CHAPTER 28... is live
The story continues
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 - CHAPTER 23 - CHAPTER 24 - CHAPTER 25 - CHAPTER 26 - CHAPTER 27
Previously on “The bomb in the shed…”; Back in the New Mexico dessert 20 years ago Elizabeth make a breakthrough. But before she can tell Arthur Fitzpatrick arrives to stop her - shooting her and blowing up the lab.
And here we go with CHAPTER 28…
Chapter 28
Finchley – Present day
Jacob was with Ramirez in the control truck of the forward command centre, listening to the feed from Arthur’s earpiece.
“Go on then, call her.”
Fitzpatrick was urging Arthur to summon Elizabeth. Why was he fixated with the woman too – she’d been dead for twenty years.
“Elizabeth, I need to speak to you.” Arthur seemed to be humouring Fitzpatrick.
“Why is he so obsessed with Elizabeth?” Ramirez was staring at Jacob like this was exactly the kind of question he was there to answer.
“I’ve no idea.” Jacob shouldn’t even be here. He was supposed to be with Arthur’s family, flying them to safety. Not stuck in a van with a bunch of soldiers just down the road from a nuclear ground zero.
Ramirez shook her head dismissively and turned her attention back to the audio feed.
“Where is she?” Fitzpatrick was shouting now. And loud, like he was right next to Arthur. “Show yourself, Elizabeth, or I’ll shoot your boyfriend.”
Jacob checked the stats on the voice polygraph screen, to see if Fitzpatrick was lying. It didn’t look at all good for Arthur, all of the metrics were flashing green and pointing to a high probability of truth. Ramirez was checking the screen as well. Her frown deepened a little, but apart from that she was emotionless.
“I told you, she’s gone.” Arthur sounded defeated.
There was a loud thud, a sharp burst of feedback, and then silence.
“Did he just shoot Arthur?” Jacob couldn’t quite believe it.
“I don’t think so,” replied Ramirez calmly. “He just hit him. We’ve lost audio.”
Just hit him? As if that didn’t matter. It sounded pretty violent and Arthur was still frail. It didn’t seem to concern Ramirez though.
One of her team interrupted her with a microphone. “She’s online, Ma’am.”
Ramirez spoke into it. “Marie, thanks for agreeing to talk to me. I need to ask you some questions about Robert Fitzpatrick.”
A woman’s voice came over the speaker.
“I tried telling you people about him at the hearing. No-one would listen to me.”
“I apologise for that, Marie. I’m listening now.” Ramirez was trying to be nice, through gritted teeth. “What was the nature of the relationship between him and Elizabeth?”
There was a pause, then Marie replied “I don’t know the full story. Just what Elizabeth told me, and what I saw for myself.”
“Tell me anything you can.”
”I would say it was an abusive relationship,” replied Marie. She sounded a little uncertain at first but putting it out there seemed to give her confidence. “He psychologically manipulated her. He was controlling. There was at least one incident of sexual harassment, probably more, possibly worse. But Elizabeth refused to see it that way.”
“How would you expect his current mental state to be in relation to Elizabeth?”
“I don’t know. She’s dead and I’ve not seen him in twenty years.”
Ramirez frowned. Paused for a moment. “Would it surprise you if I said he had been harbouring an unhealthy obsession for her that had triggered an unstable psychological episode?”
“What’s going on? Has something happened?”
“I’m sorry I can’t say. Please just answer the question.”
Another pause.
Then, “No, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Thank you,” Ramirez handed the phone back even as Marie continued to talk.
“What are we going to do?” asked Jacob. Something, surely. Now Arthur had no way of contacting them. Would she send in the troops? The missile?
“We do nothing,” Ramirez replied. “We’ve got another thirty five minutes before Fitzpatrick’s hour is up.”
—
“You shot me.” Elizabeth kept Arthur’s voice calm despite the cauldron of emotions they were both experiencing. “The day of the accident, you shot me.”
Countless times Arthur had asked Elizabeth what had happened the day she’d died. They’d been trying to piece together her breakthrough so they could replicate it. The breakthrough she’d told him about on the phone but never had a chance to explain. But however hard she tried, Elizabeth couldn’t remember anything about that day. So they’d had to go back to the drawing board. Build the whole thing from scratch again. All this time he’d thought her lost memory was slowing down the process of finishing Bella. But there was a deeper secret all along.
Fitzpatrick had murdered Elizabeth.
Arthur felt a surge of hatred for Fitzpatrick growing inside him, mirroring Elizabeth’s. The two feeding off each other. His instinct was to turn away, horrified. How do you look into the eyes of someone who murdered a person you cared for? But Elizabeth wouldn’t let him. She stood firm, staring at her killer unflinchingly through Arthur’s eyes. He wasn’t a violent man by nature, Arthur had no concept of turning his anger towards Fitzpatrick into something physical, Elizabeth had no qualms, he could feel it.
But his body was injured and weak, with no muscle memory for acts of aggression. No match for Fitzpatrick, even with his injured leg. Despite her knowing this, Arthur could feel Elizabeth’s overwhelming urge to act on her desire to hurt Fitzpatrick, with every fibre of her being. He wanted to resist the urge, but it was hard, their anger was bound up together.
“I’m glad you remembered,” said Fitzpatrick, looking down at Arthur, still on his knees. “I want you to remember.”
“Then what? You blew up the lab to cover it up?” asked Elizabeth. “Was it you, Robert, were you the spy?”
She was buying time, giving Arthur’s exhausted body some chance of recovery.
