Five minutes. Five fucking minutes. Christ, what is it with us humans? Always have to do everything in a hurry.
In a moment of blind optimism, I surveyed the walls of the cubicle. Hmm. No chance. There wasn’t much more than a few feet of plasterboard between them and the main area of the Dome. And judging by the incredibly large hunk of plastique I could see, we’d have needed a bloody bank vault to stop the explosion.
So no chance of withstanding the blast. And five minutes was way too short to get it out of harm’s way in a place this size. So that just left one option for me: defuse the bloody thing.
Sometimes, I really fucking hate humanity.
I mean, first off, we build something as monumentally stupid as the Millennium Dome. Then, perfectly true to form, as soon as we build something, another bunch of people decide they want to destroy it. The thing’s only been here for a year and already there’s been three bomb-scares. You’d think they’d put in a decent security system, but that would be admitting they had a problem, that the perfect British millennial utopia is actually still in the middle of having a war, and we couldn’t have that, could we? Far better a few Irish loonies kill a couple thousand people than Britain admit to itself what’s actually going on.
I caught myself. No time for ranting now. Typical - having to do electronics stuff always makes me edgy. I never had any real knack for it for some reason. And this was a messy looking job. A combination of decent know-how and frantic desperation, a hodge-podge of top-level government stuff and home toolkit improvisation that could have featured on Blue Peter. If it did a special on do-it-yourself terrorism, that is.
So no chance for me to figure out how to disarm it. I could probably rip open the bottom of the cistern and tear away the plastique, but I couldn’t even be sure that would work. If I didn’t get it away clean, in one go, I could trigger a motion switch and the whole game would be up. I checked the timer again. Four minutes, eight seconds. Damn. I was running out of options.
It was possible I could warn people outside. In four minutes, you could potentially clear a wide area. But not enough, not with the crowds here today. There’d be panic, and there’d always be injuries. And this one was clearly designed to do a lot of damage. After all, the guy who put it here had only given himself five minutes. That was barely enough time to get back to the front gate. Someone who’s quite happy to risk blowing themselves up with a bomb usually isn’t content to only kill half a dozen punters. This one was a biggie.
I wish I’d had the presence of mind to grab him when he’d left. I’d been following the bastard for an hour since I’d spotted him on the tube, so I could have easily trailed him through the crowd. He could have defused it for me nicely. But no, I had to charge right in after the bomb like the big hero I am, and now it was too late. Silly, silly boy.
That’s when it hit me. He could have defused it for me. Well, of course. And he still could if I could pull it off. Psychometry isn’t exactly easy, especially at the level of detail I was going to need, but I was running out of options. And there was only three minutes, forty four seconds left. Forty three. Forty two.
I touched my hands very gently to the sides of the timer, and shut my eyes. Like I said, I’d been following him all morning, so I was able to get a picture in my head pretty quickly. I concentrated. I tried to forget that the clock wasn’t right now potentially ticking down the last few minutes of my life. I bit my lip and emptied my mind, till all I could see was his face.
For the longest moment, there was nothing, and I thought I’d botched it. Then I had him. He was still here - maybe he did want to go up with it. Or more likely, he wanted to see it, to feel it, as it made the whole ground shudder and the pavement crack. He was sitting out the front, just next to the exit, waiting for the big show. OK, buddy, time to go back a bit. I refocussed my mind on the object in my hands. I resisted the temptation to peek at the counter, just going purely on feel. That made it harder, and it was even worse because I couldn’t actually touch the thing anywhere else for fear of setting it off. I started to get something, then it wavered, and I lost it.
My throat was dry and my knuckles tingled from holding them still. I looked at the timer. Two eighteen. Again. I sniffed, wiped my eyes and sat down on the lid of the toilet. Hopefully that would make it easier to concentrate.
I got him again pretty easily. Still sitting there, backpack on his lap, big serious look on his face. Oh yeah, buddy, this is your moment. This time, I looked at the bomb. I stared down into the mess of wires twisted around the float and held it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the left most digit twinkle over to 1.
You know how you’ll see a guy in a movie, and you won’t recognise him, but then ages later, out of nowhere, you’ll remember the other movie he was in, and suddenly you get this amazing spark of recognition, of context, that makes everything clear, that joins everything up? That’s what it feels like when you get it. And I did. Suddenly there was the spark, and I had him, and I had the bomb, and it all linked up. I felt it in his hands as he put it carefully into the cistern, like laying down a sleeping baby. OK, now I just had to go back.
There’s no fast forward on psychometry. I had to go all the way back through the grounds, the bomb sitting so heavy and oblong in his backpack. Back to the station, back on the tube, then halfway back across London, to his pathetic little squat near Lamberth. Back a few days as it sat, with terrifying importance, in the brown paper bag behind the radiator, and then finally, to the table, that cold August night when he’d sat up till dawn following the print-out by his elbow, building in switches and counterswitches, growing more and more proud as it grew more and more complex, and then finally breaking into giggles as he threaded the last piece of green wire to the timechip, and lifting the simple arming key to his lips for one sweet kiss of victory….
I didn’t have time to double check. I snapped awake, then blinked about a dozen times until my head stopped spinning. Twenty two seconds left. Hoo boy. I really hoped he hadn’t added another motion detector later that I’d missed.
I slowly lowered my hand into the cold water, down the left side of the cistern, careful not to brush the top plate with my coat sleeve - that was where the pressure sensor was, of course. Now I just had to make sure I grabbed the plug that linked the battery to the armer, and nothing else. Fifteen seconds. Easy boy. Nearly there. But now I couldn’t quite see where I was grabbing any more - my fingers were now under the decoy wires that were twisted around the top plate, but I couldn’t use my other hand to shift them - it was holding my sleeve back now. Cursing, I bent low down and blew on the water. Not enough. I stuck my head in and pushed them with my nose. The wires moved. I kept my head low and turned it sideways, and then I could just see it. Nine seconds. Move your fingers closer, boy. Good. Now grab it. No, I said grab it. Good. Five seconds. Now pull. I said ‘pull’. Four seconds. What do you mean it won’t come off? Pull it dammit! Three seconds. Christ, come here you bastard! Come here now!
I guess I overdid it, because not only did I pull out the plug, I yanked the cistern off its base and tipped its entire contents all over myself as I fell crashing to the ground. I spat out lemon-scented water. Pfah. Just what I needed - half a toilet on my head. Still, on the up side - no explosion. Call it my good deed for the day.
Thanks to the pathetic air-drying machines in the toilet, I was still squelching as I came storming out of the bathroom. I dumped the wires and the rest in the first bin I found, the plastique I’d get rid of elsewhere. By the time I got outside, the little punk had realised the gig was up and was tearing away though the crowds like a madman. Guess he wasn’t quite as brave as he though he was. Feeling the water in my shoes, and the way my heart was going, I decided not to chase him. Run, you little fucker, I thought. I know where you live now. Right now, I just needed a pint.
As I turned to leave, I noticed something on the ground next to where he’d been sitting. It was another of those bloody Millenium Dome models which were absolutely everywhere. Maybe the bomber had wanted a souvenir of the thing he was blowing up. Another example of that old reliable human stupidity. Scooping it up, I spied two old biddies coming through the exit armed with the whole kit of Dome paraphernalia - postcards, stickers, books, you name it, they had it. I walked over to them and offered it out. “Excuse me,” I said. “It seems someone has dropped this. Perhaps you would like it?”
After a moment, the shorter of the two took it and smiled far more broadly than any human should ever smile after being given a hunk of cheap plastic and tin. “Well, thank you, dear” she said. “Aren’t you just an angel?”
Well, quite.