“How tough?” asked Aylrod.
“Man for man they could hold their own against the SEALs or the SAS. Smart, resourceful, superb level of training, and they’re equipped with the latest and the best gear.”
“Who’s training them?”
“Unknown.”
“Any of them in custody?”
“So far none have been taken alive.”
“Pity,” said Welles.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re anxious to have a meaningful chat with one of them.”
“What else have you learned?”
“Not much. There’s someone called the Spaniard who acts as a liaison between the street teams and the Kings. He’s known to be utterly ruthless and to have a special love of torture with knives and edged weapons. But that’s all we have on him. Everyone we’ve heard of who has run afoul of him is dead. I saw one of his victims. Not a pretty sight.”
Aylrod said, “Any leads through the equipment they use?”
“No. It’s either Russian or Chinese made or stolen American stuff. The street teams are more likely to have AKs; the Kingsmen came at us with M4A1 carbines and a couple of HK416s. Those HKs are state-of-the-art-Delta Force weapons.”
Aylrod nodded gravely, then pointed to the screen. “What happened after the logo was painted?”
“He walked away,” said MacDonal. “The camera at the corner caught him, but then he vanished. Looks like he either entered the hospital or somehow slipped away out of sight of the other cameras. We have someone searching the camera feeds in an expanding grid to see if he shows up anywhere else.”
The Home Secretary nodded. “Assessment?”
MacDonal pursed her lips. It made her look like an evil librarian. “The person in the video may or may not have been part of this Seven Kings group. He could have been a gangbanger given a few quid to paint that on the wall.”
“That was a grown man,” Childe observed. “Not a teenager.”
“How can you tell?” asked Welles.
“General build and the way he walked. He was confident and careful, but not furtive.”
I nodded. “And he’s painted that logo before. He wasn’t tentative about it. He wasn’t trying to figure out what to write or how to write it. He did it as quickly and smoothly as if he’s done it plenty of times before.”
“A gangbanger would be just as quick and smooth,” MacDonal said.
“Sure,” I agreed, “but as Mr. Childe pointed out, this was no kid.”
Welles said, “Any clue as to why this group calls itself the ‘Seven Kings’?”
Benson Childe shook his head. “We helped the DMS with the research on that, but so far we haven’t struck gold. There are over three hundred thousand hits on that name on the Internet. A boat storage facility and a real estate developer of that name, both in Florida; the Seven Kings Relais hotel in Rome; a mystery novel called The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings published in 1899; a tomb of the Seven Kings in Andhra Pradesh, India; a punk rock band of that name; and even a town here in London.”
“Where in London?” asked Welles.
“It is a suburban development in the borough of Redbridge, part of the Ilford post town. We have people out there, but so far that image has not been found on any walls.”
“We’ll send this out to all stations and departments,” concluded Welles. “And I believe that we’ll be using Captain Ledger as an advisor. He’s asked to be part of the hospital investigation and I think that would be a wise choice. Moving on. What do we know about the actual fire?”
“The fire is still too hot for a proper analysis,” said a frail-looking man with watery brown eyes who sat next to Childe. Unlike the others, he hadn’t given me his card. “But from gasses collected at the site the fire investigators have verified the presence of nitrates, and in great quantities. This was definitely a bomb. Or, more precisely, several.”
“How many, Darius?” asked Welles, and that fast I knew who the frail man was. Darius Oswalt, Director General of MI5. I knew him by name and reputation, but the mousy physique didn’t match the legends I’d heard. I expected a Daniel Craig type, not someone who looked like a low-level chartered accountant.
Oswalt spread his hands. “We’ve looked at the CCTV feeds from the moments leading up to the explosion. Witness reports vary between four and nine blasts. However, we estimate that there were fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” gasped Welles.
“No one reported that,” said Aylrod.
“Not surprising,” said Oswalt. “But the CCTV images of Whitechapel Road show fire erupting from multiple points when the ‘first’ blast happened. We believe that all of the bombs had been set to detonate at the same time and were positioned to do the greatest possible structural damage. Considering how much of the complex has already collapsed, I think it’s a safe bet that many of the charges did, in fact, simultaneously detonate. As for the mistiming? There are always some x-factors when it comes to the wiring and setting of the digital timers. The blasts all happened within four seconds of each other, though, so it’s as close as may be. How the terrorists managed to smuggle fourteen bombs, give or take, into a building with moderately good security—well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?” He paused and from the look on his face it was clear that he had a bomb of his own to drop. “Based on the CCTV footage, we can make a pretty good guess as to the time the perpetrators intended all of the bombs to go off.”
“What time?” I asked, and everyone leaned forward, caught by Oswalt’s grave tone.
The MI5 man sucked his teeth for a moment, eyes introspective.
“According to CCTV,” he said slowly, “the bombs detonated at precisely eleven minutes after nine this morning.”
“Bloody hell,” murmured Aylrod.
I closed my eyes for a moment and felt an old ache in my chest.
The bombs had gone off at 9:11.
Interlude Five
The State Correctional Institution at Graterford
Graterford, Pennsylvania
December 17, 1:51 P.M. EST
He sat in his cell and smiled at the shadows. The cockroaches were his friends. The spiders, too, and he read great mathematical truths in the subtle intricacies of their webs.
The guards feared him. The gangbangers never messed with him. They’d tried during his first week, but never again. Longtime inmates gave him space in the mess hall and would walk out of their way so as not to step on his shadow during afternoon exercise. The multitude of the Aryan Brotherhood mythologized him, ascribing biblical powers to him and endlessly arguing over hidden meanings in his most casual comments. Men had been shanked over such disputes. The Jamaican and Haitian convicts thought that he was some kind of white bokor. The Muslims thought that he was a demon. The madmen among the prison population thought he was a god. Or an angel. Men had been killed for speaking ill of him.
In truth, Nicodemus took no sides among the thirty-five hundred prisoners within the walls of Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security correctional facility. He would not allow himself to be tattooed with gang markings or colors. He did not deliberately sit with any one group or another. When asked why by a wide-eyed and fatuous young Latino fish, Nicodemus had closed his eyes and said, “Because I belong to all of His people.”
“Whose people? God’s? People say that you think you talk to God. Or maybe the Devil. But that’s just bullshit, isn’t it?”
Nicodemus merely smiled and did not answer. A week later Jesus Santiago was found dead in the laundry room. His tongue had been cut out and the numbers 12/17 were carved nine times into his flesh on his chest and back. The medical examiner concluded that Santiago had died from a heart attack. He was twenty-one years old and had no history of heart trouble.