A/N: Minor detail change: Tim and Gwenith now live in Southall, not Croyden, because optimustaud is a genius. Also, happy New Year!
/News/Current Events/22.06.98/Tokyo, Japan: It's been twenty-four hours now since the unexplained spatial anomaly opened in the prefecture of Chiyoda in Tokyo, Japan. Rescue workers are still unable to enter the 78 square kilometer area, either on foot or by air due to focused seismic activity and dangerous physical conditions. The first team of responders who attempted it have not been heard from since they crossed the boundary yesterday.
It is unknown how many people were injured or killed; it is certain, however, that not a single person who was in Chiyoda as of noon yesterday has emerged from the wreckage of the city streets, and no calls for aid have been received. With a population density of 6,029 people per square kilometer, the death toll could potentially reach nearly half a million.
Scientists remain baffled as to the cause of this devastating event, although they suspect that it is linked to the disappearance of the stars. On the question of whether or not Japanese authorities had reason to believe that disaster was approaching, and whether steps could have been taken to prevent it or at least to mitigate the damage, officials are remaining silent.
In the meantime, friends and family remain ignorant of their loved ones' fates, and the city has ground to a halt in the wake of the devastation. It's as if the gates to hell have opened here in Tokyo./
Brigid stared at the images of death and destruction, multiplied a dozen times over on the wall of television screens in front of her.
"Christ," she breathed. "All those people." Not even during the darkest days of the Troubles had she seen such utter devastation. It was the same footage that all the stations had been showing on a loop since yesterday: a collection of amateur videos captured by bystanders at the edge of the disaster area and first-on-site news recordings. Between clouds of smoke and ash, they showed massive cracks in the pavement of the streets, metal signs and street lights bent and twisted into impossible shapes; and beneath the pixelated boxes were what could only be corpses. It looked like a war zone. No matter how often the reporters and expert analysts dissected the images, the story didn't change. And she couldn't take her eyes from it.
"They're calling it 'Hell's Gate'," Jack Simon said beside her, his tone grave. Except for the two of them, the electronics section of Allders was empty this afternoon. No one in the city seemed to be in much of a mood for shopping.
"Do they know what it is?"
"Not my department," the MI-6 agent said vaguely, then gave a little sigh of irritation. "I haven't spent the past four hours waiting here for you to discuss events half a world away. You're late."
"Hm," Brigid said, her gaze fixed on the televisions. The thought of Simon wandering aimlessly around a department store all morning in that conspicuous white suit and sunglasses would have amused her on any other day, but the images of smoke and that eerie blue glow repeating before her eyes were too sobering. "I told you that I wouldn't be able to set a precise time - I'm sort of in the middle of planning an act of terrorism. There's quite a lot to juggle."
"Yet Fitzgerald doesn't mind you taking time off for some shopping?"
"I needed a new bottle of perfume," she said flatly. "Thanks for calling off the tail, by the way; Dillon or one of the others would have spotted him right away."
"I didn't call him off," Simon said. "Now that I've secured your cooperation, I was able to obtain permission to use more highly trained agents."
Brigid gave him a sidelong glance, then snorted. "Liar. You need to work on your bluffing skills."
A muscle in Simon's jaw twitched slightly. "Has Fitzgerald set the date yet?"
"Tomorrow, at noon. Canary Wharf." She returned her gaze to the bank of screens, and saw Simon's posture stiffen out of the corner of her eye.
"Tomorrow? The last time we talked, you thought it would be weeks away."
"'Now is the time to remind the English that the people of Ireland will not sit idly by while government denies us our rights as a free people'," she quoted. "Dillon thinks that MI-6 and the military will be too occupied with the fallout from the Tokyo disaster to pay much attention to domestic affairs, so he moved the date up." They'd argued briefly about the tact of committing terrorism in the wake of such a tragedy, but Brigid's heart hadn't been in it, and she'd given in quickly. She just wanted this job over with as soon as possible.
Simon sighed wearily. "Well, he's partly right. However, domestic security is still a top priority; the mission is a go."
"How much control do you have over information dispersal?"
"As of now, only myself and my direct superiors are aware of our arrangement; after our meeting today I will inform the heads of police and the military units that we've tapped of the details on a need-to-know basis. I cannot guarantee that the information won't leak down from there, but they will have orders to keep it classified."
Brigid nodded. "Good. We have people in both the police and the army, middle levels. If word gets to them that the authorities know about the attack, they'll know we have a mole in the crew. Even if it doesn't point to me, Dillon will change the plan and you'll lose your chance. I'll lose my chance."
