Keller rushed forward while Gabriel raised the Glock. He waited until the instant Keller grabbed the bomber’s left hand before squeezing the trigger. The first two shots obliterated the bomber’s face. The rest he fired after the man was on the pavement. He fired until his gun was empty. He fired as though he were trying to drive the man deep underground and all the way to the gates of hell.

Suddenly, there were police and bomb-disposal technicians rushing toward them from all directions. A car pulled up in the street, the rear door opened. Gabriel hurled himself into the backseat, and into the arms of Chiara. The last thing he saw as the car drove away was Christopher Keller holding a dead man’s thumb to a detonator switch.

Part Four

Gallery of Memories

70

London

The evacuation of Westminster and Whitehall was far shorter in duration than Saladin might have hoped, but traumatic all the same. For nine long days, the beating heart of British politics, the religious and political epicenter of a once-glorious civilization and empire, was cordoned off from the rest of the realm and closed for business. The dead zone stretched from Trafalgar Square in the north to Milbank in the south, and eastward into Victoria to New Scotland Yard. The great ministries sat empty, as did the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Prime Minister Lancaster and his staff left 10 Downing Street and relocated to an undisclosed country house. The Queen, against her wishes, was moved to Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Only the CBRN teams were allowed to enter the restricted area, and only for limited periods. They moved about the deserted streets and squares in their lime-green hazmat suits, sniffing the air for any lingering traces of radioactivity, while the mournful tolling of Big Ben marked the passage of time.

The reopening was a joyless affair. The prime minister and his wife, Diana, stole into Number 10 as though they were breaking into their own home, while up and down the length of Whitehall civil servants and permanent secretaries returned quietly to their desks. In the House of Commons there was a moment of silence; in the Abbey, a prayer service. London’s mayor claimed the city would emerge stronger as a result of the near disaster, though he offered no explanation as to why that was the case. A headline of a leading conservative tabloid read welcome to the new normal.

It was a Wednesday, which meant the prime minister was obliged to rise before the Commons at noon and field questions from the political opposition. They were deferential at first, but not for long. Mainly, they wanted to know how it was possible that, just six months after the devastating attack in the West End, ISIS had managed to smuggle the makings of a dirty bomb into the United Kingdom. And how, given the elevated threat level, the security services had been unable to identify the bomber before the morning of the planned attack. The prime minister was tempted to say that the near-impossible security situation confronting Britain was the result of mistakes made by a generation of leaders—mistakes that had turned the land of Shakespeare, Locke, Hume, and Burke into the world’s preeminent center of Salafist-jihadi ideology. But he did not rise to the bait. “The enemy is determined,” he declared, “but so are we.”

“And the manner in which the suspect was neutralized?” wondered the MP from the Washwood Heath section of Birmingham, a heavily Muslim city in the British West Midlands that had produced numerous terrorists and plots.

“He wasn’t a suspect,” interjected the prime minister. “He was a terrorist armed with a bomb and several grams of radioactive cesium chloride.”

“But was there really no other way to deal with him other than a cold-blooded execution?” the MP persisted.

“It was no such thing.”

The stated position of Her Majesty’s Government and New Scotland Yard was that the two men who prevented the terrorist from detonating his dirty bomb were members of Met’s SCO19 special firearms division. The Met refused to make public their names. Nor did it agree to the media’s request to release CCTV images of the operation. Somehow, there was only a single video of the incident, shot by an American tourist who happened to be standing at the security gate of Downing Street at nine o’clock. Out of focus and tremulous, it showed one man firing several rounds into the terrorist’s head while another man held the detonator switch in the terrorist’s left hand. The shooter immediately left the scene in the back of a car. As it raced up Whitehall, he could be seen embracing a woman in the backseat. His face was not visible, only a patch of gray, like a smudge of ash, at his left temple.

But it was his partner, the one who held the terrorist’s thumb to the detonator for three hours while technicians disarmed the dirty bomb, who received most of the media’s attention. Overnight, he became a national hero; he was the man who had selflessly risked his own life for Queen and country. But such stories rarely survive long—not in the graceless age of twenty-four-hour news and social media—and soon there appeared numerous stories calling into question his identity and affiliation. The Independent claimed he was a former member of the Special Air Service who had served notably in Northern Ireland and the first Iraq War. The Guardian, however, weighed in with a dubious claim that he was actually an officer of MI6. Lines had been blurred, the newspaper said, or perhaps even crossed. Graham Seymour took the unusual step of issuing a denial. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service, he said, did not engage in law-enforcement activities, and few ever bothered to carry a firearm. “The allegation,” he declared, “is laughable on its face.”