-24-
"You ready?" Copell asked Nina, jumping out of the van to greet them. The rain hadn't let up, and they were slowly getting soaked. She nodded.
"Your piece?" Copell held out his hand, expecting her to pass him her 9mm Glock that was standard issue for CTU agents and the FBI. Nina looked puzzled for a moment.
"It's at CTU," she told him, "I rarely carry it." She explained, and then pulled her mobile off her belt clip. She passed it to Jack rather than Copell. "I think that's it." She ran her hand along her belt and couldn't think of another thing she might be wearing that would offend their bomber.
Jack knew his agents a little better. "Knife?" he asked her, having seen her conveniently with a knife in an ankle holster before he was actually hoping she'd take it with her.
"It's in the car." Nina told him, recalling that she hadn't put it back on when she dressed back at the hospital. She presumed Jack wanted her to remove it, but...
"She shouldn't take it with her anyway." Copell mentioned to Jack. After a few moments of silence, Copell reached back inside the van and pulled out an umbrella. "Looks like you'd better go in." Nina nodded, accepting the umbrella and opening out of the path of other agents.
"You're sure the wire's working?" Jack asked the technician who'd retaken his seat at the console.
Jerry nodded, having learnt his lesson earlier, he kept a sombre mood. "I did a quick level check when you guys were in the van."
Jack nodded, he wondered if anyone had heard his short discussion with Nina, but didn't notice any smirking or quiet comments, they were either too professional or they hadn't overheard their conversation. He touched his hand to Nina's right elbow, as Copell did to her left, and they steered her until she was facing the entrance to the station. Nina ducked under the orange tape and made a run for the station.
-24-
Nina collapsed the umbrella as she reached the station door, folding the cord around it, and leaving it propped up against the outside of the door. She took a deep breath before she opened the door, hugging her coat tighter before the heating fans hit her.
She'd only travelled by rail a few times before, most of them as a student, or when she'd lived in Chicago and then New York using the subway every day. The inside of the station was huge, three storeys high, the rafters were filled with birds, and the only sound she could hear was their cooing. This first part of the station was designed to grab last minute shoppers, luggage stores, and flower shops, news agencies. It was completely empty, and Nina walked down to the turnstiles at the end of the room. She didn't have a ticket, and so she climbed up onto the turnstile and crawled over the top. The electric door whooshed open, and she leant back onto the machines to let it shut again and spoke, opening up her coat and leaning towards her chest. "Can you guys hear this?" she quietly asked, hoping she couldn't be heard through the doors.
The earpiece crackled, and Jack's voice came over it, "Don't worry we've got a nice clear signal." He reassured her, and she slipped off the turnstile and walked through the electric door.
"That didn't take too long." Said a voice that she instantly recognised. She turned to its origin and was presented with the image from the camera footage. Davison was walking towards her, carrying the briefcase, but behind him was the circle of people he'd seated on the floor. Businessmen, metro workers, school children, teenagers, mothers, seated in a massive circle on the floor. He held his gun pointed at her and placed the briefcase on the floor about a metre from her feet. "Pick it up." He ordered her, and as she stepped towards him he retreated towards the circle.
Nina reached for the case when he stopped her. "Take off the coat first."
Nina nodded and slipped out of her thick woollen coat, and then turned, folding it. There were several rows of chairs a few metres away, and she placed in on the seat cushion and then turned back to him, trying not to shiver. She collected the briefcase, and Davison led her back to the circle. He kept his eyes on her, every so often glancing back at the circle of people.
"Stand in the middle." He ordered her as she reached the outskirts of his group, and she took two strides to make it between the rows of people, and then she moved to stand in the centre of the circle.
Davison softened as he began to feel more comfortable with his new hostage, he gave her a misleading smile. "It's nice to finally meet you." He told her, as he began walking round the outside of the circle. He came to rest after he'd walked a third of the circle and took the safety off the gun and pulled the slide back. "Guess we don't need these anymore." He said happily, he turned and aimed his gun at a camera on the pillar above his head, shooting the glass lens and the wires, and then aimed at the one across on the other side of the circle. The glass smashed and clattered to the floor, and Nina cringed, the SWAT team would have no idea what was going on.
