A Very Big Bang Page 9

  Such mutinous thoughts passed through Shard’s mind as he listened, in Hesseltine’s office not long after Hedge had seethed away from St. James’s Park, to the words of wisdom coming from various pundits. He caught Hesseltine’s eye as an elderly Defence Ministry official laid down military law: Hesseltine was looking glazed and, at an appropriate moment, butted in.

  “Gentlemen, I must remind you — time is short. We have four days’ maximum if the time table is kept to. I have the feeling that some of us don’t quite believe the facts. Am I right?”

  There was a shuffle of feet, a murmur of voices, some modulated laughter.

  “Well, gentlemen?” Hesseltine, eagle-eyed copper, stared round the faces with rising impatient truculence. “Will you allow me to suggest you cut the cackle and come to something like a decision, or will you give me carte blanche?”

  Gasps: the gentlemen showed indignation. A voice or two — Defence Ministry, supported by Home Office — murmured that the whole thing was fantasy, that it strained belief, that the precautions currently being taken were more than enough, that the public would become alarmed, that indeed there might be a panic reaction if anything more obvious was done.

  Hesseltine, loudly, said. “That’s nonsense. The situation is dangerous in the extreme. Do you not realise?” He thumped the table, glasses of water trembled alongside virgin blotters and sheets of note-taking A4. “London is faced with the worst threat yet, the threat of a nuclear underground explosion!” Hesseltine simmered, reading the expressions turned towards him: aggrievement, dudgeon, offended dignity. High civil officials didn’t take a cry of nonsense from men who had spent a large proportion of their working lives in a blue uniform: Hesseltine was being unseemly. Almost his sole support came from London Transport.

  London Transport came in as crisp as one of its own trains crescendoing into Piccadilly: “Mr Hesseltine’s right. We’ve had the starters, some big, some small. Remember the Old Bailey explosion. Remember the railway stations, remember all those filthy pub bombings. Remember the army coach in Yorkshire, the bomb attacks on military establishments, the Tower, the government offices in Balham. All right — that was all the IRA, and this isn’t! Now we’re being hit by the other mob. The point is, these things happen, although none of us believed they ever could or would — not in England. England’s changing. Only fools won’t face the fact!”

  “Well, really —”

  “Let me tell you something, gentlemen: we in London Transport have always feared something like this. We’re wide open to it, and the only wonder is that it hasn’t happened long ago. I beg of you to use your imaginations: rivers of blood just won’t be in the race! I don’t know, I can’t suggest, how we combat this. It’s not my job to instruct the police — and God knows, they’re faced with a big enough task. All we in London Transport can do is to keep up our own security at its top pitch, and co-operate with any extra security the police suggest. But I say again, you must all take the threat very seriously.”

  He sat down; Hesseltine nodded his thanks. “Take due note, gentlemen. Detective Chief Superintendent Shard may help to clear your thoughts, I fancy. Shard?”

  Shard, feeling drained by the faces of complacency, got up, leaned his weight on the polished table. “I’ve not much to say. We don’t know who these people are, where they come from — other than broadly — where they are now. But we’re going to dig them out.” He paused. “This we do know: one Garda officer, one priest and his housekeeper have been murdered. They killed one of their own people — I saw it done. I’ve been in their hands, was rumbled, got away. I know they exist. I know they will do what they say. I know London is to be blown from underneath. I know all this — there’s no argument. Go back to your ministries, tell your chiefs to persuade Government to act. There’s no further point in secrecy. I’ve come round to this view: until we’ve arrested these people, the whole tube system must be shut down, guarded and patrolled along its whole length by police and troops.”

  He caught the eye of Hedge: Hedge, who had remained silent and anonymous, was not pleased. His God was secrecy.

  *

  In St James’s Park station, down on the platform, Hedge said, sotto voce, “I still don’t agree. You had no business to say that.”

