Bubble

‘This is awful.’ Kim looked at her watch for the twentieth time. ‘How long should we wait?’

‘Xavier said to stay here.’ Delphine’s body was tense, worry etched plainly on her pale face. Emma had taken to twisting her fingers in her lap and had suspiciously moist eyes.

‘What’s happening?’

‘He has a locator link on Alain in the comms channel but some sort of alert just popped up. Wait.’ 

Delphine touched her hand to her ear in a gesture Kim was beginning to find familiar.

‘Alain says there’s somebody approaching them at speed. He’s closing the link.’

‘Now what?’ Kim was trying not to panic. She felt they were in an isolated bubble, with no information about what the others were doing. There would be no warning if things went wrong.

‘It may be a temporary closure. We must wait for a time to see if he renews the link,’ said Delphine pragmatically.

‘And if he doesn’t?’

Delphine shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to compute the best next steps. Let’s think about this. Xavier, Jean-Claude and Joe are inside the warehouse complex. They know Alain, Hugo and Brontẽ are there. Somebody else, possibly not friendly, is coming towards Alain. If he had time to tell us that, he will have told Xavier too.’

‘Goodness knows how many people were in those three black vans that we saw go past,’ said Kim.

‘They may have been nothing to do with us,’ said Emma, ‘we’re only guessing they might be.’