Davison blew the top of his gun, and wiped the gunpowder off his hand. "Always wanted to do that," he confessed, "All that time in the military, and I never fired my gun, believe that?" He resumed walking around the circle.
Nina wondered where the remote she'd seen in the video footage was, he was walking clockwise around the circle, so his left side was turned to her, but even so she should have been able to see the detonator in his hand, he must have pocketed it. "Why didn't we get any warning about this one?" She asked him. He walked past her until she could only see his movement in black and white in her peripheral vision, and then she tilted her head to look at him the other way. "You've given us tonic signals for the other two, why not this one?"
Davison didn't answer. "How's your head?" he asked instead, pausing for a moment in front of her to ask the question before he began to walk around her again.
Nina had to think about the answer, the pain in her head wasn't there at the moment. "It's okay." She told him cautiously, trying to gauge for herself if it was actually hurting anymore.
"It looked like it was bleeding pretty badly." He commented, "Did they give you anything for it?" Nina could almost detect a note of concern in his voice, and so she called him on it. "Just answer the question." He told her gruffly, and continued walking around the circle.
A child in the second row burst into tears, and a businessman ended up comforting him, hugging the little child to his leg as the boy ruined his expensive suit. Nina watched the exchange before she answered him. "They gave me a painkiller and some Dramamine. It's fine now."
He paused behind her. "And making you sea sick? Right, I mean Dramamine's the stuff you take for motion sickness?"
Nina turned as she answered. "Yeah, I guess it was making me dizzy, but not as badly as watching you walk around me."
Davison smiled and nodded. He ran a hand through the short hair on his head, and decided to stay put. "What about your stomach?" He asked.
"They wanted to open me up and see if you permanently damaged any of my organs. Bruised pancreas and liver, I should be in hospital right now."
"I'm sorry." Apologised Davison, "I shouldn't have thrown it so hard, but it was heavy and I wasn't sure how far it would go, I couldn't risk that you'd see me."
She was alarmed, "You threw that chunk of concrete at me?"
"Well not threw." He said and used his right hand to illustrate something dropping, complete with sound effects.
"You dropped it on me?" she clarified.
He nodded, "Had to." Nina tried to suppress the nausea she felt at that. Davison continued on without preamble. "I did think about giving you guys warning about this one, but I figured, seeing as you nearly stopped the last one, perhaps it would be better if I placed it before I told you." He muttered.
The nausea didn't go when Davison changed topics. It became the urge to wretch, and she doubled over, unable to stop herself. The rapid contraction of her stomach muscles only served to trigger terrible pain in her abdomen and for a second it was as though her it was being ripped out. Her face broke out in a sweat and she gave herself lots of time to stand upright again.
"You okay?" Davison asked her just as Jack's voice came crackling over the earpiece: "Nina what happened?"
"I'm fine." She said aloud, hoping Davison and Jack could hear her. The microphone was clearly sensitive enough for it to pick up the wretching sound. She wanted to move swiftly on, suppressing the urge by talking. "How about this for a reason? How about you didn't intend to give us any warning for this last one?"
Davison laughed and took a few steps around the circle before he realised he'd promised to stop. "What makes you think that?"
"The remote in your pocket." Davison gave the impression that he was caught off guard.
He was misleading her, she was sure, on the camera footage the remote hadn't been obviously displayed, but he been hoping she'd search for it. "You weren't planning on telling us about this bomb, you were just going to detonate it. Was there a reason? Were you getting bored of my conversation? We could have called an FBI negotiator in for you?" she swung the briefcase in her hand, confident that C4 was stable enough to not explode from some gentle knocking. "What's the blast radius on your latest work, Dave?" she was baiting him.
"Enough." He growled at her, fuming for a minute. "It's wide enough."
"C4?" she questioned.
Davison nodded, sliding out the bullet clip, and checking it, poking at the bullets before he slotted it back in. "So, where did you learn to make bombs?" She asked, "We both know you didn't learn the intricacies of mass destruction from the army. I've read your file."
"Well they taught me the basics of the basics." He was boasting. "But most of it I had to learn for myself."
"And where did you get the C4 from?"
"Stole a little here, a little there." He noticed Nina's raised eyebrow and explained, "Maybe half a kilogram here, there. You see the weight of the explosive varies according to the conditions it's kept in. So if it's wet, the weight can be twenty to thirty percent on top of the weight of C4."
