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Kerr was speaking. Melanie strained forward, touching his arm for him to pause. ‘That’s my team,’ she said. ‘Something’s up, John. We’re needed in Lambeth.’ She listened intently, quite at ease in her lurching, braking, hyperactive workplace. ‘Bloody hell. It’s Avon.’
    Kerr immediately pressed the horn to activate the siren, accelerating hard. ‘Ahmed Jibril. The sleeper,’ he said. Kerr was overseeing seven live surveillance operations, but Avon was always somewhere near the front of his mind.
    ‘Whatever,’ said Melanie, flicking on the blue light. ‘Sounds like he just woke up.’
    They reached the river, the Tower flashing past to their left as they charged into Lower Thames Street. As they raced west beneath the underpass that would bring them onto the Embankment, a motorcycle pulled in behind them. It appeared from nowhere, headlight dead centre in Kerr’s mirror, the growl from its powerful engine bouncing off the tunnel walls.
    ‘Alpha from Red One.’
    Kerr spoke into the visor. ‘Go ahead, Jack.’
    ‘The Reds are short-handed. Can I have Mel back?’ Despite the wind noise, Jack Langton’s Geordie accent was as rich as if he had just ridden down from Newcastle.
    Kerr shot out of the tunnel towards Temple. ‘What’s your location?’
    ‘Look in the mirror.’
    Kerr was doing seventy, but Langton’s overtaking Suzuki GSX R1000 left him standing. Bike, rider and helmet were all black. Langton was Kerr’s deputy and ran the surveillance teams on the ground. Opposite the Inns of Court Langton braked sharply to a stop in front of him, and Melanie already had the door half open. ‘Thanks again, John.’ She leant over to squeeze Kerr’s arm. ‘You’ve got blood on your sleeve, by the way. And a bit of scrambled egg.’
    Langton already had the spare crash helmet and jacket ready as Melanie sprinted to him and climbed aboard, then a black-gloved hand lifted in acknowledgement and the radio crackled something as he and his partner roared away.

Part Two

Five
    Thursday, 13 September, 08.12, safe-house, Lambeth
    Ahmed Jibril was the third terrorist to obtain his UK entry visa with the secret authority of the Home Office minister herself. All were jihadis , secret members of Al Qaeda, determined to re-establish itself after the execution of its leader, Osama bin Laden, by the hated Americans in May 2011. These three were dedicated to waging war against the United Kingdom. They were specially selected for this mission because Al Qaeda believed they were ‘clean skins’, unknown to any Western security agency. Once past the immigration desk at Heathrow, they vanished without trace to the target cities of London, Manchester and Leeds, from whose alienated masses they spotted talent for military training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their holy mission was, of course, to prepare Al Qaeda cells for suicide atrocities.
    Ahmed Jibril had entered the UK as a student of dentistry, with a perfectly forged offer of a place at Birkbeck College, University of London. His clean skin had become defiled because he had breached Al Qaeda’s strict operational security. An unauthorised, unintelligible coded phone call lasting less than ten seconds to a contact in Lahore had been enough to suck him onto the Allies’ global radar screen. GCHQ had tracked the signal, and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, had traced the body.
    But he had only come to the notice of Kerr’s team because the MI6 head of station in Yemen had owed his friend in London a favour and was a believer in doing the right thing.
    On 9 September – a Sunday afternoon when the intelligence world was slumbering in the Home Counties – without getting clearance from Vauxhall Cross, Joe Allenby scanned a photograph with a Yemen Airways flight number to the old Special Branch office at Heathrow, a glorified broom cupboard hidden behind a one-way mirror at the front of Terminal 3’s immigration hall. It gave Jibril’s full name and