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evidenced by his dour expression as the Jaguar pulled into the street. He removed a copy of the next morning’s Telegraph from the seatback pocket and dropped it in Gabriel’s lap. The headline read REIGN OF TERROR . Beneath it were three photographs depicting the aftermath of the three attacks. Gabriel searched the photo of Covent Garden for any sign of his presence but saw only the victims. It was a picture of failure, he thought—eighteen people dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.
    “Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”
    “You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”
    “She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”
    “How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.
    “As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”
    “Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”
    “Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”
    “They must have been in the vicinity.”
    “They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”
    “So why did they take me down instead of the suicide bomber?”
    “Because neither Scotland Yard nor the Security Service wanted a rerun of the Menezes fiasco. As a result of his death, a number of new guidelines and procedures were put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Suffice it to say a single warning does not meet the threshold for taking lethal action—even if the source happens to be named Gabriel Allon.”
    “So eighteen innocent people died as a result?”
    “What if he wasn’t a terrorist? What if he was another street performer, or someone with mental problems? We would have been burned at the stake.”
    “But he wasn’t a street performer or a mental patient, Graham. He was a suicide bomber. And I told you so.”
    “How did you know?”
    “He might as well have been wearing a sign declaring his intentions.”
    “Was it that obvious?”
    Gabriel listed the attributes that first raised his suspicions and then explained the calculations that led him to conclude the terrorist intended to detonate his device at 2:37. Seymour shook his head slowly.
    “I’ve lost count of how many hours we’ve spent training our police officers to spot potential terrorists, not to mention the millions of pounds we’ve poured into behavior-recognition software for CCTV. And yet a jihadi suicide bomber walked straight into Covent Garden, and no one seemed to notice. No one but you, of course.”
    Seymour lapsed into a brooding silence. They were headed north along the floodlit white canyon of Regent Street. Gabriel leaned his head wearily against the window and asked whether the bomber had been identified.
    “His name is Farid Khan. His parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Lahore in the late seventies, but Farid was born in London. Stepney Green, to be precise,” Seymour said. “Like many British Muslims of his generation, he rejected the mild, apolitical religious