The Marching Season Read Free Page B

very likely a rolling model. At dawn, officers fanned out along the Piccadilly Line—from Heathrow in the west to Cock-fosters in the northeast—and questioned morning commuters at every stop. Police received some three hundred reports of passengers carrying suitcases on a late-afternoon train, one hundred of a rolling variety.
    As luck would have it, a Dutch tourist named Jacco Krajicek came forward shortly before noon and said he had helped a woman with a large rolling black nylon suitcase at the Knightsbridge Underground station in the late afternoon. He provided a thorough description of her appearance and her clothing, but it was two other details that piqued the interest of investigators. The woman had operated the automatic ticket machine with the speed and confidence of a Londoner who commutes on the Underground every day, yet apparently she hadn't realized there were steps at the entrance of the Knightsbridge stop; why would she have tried to take the heavy suitcase, otherwise? She spoke
    20 Daniel Silva
    with an American accent, Krajicek said, but the accent was a fake. The detective inspector who took Krajicek's call asked how he reached such a conclusion. Krajicek said he was a speech therapist and linguist who spoke several languages fluently.
    With Krajicek's assistance, detectives produced a photo-kit sketch of the woman from the Underground. The sketch was sent to the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the headquarters of MI5 and MI6. Officers pored over their files and photographs of all known members of paramilitary groups, Republican and Loyalist. When no match was discovered, the photo-kit image was put into broader circulation. Police theorized that after the bombing the woman probably boarded a departing flight at Heathrow and fled the country. The photo kit was shown to ticket agents, baggage handlers, and airport security officers. Every airline that had a flight leaving Heathrow that night was given a copy. Every inch of videotape shot from every surveillance camera in the airport was viewed and viewed again. The photo kit was given to friendly intelligence services in Western Europe, along with Israel's Mossad.
    At 7 P.M., the search for the woman was brought to an abrupt halt by the discovery of another body in the rubble of the train platform. The features of the face were surprisingly intact and roughly matched the photo kit provided by Krajicek. The Dutchman was brought to Heathrow to view the body. He nodded grimly and looked away. She was the woman he had helped in the Knightsbridge Underground stop.
    A similar series of events played out across the Irish Sea in Dublin. No fewer than a dozen witnesses reported seeing a bearded man with a limp carrying a large heavy briefcase into the library just before the bombing. The doorman at the Shelbourne Hotel provided a detailed description of the suspect to a pair of Garda detectives two hours after the blast.
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    The library attendant who had given the bearded man a pass for the reading room survived the blast with only minor cuts and bruises. He helped police pick out the suspect on a videotape shot by the library's surveillance cameras. The Garda released a photo-kit sketch and a fuzzy image made from the videotape. Copies were faxed to London. That evening, however, rescue workers once again pulled a body from the rubble that appeared to match the description of the suspect. When a pathologist removed the clothing from the corpse he discovered a heavy brace on the right knee. Detectives ordered the knee X-rayed. The pathologist discovered no injury to the knee—either bone, cartilage, or ligaments—that would require the support of such a heavy brace. "I suspect the man was wearing the brace in order to produce a limp rather than support a damaged knee," the pathologist said, staring down at the corpse's leg. "And I'm also afraid that your only suspect in this case is officially quite dead."
    To the north,