Back at base – A disused, Cold War nuclear bunker, Buckinghamshire, England…


‘You knock.’
‘No. You knock.’

Ken knocks on the door of the biggest bunker room - (Maggie’s office, on level 2)

‘Come in.’

The pair enter.

She stops writing and looks up slowly from her desk.

‘Oh, it’s you two half-wits.’
‘That’s a bit strong isn’t it, ma’am,’ replied Ken.
‘Not really.’
‘Well, we did get you what you asked for. It’s down in the lab.’
‘I know it is. But I asked you to bring me a microchip, not an arm in a Tesco bag!
………What do you have to say for yourself, Johnson.’
‘I did try to locate and retrieve the chip from him using the scanner that the tec-boys bolted to my mobile, but it just kept saying buffering. I could tell it was somewhere in his left arm, but that was about it… so it had to come with me.’
‘I hear you hacked the poor man’s arm off with some plastic scissors!’
‘I hunted round, but it’s all I could find.’

She looked at the pair and sighed heavily.

‘At the end of the day, we brought the chip back, and no one saw us… No harm done.’ said Ken, trying to ease their predicament.
‘Yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that. The now dead Mexican guy was recently kidnapped and tortured for information. Intelligence informs us he had been held somewhere underground for several days. His right hand had been crushed and held in a vice and he’d tried to escape by hacking his own arm off using his free arm. But now, how is he supposed to have done that! …They will know someone...