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. Recalling 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.