Blackout Britain

By now sweat was streaming from his brow. Tim Davies gasped as the first crushing wave of claustrophobia swept over him. Then the accountant cursed as his briefcase slipped from his soggy palms, sending the day’s paperwork cascading around the feet of his fellow Tube passengers. About 20 minutes earlier, their train had stopped abruptly during the manic jam of the evening rush hour. Carriage lights spluttered, then died. They were trapped 100 feet beneath central London. The heat was rising. So too was the panic. Voices wobbled in the darkness of a terrorist strike somewhere above them.

Antonio Moroni would soon know how Davies felt. Days later, 1,000 miles away in Rome, the security guard had summoned an elevator to pop downstairs for a late-night espresso. It was a bad choice. With a fearsome clank the tin box froze between floors. And unlike Davies, Moroni would have no-one to share his nightmarish thoughts of an Al-Qaeda strike. Outside, pandemonium would erupt on the streets of the Italian capital. Barely a week earlier neon-gorged New York, beacon of the world economy, had too been plunged into blackness. A power shortage in Denmark and Sweden would quickly follow, and soon after the...

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