Invasion (11 page)

It was time. The final minutes seemed to have stretched into hours, but now the moment had finally arrived. Target One, bomb armed and pressure switch in hand, eased the UPS van away from the kerb.

At Parliament Square, the armoured black Jaguar
carrying Anna Beecham, flanked by her two-vehicle police escort, swept past a mob of placard-waving protesters. Anna tried not to look but couldn’t help herself, saw the obscene hand gestures, heard the muffled filth that poured from the protesters’ twisted mouths beyond the bulletproof glass. What had she ever done to these people? She had asked herself that question a thousand times. There was no answer, other than the fact that they hated her for reasons of their own.

As they turned into Whitehall, Anna knew she’d made the right decision in going to Greenwich. It’d
felt good to get out, to escape Westminster
and have a civilised day with decent people, meeting the parents and children. But now they were back in town, her raw nerves were exposed once again. They turned left into Whitehall, and Anna noticed that the driver had eased off the accelerator
as they approached the black gates of Downing Street. Even her protection officers were glad to get behind that formidable barrier these days.

She was looking forward to a shower and a few moments with Harry before this evening’s dinner. They’d take a holiday soon, she decided, when Parliament goes into recess, perhaps the villa in Italy for some Mediterranean sun. Harry could certainly use a break and Anna longed to leave the pressure cooker of Britain behind them for a while. Or maybe longer, God willing. She reached down for her handbag
as the Jaguar slowed
for the turn into Downing Street. She pulled out her cell phone, tapped the text message and hit send:
I’m home xx
.

Target One turned the wheel to his left and touched the accelerator, cutting across the westbound
traffic. Dead ahead, across the wide expanse of Whitehall, a three-vehicle convoy was turning into the security gates of Downing Street. A gift from Allah, Target One realised. If he was quick he might be able to get in behind them, drive the bomb into Downing Street itself...

In a moment of cold clarity, Target One realised the enormity of the task he was about to undertake and it filled him with an aching pride. Gone were the nerves and the shaking hands. The fear he’d felt only minutes before had slipped away, like the removal of a heavy coat. A calm descended upon him then, a calm unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Or would again. Muttering
his last prayer, he floored the accelerator and powered the vehicle across the street, a cacophony of angry car horns trailing in his wake.

At the entrance to Downing Street, Anna saw the police constable on duty take a few steps towards the security post to activate the gate release. A sudden blast of car horns brought his head around and Anna turned too, her heart rate suddenly increasing. Something was happening behind them, something that had the police officers around the Jaguar scattering in all directions.

‘Get that fucking gate open!’ Matt Goodge suddenly roared from the passenger front seat, a pistol in his hand. Anna nearly leapt out of her skin and the next moment she was dragged to the floor of the limousine by the police officer next to her, his weight pinning her to the carpet. Rifle shots echoed across Whitehall and Anna shrieked involuntarily. She buried her face deeper into the carpet, her hands covering her ears as the sounds of screaming and shouting, of gunfire, and the growing roar of a vehicle engine tore away the thin veil of composure she’d struggled to maintain for so long. She drew her knees up and closed her eyes, the litany whispered through trembling lips.

‘Please God, I can’t take this any more. I can’t take this anymore…’

Target One had kept as low as possible
on his final journey, peering just over the dashboard to keep the truck straight. The bullets had cracked through his windscreen but all had missed. Death was seconds away. He sat up then, flooring the accelerator
as hard as he could. He had not failed! He screamed, a scream of pure exultation that was cut short as a bullet took him through the throat. Target One’s
head snapped backwards, his body slum
ping to his left. The pressure—
switch dropped from his hand.

The van hit the rear of Anna Beecham’s Jaguar and exploded in a white-hot blast. The detonation pulverised buildings, cars, buses, people, shredding everything
with a million shards of metal and a wave of heat and fire that punched across Whitehall, destroying everything in its path. Smoke and dust blanketed the area and alarm klaxons began to wail over the shattered rooftops, battling for supremacy with screams, alarms and sirens.

A massive crater, several feet deep and filling rapidly with water from a cracked main, marked the spot where Target One had died achieving his deadly goal. Everything around it was gone, the Cenotaph cut in two by the blast, its flags and wreaths scattered and charred to dust. In Downing Street itself, every window was blown out and a large part of the façade of numbers ten and eleven had caved inwards, exposing the shattered interiors. Roofs had collapsed into the street, black railings twisted and buckled. There
was rubble everywhere and smoke from scores of fires billowed into the sky.

One of the Prime Minister’s domestic staff staggered
out into the street, blood streaming from several wounds, his once-white shirt blackened and shredded. He looked around at the devastation, his eyes wide in shock. He staggered a few more steps, determined to get help, but his legs failed him and he collapsed onto the smoking rubble. He dragged himself into an upright position and sat there, his legs splayed out before him. No matter, help would be here shortly.

