flyer.’ Edie looked back at the screen. ‘I think her team were all in love with her.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s her.’
I removed the lid from the Bar Italia carton and bolted down a triple espresso. ‘Thanks.’
‘Must be a bit cold by now but it’s the thought that counts,’ Edie said, holding out her arms. ‘Come here.’
She hugged me awkwardly. I hugged her back, equally awkwardly as she accidentally gave me a gentle headbutt, the embrace of colleagues who liked each other but were working out exactly what that might mean. As far as I knew, she was still seeing her married man. As far as I knew, the creep was still promising to leave his wife.
But it still felt good to hold her.
And I was suddenly bone-tired. I closed my eyes and I could have slept in her arms for somewhere between fifteen minutes and a lifetime. Then I felt her let go of me and step back. When I opened my eyes, Edie was watching me and waiting.
‘What happened on Borodino Street?’ she said.
‘It went wrong from the go,’ I said. ‘From the moment the jump-off van pulled up outside.’
I told her almost everything. I told her about the figure in the niqab coming out of the house and Asad Khan opening fire before we had even got started. I told her what happened on the street. I told her about Alice Stone and Asad Khan dying within seconds of each other. I told her about telling Mr and Mrs Khan and their granddaughter Layla to raise their hands and run.
But I did not tell her about the basement and Adnan Khan on his knees and DC Ray Vann looking at him through the sights of his assault rifle. I didn’t tell her about the single shot in the basement that was still ringing in my ears, or the muzzle blast that was still burned on the back of my retina.
The sounds of the crowd down in Savile Row drifted up through the open windows. I looked at Edie, still not understanding what they were doing here.
‘It’s probably because we’ve got the Khan family, or what’s left of them,’ Edie said. ‘They were brought here after the op. The father and the mother and the girl, Layla, the daughter of the brother who got slotted in Syria. Mrs Khan and the girl are on the second floor with the FLO.’
Family Liaison Officer.
‘And what about Mr Khan?’ I asked.
‘He’s down in the custody suite.’
‘Why have they got him locked up?’ I said.
‘Waiting for CTC,’ Edie said. ‘Then they’re shipping him over to Paddington. That’s why there’s a bit of a mob outside – because we have the old man. It is all very civilised so far, but I think they would quite like to see him hanging from a lamppost. He had three sons and all of them were terrorists. It’s not a good look, is it?’
CTC is Counter Terrorism Command and Paddington is Paddington Green Police Station where almost all terrorists are interrogated. When the news reports that a terrorist suspect is in ‘a central London location’ it means that they are inside Paddington Green. IRA headbangers, failed suicide bombers and graduates from Guantanamo Bay have all graced the cells and interview rooms of Paddington Green. It looks like a budget hotel, if you can imagine a budget hotel with two-inch-thick steel doors.