espionage [h.s.]

FIFTY THREE

"Who took you?" I suddenly ask her. "Who did this?"

"I d-don't know," she replies shakily, a look of helplessness flashing in her eyes. Once again, it's an emotion that I've never seen from her before, and it's definitely an emotion I don't like. "I was in this dark room....knocked out most of the time. They were speaking in some language I don't know. Farsi, I think....."

"Persians?" I ask, and when she nods in confirmation, I realise that the terror cell were telling the truth, that they did attack the institute and take Rochelle, holding her captive ever since. At first, when the video message was sent in, I thought maybe they were just messing with us, trying to get some kind of revenge for all the trouble we've caused them over the years. Maybe they just wanted us to leave them alone, and they somehow knew exactly which button to press to get us to oblige. But now, I know that they did take her after all. However, the reason for that, and why they chose Rochelle specifically, I'm not so sure. "Did they take you to Iran?"

"No." She shakes her head. "I tried to count how long I was travelling for and it was only a few hours. I was in a van first, then some kind of boat, I think.....and then a car." When I furrow my eyebrows in confusion, she explains, "I was either blindfolded or knocked out, but I could hear and sense whereabouts I was." As she says this, my eyes trail over the purple and yellow bruises littered across her head which I can guess were probably due to the aforementioned knockouts. Just from looking at them, I can think of a few people who I want to, and will, knock out. Permanently.

Just as this thought is crossing my mind, I'm snapped out of it by the sound of Earl and Elias finally reaching us, and the two deep exhales I hear from behind me are enough evidence that they're now close enough to have figured out what's going on. A deafening silence settles over the four of us as everyone realises the direness of this situation, and then after a few minutes of silence, Earl, who I've never heard swear a day in my life, is the first to speak to when he suddenly says, "What the fuck have those bastards done?"

HOUR 2

Myself, Elias and Earl have all been pacing up and down, desperately trying to figure out what we're going to do. Rochelle hasn't really moved an inch because all of us are too scared for her to do anything in case it triggers the bomb, but she still looks too frozen with fear to really move anyway. While we've been discussing plans and strategies, she's remained silent, staring blankly out at the miles of rolling hills in the distance, practically catatonic, which Earl has explained is due to her being in a state of shock. I think I'm in shock too, I must be, but my body hasn't registered it yet, probably because my fight or flight response has made it impossible for me to do anything else but attempt to think of ways to get us out of this situation. But so far, it's been to no avail.

I'm trying to remain calm, or at least I'm trying to pretend to remain calm for Rochelle's sake. I'm trying to remember my training, to be analytical, logical, organised, composed, rational - but I'm realising that's quite a difficult task, especially when every time I glance up, I see a bomb that I don't know how to disarm staring right back at me. And to make it even worse, if it even could be any worse, that bomb just so happens to be attached to the chest of the person I care about the most in the world. The person who brought happiness back into my life when I thought there was simply none left for me.

But now that happiness is, quite literally, about to blow up in my face. Unless I figure out a way to stop it. And soon.

As I'm thinking this, Elias jogs back over to us from the call he just made back in the van to an old colleague of mine, Hassan, who, for lack of any better technical term, is a bomb expert. While I've always been literate in explosives throughout my career, I've never met anyone who could explain and disarm bombs as easily and quickly as Hassan. I don't know what he's up to nowadays, in fact I haven't seen or worked with him in years so I'm sure he's rather surprised by me contacting him now, but I don't really have many other options.