  “They don’t have to do as I say, though I hope they will.” Hedge said, “A one-day closure, as I suggested in the beginning — fair enough. But no longer. It’d be an impossible business. Bring life to a halt.”

  “So will the explosion.”

  “A once and for all thing!” Hedge snapped.

  “You don’t mean that, Hedge. Not even you.”

  “Well …” Hedge didn’t go on. He gave a sniff of disapproval, glaring round at mixed humanity. “Another point: unlike you, I don’t see that we can blow all secrecy.”

  “Not all secrecy,” Shard said, heavily patient. “But we can’t avoid the admission that we do know about the threat. Not any more — and damn it, I admit my own failures! We’re in a position now to take overt precautions. In the public interest, we must take them. That’s all.”

  Hedge glowered, went off at a tangent. “Waste of time — that meeting. Talk, talk, talk.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It cleared the air a little — I did detect a welcome and salutary sense of fear in some of them, not to say a touch of the dirtied trousers —”

  “Shard, really —”

  “And how about you?” Shard enquired, grinning.

  “Me?”

  “You’re now slap bang on the underground system — true, this is sub-surface and not deep level, but perhaps you get the feeling?”

  Hedge sucked in his cheeks, staring with obvious spite. “So that’s why you talked me into coming down here. It’s no damn farther to walk all the way — I told you —”

  “Yes,” Shard agreed, still grinning. “But you don’t often use the tubes, so I thought —” He broke off, hearing a distant rumble. “Here’s our train.” In silence they waited for it to pull in. It stopped, a non-smoking door right opposite them. Hedge stepped forward, was halted by Shard’s hand on his arm. “Careful, Hedge!”

  “Why?”

  “Look!” Shard pointed, face grave now though the eyes were a give-away. “A Middle Eastern gentleman, Hedge — carrying a parcel.”

  Even Shard hadn’t expected the instant reaction: Hedge beat it rapidly, and somewhat pointlessly really, for the next carriage along the platform. When he plumped down into a seat, he was quite breathless. He mopped his face and wouldn’t speak to Shard. Shard, looking down at the neatly rolled umbrella, saw that the french letter had gone. He wondered if it had been left in Scotland Yard.

  *

  There was indeed still that point Shard had made to Hedge right at the start, after Casey’s body had been found: closure of the system was in a sense pointless, since the Nazarrazeen mob could lie low for a while and then, when the nine-day-wonder was over, come out and start again. Yet, now, it was something that couldn’t be avoided, in Shard’s view. This was, however, a view not shared by the summit. Shard, when Hedge disembarked at Westminster, went on alone, changing at Charing Cross for Leicester Square, and soon after he reached his office Hedge was on the line.

  “Vetoed,” he said. “He won’t have it.”

  “He?”

  “The Prime Minister. He’s been approached —”

  “Already?”

  Hedge sounded reproving. “There’s a certain urgency, is there not? We’re not always slow —”

  “For God’s sake, why the veto? Doesn’t he care?”

  “I’m quite sure he does, but we must see his point, my dear chap.” Hedge was being patient, though with difficulty. “He said — so I’m told — we mustn’t be seen to be defeated otherwise the country could become ungovernable. I agree, Shard — and so do you really. Look at the hijacks: worse and worse, and will become more so until someone stands up to the demands. He —”

  “So London’s to be the standing ground, the test
case?”

  “Well, you could say that, I suppose.”

  “I do say it. Christ, Hedge! Couldn’t a stance have been taken over something smaller?”

  “Agreed — but it wasn’t. Now we’re stuck with this.” Hedge paused. “The Prime Minister spoke of Belfast, apparently. Look how they’re taking it, he said —”

  “They haven’t an underground, Hedge.”

  “True. But it’s been years and years … and nothing’s packed up because of terrorism. It’s a point, you know. We mustn’t be panicked.”