"So you take a pound of C4 from a twenty pound bag and claim that the extra weight was water, or add some to keep the weight up."
"It's amazing how stupid some officers are." He chuckled, and took a few steps to the right before turning and taking a few in the opposite direction, oscillating around his original position.
"Is that how you got that entire drum you had in your apartment?" she asked, imagining the size that Jack had told her it was, but having no idea of the density of C4 she wasn't sure how much he had to steal to fill it. The suitcase was quite heavy, although she had no numerical concept of the weight, she could imagine the drum weighing slightly more than her.
"Is there anything in particular about this one that makes it special? Why weren't you going to warn us? You getting bored of playing with us? Of making us run around LA?" Nina baited him.
In the stress she felt the pain in her head return too, like a vein in he forehead burst, tearing the skin in thousands of places. The millions of little nerves in the skin on her forehead were screaming, and her eyes began to water. "Were you just hoping to kill as many people as possible, and maybe call afterwards to gloat?"
Davison didn't say anything, merely walking back and forth, oscillating. Nina continued trying to spur him on, get him to talk. "You obviously weren't planning on telling us. No timers, just a remote, right?" Nina walked over to his side of the circle. "Did you want to watch?"
Davison snapped to look at her. "Get back in the middle!" He ordered, and Nina raised an eyebrow at him, and then calmly walked back to the centre of the circle.
"Easy, Nina." Jack cooed over the earpiece, "The last thing we need is to have him get angry and trigger happy."
"Don't you think I know that?" She whispered into the microphone whilst her back was turned.
It was a while before Davison's breathing slowed and became deep enough so Nina could presume he was calm. "You know at the metro station, we found a little girl in the wreckage, her mother was dead and she was in pretty bad state. We took her to the hospital and she stabilised." She began to weave a story, inserting elements of truth to make it realistic, but not quite convincing enough for a polygraph. "We got a hold of her father, who came in to the hospital, and grieved over her mother, then he told her off for not getting out of bed early enough to take the bus. And then a blood clot from one of her many, many cuts made its way towards her heart, and she died."
"Shut up!" exclaimed Davison, turning his side to her and increasing the distance he walked with each swing past her.
"How many people do you suppose are in this room?" she continued. She was finally sensing remorse in him, and she was going to play on it. "One hundred? Two hundred? I feel like I'm giving a lecture, how about two hundred and nineteen? That's how many people were either killed or taken in to hospital yesterday morning after your bomb on the metro system. Did you know that?"
"Shut up!" He yelled again. A few hostages in their assembled audience began to cry, they could feel the tension rising, and were all afraid for their lives.
"Why?" asked Nina, spinning round to look at him, "I'm in the middle."
She let him cool down again a little before she spoke again, she wanted him to get upset and then calm him down enough to do some rational thinking before she bombarded his mind with the unpleasantness of what he'd chosen to do with his life again. In the long run it would help make his final decision more formed, so hopefully it wouldn't be a suicidal choice.
"The bomb was placed quite high up in the train." She told him, "Did you do that intentionally, to maximise the blast? It was the beginning of rush hour, and that train was seven carriages long. The bomb was in the third carriage in, but the explosion blew out the back of the train. Two carriages behind, and two carriages in front. The little girl was in the third carriage in front of the bomb, but she still died. Each carriage has about thirty seats in it, and we both know commuters cram themselves into any space they can find."
She gripped a hand to her side, pressing it onto her stomach, just above the bandage, hoping to stop the blood flow to the whole painful area. "Did you pick that building yesterday because of the September eleventh visual, or because it was convenient? You had access. Tell me, did you know the people at JayKay's marketing? Had you met Mr Kaiman, the 'Kay' of JayKay's? Did you know his fifteen year old daughter who was interning with him for the week?" She paused, hoping to once again gauge his reaction. "Mr Kaiman sent her out of the building with his secretary, but he'd chosen to stay inside and telephone Mr Janison in London, the 'Jay' by the way. When Mr Janison's connection went dead he presumed it was a fault with the new phone system."
