by Condor
Under her jacket, the cotton leotard was packed with seven pounds of homemade explosive—a mixture of diesel oil, bleach, wax and potassium chloride from a health foods website. Each of the ten pockets was packed with a sausage of it. She had helped Uncle and Aunt mould them herself, rolling the sticky, greyish stuff between her palms and inserting a blasting cap and a length of detonator wire into the tops. Around the sausages lay the shiny steel spheres Uncle called, “God's tears”.
The ball bearings were twenty-one millimetres across. Uncle had been most specific on that point when ordering them from the factory. He said the number was significant because it was the product of the seven deadly sins and the Holy Trinity. Together they’d dropped twenty-five into each of the ten pockets, where they nestled against the yielding surface of the explosives.
The girl looked around again. Her phone wasn't as shiny as these others. It didn't even have a camera. Not that she could have reached it to take a picture, in any case. It, too, was sewn into her vest, in a channel sitting right over her heart. The wires from the explosives ended in a control box soldered onto the phone's battery charger socket.
*
Harry and Vivienne’s bus pulled up outside a shop selling soaps and bath products. Through the narrow windows on the top deck, wafts of scent—tropical, spicy, lemony—insinuated themselves, causing Harry to smile without realising why. He was happy. Happy Harry.
Vivienne's thigh was pressed against his, and even though he knew it was just an accident caused by the stingy seating arrangements, he felt a prickle of desire. And it had been a long time since that had happened. Linda had stopped putting out for him years ago, and he'd never been a guy to go off looking for pleasure in a cathouse or a strip club. Not that he’d have had time, the hours he put in.
“Look at her,” Vivienne said, prodding the glass on her left and gazing downwards. “Poor thing looks so miserable. And on a beautiful day like today. You'd think she’d manage a smile.”
Harry leaned across, taking the opportunity to glance down the front of Vivienne's blouse. Great rack!
“Who? Her? The skinny one in the puffy jacket? Yeah, she does look kind of sad.”
*
Gabriel finished his coffee, dabbed a wet fingertip into the yellow crumbs dusting his plate, sucked them into his mouth, and then stood. His meeting was in an office on a side street leading east from Regent Street. He took one final glance towards Oxford Circus, then picked up his battered Hartmann briefcase and strode off towards Great Portland Street.
His phone rang. He saw the small circle enclosing a face he knew and smiled. He swiped his thumb to the right to answer the call.
“Hi, Britta, how are you? Where are you?”
“Hey, Gabriel. I’m good. I’m at my place in Chiswick, actually, painting my nails. My boss pretty well ordered me to take some leave. Been burning the midnight oil at both ends.”
Gabriel laughed. However good her English was, Britta Falskog hadn’t quite mastered all the subtleties of idiom. On the other hand, he liked her very much; always had. They’d run joint ops for a while, back in the day, she in Swedish Special Forces, he in the SAS. And there had been the odd overnight stay. Now, since she’d been seconded to MI5, working out of Thames House on Millbank, maybe there was something in the air between them.
“So, do you want to meet up?” he said. “I’m in town too. Going to see a new client.”
“I would like that. Do you want to get dinner?”
“Sure. Then I’m heading back to Salisbury.”
“Oh, OK. Well, you know, I do have a few days to kill, so maybe …”
“A trip to the countryside? Sounds like a lovely idea.”
While they bantered, Gabriel made his way along the uncrowded roads to the north of Oxford Street, heading for the offices of Faulds & Vambrace (VIP Protection) Ltd.
*
Eloise Payne slid her Oyster card over the scuffed magnetic reader and made her way to the stairs of the bus, which she climbed, gripping the handrail tightly. There was one free seat, about halfway back, behind a couple who were chatting away about museums and art galleries. The man reminded her of Uncle. He had the same short, white hair. Only this man spoke with an American accent.
