Ultimatum

Twenty-four

15.00

The journalist on the Sky News desk sounded bored and irritated as he answered the phone.

‘This is Islamic Command, responsible for the attacks on the Crusader forces and those who support them,’ said Cain through the voice disguiser. ‘We are still waiting for a response from the British government to our demands. Do they not think their people are worth protecting?’

‘And can you repeat your demands?’

Cain was pleased by the note of panic that had now crept into the journalist’s voice. ‘If they do not comply by eight p.m. tonight, we promise to launch an attack so ferocious it will make your Godless country quake.’

The journalist started to speak again but Cain had already ended the call. He switched off the phone, removed the SIM card, and threw it into a bush, before walking a few yards further through the copse of trees and chucking the phone into a tangle of brambles.

The trees opened up in front of him, and he stood at the top of Hampstead Heath, looking down past the rolling parkland to the city that stretched out as far as the eye could see below him, its iconic structures — the Gherkin, the London Eye, the Shard — all clearly visible as they rose up from the mass of buildings around them. Up here it all looked so peaceful, but down there he knew it was chaos as the security forces desperately tried to hunt down the men behind the terrorist attacks that morning.

So far, the government’s only reaction to the attacks was to condemn them utterly, send their sympathies to the victims and their families, and repeat their standard mantras that the British government never negotiated with terrorists, and that Londoners should carry on regardless, not allowing the terrorists to disrupt their lives. Although the Prime Minister was supposedly chairing a meeting of Cobra — the government’s emergency reaction committee — he’d left it to the Commissioner of the Met to field questions from the nation’s media.

So, they were reacting in exactly the way Cain had predicted they would. In other words, everything was going according to plan.

He took out another of his phones. It was time to call Brozi and set up the meeting.