The Arrow

Stella Robinson was a grammar school girl who graduated with a double first in Mathematics from the University of Bath. The security services recruitment branch took no notice. Bath is not Oxbridge, in fact they weren’t sure Bath was a University at all and they were doubly not sure how you got a double first, maths was just maths after all.

She was starting her PhD in game theory when she saw an advert for MI5 in the paper, well it was the puzzles they set which caught her attention. She went online, found them ridiculously easy and completed the tests in record time. This time she wasn’t ignored. They brought her in to headquarters, which she thought looked as if it were made out of Lego, and put her through a variety of intellectual, practical and psychomotor tests. Again, all too easy.

She was introduced to the Head of Service Recruitment and after an interview lasting half an hour, she had signed a contract and endless Official Secret nonsense, which even then she could see anybody could run rings round, and dispatched to Huntingdon to start her practical training for MI6.

Once in the field she was competent. She barely left a ripple wherever she was sent and if people had to die, it invariably looked like an accident, unless she was set up, when she was ruthless.

Quickly the Director at MI6 saw she was taking on riskier assignments which could end badly, and that her extreme talent would be used to better effect in the UK, so she was transferred to MI5 and sent to back to Millbank.

There her same pragmatic ruthlessness in an office setting surprised and eliminated her male colleagues, and promotion was rapid. A long stint as number two to ‘The Duke’ and she took over as Director. And there she set about running a tight, tidy ship, until a young man fifteen years her junior came into her life, reinvigorated her and they pulled off a series of impressive coups. She absorbed first GCHQ, then MI6, finally being promoted to Head of National Security and made a Dame.

There is a building in Whitehall called the Banqueting House. Outside on the pavement of Whitehall, is the site of Charles I’s execution on 30 January 1649. Every few weeks there is a guided tour to explore the history of the Rubens ceiling in the banqueting hall itself, the rest of the time it is used as a conference room. It is to this building Stella chose to relocate her headquarters. The top four floors above the ballroom were refurbished as executive office suites, the thirteen floors underground as various functioning departments. The tunnel on the lowest floor through to the Ministry of Defence was reopened.

This satisfied her sense of rightness. It brought the heads of the three organisations together under one roof with her at the centre for efficiency, it’s proximity to Downing Street was just realpolitik’s and the connection to the MoD a pragmatic acceptance of how war would be waged in future. She also loved the symbolism as being the only place in England a modern monarch had been beheaded.

She still kept a keen eye on active missions and ‘her boys and girls’.

One of those in particular is Janine Fletcher, Jaz to her very close friends, who is currently a field agent, being groomed, though she doesn’t know it, as Stella’s possible replacement one day. In her last assignment she got very close to group of people, then had to suddenly cut all ties, the Barbara she was then ceased to have ever existed. It felt as bad as a bereavement to Janine, so Stella has sent her to the Turks and Caicos Islands for a month to recuperate. She has sent another agent to keep her company.

Sharmi Kapoor trained in the same class as Janine. Not destined for the top, Stella thinks she is an ideal WingWoman for Jaz. She was born in Clapham to Asian parents, is five foot six, thin, bright and bubbly. She waves very expressive hands around when she speaks, which she does a lot.

Stella has a friend who has a beach hut there which cost a fortune, they say it’s very boho but it just basic really. Wooden walls, rattan floor, thatched roof, but it has a bathroom, electricity and a cooking area of sorts. The front of the house fully opens onto a large covered veranda which rests on the sand with the sea twenty metres away. It is just what Janine and Sharmi need for a peaceful stress free break. Janine swims, works on her all over tan whilst Sharmi is already a lovely golden hue, so she just rests and reads. They go to the market every day to buy vegetables and spices, and cook over an open wood fire each night.

They have been there a week when Janine feels relaxed enough to suggest a night out ‘on the pull’ as she puts it. Sharma has been researching. This means a cab trip to the posh bit of Providenciales, and Bugaloo’s Conch Crawl. Sharmi will never eat a conch again.