The Marching Season

prime minister stepped from the doorway at No. 10, into the driving rain, and stood before the reporters and cameras waiting to beam his remarks around the world. An aide tried to hold an umbrella over the prime minister's head, but he quietly nudged him away, and after a moment his hair and the shoulders of his suit jacket were soaked. He expressed his despair at the appalling loss of life—sixty-four dead at Heathrow, twenty-eight dead in Dublin, two more in Belfast—and vowed that his government would not rest until the killers were brought to justice.
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    In Belfast, the leaders of all the major political parties— Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Loyalist—expressed outrage. Publicly, the politicians refused to speculate on the affiliation of the terrorists until more facts became known. Privately each side pointed fingers at the other. Everyone appealed for calm, but by midnight Catholic youths were rioting along the Falls Road, and a British army patrol came under fire on the Protestant Shankill Road.
    By the early hours of the following day, investigators had made enormous progress. In London, forensic and explosive specialists concluded that the bomb had been placed in the sixth carriage of the Heathrow-bound train. The explosive material was fifty to one hundred pounds of Semtex. Shreds of material that were found around the blast zone led investigators to conclude that the bomb was probably contained in a black nylon suitcase, very likely a rolling model. At dawn, officers fanned out along the Piccadilly Line—from Heathrow in the west to Cock-fosters in the northeast—and questioned morning commuters at every stop. Police received some three hundred reports of passengers carrying suitcases on a late-afternoon train, one hundred of a rolling variety.
    As luck would have it, a Dutch tourist named Jacco Krajicek came forward shortly before noon and said he had helped a woman with a large rolling black nylon suitcase at the Knightsbridge Underground station in the late afternoon. He provided a thorough description of her appearance and her clothing, but it was two other details that piqued the interest of investigators. The woman had operated the automatic ticket machine with the speed and confidence of a Londoner who commutes on the Underground every day, yet apparently she hadn't realized there were steps at the entrance of the Knightsbridge stop; why would she have tried to take the heavy suitcase, otherwise? She spoke
    20 Daniel Silva
    with an American accent, Krajicek said, but the accent was a fake. The detective inspector who took Krajicek's call asked how he reached such a conclusion. Krajicek said he was a speech therapist and linguist who spoke several languages fluently.
    With Krajicek's assistance, detectives produced a photo-kit sketch of the woman from the Underground. The sketch was sent to the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the headquarters of MI5 and MI6. Officers pored over their files and photographs of all known members of paramilitary groups, Republican and Loyalist. When no match was discovered, the photo-kit image was put into broader circulation. Police theorized that after the bombing the woman probably boarded a departing flight at Heathrow and fled the country. The photo kit was shown to ticket agents, baggage handlers, and airport security officers. Every airline that had a flight leaving Heathrow that night was given a copy. Every inch of videotape shot from every surveillance camera in the airport was viewed and viewed again. The photo kit was given to friendly intelligence services in Western Europe, along with Israel's Mossad.
    At 7 P.M., the search for the woman was brought to an abrupt halt by the discovery of another body in the rubble of the train platform. The features of the face were surprisingly intact and roughly matched the photo kit provided by Krajicek. The Dutchman was brought to Heathrow to view the body. He nodded grimly and looked away. She was the woman he had helped in the Knightsbridge Underground stop.
    A similar series of events played out across the Irish Sea in Dublin. No fewer than a dozen witnesses reported seeing a bearded man with a limp carrying a large heavy briefcase into the library just before the bombing. The doorman at the Shelbourne Hotel provided a detailed description of the suspect to a pair of Garda detectives two hours after the blast.
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    The library attendant