Carver could almost feel the shame rising from the audience, the consciousness of a sin that could never be expunged or atoned for. But he was only half listening to Roberts. Instead, his concentration was focused on the sky above the crowd as he swept his binoculars slowly back and forth, looking out for the drones.
‘But white people were not the only sinners in the slave trade, nor Africans the only victims,’ Roberts continued. ‘No white man had ever ventured close to Lake Chad at the time my folks were seized. They were first enslaved by their fellow-Africans, who probably traded them to Arab merchants along the way. And this trade flowed in more than one direction. Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of white Europeans, many of them from England, were captured by raiders and taken to be sold in the slave markets of North Africa. This is how it has been since the very dawn of mankind. Slavery is the original form of human oppression. And it is still among us, on a greater scale than ever before, right here in the heart of our civilization, right now in the twenty-first century.
‘So it is time we made a stand …’
As the crowd started getting to their feet, clapping and cheering as they rose, Carver shouted at Grantham, ‘How many of these drones are there?’
‘Dunno. Two, I think.’
‘It is time we said, “Enough is enough!”’ Roberts declared.
The crowd noise rose another level as Carver yelled, ‘You sure?’
‘No,’ Grantham replied, having a hard time making himself heard. ‘Why does it matter?’
Roberts’s voice grew stronger still: ‘It is time we put an end to slavery. And that is what I, and you, are going to start doing today.’
Carver’s throat, still suffering the after-effects of Tyzack’s torture, felt as though he’d just swallowed a cocktail of acid and barbed wire and his voice was starting to go. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he rasped. ‘ “Look to the sky.” That’s what Thor meant. Tyzack is using a drone!’
Grantham cupped a hand to his ear and screwed up his face to indicate that he couldn’t hear over the din. Then the noise subsided as the President stood silently again so that he and everyone else could all catch their breaths.
‘It’s the drones,’ Carver repeated. ‘That’s how Tyzack is going to do it.’
‘You sure? They’re not armed or anything,’ said Grantham sceptically. ‘But call it in if you think you’re on to something.’
On stage Lincoln Roberts was moving to the next section of his speech. ‘Pretty soon I’m going to tell you all how I believe we can use the power of our armed forces and the strength and justice of our cause to beat the people-traffickers and slave-traders. But first, I want to show you what slavery looks like today; what form its victims take. I’d like to introduce a very special, very brave young woman whom I had the privilege of meeting earlier today. She comes originally from the land of Armenia. Some of you may have heard or read of her story … how she was betrayed by a member of her own family and handed over to men of unspeakable evil and brutality … how she was bought and sold just like my ancestors were … how she was forced into prostitution against her will; beaten, raped and abused. To understand this young lady’s courage, just know that as we were coming here I showed her the words that I have just spoken to you, words that describe her shame and degradation. Yet she still agreed to stand by me today because she felt that it was her duty so to do - her duty to the women who still suffer as she once did. It is my profound honour to introduce to you … Miss Lara Dashian!’
While Roberts was making his introduction, Samuel Carver was trying to get a message through to Assistant Commissioner Manners. The officer to whom he spoke did not have his name on the official list of the communications system’s approved users. He certainly wasn’t willing to disturb his commanding officer at such a vital point in the day’s proceedings. And anyway, he could not hear, let alone understand what Carver was saying over the cacophony of background noise. In the end, he cut Carver off without a word of warning, still less apology.
On HMS
Daring
one of the seamen operating the Sampson radar displays called over an officer. ‘There’s something odd going on here, sir. It’s the area directly above where the President is giving his speech. I’m seeing three spotter drones.’
‘Yes, what’s the problem?’
‘There are only supposed to be two.’
‘So which one isn’t meant to be there?’
‘I don’t know, sir. The drones don’t carry any kind of identification beacon, they’re too small. They’re only the size of model airplanes, sir.’
‘What’s the altitude?’
‘About one hundred and fifty feet, sir.’
The officer thought the problem through. Even if there was an extra drone, and there was something suspicious about it, they didn’t know which one it was. Even if they did know, they could hardly blast it out of the sky: that close to the ground, the exploding missile would cause a host of casualties in itself.
In the circumstances, he did the sensible thing. He covered his backside, called the ship’s bridge, informed them of the situation and passed the problem up the line.
Damon Tyzack felt just fine about what he was going to do. If there was one thing he really hated, it was pompous, sanctimonious moralizing. This President Roberts was the worst kind of preachy, self-righteous politician. It would really be doing the world a favour to get rid of him. And … ah, perfect! Here came little Miss Dashian, looking very nicely scrubbed-up and respectable. He thought of the whore he’d carried to his hotel bed in her high heels, micro-skirt and painted tart’s face.
You don’t fool me, my dear, Tyzack thought. You’d still be anybody’s for five hundred dirhams.
He looked down at the iPhone. Its screen displayed a map of the Broad Quay area. A moving, flashing dot showed the position of the drone that Geary and his men had launched from the playing fields. It was moving towards the stage, its precise location tracked by a pair of ever-changing co-ordinates at the bottom left of the screen. After yesterday’s practice runs, Tyzack knew precisely where the drone had to be, at what altitude, and at what speed it had to be travelling to ensure the delivery of its payload to the precise spot where the President and the whore were standing.
And now she started to talk. ‘My name is Lara Dashian …’
‘Well, that does it,’ murmured Tyzack, his finger hovering over a digital ‘Fire’ button displayed at the screen’s bottom right.
The drone had settled on a course that aimed it directly at the stage. It was moving in.
Just a few seconds to go now.
Carver had been reduced to screaming down the microphone, ‘Get him off the stage! Get the President off the fucking stage!’ But the people at whom he was shouting either could not or would not hear him.
