“We need to get the five leaders out of the Pillared Room and into the Downing Street tunnel immediately.”
“If I’m not mistaken, the PM has made his position clear on that question.”
“But you’re going to tell him that he has no other choice.”
“Lucky me,” said Christopher, and followed Graham out the door.
Neighbors and passersby would later offer conflicting accounts as to how many gunshots they heard emanating from inside the vast, empty house in Wilton Crescent. Some said it was three, others claimed it was five or even six. In point of fact, seven rounds were fired, the entire capacity of a subcompact Walther PPK. Gabriel ejected the spent magazine and inserted a backup. Then he leaned his shoulder hard against the ruined door and crashed onto the roof terrace.
The wail of approaching sirens filled the air. It sounded as though the entirety of the Metropolitan Police Service was headed their way. Gabriel sidestepped a vine-covered trellis and spotted the drones. There were ten in all. Each was the size of a small café table and had four rotors. Three had a payload of some sort, doubtless explosive in nature.
Gabriel took hold of the nearest armed drone and placed it topsy-turvy on its propellors, rendering it incapable of flight. It was an effort; the payload was fifty pounds at least. He reached for a second armed drone, but its propellors were suddenly spinning like buzzsaws, as were the propellors of the other eight drones. All nine leapt simultaneously from the roof an instant later and set off toward their assigned targets. One headed toward the Royal Albert Hall, one toward the US Embassy at Nine Elms, one toward Buckingham Palace, which was exactly 849.78 meters away. The two armed drones made straight for Downing Street.
Gabriel wheeled round and saw Sarah staring horrified at the London sky. “Not since the Blitz,” she was saying. “We have to warn them somehow.”
Gabriel crouched next to the disabled drone. It was a flying IED, he thought, capable of inflicting enormous damage and loss of life, all with a single keystroke by a remote operator in Moscow. The high-resolution camera was its most insidious feature. It gave the operator the ability to guide the device to its target and kill with precision. At present the operator was staring at the face of Gabriel Allon.
“We need to get off this roof,” he said. “Now.”
Graham and Christopher entered the Pillared Room to find it deserted save for a few junior aides who were tidying up the mess. “Where are they?” Christopher demanded to know, and one of the aides, a red-haired woman of perhaps twenty-five, answered nervously, “They’re about to hold the press conference, sir.”
By the time Graham and Christopher reached the reception area, the five leaders were filing out the famous black door. On theopposite side of Downing Street, behind a line of metal barricades, were some two hundred reporters and photographers. Lights flashed as Jonathan Lancaster stepped up to the modest wooden podium. Christopher didn’t hear a word the prime minister spoke. He was listening only to the distant sound of sirens.
In hindsight Gabriel should have left the Walther behind. Fully loaded and charged, it was still in his right hand as he chased Ingrid and Sarah down the long staircase to the ground floor of the enormous house, inwardly counting the number of seconds that had passed since the Russians had seen his face. When at last they reached the entrance hall, the door came crashing open and a dozen officers of the Met’s M019 Specialist Firearms Command poured through the breach.
One of the officers spotted the Walther pistol and pointed his Heckler & Koch submachine gun toward Gabriel’s heart. He quickly dropped the gun to the marble floor and four of the officers dragged him from the house. A moment later he was lying face down on the pavement of Wilton Crescent with his hands behind his back and a knee on his neck, staring into the eyes of Ingrid, who was similarly posed. “Downing Street!” he shouted. “Russian drones are heading for Downing Street!” Then London shook with a thunderous explosion, followed a few seconds later by another. The third explosion was closer at hand. After that everything turned to black.
Part Four
The Dead Zone
56
Bloomsbury Tavern
The official committee of inquiry would later determine that the Protection Command of London’s Metropolitan Police received only thirty-three seconds’ warning that a swarm of drones was approaching Downing Street, though where the warning originated and how the information was obtained in the first place would never be determined to anyone’s satisfaction. It was chief of staff Geoffrey Sloane who informed Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster of the impending attack, and Lancaster who in turn told the four other leaders standing next to him outside Number 10’s black door. Several Protection Command officers quickly escorted the visiting dignitaries into the Downing Street tunnel, but Lancaster refused to go. In one of the attack’s most enduring images, he was seen calmly herding the press corps into the safety of the neighboring Foreign Office. Several journalists refused to heed his warning, including Samantha Cooke ofThe Telegraph, who used her smartphone to capture an iconic photo of the drones skimming across the treetops of St. James’s Park.
As the drones passed low over Horse Guards Road on their final approach to Number 10, a man in a dark business suit was seen firing on the aircraft with a SIG MCX tactical rifle. The committee of inquiry would later identify him as a plainclothes ProtectionCommand officer, though some observers, including Samantha Cooke, would suggest he worked elsewhere. Regardless of his affiliation, the business-suited man with the tactical rifle managed to damage the rotors of one of the armed drones. It tumbled to earth in Mountbatten Green and detonated on impact. Because the area was closed to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, there were no casualties.
