FOURTEEN
Susan and her team began to activate their systems once more observing, and watching Simon, and the new person that lived in the flat below from where Simon lived.
One of her team began to run a trace on the ownership of the flat from his laptop. Logging into the MI5 database he began his search. Within minutes, his search came back with a Stuart Page, owner of the property since 2011. No known criminal activity or political activity. He also ran a search on his military history but this only came back blank.
With the listening and recording devices in place, the team were confused to see just one person lying down in the main room of the flat. He had obviously been there for quite a few hours and was probably asleep or just lazing around.
‘Mike pass us over the flask’ asked one of the team.
‘Has he moved yet?’
‘Well it looks like nothing is going to happen this morning. He will probably not make a move until later today. You had better report that to Susan’.
Mike opened the flask and passed over to John a cup of tea.
‘What’s that sound’ enquired Mike
Suddenly all around them there could be heard a large high pitch sound. It was almost as high pitched as a dog whistle.
A second later, there was silent and then an almighty eruption. From a small spark a titanic explosion erupted across the flat and the four men that were in the building where disintegrated within a second. In an instant, all four men were dead.
A great ball of orange and yellow fire erupted through the flat shattering windows, and bringing the walls of the flat crashing down. Smoke bulged out of every window rolling up into the sky like a volcano erupting.
A short distance away Susan was walking from Princess Gardens towards her team. All was looked normal. Susan did not detect anything out of the ordinary. She was quite happy as her team was back on the trail of the allusive Mr Dunbar and she was getting ready for her next move.
As she walked closer to her team, she glanced at herself in a shop window. She noticed that her face this morning was like a dome, pale white and somehow wavering. She looked at her figure and started to think about Tony. No matter how much she tried, she would never mean anything more to him than his astonishing beautiful lover.
She missed him. He had not called for a few days that meant he was with his family that milestone that stopped him leaving his wife and spending his life with her. She was sure once the kids grew up that he would be off just him and her.
She started to think about his short hair that floated around him like black smoke. His great long jacket that he always wore that shifted as if it was part of an unfelt wind.
Her attention was brought back to the present as the sound of traffic and people chatting as they walked past her drew her away from her daydreams.
As she looked back at her face a second time she could not help notice a madness still lurked in her face, but it was a quieter madness now, not the savagery of before now that she was back on the trail of Simon.
As she approached the flat from where her team was watching Simon and his new friend Mr Page she noticed a police van parked on a street corner. Susan did not think anything significant about this after all there had been a murder there a few days before and the Police would want to establish a presence to keep the locals happy.
The day was very hot day and the area round the flat was busy as people drifted in and out of the pub that stood opposite the flats that she was walking towards.
A short time later, there was a strange and weird noise. It was a dull thud, like something very heavy being dropped. It reminded Susan the noise you hear in the gym when someone drops a heavy weight on the ground. At the same time, a blast of air blew into her face. Not enough to blow anyone off their feet, but it did make a lot of dust from the bushes and trees that lined the road. It filled the air with dust. It was like the air blast you get from being on an underground station when a train is just about to arrive.
Next to Susan, a woman burst into tears and buried her face in her partner's shoulder. At first, this all seemed surreal and Susan could not understand why she reacted like that.
Her first thought was that one of the billboards that littered the street had had fallen over. Susan did not feel afraid at all. She felt more a mixture of confusion and perhaps a bit of curiosity.
The first thing Susan noticed was that all the windows around her had blown in. The trees and bushes around her had in fact acted as shields. None of them had blown over and they had stopped most of the glass from slashing her body. One man was injured. He was wearing shorts and had a small cut across his leg. He seemed embarrassed about it and did not really want any help. In spite of his protests, one of his neighbours phoned for an ambulance, but the message came back that they could not send any ambulances because more bombs were expected to go off.
The main sound she heard was that of burglar alarms erupting into actions. All around here there was a lot of debris raining down.
People were in no sense of panic. No one was talking much. People just stood around in a circle dazed from the explosion. A couple of people had mobile phones and they offered them around to anyone who wanted to call friends and relatives.
At some point, this sense of calm was broken when a man came sprinting into the chaos. He was a bit hysterical and kept going on about seeing lots of dead bodies in a bar and how a woman had been blown off her feet and her head had been smashed into a concrete wall.
As Susan wondered through the chaos of the destroyed buildings, a fire engine drove past. The crew were craning their necks outside the cab, looking upwards checking for signs of buildings about to collapse. The vehicle was moving very slowly, only a bit more than walking pace.
Now that she had come to her senses, she suddenly started to think about her team. Her training began to kick in. She needed to secure her team and its base and ensure that all were safe. As she looked towards the lookout post, all she could see was a great hole where the flat had been ripped out of the building. The remains of her team lay in pieces. All four had died instantly bringing the flat crashing down to the ground.
