Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

‘Bloody Maxine. Why Ahmet married a fucking lap dancer I—’ Suddenly something hurt – a lot.

  More slowly than he had shoved it in, Ali Reza pulled out the short knife he had just thrust into Harrison’s abdomen.

  ‘Fortunately for my reputation, no one will ever know,’ Ali Reza said. He threw the knife to one side and then held Harrison as he began to sink slowly to the floor. ‘I’m doing this for myself but you should also know that Ahmet asked me to kill you. He didn’t want any loose ends.

  ‘You bastard!’ Wet bulging eyes looked at Ali Reza through the gloom and Harrison repeated, ‘Bastard!’

  Although he could hardly see what he was doing and he was weighed down by the cumbersome suicide vest, Ali Reza managed to lower Harrison to the ground. Halfway through, a train went by and briefly illuminated Harrison’s grey, dying face. It also showed Ali Reza that there was a lot of sticky blood everywhere. He moved away from it before he got too much on his hands. Then he just listened to the sound of Harrison’s demise as he wiped his bloodied hands on the sides of his trousers.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  Tower Hill station, İkmen learned, had one entrance, which doubled as an exit, and one dedicated exit. Apparently the single exit on Cooper’s Row had once been the only entrance and exit to the station. But an increase in passenger numbers had meant that another, bigger entrance had been built, with a ticket office.

  İkmen was standing in Trinity Square Gardens with a small group of London Underground workers, one of whom, an elderly man called Alf, had tried to pump him for information about what exactly the police were doing. In line with his instructions, İkmen had assisted his colleagues in clearing out the station but now, along with Ayşe Kudu, he was to keep well out of the way. As he understood it, Inspector Riley and DI Roman were now coordinating a minute search of the station while trains had been instructed not to stop at Tower Hill. Neither Harrison nor Hajizadeh had been picked up on CCTV and so the chances of their being down on the Tower Hill platforms were slight. But apart from anything else, the police had to maintain their story about a suspect package and so they needed to be down there, and there was always a chance the men were in fact down there. It was possible to walk from station to station along the track. There were little alcoves in the wall where those working on the line could stand when trains passed. These could also be used by terrorists. There were three possible routes in: from the east on the Circle line from Aldgate, from the west on the District line from Monument, and from the east also on the District line from Aldgate East.

  ‘Suspect packages don’t normally take the coppers that long to deal with,’ Alf said as he offered İkmen a cigarette. ‘Even back in the old days when the IRA were at it all the time, suspect packages never took that long. Do you know if they’re calling out the army? To take it away and blow it up?’

  İkmen took the proffered cigarette with a smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘If the officers down there think they need bomb disposal, they’ll call for it,’ Ayşe said. ‘They’ll make a judgement about that.’

  Alf lit his own and İkmen’s cigarettes and then said gloomily, ‘Better not blow up my station.’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t happen, sir,’ Ayşe replied. ‘You’ve obviously been around these things many times before, you know how often they turn out to be hoaxes.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Alf sucked hard on his cigarette and then said, ‘Mind you, this al Qaeda mob we’ve got now, they don’t muck about, do they? Back in the old days with the IRA you generally got the warning phone call. But not this lot. Just blow people up. For God, they say, although I can’t see that myself.’

  ‘Al Qaeda believe they’re working for God,’ Ayşe said, ‘but their view of God is not the same as everyone else’s.’

  ‘You can say that again!’

  İkmen and Alf smoked in silence for a while, watching as the uniformed officers outside the station turned people away. A couple of people, angered at having to use an alternative station, argued uselessly with them, but in general people took the inconvenience well. In that the Londoners were very similar to İstanbullus, İkmen thought. Things cancelled or shut were inconvenient but what else could a person do but shrug his or her shoulders and just carry on?

  ‘Mind you, if they blow this place up, we could always go back to using the old station,’ Alf said as he looked up into the pale grey early evening sky.

  ‘The old station?’