"Who - " Simon started to ask, but Brigid cut him off.
"No names," she said sharply. "If anyone from the crew gets caught during the job, that's on them, not me. You want Dillon; I'm giving you Dillon, no one else. That's what we agreed to."
The MI-6 agent tried unsuccessfully to hide the irritation in his voice. "Fine. What form will the attack take, and where will Fitzgerald be? If you're involved, I'm assuming that there will be explosives?"
The news channel was now showing the footage of the anomaly forming, caught by an amateur movie maker: a storm of dust and debris kicked up by invisible winds swirled up into the air in the shape of a massive dome, like steam trapped beneath the lid of a pot of boiling water, obscuring the streets behind it. People lined the sidewalks gawking at the sight; cars came to a screeching halt. There was a bright blue glow, a flash of light - and when the smoke cleared, devastation.
"This is the tricky part," Brigid admitted. "It'll be an IED carried in a van, set outside One Canada Square. Under the railway station."
"That's the exact same scheme that the IRA tried in '92," Simon interrupted, one eyebrow arched.
"So I've heard; I don't know, I was in Morocco at the time, I think. Or maybe Bulgaria. Anyway, that doesn't matter - we have someone in tower security too, he'll run interference for us at the scene, along with our cop. The van will get through. Dillon is adamant that we don't use a remote detonator, because of the problems that the IRA had previously. It's going to be a mercury flip-switch instead."
Simon's brow furrowed. "Unacceptable," he said. "I'll have to send in the bomb squad to disengage it, and that will tip Fitzgerald off."
"I know, stop interrupting!" Brigid snapped. "Dillon wants someone in the van to make sure everything is set before time; I'll be able to disconnect the timer once the driver is clear. There will be another set of eyes on it during the assembly, so I can't disarm it any earlier." They'd finally settled on James as driver and Patrick as back-up, much to Dillon and Eddie's frustration. But after Tim had so reasonably pointed out that Dillon's face was well-known to the police and MI-6 both, Dillon had conceded. And he was much less supportive of Eddie being in the van without him there as well. How Brigid was going to convince the crew - especially James - that she ought to go in Patrick's place, she still had no idea; but Simon didn't need to know that.
"Dillon will be waiting nearby, somewhere where he can see everything without being conspicuous," she continued. "I won't know where that will be until tomorrow. Once the bomb is placed - and I disarm it - I'll head towards Dillon's location. The police can follow me and arrest him. Better arrest James and me as well, make a show of it. That way he won't suspect my involvement. I'm trusting you not to screw this up for me." She rubbed her temple; she could feel a headache coming on. "You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette, would you?"
An exasperated sigh escaped the MI-6 agent. On the wall of television screens, a sobbing Japanese woman was being restrained by the police. As Brigid watched, the woman broke free and ran, stumbling, into the wall of smoke. Brigid wondered who she was running to, and whether anyone would ever see her again.
~~~~o~~~~
"Did you get what you needed?" James asked when Brigid entered their flat.
She nodded, and held up the large purse that hid the clothes and perfume that she'd lifted from Allders, and the pair of shoes that Abigail was lending her. "How's the device coming along?"
Patrick looked up from the dining table where he and Eddie were working. Well, Patrick was working; Eddie was chasing a bead of mercury across the tabletop with a pair of tweezers.
"Getting close," the army bomb squad member said. "I followed your instructions with the frame, but it's the wiring next - you ought to do that bit, I'm better at cutting them than putting them together."
Brigid dropped her bag onto the sofa and switched on the telly, then seated herself at the table across from Patrick. He was carefully measuring out portions of gunpowder that Kelly had delivered the day before. That wasn't for the device; it was for cartridges for the crew's small arms - something that Brigid hadn't been too pleased to learn about, but also hadn't been able to successfully argue against. We never needed guns before, she'd told Dillon. He'd just smiled at her and said, Times change, Bridey.
She glanced at the television - the same reports that had been on at the department store - then the screen suddenly went dark.
"I was watching that!" Brigid protested.
James tossed the remote control onto the sofa, then shook his head. "It's too depressing, love - and you've been watching it all morning."
"James is right," Patrick added."We don't need to be seeing all o'that. Anyway, you need to keep focused or we'll never get the device finished."
"Bridey can throw a bomb together in ten minutes," Eddie said, eyes fixed on the little blob of silver in front of him.
"If you heard that from Dillon, he was just exaggerating as usual. Anyway, this one calls for some extra care, nothing slapdash. Eddie, give those to me." She held out her hand. Eddie looked up from the mercury, then grudgingly handed Brigid the tweezers. She scooped the liquid metal back into its glass vial, then set it aside.
