“God help me,” the man whispered. The contents of his stomach turned to sewage and he had to take deep breaths to keep from vomiting. He stepped cautiously out of the doorway, afraid of falling down. He cast one look at the doorway to the Vermin Control Office, then turned away and hurried home to his children.
Chapter Ten
Barrier Headquarters
London, England
December 17, 1:37 P.M. GMT
“The Prime Minister has authorized that the Threat Level be raised to ‘exceptional.’” The Home Secretary, Julian Welles, sat at the head of the table and looked for reactions to his news. No one offered any, so he continued. “We are five hours into this. What do we know?”
The gathered men nodded; a few sighed. I kept my face neutral. Ghost lay beside my chair, and I’d given him the commands for down and quiet. A muted plasma screen showed the scene at the hospital. Most of the building had collapsed by now, and they were using deluge cannons to knock down the remaining flame-shrouded walls rather than let them topple into the streets. One corner of the old building still stood, though, and the news cameras kept returning to it, as if its stubborn refusal to yield meant something more than a vagary of physics. The streets around the hospital had all been evacuated—a process that started in earnest once the first of the new towers fell, kicking out massive gray clouds of billowing smoke. 9/11 might be over a decade ago, but even the average guy on the street knew about the dangers of breathing in that dust. It was more than debris—the fire and the pressure from the collapsing buildings had vaporized people.
There was an untouched plate of sandwiches on the table. No one had an appetite.
Welles was a small man who exuded a great degree of personal power. He had an aquiline face, a hooked nose, and black hair combed back from a high brow. A casting agent would have looked at him and said, Sherlock Holmes.
“We don’t know anything for certain,” said Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod, head of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. “The hospital has taken a number of threats from animal rights groups who want to stop the animal testing that’s part of the cancer research center. But … our initial background checks on known members resulted in what you’d expect. Vegans with too much free time and only the most minor political connections, and even then they seem tangential. Even so, I’ve ordered all of our staff to report for duty to do comprehensive interviews, and we’ll share our information with the general pool.”
Welles turned to the only woman at the table, Deirdre MacDonal, a fierce Scot with a bun so tight that it had to hurt her brain. She ran the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, a police organization funded by, and reporting to, the Association of Chief Police Officers, which in turn advised the British government on its counterterrorism strategy. “What have you got, Deirdre?”
She scowled. “Too much and damn all. We’re monitoring a laundry list of microcells and splinter groups, but none of them has ever demonstrated the capabilities to do something like this. Or anything even close to this.”
“Has anyone taken credit for this?”
MacDonal snorted. “The whole daft lot of them are queuing up to take credit. We’ve even had nine separate calls from people claiming to be Osama bin Laden himself. And one from Saddam bloody Hussein.”
“From beyond the grave, no less.”
“He claimed that the man they hanged was a clone.”
“Ah,” said Welles, and shot a look at me. “Would the DMS have any opinion on that?”
“I’ll pass it up the line, but I doubt if Saddam was alive he’d be calling to chat.”
“I daresay. Who would benefit from this?”
Childe cleared his throat. “Hard to say, especially if you look at the staff and patient demographics. There are a fair number of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. The hospital isn’t particularly political. No one of political or religious significance is associated with it or incarcerated as a patient. If this is a political statement, it’s more obscure than it needs to be.”
“Yes,” agreed the Home Secretary, “and our press statements will reflect a neutral and nonaccusatory attitude until such time as we know at whom we should point our finger.”
Childe nodded.
The Home Secretary eyed the group. “Has anyone received a credible threat of any kind? Something we can act on?”
Deirdre MacDonal said, “There have been several calls made to local precincts, but none of them are likely. Most are local nutters who regularly take credit for everything from the latest drive-by shooting to conspiracies by secret societies. Freemasons, the Illuminati, bloody space aliens. Barking mad, the lot of them.”
“None of them bear investigation?” asked Welles.
She sighed. “All of them do, Home Secretary, and we have teams running each one down, but we don’t expect any of them to actually be directly related.”
Welles looked at me. “Was anything phoned in to any of the American agencies?”
“Same as you have here,” I said. “A lot of groups and individuals trying to take credit but no one who stands out. We’re processing everything as fast as we can, though. I’m sure a pattern will emerge.”
“You’re sure or you’re hoping?” asked MacDonal.
“I’m sure and I hope I’m right,” I said, and that squeezed a smile out of her pinched face.
Welles steepled his fingers. “Do we think that this might be related to any of the upcoming holiday or charity events? Or is there any indication that the scheduled events may become targets?”
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, “but as I’m here more or less on vacation, I haven’t been paying attention to the social pages. Which events are most politically sensitive? Doesn’t the Queen give a Christmas address of some kind?”
“That’s a fair question, Captain,” he said. “And Her Majesty usually touches on politics, and in recent years that’s been Afghanistan and Iraq. The broadcast is on Christmas Day but is actually taped beforehand.”
“Do people know that?”
“Yes,” answered MacDonal. “Which puts it low on the list of likely targets.”
“There are large gatherings of people at Trafalgar Square and the South Bank on the nights leading up to Christmas,” said Aylrod. “The tree lighting has already passed; that was the first Thursday of this month. But there are several scheduled events for caroling. A bomb at either place would do untold harm, and if timed to Christmas … well, the religious and political implications are there to be seen.”
“Bloody wonderful,” said Welles sourly. “Put people on both events.”
“What about the Sea of Hope?” asked MacDonal.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She smiled. “I would have thought you knew about that, Captain, as it’s really an American event. It’s a big international fund-raiser for humanitarian aid for those countries suffering from diseases of poverty.”
I nodded. Although I didn’t know much about the fund-raiser, I certainly knew about the epidemics. Lately AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis—the classic diseases of poverty—had taken alarming upsurges in Africa, with comparable spikes from the new Asian flu in Malaysia, another new strain of mumps in the poorer sections of Ireland, dengue fever in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay, and a stunningly potent new strain of meningitis that was burning its way through West Africa.
“The event takes place aboard the SS Sea of Hope, one of those absurdly large Norwegian cruise ships,” Welles said with disdain. “There will be plenty of speeches and appeals for humanitarian aid from nations, corporations, organizations, and individuals. Prince William is nominally in charge of our end of the project and will be giving the keynote address; however, the Bush twins, Chelsea Clinton, John Kerry’s daughters, and a few other political offspring are part of the board of directors. It’s all part of the Generation Hope campaign started by the eldest Obama girl.”