Girls With Guns

by Ali Vali

  “We have the intelligence, Reilly.”

  “But what intelligence? Who’s she targeting?”

  “Terrorists don’t need a target. They want to destroy, kill and make a point.”

  “Then what’s her point?” None of it was making sense. “Who’s she working with or for?”

  “As far as we can tell, she’s working alone.”

  “Alone? You’re fucking kidding me?” Something was missing. “How did the undercovers get onto someone with no previous record or involvement in terrorist activities and who by all accounts is working alone?”

  Conrad shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care. But thank God they did.”

  It was too difficult to put the puzzle together without all the pieces. Bel couldn’t imagine that any grudge Esther held was worth killing innocent people to settle. She lost control of her emotions. “I love her. I don’t want her to be Esme Gaffney.” She stood and walked away. The fact that she’d said the words aloud was enough; for Conrad Rush to see her cry was unbearable.

  “Look, Reilly, she’s pissed off at someone for reasons only she can know. But she needs to be stopped.”

  Charlie spoke for the first time. “We need your help to find her before she does something she might regret.”

  Bel pulled out her phone. “I can call her. That’s all I can offer. She didn’t say where she was going. I was supposed to meet her at the bar tonight.” She looked at her watch. She would meet her in eleven hours. It seemed so distant. She wanted to fast-forward until then so she could walk into the bar and see Esther flirting with a customer or frowning as she concentrated on pulling the perfect beer. She had to endure an entire day to reach a time where that scenario might be possible, except it was probably impossible. Whatever happened that day would shape the rest of her life. With the exception of the day her mother died, never before had Bel wanted to start the day again as much as she wanted to now.

  “Bel?” Charlie raised her voice.

  “Sorry, yes. I’ll try her now.” She dialled the number and placed the phone on speaker before resting it on the table in front of them.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Esther. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

  It didn’t ring, just went directly to message bank.

  “It was Esther you were after this morning, wasn’t it?”

  Conrad nodded. “We had her, but then we lost her. It was Scott, wondering where the hell you were, that spotted you both chatting. Then the system surged and we lost you.”

  “We only went to get coffee. I was trying to walk Esther in the direction of the exit. I wanted her out of danger.” Esther was the danger.

  Charlie and Conrad exchanged glances. “We had to consider you were working together. We directed our attention to the platforms. We didn’t look near the stairs,” said Charlie.

  “There’ll be severe repercussions for switching off your mike, Reilly.”

  Bel knew her career was probably over.

  “You wanna hope she doesn’t get a chance to blow anything up, or that error might haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  Bel cringed.

  “No, not a pleasant thought, is it, knowing you had a hand in the deaths of countless innocent people?”

  Charlie intervened. “Let’s get back to Control.” She stared at Bel, who was staring at Conrad. Bel looked away, reluctantly backing down from defending the accusation that it was her fault. Charlie continued. “We need to find her before she does anything stupid.” She nodded encouragement to Bel and eyed Rush warily.

  He nodded. “You know her better than any of us. You’ll recognise her immediately. I want your eyes on every screen in there. Find her.”

  Bel wanted to find Esther, but when she did, what was she to do? The faint hope that this was all a mistake had settled in the pit of her stomach, but weighing heavily on top of that was all the evidence that suggested otherwise. She was, after all, part of a team that specialised in this area, and if she were a betting person she’d wager that Hotstream had it correct. If she saw her on the CCTV, should she tell Rush where she was and risk her being shot? If she didn’t tell him and Esther detonated the bomb, she’d have to live with her death and the death of scores of innocent people for the rest of her life. She knew the drill. Shoot to kill. It seemed that either way she went, Esther was dead.

  Chapter Eight

  Control was a buzz of well-rehearsed action. Everyone had a job to do with a defined outcome. At the moment, everyone was searching for Esther.

  Bel sat tentatively at her assigned desk. Several monitors beamed at her, and she manoeuvred the mouse that controlled the cameras she could select to view at intervals she chose. It was the only thing that even hinted toward her having some control over the situation.

  Unfortunately, nothing sprang to mind that might lead her to look in any particular place. She had no romantic memory of a moment shared on the underground, no station or location that was special between them. Nothing. In any case, it was doubtful Esther would deliberately bomb a special place, but because they shared no special place, there wasn’t one single location she could discount. She knew Esther intimately, but it was becoming painfully obvious she barely knew her at all.

  “Chances are she’ll still be wearing the same coat, but you have a better chance of recognising her in any outfit, so keep your mind open as well as your eyes,” said Charlie.

  Bel didn’t know where to begin. Even her comprehensive knowledge of the underground left her jittery with confusion; she had too many options. She inhaled deeply and pushed her hair off her forehead. She commenced looking on the Northern line and concentrated her search around central London. She systematically clicked through the images on the screen, station by station, carriage by carriage, train by train. The task was enormous. She could click on one camera, only to have Esther walk into a shot moments after she clicked off. She could be chasing her all day. Except she didn’t have all day. She wished she knew how long she did have, but there was no answer to that question. There were no answers at all, just more questions.

