A Gentleman's Game Read online

  “Now!” he screamed. “Get out!” And to urge them, like cattle, he fired again, and again, and there was screaming now, and the passengers were scrambling over each other, pulling on one another to make for the door at the far end of the car. He fired into them, hitting a woman he thought was moving too slowly.

  The car emptied, and the train was still swaying, speeding toward the station.

  He turned to the closed-circuit camera in the corner above him and put a bullet into it, knowing that it had already witnessed what he had done. If all was according to plan, the conductor was already contacting the station, and the station, in turn, had begun its emergency response. The evacuation would have begun, the police been notified, Armed Response Units dispatched.

  All to plan.

  With his free hand, he reached into the backpack and removed the first bottle, turning and throwing it down the length of the carriage. It shattered on a metal handrail, glass bursting, petrol splashing, its scent sudden and almost sweet. He took the second bottle and threw it against the conductor’s door, where it smashed. Petrol spattered on his pants and arms, sloshed across the floor, saturating the clothes of the wounded man at his feet.

  He heard the door from the adjoining carriage open, and he fired without looking, not caring who, or even if, he hit. The gun was almost empty, but the gun had never been the weapon, only a tool. Even the petrol was only a tool.

  As he had been taught, he was the weapon.

  He reached into the backpack a final time for the box of matches. He tucked the pistol into his pants and opened the box quickly. The door at the far end opened again, and he knew they were coming to stop him, seeing this moment as their opportunity, or perhaps realizing what would happen next. He fumbled the matchbox in his excitement, the wooden sticks spilling onto the floor. He heard cursing and shouting, but it didn’t matter, he had a match in his hand now, and with a stroke it was alive, and he let it fall.

  The air around him moved, heated, and he saw flame race over the floor of the car, eating the petrol, taking purchase, growing hotter. The man at his feet made a noise as he caught on fire, and he glanced down to see that his own clothes had also caught, felt the fire climbing his body. He looked down the length of the carriage, saw that the flames now held the others at bay, felt the flames sear his skin as his shirt caught.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw the blackness of the tunnel open to the harsh light of the station.

  He pulled the gun from his waist, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  •

  It happened again three minutes later, on the Bakerloo Line, as the train pulled into Piccadilly Circus.

  •

  And again, seven minutes after that, on the Northern Line, at King’s Cross.

  •

  When the final numbers were in, the death toll stood at three hundred and seventy-two. Very few of these fatalities came from direct contact with the terrorists, all three of whom had used essentially the same technique: the gun as the instrument of terror, to empty the car and to buy time; the petrol as the primary mechanism of attack, to set the trains aflame and to force them to stop on the tracks.

  As anticipated, the Underground suffered from not one but two weaknesses, and the terrorists had exploited both. The first was that, at any given time on the tube, there were more trains in motion than there were stations to receive them. A station closure, therefore, or an instance of track blockage would result in multiple trains stacking up between stations. If those trains were then forced to evacuate their passengers, the evacuees faced walks of varying lengths through the tunnels until they could reach appropriate access back to street level. With most of the tunnels one hundred feet or more beneath street level, it made for quite a trek.

  In and of itself not life-threatening, but certainly an added complication for riders and rescue teams, should the situation ever arise.

  It was the second weakness that made the situation not simply life-threatening but a death trap. The Underground had no mechanical means to circulate air, fresh or otherwise. No air-conditioning. No fans. Air moved through the tunnels and the stations as a result of the movement of the trains, forcing dead air up and out at stops and other ventilation points, sucking new air into its wake.

  While the cars on the Underground were constructed with fire-resistant and fire-retardant materials, gasoline can ignite dirt. With three trains set ablaze on the three busiest London lines, all within minutes of one another, the tube had come to a violent and convulsive halt. Cars evacuated into tunnels that swiftly filled with roiling clouds of dense black smoke, an orgy of burning plastics that in turn spawned their own toxic gases. While counterterrorist and emergency service personnel responded as best they could, as fast as they could, civilians succumbed to the lethal mixture of poisonous air and their own panic.

