All previous chapters - CHAPTER 1 - CHAPTER 2 - CHAPTER 3 - CHAPTER 4 - CHAPTER 5 - CHAPTER 6 - Chapter 7 - CHAPTER 8 - CHAPTER 9 - CHAPTER 10 - CHAPTER 11 - CHAPTER 12 - CHAPTER 13 - CHAPTER 14 - CHAPTER 15 - CHAPTER 16 - CHAPTER 17 - CHAPTER 18 - CHAPTER 19 - CHAPTER 20 - CHAPTER 21 - CHAPTER 22
Previously on “The bomb in the shed…”; xxx
And here we go with CHAPTER 23… Ramirez reveals Fitzpatrick has taken the bomb to Arthur’s house, is holding his family hostage and will detonate the bomb unless they hand over Arthur.
Chapter 23
“Are you ok?”
Ramirez had given Arthur two minutes to talk alone with Jacob. She hadn’t been keen on conceding even that. But Arthur had insisted. If you want me to go to Fitzpatrick then I need this first.
Arthur had been about to launch straight into an explanation of what was going on. But when he saw the state Jacob was in he couldn’t do that. The guy had been shut in this little room for hours and was staring into space.
He didn’t seem to hear.
“Jacob, are you ok?”
“Not really,” Jacob looked up. “What’s going on?”
“They’re finally listening,” said Arthur. “That’s something.”
This seemed to brighten Jacob a little.
Arthur took a seat opposite him and handed over the half packet of crisps he’d saved. Jacob grabbed it and got stuck in.
“Listen, we don’t have much time,” said Arthur, “So I’m going to have to just tell you.”
“What’s happened?” asked Jacob through a mouthful of crisps.
There was no way to sugar coat it, even if they had more time.
“Fitzpatrick has Bella. He’s threatening to detonate her.”
Jacob was pouring the last of the crumbs from the bag into his mouth. He paused mid flow, then dropped the bag on the table. The brief moment of brightness had passed.
“Why would he do that?”
“We don’t know,” replied Arthur. “But he’s asking for me. That’s his only demand so far.”
Jacob looked as confused by that as Arthur felt.
Arthur said, “Sorry but we don’t have much time to talk. We need to leave.”
“We?”
“Yes, I want you to come with me.”
Jacob leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and started running his fingers through his hair over and over again, staring into the distance. “You want me to go with you to ground zero of a nuclear bomb?”
“Fitzpatrick is at my house. He’s taken my family hostage. Camilla, David, Angela, baby Gemma…” after a protracted pause he added, “…and Alex.”
Jacob and Alex had only started seeing each other recently, but Camilla said they were already smitten with each other.
“Alex is there?”
Was it fair to pressure Jacob like this? But he had to, Arthur needed him there, whatever it took.
“Fitzpatrick said he’ll release them when he has me,” explained Arthur. “I want you there to keep my family safe. Make sure they’re as far away as possible as quickly as possible. Just in case it all goes wrong.”
“Can you stop Fitzpatrick?” asked Jacob.
Arthur took the kill switch out of his pocket and held it up. Such a small thing, a microchip. But it had the power to change everything.
“All I need to do is fit this into the main circuit board,” he explained. “The board is easy to access, the chip is designed to plug straight in. It will disable the whole system, shut it down. Permanently. I just need one chance to fit it. Fitzpatrick won’t know what I’m doing.”
“No, I mean can you do it? When it comes to it can you destroy Bella?”
Jacob was staring at Arthur intently now. His doubts were understandable, after everything that had happened. And now Arthur was expecting him to risk his life.
Arthur placed the chip back in his pocket, very carefully. “You’re right, it’s going to be hard for me. But I know now that Bella has to be destroyed.”
“You promise?” asked Jacob.
He didn’t sound completely convinced.
“Promise.”
---
Arthur was already in the helicopter and strapped into his seat by the time Jacob arrived at the hanger, looking rather flustered. An airman helped buckle him in the seat next to Arthur then left them both alone. There were four other seats, waiting for whoever joined them. Jacob was carrying a Tupperware box which he held up for Arthur to see.
“I asked for some food and I think they gave me someone’s packed lunch.” He popped open the lid. It was a pasta salad. “No fork,” he complained to no one in particular.
He stared into the box for a moment as if expecting a fork to magically materialise, then looked around the cabin, as if cutlery might be part of the onboard supplies of an army helicopter. For a moment the battle between hunger and fear of ruining his trousers played out across Jacob’s face before hunger finally won out and he started shovelling the salad into his mouth with a credit card from his wallet, trying as best he could not to drop anything on his clothes.
Not a pretty sight.
A few moments later they were joined by Ramirez and one of the guards. Both jumped in confidently and strapped themselves in.
Staring man obviously wasn’t joining them. Arthur felt relieved.