  ‘Old Tower Hill station,’ Alf said. ‘Not many people remember it now. Shut in the late sixties, I think it did.’ He nudged his colleague. ‘When did old Tower Hill station close, Reg?’

  Reg was older than Alf. ‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Sixty-eight? Sixty-nine?’

  ‘About then,’ Alf said. ‘When this place was built they shut the old station, locked it up and turned off the lights.’ He smiled. ‘Like something out of the war, it was, old Tower Hill, or rather to give it its proper name, Mark Lane.’

  ‘Mark Lane?’ İkmen began to feel his heart increase its beat.

  ‘Mark Lane is what old Tower Hill was originally called,’ Alf said. ‘It’s like a proper time capsule down there. Posters on the wall for Marmite and Ovaltine. Course you can’t go down there now, not since the bombs in two thousand and five.’

  Ayşe looked at İkmen who looked at her with the very same thought in his head.

  ‘Is this station on Mark Lane?’

  ‘No,’ Alf said. ‘You actually get into it, or you used to be able to get into it, by going down the Byward Street underpass. From the back of All Hallows underneath the road, to an opening next to some bar on this other side.’

  İkmen turned to Ayşe. ‘That subway you took me down,’ he said. ‘The one where the trains running underneath reminded me of the earthquake. That’s where Mark Lane is!’

  Ayşe took her phone out of her jacket pocket and began to scroll through numbers as she grabbed İkmen’s arm and started to run towards the west. ‘Come on!’ she said.

  Ever since four o’clock the number of trains running in both directions had increased significantly. So timing – getting down on to the lines, detonating the device – was going to be crucial. Ali Reza switched the torch on again and pointed it at his watch. It was now one minute to five but still he hadn’t received anything from the ayatollah. Slightly anxiously he wondered what he would do if the text never came but then decided that that was just not possible. What he was doing was all part of Nourazar’s great work and so nothing would get in its way. And besides, even if the text didn’t reach him, he was committed to his course and would detonate eventually come what may.

  Ali Reza smiled. Soon he would be in Paradise with all the pettiness and horror of the world very far away. For a second he trained his torch towards the back of the old platform and saw Derek Harrison’s slack body. One thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be meeting him in Paradise. What a ridiculous person he had been! To want to take revenge upon a means of transport on which you’d had an accident was insane.

  Ali turned his mind back to thoughts of Paradise. Then, as if by some noble sacred magic, his phone beeped to tell him he had a text.

  Both Ayşe and İkmen panted as they looked at the plain metal-faced door at the bottom of the staircase leading to the underpass. There were stickers all over it saying ‘No Entry’, ‘Keep Clear’, ‘Eye protection must be worn’ and ‘These doors are alarmed’. There was a numerical keypad halfway up the wall on the left-hand side of the door.

  ‘There must be some sort of entry code,’ Ayşe said as she panted to catch her breath.

  İkmen, who felt as if he was about to pass out from lack of oxygen, said nothing. This door, when he had first seen it, had barely entered his consciousness. Now he read, ‘Keep clear. Exit from emergency escape route’. It was known about – as an escape route.

  The clatter of heavy boots on concrete stairs heralded the arrival of Riley, Roman and a team of uniformed officers, one of
whom was carrying a metal battering ram. As they approached, Riley terminated the call he had been engaged in on his mobile and turned to the uniforms. ‘Break it down,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, there’s a code,’ Ayşe said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Riley replied. ‘But we don’t have time for that now.’ He stood out of the way of the ram as a particularly burly officer began smashing it into the door. ‘I want you and İkmen out of here,’ he said to Ayşe. ‘If Harrison and Hajizadeh have set a bomb down there, I want you two a long way away from here. Now!’

  For a moment İkmen stood rooted to the spot, mesmerised by the sight of the metal on the door buckling under the force of the battering ram. But then Ayşe took hold of his arm and said, ‘Come on, Çetin!’

  They began to run towards the All Hallows exit.