Resisting the temptation to search the debris for survivors Susan turned around and headed back to her base in the Lothian and Borders Police Head Quarters.
Using her training she pulled herself together ascertain the situation and realised that the base and the team had been fully compromised. What she needed to do was work out what to do and formulate a plan, a plan of action and sort out this mess before all leads were lost.
She stopped. She realised going back to the Police Station would be useless. Therefore, she walked a few hundred yards, then turned around, and walked back to her hotel room where she was going to work out what next to do. However, right now she needed a drink, a strong drink to wash away the anger and fury that was raging inside her.
The walk seemed to last forever as she wondered what to do next and how she was going to get Simon back for the death of her team.
A few hours later Susan had finished the last of her vodka, she was drunk, very drunk, and decided to hit her bed. She might not have been close to her team but she was right to feel the pain of their loss and their death. She would have to draft a latter to their families and children and attend the various funerals and services as the representative of the service as well as deal with those awkward questions as well as justify why she had survived and they were now dead.
The families would later receive notification of their deaths and the media would camp outside their houses, read their e-mails and listen to their phone messages printing stories about them before they moved onto their next victim the following day. Years later the men’s names would be recorded as having died in duty and a respectful log would be recorded for all to see. However at this stage chaos reigned.
The last thought she had before she fell into her drunken sleep was revenge. She would hunt this Stuart page down like a dog and use him to get to Simon....
The next day, Susan was at work looking over the evidence from the previous day. It was now worse than she thought. The reports she was reading identified that bomb had exploded in three places. A bomb had been planted in the coffee flask of her team that emitted an electronic signal that set alight the apartments of both Simon and Stuart gutting both flats. All evidence of either Stuart or Simon had been destroyed in the blast.
As more reports and information began to come in during the day, the situation began to look worse and worse. Thankfully, by some miracle, only three people had died in the explosion in addition to her team. At least their deaths had been quick and therefore relatively painless. Susan would soon have a new team in place and this time they would be ready for Simon and his many schemes. She still did not know how he managed to get a coffee flask into the flat and how he knew that they were still watching him.
Susan let out a fresh sigh. How was she going to find her teams murder again. He was a very tricky agent and had managed to escape detection and capture several times before despite being on the wanted list by both MI5 and the rest of the secret service establishment.
She really did not know what she was going to do. After much thinking, she decided she needed to do something. She knew that she needed to do something. It was far more productive than giving up. Therefore, she reluctantly began to look at the evidence that she had started to piece together.
Susan stood before a glass evidence wall. It was full of pictures stuck to the glass wall with a variety of arrows and triangles and squares linking pictures to diagrams. Names were written at key points on the glass wall with arrows and dotted lines linking names to pictures and to places. Terms like Run GSR analysis and identify and compare samples of glass where written in bold underlined handwriting.
That’s when she had an idea. She walked back to her computer and did a run on credit card payments by Stuart. Within minutes, his bank fired off a series of cash withdrawals until on one of his statements came up a train fare from Edinburgh to Milngavie.
What was more he only paid for the train early yesterday morning. Immediately she logged into the stations CCTV camera until she finally caught him running to catch his train. She logged the train leaving entered the trains CCTV recorder and watch him travel all the way to Milngavie on the train.
A few hours later, she had authorisation for a RAF Reaper to take off from RAF Waddington in Leicester. Knowing she would have use for 28 hours, she ordered it to circumnavigate the Milngavie area in search of Stuart.
Back in Waddington, a three-man team piloted its Reaper aircraft. The crew watched as the small aircraft erupted into action. Purring like a well fed cat the aircraft took off and headed north towards the North Glasgow area. Supporting the crew was a team of intelligence specialists, signallers, and meteorologists that guided the unmanned aircraft in and around Milngavie in search of Stuart.
As the new born sunrise rose in utter silence and the trees, all leafy and dowsed in the early morning mist and the air lay soft and unruffled the Reaper continued to roam along the banks of Loch Lomond the reports started to flood to Susan that there had been several sightings of Stuart along the West Highland Way.
With this news, Susan looked up at her new team, and smiled with a warmth she did not feel glad to know that her new team would be hunting Stuart down. Her face, which was now strong and intimidating, focused in on her team.
With her team ready she stood with her them in front of three large Range Rover vehicles and felt that a pep talk was needed
‘Right lets go, we are going to track this murdering bastard down. We are not going to fail this time; there is no room for failure this time. Do we all understand?’
It was more of a statement than a question and they all understood. Each man and woman knew what happened if they dropped, their guard the death of four colleagues was enough of a threat to motivate her team but the pep talk just ensured her team all knew about the dangers of failure.
With her speech finished, the team mounted into three black Range Rovers and they set off for the area around Loch Lomond from where they would begin their hunt for Stuart and the missing Simon Dunbar.