No sooner had the thought entered his head when the alarm klaxons that split the early evening air with their ghastly wail suddenly fell silent.

Harry picked himself up off the kitchen floor, grimacing in pain. The palms of his hands were scalded where a pot of steaming coffee had hit the floor tiles and blood ran down his face from a gash on his skull. He felt dizzy and nauseous and his ears rang with a persistent, high-pitched
tone.

He looked around what was left of the kitchen. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and the wall that overlooked Downing Street was completely
gone. Harry scrambled backwards.
Exposed power cables swung
lazily from the shattered ceiling and roof tiles scraped down from above, sailing past the huge hole and crashing to the street below. The power was out and he could smell gas. That wasn’t good. Harry’s first thought was a gas blast.

His mind reeled as he tried to piece together the last few moments. He’d been pouring a coffee when a huge flash had lit up the kitchen, followed by an ear-splitting bang. Harry had felt the floor drop away only to rush back up and meet him, then the air filled with choking dust. The contents of the coffee pot had washed over his hands causing him to howl in agony, yet curiously the pain helped him to focus.

As the ringing in his head faded, he became aware of the sound of breaking glass and falling debris. He thought he heard sirens, too. Getting slowly to his feet, Harry grabbed a tea towel from the shattered kitchen counter and clamped it to his head to stem the blood flow. He could still smell gas. That must have been the cause of the explosion.

He stumbled out of the kitchen and into the hallway where the air was thick with dust. He picked up the wall phone. Nothing. He made his way out of the apartment and headed downstairs, staggered by the damage around him. The whole building seemed to have taken a terrible hammering, as if some huge hand had picked it up and shaken it violently. Nearly every photograph that lined the staircase had been ripped from the walls and Harry’s feet crunched on the broken glass that littered the carpet.

As he stepped over more debris on the first floor landing, he heard someone coming up the stairs and David Fuller stumbled into view. Harry stared, open-mouthed, in shock. Fuller’s
normally immaculate appearance
was gone. His face was covered in black soot and his thick, well-groomed hair was almost completely singed off. What hair he had left stood up in small clumps across a skull that bled from various cuts. His suit was shredded, a shoe was missing and his left foot was covered in blood. When he saw Harry, a mixture of relief and pain swept over his face. Harry was rooted to the spot.

‘Jesus Christ, David, what happened?’

Fuller tried to speak, then coughed deeply for several seconds, steadying himself on the banister. Harry rushed to his side and grabbed his elbow. He saw blood on his lips.

‘Take it easy. We need to get you some help.’

Fuller, gasping for breath, shook his head. ‘Not yet, Harry. First we have to get you to safety.’

Harry heard more shouts downstairs. Several black-clad police officers brandishing automatic weapons had entered the shattered lobby of Number Ten. One of them looked up and saw Harry on the staircase above. He charged up towards them.

‘Sergeant Morris, Met police,’ he panted. ‘There’s been a bomb, at the entrance to Downing Street.’ He tapped the radio clamped to his Kevlar vest.
‘Afraid that’s all I know. All comms are down.’

Harry was dumbfounded. A bomb? Where the hell did all this come from? And where was Anna? She’d texted him only…

‘Jesus Christ! Anna!’

Harry pushed passed him and charged down the stairs, running out into Downing Street. What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks. The security gates at the end of Downing Street had simply disappeared, along with large corners of both the Cabinet and Foreign Office. On a devastated floor above, a large conference table hung by two of its legs from severed timber joists. As Harry watched, the timbers groaned and gave way, sending the table crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust and rubble.

A gigantic crater marked the entrance to the street and water from a broken main arced into the air, showering
a curtain of mist halfway across Whitehall. In the surrounding buildings, fires were beginning to take hold and the road beneath Harry’s feet was buried under a carpet of rubble. Amongst the debris he could make out a body, crushed beneath a collapsed wall. He turned away in revulsion – and saw the wreckage of a car buried in a wall at the far end of Downing Street. Harry stumbled towards it, ignoring the shouts of the police officers behind him. All that was left of the Jaguar was the front axle and a blackened engine block, overturned and half buried in rubble, the remaining wheel with its distinctive emblem still alight and dripping burning rubber. Was it hers? Was Anna inside?

She was gone. He knew it then, felt it deep inside; a sudden, gaping hole in his heart that hadn’t been there before. I’m home, his cell had chirped only moments before the blast. He reached out towards the twisted metal, but Morris and another police officer grabbed his arms and pulled him back from the flames. Morris’ face was an inch from Harry’s.

‘Prime Minister!’ he shouted. ‘We have to get you out of here, now! No arguments! We may be under attack!’ As if to emphasise his words, a distant explosion echoed around Whitehall, followed by several gunshots.

