Today, though, her mind had been on just one thing since waking; the Zurich field job. If anyone had asked during the long walk home last night, she’d have said she was absolutely not taking it, not after proving she couldn’t be trusted with a child’s stroller. But upon waking, she wondered if that was rash. So she’d come to the gym early, hoping a combat workout before the office might clear her mind.
Bridge hadn’t been a physical child. She buried herself in books and music, voraciously reading her father’s sci-fi collection several times over — to the point of exasperating her mother, who just wanted her petite Brigitte to spend time with other children, make friends, maybe try talking to boys like Édith (her mother refused to call her sister ‘Isabelle’) did so effortlessly. When they came to England, though, Bridge’s self-sufficiency and contentment with her own company made the move an order of magnitude easier for her to cope with than for Izzy, who had to leave not just her friends, but a new boyfriend. As compensation, their parents paid for Izzy to take horse-riding lessons, dancing lessons, music lessons… Bridge saw this and exaggerated how completely devastated she was by their move to England, using it to bargain for her own computer. Her father justified it to her mother by insisting it would be educational.
It certainly was that, although in a strange way she was glad he hadn’t lived to see her arrested for hacking the local government’s website and defacing it with vegetarian propaganda.
Despite her disinterest in sports, she’d also taken up karate after coming to London. Her parents were delighted at her showing interest in a hobby that wasn’t just physical, but disciplined. Her mother, in particular, had made for a strange sight in the audience at martial arts sparring events and exhibitions where Bridge competed, dressing for each occasion like it was Ascot, but shouting Gallic encouragement like she was ringside at a wrestling match.
The truth behind Bridge’s interest in martial arts had been much less noble. Almost as soon as she arrived in England, the bullies at school found her out. Puberty had still been a year or two away, but the English girls didn’t seem to appreciate a new pupil who’d rather spend her break periods reading the latest William Gibson novel, or listening to a new VNV Nation album, instead of gossiping and parading around for the boys. They called her ‘Freaky Frog’ and ‘Spooky Slut’, which Bridge found maddeningly ironic considering everyone else at the school seemed to be getting off with someone, while she walked home alone every night. They broke into her locker, stole her textbooks, hid her gym clothes, and waited for her after school with their hair tied back and fingernails sharpened.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents. What could they have done about it, anyway? If they made a fuss at school, the girls would simply renew their efforts. If she moved to a new school, everyone would know why, and it would just be a different group of kids that bullied her instead. And if they did nothing, the bullying would continue and she’d feel as useless as ever. No, the only way to stop it was to fight it. But Bridge had spent her entire life living in books, computers, and music. She didn’t know how to fight back if she wanted to.
So she decided to learn, and she learned fast. By the end of the final term of her first year, nobody at school was bullying her any more.
But then she had another revelation; it turned out she really enjoyed martial arts. Sergeant Major Hardiman, or ‘Hard Man’ as he was better known, had commented on it while giving her top marks in her induction class for Close Quarters Combat. She shrugged it off, said it was a way of staying fit that didn’t involve chasing a ball around a court. He never mentioned it again, but the look in his eye suggested he had some idea of the truth.
She didn’t mind. CQC became her favourite subject at ‘The Loch’, the typically understated name for a training facility compound covering twenty square miles of Scottish highland. There, ‘Hard Man’ — an officially retired Royal Marine now running a distinctly unofficial facility — and his battalion of instructors taught non-military security service personnel the necessary skills to survive in the field. MI5, SIS, Special Branch, sometimes even the TSG and diplomatic corps. They sent their men and women to learn everything from firing standard issue pistols and close combat to advanced driving and surveillance. Everyone at the Loch attended those basic courses, but only certain students went a stage further to study what Hard Man and the other instructors referred to as “Nobby Bollocks” classes. Along with a small group of others, who she assumed were also intelligence or special forces officers of some kind, Bridge learned how to build improvised bombs with household cleaning products, how to resist interrogation, how to mix fast-acting poisons, and more. She absorbed it all like a sponge, and so long as Hard Man and the others kept teaching her, they could think whatever they liked about her motives. After a while, she even stopped asking who the hell Nobby Bollocks was. It was only when she returned to London, and Giles congratulated her on passing the ‘Nasty Business’ course, that she got the joke.
But then came Doorkicker, and reality. Bridge lost her partner, screwed up the mission, and nearly got herself killed. It was all a far cry from thirty minutes of controlled karate sparring at the Loch.
The gym was filling up. She grabbed her things and headed for the
