by Ali Vali
“I’m not about to get arrested for ensuring the safety of a bunch of overpaid and under-talented musicians, though, am I?”
“No, but you’re not about to make thousands of pounds either.”
Bel was tired of talking about the pros and cons of her imaginary job. Where the hell had all this stuff Esther was on about come from?
“Money isn’t everything,” said Bel.
“It is to some people.”
“Who?” Esther was the last person Bel expected to be money focused.
“What?”
“Who?” Bel repeated. “Who are we talking about specifically?”
“No one.” Esther shrugged. “I was just thinking out loud.”
Bel eyed her warily. “Are you trying to tell me something? You’re not laundering money through the bar or something dodgy like that, are you?”
She was expecting a laugh or a playful punch on her shoulder, but Esther offered nothing more than a shake of her head.
“Fancy a coffee? My shout.” More caffeine was far from what Bel needed, but hanging out with Esther was delaying her return to base, and it was all she could think of. Esther was acting weird. She just wanted to do something normal with her.
“I don’t know if I’ve got time for coffee.”
“Where exactly are you going?”
“Nowhere important.”
“So, one coffee won’t hurt?” Bel was struggling with Esther’s secrecy.
Esther looked around her. Her eyes darted back and forth as if she were expecting someone else, but before Bel could probe further, she said, “Oh, come on, then.”
They walked in silence, dodging the crowd until Bel returned to a previous subject, not willing to chance her luck again about Esther’s destination. “Is there something illegal going on at the bar?” she asked.
“We sell alcohol to underage people and sometimes don’t pay the kitchen workers minimum wage. Of course there’s something illegal going on at the bar.”
“Why don’t you do something?”
“I do.”
Bel’s earpiece crackled, dragging her back to the present. She was probably being watched as she and Esther leaned against the far wall on the upper level of Moorgate station. They reached a coffee vendor and Esther ordered them each a latte, directing the young man to keep the change. Bel only noticed because she used a twenty-pound note to pay for two coffees worth barely five pound.
“I feed them a healthy dinner and give them the leftovers to take home to their friends or family.”
Bel smiled. That was exactly what she knew Esther would do. Most of the people that worked in the kitchens were migrants, and to buy even a burger at some of these bars cost more than an hour’s wage, maybe two.
“Do you wish you could do more?”
“I wish the people who have everything could just see how much difference giving a little could make. If every above-average earner in London accidentally dropped a ten-pound note one day and an underpaid person picked it up, who do you think it would make the most difference to?”
Bel knew the answer, and she knew this compassionate side of Esther was one of her most endearing qualities. “The rich wouldn’t even notice it was missing.”
“Exactly. But that struggling person who picked it up could feed their kids for a week with that.”
“Yeah.” Bel scoffed. “And spend the tenner they saved on a cheap bottle of wine or a packet of smokes.”
“No, Bel, and that’s precisely the narrow-minded mentality I’d expect from those that have more than enough. You think like that because it justifies you doing nothing. In reality, they’d buy their kids some shoes or a warm hat and gloves. The sacrifices some of these parents make for their kids are astounding.”
“I’m sorry. I was being flippant. I see your point.”
Esther looked disappointed.
“I do, honestly. I was being an idiot.”
Esther’s questions about her job had distracted her from what was going on in the tunnels. She needed to craftily encourage Esther out of the underground system.
“So where was it you said you were going today?” She fully focused on Esther. “And are you cold?” She eyed the thick black coat Esther was wearing.
Esther looked down at herself. “I guess I was feeling a little under the weather.”
Bel pressed the back of her hand against Esther’s forehead. “You’re burning up.” Tenderly she tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Esther’s ear. “And you’re a bit clammy. Should you see a doctor?”
“A doctor?” Bel knew Esther wasn’t a fan of western medicine. “It’s the doctors in this country that do their best to keep us all ill.”
Bel humoured her. “Okay then. Perhaps you need some chicken soup and a day in bed.” She saw an opening. “And some vitamin D. How about you catch the bus to wherever you’re going? Get some fresh air and sunshine.” She thought for a moment. “Honestly, Esther, where are you going?”
Bel’s earpiece crackled again, only this time the channel remained open and her ear filled with commands and discussion about the operation. She yanked out the earpiece. She was no longer involved in the operation, and getting Esther aboveground was her priority.
“Honey?” She waved her hand in front of Esther. “Earth to Esther. Where are you going?”
“Oh.” Esther shook her head. She’d been a million miles away. “I’ve got an appointment.”
Sometimes Esther’s vagueness made Bel want to scream. She gave up with the questions and tried a different approach. “Come on. I’ll walk you out. I was just on the way to get some fresh air myself.”
“Why don’t you go ahead?” Esther cupped Bel’s face. “I’m not in a rush. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“What time is your appointment?”
“It’s not ’til later. You’ll be long gone by the time I get to where I’m going.”
Bel cursed. She should be better at this kind of thing. Today just wasn’t her day. She racked her brain to come up with something better. “I’ve got time to kill, Esther. Can’t we do something together just for a while?” If in doubt, whine like a child and go for the sympathy vote.
