Ultimatum

Three

08.03

Akhtar Mohammed pulled up on double yellow lines several yards past his destination. The traffic had been bad and he was three minutes late. He still couldn’t believe what was happening to him. It was like being stuck right in the middle of a nightmare.

He stared at the backpack on the passenger seat next to him, desperate to know what was inside, but not daring to look. He was scared out of his wits. He just wanted to get this thing delivered so he could get on with his life again, but he also knew it might contain something bad — something that could get him into even more trouble.

He cursed himself for ever getting involved with Mika. He cursed himself for-

The BlackBerry he’d been given started ringing, the ringtone a blaring horn. Akhtar spent a few seconds trying to find it with shaking hands before pulling it out of his back pocket. He pressed the green answer button.

‘Where the hell are you?’ demanded the gunman. ‘I told you that you needed to be there by eight o’clock.’

‘I’m here now,’ said Akhtar. ‘I’ve just parked.’

‘Tell me the street, and the name of the shop next door to the right.’

Akhtar looked round hurriedly. ‘I’m on Wilton Road. Just behind Victoria Station. There’s a hairdresser’s to the right of the coffee shop.’

‘Good. Now I want you to stay on the phone while you go inside the coffee shop with the backpack. And I want you to act completely normally.’

Keeping the phone to his ear, Akhtar picked up the backpack with his free hand and pulled it over one shoulder. ‘OK,’ he said, getting out of his car and walking unsteadily over to the coffee shop door. His legs felt weak and he could hear his heart beating in his chest as he stood to one side to let two smartly dressed young women in the middle of a lively conversation come out with their takeaway coffees.

‘I’m going in now,’ he continued, squeezing through the door with his rucksack, the heat and noise of the place hitting him right in the face. The place was busy with commuters ordering their caffeine fixes, but he hardly saw them. They were just a blur.

‘Can you see a woman in her early forties with shoulder-length hair sitting anywhere? She’ll either be on her own or sitting with a man with a grey beard.’

Akhtar scanned the room, forcing himself to concentrate on faces as he slowly approached the queue of people at the counter. He saw two people in the far corner. The woman had her back to him and appeared to be talking intently to the man, who had a deeply troubled expression on his face. ‘Yes, I can see them.’

‘I want you to take a seat as close to the woman as possible.’

‘You don’t want me to say anything to her?’

‘Just do as you’re told. Take a seat … nice and close.’

It was those three words that set off alarm bells. Nice and close.

It hit him then. He was carrying a bomb. He had to be. As soon as he found a seat close to the woman, the gunman would detonate it somehow — Akhtar had seen it done on all those TV shows — killing him, the woman, and everyone around them. And he, Akhtar, would end up getting the blame, because he would have been the one carrying the bomb, heaping even more shame on his family.

He looked over at the woman. She looked totally normal. White, attractive, well bred, with expensive clothes — and he wondered if he was wrong. Whether he was just being paranoid.

And then the woman turned his way and their eyes met, and even from twenty feet away he could see the fear and tension in them. He turned away quickly.

‘Are you sitting down yet?’ demanded the gunman.

‘I’m trying to find a seat. It’s crowded in here.’

‘How close are you?’

It was a bomb. It had to be.

‘Not too far, but she’s sitting near the counter and there are a lot of people in the way.’

‘Get as close as you can.’

The fear was so intense now that Akhtar could hardly walk. If he stayed here, he died. No question. If he put the bomb down and tried to evacuate the place, the man on the end of the phone would detonate it, and he still died, along with everyone else. And if he hung up, he also died. He was completely trapped, and only seconds from death. He had to make a decision.

Joining the end of the queue at the counter, he put the backpack down on the floor then, looking round briefly to check that no one was watching him, he walked towards the coffee shop door, making way for a young student couple coming the other way, trying not to look at their faces, knowing that he could be sentencing them to death.

He reached the door. ‘OK. I’m just about to sit down.’

‘How far away?’

‘Five feet,’ he replied, holding the phone against his jacket to block out the sounds of the street as he stepped outside and immediately broke into a run.

When Martha Crossman caught the Asian man with the backpack staring at her, she thought the worst, but as he turned away and joined the queue she told herself to stop being so foolish. No one knew she was here. And even if they did, they wouldn’t kill her in a public place.

She turned back to Philip Wright. His demeanour had changed since she’d told him about her secret. Beforehand he’d seemed reassuring yet cool, as if he was half-expecting to be wasting his time coming here. Now, the tension cutting across his features matched hers.

‘You’re talking about murder here, Mrs Crossman,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to have to talk to the police immediately. I can’t help you with this.’

‘I don’t want to involve the police yet. Not until I’m absolutely sure that what I’ve discovered is actually what I think it is.’

‘OK,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘I can understand that. And it’s something I can authenticate very quickly. But I’m going to need to see it.’

She motioned towards the handbag on the seat next to her. ‘It’s in there.’

He frowned. ‘You’ve brought it here with you?’

‘I wanted you to see it as soon as possible. Listen,’ she added, looking round, unable to see the Asian man any longer, ‘I’m feeling a bit claustrophobic. Can we go somewhere quieter and more private? Please?’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’

Martha felt faint, the need to vomit even stronger than it had been when she’d first come in here, and she stood up unsteadily.

He stood up too. ‘Are you OK?’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go to my car. I’m parked up the road.’

She needed no encouragement. The room was spinning, and she could feel the beginnings of a panic attack — the first she’d had in years. With Wright holding on to her she hurried towards the fresh air and salvation.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a voice behind them. ‘You haven’t paid for your coffee.’

Martha turned back towards the waitress at just the moment the bomb exploded, the force of the blast caving in the windows and the Plexiglas counter and sending jagged projectiles hurtling through the enclosed space at more than two hundred miles per hour.

The bomb — five kilos of PETN plastic explosive surrounded by the same weight in assorted shrapnel — was designed to rip to shreds everything in its immediate proximity.

Neither Martha nor Philip Wright had time to react, or even understand what was happening. Wright was struck in the left eye by an industrial railway bolt that immediately pierced his brain, killing him near enough instantaneously, while Martha saw a single, all-consuming white flash, heard a roar like a great wave crashing over her, and then a sixteen-inch-by-ten-inch shard of Plexiglas that until a second earlier had been covering the muffin cabinet sliced effortlessly through her neck as if it was butter, taking her head, and her secret, with it.