‘Know what you’ve forgotten?’ he said, abruptly switching his hold to Brice’s arm to keep it raised straight upwards. ‘The Shamir!’
He forced Brice’s gun hand in front of the ancient weapon.
The pistol blew apart in a shower of razor-edged splinters. Eddie cried out as shrapnel stabbed into his arm and the top of his head — but Brice’s wounds were vastly worse. The MI6 agent screamed as his right hand was shredded, splattering both men with blood.
Eddie let go and pulled back — then kicked Brice in the stomach. He crashed against the tailgate. The impact dislodged the Shamir, its horn sliding across the end of the casket. The assault on the clock tower ceased, the invisible beam instead carving into the grey Edwardian headquarters of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on the square’s north side. Its top floors exploded, the roof collapsing and crushing everything beneath under tons of debris.
Realising lives were still at stake, the Yorkshireman abandoned his attempt to finish off the spy and scrabbled back into the pickup bed. He shoved the Shamir into its box.
But his hope that would end the threat was instantly dashed. Without the lead container’s lid, the stone was still being charged by whatever energy it fed upon — and the casket shuddered, the dense metal flaking and cracking as it took the full force of the Shamir’s beam.
A glance at Big Ben as the bells continued their mad chorus. The clock tower’s top was listing again, a chunk hacked out from below it as if struck by a lumberjack’s axe—
The end of the casket succumbed to the Shamir’s power and splintered apart. Stone pillars on the far side of the road crumbled, a van passing through the beam ripping open as if slashed by an invisible scythe.
Eddie looked back in desperation at the strange stone. He had to move it — but to where?
The river—
Westminster Bridge was just a few hundred yards away, beyond Parliament. Nina had told him that flood waters once cut off the Mother of the Shamir from its source of power — maybe the Thames would do the same for its offspring…
He pulled the Shamir upright, aiming the thrumming stone horn towards the sky, then jumped from the pickup. Brice had gone, but he couldn’t spare even a second to look for him, instead piling into the cab. The keys were still in the ignition. He started the engine and jammed the Transit into reverse, looking through the rear window as he set off.
Complete chaos had erupted. People fled in all directions, some drivers trying to weave through the crowd as others abandoned their vehicles and ran. He saw a couple of armed police helping the cop shot by Brice, but the appalling spectacle of the teetering clock tower dominated the attention of all their comrades. Nobody tried to stop him — but nor did they attempt to help him either.
He was on his own.
Eddie sounded the horn, gesturing frantically for people to get out of his way. The Transit somehow reached the road without mowing anyone down, but now he had to go against the traffic to reach the bridge—
A car ploughed into the van’s rear. Eddie was thrown across the seats as it spun. He dragged himself upright, looking back at the pickup bed — and saw that the Shamir had been knocked over by the collision. The tax office took another devastating blast as he wrestled the Transit into first gear and swung back towards the river.
London’s traditional order had broken down into a free-for-all, cars veering across every lane. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he gasped, swerving between them. Another glancing strike as he turned hard to avoid a head-on crash — then he was through, the way to Westminster Bridge opening out ahead of him.
The reason for the suddenly clear road was obvious: nobody dared drive past the clock tower. The street near its base was strewn with fallen debris. Traffic coming from the far bank had stopped, the crossing choked at its halfway point as drivers tried to turn back.
An ominous boom from above. The Shamir was no longer pointing at Brice’s target, but it had done its work. The tower tilted again, tortured girders screaming — and the clock’s northern face disintegrated, glass and iron cascading towards the street…
Followed by the hands of the clock itself as the mechanism ripped apart.
Eddie had already stamped on the accelerator. The van roared towards the bridge. His view was suddenly obscured by a snowstorm of white glass, a demented drum roll sounding on the roof as broken metal bombarded it. But he didn’t dare stop—
The clock’s hands stabbed into the road right behind him like colossal spears. The earth-shaking impact of almost five tons of metal kicked the van’s rear wheels into the air. He fought to keep control as the tail crashed back down, skidding before straightening out. The overturned Shamir cut a line of destruction along the façade of the MPs’ offices in Portcullis House as he drove past.
Then he was clear, passing the junction with the Embankment and reaching the bridge itself. He had hoped to reach the middle to dump the Shamir in the deepest water, but there were too many cars blocking the way. Instead he built up as much speed as he could, veering into the oncoming lanes — then turning sharply to the left and aiming straight at the railings along the crossing’s side—
The Transit smashed through them, shattered metal spinning over the Thames as it arced towards the brown water below.
Its driver had already bailed out. Man and van hit the surface together, Eddie swallowed by the vehicle’s churning splash. The Transit bobbed nose-down for a moment, then rolled on to its back. The Shamir was pitched from the pickup bed and sank into the turgid depths. Its bone-shaking hum quickly faded to nothingness, the water cutting it off from its source of power, just as Eddie had hoped.
Of Eddie himself, there was no sign.
The great clock’s surviving face finally followed its counterparts into oblivion. The empty spaces gaped like anguished mouths, the bells behind them howling out a last discordant cry…
And the tower began to fall.
The stonework on the south face sheared away — then the weakened girders beneath buckled and snapped. The entire upper section housing the clock dropped several feet, a halo of pulverised stone blasting outwards before the sheer mass of tangled metal brought it to an abrupt halt.
For a moment, all that moved was billowing dust…
That moment passed.
Slowly at first, then with rising speed and inevitability, the clock tower toppled like a slain redwood on to the Houses of Parliament.
It smashed down on to the north wing, utterly flattening it — but the destruction had only just begun.
The remains of the clock itself, inside a huge and heavy cage of Victorian ironwork, broke from their supporting structure on impact with the ground and were flung onwards. Hundreds of tons of shattered metal scythed through the walls of the Commons chamber and the division lobbies on each side. The western lobby, in line with the tower, suffered the worst of the destruction. Politicians from the government’s side were torn apart by shrapnel and tumbling debris, Big Ben itself rolling like a juggernaut over the screaming survivors and mashing them into unrecognisable pulp before the great bell shattered against the pillars at the lobby’s southern end. Those trapped inside the main chamber suffered an equally horrific fate as the ceiling collapsed, crushing them beneath wood and slate and glass.
Then stillness descended, the cracks of falling stone gradually replaced by the wails of the injured.
It was a scene of unimaginable carnage, the seat of British democracy reduced to blood-splattered ruins. Hundreds were dead.
But thanks to Nina’s warning… hundreds more had survived.
39
Nina watched through the windows with Huygens and other shocked embassy staff as a dark cloud drifted across the Thames. The Houses of Parliament were out of direct sight around a bend in the river, but the thunderous boom of an uncontrolled building collapse had already told her enough. It was a noise she had heard before; she had been in her native Manhattan on September 11, 2001, a similar distance from Ground Zero, and its recurrence chilled her very soul.