‘Will you know when they’re ready to attack?’
‘I expect so; there’s bound to be greatly heightened tension just beforehand.’
‘Then we’ll have to stake out the flat and track them when they come out.’
‘Too risky – suppose they evade us and get to their van? And you’re still forgetting some of my special talents. Once we’ve got them, I’ll locate the garage readily enough. I suggest we move in this evening as soon as the street is clear.’
He grunted and sat in thought. Suddenly I detected a change. ‘I think they’ve received a message or something – the tension has shot up.’ I waited for another few minutes, concentrating on the shifting patterns of the distant emotions, sometimes losing them in the steady roar of mental noise. Then a decision was reached. ‘They’re on the move!’
Richards’ mobile phone rang. He cursed and opened it, then listened intently for a minute before saying, ‘very well’ and shutting the phone. ‘There was a call to the mobile phone we took from the Birmingham flat. Someone must have decided to do a last minute check and realised that something had gone wrong.’
‘Did they trace the call?’
‘Unregistered mobile, presumably stolen. From this area.’
I groaned, then refocused on our targets. ‘We have to go – they’re moving out of range.’
The driver started the van and moved off towards the T-junction at the end of the road.
‘Hang on – they’ve stopped moving. They’re waiting for something.’ A pause as the driver stopped just before the junction. ‘They’re moving again – I think they’ve got on a bus. They’re going to cross in front of us.’
The driver edged up to the junction, then turned right to follow the bus, keeping a few vehicles between us. Richards was talking rapidly into his mobile; several cars were on the way, directed to move in behind us or to get in front of the bus. I looked at a street sign as we went past and discovered that we were on the Kingsland Road, heading south. Richards took his phone away from his ear for a moment. ‘It’s a number two-four-three bus which terminates at Waterloo. Men are on their way.’
The bus turned right into Old Street and our driver ignored the ‘buses only’ restriction to follow, soon afterwards negotiating the large roundabout at the junction with City Road. We followed as the road became Clerkenwell Road, then I detected intention, and movement. ‘They’re going – no, just one of them is. Not the leader.’
Richards muttered into his phone and I deduced that one of the cars had stopped to allow an agent to track the terrorist. After dropping him off just before the junction with Farringdon Road, the bus continued its journey along Theobalds Road, then turned left into Drake Street, right into High Holborn and left down Kingsway. At the first stop, near Holborn Station, another of the terrorists disembarked, and another car was detailed to follow. ‘Still not the leader.’
The bus headed down the Kingsway towards the Thames. At Aldwych the bus turned left and a third man got off, leaving just the leader behind. The bus turned right into the Strand before turning left again to cross the river at Waterloo Bridge, heading past the National Theatre to the station. The tension in our van rose palpably as the bus neared the terminus.
‘We have a problem,’ Richards said. ‘You can’t go out in broad daylight – you would cause a sensation. When he gets off, we’ll have to track him without you.’
‘We’d better stay in the van. Now that I’m attuned to his mental pattern, I can follow him from quite a distance, even in a crowd.’
‘All right.’
The bus turned into the Mepham Street terminus and we cruised slowly past, watching the terrorist walking up the flight of steps into the concourse of Waterloo Station. One agent followed, to join the four already in the station. Richards followed their reports intently, then frowned. ‘He’s just gone to a café out in the concourse and is sitting down, making no attempt to go anywhere’.
I “tasted” the terrorist’s mood and was puzzled. ‘He’s not worried – seems grimly satisfied.’ A terrible thought dawned, and I instantly knew it was true. ‘He may be the leader but he’s acting as a decoy! One of the others must be trying to get to the van!’
Richards cursed viciously and barked ‘pull him in!’, then punched numbers into his phone, demanding situation reports from the detached groups following the other terrorists and ordering; ‘arrest them now! Don’t wait any longer!’
Two of the groups reported back promptly and moved in, but the third call had a different response. ‘You’ve WHAT! How did you lose him?’
‘Which one?’
Richards angrily lowered his phone. ‘The first one. Farringdon Road. They somehow contrived to lose him by the station.’
The van had already turned round and circled the drum-shaped glass Imax cinema before racing off down Stamford Street, then taking a sharp left to cross the Thames again via Blackfriars Bridge. The van tore up New Bridge Street, past Ludgate Circus and up Farringdon Street, under the Holborn Viaduct and on up Farringdon Road, where the driver made a sharp right turn, skidding slightly on the wet road, and screeched to a halt by the combined rail and underground station. I was already scanning, but could detect nothing.
‘Back to Hoxton! The garage is bound to be somewhere nearby.’
Richards nodded and the van set off again, the chastened agents in tow. A U-turn in front of the Caxton House car park followed by an illegal right turn back into the Clerkenwell Road saw us retracing the bus route, albeit at a considerably higher velocity. Once in Hoxton we slowed and trawled the streets. Much of the area had recently become ‘gentrified’ as indicated by the appearance of up-market coffee bars, but nearby there were still many poorer estates and we concentrated on those.
The minutes ticked by as we toured street after street. Suddenly I made contact. ‘Got him!’ And a few seconds later; ‘he’s moving!’ His mental state had changed; now his mind was locked, somehow both blank and tightly focused with a steady babbling undercurrent. I suddenly realised that he was praying constantly, and shouted, ‘he’s in the bomb van!”
Richards suddenly calmed. ‘Where?’
‘To the west of us, heading south.’
He consulted a street map as the driver swung the van into the next turn and accelerated. ‘Where now?’
‘Keep going, then turn left at the next major junction.’
‘East Road,’ Richards muttered. The driver raced to catch up, while Richards sent yet another stream of instructions over his phone.
East Road joined City Road, which crossed Old Street – the second time that morning we had been round that roundabout – then at London Wall the terrorist turned left towards Whitechapel.
‘Where is he going?’ muttered Richards as our driver wove through the traffic.
‘Don’t get too close,’ I warned, ‘if he knows he’s being followed he’s liable to blow the bomb instantly.’
The driver slowed a little. Richards turned to look at me, his face grim. ‘We can’t stop him in the usual way; he mustn’t suspect anything. We’ll have to find a way of stopping him which doesn’t alarm him, then you’ll have to get him. It’s the best chance we’ve got – we’ll never get snipers into place in time.’
I nodded. ‘Fair enough. You do your bit and I’ll do mine.’
Rain was falling steadily as we crossed Aldgate High Street and followed the anonymous dull-blue van down Minories towards the Tower of London. Richards made another phone call, giving clear instructions, using what appeared to be some identification code. We waited in silence as we crawled in heavy traffic past the Tower towards Tower Bridge. The stone-clad gateway marking the entrance to the bridge loomed up ahead of us, then the traffic suddenly ground to a complete halt. Richards smiled grimly and said ‘Gotcha!’