She took the seat next to a black woman in her thirties who was chatting into her phone and admiring her fingernails, which she extended in front of her in a fan. There seemed to be yellow flecks, like gold, floating in the orange varnish, and the tips were white.
*
Standing by the drawing room window, in the elegant terraced house where Eloise Payne had so recently been stitched into the garment that was to become her shroud, was a grey-haired man named Robert Slater, known to the Children as “Uncle Robert”. He looked out at the oaks, beeches and hornbeams dotting Regent’s Park. He was six foot, slim, and wearing a white shirt and white trousers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. They were the blue of a sunny day in February, promising warmth, but delivering none. In the distance, he could make out the long, dappled necks of a pair of giraffes grazing in their enclosure in the zoo. Through the open window, he could smell burning leaves from a bonfire somewhere in the park.
In his hand, he held a smartphone, a number keyed in and ready to be called. Beside him, Irene Stevens, Eloise Payne’s Aunt and a former manager of a dressmaking business, spoke.
“Père Christophe will be pleased.”
“Yes. We have proved our worthiness.”
Then he tapped the green phone icon.
*
Inside the neat, stitched channel covering Eloise Payne’s heart, the phone's circuitry woke up as the incoming call was beamed in from a cell tower on top of an office block two hundred yards to the north.
The electric current it generated was tiny. Just enough to cause a glimmer from a Christmas tree light. Or to impel a child's toy robot to take a buzzing half-step across a polished tabletop. But also enough to excite the atoms in ten, foot-long pieces of copper wire. The wave of energy travelled along the wires at the speed of light until it reached the fat cylinders of explosive corseting their wearer.
There, something curious happened. The energy of that tiny electrical charge multiplied itself billions of times as the chemical reaction it initiated gathered pace and violence.
Exactly seventy-three milliseconds later, the atoms comprising the charges became unstable and, searching for equilibrium, set off a chain reaction that released all their pent-up energy into the surrounding space.
*
Gabriel had just turned into the side street where his client was based. He and Britta were fixing the details of a pre-dinner drink.
“So meet at six-thirty at the French House,” Britta was saying. “Shall I book a restaurant?”
“Yes, please. Anywhere we can get a decent burgundy. And I hope you …”
Gabriel didn’t finish his sentence. A roaring, shattering boom cut him off. He recognised the shape of it. It sounded like a truck bomb. There was a second or two of total silence, then distant screaming.
“Call you back!” he said. He stuffed the phone in his pocket, then spun round and ran back to the main road. He turned left at the junction and sprinted towards Oxford Circus. And hell.
*
Eloise Payne simply disappeared in a cloud of wet, pink specks that combusted into oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms and a few trace elements. The explosion leapt outwards from her torso, popping her head from her neck like a cork from a shaken champagne bottle. The roof of the bus split apart into flying shards of red metal, allowing the roughly spherical object, trailing bright arterial blood and gin-clear cerebrospinal fluid, to travel diagonally upwards for one hundred and seventy-five feet, and roughly south.
The force of the explosion blasted Harry Barnes and his new friend Vivienne Frost into a fine mist of flesh and blood. They had been discussing which museum they should visit first and had just settled on the Victoria and Albert, Vivienne’s choice.
T
he black woman with the orange nails was cut into rags. Later, a fireman would retrieve her feet from the wreckage where they had jammed against a twisted piece of steel tubing that had once been the frame of her seat.
Everybody else on the top deck of the bus was killed instantly, either by the compression wave of the blast itself or the ball bearings flying out in a sphere from their point of origin.
Downstairs, there were multiple fatalities from the blast itself and horrific injuries as limbs and bodies were torn and punctured by the God's Tears or the shrapnel created from the bodywork and fittings of the bus.
*
The shattered bus sat among piles of dead passengers and pedestrians. Body parts were scattered everywhere—lying on the ground, flung through shop windows that sliced them more cleanly than a butcher’s knife, impaled on railings, and dangling from streetlamps. The street was inches deep in blood. People were screaming and moaning, clutching bloody stumps, bleeding heads, and each other. Many had horrific burns that had blackened and charred their exposed skin. Others stood around in a daze. On the periphery, the unharmed were already filming the carnage on their phones.
