by Rob Aspinall
I leaned over the edge of the stone wall that ran around the roof of the building. Down below, I saw a grey-haired man in a brown tweed suit approach the building carrying a boxy metal case by the handle. He looked around him before entering a discreet side door held open by an armed guard, who looked left and right before closing the door behind.
I couldn’t see much, other than the tops of their heads, but the security guard was a big guy. Enormous shoulders. Tweed suit was tiny in comparison. He must have been a politician or a civil servant, I thought, entering through a special VIP entrance. I skirted the rooftop one more time, looking for trouble. A sniper on the roof maybe. An out-of-control plane in the sky. A robot dog or a Type A looking shifty. There was absolutely nothing suspicious going on. Not even a sniff of JPAC danger. I headed inside, thinking I’d at least do a little sightseeing. There was a circular pod in the centre of the dome floor with a huge, glittering glass structure the shape of an ice-cream cone soaring to the roof.
Standing at the pod, with its info points and screens, you could see parliament in session through a glass ceiling below. It dawned on me that I might be in the wrong part of the building. That JPAC’s Black Flag Protocol event was going to happen down there in the parliament, where I couldn’t gain access. As rebel fighters go, I was pretty piss poor.
Then I spotted something that rocked me back on my heels. It was like a punch in the gut that told me this was real. And that I was in exactly the right place. The man in the tweed suit shuffled in with the big security guard, dressed in grey pants and a jumper like his colleagues. The pair of them walked right by me – Dr Belinsky carrying his silver, box-shaped case alongside the armed guard, six-five and buffalo-broad.
What the hell was Belinsky doing at the Reichstag? And what was in that case? A few small details set off alarm bells inside me.
The pair of them looked red in the eyes, like they hadn’t slept. The guard was sporting a small, pink puncture mark on the side of his neck. His holster was unclipped and one of his hands gripped Dr Belinsky by a brown leather elbow patch. Belinsky being here was no coincidence. This smelled funkier than month-old underpants. The guard steered Belinsky up the walkway that spiralled around the dome. They ambled slowly, heads on a permanent swivel.
I left the central pod and started up the walkway, following at a distance, acting like I was an interested tourist – a clever, cultured schoolgirl who had no time for the running and shrieking of the other children still milling and messing around on the roof. The walkway wound its way up at a shallow angle, so you didn’t realise just how high you were climbing. On the other side of the glass was the Berlin skyline – the TV tower fuzzy in the distance and, just across the main road, a sprawl of parkland the colour of limes and cooked spinach. The guard picked up the pace with his giraffe-sized lope, cutting past early-bird visitors and a gaggle of school kids who’d sprinted their way towards the top. Dr Belinsky shuffled quickly to keep up on his short legs, clutching the box close to his stomach. By the time I got to the summit, the pair of them were already sitting down.
The dome had a hole in the roof with the giant, ice-cream-cone funnel ending directly underneath, with a low circular wall you could sit on if you fancied a rest. The two men sat there now, the guard rubbing his hands and glancing around. Belinsky stared at the floor, knuckles white as he held on tight to the box. A big, loud man with a geography teacher beard stood next to me, carping on about the design of the Reichstag building to his wife. Tossing himself off with his own detailed knowledge:
Some famous architect called Norman Foster had designed it.
A funnel went straight down the centre of the cone.
It caught any rain or snow that fell in through the hole, which was then recycled as water used within the building.
The funnel also acted as ventilation, letting cool air in and hot air out.
I moved out of earshot of Mr Boomy, but lingered around the funnel. The guard checked his watch and nodded to Belinsky. The good doctor kneeled down in front of the box and unclipped the top, but I couldn’t get a good look at what was inside. I edged closer and took a seat on the wall a few feet along. Still couldn’t see. Whatever it was, he was shielding it from sight. The guard glared right at me. I quickly turned my head and swung my legs back and forth, carefree like a little kid. As the guard looked away, I shoved sideways on my bum. A foot closer. Dr Belinsky shut the case with exaggerated care, like he was afraid of it. He nodded at the guard and, without a word, they stood up and walked off quickly down the ramp, as if they couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I jumped up and walked over to the case. Belinsky had closed the top but not bothered to lock it. I pressed down on the two release buttons and carefully opened the lid.
