Dead if You Don’t

7

Saturday 12 August

15.00–16.00

I’m a bomber! Uh-huh! Boom!

It felt good to be wanted!

Ylli Prek had been told by his mother that his first name meant ‘star’ in Albanian and his last name came from a freedom fighter.

That’s what he was! A freedom fighter with a bomb!

But for the moment, at 3.30 p.m., as he walked away from the train station at the Amex football stadium and across the busy concourse, he was Ylli Prek, football fan. Slung from his shoulder was an elaborate Sony FS7 camera, the kind professionals used.

Although it wasn’t a camera at all, of course.

It was a bomb. Filled with nails, bolts and ball bearings. The explosive charge packed inside would be enough, he had been told, to kill at least forty people all around him. And to injure at least one hundred, if not more.

He had in his wallet a ticket for a seat in the South Stand. Quite a lot of adults and children should be killed or maimed, if all went well.

‘I’m a bomber, I’m a bomber!’ he sang under his breath. A small, thin, bespectacled man of twenty-three, with a beaky nose and a shapeless mop of prematurely thinning dark hair that looked like a bad toupee, squashed beneath a red baseball cap. He strode along in a tracksuit with baggy trousers, with a gait that was a lot more confident than he felt inside.

I’m a star. I’m a freedom fighter!

I’ve been paid more money than I could ever have dreamed of. My mother will be so happy when she receives it!

This beat the crap out of working in the car wash for the past eighteen months. Wiping, polishing, vacuuming. Damp, cold, constantly numb hands. Shit pay. Shit accommodation, four of them in a single room.

Now I’m a bomber!

Oh yes. Uh-huh!

I have status! I’m a somebody.