Lara Dashian had begun to speak. This, Carver realized, was the perfect moment for Tyzack to strike. He must think Christmas had come early, being able to get rid of his prime target, the President, and an inconvenient witness to a past crime.
There was only one way to stop this.
Carver stepped right up close to Grantham and yelled in his ear, ‘Give me your gun!’
Grantham shook his head.
‘Give me the bloody gun!’
Grantham turned and pushed Carver away.
Carver stepped back, away from Grantham’s hand, fractionally adjusted his balance and then sprang forwards. As he moved he swung the heel of his right hand, slamming it into Grantham’s face, just to one side of his chin. The blow caused Grantham’s head to jerk round, wrenching the tendons of his neck and sending his brain bouncing off the inner walls of his skull like a pea in a whistle. Grantham was lifted off his feet and flung back across the roof until his body slammed to a halt against a raised air-conditioning vent.
Carver walked across and removed Grantham’s gun from its shoulder holster. SIS must have taken advice from the Special Forces because the gun was a SIG-Sauer P226, precisely the same model that Carver himself always used. That would make life easier.
Something had to, because what he was about to do was verging on the impossible.
He stepped to the edge of the roof and looked over the parapet to the stage, at least one hundred yards away. The distance was at the very furthest limit of the gun’s effective range. He was shooting downwards, into and across a stiff breeze coming in off the river behind the stage.
But he had no alternative.
Carver raised his gun, aimed it at Lincoln Roberts, President of the United States, and fired.
‘No!’ shouted Damon Tyzack as four gunshots rang out and one of the clear perspex screens that acted both as the President’s autocue and his shield shook with the impact of the bullets.
On the display in front of him the drone was still five seconds away from the point at which the two anti-personnel grenades mounted in place of the conventional surveillance equipment could be released.
Before the sound of the shots had died away, the first Secret Service man had hurtled across the stage, grabbed the President and was manhandling him away. Roberts appeared to be trying to stop him. He was reaching out towards the girl, but the agent, now joined by two of his colleagues, had virtually lifted their charge off his feet and was carrying him to safety.
Two seconds left and Tyzack - his system surging with a toxic cocktail of rage, impotence and overwhelming frustration - thought about firing on the President himself. But his own gun was still holstered. It would take too long to draw, aim and fire. In any case, unless he shot the three Secret Service men up there with him before aiming at their President he would be signing his own death warrant. There was certainly not time to hit all four targets. From now on in it was strictly a damage-limitation exercise.
He could hear the Americans talking to their headquarters.
‘I saw muzzle-flash,’ one was saying.
‘I have a location,’ the other added, virtually simultaneously.
At the front of the crowd, the dignitaries nearest to the stage were desperately trying to get away and their panic had already begun to infect those around them.
Meanwhile the whore had barely moved at all, paralysed by indecision and fear. All was not yet lost. At least he could get her.
Tyzack pressed the red button on his display and the grenades were released. For a fraction of a second, as he launched the attack, his gaze had dropped to the iPhone. When he looked up there was another figure on the stage. A tall, spindly young man in glasses was racing towards the whore. He wrapped his arms around her, held her tight and then leaped off the front of the stage.
An instant later the grenades struck the stage at exactly the point where Lincoln Roberts had been standing. They detonated in a pair of orange and yellow fireballs that blasted superheated fragments of steel shrapnel through the air, shredding the screen that had withstood the gunshots, destroying the backdrop, ripping into the lighting rigs above and to the sides of the speaking area and killing several members of the stage crew, as well as a Secret Service agent who had not yet got offstage.
The main force of the blast, having exploded some ten feet above the ground, went over the heads of the crowd in the immediate vicinity, though several people further back were killed and many more wounded by shrapnel particles that travelled up to two hundred yards from the impact point. Tyzack’s attention, however, was concentrated on the foot of the stage where the whore’s body lay motionless on the ground, next to that of the young man who had tried to rescue her.
For a moment Tyzack felt a brief flutter of hope, a tiny scintilla of optimism amidst the bleak disappointment of the failed mission. But even that shred of good news was taken from him as the whore slowly pulled herself out from under the man’s body, staggered to her feet and then, when she saw that the figure was utterly inert, started screaming with a desperate despair that seemed to Tyzack to echo his own feelings.
Perhaps he should put the silly bitch out of her misery.
There was nothing to stop him shooting her. It was a fiendishly tricky shot but there was no risk from the Secret Service. They knew that their President was safe. Tyzack could always claim to have aimed at a fleeing suspect.
He unholstered his weapon and then stopped as he heard one of the Americans say, ‘I have a visual on the roof from which the shots were fired. There is a man down, repeat a man down. Another man appears to be vacating the area. He is approximately six feet tall, slim to medium build, dark brown hair, wearing civilian clothes: black pants, possibly jeans, and some kind of grey top.’
Carver, thought Tyzack with rancid bitterness.
Forget the whore. It was time to go. Tyzack wasn’t afraid of being caught by any British or American security forces and he certainly wasn’t scared of Carver. But the absolute certainty of Arjan Visar’s displeasure, and its potentially fatal consequences, meant that he needed to disappear. Starting right now.
He walked towards the door that led to the stairway down to the top floor of the building. When he got there he turned and said, ‘Bye, chaps.’
The two Secret Service men turned towards him, an automatic reflex, acknowledging his farewell. Tyzack killed them both with two single headshots. It was time, he decided, that he made sure witnesses were definitely, undeniably dead. Furthermore, it was always a delight, the sort of thing that only a true connoisseur could appreciate, to see the fractional look of surprise on the face of the second of two victims as they realized what had just happened to their companion an instant before it happened to them, too. And finally, he was seriously pissed off, and the sheer pleasure of inflicting death took the edge, at least, off his anger.