The Beretta slipped from his hand, and suddenly he was running, tearing at the air with his hands, as though trying to propel his way there faster. As he reached for the car door, a flash of brilliant white light blinded him, like the light of a thousand suns. He rose on a blast of scorching wind and tumbled helplessly backward into a storm of glass and blood. A child’s hand reached for him; he seized it briefly but it slipped through his grasp. Then a darkness fell over him, silent and still, and there was nothing at all.

PART TWO

DEATH OF A SPY

28

LONDON

LATER, THE METROPOLITAN POLICE WOULD determine that it was forty-seven seconds—forty-seven seconds from the time the woman abandoned the car on Brompton Road to the instant the bomb contained in its trunk detonated. It weighed five hundred pounds and was of expert construction. Of Quinn they expected nothing less.

Initially, however, the Met did not know it was Quinn. All that would come later, after the shouting matches, the threats of resignation and reprisal, and the inevitable orgy of bloodletting. The Met knew only what they had been told by Amanda Wallace, chief of MI5, in the minutes before disaster struck. A thirty-two-year-old woman with a German passport had collected a stolen late-model BMW from the short-stay car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 and was driving alone toward central London. MI6 had been told by a senior foreign intelligence operative—the operative was not identified—that the woman was connected to a known terrorist mastermind and bomb maker. Amanda Wallace recommended to the Met commissioner that he take any and all appropriate measures to impede the car’s progress and take the woman into custody. The commissioner had responded by dispatching units of the SCO19, the Met’s tactical firearms division. The first armed response vehicle arrived at the scene at the instant of detonation. Both officers were among the dead.