Harry stared uncomprehendingly
at Morris. ‘What the hell’s happening?’

‘No idea, but we have to get off the street! Let’s go!’

Harry found himself being
bundled
back to
Number Ten. Across Whitehall, he saw
the façade
of the MOD
building, windows broken and stonework peppered by the blast. He flinched
as another volley of gunfire split the air and then they were back inside the remains of Number Ten.

He felt breathless, numb, no fear, no despair, just numb. First a car bomb and now more gunfire. A coup, his inner voice warned him, this must be some sort of coup, and Harry shuddered at the thought. This wasn’t the way things were done in Britain. This was a civilised country, where policies were robustly debated on national TV, where people queued quietly to cast their votes in libraries, schools and church halls.

But things had changed, he knew that.
The level of anger across the country building daily, the public’s patience wearing thin, his own administration failing to deliver on a number of fronts. Is that what they were witnessing here, a new form of British rebellion? Harry didn’t think it possible. Surely things hadn’t got that bad, that quickly?

As the police officers
formed a protective cordon around him, Harry wondered that if a coup was really in progress then who was behind it? Who out there, amongst his many political rivalries, amongst an angry and desperate electorate, would possess the means and the motivation to engage in such a deadly course of action? To kill so many? To kill his wife?

Harry clamped a blood-covered hand across his mouth to stifle the wail of despair that threatened to erupt from his throat.

Geoffrey Cooper regained consciousness slowly, his vision wavering between darkness and a blurred nightmare. Cooper
preferred the
darkness.
It
was somehow warmer, more comforting, but a sharp pain in his lower abdomen was denying him the beckoning shadows. He gradually opened his eyes, cuffing away the dust that clogged them. After several confused moments, he realised he was lying face down on the floor of his private office. How on earth did he get here? Had he fallen? He shifted his head around to the right. There was his computer screen, the one he’d thrown earlier, lying in pieces on the floor. There was something about that screen, a suspicion that it was somehow key to his present condition.

Slowly, painfully, he rolled over onto his back. The ceiling above was scarred and pitted, the large crystal chandelier that hung from the centre of the room gone. Cooper raised his head slightly. The wall was gone too. How could that be? In its place was a huge, jagged hole through which he could see all the way across Whitehall. Above him, the damage reached up into the shattered ceiling where the plaster had been blasted away and large, wooden floor joists hung dangerously low. A few feet away, the floorboards were torn and ripped at crazy angles, creating long, jagged splinters.

Very much like the one in his stomach, thought Cooper. A thick wooden stake, about eight inches long, had penetrated his abdomen close to his left hip. It was bent all the way over, presumably where he had lain on his stomach in the gentle embrace of unconsciousness. Cooper was too dazed to be horrified. Instead, he looked at the wound with a detached fascination. There didn’t seem to be much blood, which was good. Blood was so difficult to remove and the shirt was hand-made from Saville Row. And I’ll probably need a tetanus shot, too, he realised.

It bloody well hurt, but the pain ebbed and flowed and Cooper briefly considered pulling the stake out. He’d
seen it done in movies and suchlike, the hero extracting whatever sharp implement had skewered him, normally followed by some sort of wisecrack. But this wasn’t the movies. Cooper gently unbuttoned his shirt and opened it around his plump waist. Ugh. The skin around the wound was a deep bluish-purple and from the wound itself seeped a steady flow of thick dark blood. Cooper felt sick. No, he’d better not attempt any amateur surgery. Better leave it to the experts.

He let his head rest back onto the rubble-strewn carpet. There was another pain too, niggling at the back of his mind; a bad memory that bubbled just under the surface. Something
to do with his computer…

Al
eema's message
. That’s when he’d first felt the pain, far worse than the wood in his gut. Cooper closed his eyes, trying to recall the details that led to this nightmare. Dammit, what was it? He slowly opened his eyes and there it was, just a few feet away, lying amongst the rubble. Its slim, metallic case was cracked and covered in dust, but it was unmistakable. His computer terminal. That’s when Cooper saw it, the small device plugged into the back. With considerable effort, he crawled across and removed it, studying its tiny black case with a suspicious eye. No asset tag, no serial number or manufacturer’s stamp. He’d never seen it before, the use of such hardware being forbidden in government departments.

Ali
.

It had to be. He was the obvious suspect. The device was some sort of bug, he knew that now. Whatever
its intended use, Ali’s call and Aleema’s gut-wrenching movie had confirmed the success of whatever espionage mission they were on. Buried beneath the thick layers of his ego, Cooper had half suspected he was being used, the odd fleeting thought that had piqued his conscience, but the promise of a life with Aleema had smothered his better judgement. At the CIG meeting a short while ago he’d
berated the others, treating their views with contempt. Now look. My God, what a naïve fool he’d
been
.
A stupid, naïve fool. All this devastation,
somehow it was all his fault.
There isn’t much time,
Ali had warned, or something like that. That information had to be important to someone.

