Local time – 8:10pm, Sunday 17th June, 2011.
Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
The moment the man disappeared into the cubical, Alex made her move. He had put the gun down on the ground, next to the sports bag, and Alex was able to stretch her legs out in front of her just far enough to hook it with her toe and drag it towards her. Henry managed to shuffle around the pipe far enough to reach the gun with the tips of his fingers. He clumsily picked it up and was pointing it at the man’s shins when he came out of the cubicle. The man’s eyes went wide with alarm when he realised they had his weapon. Before Alex could warn him to stay still, he lunged towards Henry. Just as he almost had his hands on the gun, Henry managed to get a finger on the trigger, and the sound of the bullet in the small tiled bathroom was like an explosion.
The man sprang backwards and Alex could see he had been shot in the hand. He clutched it and screamed in pain. She used his second moment of distraction to again stab her leg out and loop her foot into the handle of the sports bag. She prayed the hand cuff keys were in there. She was able to bring it close enough to her side to rifle through it with one cuffed hand. Henry looked over at her, seeming almost in shock, but still holding the gun. There was nothing in the bag. All its contents had been emptied out. She tipped the bag over, and though nothing fell out, but heard a faint tinkle. After some more rifling inside, she found a small pocket on the inside surface, closed with velcro. It contained two small keys. She struggled with them for a moment, trying to reach towards Henry to undo his cuffs. But she couldn’t reach him, and realised she would have to try to do a Houdini like manoeuvre and somehow poke her own key into the lock between her wrists. The man was now focused back on them, but before he could move closer, Henry threatened him.
‘I’ll shoot again. Stay back!’ Alex thought most guns held six bullets, and so she calculated that the gun in Henry’s hands might only have two bullets left. She hoped Henry wasn’t going to waste bullets trying to scare the man. While Henry’s gun kept him motionless, she finally felt the key turn in the lock and the cuffs sprang open. In one swift movement, she undid Henry’s cuffs and they both stood up, unsteady, but triumphant. Alex couldn’t help but feel proud of herself as Henry grabbed the man by the shoulder and pushed him out through the bathroom door. Bernie had always said her rants were first class. He would have been extra proud of that one. And never had her passionate sincerity mattered more.
Acting almost automatically, Alex grabbed one of the handcuffs, and put the keys in her satchel. Then she joined Henry in the nuclear exhibit. She stopped and stared at the carnage for a moment, and the terror of all the shooting came back to her; she started shaking uncontrollably. Henry seemed hardly to notice it, and didn’t even glance in the direction of his dead colleagues. He pushed the Pakistani towards the truck in the middle of the room and pushed him roughly onto the ground. He called to Alex to bring the handcuffs to him, and used them to cuff the man’s uninjured hand to a rectangular metal loop that acted as a step to the cockpit.
Alex went over to the closest body – the other Pakistani who Josh had shot. Trying not to look at the bullet hole in his back, she ripped the cotton shirt he was wearing and then went over to the injured man. She had done a first aid course, and could tell his wound wasn’t too serious. The bullet seemed to have sliced through the flesh on the side of the hand, and probably broken the bone that joined the little finger. But as long as she stopped the bleeding, he wasn’t going to die from the injury. Henry glared at her, but she ignored him. She watched him walk over to Phil’s body and take the phone out of his pocket. She wondered again at the lack of emotion he showed towards Phil and Josh, who, after all, had been his friends. He then stood by silently as Alex finished wrapping the man’s bleeding hand in strips of material, holding a gun near him as a warning to behave. The man didn’t look like he was in any condition to fight. He stared ahead blankly, almost as if he were too exhausted to move. When she was done, she stood up next to Henry and pulled him out of hearing distance of the man.
‘All that stuff I said to him, that was for us too. We need to decide right now what we’re doing here. How are we going to stop the Bilderbergers with this weapon?’
Henry looked uncomfortable at this question. He shrugged. ‘It was Bernie’s job to find the weapon. He was going to know what to do with it.’
He sounded petulant. Alex looked at him sharply. ‘So you don’t know who he was going to contact, to make it known he had located it?’
‘If there was someone, I don’t know who it was. I think we should move it first, and then tell them we have it.’
Alex couldn’t believe what Henry had just suggested. How were they going to move the weapon? Apart from the logistical impossibility of the proposal, Henry was just putting off the inevitable. This weapon was no use to anyone if the Bilderbergers didn’t know they had it. Now, just as with the map in the iPad, it seemed it was up to Alex to work out what Bernie was going to do once he reached the Army Museum. An overwhelming sense of dismay engulfed her when she realised Phil might have been able to provide this information. Why had they not discussed this before? She had got so caught up in the challenge of finding the weapon that she had hardly given any thought to what they would do if they found it. She looked over at the truck, with a missile sitting on it that could easily begin a world war. Only moments ago, she had believed this weapon could save the world. But, she had also thought the armed people in the room were safer than the unarmed. Phil and Josh had been armed, and now they were dead. So was having this weapon really making the world safe from the Bilderbergers’ plans? Or did it just give the world government an excuse to use their weapons first?
Another sickening thought occurred to her, which made Henry’s idea of moving the weapon less stupid. The man who had come behind them was almost certainly sent to kill her. He – or someone like him – had probably killed Bernie to stop him getting to the weapon. And now, she had not only let him track them down, but she’d also let him follow Bernie’s specially made map and locate the weapon himself. So, how likely was it he had already called in the location before entering the museum? And how long would it take for someone else to be sent in his place?