The engine fired up and the blades turned, slowly at first then faster and faster, the noise in the cabin building as the speed intensified. One moment Arthur felt the full weight of the helicopter anchored securely on the ground, the next they were hovering a couple of feet in the air. Arthur’s understood the physics of how a helicopter worked, but it was still hard to believe something this big and heavy could fly.
They were moving forward now, almost at walking pace. It was a strange experience, taxiing out of the hanger close to the ground but somehow free from gravity’s pull. Once clear of the hanger they rose up quickly, the ground dropping away, there one moment, gone the next. The noise in the cabin was so loud it was hard to concentrate. It was different from being in a plane where you felt safely cocooned from the airborne world around you. They were hundreds of feet up travelling at well over a hundred miles per hour and the experience felt so immediate and raw, exhilarating reality, not theory.
Ramirez grabbed a set of headphones hung up next to her seat and indicated Arthur and Jacob do them same. As soon as Arthur put his pair on the noise all but disappeared leaving an eerie sense of calm. They completely covered his ears and had a microphone on a small boom that he positioned in front of his mouth. Jacob was looking uncertainly at his hands, wet with salad dressing, then noticed the sweetcorn and spots of grease already on his trousers, shrugged and wiped his hands clean on them, before picking up his headphones.
A loud click in his ears made Arthur jump.
Ramirez’s voice filled his head. “Give me a thumbs up if you can hear me.”
They both did.
“It’s going to take about a quarter of an hour to get to Finchley. We’ll be landing in a small park a few roads over from your house, Arthur. There’s a froward command centre at the end of your road, we’ll all head for that. From there you’ll go on alone to your house. Ok?”
Thumbs up again.
“What do we know about what’s happening in the house?” It was preying on Arthur’s mind and there had been no time to talk about it until now.
Ramirez didn’t reply. She tapped her headset and shrugged. Then her voice came online again. “You need to press the button, otherwise we can’t hear you.”
Arthur repeated his question with his button pressed.
“We don’t know much,” replied Ramirez. “Fitzpatrick has taken your family hostage and there’s a very high probability that he’s armed. As far as we know they are all in the house and everyone is ok. The bomb is in the shed, but Fitzpatrick says he’s attached a remote detonating device to it. If that’s true he can trigger it at anytime from anywhere.”
“What about the neighbours?” asked Jacob.
“The surrounding streets have been evacuated. We’re telling people there’s a large, unexploded Word War Two bomb. That should cover all the activity and make sure people stay away.”
Not much help if Bella was detonated though.
“Shouldn’t you evacuate more people?” asked Arthur. “In case the bomb goes off.”
“To protect everyone in danger would mean evacuating hundreds of thousands of people. It would take days if not weeks to do that, not to mention the full scale panic it would cause. It’s not practical. We just have to make sure Fitzpatrick doesn’t detonate.”
Arthur turned to the window and watch the world below, a complex tapestry of houses and roads. They were within the radiation zone now, soon they’d be over the blast area. All those people living their lives, oblivious to the horrifying fate that potentially awaited them. Initial fatality rates would likely be thousands of people, tens of thousands in the long run. He’d been dancing with these kind of statistics all of his life, but they’d never meant anything real to him.
Not until now.
All those lives hanging in the balance.
Because of him.
---
Fitzpatrick was still holding a gun on Camilla’s family.
There was no doubt whatsoever in her mind that she was fully capable of ripping his head off and stuffing it down his own neck, given half a chance. She wasn’t frightened, she felt nothing but pure rage. But she couldn’t act on it, it was too risky. Keeping a lid on that rage was difficult. So Camilla sat staring at Fitzpatrick with her loathing bubbling away beneath the surface, fondly imagining what she might do to him if he didn’t have that gun. He was the one Camilla had been warned about, by Arthur’s old colleague Marie when she was in the US. Camilla had come back home, but she hadn’t done a very good job of looking out for him. But she was damned if she was going to make that mistake again.
Why was he keeping them here?
Fitzpatrick wouldn’t answer any questions. Just said they should sit and wait.
Wait for what?
He wouldn’t say. But it had to be about the bomb. What else could it be? Had he brought it back to the house? Was it in the shed?
There had been police going house to house down the street, knocking on doors. All the doors except their own which was studiously avoided. Soon after hey’d heard the sound of their neighbours leaving in cars and on foot. A mass exodus of everyone apart from them.
“What’s going on?” asked Camilla.
She had to try again.
Fitzpatrick still wouldn’t answer.
He was staring the radio in his hand, waiting for it to spring into life. He’d been talking to somebody on it, though Camilla had no idea who. She’d not heard his conversations
“At least let the kids go with the baby. You’ll still have me.”
David and Alex protested at that.
Angela, still holding on to baby Gemma, kept silent.
Fitzpatrick said, “You’re all staying until he gets here.”
“Until who gets here?”
He wouldn’t answer that either.
But he meant Arthur.
Of course he meant Arthur.
That’s it for Chapter 23, I hope you enjoyed it and are looking forward to more. Chapter 24 will be out the same time next week, Friday at 4:00pm UK time.
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