  Women wearing black coats were everywhere. After barely fifteen minutes her eyes were nearly stuck closed from squinting, and her nerves were frayed from listening to her colleagues’ attempts at hunting Esther down. Bel wanted to be looking in the tunnels, but when she gave that choice due consideration, she knew if she were down there, she’d probably want to be where she had unlimited access to the entire system. She was in the place statistically offering the highest chance for a result, but it didn’t seem like enough.

  Bel understood the psychology behind panic, she knew that the empty sense of helplessness eating away at her insides was a natural response, and she realized the increasing tempo of her thumping heart was inevitable. What would never be written in any textbook was the way it would make her feel. She wanted to scream, run, punch, fight, and explode. She slammed her fist hard on the desk before pushing her chair away and fleeing the room.

  She ignored Conrad calling her name.

  In the sanctuary of the toilet, Bel sat on the closed lid and forced her throbbing head between her legs. She had nothing left to throw up and honestly feared if she dry-retched, her insides would come away, like a boat breaking its tether in a storm. She might be forced to flush her intestines, and indeed her life, down the toilet.

  It briefly occurred to her that for a boat to have its tether broken was a chance at freedom. The owner mourned the loss and the boat rejoiced in the open sea. Bel’s beliefs were being challenged, and she honestly didn’t know what to think anymore.

  She rested the side of her head on the toilet roll as her fear and panic subsided. Boats don’t think.

  She regained valuable focus.

  She knew what she had to do.

  Bel returned to the control room purposeful and calm. The chances of finding Esther were akin to winning the lottery, but you had to be in it to win it, and to find her she had to look and she had to make it count. Recalli
ng her training, she concentrated on shutting out all external noise and distractions. Within a minute, it was just her, the screens, and the hundreds of thousands of people using the London underground system.

  Every moment that passed was another moment Esther was alive, another moment she could be saved, and another moment the people of London were safe. If Esther really was the bomber, Bel wasn’t naive enough to misunderstand that it was also another moment closer to detonation.

  Although she refused to absorb the noise around her, she sensed Conrad was beginning to panic. The busy morning rush of commuters would soon be ending. If Esther was going to detonate a bomb causing supreme devastation, the window of opportunity was closing.

  Precious minutes passed and Bel remained focused on the screens. She looked carefully and deliberately at everyone resembling Esther. She had to find her before the others did. Brown hair, possible ponytail, black coat, and denim jeans. Such was the quality of the cameras that unless you had a specific target to zoom in on, it was all she could go on.

  Click, click, click. She searched the District line: White City, Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park, Notting Hill Gate, Queensgate, Lancaster Gate, Marble Arch, Bond Street. Her eyes remained wide and alert. Time was ticking.

  “She might have thought twice about going through with it after seeing me this morning.” Bel offered the comment when a natural lull in the control room saw the volume decrease. She never removed her eyes from the screens.

  “She won’t have.” Conrad was quick to squash the notion.

  “She could have.” Charlie was giving it serious thought.

  Bel wanted to ask Conrad who he’d slept with to get to the top, but then men didn’t need to sleep with anyone to advance. They just needed to be good suck-ups, mediocre golfers, and loyal members of the boys’ club. His narrow-mindedness had surely hindered him his entire career. Charlie could easily make him look incompetent if she wanted to, and he was too stupid to see it. But then, he was the boss. Maybe Charlie was exactly where he wanted her.

  “Is someone at her place?” Again, Bel spoke without looking away from the monitors.

  “Her place has been searched, Reilly.” Conrad’s temper was fraying. “I can’t afford to have people wandering off all over the place when I need them here.”

  “I’ll get the local police to wait at her flat and her work,” said Charlie. She immediately picked up the telephone. “We’ll keep our specialised resources here. I should have thought about that before.”

  Charlie was covering for him, and if Bel knew it, everyone else did too.

  “So, for all we know, she’s back home cooking an omelette with her feet up watching Good Morning, Britain.” Bel couldn’t hide the contempt for him in her voice.

  Conrad pounded the wall with a balled-up hand. “She’s here!”

  For the first time, Bel looked up, but it wasn’t to glare at Conrad. It was to eye Charlie. Bel thought she might hold the clue as to why the idiot in charge was so damn sure Esther was still a threat.

  Bel returned her full attention to the screens, and after only seconds, she glared at an image that caused her heart to race and her head to burn hot with anticipation, relief, and pure terror. To cover her tracks, she clicked from the image of Oxford Circus to a camera view of Wimbledon station. In her mind, even as she was rising from her chair, she was calculating the fastest route to her destination. Without a word she walked from the control room.

  “Where the hell are you going now?” Conrad shouted after her.

  “The bathroom.” Bel kept her tone low and unagitated to avoid raising unnecessary suspicion.

  Tick, tock.

  The moment he was out of sight, she ran down the dull beige corridor and slammed through the fire-escape door into the stairwell. Taking the steps two at a time and using the handrail to corner as quickly as she could, Bel reached the ground floor. It had taken her eleven seconds. She slowed herself enough to walk at a reasonable pace on the approach to the security desk. How long would it take them to realise she wasn’t in the toilet, and when they realised that she was missing, how long before someone offered the useful suggestion that she’d fled the building?

