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collected by the people whose job it was to turn it into bombs. Fox had no idea of their identities, he’d simply dropped off the tub containing the C4. Then, two weeks later, he’d received an anonymous text telling him to go back to the lock-up, where six identical black North Face backpacks and a small trolley suitcase were waiting for him, all of them now converted into deadly weapons.
    Fox didn’t bother re-padlocking the crate since they’d be needing the contents soon enough. Instead, he pulled out one of the Kevlar vests, grabbed a set of stained navy-blue decorator’s overalls from a built-in cupboard next to the door, and got changed, packing the civilian clothes he’d come here in, and which he’d be needing later, into a backpack. Although he wore gloves throughout the process, he wasn’t too worried about leaving any DNA behind. A local cleaning company had been hired to come in the following day and give the whole place a full industrial steam clean, which would remove all traces of his presence here.
    Fox could feel the excitement building in him now. This was it. The culmination of months of planning. Success, and the whole world was his. Failure, and it would be his last day on earth.
    Death or glory. The choice was that stark. It reminded him of his time in the army, in those all too rare moments when he’d seen action. It was that feeling of being totally and utterly alive. He loved the thrill of violence, always had. And today, for the first time in far too long, he was going to get the chance to experience that thrill on a grand scale.
    Down the corridor, he heard the sound of the rear loading doors opening, and he smiled.
    The others were beginning to arrive.

Six
    CAT MANOLIS PACED THE hotel room, wondering if it was work or the interminably heavy London traffic that was delaying her lover.
    Their affair had started innocently enough. The occasional shared smile as they passed each other in the corridor at work, or in the gym beneath the building, where they both worked out; the first conversation on the treadmill at 7.30 one morning; the knowing look he’d given her. Even then it had been weeks before he’d asked her out for a coffee. Everything had had to be so secret. It was the same old thing. He was trapped in a loveless marriage, a handsome, charismatic man in need of female attention, possessed of the kind of power that was always such an aphrodisiac, even to a woman barely half his age.
    They’d met for coffee one Saturday morning in a pretty little café on the South Bank. He’d made an excuse to his wife, telling her he had to come into town, and they’d spent a snatched couple of hours together. They’d walked along the banks of the Thames, and Cat had put her arm through his as they talked. She’d told him about her upbringing in Nice, how she’d been the only child of a father who was long gone by the time she was born, and a mother who’d never forgiven her for it, as if she was somehow to blame for his fecklessness. How she’d gone off the rails (although she refused to give him too many details about how low she’d fallen) before pulling herself together and marrying a man who was the love of her life, only to lose him a week before her twenty-fourth birthday. It was grief, then, that had brought her to London five years earlier.
    He’d seemed genuinely touched by her story and had told her his own more familiar one: how he’d been with the same woman since university, how they’d once been in love, and how, over the thirty years and three children since, their love had faded to nothing more than a hollow husk, leaving him desperate to be free of the marriage.
    ‘I care for you very much,’ he’d said gently when it was time for them to part. He’d looked into her eyes as he spoke so she’d know his words were heartfelt.
    They’d kissed passionately. It had been something that was always going to happen, and it seemed to last for a long, long time.
    When