‘Leila, Leila, there’s no fucking way through!’ Marchant shouted into the phone. His hands were wet with sweat and he gripped the receiver tightly as he ran, like a relay baton. He could hear her talking urgently to other people in the background. ‘Jesus, Leila, we’re slowing down with five hundred people backing up in front of us.’
‘Head left, head left!’ a voice was suddenly saying. It wasn’t Leila’s. Left? For a moment, all Marchant could think of was the blue tartan shoes he had as a child, ‘L’ and ‘R’ embroidered in red on the toes. Then Pradeep pointed ahead of them at a marshal who was beckoning frantically. He was trying to direct them over to the far side of the crowd, where marshals were pushing runners back, making a channel.
Marchant couldn’t dredge up another word, let alone shout that he was a doctor, but in the end there was no need. They were suddenly through the roadblock, running on their own, the din of the crowd receding fast behind them. The marathon behemoth had spat them free.
Eight hundred yards ahead lay Tower Bridge, flags flying, eerily deserted. Marchant managed a faint smile, but not for long. Up until the roadblock, Pradeep’s mission would still have had the appearance of viability to any observer. Now, as the two of them ran on alone up the empty road, the suicide operation was blown. All Marchant could hope for was that Pradeep’s handler, if he had one out there, would wait until the iconic setting of Tower Bridge to cut his losses. The Ambassador wouldn’t die, there would be no ‘Carnage at the London Marathon’ headlines, but a suicide bombing at one of the capital’s most famous landmarks would still be worth something.
‘Leila?’ Marchant asked, still short of breath, struggling to grip the phone.
‘We copy you,’ an American man’s voice said.
‘Where’s Leila?’ he shouted. ‘Put Leila back on the line, do you hear?’
‘It’s OK, Daniel,’ a voice said. ‘She’s still here. We just patched you through directly to Colorado Springs. You’re now talking to me, Harriet Armstrong, in London.’
The bitch, he thought, but he said nothing. He was too tired.
‘They’re going to slow you down in a couple of minutes,’ Armstrong continued. ‘We’ve got two from the Bomb Squad waiting on the north side of the bridge. As soon as you’re walking, they’ll move in. Try to get more out of Pradeep. Cell names, contacts, who’s running him, anything. We’ll call you back in two minutes.’
It felt strange to run the London Marathon through deserted streets. He had always liked empty spaces, big yawning skies, mountains, the open sea. In cities he felt trapped, but he could live here if it was always like this. He suddenly thought of the Thar Desert, trudging over sand dunes with Sebastian on a camel beside him, their parents up ahead, smiling back at them.
As far as Marchant could tell, the police had cleared a corridor a hundred yards either side of the route. For a moment, he imagined that he was leading the field with Pradeep, having broken away from the leading pack in a ruthless final kick for home. Then his legs reminded him how tired he felt.
‘Where are you from, Pradeep?’ he asked. ‘Which part of India?’
‘How do you know I’m from India?’
‘I used to live there.’
‘Which place?’
‘Delhi. Chanakyapuri.’
‘Very nice,’ Pradeep said, moving his head from side to side, managing a faint smile. Talk of home seemed to give him strength.
‘All I remember is the yellow blossom of the laburnum trees. I was very young.’
For a few seconds their steps were synchronised, rising and falling together. They both noticed it, momentarily entranced. ‘Are we going to die?’ Pradeep asked.
‘No. We’re not.’
‘My home place is Kochi.’
‘Kerala?’
‘My wife, she is also from there. We have one son, living with us in Delhi. They will kill him if I don’t do this today.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
Pradeep didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled out a small photo from a pouch at the front of the belt and showed it to Marchant.
Marchant looked at the young face that smiled back at him. This hadn’t been a part of his calculations. Pradeep might have been a reluctant bomber, but he now had a motive to see it through. His heart sank. Pradeep had missed his target, the Ambassador, but he could still honour his word by blowing himself up at Tower Bridge to save his son. Marchant glanced at his watch: one hour thirty-nine minutes.
‘But you don’t want to go through with this, do you?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want to die.’ Before Pradeep could answer, Marchant’s phone started to ring. It was Colorado Springs.
Again, Marchant imagined himself from high above, the bridge looking even more like a child’s model than it did from the ground. He listened to the young American on the phone, calm and authoritative, talking to him, to Armstrong, to someone else. And then, at last, it was time to slow down.
‘If the GPS makes any sound at all, increase your speed immediately, do you copy that?’ the American asked.
‘Copy that.’
‘Now take it down slowly, sir. Your window is open. Two minutes and counting.’
Marchant looked at Pradeep, suddenly unsure of his cooperation. For so long he had wanted him to keep on running; now he was praying he would slow down. But Pradeep’s pace remained constant, his eyes looking straight ahead. If anything, he was growing stronger. He was hanging on until they reached the bridge.
‘Remember, you’ve got time to speed up again if the GPS doesn’t like it,’ the American said. ‘Ease it down now. One minute forty-five and counting.’
Marchant moved closer to Pradeep and grabbed his arm. ‘It’s OK, we can slow down. We can stop. We’ve done it.’ They were at the edge of the bridge, approaching the first tower, still not slowing. Marchant knew that tears were mixing with Pradeep’s sweat as he tried to struggle on, for his young son, to the middle of the bridge. But his legs were beginning to buckle, first one, then the other, and soon he was in Marchant’s arms, sobbing, as they slowed to a walking pace. Marchant glanced at his receiver to check their speed: it still said that they were running at eight minutes per mile.
Marchant never established the exact order of what happened next. He remembered two bomb disposal officers, weighed down with protective khaki clothing, running across from the far side of the bridge, shouting at him to remain where he was. And he later learnt that at the same time, somewhere in the skies above Heathrow, two passenger planes started their final approaches sooner than they should have, setting themselves on a collision course that was only averted by an extra-vigilant air traffic controller.
The double-tap gunshot that rang out on the bridge, jerking Pradeep’s head back, must have been fired just before the bomb disposal squad reached them. Marchant remembered holding Pradeep’s limp body for a second and then slumping down with him to the tarmac. The two dum-dum bullets had spread out inside Pradeep’s skull, rather than passing through it. The back of his head felt like moist moss.
The belt was cut free and disarmed in the subsequent blur, but as Marchant was led away in a cacophony of sirens, all he could recall thinking about was Pradeep’s son, and whether he would now be allowed to live.
4
Daniel Marchant looked out across the shallow valley and watched as a flock of Canada geese flew along the canal, rising from its surface to turn right towards the village. A faint mist hung above the water, streaked with blue smoke from the early-morning stoves of canal boats moored along the far bank. Beside the canal was the railway to London, and a small, three-carriage train was waiting in the station for the first commuters