Siege

Three

15.25

THE WESTFIELD CENTRE in Shepherd’s Bush is London’s largest and one of its newest shopping malls. It opened for business on 30 October 2008 and contains 255 stores spread over 150,000 square metres of retail space – equivalent to thirty football pitches.

An underground car park with 4,500 spaces is situated directly beneath the centre, and although there were still more than five weeks to go until Christmas, spaces were already few and far between as Dragon drove the white Ford Transit van on to the car park’s upper level. By a stroke of luck he managed to find a space next to the pedestrian walkway, barely fifty metres from the Waitrose Customer Collection Point, and the entrance to the lifts. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a harassed-looking woman in expensive designer clothes unload two pre-school boys from her brand-new 4 × 4, and shove them into a double-pushchair. One of the boys was struggling in her grip, and the woman’s expression was one of anger and frustration as she shouted at them, although she was too far away for Dragon to hear what she was saying.

He watched her for a moment, wondering what pleasure she derived from her material wealth. Very little, he suspected. That was the problem with these people. They led joyless, empty lives, and because they’d had it so damn easy they’d ended up becoming soft, fat and lazy.

In the back of the van, hidden from view behind a Tottenham Hotspur flag, were sixteen 47-kilo cylinders of propane gas piled on top of one another in groups of four. Wedged between the cylinders and the front seats of the van was a rucksack containing a specially modified mobile phone set to vibrate, a battery pack, and a 3-kilo lump of C4 plastic explosives. When a call was made to the phone, the vibrations would complete the electrical circuit, thereby setting off the detonator and igniting the C4, which in turn would ignite the propane gas, causing a huge fireball.

Casualties wouldn’t be particularly high since the bomb would only hit those people passing by, either on their way to or coming back from the shops, and the blast wouldn’t have the force to cause any damage within the centre itself. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to cause panic and chaos among the civilians in the immediate area, and to stretch and divide the resources of the security services so that they’d be less quick to react when the main operation got under way.

Dragon watched the harassed woman as she wheeled her kids down the walkway, and he wondered if she, or they, would be among the casualties. He hoped not. He didn’t like being able to put individual faces to the names of victims. But he’d always been a believer in fate. If your number was up, then it was up, and that was just the way it was. The world wasn’t fair. It never had been, and despite the efforts of at least some of mankind, it never would be. All Dragon could do was protect himself, and he was sure he’d done that pretty effectively. The number plates on the van were false. He’d changed them en route here for another set of false plates so that the police wouldn’t be able to use the ANPR system to trace the van’s journey. He’d also changed his appearance for the numerous CCTV cameras that would be filming him as he moved through the building. His skin had turned a deep olive thanks to the tanning agent, coloured contact lenses had turned his eyes from grey to dark brown, and his hair was far longer and darker than usual. To counteract the facial recognition software available to the security forces, he’d also changed the shape of his face. His nose was bigger and more crooked, thanks to the highlighted putty base that had been added to it; padding had pushed his cheeks out, making them look fatter; and a prominent, raised birthmark the size of a fifty-pence piece had appeared on his upper cheek just below the left eye. If any witnesses were asked to describe him later, it would be the birthmark they remembered.

Success, he knew, could only come through intensive planning. They’d planned this whole thing down to the last detail, and Dragon was experiencing a heady mixture of confidence and excitement that was all too rare these days as he got out of the van and joined the thin but steady stream of shoppers heading into retail nirvana.