Gabriel barged past a young guy with a smartphone held above his head and knelt by a teenaged girl with both her legs blown off above the knee. She would bleed out within a minute. He undid his belt and yanked it out from the loops of his trousers before cinching it around her right thigh and pulling it tight to staunch the bleeding. She opened her mouth, but the scream was silent. Her face was pale and she was shaking violently.
“You!” he shouted at the young man with the phone. “Give me your belt. Now!” He held out his hand, and as soon as the man complied, dropping his belt onto Gabriel's palm with shaking fingers, Gabriel wrapped it around the girl's other leg, tightening it hard against her torn flesh until that leg stopped bleeding too. She whimpered in pain. He took off his suit jacket, removed his phone and wallet, then covered her chest with it. The young man had woken up to what was happening. He ripped off his bright red hoodie, folded it into a pad and eased it under her head.
“You're going to be fine,” the young man said to her, looking down into her shock-widened eyes and reaching for her hand.
“Stay with her,” Gabriel said, then stood and ran to the nearest victim, a middle-aged businessman, his head pouring with blood from a five-inch gash that had torn his scalp away from his skull.
Gabriel worked solidly for another hour, applying compression to bleeding wounds, fixing more makeshift tourniquets around limbs missing their extremities, and marshalling bystanders into trauma teams to do the same for as many people as they could manage. He implemented a basic triage system, telling people, “If they’re screaming, they’ve got energy to survive. Treat them after the alive-but-silent. They need you first. The dead can wait.”
As paramedics and firefighters arrived on the scene, he felt he had become more of a hindrance than a help. He staggered out of the devastated blast site, crunching over broken glass and mangled steel and plastic, before collapsing with his back against a wall. His shirt, waistcoat and trousers were soaked with blood. His face was spattered with it where the dying had coughed from ruined lungs. His hands were those of a slaughterman.
As he let the adrenaline metabolise out of his bloodstream, he felt a terrible fatigue settle over him. The scene reminded him of others he’d witnessed, as a soldier. One in particular.
He was thinking about Trooper Mickey “Smudge” Smith, the man he’d left, dead and mutilated in Mozambique after his final mission in the SAS had gone disastrously wrong. The man, though, wouldn’t take death lying down; he continued to haunt Gabriel’s sleeping—and waking—hours.
He looked down between his outstretched legs. Something shiny lay there. A silvery steel sphere, half-covered in blood. He picked it up and held it close to his eyes. He could see his own reflection. And someone else's. Someone with a black face and no lower jaw.
“Hello, Boss,” the face said.
“Hello, Smudge,” Gabriel said out loud.
“Just like old times, eh?”
“Just like.”
Then he put the ball bearing in his waistcoat pocket and began, very quietly, to cry.
2
Père Christophe
THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN’S LEADER looked up at the young woman standing in front of him. She had been brought to his prayer room five minutes earlier by one of the Elect, a fifty-year-old former French insurance broker named Marianne Dix.
The young woman—little more than a girl, really—was nineteen years old, with fair, freckled skin, reddish hair cut short and razored in to the nape of her neck, and a slim build. Her eyes were set wide apart and coloured a startlingly bright shade of green, like the forest trees after rain.
She had forgotten her date of birth during her freeing, but Christophe Jardin knew her age for a fact. It was in the database of all his disciples—the ninety-seven Elect and the five hundred and sixty-eight Children—that he maintained on his MacBook. Her name used to be Frieda Brodbeck, back when she was a depressed undergraduate studying theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
There, she had met a young woman at a faculty party who told Frieda about her spiritual teacher and the group he had founded. A month later, Frieda quit her studies, left Berlin, and moved to a communal living space deep in the Bavarian forest.