“There was no spy, Elizabeth,” he replied. “Well, there were spies. But we knew exactly who they were and what information they were sharing. We let them do it, that was the point.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The facility, pure fusion research. It was all a sham. A way to distract our enemies, get them wasting their time and resources on something pointless. You weren’t meant to succeed. It was supposed to be impossible.”
“But we did do it,” she said defiantly. “Even with you trying to stop us.”
“Yes you did,” replied Fitzpatrick. “That’s why I did what I did.”
Arthur was feeling a little stronger, now that the initial shock of being smashed in the face had subsided. Elizabeth could feel it too. A glimmer of hope that she might get her revenge. Arthur just wanted control of his body back.
“But why?” asked Elizabeth. “Pure fusion is the future. Cheaper, easier to make, smaller, more controllable…”
“… and more likely to get used,” said Fitzpatrick, interrupting her. “taking nuclear weapons from act of last resort making them a credible tactical strike option. Devices would get smaller and easier to make over time. Would you want that in the hands of our government? Our enemies? Terrorists? The technology would get out there, to everyone, it always does. There would be no way to control it.”
“If you’re so against, why are you threatening to use it?” She wanted to wipe that smug self-satisfied expression off his face.
“To make sure I got what I wanted,” he replied
“Which was?”
“Arthur.”
There was a hammer on the floor, in Arthur’s peripheral vision. Elizabeth’s attention flicked to it for a moment, though his eyes didn’t stray from Fitzpatrick. She wanted it. He could feel it. She was imagining what she would do with it. The thought sickened him. Elizabeth did all she could to supress those feelings.
“Why?” She was still playing for time.
“To end pure fusion once and for all.” Fitzpatrick nodded to the radio in his hand. “One threat of detonation and they’ll send in a missile strike. The bomb, Arthur, his research, it will all be gone. Forever this time. I don’t want to detonate a nuclear bomb. I’m not insane. I just needed them to believe I would.”
“You’re going to kill Arthur?” Elizabeth’s urge to pick up the hammer and smash it into Fitzpatrick’s face felt stronger than ever.
“It’s the only way to make sure. You must see that. The alternative is just too dangerous.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me,” replied Fitzpatrick.
He was probably right, Arthur’s strength was returning, but slowly. His body still frail. That wasn’t going to deter Elizabeth though. Her mind raced, calculating how she might change the odds. Put Fitzpatrick off balance.
“Why haven’t you done it yet then?” It was more a taunt than a question.
“You want me to?”
Arthur’s shoulders shrugged. “You have the bomb, you have Arthur. Call it in. What are you waiting for?”
It wasn’t something Arthur would think of, to goad Fitzpatrick. But she was right. Why hadn’t he triggered the strike yet? There was nothing stopping him.
“I needed to see you first. To explain. I need you to forgive me.”
Arthur laughed, a sharp callous laugh that burst out of him. None of this was funny. But to Elizabeth right then Fitzpatrick really was laughable. “I’m sorry?”
“Don’t mock me.” Fitzpatrick was losing his cool, and his concentration, which was exactly what Elizabeth wanted. “Do you understand how hard it was for me to do what I did? Shoot you, destroy the lab. And then live with it all those years? I need you to forgive me, Elizabeth. I love you. You must know that. I always have.”
“So what?”
Fitzpatrick looked apoplectic. What Elizabeth had said wasn’t just a rejection. It was dismissive. In all those years at the lab it was something even Arthur had noticed about the man. He hated to be treated with contempt. This visceral reaction was distracting him, just as Elizabeth had hoped.
She compelled Arthur to reach for the hammer and rise from his knees, his muscles straining under the conflicting forces of his body’s weakness and her strength of will. He tried to stop her, fuelled by his disgust at being controlled and fear of what Elizabeth would do, but he reached out anyway. It felt foreign in his hand. He rarely used a hammer. It was blunt and imprecise. How could he attack a human being with it, even a killer like Fitzpatrick? It was such a primitive act. It seemed to weigh a hundred kilos. But Arthur didn’t drop it. Instead he stood and raised it up high, ready to strike.
Fitzpatrick watched him, dumb surprise on his face.
One swift forceful blow and it would all be over.
Except Arthur couldn’t do it. Despite everything Fitzpatrick had done and what he was going to do. It was just wrong. Elizabeth tried to force him to smash the hammer down into the loathsome man’s face. But Arthur held firm.
Fitzpatrick pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed it at Arthur, who stood frozen, hammer raised, in what must have looked a comical statuesque pose. “You can’t do it, Arthur, can you? You can build a nuclear bomb capable of killing millions of people, but you can’t kill one person to save them. To save yourself. What kind of man are you?”
Was this how he was going to die? A gun in his face and Fitzpatrick the last person he’d ever see? Just like Elizabeth. Maybe this was justice, dying the way she had, for committing the same crime.
Then an image appeared in Arthur’s head, unbidden. Elizabeth slumped in a chair in the lab, blood streaming from her belly and splashing onto the cold hard floor. Her life slowly ebbing away.
Two lives lost with a single gunshot.
Elizabeth’s and their unborn child. The original Bella.
He swung the hammer down hard.
Fitzpatrick might have been able to dodge the blow, if he’d reacted quickly. But he didn’t, he just stood there watching it, a look of utter surprise on his face. The sickening thud of metal on bone reverberated through the handle and into Arthur’s arm.
Fitzpatrick fell to the ground.
That’s it for Chapter 28, I hope you enjoyed it and are looking forward to more. Chapter 29 will be out the same time next week, Friday at 4:00pm UK time.
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