Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tony Parsons
Title Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
Copyright
About the Book
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?
About the Author
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.
Also by Tony Parsons
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
1
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.