And as a result of all this change, of course, most things remained the same.
In a room some storeys below the breaking dawn, the lately-appointed First Desk of Regent’s Park was speaking.
“First, the big picture. This is new. Something we’ve never seen before. Crowds as targets, yes, that’s always been the fear, whether it’s football stadiums or market squares, but this takes terrorism onto a whole new level. These kids were invited.”
Claude Whelan was a short man with a high forehead and a pinched way of speaking: words issued from him as if in perforated sheets; his full stops almost audible. But his manner was generally pleasant, and informality the key to his character. While suit-and-tie remained de rigueur among the Park’s male aristocracy, Whelan turned up on his first day wearing a polo shirt under his jacket, “and it was like,” one of the Queens of the Database breathlessly uttered, “a fresh breeze had blown through the whole building.”
“We’ve always known we’re defenceless against the individual extremist. Groups, yes, because groups have to communicate, but the lone wolf, who puts something together in his garage and sets it off in his local supermarket—when they’re completely under the radar, we can’t stop them. We all know that, deep down—everybody knows. But the advantage we’ve always had is that lone-wolf types tend to stick out. They tend to be odd, to arouse suspicion, and they tend—Hollywood notwithstanding—to be functionally moronic, so more of them plaster themselves over those same garages than ever make it as far as the shops.”
He was fifties, childless, but with a wife whose photograph adorned his desk, and whose image he was prone to introduce to visitors: “Claire,” he’d say. “Lost without her.” And sometimes with the words would come a furrowing of the brow, as if the phrase weren’t a simple mechanical tribute but a glimpse into an alternative state of being, where the landscape was a wasteland across which he’d wander mapless, his footprints circling nowhere.
“This one appears to have been different. This one planned his attack carefully, down to the hijacking of the Twitter feed on which the event was first mentioned. That feed belongs to one Richard Wyatt, twenty-one, a student at the LSE, who has a large number of followers owing to his role on the college’s entertainments committee. The tweet appeared at eight forty-seven a.m. on Monday the first, the day before the event. It read, ‘Mob needed for dance duty,’ followed by three exclamation marks and a hashtag, ‘flashthemall.’ We are satisfied that Mr. Wyatt was not responsible for its appearance.”
As for Whelan’s office: that was more fodder for the gossips. His predecessor, Dame Ingrid Tearney—a sweet old lady who drank fresh blood for breakfast—had occupied a room in the grand, and grandly visible, section of Regent’s Park whose windows overlooked the park itself, and whose walls were dappled in summer by the shadows of waving branches. But Whelan had decided that his place was among his staff, most of whom laboured away hidden from sunlight, if you didn’t count the spring-effect bulbs. And so he’d taken one of the smaller offices on the hub, an open-hearted gesture which immediately endeared him to the junior spooks, but put everyone else’s back up.
“By mid-afternoon, the flash-mob announcement had been retweeted over four hundred times and a page had appeared on Facebook. This was the work of one Craig Harrison, twenty-two, unemployed, of Bristol. We’re almost certain he’s innocent of anything more than an enthusiasm for public mischief, but the fact that he didn’t actually attend the gathering sounded alarm bells. His story is that he couldn’t afford the train fare to London, but nevertheless wanted to be part of what he describes as a ‘messin’ bang.’ Once the penny had dropped that a bang is precisely what ensued, Mr. Harrison was quick to add that this is a slang term for a party, and he was not admitting prior knowledge of the attack. Investigation has borne out his claim to poverty, but as we speak, Mr. Harrison’s interrogation has yet to be concluded.”
But a few ruffled feathers aside, things had gone smoothly so far. Claude Whelan’s breezy entrance may have made papers rustle, even blown one or two from unregarded shelves and cast them fluttering to the floor, but it hadn’t caused locks to fall apart, or twisted handles on doors best left shut. “That chap Whelan,” a voice Down the Corridor had remarked, “underneath it all, he’s One of Us.”
Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
“So what about the event itself? Our bomber can be reasonably assured of a crowd turning up, because his target audience will respond to the call of Twitter. That would have been enough for some of his ilk, but no, he wants an actual party to happen, because he knows that that will magnify the horror of the event a hundredfold. A thousand. Now, I’m not going to apologise for showing you the footage again, though God knows we’ve seen it often enough already, but the definition here’s higher than we’ve managed so far. Here’s what we have.” He raised a hand and clicked his fingers. “There. Now we’re looking at the CCTV film. The shopping mall, the kids arriving, the trio with the music machine.” He waved an imaginary baton at a point in the air behind him. “And stop.”
He paused, as if allowing his invisible audience to soak in the invisible scene he’d freeze-framed.
“These three boys. We know from the radio chatter that at least one of Westacres’ security guards, one Samit Chatterjee, guessed something was up when they appeared. Good for him, though sadly he was among the victims. The boys are Jacob Lee, Lucas Fairweather and Sanjay Singh. All sixteen, all at the same local school, inseparable friends according to reports. None with any known involvement with any extremist groups, none with any kind of police record . . . except for Fairweather.”