2.35am. Saturday, 11th November
They dressed his knee in A&E, pumped antibiotics into him, counted three broken ribs, checked him for concussion, and for wounds that had drenched him in gore but the blood wasn’t his. If the junior doctor wasn’t so overwhelmed by the casualties and the trauma stacking up in triage, she might have asked about the ridged scar through his hair. But she didn’t. There were lives to save, limbs to save. No time for conversation. Instead, the walking wounded sat with sweet tea in the waiting room and along the corridors of the hospital. Someone made a joke that they had to be the best-dressed patients the hospital had ever seen but no one laughed. A TV played out in the corner: estimates had it at more than 48 dead and more than 250 wounded. Unconfirmed reports claimed the Prime Minister and her Italian counterpart were dead. They could confirm the German Chancellor was seriously wounded and five other UK ministers believed to be dead including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary. President Trump was unharmed and already on Air Force One heading home. He’d tweeted his outrage. No one had yet claimed responsibility. The bomb, however, was believed to be the work of an ISIL splinter group operating out of Libya. Complaints were already coming in about the response of the emergency services.
At the news of the Prime Minister’s death, a young girl began to sob and an elderly man who had earlier described himself in a clipped tone as “Foreign Office” rubbed her back, round and round, patting it every now and then as if she was a babe-in-arms. Two policeman in bullet-proof vests wandered the corridors, catching the injured, harvesting names and addresses, asking them what they had seen, where they had been standing when the bomb went off. If they had consulted their pocket notebook they would have remembered the big guy who had wrecked his knee was Jack Keegan, a waiter with Blue Arrow Catering, and no, he hadn’t seen anyone suspicious. He’d been by the door, his tray empty about to head back in for refills when the bomb went off. Thank God eh? Or he might be dead too. Of course they could have his address and mobile – whatever they needed. All he could tell them was it was just the usual function with more security. His friend died, another waiter, and he’d carried some nice American lady out – she was dead too. He’d gone quiet then which hadn’t been an act. They’d liked that though. The sergeant patting him on his upper arm. Telling him “It’s all right, son.” And North thought about the Army and how much he missed it.
Occasionally a relative or friend, North wasn’t sure which, stumbled among them searching, raising people’s heads, looking for husbands or colleagues – their fear of loss, of discovery, almost unbearable to him. They would plead with a nurse, she’d shake her head and they’d leave again, no wiser and no sorrier, but that much closer to the inevitable fact of death.
The injured sat on – in no hurry to leave. Even though they had been treated, glassy-eyed, their heads bandaged and wounds stitched, they found another plastic seat and went back to waiting. North had seen it before – the consolation of a stranger who’d shared the same experience worth more at that moment than the warm arms of a wife who hadn’t been there – could not imagine the horror, the realisation that what you had been through had changed you.
A groan from the assembled patients, a chorus of “No’s”. He looked back at the TV. Two white-coated doctors and a handful of pale, exhausted nurses had emerged from curtains and cubicles and tiny rooms. North couldn’t understand the pictures, couldn’t process what he was seeing. Overcome, a young nurse collapsed weeping against a colleague’s chest. The tickertape spelled it out – bomb attacks in seven venues in London. Aside from the Banqueting Hall, three other suicide bombers wrapped around with plastic explosives, the devices triggered by a pressure switch, one in the Dorchester, the others in the Westgate mall and Whiteley’s shopping centre, one suitcase bomb on a timer at Victoria Station, along with two car bombs of pressure cookers loaded with nails and pieces of metal outside Buckingham Palace and Chelsea Barracks triggered remotely.
A pressure switch. Sonja’s sorrowful, panicked eyes. Her hand had been wrapped around a pressure switch. Let go the switch – on purpose or accidentally and Boom.
Anarchy came to town.
“These people need locking up.” The middle-aged Cityslicker, one eye padded with gauze, had been furiously stabbing at his mobile phone since he sat down. Mobile communications were down across London and the South-East, the news report had already announced, and servers were working to resume normal service as soon as they could. But it didn’t stop him. As if he might get lucky and his text make it through. As if the rules didn’t apply to him.
A murmur of assent from the assembled crowd. “They should throw away the key.” The elderly diplomat who had been patting the young girl’s back stopped long enough to agree.
Then there she was. On the TV screen. Honor Jones – in a silver quilted jacket. Blood covered the pale skirt and there was a mauve bruise against her cheekbone which somehow made her eyes even greener. Her short hair was tousled as if she had run her hands through it but even so, it framed her face perfectly. She spoke directly to the camera against a backdrop of flames and burning shops. A nurse behind the desk turned up the volume.