A second drone, also armed with an explosive payload, passed over the security gate at the western end of Downing Street and made straight for the door of Number 10. Samantha Cooke quickly sought cover in the Foreign Office, where, along with the prime minister and his chief of staff, they awaited impact and detonation. But much to everyone’s surprise and relief, the drone sailed harmlessly over the gate at the opposite end of Downing Street, over the deserted pavements of Whitehall, over the car park between the Ministry of Defense and New Scotland Yard, over the Victoria Embankment and Westminster Pier, and into the steel-gray waters of the River Thames. Its detonation sent a towering geyser of water skyward. While precariously close to the London Eye observation wheel, the explosion resulted in no damage or injuries.
The same could not be said, however, for the third detonation. It took place not in a park or waterway but on the roof of 27 Wilton Crescent in Belgravia. The blast left the house and the two neighboring dwellings in ruins and injured twelve Metropolitan Police officers. Three other people sustained minor injuries as well, though for reasons never made clear their names were withheld from the public.
Seven remaining drones, all unarmed and presumably decoys, met with watery ends—one in Hyde Park’s Round Pond, two in the Serpentine, a fourth in St. James’s Park Lake, and three in the Thames. By midafternoon London’s phones and Internet were once again working, and at 5:00p.m.the prime minister returned to the podium outside the iconic black door of 10 Downing Street, this time to declare the incident over. He then headed straight to the COBRA room in the Citadel, where he would remain, huddled with his senior ministers and defense and intelligence chiefs, until nearly midnight.
By then the jihadist terror group ISIS had issued a claim of responsibility—as had a hitherto unknown environmental group and a long-forgotten Irish faction—but the television experts were certain Russia was to blame. The British government, however, refused to assign responsibility until the investigation was complete. That didn’t prevent Kremlin spokesman Yevgeny Nazarov from issuing a preemptive denial, which one analyst likened to an unintended admission of guilt. A bellicose Russian television commentator known to reflect Kremlin thinking warned Britain not to retaliate. “Otherwise,” he said with a smile, “the next munition aimed at Downing Street will be nuclear-tipped, and it won’t miss.”
But why had so many of the drones, eight in all, veered wildly off course and crashed? Once again the British government said it would withhold judgment until all the facts were known, but so-called well-informed sources told anyone who would listen that the aircraft had been knocked off course by signal jammers deployed around Downing Street. In truth, signal jamming had played no role whatsoever in the failure of the drones to strike their intended targets; it was a team of computer hackers from the Dutch intelligence service who had spared Britain a calamity. Sitting at terminals in their darkened lair in Zoetermeer, they had remotely seized control of the Russian drones and guided them harmlessly into the nearest body of water—all while their counterparts at GRU headquarters in Moscow, including the commanding general of Unit 29155, stared at their screens in disbelief.
Official London misled the press and the British public aboutother key aspects of the incident, including the events surrounding the third and final detonation in Wilton Crescent.Why did the third drone fail to take flight?Official London would have more to say at a later date.What about the reports of gunfire inside the house?Official London was looking into the matter.Were the three injured civilians somehow connected to the case?Official London declined comment.
Nor did official London have anything to say—at that early juncture, at least—about the female Russian intelligence operative who had entered the house in Wilton Crescent after expertly dropping a team of MI5 watchers in Trafalgar Square. She left the house through a rear garage door ten minutes before the start of the attack, accompanied by a man who was wearing a hat and sunglasses to conceal his appearance. It was the assumption of MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service that the man was likewise an illegal Russian operative. Five days after the incident, both individuals remained unaccounted for, much to the dismay of official London.
Eventually the brick wall of official silence began to crumble, as such walls invariably did. It wasThe Guardian, quoting a slew of intelligence and security sources, that first pointed the finger of blame at Moscow and, more specifically, at GRU Unit 29155. The article appeared shortly before Jonathan Lancaster made his first post-attack appearance in the House of Commons. Conservative and Labour MPs alike gave him a hero’s welcome, which prompted one commentator to say that Lancaster, with his act of courage after learning of the pending attack, had single-handedly restored his party’s fortunes for the next election.
Away from the glare of the Commons, Lancaster and his Cabinet were considering an array of retaliatory measures against Russia, ranging from additional economic and diplomatic sanctions to a massive air strike on Russia’s frontline forces in Ukraine. The primeminister’s rage notwithstanding, his primary goal was to avoid a war with a vastly superior nuclear power—a war that Britain, in its current state, could ill afford. It was Graham Seymour, director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service, who suggested an alternative. It was time, he said, to take the gloves off—in the British tradition, with stealth and low cunning and, yes, a touch of wickedness. SIS would confront Russia’s so-called hybrid war on the West with a hybrid war of its own, led by the same officer who, after draining two glasses of the PM’s Macallan whisky, had calmly snatched a SIG MCX rifle from the Downing Street weapons room and shot down one of the two approaching Russian drones.
None of which the prime minister mentioned when, six days later, he appeared before the press to announce the results of Britain’s initial investigation into the drone incident. He confirmed that GRU Unit 29155 had carried out the attack and announced a raft of new sanctions, including the expulsion of thirty-two diplomats from the Russian Embassy in London and the seizure of all Russian money held by British banks. Additionally British authorities issued arrest warrants for a GRU officer known as Chloé Lamont and her as yet unidentified male accomplice.