Davison was getting even more strung out, but Nina kept ranting. It was more because she was angry than any tactic. "Do you know how many fringe groups tried to take advantage of the asset movement in October? When all the military reserves were called up? Do you embrace pluralism? All these groups all trying to take advantage of a country in mourning and how many succeeded? None. Zero. I guess you should feel a little proud of yourself for succeeding where oh so many failed."
She took a few steps towards him, moving from side to side with him as he oscillated back and forth. "Except," she phrased it like a revelation, it was a question they had yet to answer. "We know why each of those groups did what they did. What about you?"
Davison's pacing got faster. "What's your motivation?" Davison stopped abruptly and levelled the gun at her chest.
"Get back in the middle!" He screamed at her.
Nina calmly raised an eyebrow at him, and then retreated slowly back to the centre. When she turned back to Davison he was still watching her, but had taken a few steps backwards. After a few moments of mutual observation he smiled, when he spoke there was a cheerful note in his voice. "I'm just going to nip off, I need to take care of something."
Davison turned and began to walk away. "Don't be calling the SWAT team in, remember, I've still got the remote."
Nina was confused and for a second she thought about her conversation with Jack earlier. What if he was retreating to a safe distance to detonate the bomb. She took a quick glance down at the briefcase. It was too heavy to throw, it would never make it far enough away from the group. She chased after him, if he was close to the bomb he wouldn't blow it. He was rapidly getting away, nearly half the way across the room, and so she stumbled over the last row of the circle and ran towards him, she had to reach him before he made it to the metro entrance, he could use the pillars to shield him from the blast.
-24-
"What the hell was that?" Jack asked the team in the van. He didn't even wait for a response before he pressed the send button, to talk to Nina. "Nina, what's going on?" he asked her, pressing the microphone of his headset closer to his mouth. "Nina?"
"It's no use," Jerry explained. "We've lost the signal."
Jack pulled off his headset and chucked it on the counter. Grabbing huge handfuls of his hair, he rested himself against the far wall. The explosion had sounded through the wire and been heard loud and clear in the van before dissolving into static, now there was no response from Nina, and the wire had been destroyed, probably melted into a little pool of charred plastic inside it's wearer's ears.
"You ready?" Copell asked Nina, jumping out of the van to greet them. The rain hadn't let up, and they were slowly getting soaked. She nodded.
"Your piece?" Copell held out his hand, expecting her to pass him her 9mm Glock that was standard issue for CTU agents and the FBI. Nina looked puzzled for a moment.
"It's at CTU," she told him, "I rarely carry it." She explained, and then pulled her mobile off her belt clip. She passed it to Jack rather than Copell. "I think that's it." She ran her hand along her belt and couldn't think of another thing she might be wearing that would offend their bomber.
Jack knew his agents a little better. "Knife?" he asked her, having seen her conveniently with a knife in an ankle holster before he was actually hoping she'd take it with her.
"It's in the car." Nina told him, recalling that she hadn't put it back on when she dressed back at the hospital. She presumed Jack wanted her to remove it, but...
"She shouldn't take it with her anyway." Copell mentioned to Jack. After a few moments of silence, Copell reached back inside the van and pulled out an umbrella. "Looks like you'd better go in." Nina nodded, accepting the umbrella and opening out of the path of other agents.
"You're sure the wire's working?" Jack asked the technician who'd retaken his seat at the console.
Jerry nodded, having learnt his lesson earlier, he kept a sombre mood. "I did a quick level check when you guys were in the van."
Jack nodded, he wondered if anyone had heard his short discussion with Nina, but didn't notice any smirking or quiet comments, they were either too professional or they hadn't overheard their conversation. He touched his hand to Nina's right elbow, as Copell did to her left, and they steered her until she was facing the entrance to the station. Nina ducked under the orange tape and made a run for the station.
-24-
Nina collapsed the umbrella as she reached the station door, folding the cord around it, and leaving it propped up against the outside of the door. She took a deep breath before she opened the door, hugging her coat tighter before the heating fans hit her.
