With the element of surprise and Fitz’s brilliant disguise, Boyd would never see him coming. He thought about how he would do it, maybe he would cross the park in front of the café, then pretend he wanted a coffee. He would purchase his beverage, then walk over to Boyd at the table and say, ‘Is this seat taken?’ before pulling the sunglasses down and revealing his identity – magic!
Fitz had barely been under the cover of the trees for a minute before Tinker started to whine. The Tork family dog wasn’t a fan of stopping when he was out on a walk and he didn’t mind letting you know it. ‘Tinker, stop moaning,’ Fitz whispered as he carefully scanned the park. Tinker declined the request and increased the volume. ‘Come on, sausage, give me a break for two minutes, eh?’ Fitz looked down at his dog’s little golden face.
But Tinker wasn’t looking out at the wide-open space of the Rec, he was looking at the Scout hut behind them. Fitz turned as he realised someone was watching him but before he could get his head around to see who it was, he heard Boyd’s voice.
‘Is that meant to be a disguise?’
‘No,’ Fitz said defiantly.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Boyd said with a smile. ‘That’s you, incognito?’
‘Listen, do you want my help or not?’ Fitz said, finally turning to look at Boyd. When he did, he stopped dead and his mouth dropped open. Boyd was dressed in his hoodie and tracksuit bottoms; both were completely filthy, stained and dotted with rips and tears. ‘Crikey! You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!’ Fitz exclaimed.
‘Yeah, well, I ran through it forwards actually.’ Boyd let out a small laugh from under his hood. Just visible, on his forehead, was a purple lump.
‘What the hell happened to you?’
‘It’s a really long story and I’m still trying to piece it together myself. Did you see the news about an illegal party on Bloomfield Beach last night?’
Boyd had used Pixie’s iPad to search the online news sites to see if there had been any reports about the gunfight on the beach. That’s when he found that the police had made a statement about a rave that had turned into a fight; so whoever had chased them had somehow covered up the truth.
‘Yeah, something about a fire and kids tearing around on motorbikes. What about it?’
‘It wasn’t kids. It wasn’t a party.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I was there, Fitz; I was the guest of honour. Someone tried to kill us – me and Aurora – and I have no idea why. I really need your help.’
‘Tried to kill you? Holy crap! Um, yeah of course, come back to mine and we can sort this out.’
‘I can’t, Fitz. I have to stay out of sight until I know what the hell is going on.’
‘It’ll be fine. My parents barely know if I’m in the house, so I can get you in and out without them noticing. But if you want my help, I need to know everything. Don’t leave anything out, okay?’
‘Okay. And Fitz, about the other day at school…’
‘Forget it.’
Boyd nodded, relieved. ‘What are friends for, eh?’ he said, raising his fist.
Fitz lifted his and bumped it against Boyd’s. ‘Exactly.’
Full of Surprises
It turned out that getting into Fitz’s house without his parents’ knowledge was the easiest thing Boyd had done in the last 48 hours. Despite it being a Saturday, his dad was at work and his mum was in her cabin office in the garden. Fitz pressed an intercom attached to the kitchen wall and linked up with his mum’s office. There was a buzzing noise, then his mum answered.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m just going to have a shower, whack some washing on, then I’ll make some noodles,’ Fitz had said.
‘Your dad and I are having spag bol later – you don’t want any, then?’ Marjorie had replied, clearly unhappy with her son’s dinner plans.
‘No, thanks,’ Fitz replied and cut off the conversation.
Fitz’s mum and dad had a shower room in their bedroom, which meant that Fitz had the main shower room in the house to himself. Boyd cleaned himself up and got back into Fitz’s room as quickly as possible because he didn’t want to risk getting caught. Fitz had laid out some clothes on his bed for him to try on. He was quite a bit taller and wider than Fitz, who had pinched some clothes from his dad’s wardrobe. Boyd went for the plain items, swerving T-shirts emblazoned with Guns ‘n’ Roses tour dates or images of Elton John’s face. When Fitz came in with the noodles, Boyd was sat on the bed in a plain grey T-shirt and a pair of old, faded black jeans that were ripped at the knee.
‘Dad used to wear those to gigs,’ Fitz said, as Boyd pulled on the jeans. ‘But mum says he’s too old for them now. He won’t miss them.’
