Shirley was upright again. “ ’Kay. In we go.”
Ho said, “But everyone’s coming out.”
“Jesus wept—you’re aware you’re MI5, right?”
“I’m mostly research,” he explained, but she was already shoving her way through the emerging crowds.
The gun looked natural in Piotr’s fist, no more surprising than a coffee cup or beer bottle. He pointed it at Marcus. “Hands on the table.”
Marcus laid his hands on the tabletop, palms down.
“All of you.”
Louisa complied.
After a moment, Webb did the same. “Shit,” he said. Then, “Shit,” he said again.
Pashkin snapped his briefcase shut. The alarm was still looping, so he raised his voice. “You’ll be locked in. Those doors, they’re pretty good. You’ll be best off waiting for help.”
Webb said, “I thought we were—”
“Shut up.”
“—doing something here—”
Kyril said, “You were. You were helping us out.”
“Thought you couldn’t speak English,” Louisa said.
Marcus said, “They’re not just going to lock us in.”
“I know.”
Kyril said something that made Piotr laugh.
The alarm wailed on, swelling then diminishing. Other floors would be being evacuated; the lifts would have frozen, and the doors into the stairwells automatically unlocked, allowing access either way. Crowds would assemble at designated points outside, and names be checked off against lists held by security, or matched against the keycards currently in use. But no one on the seventy-seventh floor would appear on either of those lists. Their presence was off grid.
Webb said, “Look, I don’t know what the alarm’s for, but I promise—”
Piotr shot him.
Seventy-seven storeys below, people trooped onto the streets; some wearing that fed-up look that comes with unwelcome interruption; others happily lighting unscheduled cigarettes; and all—once they realised that not only their own but every building in sight was evacuating—changing mood: standing still, looking skyward. All were used to drills and false alarms, but these happened one at a time. Now, everything was happening at once, and the grim possibilities took root and flowered. The City broke into a run. Its directions were various, but its intentions clear: to be somewhere else, immediately. And still people kept appearing, because the buildings were ten, fifteen, twenty storeys high, and each floor was packed with workers. Whether at desks, in meeting rooms, huddled round watercoolers or chatting in corridors, all were hearing the same thing: their building’s alarm, instructing them to leave. Those who paused to look from their windows saw scattering crowds below. This was not conducive to orderly evacuation. Jostling gave way to shoving. Ripples of panic became waves, and the voices of reason drowned in the swell.
This didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened often. As the City warned its worker bees of a possible terrorist event, some of those bees turned on each other, and stung.
Most of the resulting injuries, it was later calculated, happened in those buildings containing bankers. Well, bankers and lawyers. It was too close to call.
Smoking again, Jackson Lamb slouched across a highwalk in the Barbican complex, heading for Slough House. Above him rose Shakespeare or Thomas More, he could never remember which tower was which, and ahead was a familiar bench. He’d fallen asleep on it once, clutching a cardboard coffee cup. When he’d woken, it held forty-two pence in small change.
He sat on the bench now to finish his cigarette. Above and behind him loured the 1970s, wrought in glass and concrete; below him the middle ages, in the shape of St Giles Cripplegate, and to the east, the up-to-the-minute sound of sirens, which had been building for some while, but only now crashed through his absorbed state. A pair of fire engines blared along London Wall, followed by a police car. Lamb paused, fingers halfway to his lips. Another fire engine. Dropping the cigarette, he reached for his phone instead.
Taverner, he thought. What have you done?
Webb was thrown to the floor as a thin pink spray fritzed the air, then laid a pattern across the carpet. Marcus and Louisa dropped at the same moment, and a second shot carved a chunk from the tabletop, coughing up splinters. But there was no other shelter. They had a second, maybe less, before Piotr crouched and fired directly into their heads—panic blooming, Louisa looked to Marcus, who was ripping something from the underside of the table, something which fitted his hand as naturally as a coffee cup or beer bottle. He fired and someone screamed and a body hit the floor. Raised voices swore in Russian. Marcus scrambled up and fired again. The bullet hit closing doors.
On the far side of the table, Kyril lay clutching his left leg, which was all messed up below the knee.
Louisa pulled out her phone. Marcus ran for the doors, gun in hand. When he pulled them they gave just enough to reveal the U-lock threaded through the outer handles—another gift from Pashkin’s damned briefcase. He tugged again then leaped back as a bullet slammed into the doors from the other side.
In the lobby, the alarm swirled. Beneath its noise, Marcus could make out the sound of the two men entering the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
As the rally neared the City—its head winding round St Paul’s; its tail back beyond the viaduct—a new awareness rippled through it, a morphic resonance fuelled by Twitter, allowing its entire length to hear the rumours at once: that the City was collapsing, its buildings emptying. That the palaces of finance were crumbling at the mob’s approach. With this news came a change of mood, spilling over into aggressive triumphalism; the kind that wants to see its enemy spread on the pavement with its head split open. Fresh chanting broke out, louder than ever. The pace picked up. Though already, in counterpoint to the hints of victory, another tremor was wavering west: that the rug had been pulled, and danger lay ahead.
At first sight, this took the form of official resistance.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, this rally has now been cancelled. You’re to turn and calmly make your way back towards Holborn where you’ll be able to disperse.”
The black armoured units that until now had been discreet shadows had disgorged bulked-up shapes in shields and helmets, and barriers were blocking Cheapside. Somewhere behind them was a man with a loudhailer.
“The streets ahead are closed. I repeat, the route is closed, and this rally is now cancelled.”
The sound of sirens wafting from a distance underlined his words.
For two minutes that stretched into four the head of the mob went no further, but swelled in size, filling the junction on the Cathedral’s eastern side. And still, up and down its length, messages were relayed, the way a worm communicates to itself the news of its own dicing. At intervals behind them, more tactical units were breaking the march up, rerouting groups into narrow streets and squares, and sealing their exits. Singing died and curdled into anger; tempers frayed and broke. Cats and dogs, witches and wizards, clung to their parents’ legs, while once-mild protestors sprayed spittle in the faces of unmoving policemen. Overhead, the whump-whump of helicopter blades throbbed in and out of hearing, sometimes drowning the shrill alarms from the City, sometimes becoming its rhythm section, while from the City itself a less organised procession fled the rumours of destruction, arriving in a rabble behind the police rows blocking Cheapside.