She'd only travelled by rail a few times before, most of them as a student, or when she'd lived in Chicago and then New York using the subway every day. The inside of the station was huge, three storeys high, the rafters were filled with birds, and the only sound she could hear was their cooing. This first part of the station was designed to grab last minute shoppers, luggage stores, and flower shops, news agencies. It was completely empty, and Nina walked down to the turnstiles at the end of the room. She didn't have a ticket, and so she climbed up onto the turnstile and crawled over the top. The electric door whooshed open, and she leant back onto the machines to let it shut again and spoke, opening up her coat and leaning towards her chest. "Can you guys hear this?" she quietly asked, hoping she couldn't be heard through the doors.
The earpiece crackled, and Jack's voice came over it, "Don't worry we've got a nice clear signal." He reassured her, and she slipped off the turnstile and walked through the electric door.
"That didn't take too long." Said a voice that she instantly recognised. She turned to its origin and was presented with the image from the camera footage. Davison was walking towards her, carrying the briefcase, but behind him was the circle of people he'd seated on the floor. Businessmen, metro workers, school children, teenagers, mothers, seated in a massive circle on the floor. He held his gun pointed at her and placed the briefcase on the floor about a metre from her feet. "Pick it up." He ordered her, and as she stepped towards him he retreated towards the circle.
Nina reached for the case when he stopped her. "Take off the coat first."
Nina nodded and slipped out of her thick woollen coat, and then turned, folding it. There were several rows of chairs a few metres away, and she placed in on the seat cushion and then turned back to him, trying not to shiver. She collected the briefcase, and Davison led her back to the circle. He kept his eyes on her, every so often glancing back at the circle of people.
"Stand in the middle." He ordered her as she reached the outskirts of his group, and she took two strides to make it between the rows of people, and then she moved to stand in the centre of the circle.
Davison softened as he began to feel more comfortable with his new hostage, he gave her a misleading smile. "It's nice to finally meet you." He told her, as he began walking round the outside of the circle. He came to rest after he'd walked a third of the circle and took the safety off the gun and pulled the slide back. "Guess we don't need these anymore." He said happily, he turned and aimed his gun at a camera on the pillar above his head, shooting the glass lens and the wires, and then aimed at the one across on the other side of the circle. The glass smashed and clattered to the floor, and Nina cringed, the SWAT team would have no idea what was going on.
Davison blew the top of his gun, and wiped the gunpowder off his hand. "Always wanted to do that," he confessed, "All that time in the military, and I never fired my gun, believe that?" He resumed walking around the circle.
Nina wondered where the remote she'd seen in the video footage was, he was walking clockwise around the circle, so his left side was turned to her, but even so she should have been able to see the detonator in his hand, he must have pocketed it. "Why didn't we get any warning about this one?" She asked him. He walked past her until she could only see his movement in black and white in her peripheral vision, and then she tilted her head to look at him the other way. "You've given us tonic signals for the other two, why not this one?"
Davison didn't answer. "How's your head?" he asked instead, pausing for a moment in front of her to ask the question before he began to walk around her again.
Nina had to think about the answer, the pain in her head wasn't there at the moment. "It's okay." She told him cautiously, trying to gauge for herself if it was actually hurting anymore.
"It looked like it was bleeding pretty badly." He commented, "Did they give you anything for it?" Nina could almost detect a note of concern in his voice, and so she called him on it. "Just answer the question." He told her gruffly, and continued walking around the circle.
A child in the second row burst into tears, and a businessman ended up comforting him, hugging the little child to his leg as the boy ruined his expensive suit. Nina watched the exchange before she answered him. "They gave me a painkiller and some Dramamine. It's fine now."
He paused behind her. "And making you sea sick? Right, I mean Dramamine's the stuff you take for motion sickness?"
Nina turned as she answered. "Yeah, I guess it was making me dizzy, but not as badly as watching you walk around me."
Davison smiled and nodded. He ran a hand through the short hair on his head, and decided to stay put. "What about your stomach?" He asked.
"They wanted to open me up and see if you permanently damaged any of my organs. Bruised pancreas and liver, I should be in hospital right now."
"I'm sorry." Apologised Davison, "I shouldn't have thrown it so hard, but it was heavy and I wasn't sure how far it would go, I couldn't risk that you'd see me."
She was alarmed, "You threw that chunk of concrete at me?"
"Well not threw." He said and used his right hand to illustrate something dropping, complete with sound effects.
"You dropped it on me?" she clarified.
