The Marching Season

The Marching Season Read Free Page A

Book: The Marching Season Read Free
Author: Daniel Silva
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approached the stop for Terminal Four. The woman stood and moved to the doors as the black of the tunnel gave way to the severe light of the platform. When the doors opened she pressed the button on the transmitter, arming the bomb. She stepped onto the platform, and the doors closed behind her. She began walking quickly toward the way out. It was then that she heard pounding on the window of the train. She turned and saw one of the young English businessmen beating his fist against the glass. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but she could read his lips. Your bagl he was shouting. You left your bagl
    Dame made no movement. The expression on the Englishman's face abruptly turned from mild concern to complete terror as he realized the woman had left the bag intentionally. He lunged toward the doors and tried to pry them open with his hands. Even if the man had managed to arouse attention and stop the train, nothing could be done in one minute and fifteen seconds to prevent the bomb from exploding.
    Dame watched as the train slipped forward. She was turning away when, a few seconds later, the tunnel shook with an enormous blast. The train lifted from the tracks, and a wave of searing air rushed over her. Dame instinctively raised her hands to her face. Above her, the ceiling began to crumble. The concussion of the blast lifted her from her feet. She saw it all terribly clearly for an instant—the fire, the crumbling cement, the human beings, like her, caught in the fiery maelstrom of the explosion.
    It ended very quickly. She was not certain how she came to rest; she had lost all sense of up and down, rather like a diver too long beneath the surface. All she knew was that she was en-
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    tombed in debris, and she could not breathe or feel any part of her body. She tried to speak but could utter no sound. Her mouth began filling with her own blood.
    Her thoughts remained clear. She wondered how the bomb makers could have made such a mistake, and then, in the final moments before her death, she wondered whether it was really a mistake at all.
    LONDON
    Within one hour of the attacks, the London and Dublin governments launched one of the largest criminal investigations in the history of the British Isles. The British inquiry was coordinated directly from Downing Street, where Prime Minister Tony Blair met continuously with his key ministers and the heads of Britain's police and security services. Shortly before nine o'clock that night, the prime minister stepped from the doorway at No. 10, into the driving rain, and stood before the reporters and cameras waiting to beam his remarks around the world. An aide tried to hold an umbrella over the prime minister's head, but he quietly nudged him away, and after a moment his hair and the shoulders of his suit jacket were soaked. He expressed his despair at the appalling loss of life—sixty-four dead at Heathrow, twenty-eight dead in Dublin, two more in Belfast—and vowed that his government would not rest until the killers were brought to justice.
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    In Belfast, the leaders of all the major political parties— Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Loyalist—expressed outrage. Publicly, the politicians refused to speculate on the affiliation of the terrorists until more facts became known. Privately each side pointed fingers at the other. Everyone appealed for calm, but by midnight Catholic youths were rioting along the Falls Road, and a British army patrol came under fire on the Protestant Shankill Road.
    By the early hours of the following day, investigators had made enormous progress. In London, forensic and explosive specialists concluded that the bomb had been placed in the sixth carriage of the Heathrow-bound train. The explosive material was fifty to one hundred pounds of Semtex. Shreds of material that were found around the blast zone led investigators to conclude that the bomb was probably contained in a black nylon suitcase,

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