Esther frowned awkwardly.
If she hadn’t known better, Bel could have sworn Esther just wanted her to bugger off and let her get on with her day.
Bel’s phone rang. How difficult could it be for a MI5 operative to get one woman, just the one, out of the underground? She pulled her phone from her breast pocket and frowned at the number. Poised to decline the call, she recognised the last four digits. Oh shit! It was her office number. Her desk phone. “Fuck. I have to take this.”
Esther smiled and shrugged.
How were you supposed to answer a call from your own phone? She went with a safe bet. “Hello.”
“Where the fuck are you?” Charlie’s tone was far from bubbly.
Bel turned to face the wall. If she was about to get her arse kicked, she wasn’t keen for Esther to bear witness. “I’m just leaving Moorgate now.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She heard Charlie relay her location to others in Control. She was out of the hunt. Why did they care where she was? She perked up. Perhaps they needed her back.
“And why the fuck isn’t your mike on?”
“I’m on—”
“And on whose damn authority did you decide not to answer when Control called you?”
“I was—”
“Shut up and listen to me, Bel. You’ve been seen with a woman. Who is she?”
Fuck, fuck, and even more fuck! The day was turning out to be horrendous. She couldn’t do a thing right, but then she wasn’t convinced she’d done anything wrong, not by the umpteen policies and procedures that had been drilled into her in the past few months. “I’ve been chatting to a friend, Esther.” Bel turned to give Esther the obligatory eye roll at mentioning her name, but she was gone.
“Is she with you now?”
Brown hair, black jacket—she scanned the im
mediate area, but every second person wore a black jacket and had brown hair.
“No.”
“No? What do you mean no?”
“She was here and now she’s not.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” Bel finally remembered she was a trained operative and not in kindergarten. “What the hell’s going on?”
“The woman you were with, Esther, do you know her well?”
“Charlie, where is this—”
“Answer me! Do you know her well?”
“We’re friends.” She opted for the truth. “Close friends.”
“You sleep with her?”
“Well, that’s one—”
“Do you sleep with her?”
“Yes. I sleep with her.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Come on, you can’t be serious. I was just chatting to a friend.”
“Bel, answer the question.”
Bel couldn’t think straight. Why all the interest in Esther? Do they check out your partners to make sure you aren’t leaking information to the Russians? The cold war is over, you idiot! She was never told she had to inform anyone she was in a relationship. “Banks. Her last name is Banks.”
“Is that her real name?”
“What the fuck? Of course it’s her real name.”
“We had vision of you both until our system glitched for no more than five seconds. We weren’t able to find you again, and now you can’t see her?”
“No.” Bel didn’t know whether to stay put or go searching. Why had Esther suddenly disappeared?
“No, us neither.” Charlie barely took a breath. “You’re to return to HQ immediately. Conrad is waiting to speak to you.”
“Rush?” She really must be in all sorts of trouble if Conrad Rush wanted to see her. In fact, she’d thought he was an imaginary boss for the first month she worked there. He showed his face eventually and she immediately wished he’d stayed away. He was the single most intimidating man she’d ever met.
“Charlie, I was on my way back. I ran into a friend, that’s all.” Unless she’d shot the PM himself, she wasn’t sure why Rush would even know of her existence, let alone be waiting to speak to her. “How come Conrad is involved in all this?”
“Turn on your mike, replace your earpiece or connect it or fix whatever you’ve done to become off-line, and get your arse back here now. If you see Esther again, call it in.”
“What has she got to do—”
“That’s an order, 5709. Over.”
Why had Esther disappeared and why was she in so much trouble? Bel struggled to compute what had just happened. Charlie, Esther, and bloody Conrad Rush. What the hell was going on?
As ordered, Bel replaced her earpiece and the line crackled into action, but it wasn’t on the main channel because she couldn’t hear anything regarding the ongoing incident.
Although she knew exactly what she should do next—hightail it back to the office—something stalled her: Esther. Beautiful, tender Esther. But there’d been something else. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, something distant. Yes, that was it, Esther had been distant. So distant in fact, she’d disappeared. Bel couldn’t stand the mystery a moment longer. She jumped on the next southbound train on the Northern line, toward HQ.
Chapter Six
“Come with me, Bel.” Charlie met her the moment she shoved her swipe card into her breast pocket after entering the secure main offices of the task force.
“Charlie, you’re scaring the hell out of me here. Am I about to get fired?”
“Not now. We don’t have time for this.”
Bel was expecting a direct route to Conrad’s office, but they were marching swiftly in the opposite direction. They were heading toward one of the incident rooms.
Hotstream’s incident rooms were state of the art. Without the trendy television-set lighting and excessive, if not completely useless, props, they looked nothing like the shows she used to watch religiously. The equipment inside was imperative once you knew what you could access and how quickly you could access it. The information at your fingertips was mind-blowing.
She stepped inside, and the images she saw displayed on the monitors hit her like a truck. She swallowed hard to counteract the reflex of vomiting.
