Epilogue

EPILOGUE

The first reports to emerge from the US ambassador’s residence were confused and contradictory: a shooting, a frenzied stabbing, a bloodbath. All three were true.

Throughout the night, Downing Street and White House press officers vainly attempted to impose news blackouts, which simply fanned the flames of rumour online as well as on TV. By the end of the night people at home on either side of the Atlantic could choose from at least twenty interpretations of what had just happened.

By seven a.m. London time, some of the rumours had solidified into confirmed reports. The frenzied attack of a lone female guest had been eclipsed by a much stranger and even more compelling claim. The Mail Online dubbed it a ‘Romeo and Juliet attack’, the suicide pact by a pair of doomed lovers who had given their lives to jihad.

At ten a.m. a joint press conference was convened, but only after several hours of wrangling had taken place between the two governments over what could be said, should be said and definitely could never be said. The agreed line was that the US Secret Service had magnificently thwarted an audacious attempted suicide bombing. But nothing could be done to cover up the fact that the young male bomber had actually been in the pay of the UK’s governing party. As for his lover, the woman known only as Nasima, her identity remained a mystery.

Five thousand miles away, Aaron Stutz stood alone in his penthouse, watching multiple screens featuring TV and online attempts to get to grips with the story. Either way, for him it was a win: whether the two premiers died or survived, both outcomes guaranteed that anti-Islamist tensions would escalate to new heights. Public demand for stiffer measures against Islamist extremism was inevitable. Getting the incumbent President and prime minister off the stage would have ushered in successors who would be obliged to consider the case for the digital fortress – and almost certainly act on it. But even if they survived, and in any case both of them were up for election within the year, they would have to be seen to act. The digital fortress would become a reality now.

Stutz helped himself to a tumbler of Jim Beam Black and turned away from the screens to the picture window that ran along the whole side of the room. He looked in the direction of the mosque rising in the south-east of the city and raised his glass to the memory of the young woman who had given herself so bravely and so audaciously for the cause.

In Thames House, inside Mandler’s glass refuge, Jonathan Rhodes, his opposite number from Vauxhall Cross, was just finishing his briefing. It had been an awkward encounter.