“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Hurry!” he shouted at her. “For your child.”

He thrust her toward safety and in his thoughts began to calculate how much time had elapsed since the text message had appeared on his BlackBerry. Twenty seconds, he thought, thirty at most. In that brief span of time, they had managed to move more than a hundred people from what would soon be the immediate blast zone, but cars still jammed the street, including the white Ford compact.

Shoppers were now streaming from the entrance of Harrods. Gun in hand, Gabriel herded them back into the lobby, shouting at them to take shelter deep within the building. Returning to the street, he saw that the traffic had not moved. The white Ford compact waved to him like a flag of surrender. The woman was still behind the wheel, paralyzed by indecision, unaware of what was about to happen. In the backseat the child screamed inconsolably.

The Beretta slipped from his hand, and suddenly he was running, tearing at the air with his hands, as though trying to propel his way there faster. As he reached for the car door, a flash of brilliant white light blinded him, like the light of a thousand suns. He rose on a blast of scorching wind and tumbled helplessly backward into a storm of glass and blood. A child’s hand reached for him; he seized it briefly but it slipped through his grasp. Then a darkness fell over him, silent and still, and there was nothing at all.

PART TWO

DEATH OF A SPY

28

LONDON

LATER, THE METROPOLITAN POLICE WOULD determine that it was forty-seven seconds—forty-seven seconds from the time the woman abandoned the car on Brompton Road to the instant the bomb contained in its trunk detonated. It weighed five hundred pounds and was of expert construction. Of Quinn they expected nothing less.

Initially, however, the Met did not know it was Quinn. All that would come later, after the shouting matches, the threats of resignation and reprisal, and the inevitable orgy of bloodletting. The Met knew only what they had been told by Amanda Wallace, chief of MI5, in the minutes before disaster struck. A thirty-two-year-old woman with a German passport had collected a stolen late-model BMW from the short-stay car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 and was driving alone toward central London. MI6 had been told by a senior foreign intelligence operative—the operative was not identified—that the woman was connected to a known terrorist mastermind and bomb maker. Amanda Wallace recommended to the Met commissioner that he take any and all appropriate measures to impede the car’s progress and take the woman into custody. The commissioner had responded by dispatching units of the SCO19, the Met’s tactical firearms division. The first armed response vehicle arrived at the scene at the instant of detonation. Both officers were among the dead.

Nothing remained of the blue BMW, only a crater, twenty meters wide and ten meters deep, on the spot where it once stood. A portion of the roof was later found floating in the Serpentine, a distance of more than half a kilometer away. Cars and buses burned like embers in the street; a geyser spewed from a fractured water main, cleansing the severed limbs of the dead and wounded. Curiously, the buildings on the north side of the street, the side closest to the car, suffered only moderate structural damage. It was Harrods that bore the brunt of the bomb’s rage. The blast ripped away the building’s facade, exposing its interior like the floors of a doll’s house—bed and bath, furniture and home accessories, fine jewelry and perfume, women’s wear. For a long time afterward, dazed patrons of the Georgian Restaurant stood staring into the shattered street below. The famed tearoom was popular among wealthy women from the oil-rich emirates of the Gulf. Cloaked in their black veils, they looked like ravens perched upon a wire.

The number of casualties proved difficult to calculate. By nightfall the dead would number fifty-two, with more than four hundred wounded, many critically. Several television experts expressed relief—even shock—that the numbers were not far higher. Survivors spoke of two men who had engaged in a desperate attempt to move passersby to safety in the seconds before the bomb exploded. Their efforts were clearly visible in a videotape that found its way onto the BBC. One man, armed, herded pedestrians along the pavement, while the other ripped passengers from a London bus. There was confusion over their identity. Their car, like the bomb car, had been blown to pieces, and neither man came forward, at least not to the public. The Met disowned them; MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service chose not to comment. The CCTV video showed one of the men taking shelter seconds before the bomb detonated, but the second man was last seen running toward a white Ford Fiesta trapped in the snarled traffic along Brompton Road. The occupants of the car, a mother and her young son, were incinerated in the fireball. The man was presumed to be among the dead, too, though his body was never found.

The initial shock and revulsion quickly gave way to anger and an intense search for the perpetrators. Atop the list of possible suspects was ISIS, the extreme jihadist group that had terrorized and beheaded its way to an Islamic caliphate stretching from Aleppo nearly to the gates of Baghdad. The group had vowed to attack the West, and its ranks included several hundred residents of the United Kingdom who had retained their precious British passports. Surely, declared the television experts, ISIS had both the motive and the capability to strike in the heart of London. But an ISIS spokesman denied the group had been involved, as did several other elements in the global Islamic conglomerate of death known as al-Qaeda. A remote Palestinian faction did claim responsibility, as did something called the Martyrs of the Two Holy Mosques. Neither claim was taken seriously.

The one person who could answer the question of responsibility was the woman who had delivered the bomb to its target: Anna Huber, thirty-two years of age, German citizen, last known address Lessingstrasse 11, Frankfurt. But forty-eight hours after the attack, her whereabouts remained a mystery. Attempts to track her movements electronically proved useless. CCTV briefly showed her walking along Brompton Road toward Knightsbridge. But after the detonation, as smoke, debris, and panicked crowds poured into the street, the cameras lost sight of her. No one named Anna Huber had left the country via plane or rail; no one named Anna Huber had crossed another European frontier. Units of the German Bundespolizei raided her apartment and found four uninhabited rooms containing no trace of the person who might have once lived there. Neighbors described her as quiet and introspective. One said she was an international aid worker who spent a great deal of time in Africa. Another said she did something in the travel industry. Or was it journalism?

Responsibility for protecting the British homeland from terrorist attack fell primarily to MI5 and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center. As a result, public and political anger over the Brompton Road bombing was directed largely at Amanda Wallace. The word embattled began to appear before her name in print or whenever it was mentioned on television or radio. Unnamed sources at the Met complained that the Security Service had been “less than forthcoming” with intelligence related to the attack. One senior investigator likened the flow of information from Thames House to Scotland Yard to the advance of a glacier. Later, he clarified his statement, calling cooperation between the two organizations “nonexistent.”

Subsequently, there appeared in the press unflattering accounts of Amanda’s management style. Underlings were said to fear her; numerous senior staff were said to be searching for greener pastures elsewhere at a time when Britain could least afford it. It was written of Amanda that she had a difficult relationship with Graham Seymour, her counterpart at MI6. It was said the two were scarcely speaking, that during one crisis meeting at Number Ten they had refused even to acknowledge each other’s presence. One notable former spook said that relations between Britain’s two intelligence services were at their lowest point in a generation. A respected journalist who covered security issues for the Guardian wrote that “British intelligence was in the midst of a force-ten crisis,” and for once the journalist was correct.