Someone followed. I heard the door slam, footsteps behind me. Then a man’s voice, English.

‘You forgot this.’ It was the gunman. He held up a wallet. It wasn’t mine. He sounded well spoken, which wasn’t the comfort you’d expect. I thought through the various options for incapacitating him: eyes, throat, knees. Then it became irrelevant.

The explosion shook the building. I found myself on the floor beside the wall, in the dark, thinking: that sound, the one that gets you in the stomach. A car bomb. Thinking: I’m alive. The President …

I got to my feet. There was plaster over my skin. I continued down the stairs, checking myself for injury. I was okay. I’d been lucky.

I’d been saved.

Screaming began on the seventh floor. Windows had blown in from the fifth floor down. Then I was stepping over debris, over a car door. A woman’s bare arm lay on the third-floor carpet, severed at the shoulder, bracelet still on.

Dust filled the reception. The heat of the explosion lingered. There was no front wall. The central spine of the revolving doors had become implanted in the wall. A car lay on its roof beside a stump of the lobby’s fountain. One security guard sat on the floor, back against the reception desk, gun out, no right leg beneath the knee.

A few dazed, dust-caked figures wandered in the snow outside. Thick smoke plumed from two burning cars, turning the snow black. I made out a 20-foot crater in the driveway’s tarmac, halfway between the hotel’s entrance and the gates to the street.

The security staff who had survived were coming to their senses, trying to clear the area. More often than not there was a second bomb. Sometimes the second bomber waited for the emergency services to arrive. I couldn’t see any unattended vehicles. The first sirens were approaching.

Saved. I turned back, thinking I might see my guardian angels emerging from the dust. There was a woman in shredded evening wear, blood down her chin, mouth working silently. I gave her my coat before continuing into the storm.

FORTY-NINE

I stumbled away from the scene through a cloud of black flakes, gripped by a sense that I should have known. I heard the screams of two women. The first emergency vehicles tore into the hotel grounds, almost hitting me.

A minute later I was still walking, starting to shiver with early-stage hypothermia. I flagged a car beside Lovers’ Park. The driver was agitated, seeking information rather than a fare. The sirens were endless now; a troop carrier tore past us. I could still smell synthetic materials burning, and see the smoke plume in the light of adverts.

‘What happened?’

‘A bomb.’

‘I must go home. I can’t drive you.’

‘I just need to get to somewhere where I can be indoors.’