Brigid had chosen their flat in which to build the device; the pub was closed this early in the day, and with the curfew still in effect business was slow anyway. And, Brigid wanted the explosives under her direct supervision. She didn't trust anyone to sabotage the device except for herself. Eddie was there to be their gopher; though so far, they hadn't needed him and he was clearly getting bored.
James pulled up a chair to start funneling the gun powder into cartridges. "Where'd you learn to build bombs, anyway?"
"Um," Brigid said as she adjusted the jeweler's glass that Eddie had brought; Patrick leaned over to watch with professional interest. "I fooled around with firecrackers a bit when I was a girl in Liverpool; then in, I don't know, '83, maybe, we had an IRA explosives expert hole up with us for a few weeks." With the tweezers, she carefully twisted a couple of wires around a screw. "Cousin of somebody's brother's nephew, you know how it is. Anyway, he taught me some tricks; after he left, I kept tinkering."
"Why explosives?"
Brigid shrugged, and picked up her screwdriver. "I don't know - I had a knack for it, and it was something useful for the Cause."
"Dillon always said you just liked to make things go bang," Eddie put in. "Like the time you threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the dry cleaners, because they didn't get the mustard out."
Brigid laughed at the memory in spite of herself. "It wasn't mustard, it was curry. It wasn't even my dress, I'd stolen it for a job. And anyway," she said hurriedly at the sight of the slight frown on James' face, "I waited until after closing and no one was there. I don't do that sort of thing anymore."
"Why don't you?" Eddie said, a bit petulantly. "The Cause needs you; it hasn't been the same without you around."
"I have a life with James now," she told him. "We're starting a family - there's no place for revolution in that." She smiled at James over the jeweler's glass, but he returned it only half-heartedly.
Eddie humphed, and pulled out a cigarette. Brigid only realized what he was doing when he held up the lighter; Patrick noticed at the same time.
"No!" they exclaimed in unison.
Eddie dropped the lighter in a startled flinch. To Brigid's relief, he hadn't had a chance to open it.
"Jeez," he said, "I just forgot the no smoking round Bridey while she's preggers rule; no need to shout."
Brigid's heart was pounding. "It's not that," she said. "It's dangerous to have an open flame around this much gunpowder; even a trace in the air can ignite, and with all the materials for the device - just the smallest spark - damn it, you could have blown us sky high! Didn't I ever teach you not to smoke around my explosives?" She smacked the back of his head.
"I was seven, I didn't smoke then," Eddie said, eyes wide. "Anyway, you never let me anywhere near you when you were working on bombs."
"Oh. Really? That was surprisingly responsible of me."
Patrick gave a soft chuckle, while James raised his eyebrows. "Eddie," James said, "you can smoke on the balcony - it's just through the bedroom."
Eddie left the room, still a little pale at the thought of the near-miss. The others were shaken too, Brigid could tell; they returned to their work silently. She swept her hair back into a ponytail to get it out of her face, and concentrated on connecting the timer (an old digital watch of Eddie's) to the firing circuit, wedged snugly between blocks of plastic explosives.
"I thought you grew up in Belfast, not Liverpool."
"What?" It took Brigid a moment to place James' question into a context that made sense. "Oh. Pat, hand me that screwdriver, will you? No, the small one - thanks. Bit of both, I guess. I was born in Liverpool, moved to Belfast later. I'll tell you about it another time," she promised with a raised eyebrow.
Patrick switched the watch to the stopwatch function. "What time do you want to set?"
"Um…" Brigid sat back and thought. "Eighty-one minutes," she said, and Patrick punched in the number.
Eddie returned as they were cleaning up. "Is it done?" he asked with interest.
Brigid nodded. "Just about. I don't want to attach the switch until we get it loaded in the morning, just to be safe; but we tested all the circuits earlier and they worked fine. We'll put the cover on once the switch is live."
"It's a work of art," Patrick said, taking a step back to admire the intricate web of wires and circuits.
"Hm. I would have preferred to mix up my own blasting material," Brigid said, with grudging pride. She cast a critical eye over the plastique that Kelly had commandeered for them. "But Dillon didn't give me much time to work with. This will have to do."
Eddie was standing well back of the device, she noticed. "How does it work?"
Brigid held up a small glass tube containing a pair of electrodes with two leads running out of it. "This is the switch," she said. "Tomorrow once we get the device loaded in the van, I'll attach this to the timer" she pointed to the watch "and add the mercury to the base of the switch. The switch will be loose; as the van drives, it'll be jostled until it flips over, letting gravity pull the mercury down to the electrodes. That completes the circuit."