Worst. Case. Scenario. Ever.
A bomb. Set to go off in three minutes’ time.
2:59 …
2:58 …
2:57 …
33
Ticker
A bit about the bomb:
A row of vertical plastic tubes full of a clear liquid.
A rainbow of wires taped together between the tubes and plugged into what looked like plastic explosives: oblong blocks taped to the back of the case directly behind the tubes.
A keypad to the left of the tubes – 0 to 9 with three other buttons below: TIMER, SET and DISARM.
A red digital clock ticking down.
I pressed the DISARM button first. Nothing happened. Pressed it again.
Shit on a stick!
I raced through my options:
Maybe I could cut the wires. Which one? With what?
I could beat the code out of the guy. Yeah, sure. He was six-five, armed and on his way out already.
I could get everyone out of the dome. Too many people. Too far to run.
2:30 …
What else? What else?
A hand landed on the neck of my sweater. That’s what else. The guard was back. This time alone. He heaved me up to my feet, pushed me away from the bomb and told me in German to run. I darted forward, pulled the weapon from his belt and pointed it at the hole in the dome roof. Before he could stop me, I fired off a round and shouted for everyone else to run. Screams from shocked tourists echoed around the dome. The guard wrenched the gun from my hand. He ejected the clip and the bullet from the chamber, flinging the whole lot away. He slapped me with the back of his hand, hard as a brick. It sent me sprawling and sliding across the squeaky floor. To his credit and my surprise, Mr Boomy put himself between me and the guard.
“Hey,” he said. “Leave her alone.”
The guard replied with a hard jab to the face, knocking the guy off his feet.
“Go!” I shouted at Mr Boomy. He picked himself up with the help of his terrified wife and got out of there. The guard watched the bomb tick down, resigned to his fate, thinking I was done.
I wasn’t.
My heart told me to go for the knee and let his titanic frame do the rest. Still on the floor, I tucked my right leg in and kicked with everything I had on the inside of his right kneecap. He made a throaty sound and dropped to his remaining good leg. I rose to my feet, cracking my knee in his temple and putting him on his back.
2:00 …
I put a hand on either side of his face and hit his head against the dark, buffed flooring. It was worth a shot.
“How do I stop it?” I shouted.
He gritted his teeth and kept it to himself. I hit his head again.
“How do I stop it? Tell me!”
Again.
“I can’t,” he said. “They have my family.”
Shit, there’s no way he would talk. I went back to the bomb. Twitchy-bum time as the clock ticked down relentlessly.
My hands flailed around the bomb, touching at the wires, jabbing at the keypad. I didn’t have a clue. Worse still, the guard was back up. My God, it just wasn’t like in the movies at all. These guys never gave in. This time he had me good, in a full nelson from behind, his arms
wrapped under my armpits with hands clasped behind my head. He lifted me off my feet, not trying to kill me. He didn’t have to. The bomb would do that all by its bad self. I watched the thing tick down, smelling his BO, feeling my chest tighten with panic. I tried to wriggle free, but not this time. Hundreds of gooses were about to be cooked. The dome was about to explode into a billion tiny shards of whatever transparent super-material it was made of. That glittering mirror cone would tumble through the glass ceiling of parliament and all the MPs would be crushed, blown, cut or burned to death, along with hundreds of school kids for added effect. And I had the ultimate ringside seat.
Talk about plans blowing up in your face.