He could hear the wail of sirens but they sounded a long way off. Where the hell were his staff, the police and ambulances? This was Whitehall, for God’s sake, filled with important people like him. Surely they should have responded by now? Cooper wasn’t certain how long he’d been lying there, but it seemed like quite a while. Where
was everybody?

To hell with it, he’d
find help himself. Maybe he could make it the few yards to Downing Street. Harry had to be told, of course, about Aleema and that greasy bastard Ali, about Sharm El Sheikh and the bug in his computer. And he’d get medical help too, get this awful piece of wood removed. It was really beginning to hurt now.

Cooper leaned against the wall, pushing himself to his feet. His head swam and he suddenly felt the bile rise in his throat. He leaned over and vomited, splashing a late luncheon over his shoes. When he had finished retching, he wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. Now, that can’t be good. Blood in his vomit. Better get a move on.

He made it to the landing and staggered down the stairs, gripping the handrail fiercely with both hands. There didn’t seem to be much damage down here, or even in the small courtyard that led out into King Giles Street, but he didn’t see a single person. He looked at his watch, but the face was cracked and the hour hand rattled loosely inside. Dammit. A Tag Hauer too, bloody expensive. He squinted to focus, swaying
on wobbly legs. Well, it was gone six, anyway. Most people would have left for home by now. Good. The fewer casualties, the better.

He stumbled out into King Giles Street, through the arched portico and past the deserted security gate. He turned left and shuffled the few yards to the junction of Whitehall, where he leaned heavily against the white stone façade. He looked down and discovered his trousers were wet with blood. Fear gripped him then. He might actually die if he didn’t get help soon. He raised his head and, despite the growing pain, Cooper’s mouth dropped open as his eyes took in the full scale of the devastation around him.

The Cenotaph was cut in two and there was a sea of rubble that stretched across Whitehall. He looked up above him, to his first floor study where he had been lying moments before. He could see the huge hole and his blackened ceiling beyond, the wrecked
floors above his own. The whole front of the building had been blasted away. Further up the street, a deep crater marked the entrance to Downing Street and a burst pipe sprayed water high into the air. Falling masonry from surrounding buildings rumbled and collapsed into the street in clouds of dust. Cooper could see fires too, crackling and spitting amongst the rubble. A bomb, a huge one, he realised. Cooper’s head spun with the enormity of the scene. For God’s sake Geoffrey, what have you done?

Summoning his failing strength, he pushed himself off the wall and headed towards Downing Street, veering into the road to avoid the worst of the damage and the falling masonry. He picked his way amongst the rubble, stumbling over the debris, but the effort was proving too much and he fell several times. He vomited again, only this time the fluid seemed more like blood than anything else. It took Cooper nearly every ounce of strength just to stand upright. He had to get to Downing Street, but the pain was really starting to take hold now and he was feeling very weak. Maybe he’d take a quick rest, gather his strength.

He sat down heavily, leaning against the remains of the Cenotaph, and looked
across the road. What little he could see of Downing Street was in bad shape. There were fires down there too and he couldn’t see a single person moving. And those lifeless rags there, they looked like bodies. When all this was over, when the dead had been buried and Whitehall rebuilt, when all the investigations had been completed, his reputation would be in utter ruins. He would be branded everything: traitor, murderer, lovesick puppy. Spy. But he was beyond caring now.

He felt faint and let his body slump sideways, lying prone against the base of the monument. Even being here, in this spot, felt wrong. The Cenotaph was a monument erected to commemorate those who’d died in the First World War, an annual focus for solemn remembrance and national pride. Not a place for selfish, reckless fools like Geoffrey Cooper.

His eyes clouded over and the darkness called him again. He felt relieved. He’d succumb this time. The pain in his stomach had gone, to be replaced by the pain of remorse, betrayal… and unrequited love.

He
opened his eyes and he
held her again, under the cool canopy of the oasis, her beautiful face, her warm smile, a smile that embraced and caressed him. She slipped away from his arms and he reached out after her. She laughed, dancing from his grasp as she flitted between the trees. He chased after her but she pulled further away, her voice echoing amongst the palms. Then
she was lost in the shadows.

Cooper looked up through the treetops. It was night, but a night so dark that it momentarily frightened him. There were no stars and no moon, and the darkness seemed to be descending like a black ceiling, swallowing the tops of the palms
as it sank towards him. Then it swallowed him completely and suddenly he didn’t feel afraid anymore. The darkness felt warm and comforting, a place where he could forget everything
that had ever been,
except the love of a beautiful
woman
.

He closed his eyes and then there was nothing.