  Ali Reza had just jumped down on to the track when he heard the commotion up above. Either the man who had given Harrison the code had grassed them up to the police or someone had finally worked it all out. Not that it mattered. He could already see tiny pinpoints of light in front of him, meaning that a train was coming. It was the train he was going to destroy.

  Up above, the hammering continued. In front of him the lights from the train grew closer at speed. Ali Reza put his hand inside the explosive vest and twisted his fingers round the cord that was connected to the detonator. If he pulled the cord too soon he would damage the old station without actually blowing up the train. But if he left it too late, the train might mow him down before he could pull the cord and then who knew what would happen? He assumed the device would still blow up but he couldn’t be certain.

  Strange the way that everything suddenly felt really slow. The lights that had been coming toward him at such a fast rate now seemed as if they were only edging forward, centimetre by centimetre. It was odd. The sensation in his head felt very like his one and only experience with cannabis: floaty and without a care for anything much. There was something he wanted to say before he died but suddenly be couldn’t recall what it was. The only thing he could remember as the lights in front of him suddenly became massive in his eyes was that he had to pull the cord. This Ali Reza Hajizadeh did just before the front of the train barrelled into his chest.

  The blast from the explosion in the tunnel beneath them picked İkmen and Ayşe up off their feet and slammed their bodies up against the tiled walls of the underpass. As the bomb detonated, the officers who had just broken through the door into the old station were also knocked off their feet. Dust and debris from the explosion blew out through the open door.

  ‘Christ!’ Riley pulled Roman and another officer down on to the ground with him as the vast compressed dust cloud engulfed them. The officer who had been breaking down the door lay motionless beside his battering ram, half in and half out of the doorway. Down below, the sound of crashing, twisting metal screamed as what remained of the tube train smashed both into itself and into the walls of the tunnel. Later, the blasted driver’s cab at the front of the train would appear at the end of the eastbound platform of Tower Hill station, slowly and horrifically coming into view to the officers still searching the platforms.

  İkmen only blacked out for a second. Unlike Ayşe, he didn’t actually crack his head when he was thrown up against the wall. But he was disorientated and for a few moments he couldn’t catch his breath. The air was filled with dust and what tasted like metal and if he tried to breathe in he felt as if his chest would burst. Then there was the noise. It was like the earthquake of 1999, crashing and shuddering below him as if some monster of the deep had awakened in a fury, hell bent upon rising to the surface on some terrifying mission of revenge. Everything in him recoiled from the sound and for a moment he just curled himself up into a foetal shape and howled. But as he unravelled himself, he saw that Ayşe was lying quite still beside him. Instinctively he called out in Turkish, ‘Help! Help me!’

  But not a soul responded. He pulled himself across the concrete towards her and put his head down to her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. With a superhuman effort of will he made himself remember some English and he yelled, ‘Ayşe isn’t breathing! Help me!’

  He could hear screaming. Whether it was from down below or in the underpass, İkmen couldn’t tell. Desperate, he tried to rise to his feet but his legs seemed to be made of jelly and his attempt left him stranded on the ground like a beached fish. ‘Help me!’

  He looked at Ayşe. She still wasn’t breathing. But then suddenly, out of the dust and filth that surrounded him, the figure of a man appeared. He came from the All Hallows end of the underpass and he had some sort of mask over the lower half of his face. He was in Metropolitan Police uniform.

  ‘Help her!’

  In one rapid movement the officer picked Ayşe up and then turned to run with her back down the underpass. Another man, also in uniform, bent down and pulled İkmen to his feet. His legs were still shaking but as he leaned against the man he found that he could just about manage to put one foot in front of the other. When they got to the stairs, the officer picked İkmen up in his arms and carried him out into the open air. It felt so cool and sweet, he almost cried.

  ‘There are other officers in the subway,’ İkmen said as the officer placed him on a bench beside the church. On the pavement just to the side of him, a man was breathing into Ayşe Kudu’s mouth. The noise all around, although not as terrifying as the sounds he had heard from the tunnel, was tremendous. Sirens wailing, people shouting, emergency vehicles pulling up and paramedics, firemen and police officers getting out of them.