  King’s Cross, which had seen a fatal fire in 1987 that claimed thirty lives, suffered the worst, as dozens of riders were trampled to death in the panicked attempt to flee the station.

  •

  An added tragedy came to light in late August, when The Guardian ran an article citing an uncirculated report commissioned by the Home Office through the Security Services at the request of the Government. The report had been undertaken specifically to determine what, if any, exploitable weaknesses existed in the public transport systems in and around London, and it had concluded that the Underground—despite massive counterterrorism measures taken in the past—was still vulnerable to “a coordinated attack directed against those traits unique to the system.”

  Further investigation revealed that this document had actually enjoyed limited circulation and support, until it was killed by a senior civil servant in the Home Office, who had unfortunately given his reasons in writing. “While the report is admirable in its concern,” he had written, “it fails to take into account the difficulties, both financially and in terms of public discomfort and inconvenience, that a retrofitting of the Underground would require. Given the unlikelihood of such a coordinated effort as described, and the pointlessness of the result of such speculative mass murder, the author’s suggestions shall be set aside until such time as action becomes feasible.”

  Resignations followed immediately, culminating, in late September, with the withdrawal from public life of the aforementioned senior civil servant at the Home Office.

  2

  London—Camden, Regent’s Park Terrace

  07 August 1551 GMT

  It was a peculiarity to those in Tara Chace’s line of work, their habits and hobbies, the things they would obsess upon in lieu of family and friends.

  Tom Wallace, for instance, had put his passion into cars, specifically into the Triumph, and more precisely into the Triumph Spitfire MK I, 1962 model year. Wallace had, in the years Chace had known him, acquired four of the vehicles. He had tenderly restored each, enjoying its comfort and power in his free time, then sold the previous to make room for the next. He hunted the Triumph online and in newspapers, engaged in long, enthusiast correspondence with others of the Triumph religion, and generally poured every pound and pence not vital to his day-to-day existence into the hobby.

  The late Edward Kittering had shared Wallace’s lust for internal combustion, but in his case it had been motorcycles, and like Wallace, he’d been a devotee of a particular make and model, the Buell Thunderbolt. Kittering had been in the Section almost three years before his death from an apparent brain aneurysm, and in that time she’d seen him go through five bikes, and ridden two of them herself. They were, in her opinion, nothing more than two wheels ornamented with an overactive engine and a saddle, an opinion Kittering had often mocked her for voicing. He had been a far less discriminating collector than Wallace, his only criterion that the motorcycle be built prior to 1996, when the Harley-Davidson purchase of Buell had led to a redesign of the bike, and the motorcycle had “gotten all nice and proper like,” in Kittering’s words.

  Chace had inherited the las
t of Kittering’s bikes, a black and yellow 1995 Thunderbolt S2T that made her feel like a wasp whenever she rode it. She didn’t ride it often, traffic in London being a perpetual nightmare and public transport being more than sufficient to service most of her needs. The Thunderbolt was expensive as well; on those rare occasions when she did ride it, it would invariably break down. Whereas Kittering had the patience and interest to tinker with the vehicle, Chace could hardly be bothered.

  But she kept the motorcycle anyway, because it was one of her only links to Kittering, and because in the year before he died, they had been lovers. The affair had ended badly, with Chace breaking Kittering’s heart. His death had left many things unresolved, and so she kept the bike, and hoped that in doing so it would bring more closure than grief.

  Nick Poole, the current Minder Two, was a passionate cook. The kitchen of his Spice Quay flat, in the shadow of Tower Bridge, had been renovated with restaurant-grade appliances. Poole invested in only the finest cookware and tried—generally in vain, due to the unreliable schedule of their work—to grow his own herbs for seasoning. He took cooking classes, read cookbooks, and was zealous in his pursuit of “the fresh.” The week after Wallace had departed the Section, leaving Chace as Minder One and Poole suddenly elevated to Minder Two, he’d invited her over for a dinner of sole paupiette with crab and smoked salmon mousseline, watching her like a hawk until she’d taken her first bite. The meal had been extraordinary, as fine as any Chace had tasted when she’d run alongside the Sloanes and their wealth, and her praise of the dinner had done more for her relationship with Poole than any interaction they’d had in the office or in the field.