  She saw nothing unusual about the activity on the security desk; the two civilian contractors manning the station constantly eyed everyone with suspicion. It was their job. Should she smile at them and risk drawing attention to herself, or should she act nonchalant and saunter past like she owned the place? The latter worked in expensive hotels if you needed an urgent pee stop, but she wasn’t sure if she could pull that off now.

  She took a deep breath. She walked past this desk every day, more than once a day at times, and unless they had already been alerted, why would security care whether she was coming or going? She was an agent with MI5, highly paid and well trained, and she concluded the best action to take was to act like it.

  Holding her head high, Bel marched tenaciously past the security desk, drawing her sunglasses from her breast pocket and placing them firmly on her head. As if starring in a blockbuster spy movie, she stepped through the sliding entrance doors as a gentle breath of wind caught her hair and propelled it back from her forehead. The similarities to a Hollywood spy movie ended there.

  The moment the fresh air hit her she burst into a full sprint toward Southwark station. She was agile and moved through the familiar London population with ease. Her phone rang. It was an unknown number, but she knew it was Charlie, or perhaps Conrad was calling to fire her himself. Without a second thought, she declined the call and made one of her own.

  “Esther, it’s me.” She wasn’t surprised the call diverted directly to voice mail. “If you get this, I need you to stay where you are. Please let me help you.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say so she hung up.

  Her phone rang again, and this time she recognised her own work number. Predictably, Charlie and Conrad were persistent, but again, she declined the call and returned her focus to Esther. Suddenly, a jolt of panic tore through her insides, and as she was poised to descend into the abyss of the underground network, she paused on the dank stairs and called Esther again.

  “Look, I don’t know what today will bring, but I want you to know I love you.” She hung up feeling neither stupid for loving a potential bomber nor frightened that life as she knew it was ending that day.

  She disappeared into the station.

  Chapter Nine

  Bel was an accurate judge of space and time; it was one of her most useful qualities. Of course, it was something you could learn or practice, but she required nothing other than her instincts. She could pack a suitcase, small bag, car boot, or anything really with an unfathomable amount of objects. It was like a game of Tetris. Shapes, spaces, and at times stubborn brute force would see her succeed. When it came to time, she possessed an uncanny knack of running a scenario through her mind in fast-forward and translating that scene to normal time. She calculated that if everything went to plan and the trains ran on time, she would be in Esther’s vicinity within fifteen minutes.

  It seemed like such an agonisingly long time to reach her destination, and if she were to run between trains the time would be halved, but running and drawing attention to herself was not a viable option. If Control spotted her running they could track her easily. In fact, if she were to remain wearing the same outfit, she’d be apprehended in no time. She paused to look around. Two doors down from a specialty cupcake cart was a vendor selling London souvenirs. The locals knew the goods were cheap crap made in China, but she made a beeline for the little stall, selecting a cap and a flimsy black zip-up hooded jacket emblazoned with the Union Jack and the words, In London, I Am the King.

  With only the stall holder as her audience, she quickly transferred everything from her jacket pockets to her jeans and took it off. Her holster and weapon were in full view. The man’s eyes bulged from his head like those of a character in a cartoon.

  “Oh, don’t worry. It’s not real.” She sounded relatively
convincing, even to herself. She pulled on the black jacket. “I’m an extra on Scott and Bailey. Have you seen that cop show?” He looked relieved but clueless. “You should watch it. It’s great.” Scott and Bailey was filmed miles away in Manchester. It was the best she could manage under the circumstances.

  She pulled on the cap and resumed her journey to reach Esther. It was a long shot. Esther was probably on the move, but this was Bel’s only chance. Sitting and waiting for something to happen wasn’t a viable plan. Conrad Rush finding Esther first wasn’t viable either. Bel had one chance and she was taking it.

  She walked briskly toward the westbound platform. When a group of people rushed by her, she tagged onto the end of their pack, inconspicuously gaining ground. As the train arrived, she leapt on it and stood by the door. She needed an escape route.

  If Control located her, the odds of reaching Esther were slim. Her knowledge of the underground network was not superior to others in Hotstream, and once Control agents were tracking her on camera, it was unlikely they’d lose her. Although they’d lost Esther once already that morning. She prayed Esther stayed lost until she found her.

  The next station was Waterloo and it was always busy. It was imperative she leave the Jubilee line as soon as possible. The Jubilee line was the only one that serviced the Southwark station. It left her exposed to remain on Jubilee one moment longer than necessary.

  Waterloo station was extensive, and although CCTV cameras more than adequately surveyed every nook and cranny, the masses of commuters using the station relieved some of her tension.

  Bel swiftly made her way to catch a northbound train on the Northern line. Heading directly into the city, the Northern line was busier than Jubilee and was a good place to blend in. As she took up position in the doorway of the carriage, she looked at her phone. She’d had another seven missed calls, but nothing from Esther. She had no service now, so there was no use trying Esther.