He nodded, "Had to." Nina tried to suppress the nausea she felt at that. Davison continued on without preamble. "I did think about giving you guys warning about this one, but I figured, seeing as you nearly stopped the last one, perhaps it would be better if I placed it before I told you." He muttered.
The nausea didn't go when Davison changed topics. It became the urge to wretch, and she doubled over, unable to stop herself. The rapid contraction of her stomach muscles only served to trigger terrible pain in her abdomen and for a second it was as though her it was being ripped out. Her face broke out in a sweat and she gave herself lots of time to stand upright again.
"You okay?" Davison asked her just as Jack's voice came crackling over the earpiece: "Nina what happened?"
"I'm fine." She said aloud, hoping Davison and Jack could hear her. The microphone was clearly sensitive enough for it to pick up the wretching sound. She wanted to move swiftly on, suppressing the urge by talking. "How about this for a reason? How about you didn't intend to give us any warning for this last one?"
Davison laughed and took a few steps around the circle before he realised he'd promised to stop. "What makes you think that?"
"The remote in your pocket." Davison gave the impression that he was caught off guard.
He was misleading her, she was sure, on the camera footage the remote hadn't been obviously displayed, but he been hoping she'd search for it. "You weren't planning on telling us about this bomb, you were just going to detonate it. Was there a reason? Were you getting bored of my conversation? We could have called an FBI negotiator in for you?" she swung the briefcase in her hand, confident that C4 was stable enough to not explode from some gentle knocking. "What's the blast radius on your latest work, Dave?" she was baiting him.
"Enough." He growled at her, fuming for a minute. "It's wide enough."
"C4?" she questioned.
Davison nodded, sliding out the bullet clip, and checking it, poking at the bullets before he slotted it back in. "So, where did you learn to make bombs?" She asked, "We both know you didn't learn the intricacies of mass destruction from the army. I've read your file."
"Well they taught me the basics of the basics." He was boasting. "But most of it I had to learn for myself."
"And where did you get the C4 from?"
"Stole a little here, a little there." He noticed Nina's raised eyebrow and explained, "Maybe half a kilogram here, there. You see the weight of the explosive varies according to the conditions it's kept in. So if it's wet, the weight can be twenty to thirty percent on top of the weight of C4."
"So you take a pound of C4 from a twenty pound bag and claim that the extra weight was water, or add some to keep the weight up."
"It's amazing how stupid some officers are." He chuckled, and took a few steps to the right before turning and taking a few in the opposite direction, oscillating around his original position.
"Is that how you got that entire drum you had in your apartment?" she asked, imagining the size that Jack had told her it was, but having no idea of the density of C4 she wasn't sure how much he had to steal to fill it. The suitcase was quite heavy, although she had no numerical concept of the weight, she could imagine the drum weighing slightly more than her.
"Is there anything in particular about this one that makes it special? Why weren't you going to warn us? You getting bored of playing with us? Of making us run around LA?" Nina baited him.
In the stress she felt the pain in her head return too, like a vein in he forehead burst, tearing the skin in thousands of places. The millions of little nerves in the skin on her forehead were screaming, and her eyes began to water. "Were you just hoping to kill as many people as possible, and maybe call afterwards to gloat?"
Davison didn't say anything, merely walking back and forth, oscillating. Nina continued trying to spur him on, get him to talk. "You obviously weren't planning on telling us. No timers, just a remote, right?" Nina walked over to his side of the circle. "Did you want to watch?"
Davison snapped to look at her. "Get back in the middle!" He ordered, and Nina raised an eyebrow at him, and then calmly walked back to the centre of the circle.
"Easy, Nina." Jack cooed over the earpiece, "The last thing we need is to have him get angry and trigger happy."
"Don't you think I know that?" She whispered into the microphone whilst her back was turned.
It was a while before Davison's breathing slowed and became deep enough so Nina could presume he was calm. "You know at the metro station, we found a little girl in the wreckage, her mother was dead and she was in pretty bad state. We took her to the hospital and she stabilised." She began to weave a story, inserting elements of truth to make it realistic, but not quite convincing enough for a polygraph. "We got a hold of her father, who came in to the hospital, and grieved over her mother, then he told her off for not getting out of bed early enough to take the bus. And then a blood clot from one of her many, many cuts made its way towards her heart, and she died."
