Free Wrong Time, Wrong Place by Simon Kernick Page B

passenger seat next to him, desperate to know what was inside, but not daring to look. He was scared out of his wits. He just wanted to get this thing delivered so he could get on with his life again, but he also knew it might contain something bad – something that could get him into even more trouble.
    He cursed himself for ever getting involved with Mika. He cursed himself for—
    The BlackBerry he’d been given started ringing, the ringtone a blaring horn. Akhtar spent a few seconds trying to find it with shaking hands before pulling it out of his back pocket. He pressed the green answer button.
    ‘Where the hell are you?’ demanded the gunman. ‘I told you that you needed to be there by eight o’clock.’
    ‘I’m here now,’ said Akhtar. ‘I’ve just parked.’
    ‘Tell me the street, and the name of the shop next door to the right.’
    Akhtar looked round hurriedly. ‘I’m on Wilton Road. Just behind Victoria Station. There’s a hairdresser’s to the right of the coffee shop.’
    ‘Good. Now I want you to stay on the phone while you go inside the coffee shop with the backpack. And I want you to act completely normally.’
    Keeping the phone to his ear, Akhtar picked up the backpack with his free hand and pulled it over one shoulder. ‘OK,’ he said, getting out of his car and walking unsteadily over to the coffee shop door. His legs felt weak and he could hear his heart beating in his chest as he stood to one side to let two smartly dressed young women in the middle of a lively conversation come out with their takeaway coffees.
    ‘I’m going in now,’ he continued, squeezing through the door with his rucksack, the heat and noise of the place hitting him right in the face. The place was busy with commuters ordering their caffeine fixes, but he hardly saw them. They were just a blur.
    ‘Can you see a woman in her early forties with shoulder-length hair sitting anywhere? She’ll either be on her own or sitting with a man with a grey beard.’
    Akhtar scanned the room, forcing himself to concentrate on faces as he slowly approached the queue of people at the counter. He saw two people in the far corner. The woman had her back to him and appeared to be talking intently to the man, who had a deeply troubled expression on his face. ‘Yes, I can see them.’
    ‘I want you to take a seat as close to the woman as possible.’
    ‘You don’t want me to say anything to her?’
    ‘Just do as you’re told. Take a seat … nice and close.’
    It was those three words that set off alarm bells. Nice and close .
    It hit him then. He was carrying a bomb. He had to be. As soon as he found a seat close to the woman, the gunman would detonate it somehow – Akhtar had seen it done on all those TV shows – killing him, the woman, and everyone around them. And he, Akhtar, would end up getting the blame, because he would have been the one carrying the bomb, heaping even more shame on his family.
    He looked over at the woman. She looked totally normal. White, attractive, well bred, with expensive clothes – and he wondered if he was wrong. Whether he was just being paranoid.
    And then the woman turned his way and their eyes met, and even from twenty feet away he could see the fear and tension in them. He turned away quickly.
    ‘Are you sitting down yet?’ demanded the gunman.
    ‘I’m trying to find a seat. It’s crowded in here.’
    ‘How close are you?’
    It was a bomb. It had to be.
    ‘Not too far, but she’s sitting near the counter and there are a lot of people in the way.’
    ‘Get as close as you can.’
    The fear was so intense now that Akhtar could hardly walk. If he stayed here, he died. No question. If he put the bomb down and tried to evacuate the place, the man on the end of the phone would detonate it, and he still died, along with everyone else. And if he hung up, he also died. He was completely trapped, and only seconds from death. He had to make a decision.
    Joining the end of the queue at