12 Minutes (#2 in Military series)

Chapter 35

Happy holidays everyone! 

Chapter 35

The director of MI5 strode into the control room with a look of controlled anger on her face. There was nothing more she hated than surprises and a call from the PM's private line had blindsided her completely.

Swiping her key card over the appropriate scanner she waited for the loud, monotone buzzer that told her the door was unlocked before she pushed it open and stepped from the hard tile of the corridor onto the thin dark carpet of the control room.

"Can someone please tell me," She called out, her voice travelling over the vast space, announcing her arrival to everyone, "Why I have the Prime Minister ringing me personally for an update on the situation?"

Truro looked up from the screen which held some of the information one of Strong's men recovered from the previous site when he heard the unmistakeable voice of his boss. Turning away from the map he was analysing he looked up the walkway that ran between the rows of computers and saw that he was correct and indeed, the head of MI5 was making a beeline towards him. His breath caught in his throat for a second as he gathered his nerves.

Patricia Wallace, head of the intelligence community that was MI5, was beautiful but she was made of iron and sterner stuff. She hadn't got to the position she was in now before her fiftieth birthday without drawing some blood and, if he was to believe the stories flying around the rumour mill, breaking some laws. She was the perfect person for the job; she somehow made it so that her employees were both in fear and in admiration of her. Summed up people wanted to be her but not get on the wrong side of her and as she walked towards him now Truro knew that he had gotten on the wrong side of her.

Walking out behind the row of computer analysts Truro stopped in aisle that ran down the theatre of rows, much like a lecture hall, and greeted her, "Ma'am-"

"-Truro," Wallace declared when she saw him, her lips pressing together in a tight thin line as she clasped her hands in front of her, "Do you care to tell me why you're not keeping the commander in chief of this country in the loop on this ongoing situation? Where is the liaison to Downing Street?"

Truro felt like he was at a performance review as he stared into Patricia's blue judging eyes behind her black-rimmed glasses. "It wasn't intentional," Truro started and he knew it was a weak argument the moment he said it. Truthfully he just had bigger things on his mind than how the Prime Minister was feeling, he knew the Secret Service would care to his wellbeing and he would be informed if anything arose, after all that is one of the reasons why they had these separate divisions, "We just have nothing to appraise him with yet-"

Wallace's eyes widened and her head jutted forward a little as if she had not heard him correctly, "Nothing to appraise him with?" She threw her arm out towards the floor-to-ceiling screen behind him that was still displaying fractured drone footage, "You have American aircraft landing at the site this very moment. Do you not think that that is worth letting the prime minister, or myself for that matter of fact, know about? What are they even doing there, did you call them?" Wallace was not one to call in favours from over the pond if she could help it.

"No Ma'am," Truro replied, "Commander Ridgeway called them from a sat phone on the ground."

"Commander Ridgeway," Wallace shook her head as she remembered her brief meeting with the obnoxious man, "Why did you not send out any of our aircraft that we had in the area?" She wanted to know as she thought about how the American agency were going to spin this around on them so that it looked like they had saved them rather than the truth which- Wallace was shocked to think she still didn't know everything yet. She needed to have another talk to Ridgeway when he landed.