27/10/07
9:50 AM
London
Adam didn't tend to let Wes have a hand in designing their routes through London. He did that. He could have written fast routes, routes with the fewest changes, routes with the most CCTV blackspots, routes with chokepoints for showing up tails… His routes for traveling with Wes were written mostly by fearing the worst. If Adam had been planning a bombing in London today, with the aim of killing as many civilians as he could, where would he hit? The 7/7 bombings had made him cautious about taking Wes on the tubes, buses he felt were a bit safer; so many out there at any one time, not the same risks of a gas attack… What tubes they did take weren't the busiest lines and didn't go through choke points; Waterloo, Bank…
So they went slower, more scenic ways. Jubilee line to Southwark, then a walk, across Jubilee Bridge (which made Adam nervous, but if you were going to bomb a bridge, you'd do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning, not 9:50 on a Saturday) and up to Trafalgar Square – "because there's almost always something interesting going on up there" – then a bus, pointing out the Ritz, the French Embassy (possibly a target, probably not on a Saturday morning), Wellington Arch, so that it was better than the tube, even if it was slower. They sat on the bottom floor of the bus, Adam felt that, in something like a bus, if you were on top and a bomb went off below, you were dead. If you were below and a bomb went off above you, you might have a chance. It wasn't normal, he knew it wasn't normal, he knew that he and Wes were far more likely to get killed for not looking both ways crossing the road than for being in the wrong place when a bomb went off. But he couldn't make that part of himself stop, even for an hour or two.
Chapters vary in length, I know. They are set out as scenes.