dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.
“Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”
“You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”
“She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”
“How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.
“As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”
“Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”
“Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”
“They must have been in the vicinity.”
“They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”
“So why did they take me down instead of the suicide bomber?”
“Because neither Scotland Yard nor the Security Service wanted a rerun of the Menezes fiasco. As a result of his death, a number of new guidelines and procedures were put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Suffice it to say a single warning does not meet the threshold for taking lethal action—even if the source happens to be named Gabriel Allon.”
“So eighteen innocent people died as a result?”
“What if he wasn’t a terrorist? What if he was another street performer, or someone with mental problems? We would have been burned at the stake.”
“But he wasn’t a street performer or a mental patient, Graham. He was a suicide bomber. And I told you so.”
“How did you know?”
“He might as well have been wearing a sign declaring his intentions.”
“Was it that obvious?”
Gabriel listed the attributes that first raised his suspicions and then explained the calculations that led him to conclude the terrorist intended to detonate his device at 2:37. Seymour shook his head slowly.
“I’ve lost count of how many hours we’ve spent training our police officers to spot potential terrorists, not to mention the millions of pounds we’ve poured into behavior-recognition software for CCTV. And yet a jihadi suicide bomber walked straight into Covent Garden, and no one seemed to notice. No one but you, of course.”
Seymour lapsed into a brooding silence. They were headed north along the floodlit white canyon of Regent Street. Gabriel leaned his head wearily against the window and asked whether the bomber had been identified.
“His name is Farid Khan. His parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Lahore in the late seventies, but Farid was born in London. Stepney Green, to be precise,” Seymour said. “Like many British Muslims of his generation, he rejected the mild, apolitical religious beliefs of his parents and became an Islamist. By the late nineties, he was spending far too much time at the East London Mosque in Whitechapel Road. Before long, he was a member in good standing of the radical groups Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun.”
“It sounds to me as if you had a file on him.”
“We did,” Seymour said, “but not for the reasons you might think. You see, Farid Khan was a ray of sunlight, our hope for the future. Or so we thought.”
“You thought you’d turned him around?”
Seymour nodded. “Not long after 9/11, Farid joined a group called New Beginnings. Its goal was to deprogram militants and reintegrate them into the mainstream of Islam and British public opinion. Farid was considered one of their great successes. He shaved his beard. He severed ties to his old friends. He graduated near the top of his class at King’s College and landed a well-paying job with a small London ad agency. A few weeks ago, he became engaged to a woman from his old neighborhood.”
“So you checked him off your list?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Seymour said. “Now it appears it was all a clever deception. Farid was literally a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”
“Any idea who activated him?”
“We’re poring over his telephone and computer records as we speak, along with the suicide video he left behind. It’s clear his attack was connected to the bombings in Paris and Copenhagen. Whether they were coordinated by the remnants of al-Qaeda Central or a new network is now a matter of intense debate. Whatever the case, it’s none of your concern. Your role in this affair is officially over.”
The Jaguar crossed Cavendish Place and stopped outside the entrance of the Langham Hotel.
“I’d like my gun back.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Seymour said.
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“Scotland Yard would like you to remain in London for the rest of the weekend. On Monday morning, you can go back to your cottage by the sea and think of nothing other than your Titian.”
“How do you know about the Titian?”
“I know everything. Everything except how to prevent a British-born Muslim from carrying out an act of mass murder in Covent Garden.”
“I could have stopped him, Graham.”
“Yes,” Seymour said distantly. “And we would have repaid the favor by tearing you to pieces.”
Gabriel stepped from the car without another word. “Your role in this affair is officially over,” he murmured as he entered the lobby. He repeated it, again and again, like a mantra.
THAT SAME EVENING, THE OTHER universe inhabited by Gabriel Allon was also on edge but for decidedly different reasons. It was the fall auction season in New York, the anxious time when the art world, in all its folly and excess, convenes for two weeks of frenzied buying and selling. It was, as Nicholas Lovegrove liked to say, one of the few remaining occasions when it was still considered fashionable to be vastly rich. It was also, however, a deadly serious business. Great collections would be built, great fortunes made and lost. A single transaction could launch a brilliant career. It could also