"Shut up!" exclaimed Davison, turning his side to her and increasing the distance he walked with each swing past her.
"How many people do you suppose are in this room?" she continued. She was finally sensing remorse in him, and she was going to play on it. "One hundred? Two hundred? I feel like I'm giving a lecture, how about two hundred and nineteen? That's how many people were either killed or taken in to hospital yesterday morning after your bomb on the metro system. Did you know that?"
"Shut up!" He yelled again. A few hostages in their assembled audience began to cry, they could feel the tension rising, and were all afraid for their lives.
"Why?" asked Nina, spinning round to look at him, "I'm in the middle."
She let him cool down again a little before she spoke again, she wanted him to get upset and then calm him down enough to do some rational thinking before she bombarded his mind with the unpleasantness of what he'd chosen to do with his life again. In the long run it would help make his final decision more formed, so hopefully it wouldn't be a suicidal choice.
"The bomb was placed quite high up in the train." She told him, "Did you do that intentionally, to maximise the blast? It was the beginning of rush hour, and that train was seven carriages long. The bomb was in the third carriage in, but the explosion blew out the back of the train. Two carriages behind, and two carriages in front. The little girl was in the third carriage in front of the bomb, but she still died. Each carriage has about thirty seats in it, and we both know commuters cram themselves into any space they can find."
She gripped a hand to her side, pressing it onto her stomach, just above the bandage, hoping to stop the blood flow to the whole painful area. "Did you pick that building yesterday because of the September eleventh visual, or because it was convenient? You had access. Tell me, did you know the people at JayKay's marketing? Had you met Mr Kaiman, the 'Kay' of JayKay's? Did you know his fifteen year old daughter who was interning with him for the week?" She paused, hoping to once again gauge his reaction. "Mr Kaiman sent her out of the building with his secretary, but he'd chosen to stay inside and telephone Mr Janison in London, the 'Jay' by the way. When Mr Janison's connection went dead he presumed it was a fault with the new phone system."
Davison was getting even more strung out, but Nina kept ranting. It was more because she was angry than any tactic. "Do you know how many fringe groups tried to take advantage of the asset movement in October? When all the military reserves were called up? Do you embrace pluralism? All these groups all trying to take advantage of a country in mourning and how many succeeded? None. Zero. I guess you should feel a little proud of yourself for succeeding where oh so many failed."
She took a few steps towards him, moving from side to side with him as he oscillated back and forth. "Except," she phrased it like a revelation, it was a question they had yet to answer. "We know why each of those groups did what they did. What about you?"
Davison's pacing got faster. "What's your motivation?" Davison stopped abruptly and levelled the gun at her chest.
"Get back in the middle!" He screamed at her.
Nina calmly raised an eyebrow at him, and then retreated slowly back to the centre. When she turned back to Davison he was still watching her, but had taken a few steps backwards. After a few moments of mutual observation he smiled, when he spoke there was a cheerful note in his voice. "I'm just going to nip off, I need to take care of something."
Davison turned and began to walk away. "Don't be calling the SWAT team in, remember, I've still got the remote."
Nina was confused and for a second she thought about her conversation with Jack earlier. What if he was retreating to a safe distance to detonate the bomb. She took a quick glance down at the briefcase. It was too heavy to throw, it would never make it far enough away from the group. She chased after him, if he was close to the bomb he wouldn't blow it. He was rapidly getting away, nearly half the way across the room, and so she stumbled over the last row of the circle and ran towards him, she had to reach him before he made it to the metro entrance, he could use the pillars to shield him from the blast.
-24-
"What the hell was that?" Jack asked the team in the van. He didn't even wait for a response before he pressed the send button, to talk to Nina. "Nina, what's going on?" he asked her, pressing the microphone of his headset closer to his mouth. "Nina?"
"It's no use," Jerry explained. "We've lost the signal."
Jack pulled off his headset and chucked it on the counter. Grabbing huge handfuls of his hair, he rested himself against the far wall. The explosion had sounded through the wire and been heard loud and clear in the van before dissolving into static, now there was no response from Nina, and the wire had been destroyed, probably melted into a little pool of charred plastic inside it's wearer's ears.