"It'll blow while the van is driving?" Eddie asked, aghast.
"Of course not. There's the timer, remember? The switch activates the timer; in eighty-one minutes, the timer goes off and triggers the detonator. And then - bang. Fifty-four minutes from the garage to the target site, plus twenty-seven minutes for traffic delays and time to allow James and Pat to get clear. Any longer and we risk drawing suspicion to it." That didn't leave her much time to disarm it, but she'd just have to manage. Still, it was a bit of a shame; Dillon was right, she'd loved making bombs mostly for the satisfaction of setting them off.
"Eighty-one. Isn't that the year you and my cousin met?"
Brigid shot Eddie an annoyed look. "I don't know; dates aren't really my thing." Had it been in '81? She could measure jobs down to the minute, but could hardly remember the current year, let alone the dates of random events.
"Damned unpredictable things, flip-switches," Patrick said thoughtfully. "Is that what you used at the bus depot in '86? The bomb squad runs training modules based off of that attack."
Brigid avoided James' eyes. "Yes," she said. "It's only the timing that's tricky - once they're armed, they'll go no matter what. We'd better head over to the gas company and pick up the van; just give me a minute to change."
~~~~o~~~~
"Wow," James said when she emerged from the bedroom.
Eddie glanced up from studying their fake wedding photo. His slight frown turned into a look of surprise, and he gave a low whistle. "You look like a completely different person, Bridey."
"That's the point," Brigid said with a heavy French accent, and patted his cheek. She'd chosen a well-tailored white blouse buttoned high to hide her tattoo and a navy blue pencil skirt. An up-do showed off her long neck, and the heels that she'd borrowed from Abs were tasteful yet chic, suitable for an upscale office. Her rosary was around her neck, the cross and single feather tucked into her bra. James was already dressed in a close approximation of British Gas' work uniforms; given more time, they would have stolen actual uniforms. Instead, they just had to make do with what they had.
She lifted an apple from the bowl on the counter and held it daintily in her fingertips. "Shall we go?"
Eddie dropped them off in a back alley three blocks from the gas company's fleet park; he and Patrick would head back to Southall to meet up with the others.
"Good luck," Brigid said, giving James a brief kiss. "I'm glad we're doing this together."
Brigid had been the first to volunteer to be the distraction in the van-stealing operation. "I want to enjoy my sex appeal while I still have it," she'd joked, patting her still-flat stomach.
"I'll go too," Dillon said. Brigid wasn't sure, but she thought that his smile was a little forced. "It'll be just like old times, hey Bridey?"
She was about to agree, memories of the fun they'd had on all those old jobs swimming to the forefront of her mind, when Tim cast her a warning look and said to Dillon, "Do I have to point this out again? Your face is on police suspect lists everywhere."
Dillon just shrugged. "If the distraction is good, no one'll even see me. Especially if it's Bridey doin' the distracting."
He grinned at her - and she remembered Tim's words, and the kiss in the garden the previous night. "Tim's right," she said. "It's too risky for you. James will go with me." Dillon clearly hadn't been happy about that, but he'd conceded without further argument.
"This is just like one of those couple's-bonding activities that Abs is always going on about," she said to James now. That finally got a smile out of him; he'd been so closed off to her all afternoon.
"See you in five minutes," he said.
Brigid kissed him again, and pulled the bill of his cap down low over his eyes, her pulse picking up in anticipation of a new con. "Five minutes."
She walked out of the alley on her own and headed at a brisk pace towards the fenced-in car park where the gas company vans were kept. The gate was open, but there was a little office just inside, with wide windows looking out onto the exit and to the fleet of white vans sitting in the lot. She put just the tiniest sway into her hips as she walked, and pushed open the door to the office.
An unshaved clerk with old acne scars was seated behind a low desk at the back of the small room. There was a board of keys on the wall behind him. He looked up from the newspaper crossword; the expression on his face changed from boredom to fascination at the sight of her. "Er, can I help you, Miss?"
Brigid set her clutch on the desk with an exasperated sigh. "I hope so," she said in her French accent. "I am here about my bill, where is it now?"
"Um, this isn't the place for billing questions," the clerk said as she started rummaging around in her clutch.
