He had come out of the train station and was waiting for a cab when the incident occurred.
He was about to go forward as the taxi pulled up, when he saw the woman struggling to walk. She was on crutches, with her arm in a sling. He stood back and held the door open for her. She was very grateful for the gesture and thanked him as she clumsily climbed in. Before heading off into the heavy traffic, the driver also made a comment about him being a proper gentleman. He had to admit, he felt rather good about the whole thing. The next one came almost immediately. He quickly settled down and watched, as was usually the case, how the traffic became so much lighter as they made their way out of the city.
Meanwhile, as the cab made its way across the city the woman in the taxi, being an MI5 agent, divested herself of the disguise, putting the sling and crutches on the seat beside her as she franticly pulled out her phone. She had followed the terrorists to the train station and had seen their faces and where they had hidden the bomb, but they had slipped away. She needed to report. Her part of the assignment was done. Now it was up to her to phone in the location so that they could send in the bomb squad.
She needed to get back to headquarters, where she could identify the criminals from mug shots, enabling the police to be on the lookout for them. As fate would have it, she had only just managed to dial her boss when the taxi collided with an oncoming vehicle. Her head hit the cab’s side window frame and she fell back on the seat, unconscious.
Meanwhile, her boss heard what he thought was the bomb exploding. Getting no response from his agent, he had his people triangulate her phone’s signal to get a fix on the explosion. He informed the police of the bombing and sent teams of agents out to the site to search for her and to assist where possible.
Several police and emergency vehicles turned up at the already busy crash site, only to find the woman agent, still unconscious, being transferred to a waiting ambulance, along with a badly injured taxi driver. Time passed and there was no sign of it being any kind of bomb site, but police and ambulances remained as a precaution, and several streets were cordoned off. It was when they were putting up the last of the barricade tape that they heard the massive explosion some distance away across the city.
When he watched the news item later that evening, the man who gave up his seat in the taxi, had no idea that it would have been much better for everybody concerned, if he hadn’t.