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Eight minutes later, the video screen in the ops room was filled with wide-angle CCTV footage of a shopping street, two hundred metres from the flat. The frame was paused as a moped, ridden by a man wearing a red helmet, waited at a pedestrian crossing. The timestamp showed it was captured four minutes after the drone was detonated at the flat.

Bose came over. ‘The flat owner doesn’t have a motorbike and says there was no helmet in the cupboard,’ she said, then added: ‘Is that him?’

Gabriel peered at the screen. The rider’s build was about right, the helmet was a good match and the timing fitted. But was it him? ‘I bloody hope so, Eva. Anything from ANPR?’

‘Just in. The moped was last spotted on the Westway heading east into the centre of town. He’ll be on Marylebone Road by now, given the traffic. We should have a bike with him in three minutes.’

Three minutes? It didn’t seem real. Was it possible that her two-year-long search for Abu Mujahid was going to end here and now? All those lives he had taken, all those hours she had spent tracing up false leads and spurious rumours? She searched for a trace of excitement, a gut feeling that she was finally on his trail after these two weeks of searching, after these two years of frustration. But there was nothing. No prickling of the hairs on her neck, no twisting in the gut, no adrenaline rush to let her know she was on the right track, nothing visceral.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Tennant. She answered in a side office on her earpiece.

‘Bloody good call on Wembley, Sophie,’ said Tennant. ‘The Gold Commander’s face was something else when I told him to let you take over the radio. Clearly thought I’d lost it. But bloody glad I did.’

She hadn’t the heart or the time to tell him that her fantastic evidence that Asad and Muhid were outside Wembley had been little more than an intelligent hunch. Perhaps she would just quietly forget that.

‘Sir,’ she interrupted him. ‘We’ve got CCTV on Abu Mujahid. Or at least we’re pretty sure we have. On a moped fleeing the scene. ANPR shows he’s heading south-west, to the centre of town. Bose tells me we’re minutes away from him.’

‘You don’t sound so sure,’ said Tennant.

‘I’m not going to celebrate until he’s banged up, boss.’

‘So what was his great plan? Another attack? A last hurrah?’

‘That’s just not his style, boss,’ said Gabriel. ‘He’s a schemer, not a martyr. In the three or four years he’s been on our radar, he’s not once put his own neck on the line. No. He was either going to lay low or get out.’

‘If he was planning to lay low, he was going about it a funny way, Sophie. If I were him, I’d be heading for the suburbs, looking for some quiet backwater. But look at him. He’s heading into the centre of London, the CCTV hotspot of the entire country. He must know there’s a chance we’re on to him by now.’