After six months studying the leader’s teachings, praying and handing out leaflets, and offering flowers to suspicious shoppers in the local town every Saturday and Sunday, she had been summoned to meet Père Christophe himself. In Brazil. The home compound. Eden, they called it. Deep in the rainforest thirty miles from a small town called Nova Cidade.
The room was furnished simply but, she thought, beautifully. The bed was antique, brass-framed, and dressed in white sheets with a scattering of pillows. The rugs were made from alpaca wool dyed in rich shades of earthy red, deep leaf-green and a blue that reminded her of the swimming hole at the foot of the compound’s own waterfall. They were made nearby and traded at the gates of the compound by the local women who wove them on looms Père Christophe himself had provided.
She was in awe of the man sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing her. His white robe spoke of his rejection of Western materialism. His long grey-blond hair, moustache, and beard were unkempt. He refused to pander to the sinful preoccupation with appearance. She had never been alone in his presence, and she could feel her knees shaking inside her own simple, white cotton dress. She hoped Père Christophe hadn’t noticed.
“Sit, Child,” he said, extending his right arm and placing his palm on a folded blanket woven by the local Indians in a traditional Brazilian design of alligators and hibiscus flowers.
She obeyed, folding her legs beneath her and mirroring his pose as she sat beside him, just a foot from his right shoulder. He smelled of vanilla, rose, and a deeper, more masculine aroma beneath the floral perfume.
“Have I displeased you in some way, Père Christophe?” she asked, trying but failing to keep the tremor from her voice. “Aunt Marianne said you wanted to see me.”
He smiled, stroking his beard, and stared at her hands, which were twisting around each other. Then he looked into her eyes and focused on her green irises, feeling her anxiety and stoking it with the intense gaze he practised in the mirror every morning before showering and washing his hair.
“Displeased me? Why would you think that, Child? You are blessed by the Creator. He sent you to serve me and you have only ever done your duty. You have always obeyed the First Order: Serve God through Père Christophe’s will.”
Her hands stopped their interlacing, her shoulders dropped, and a small smile broke out on her face.
“Then, forgive me for showing pride, but … have I been selected?”
He held her in the magnetic field of his purplish-blue eyes, willing his face to remain still, and the smile threatening to betray him to remain merely an impulse hovering behind the muscles of his cheeks. He no
dded.
“Make yourself ready. Then we will pray together before your devotion.”
She rose and began undressing.
Later, after he had dismissed the girl, Jardin lay on his back, sprawled across the king-size bed, the sheet kicked away, listening to the incessant song of the jungle insects and nocturnal creatures. He checked his vintage Cartier Tank watch, then placed it to his ear to listen to the wondrous whirrings and tickings of its intricate, handmade mechanism. A wide grin split his face in two; his teeth shone in the moonlight coming in through the open window. Child 105 had been obliterated, as per his orders, at the exact moment he’d been fucking the German bitch.
Too energised by the young girl to sleep, he lay there and recalled one of his father’s many speeches.
“You are a waster, Christophe,” the old man had said one evening, coming into his fifteen-year-old son’s bedroom and interrupting his reading of an American crime novel. “You have no principles. Look at your mother and me. Every day we teach at the University in the hope we can bring about change in this decadent society of ours. Marxism-Leninism needs midwives. The French are too fond of their bourgeois comforts to see that their lives are enslaved to capitalism.”
The boy had looked up at the bearded academic frowning down at him and imagined thrusting a dagger into his eye.
“But Papa,” he said. “Between you and Maman there are so many fucking principles in this apartment. Any more would shatter the windows. You think you’re going to change things by talking about them at your precious university? Get real! You need to take action, like they did in ’68. When you were … oh, yes, on fucking holiday down south in your beach house. Tell me, how do you justify such bourgeois extravagance? Did comrade Trotsky ever own a second home? Did Lenin take a month off to stay in his ski chalet?”