1:51 …
Just when all seemed lost, a thick black cord zoomed upwards out of the funnel. It split into four spider legs from a central hub on the end, each one sticking like superglue to the inner rim of the hole in the roof. There was a rapid zipping sound from inside the funnel, like the world’s biggest fly being done up. A ninja-black figure flew up out of the funnel, one hand on the cord, another holding out a gun with a silencer screwed on the end. He let off a round before he’d even reached the top.
At first I thought he was firing at me. But it was the bomber who fell flat on his back, bleeding from a hole just below his right shoulder. Philippe came to a rapid stop at the top of the cord. He swung himself off over the funnel, landing like a gymnast. He looked seriously pissed off.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” he said.
34
Zip Cord
“Okay, what have we got?” Philippe asked, kneeling down casually in front of the bomb like he’d been called out to fix a washing machine.
“A fucking bomb, that’s what we’ve got!”
His cucumber-cool only made me antsier. He pressed the DISARM button.
“I tried that already. Don’t you think I tried that?”
1:30 …
Philippe fiddled with the wires, separating them out. He pulled a phone from his pocket and lined up a photo of the bomb.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Quiet, I’m on the phone,” he said, dialling a number and holding it to his ear. He unzipped a pocket on the small black rucksack hugging his back and brought out a pair of steel wire cutters with orange rubber handles.
“Can you disarm it?” I asked, actively trying not to cack myself.
He ignored me and talked into his phone. “Max, it’s Philippe. I’ve got a countdown. I’ve sent you a photo.”
There was a pause. Too long a pause.
“That’s right, Russian,” Philippe said. “One minute left.”
Another pause.
00:50 …
This was unbearable. I was close to hyperventilating. I wanted to scream, but I knew it wouldn’t help.
“I think it’s either blue or green,” Philippe said, readying the cutters and tucking the phone between ear and head. “I’ll try green.”
Try green? Try? It’s not a science experiment. You don’t get another go.
Suddenly I was yanked to the floor by my hair. The guard, still fighting to make something happen. What was the point? JPAC didn’t give you marks for effort. As I tried to fight my way out of the guard’s grip, Nerves of Steel cut the green wire. I clenched everything, waiting for the boom.
It never came. Turns out you could try cutting a wire.
Only trouble was:
“It seems to have accelerated the timer,” Philippe said to Max.
00:40 …
I was lying flat on top of the guard staring at the sky, his right arm curling like a boa constrictor around my throat. He tried to put his left hand over my mouth. I fought it away with both of mine. I think he wanted to snap my neck and get to Philippe, who saw it happening, but rightly ignored it.
00:30 …
“How about blue?” Philippe asked Max. “Fifty–fifty, huh? I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
Philippe brought the cutters up to the blue wire. Twenty-eight seconds to live. How do you get your head around that? The truth is, you didn’t. It was too terrifying a concept for the brain to compute. And, besides, something had caught my eye.
“Oh, oh, oh!” I said.
There in smudged black ink on the inside of the guard’s palm, staring me in the flipping face for the last ten whole seconds, were four numbers. Digits. A code, surely.
4–8–3–2
“Wait!” I croaked as loud as I could. Philippe paused and glanced over his shoulder.
The guard tried to strangle the words out of me, but I had just enough of a voice. “The code …”
00:20 …
“The what?” Philippe asked.
“The code! Four … eight …”
Philippe caught on fast. With the jaws of the cutter still poised over the wire in his right hand, he punched in the numbers with his left. The would-be bomber choked me harder with his right bicep, but I manipulated the nerves that ran up the inside of his wrist. Nothing he could do but spasm.
“Three …” I spat out. “Two …”
Philippe punched in the final number and pressed DISARM.
00:10 …
It hadn’t worked. Philippe turned his attention back to the wire. I stared at the numbers in disbelief. Maybe they were just the guy’s ATM PIN.
“No, wait, wait!” I shouted.
The guard shook off the pain running up and down his upper body and squeezed me until I couldn’t talk. I reached over my left shoulder and twisted a thumb in his hot, gloopy wound, his choke arm slackening in gurgling agony.