  As for Chris Lankford, Minder Three—Provisional, he was still too new to the Section for Chace to have discovered his particular passion, though she was certain he had one. She guessed it was something boring, perhaps philately.

  Chace herself had survived the Section for a couple of years without adopting an obsession of her own, not seeing the need for one. She had been wrong and, in the wake of Kittering’s death, had reached a moment of clarity. Even as a child, her desire for self-abuse had been dangerous and acute, based less in the physical than in the emotional. She had been a rule-breaker, a discipline problem, and what past lovers had charitably described as a “wild spirit,” an appellation Chace herself detested. She smoked and drank and, upon entering university, had discovered sex, three things she had pursued with the same passion that Wallace, Kittering, and Poole directed toward their hobbies. But without the same rewards, enjoyment, or results to show for it.

  It was after the breakup with Kittering that Chace had come to the conclusion that, perhaps, such self-abuse was counterproductive. Certainly, arriving in the Ops Room for a crash briefing at oh–three hundred carrying a hangover or, worse, a drunk wasn’t going to help her career prospects. And the less said about what it would do to a mission, the better. These things, combined with a warning from the Madwoman of the Second Floor—staff psychiatrist Dr. Eleanor Callard—that should such behavior continue, Chace could find herself confined to a desk if not out of a job, served as a wake-up call.

  “Find a hobby,” Callard had urged her, “preferably one where you don’t punish yourself for sins you haven’t committed.”

  “May I still punish myself for the ones that I have?” Chace had asked sweetly.

  “By all means.”

  It had taken Chace a while to find something that would engage her. As a girl, her mother had taken great pains to see her educated in a “proper” fashion, including piano lessons, ballet lessons, and riding lessons. Chace had loathed it all when she was six, and now at thirty-one, she discovered that nothing had occurred in the intervening time to alter that assessment. Unlike Poole, she had no interest in cooking, and her kitchen was merely the room where take-away was moved from a paper sack onto a porcelain plate, and even then it was most likely to be eaten straight from the container while she stood over the sink. Unlike Wallace, her interest in automobiles was entirely professional. She knew enough to break into them, to hot-wire them, to drive them much too fast, to use them to kill people without getting herself killed in the process, and, sometimes, should the situation warrant it, to travel in them from Point A to Point B.

  It ended there.

  Finally, she’d decided to try painting, resurrecting a dim memory from her boarding-school days at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Not with oils or watercolors and palettes and easels, as she had learned, but with great sections of canvas spread on the floor or tacked to the wall, and pails of paint to spatter, drip, drizzle, and smear. She had no aspirations to be Jackson Pollock and at best considered her work to be more Modern Accident than Modern Expressionism. She had no idea if she had any talent for painting at all, in fact, but she discovered that she did, indeed, enjoy it, to a degree that truly surprised her. It was the main reason she had moved to Camden, to have more space in which to paint. The sensuality of it, in particular, appealed to her, the indulgence of the paint on her hands and its scent clinging to the back of her throat, the feel of the canvas as it drew color away from her fingers. She could lose herself in the activity for hours, and her mind could relax as her body worked, her clothes peppered with splatters, her trainers caked with paint.

  And this is why Tara Chace was up to her elbows in grasshopper green when she learned that terrorists had attacked London.

  •

  “Chace.”

  “Duty Ops Officer. Minders to the Ops Room, black, I repeat, black.”

  Chace adjusted the handset between her ear and shoulder, hastily swiping her hands down the front of her shirt, trying to clean the paint from them. The thought that this was a drill flickered through her mind, but it was gone before she could even entertain it, defeated in the subconscious acquisition of detail. One, there was strain in Ron’s voice, and not once in four years while Ronald Hodgson had worked the Duty Operations Desk had Chace ever heard that before; two, the background noise was not the usual low murmur of voices in the Ops Room but the frantic sound of motion, of voices calling for attention, information, assistance.