Underneath the picture a tag line “Hero MP saves hundreds in shopping mall bomb disaster.” The picture cut away to grainy mobile phone footage, the shot dipping and falling – Honor mustering screaming shoppers. Her voice calm as she pointed to the exit. The power had gone and the only light was from the phone but Honor’s face remained clear of worry or fear.
“I’ve got you…Nobody panic. Hold hands. Keep together and keep moving everyone.”
There was something odd somewhere. The banker next to North who had stopped trying to text started again but he cursed and someone hissed at him to be quiet. That was it. The mobile network was down, but somehow this footage got through. And what were the chances that amid the communications chaos, the pictures to emerge were of Honor Jones, MP?
Maybe the call was a lucky one – routed through a wi-fi network? North considered the chances as the news cut back to Honor. She hunkered down, wrapping a foil blanket around the young girl weeping next to her. She stood up as a reporter asked a question – her face gleaming and perfect and suffering in the lights of the gathered cameras. Honor was smart. She knew something was off from the start. She must realise the Board was behind the bomb. This was her chance to denounce the conspiracy. To end centuries of manipulation and murder.
There was motion at the margins. A hum and a shuffling and the screen filled with people of all ages and colours and states of injury crowding into the space around Honor. Their need to be close to their saviour. Their need to listen. She pulled the little girl into her so they weren’t separated, her left hand resting on the child’s shoulder, and the child smiled broadly into the camera. Someone handed Honor a baby smudged with ash. “This is a truly terrible night. But I want to say this. We will not be defeated by acts of cowardice and terrorism. We pull together and we do whatever it takes, and mark my words …” she handed the baby off to a by-stander and pointed a finger directly into the camera “…those responsible for tonight’s events should not sleep easy. Because I, Honor Jones – No. We, the people, serve notice this night – we’re coming to get you. This country has fought wars against the odds before. Liberal values have their place, serve their purpose. But strength and security serve a purpose too. Keeping our citizens safe. Safer than our political system has kept them tonight. This nation is a great and sovereign nation. We will fight to our last breath to keep it that way. Britain Forever.”
She was Boudicca. She was Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I at Tilbury. It was perfect.
Inspirational.
A masterpiece of beauty, patriotism, courage, rhetoric.
It was a leadership bid in a country which had just lost its leaders.
A ragged, gathering cheer went up in the waiting room, picked up along the corridor as pain and shock were replaced by a heady, unholy joy, by a rush of devotion and righteous anger as a wounded country fell in love with Honor Jones, MP. Only one person wasn’t cheering – Michael North. He wasn’t one for coincidence. She worked it out. The camp full of innocents. The targeted bombing of the political elite. The coup was on. JP Armitage was dead and Honor Jones was without a protector. They’d snatched her up. And as far as she knew North too was dead – his corpse rotting in her Knightsbridge Wendy house. Stella never said she was his friend and Honor never told him she cared. No man ever kept her safe. Her murderous father. Her traitorous lover. North who came to kill her and who failed to save her over and over. Her best friend had disappeared, and her mother’s last words were to barricade herself in and stay alive at all costs. Unless she made herself useful, the Board had every reason to kill her. She was a comet trailing destruction. She’d pushed one man to his death from a rooftop. In calculating the odds this time, she had switched to the winning side. A sensible decision; the work of an ordered mind in a chaotic world. Persuasively, with skill and charm, she doubtless talked the gun out of Tarn’s hand. She had done it before. I understand. You’ve a job to do. But tell me one thing….
Why then did it feel like a betrayal?
The leather jacket hung off the back of the chair in the cafe, its dark brown sleeves puddled on the floor – its owner leaning in over the tiny zinc-topped table to talk to his companion, one arm around her. North shrugged himself into the leather jacket as he walked away from their table. He needed it more – on the streets of the capital his own shredded white dinner jacket was too obvious, bound to attract attention, curiosity – sympathy he didn’t need. His shirt was worse but he zipped the jacket up, checked the pockets – only coppers, flipped open the expensive Italian leather wallet he had lifted from the mobile phone addict in the waiting room. £90 and half a dozen credit cards – two of them platinum. As he turned his back on the crowded bright lights of the hospital, he kept the cash, discarding the wallet and cards on a brick wall. Somebody’s lucky night.