  Shard bared his teeth into the telephone. “Hedge, you know very well you’ll cross the street bloody fast every time you see an Arab from now on.” Angrily, he banged the handset down on its bracket and simmered at it. Terrorism didn’t exactly frighten him: he was a copper and terrorism had become a fact of life and had to be faced as such; but in spite of all he had said it did appal him that dedicated nonentities could almost with impunity hold governments, countries, cities to ransom, have whole communities and organisations dancing to their wicked whims, the forces of authority bowing their polite way out backwards while naked savagery went into its sacrosanct performance of death and destruction. Sometime it had to stop: maybe the Prime Minister was right, but this time it was going to be too high a price to pay … the security line burred and before he answered Shard knew who it was: Hedge again, cold and furious at being hung up on.

  “You’re damn rude, Shard, and I won’t have it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Shard jerked his sleeve back and looked at his watch. “I’m going north … to talk to the only possibility we currently have for answering back —”

  “Larger?”

  “Right, Hedge. I’ll hit him with more than porn, a lot more.”

  “Keep me informed, won’t you?”

  “I’ll do that. Just as soon as I know anything —”

  “Going up by road?”

  “British Rail. My car was shot up — remember?”

  “I’ll arrange a replacement.”

  “No. I’ll go by train. You never know — something may show.” He paused. “Hedge?”

  “Yes?”

  Shard grinned. “I’m now going to ring off. I thought I’d better tell you, this time.” Hedge’s angry snort just reached him before he cut the call. Using his ordinary open line he called Beth: if he hadn’t come back into her life the evening before, she’d have been preparing, right now, to go to his funeral.

  “Simon,” he said when the call was answered: it was Mrs Micklam. “How’s Beth, mother-in-law?”

  “Oh … getting over it.”

  And no thanks to you, he thought. He said, “I may not be home tonight. If I am, it’ll be late. Will you tell Beth, please?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell her, Simon.”

  “You’ll still be there, when I get back?”

  “If Beth wants me,” she said. There had been a slight and meaningful emphasis on the “Beth”, and he rang off before he became indiscreet — maybe it was the Foreign Office atmosphere, permeating his soul so insidiously … he would have liked to have said quite a lot, quite a lot. Then, getting up from the untidy desk and going towards his safe, he gave a short, hard laugh. He was a Detective Chief Superintendent, not all that far from the top and young for his rank. If he should become a Deputy Commander CID within the next couple of years, he would be the youngest ever to hold that gilded rank. Yet he had a Mrs Micklam round his neck: the thought, in a sense, intrigued him. To the young PCs on the beat, to the fresh-faced DCs of CID, Detective Chief Superintendents had it made, they had the lot. Overpaid and underworked, shouting the odds down the chain of command, house bought and mortgage repaid, wife waiting with slippers out, you couldn’t go wrong. Couldn’t you? Shard laughed again: so many unknown crosses from which mere rank couldn’t protect you! Envy was a stupid emotion.

  *

  By tube to King’s Cross, openly, no red herrings: Shard wanted the other side to show, but he got no sign. That could be because he was too open: the fact that he would be expected, sooner or later, to go north for a chat with Larger could operate two ways at once. Shard sat cross-legged in the swaying tube train, reading the adverts, watching his shadowy reflection in the windows backed by the dirty wall of the tunnel, keeping a discreet eye on his current companionship. At the stations people came and went, white, black, yellow, medium. He couldn’t lay a mental finger on any, but he knew that danger was with him all the way now. He pressed his left upper arm to his side, liking the feel of the gun in his shoulder-holster: warm, comforting! He listened to the hollow-sounding roar, the train’s restless racket, his thoughts sliding on to the greater roar that was to come — was to come. No ifs and buts. Shard knew that the security net was tight, couldn’t be tighter given that the network was, by Prime Ministerial command, to remain open. But no security was 100 percent; it couldn’t be. This world didn’t admit perfection. Always the way through — that had been proved time and again by terrorists in many places. When men and women didn’t shrink from risking their own lives in a cause, you couldn’t, in the last resort, hold them back. They became natural winners …