  And three, black meant bad. Black meant about as bad as it could get, on the scale of “we’re at war” or “a royal has been kidnapped” or “we’ve lost a nuke” bad.

  “Confirmed, twenty minutes,” Chace said.

  “Twenty minutes,” Ron echoed, and he cut the connection, but Chace had already reseated the phone in its cradle and was halfway to the remote control. She flicked the television on with one hand, raising the volume so the sound could follow her as she pivoted back to the bedroom, already stripping off her shirt and tossing it aside. She pulled a new one from the pile of dirty laundry at the foot of the bed, struggling into it as she searched her unmentionables drawer for the keys to Kittering’s bike.

  She was out the door sixteen seconds later, still tucking the shirt in, and had unlocked the Thunderbolt and brought the engine to life before her mind fully processed the voices of the reporters and the coverage she had overheard. She didn’t know the details, but she’d caught enough to know it was most likely terrorism, and it was London, and it was bad.

  She drove with those things in mind, grateful for once that Kittering had left a motorcycle and not a dog, using the bike to snake through snarled traffic, to quick-turn from roadblocked streets, and twice to drive on the pavement.

  Even with all that, it took her almost an hour exactly to reach the Ops Room.

  •

  Chace entered thinking that enough time had passed, surely the chaos she’d heard over Ron’s call would have abated. It hadn’t.

  At its worst, she’d never seen the Operations Room looking like this. The monitor wall, plasma screens with a glowing map of the world that normally presented an up-to-the-minute accounting of all active SIS operations everywhere on the planet, was in schizophrenic disorder. Patches of BBC and Sky News and CNN jumped on the wall, voices from professionally calm to practically shrill seeped from the speakers, mix
ed in the din of radio reports and the calls of the Ops Room staff, runners crisscrossing the room, papers or maps or telephones in their hands, trying to track it all. Only the U.K. remained uncovered on the map, a bright red halo tracing the country, a gold dot pulsing on London.

  At Duty Operations, Ron was juggling three phones at once, his coms headset bouncing against his chest, dangling from the wire clipped to his shirt. Sweat had soaked his collar, wilting it around his neck, and when he caught sight of Chace, he used his left elbow to indicate the map table at the far side of the room, still balancing his multiple conversations.

  Helmet still in hand, Chace plunged into the room, making for the map table where Poole and Lankford already waited. She glanced back toward the plasma wall, saw Alexis at Main Communications, where she was matching Ron move for move with her own phones, then swept her gaze around farther until she realized she was looking for Tom Wallace, and that she wouldn’t be finding him.

  Tom wasn’t Minder One. She was.

  “What the fucking hell happened?” she demanded of Poole as she reached the table, dropping her helmet into the nearest empty chair.

  “We’ve been hit,” Lankford said.

  “I bloody know we’ve been hit, I figured out we’ve been hit, I’m asking what the fucking hell happened?”

  “It’s still coming in,” Poole told her, indicating the plasma wall. “Best anyone’s made out, we had three terrorist strikes within minutes of each other, started roughly fifteen-thirty, all of them on the Underground. Central, Northern, and Bakerloo, Oxford, Piccadilly, and King’s Cross, respectively.”

  “Nerve agent?”

  “No, it’s not a Tokyo scenario,” Lankford said.

  “They bomb them, what?”

  “Fire,” Poole said. “In the tunnels, at the stations. Hard to tell just how bad, but there’re reports of people being trampled at the stations, asphyxiating on the tracks.”

  Chace nodded, fixating on the wall, trying to see everything at once. Images of bodies being carried from station entrances, soot- and smoke-stained passengers with oxygen masks pressed to their tear-streaked faces, of dead firefighters and rescue workers laid out in lines on the pavement, being covered with opaque plastic sheets. Men and women, young and old, and children, in all of London’s colors and diversity. Curling clouds of black smoke, so thick she thought she could see the oil in it, billowing from tube vents, rising over Oxford Circus.