  A woman in a green jumpsuit put a blanket round İkmen’s shoulders and looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘Are you all right, my love?’

  ‘There are other officers down there,’ İkmen said and pointed to the smoke-swathed entrance to the underpass. ‘They’re hurt.’

  ‘We’ll get you to hospital soon,’ the woman said with a smile.

  ‘I’m fine,’ İkmen said. In a way it was true, he felt a little sore and his lungs hurt but he wasn’t bleeding and he didn’t feel sick. ‘You must get the others. The others are hurt.’

  She smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart.’ She straightened and began to move away. ‘We’ll get to them.’

  He turned to see how Ayşe was doing but she was no longer in sight. İkmen began to feel cold. He also began to feel as if he wanted to lie down and sleep. He knew he didn’t want to go to hospital. There was no need. They’d only treat him for shock and he knew how to deal with that without a doctor telling him. A chocolate bar and a cigarette usually fixed most things. Not that he had any chocolate on him. But he did have cigarettes and so as soon as his hands stopped shaking he lit one.

  İkmen threw everything in his stomach up on to the pavement in one huge, glittering arc. When he had finished, he felt much better. He lit another cigarette and began to walk towards the Tower of London and the river.

  The officer who had battered in the door that led down to the old station was dead. Flung backwards by the blast from the explosion down below, he had landed on the concrete floor on his head. Everyone else in Riley’s team had survived so far, although all of them were now on their way to various local hospitals.

  Superintendent Williams was speaking on his mobile phone to his superiors, the acting and the assistant commissioners.

  ‘Yes . . . Yes . . .’ he said as he ascended the stairs behind All Hallows with Inspector Carla Fratelli. ‘Yes, one officer dead and one just about clinging on . . . No . . . We’re going down now. Yes, I will let you know.’

  Voices, some screaming, ripped up at them from the earth below. Fratelli shuddered.

  When they reached the mangled doorway leading down into the old station they were met by a group of fire officers. A particularly grimy individual stepped forward and said, ‘I’m ACFO Harwood from Dowgate Station.’

  Williams knew that Dowgate was the closest station to the site. They’d got to the scene very quickly.

  ‘Superintendent Williams,’ he
said and held out his hand to the acting chief fire officer.

  Harwood shook his hand. ‘What looks like an eight-carriage train has suffered an explosion as it was travelling east through the old station. Vehicle was full and so we’ve got multiple casualties down there. The station itself appears to be undamaged and we’ve managed to get some lights put up. The old platform, such as it was, is quite a state.’

  ‘Are there any medics down there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harwood said. ‘From Barts. There was also one on the train. At the back. He’s shaken up but he’s unhurt and he’s helping others. We’ve no idea as yet as to numbers of casualties. But we’re taking them out here and through Tower Hill.’

  ‘Can we look?’

  Harwood passed them both mouth masks and said, ‘Stand at the top of the stairs. As I said, we’ve got lights up.’

  Williams and Fratelli stepped through the door and found themselves at the top of a mottled, rickety staircase. Large arc lamps had been strung above the tortured train carriages and smashed platform. The air was filled with smoke and dust which lent a sinister diffuseness to the scene. Williams was aware of groans of pain as well as the screams he had heard from the subway. The carriage at the far eastern end of the platform, near the front of the train, was trapped, concertinaed down to maybe half its size between the platform and the tunnel wall. No sound or movement came from it. The one directly behind it moved a little as two fire officers used cutting tools to remove its windows. There was no sound coming from it either. But further along the train towards the west, fire officers were helping bloodied men and women stagger on to what remained of the platform. One man, sobbing uncontrollably, was carried from a carriage further back. As the fire officer carrying him walked past Williams and Fratelli, they could both see that he had only one hand. Where the other had been there was just a large blood-soaked piece of cloth.

  Williams took his mouth mask off and said, ‘God help us!’