The buses were empty now, apart from passengers’ bags. Five TSA personnel boarded each one to start examining the hand luggage, carefully carrying each piece towards the X-ray machine. Along the back wall, a rotund, flabby-jawed man lowered his hands with a disgruntled: ‘What the hell’s going on anyway?’ Three SWAT team members stepped towards him, screaming at him to return his hands to his head while three red dots from their laser markers danced across his chest like fireflies. His ruddy skin turned pale; he raised his arms. And any murmuring from the other passengers instantly died away as the security personnel started passing their luggage through the X-ray machine.
A trickle of sweat dripped down the side of Mason Delaney’s face.
He was sitting once more at the long, narrow table in the White House Situation Room. There were no photographers. The President was absent. There was just him, Scott Stroman, Herb Sagan and four of Sagan’s little people. General Sagan had two fingers to his ear and was listening to updates over a headset.
‘We have an all-clear from Tampa,’ he said. ‘All passengers isolated, no incidents.’
A thirty-second silence. Delaney wiped away the sweat with a silk handkerchief.
‘Boston, Orlando, Philly, all clear,’ Sagan stated.
‘Cincinnati?’ Delaney breathed.
The general held up one finger.
‘That’s an all-clear from Cincinnati,’ he stated, before removing the headset, leaning back in his chair and exhaling explosively. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘That’s a wrap.’
Unnoticed by anyone else in the room, Delaney and Stroman exchanged a look. It would have meant nothing to anybody else, but the two CIA men knew it was not a wrap at all. The morning’s activity hadn’t ended.
It was only just beginning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard flight BA729 from London to Dublin. We’ll be underway in a couple of minutes’ time, just as soon as we get the nod from air-traffic control. In the meantime, please make sure your luggage is safely stowed in the overhead lockers or beneath the seat in front of you. Our cabin crew will shortly be taking you through some of the safety features of this Boeing 737. Please do pay attention, as these may differ from other aircraft you’ve travelled on…’
Flight BA729 was full, but nobody seemed to paying any attention to the captain’s clipped tones. They were all too busy sending last-minute text messages, or trying to stuff their coats into the overhead compartments as the heavily made-up hostesses filed up and down the aisle, checking seatbelts and handing out colouring packs to the children on the flight. An air steward and a stewardess remained at the back in the service area, replenishing the drinks trolley that they would be pushing through the cabin just as soon as they were airborne. Then they would hand out the airline meals that had just been loaded onto the aircraft by a friendly young man with a wispy blond beard that failed to hide the pockmarks on his face.
The steward noticed that a Middle Eastern gentleman in an aisle seat in the back row looked unwell. Perspiration was dripping down his face, and he seemed to be muttering something to himself. The steward put a slightly overfamiliar hand on his shoulder and bent down over him.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
The man didn’t meet the steward’s eyes. He just nodded silently.
‘Nervous flyer?’
‘I’m fine,’ said the man. He looked at his watch. Two minutes to ten. He closed his eyes and continued his muttering.
Eva’s world was spinning. She didn’t know what time it was, nor how long she had been away from the house. All she knew was that the Range Rover was in reach, ten metres away, still parked opposite the church. But she was in such agony that it could have been ten miles.
She stumbled into the car park and fell against the vehicle, gasping for breath and retching. It took a full thirty seconds for her shaking hands to align the key with the lock. Scrambling inside, she turned on her mobile phone and put it on the dashboard.
No signal.
She started the engine. As she turned the steering wheel, she cried out, and she was sobbing as she pulled out into the road and started to drive eastwards, away from the coast. In her distress she veered to left and right.
She checked the phone again. Still no signal.
She drove a mile, her speed increasing. A mile and a half. A white Bedford van – the first vehicle she’d seen – sped past in the opposite direction, the aggressive sound of its horn fading into the distance behind her.
Suddenly she slammed her foot on the brake.
A single bar had appeared on the phone’s screen. Eva grabbed the phone with one trembling hand and scrolled through her address book. Names appeared in front of her and, with fear surging through her gut, she realized that she’d been so focused on getting to an area where she could get a signal that she hadn’t even thought about who she was going to call.
Three minutes to ten. Panicking, she scrolled through her contacts again.
‘Jacobson, John, DCI’, she read.
The image flashed into her head of Jacobson staring at her as she slipped into the lift having stolen the Barfield files back at the office. The last thing he’d be expecting was a call from her. Perhaps that was to her advantage. Perhaps he would take her seriously.
She called him. After four rings voicemail cut in, scratchy and crackly. The signal was terrible. ‘This is Jacobson, leave a—’
Eva hung up and called again. She could tell from the number of rings that Jacobson had manually declined the call. The third time she tried, however, he answered it. ‘Who’s calling?’ he demanded.
Eva’s voice didn’t sound like her. ‘It’s me…’ she rasped. ‘Eva…’
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Who’s this?’
‘Eva Buckley!’ she shouted as loud as she could. The line was still poor. ‘You have to listen to me! There’s going to be a terrorist attack… ten planes… five in the UK… five in the US… explosives in the food trays… they’ll be in the air any second now… you need to find Joe Mansfield… he has the flight numbers…’
Silence.
Eva looked at the mobile’s screen. It was blank. No battery.
‘No!’ she yelled, and in a fit of frustration she hurled the phone against the windscreen. It clattered down into the footwell, but Eva didn’t see it. She was looking at the clock. Ten precisely.
She was too late.
0500 EST.
The hangar at Tampa International was almost silent. The passengers were still held at gunpoint. Two of them had been removed from the others. They were a short, dumpy Middle Eastern woman and a taller man, also of Arabic extraction. Two members of the SWAT team had brought them over to the other side of the parked buses and forced them onto the ground with their hands on the backs of their heads. Their two items of hand luggage were next to each other on a trestle table, behind which a studious-looking young woman wearing a white coat and latex gloves was examining four identical bottles of shampoo.
She picked one of them up, opened it rather nervously, and squirted a small puddle onto a petri dish. It was green, thick and viscous. A look of suspicion crossed the woman’s face. She dabbed the substance with a strip of litmus paper, which she held up to the light. She sniffed the petri dish and then, working quickly, checked samples from the other three bottles. When she was done, she looked up at a waiting member of the TSA.