“The three’s an eight. The three’s an eight!” I yelled. “Four–eight–eight–two.”
00:05 …
00:04 …
Philippe rattled in the code.
00:03 …
He must have got a number wrong.
00:02 …
He rattled it in again.
00:01 …
Oh crap.
35
Surrounded
The bomb beeped, the countdown clock froze.
00:01
If Philippe had hit the DISARM button a fraction of a second later, we’d have all been toast. The bomber slumped back in agony on the floor. No reason to fight anymore. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve and felt for my own heartbeat. Good, it was still there.
Philippe returned the cutters to his rucksack and got back on the phone. “We found a code,” he said. “Thanks, Max.”
Max talked him through unclipping the wires and the tubes from the explosives. Within seconds, Philippe had unscrewed one from the device. A small, clear vial in a protective carbon casing.
“I think Belinsky may have had something to do with that,” I said.
“As in—”
“The guy you traded Mobutu for, yeah. He was here. He started the clock ticking.”
“Then the aim wasn’t just to blow up parliament.”
“You mean it was some kind of dirty bomb?”
“Belinsky’s a bioweapons specialist,” Philippe said. “The best.”
“So that’s what JPAC wanted with him. To create a weapon.”
Philippe looked at the vial in his hand. “I’m guessing something custom-engineered. Something new.”
“Something terrible, you mean.”
Philippe shrugged and tucked the vial away in his small black rucksack. I heard distant shouting, echoing around the base of the dome. Armed Reichstag guards were moving up the ramp past the last of the fleeing visitors. Philippe stood over the bomber, who seemed devastated the device hadn’t gone off.
The guard nodded at Philippe. “Bitte,” he said.
Philippe nodded back.
The man said, “Danke,” and closed his eyes.
Philippe put a bullet right between them. I jumped out of my skin.
“What did you do that for? They’ve got his family.”
“Then you know as well as I do, they’re alread
y dead,” Philippe said, holstering his weapon and zipping up the rucksack. “And so is he … I just saved him a lot of pain.”
I turned my attention to the Reichstag guards. They were ordered to fall back behind a police SWAT team filing up the walkway, heavy-duty firearms pointing skyward.
“I think we’ve got another problem,” I said.
Philippe finished with the bomb and took a look.
“Okay,” he said, pulling out his gun again and unscrewing the silencer. “You go first.”
“Why me? Why am I always the bait?”
“Because you’re dressed like a schoolgirl … Act like one.”
“What about you?” I asked.
Philippe ran his eyes around the lower levels of the dome. The SWAT team were advancing in a staggered pattern. Four teams of two, evenly spaced around the walkway. A further two Reichstag guards stationed at the bottom by the central pod.
“There’s only ten of them,” he said, retrieving a fresh ammo clip from his bag.
Only?
“Go now,” Philippe said, slamming the clip into the gun.
I moved as fast as I could, wearing the panic all over my innocent schoolgirl face. About a third of the way round and down, I hit the first SWAT pairing.
“There’s a man with a bomb,” I shouted in German. “Hilfe!”
One of the SWAT team waved me through while another spoke into his radio. “School kid coming down. Hold your fire.”
As I circled the dome past the next line of SWAT, I looked up over my shoulder. I saw a couple of small silver canisters bouncing down the walkway. They blew open with a blinding, deafening burst of light and smoke. I only caught glimpses of what happened as I ran, but I saw Philippe break out of the smoke cloud, presumably having disposed of the first two SWAT. He hit the second line before they could react, putting them down with bullets to the chest. The third line barked at me to keep running, opening fire as soon as I was clear. Philippe was faster than lightning, returning fire on the run. As I looked back, a bullet bounced off the railing and hit one of the SWAT in the shoulder. His partner shot back, but Philippe was too fast. Too accurate.
