Private London

Chapter 68

The line went dead.

I walked around my desk and sat down, pulling my keyboard towards me and angling my monitor so Del Rio and Sam could see it.

I opened my mailbox and there were three new messages.

Two of them were unrelated but the third was from a similar random numbers and letters address as the first YouTube message I had received. The subject line read Last Chance Saloon.

I opened the email and sure enough the message was the same as the first – another hyperlink to a YouTube address.

I clicked on the hyperlink and it opened to a dark screen in the video panel. I clicked on the play icon and after a second or so it faded up on the same room as before. This time, however, Hannah Shapiro was sitting on a chair. She was still wearing the same black underwear, and her face was scrubbed clean of any make-up. She looked like the girl I had first met. Young, vulnerable and very afraid.

She had good reason to be.

What was different this time was that she had explosives strapped around her body. Wires connecting the various packages, suicide bomber-style. Rope hung again from one wrist and the other hand held a typewritten note.

She looked at the camera, her voice trembling.

‘They want you to know,’ she said, ‘that this bomb I am wearing can be triggered remotely. Any attempt to do anything other than what you are instructed to do and it will be detonated. Likewise if you attempt to deliver fake diamonds. They will be examined and if they are not genuine the device will be detonated. If police are there again as they were this morning, the device will be detonated.’

She let the paper fall to the floor as tears welled in her large, terrified eyes.

‘Please help me,’ she added in a desperate whisper.

The screen faded to blackness and I rewound the video and paused it. Looking at the devices strapped to her body.

‘They look genuine to you?’ asked Sam.

‘Yup,’ I replied.

‘We have to tell the police, then.’

‘Can’t do that,’ Del Rio said softly.

Sam held his hands up. ‘We can’t let a walking bomb get on the London Underground.’

‘We go to the police and they’ll kill her,’ I said to Sam.

‘What is it they call it – collateral damage?’ he persisted.

‘They’re not going to do anything, Sam. They want the money, is all. It’s business.’

Del Rio worked his jaw muscles again. ‘We have to protect the client,’ he said. ‘That’s our job here. We save the girl.’