“Clear the room,” Conrad bellowed.
Apart from her and Charlie, everyone obeyed the order immediately.
“Do you know this woman?” Conrad waited until the last person left before he directed his question to her.
The woman he was referring to was Esther, and pictures of her were plastered all over an entire board. Bel was in some of them—the ones taken from the underground CCTV system that morning. Many, however, were older pictures. Bel could tell by the length of Esther’s hair, the less prominent wrinkles on her face, and the tattoos missing on her arms.
Conrad waited for an answer.
“I know her. That’s my…um…that’s Esther.”
“Actually, no, it isn’t.” Conrad hadn’t seemed to notice that Bel’s world was swiftly falling apart before his eyes. “The woman you know as Esther is actually Esmeralda Gaffney. Does that name ring a bell?”
Gaffney, Gaffney, Gaffney. Bel shook her head, and then it hit her. “Brian Gaffney’s daughter.” She said the words to herself as the little minions in her brain ran off to fetch all the information she knew about Brian and Esmeralda Gaffney.
Turns out she knew enough to put the pieces together. Brian Gaffney had been a decorated police officer in Dublin, but he’d poked his nose into the IRA or, more accurately, the corrupt English politicians and high-ranking police who saw personal benefit and wealth in sustaining a volatile relationship between England and Ireland. Esther, or Esme as she was known at the time, was rumoured to have been forced to witness the cruel and inhumane torture and subsequent death of her father. Esme disappeared off the face of the earth. Some stubborn yet skilful detectives had uncovered the truth eventually—Brian Gaffney left a solid trail of evidence, so he must have known what he was getting involved in—but no one knew what really happened to five-year-old Esme. The criminals denied killing her, at the time coming up with what appeared to be a bullshit story about how she escaped. It was assumed she had been killed, but without a body, there was no evidence.
For all intents and purposes, Esmeralda Gaffney had been dead for nearly thirty years.
Until now.
“Esther is Esme Gaffney?” She already knew the answer.
“We’re almost one hundred percent sure.”
“But I don’t understand. It’s not a crime to be Esme Gaffney, surely?”
“It is when we think you’ve got thirty kilograms of explosives strapped to your body.”
This time she couldn’t stop the vomit but at least found a rubbish bin.
Esther’s odd behaviour that morning came flooding back. The coffee without change, the big jacket, and the bizarre questions: it all seemed suspicious now. Then there was last night: the intense sex, the sentimental words, and Esther declaring her love. She couldn’t bring herself to believe it, but it was textbook stuff. The indicators were that Esther was a suicide bomber.
“Why’d you switch off your mike today?” Conrad was relentless.
Bel at least turned away to spit the chunky bits of her breakfast into the bin. She wiped her mouth. “You must have heard what I did this morning?”
“Oh, I heard about it all right. Nice attempt at a decoy.”
“A what?”
“Do you expect me to believe your little fuck buddy there is working alone?” He pointed to Esther on the screens.
“I didn’t see the kid with the woman this morning.”
“How convenient. What are you, blind? Your screw is walking around ready to go off while you try your best to set up a decoy.”
“Fuck you!” The insult was out before she could engage her filter. Then, in light of having said the worst possible thing to the head of LUATRU besides “
I fucked your wife,” Bel kept going. “Esther is my girlfriend, not my fuck buddy or my screw, and I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and let you tell me she’s a terrorist.”
Chapter Seven
The saliva that induced her vomiting had disappeared. Bel’s mouth was dry with fear.
The look on Rush’s face indicated that she had gone too far. “Do you know what I’ve got Thompson working on right now?” The veins in his neck grew larger.
She didn’t really like Nicolas Thompson and couldn’t have given a damn what he was working on. She shrugged.
“He’s at your apartment, Reilly, so if you’ve got something you want to say, now might be the best time to say it, because it looks to me like I’ve got one terrorist out there preparing to blow up a train and another one standing here fucking with me!”
Her own stupidity slapped her in the face. Until that very moment, she thought Conrad Rush was just pissed at her because she’d been too stupid to realise she was sleeping with someone they now suspected to be a terrorist. “There must be some kind of mistake. Esther isn’t a terrorist and neither am I.” Her policing instincts kicked in. “You must have had me under surveillance for months now? I’ve done nothing to indicate to you that I’m a terrorist. Surely Esther’s done nothing either. She works in a bar and gives free meals to the underpaid workers. She’s a good person.”
Conrad sat down. He indicated she do the same.
Bel kept her life simple. She had one phone, one computer, and one bank account. “It’s not difficult to poke into my life. Thompson should be done by now. He didn’t find anything, did he?”
Conrad shook his head. “I had to be sure.”
She gave him the benefit of his doubt. If she ever reached a position of authority, she imagined she would have done the same thing.
“If what you’re saying is true, I just don’t understand the purpose of her bombing the underground. What’s her motive? What is she trying to achieve? So what if she’s Esme Gaffney? It means she’s had a shit life, a fucking terrible childhood, and Christ knows how she survived, but how does that make her a bomber?”