He jogged in the direction of the patch of sand that Alice had been occupying.

Jogged past the corpses of young children, elderly people, girls in bikinis, young men in dayglo shorts.

Past a man on his back staring sightlessly at the sky, a John Grisham novel still in his hand, the yellow sand dark with red blood.

Another slumped over a cool box, shot in the act of getting himself another beer.

‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered to himself.

He reached the spot.

Their towels were there, but there was no sign of either of the girls.

A wave of something like panic swept over him – a fear he didn’t recognise, because he’d never experienced it before.

And then a police vehicle drove onto the beach, and Carr thought he’d better drop the AK and put his hands up.

‘George,’ he shouted, over his shoulder. ‘Game over, son. Let them see you’re unarmed.’

24.

IT HAD BEEN a quiet day at the Vauxhall HQ of the Secret Intelligence Service.

Although the threat level across Europe had been high for some years now, there was nothing to suggest any imminent attack, and the duty officer on the Spain desk had spent the morning wading through intelligence related to a revival of Basque separatism in the north.

All that changed with a call from a GCHQ liaison officer, with intercepts of frantic communications between Spanish police and special forces on the Costa del Sol.

The duty officer’s blood ran cold, and her hands actually shook for a moment or two.

Then she picked up her phone and called her boss, Director of Operations Justin Nicholls, third-in-command of MI6 and widely tipped to be a future leader of the service.

Within the hour, the world knew that terrorists had launched a massive and deadly attack on two towns on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

By then, Nicholls was just starting an emergency meeting of the MI6 senior management team, chaired by ‘C’ – the Chief of the SIS.

‘What do we know?’ said C, his voice brusque.

‘Estimates are fifty dead on the ship, and thirty or more on the beach,’ said Nicholls. ‘Will go higher, I’m afraid. It looks very much as though Puerto Banús was the main target. They hit Málaga first, and then went onto the beach when the first responders were out of the way.’

‘Why? What were they looking for at Marbella?’

‘That’s not yet clear.’

‘How did we not know about this?’ said C.

‘We can’t know about everything,’ said Nicholls.

‘A complex, two-pronged attack, on this bloody scale, and we had no idea? They must have been planning it for months.’

‘We’re already going back through everything remotely linked to the Costa for the last two years, just in case it was there and we missed it. But at this stage, no, we had no idea.’

‘The Spanish?’

Spain’s CNI, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, was not quite at the level of its counterparts in British or American intelligence, but it had improved dramatically since the Madrid train outrage of 2004, and was more than willing to share information and co-operate in the global fight against terrorism.