"Are you sure? The man on the phone gave me this address. Such a rude man. I need to get this cleared up right away, the charges are all wrong. Ah, so sorry!" As she removed the folded-up gas bill, an open coin purse fell from the clutch, scattering a dozen coins across the desk. Brigid leaned over to start picking them up - just far enough to give a suggestion of breast without actually revealing anything. Cleavage talked inebriated pub patrons into buying more drinks, but Brigid had always believed that true seduction lay in subtlety.
"Er," said the clerk, "don't worry - let me help." His gaze flashed guiltily up to her chest, then dropped to the surface of the desk where he began to collect the coins for her.
The door opened behind her. Out of the corner of her eye, Brigid saw a short man in a work uniform and cap stride in. As he walked past the desk, the man reached over and snagged one of the keys from the board, then exited out the back.
"Oh, thank you," Brigid said to the clerk when he passed her a handful of coins. "Just in here, please." She held out the coin purse, the sides gaping open around the central zipper; there was a bead of sweat on the clerk's brow as he dropped them in. "You were saying, I am in the wrong place?" She leaned forward a bit so that he would get a whiff of her new, expensive perfume and renewed hope of a peek down her blouse.
"Uh, yes," the clerk said, eyes fixed on the strand of blonde hair that Brigid had let fall artfully across her face. "This is the dispatch office for our repair vans. You want account services. That's, um, that's…somewhere else. Give me mo', I'll look it up for you."
Brigid waited patiently, standing with her hips angled just so as he leafed through a company directory. In her peripheral vision she could see out of the side window to the fleet; a van was just exiting the lot.
"Ah, here it is," the clerk exclaimed. He wrote out the address and phone number on a scrap of paper for her. Brigid let her thumb brush up against his as she took it.
"Um, er, is there anything else I can, ah -"
"Oh no, you have been so helpful," Brigid said, giving him a kind smile. She daintily opened her clutch and slipped the paper inside. "Thank you so much."
The young man blushed slightly. "Uh, no, thank you," he said nonsensically. Brigid smiled again, and left the office. Even outside, she could feel his eyes on her arse, and grinned to herself.
The white van was idling in the alley where Eddie had dropped them off. Brigid climbed into the passenger seat and laughed. "You should have seen that poor clerk, I thought I was going to have to fetch him a mop! God, I've missed this!"
James didn't answer, just pulled out onto the main road.
"You were brilliant too," Brigid said, reaching over and squeezing his knee. "I don't think he noticed you at all."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "That was entirely your doing, love."
"Are you jealous?" she asked slyly. She knew she ought to tread carefully here, but jobs like this always got her blood up, and she loved James' possessiveness of her. Not that he ever tried to tie her down or stop her from doing whatever she wanted; but after so many years of not belonging anywhere, she never got tired of knowing that someone could feel so strongly for her. She let her hand drift further up his leg.
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. "I'm driving."
"Drive faster."
"Brigid, will you just wait?"
She sighed and took her hand back, then kicked off her heels so that she could wiggle her toes at last. To her amusement, James kept casting worried glances into the review mirror, as if the police would be right on their tail. "They won't even notice it's gone until tomorrow, earliest," she assured him. "We're clear, don't worry. Although, that is a bit disappointing."
"What? Why?"
"Next to an explosion, a car chase is my favorite thing." She giggled at the expression on his face, hoping that he didn't hear the desperate edge to her voice. The excitement that always came with thieving was proving to be a good antidote to the funk that she'd been in all morning, after hearing the news from Tokyo added to the dread of the mission tomorrow. A couple of times she tried to set her hand on his thigh again, but he would remove it with a frown that made her anticipation grow even stronger.
At last, James pulled into a parking garage at Heathrow airport. They drove slowly through the aisles until they found Dennis' old Ford Guardian, left there earlier that morning. James pulled into an empty spot a few down from it; he shut off the engine and unbuckled, then turned to Brigid. "There's something I've been wanting to talk to you about," he began, a serious look on his face.
Damn it, he wanted to get grim now? The drive had only made her impatience worse. Before he could continue speaking, Brigid leaned over and kissed him hungrily.
"Brigid, what - " he tried, before she was kissing him again.
"I can't wait," she said.
"What, here?" James asked in disbelief.
She began unbuttoning his work shirt. "There aren't any windows in the back, no one will see." Dillon would have already had her on the floor, skirt at her waist; she had to bite her lip before she could say it. It was one thing to make James jealous of a nameless clerk who didn't have a chance in the world; purposefully making him jealous of Dillon would be a bad idea.
"We need to switch the plates…."
"We have plenty of time. Please - I need you."
James' warm brown eyes were dilated and he was breathing just as hard as she was. "Christ, I love you," he managed, before Brigid was leading him into the back of the van, laughing.