‘Even if you’re right, Sophie, you’ve made a hell of a lot of assumptions here,’ said Tennant. ‘He could be dumping the explosives in a hiding place to pick up later.’

‘Sir, with all due respect, that makes no sense. He needs to get the explosives to the drones and he needs to attach them somehow. That needs space and privacy. He’s also got four men to hide. So he needs a place that’s big enough for five people, plus a shedload of drones, guns and ammo. And it’s within a twenty-minute walk, a mile at best.’ She sounded more confident than she felt.

‘Put up the map,’ said Tennant. A map of North West London appeared with a yellow dot at the location of the storage unit.

‘This is the storage unit,’ said Gabriel. ‘And this blue circle is everywhere within a one-mile radius.’

The blue circle stretched up to the North Circular in the north-west, and down to the A40 and Wormwood Scrubs in the south. Just to the north-west of the circle – maybe half a mile from the circumference – was a tiny circle of green.

Gabriel let the significance of the green circle sink in for a moment. ‘And just outside it is Wembley Stadium. I know, sir, that Pride seemed the most obvious target this morning. But the evidence surely points to Wembley now. And the biggest, most exposed, more vulnerable, most contained crowd today. Ninety thousand men, women and children sat down to watch a football match.’

‘You’ve sold me it, I agree,’ said Tennant. ‘It’s the priority. But only the priority – not our sole focus. It’s 1pm now. It’s too late to cancel or evacuate Wembley even if we were one hundred per cent sure it was the target.’

‘Some of us are,’ muttered Gabriel under her breath.

Tennant continued. ‘We’ll move the extra resources away from Pride to Wembley. I’m going to move to Gold Command – I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to see me there today. Sophie, you use whatever you need today, you do whatever you need to do to prevent this clusterfuck. Keep me updated and if anyone gets in your way, use my name and take no crap.’

DAY 18

Saturday Afternoon

Special Operations Room, Lambeth, London

It took Tennant nineteen minutes to get to the special ops room, south of the river. The SOR was quieter than the last time he’d been here, on the day of the peace march ten days earlier. Ten days? More like ten years. He walked through the pods of the cavernous operations room into the smaller Gold Command suite. The team rose as he entered, but he waved them down.

The Gold Commander, an old-school chief superintendent with a beer belly and white moustache whom Tennant liked immensely, rolled his eyes. ‘Fucking hell, boss. It must be bad if you’re here,’ he said in a Glaswegian wheeze.

‘Sorry to ruin your day, Tom. Where are we?’

‘I’ve mobilised the specialist assets to the stadium – the sniper teams will be up there shortly, the armed response vehicles and CTSFOs are in place. Officers are under instruction to be visible – be chatty and engage the crowd as much as possible. And I’ve pulled in additional BDOs.’