Sarah leaned forward against the dashboard and put her head in her hands.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
The driver of the Mercedes turned to his partner. ‘Did you get that?’
‘I got it. Paydirt.’
‘You know what to do. I’ll call the old man.’
The passenger didn’t hesitate. Twenty years in special forces and a month that had seemed like a lifetime in a dusty shithole called Fallujah had long since eroded his belief in the sanctity of human life. He reached for the mobile phone on the dashboard, chose speed dial and pressed one. His face wore a look of intense concentration as he listened to the phone dialling up the number.
The bomb was a simple enough device, smaller and less crude than the one he’d set in the Menshikov Palace, but more than big enough to do the job. He’d copied the signature – the specific design features used by a known bomb maker – from a bomb discovered during a raid on an al-Qaida safe house in Hamburg three years earlier. A kilogram of shaped C-4 high-energy explosive detonated by a mobile phone that was one of a batch of Nokia 2300s bought by the now-deceased terrorist in 2004. Normally, he prided himself on being capable of manufacturing a bomb precise enough to take out an individual target within the car. But using the Hamburg bomber’s signature also meant using his methods. A kilogram of HE would tear the car apart and destroy everything within about a thirty-metre radius. As a professional, the overkill offended him, but he also recognized the need for certainty.
Several factors dictated how the next millisecond would affect the occupants of the target car. The shaped charge and the quality of build of the engine bay combined to direct 80 per cent of the explosive force towards the passenger compartment. They started dying when they were hit by a blast wave which expanded within the enclosed space at a speed of 9,000 feet per second, causing a catastrophic pressure change that ruptured lungs, ear drums and bowels and resulted in what trauma experts call ‘full body disruption’ – multiple amputations. The nervous system is not built to withstand the kind of stress created by proximity to such an event and immediately shuts down. This was fortunate for the victims who by now had been enveloped by the 3,000 C flash which instantly followed the initial wave and inflicted first-degree burns over any exposed flesh, burned away hair and clothing and caused further internal damage as the super-heated air was drawn into already damaged lungs. In the third wave of the explosion, precisely one third of a millisecond after detonation, the combined materials which had divided the occupants from the engine compartment, now consisting of chemical dust from various vapourized plastics, white-hot molten metal and many thousands of shards of jagged steel shrapnel, caused devastating penetrative injuries from abdomen to skull. By this point the two victims were already clinically dead, their brain function fading and the memory of the previous half a millisecond merely a single white flash. In a quirk of physics which the bomb maker could hardly have calculated, the combined forces of the blast catapulted what remained of the car’s driver through the gaping hole where the roof had been, at the same time as the fireball from the exploding petrol tank. The body of the passenger – or at least the charred trunk from the knees upwards – remained in its seat to be consumed by the flames as the mangled wreckage of the German automobile spun to a stop next to the centre barrier of the autobahn. The resulting investigation and the clean-up operation would close the highway for the next twenty-four hours.
‘What was that?’ Sarah reacted to the muffled ‘crump’ of the explosion and looked round in time to see an expanding fireball a few miles back on the autobahn. ‘Must have been some kind of crash. Looks like a bad one, maybe a petrol tanker or something.’
Jamie considered stopping, then shook his head. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it.’
She sank back in her seat with her chin on her chest. ‘No, there isn’t.’ They would never know that David had spent most of the previous night debating with his superiors whether tampering with the bomb Mossad’s tame mechanic had found would compromise the operation. Or that he had eventually lost the argument and in the end had ordered the switch at the final fuel stop on his own authority.
Jamie drove into the city centre and turned off just before the broad ribbon of the River Elbe on to a road that led them past railway tracks and run-down factories. Halfway along it he stopped. For a few moments there was silence as they stared ahead at the broken skyline of Dresden’s Old Town.
‘I made a mistake. I should have trusted you.’