  Shard, very suddenly, caught his breath: his eye, taken and held by an advert along the coach, a colourful one of the Thames and a river bus going merrily down to Greenwich Pier, had given thought a jolt, sickeningly. The river. Good Christ, why hadn’t it clicked before now? The maps that London Transport security man had produced — Partington. Three — no, four, wasn’t it — four sections of track … London Bridge to Monument on the Northern Line, Rotherhithe to Wapping on the Metropolitan, and, on the Bakerloo and Northern Lines, twin sections: Waterloo to Charing Cross. All in tunnels beneath the river.

  Shard felt the sudden sweat break. Deep — yes, those trackbearing river-tunnels would be deep down, of course they would! But a nuclear explosion? Shard, horrified now, stared sightlessly back at his darkened image in the train’s window as the coach rattled on, next stop King’s Cross. Claustrophobic now, it could all happen at any moment, literally. A nuclear blow-out, its lateral movement tamped perhaps, held in — tamping had been specifically mentioned as being part of the job — so that the force went up and outwards, fracturing the tunnel wall, splitting the great weight of London clay, the river bed above. If that fracture should reach the river bottom to be widened by the huge pressure of the water … Shard knew in that moment what it meant to have the mind boggle. Imagination rioted: the huge inroad, the build-up, the solid water rushing unimpeded to infiltrate along the section, then the next section, rising over the platforms of the stations as it spread, rising until it met its own far-overhead level … the escalators submerging, rattling up from the rising floodwaters, rattling down … the whole network, the jointures of the different underground systems taking the water to fling it along their own tunnels … the panic, and the wholesale deaths as men and women and children fought to beat the tumultuous rise. It would be total disaster, the worst ever to hit London since the Great Plague and the Great Fire. This would go down in the history books as the Great Flood.

  Shard wiped away the sweat, disembarked like an automaton at King’s Cross.

  Could it happen? Did it lie only in the mind?

  He took a risk — not a large one. From a telephone kiosk he rang London Transport and got Partington. He said, “Shard. Now listen and interpret. The Thames.”

  “The Thames?”

  “You know about it,” Shard said, on edge and showing it. “It’s a river.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Things below it. Mr Partington, for God’s sake get with it! We’ve talked — you know what about. Could a certain thing happen, or couldn’t it?”

  A gasp indicated dawning awareness. “You don’t mean —”

  “Yes, I do,” Shard said. “Possible — or not?”

  “Good grief, I need warning of this one! Off the cuff I’d say not. It all depends … on size.”


  “If it’s big — bloody big?”

  “It’d have to be more than big, I fancy. Colossal. I doubt if it’s a startler, Mr Shard. On the other hand …”

  “On the other hand, what?”

  “Not impossible. No — not entirely impossible.”

  “I check with that, in my non-expert view. I’m going to ask you to do something for me, Mr Partington: go and see Assistant Commissioner Hesseltine — don’t ring, go. Tell him what we’ve talked about.” He rang off, shouldered his way out of the kiosk. The roof of King’s Cross station was dirty as ever, but where the glass was not, a bright sun shone, and there was blue sky. Buying a first-class return for York, Shard had a cold feeling, a feeling that the Bible story was about to be reversed upon a godless world: first the sunshine, then the flood.

  Ten

  Inter-City was fast: Shard, keeping himself to himself in his first-class seat behind a Daily Telegraph, found it nevertheless tedious: so much to do, and he could only sit and wait. But in excellent time he was in the nick at York, hearing what he had expected to hear.

  “Not the tiniest tickle of a cough, Mr Shard,” the DI reported.

  “Porn?”

  “That, yes. No alternative, had he?” Gleeson gave a short laugh.

  “So he’s under no illusions — he knows he’ll be going down on the porn charge, I take it?”