Flash Fiction:: Restricted Parking

“You are not allowed to park here, it is a restricted area”

“There isn’t anything to say it’s restricted, and I have the right to park here if I want”

“Actually sir you don’t, it is illegal to park in a restricted area. And there is a yellow box painted on the ground which shows it is restricted”

“Why is it restricted?”

“Well, do you know where you are?”

“Yes, I am in the area of Lambeth in London”

“Yes but where in Lambeth, what is the building you ae in front of?”

“It’s MI5, is it not?”

“Well strictly speaking I should not reveal the identity of the building, but please move your car”

 “What if I don’t want to?”

“I will have it towed away as it is now being treated as suspicious and a threat, and it will need to be searched”

“Fine then, I will go and park it somewhere else”

“No, now you are here we will need to search it”

“Ok, if you must then go ahead and search it”

“I will just go get another security guard who will come and help me search, wait here”

“Ok, no problem”

The security guard left to get is colleague and then they both came back, the driver of the car had disappeared but left the car behind.  The door of the car had been left open which was suspicious to the two guards. 

“We will need to report this to the police”

“Ok, you go and do it, and I will stay here, and while you are at it get the buildings evacuated as this could be serious”

So the second security guard left to go and inform the police and get the buildings evacuated.  Within three minutes people started piling out of the building in which the car was parked in front of and also the other buildings situated on Millbank. Everyone went to the allocated areas for when fire or bomb alerts are sounded.

The second security guard came back to the car and told his colleague that the police a couple of minutes before he called the police, they had already been contacted and told there was a bomb outside MI5 which was due to go off at 2pm.

By now it was 1.25pm so there was another 35 minutes to go and the police were arriving in their vans to make sure everywhere was evacuated and that the car bomb was isolated and no one would get hurt. The bomb squad were also coming to work at diffusing the bomb.

There is one terrorist organisation that called ahead of bombs and that was the Irish Republican Army (IRA) However they were also known for giving false information so the police were on alert for other suspicious behaviour. 

And they were right to be wary because when the bomb squad got to the car there was no bomb. This put the scare on the police and it meant two things, either the IRA were lying or else it was a prank hoax by someone. But the police weren’t taking any risk and no one was allowed back into the building and the car had to be dealt with. Either they could tow it away but just to be 100 per cent careful there was definitely no bomb in the car they decided to safely blow the car up themselves.

While the car was being dealt with, police officers and bomb disposal experts were looking around the area to see if there was another potential bomb threat.

They were told the bomb would go off at 2pm and it was now 1.55pm so they had five minutes to find something. It could be anywhere, the IRA usually went for the car bomb but they were capable of doing anything to be honest.

Everyone had now been evacuated from the buildings and some were gathered in St John’s Gardens, behind Millbank and others were in Victoria Tower Gardens but nearer the Houses of Parliament end rather than the Millbank end.

The time was slowly going and 2pm was looming in on them, and still no bomb had been found so the Police thought they may be in the clear but they were not banking on it because as they knew sometimes the IRA could be unpredictable.

The car had been dealt with now and had been blown up in a controlled explosion. The two security guards from the beginning were still around since they were the ones who dealt with the incident from the beginning and one of them had spoken to the car driver, whom they were now calling a terrorist.  He was able to describe the man in great detail so the police could try and identify him. The security guard did say that the man definitely didn’t have an Irish accent which now in the scheme of things is a bit strange. But then that was probably another decoy.

It was now 2pm and no explosion had gone off so the police thought that it was all over and it was just a hoax prank call. But they still were a bit suspicious and didn’t bring everyone back to the buildings yet. At 2.10pm it was still quiet so they decided to start bringing everyone back to the buildings, office by office.

By 2.30pm everyone was back in their offices with just a few stragglers coming up behind. Arrangements had been made to remove the debris of the car, statements had been taken by the security guard and other witnesses, so everything was in order. It was now 2.40pm. Everyone was satisfied that nothing was going to happen so the police and the bomb squad were just packing up to go when all of a sudden there was a huge explosion, and the ground was rumbling. It was 2.45pm and the bomb had gone off.

The police and the bomb squad were perplexed, as the building on front of them was still intact so where did the bomb go off. One look to the right, and across the river at Vauxhall they could see the smoke rising. It was MI6 that had been targeted and not MI5.