Passenger 13

CHAPTER ONE

It was a sunny June afternoon as the man walked into Selfridges via the Duke Street entrance and made his way through the bustling crowds to the restaurant and champagne bar overlooking the accessory hall.

If anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen a man somewhere in his thirties or early forties, lean, neatly but unobtrusively dressed in a crisp dark suit. He had the bronzed complexion and jet-black hair of a Middle-Easterner; silk shirt, navy tie, gleaming patent leather shoes. The hand holding the calf-leather briefcase wore a large gold ring, but other than that there was nothing too ostentatious or especially noticeable about him.

It was 1.15 and the restaurant was filled with shoppers, tourists, people on lunch breaks. The man took a seat at the edge of the restaurant and slid his briefcase under the table by his feet. When the waiter came he was warm and friendly. From the lunch menu he ordered crispy baby squid with wild garlic mayonnaise, then for a main course a pan-fried fillet of Scottish salmon with kale and shrimps on the side. As he ate his lunch calmly, washing it down with a half bottle of good white wine, he watched the people come and go. A small group of Japanese tourists settled at a table to his left, surrounded by bulging shopping bags; to his right a young couple with their two small children, speaking French and scouring a London travel guide.

The man watched the little boy and girl. He smiled and went on eating. When he’d finished, he looked at his watch, picked up his case, and paid a visit to the bathroom. He was gone three minutes. When he returned, he settled his lunch bill in cash and then left.

And if anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen that he’d left the gents’ without his briefcase.

The man was on the corner of North Audley Street and Green Street when he took out the mobile phone and dialled in the number that sent an electronic signal to the remote detonator. The case was packed with an expertly-prepared combination of RDX nitroamine high explosive and other substances that together were designed to produce a blast greater than a powerful car bomb.

The initial explosion engulfed the restaurant and champagne bar within one hundredth of a second. At its core, the temperature was high enough to vaporise human tissue on contact. Nothing at all would remain of the Japanese tourists, or the French couple, their little boy and girl, the bar staff or anyone else within a radius of thirty metres.

In the next three hundredths of a second the blast filled the ground floor of the department store, obliterating everything in its path. One hundred and sixty-eight shoppers were reduced to tatters of flesh and clothing; scores more were horribly maimed and burned.

The store’s ground floor windows blew out onto Duke Street and Oxford Street. Passers-by were caught in a storm of flying glass. Vehicles skidded and swerved all over the road. Broadsided by the terrible shockwave, a passing bus mounted the opposite pavement and toppled over on its side, flattening fifteen pedestrians as they stood gaping in frozen horror at the smoke pouring from the shattered department store.

In the immediate aftermath of the blast came the moments of stunned, deathly silence.

Then the mayhem began. But before the first wild screams were heard among the devastation of Oxford Street, and long before the racing convoy of emergency services units came wailing in through the panic, the man in the dark suit was already heading fast towards Grosvenor Square and his two colleagues inside the waiting car.