They would go well with his trainers, and Fitz had washed his hoodie, which was hanging to dry under a heat lamp. Fitz handed over a huge bowl of steaming noodles. He had thrown in some chicken and, by the smell of it, spiced everything up a bit with some chilli. Boyd looked at the bowl and then cast his eyes around Fitz’s rather special bedroom. ‘You really are full of surprises, Fitz.’
‘You’re not exactly a choirboy yourself, mate!’ Fitz laughed.
Boyd had told him everything on the walk from the Rec to the house: his dad going away, the attack at Aurora’s place and all the weird goings-on that followed.
‘How did you even get out of Pixie’s car without them seeing you?’ Fitz had asked.
‘They left the hotel so early, they didn’t have breakfast,’ Boyd explained. ‘Pixie and her brother moaned every time they went past a service station on the motorway until her dad finally gave up and stopped. I got out when they went in for McDonald’s.’
There was a moment of silence as they both concentrated on eating their food. Boyd’s mind began to tick over, there was so much of what had happened that just didn’t make sense to him, but what bothered him most was the nagging doubt about his aunt; he couldn’t shake it off. When he was lying down in the back of Pixie’s car, Boyd had wondered if he had been paranoid and perhaps a little harsh on Aurora. Maybe she was acting so out of character because she was just reacting to an exceptional situation. But when he had repeated everything to Fitz and ran it over in his head, he knew that something wasn’t right. The phone call to his dad, lying to Harry, the way she totally changed in front of his eyes; he had done the right thing getting away from her, from both of them. He had no idea what his dad was caught up in, but he would find the truth the only way he knew how – by doing it himself.
‘She called him what?’ Fitz had asked when Boyd told him about Aurora’s phone call with his dad.
‘Caretaker.’
‘What the hell is all that about?’
‘I don’t know, but I think I have a way of finding out – and that’s where you come in.’
When dinner was finished, Fitz put the bowls on the cabinet next to his bed, alongside an existing stash that featured three mugs, two plates and several items of cutlery. Each sported the remains of a previous meal in varying degrees of mutation. Boyd looked at the pile and thought how his dad had reacted the one and only time he had collected a similar pile: he had placed it neatly under Boyd’s duvet. Boyd had found it when he climbed into bed. Parents were all different, just like kids, he supposed.
Fitz had pulled over a small stool and Boyd was sat next to him, in front of his array of monitors. ‘So, this Miranda person who went missing from the plane – you have no idea who she is?’ Fitz asked as he tapped his top lip with a pen.
‘No.’
‘And your dad gave no hint as to knowing her or anything about her situation?’
‘We’ve been over this; none.’ Boyd sounded antsy.
‘Okay, chill out,’ Fitz replied, in his high-pitched, anxious tone. ‘It’s worth asking again just in case some memory has been nudged loose now you’ve had some rest.’ He tapped the pen on the desk. ‘It’s knowing where to start. Without any information or a sniff of a lead, it’s going to be needle-in-
a-haystack time. And he didn’t even react when you watched the video on FrakeNews?’
Boyd thought for a moment, then sat bolt upright.
‘That’s it!’
‘What? Come on, share with the group.’
‘FrakeNews! They did the report on this Miranda Capshaw, they found her name before the government scrubbed it off the flight records – so, our starting point is whoever is behind FrakeNews!’
‘Okay, I can see two problems with that straight away,’ Fitz said in a serious tone. ‘Firstly, why would they want to talk to us, we’re just a couple of kids? And secondly, how do we find them? The whole point of FrakeNews is that no one ever finds them.’
Boyd considered the questions. ‘Let’s park problem number one for a second and jump straight to problem number two.’
‘Be my guest.’
‘There’s that cryptic message at the end of every FrakeNews video about, “If you have something that might be FrakeNews… blah blah blah.” So, bring up a video, let’s listen to it.’
Fitz opened YouTube and selected a random FrakeNews video. It was the vlog from ten days ago about the unexplained power surges that had occurred all around the world.
‘Skip to the end,’ Boyd said.
‘I’m on it.’ Fitz clicked the arrow on the last minute of the video. He nudged it along to the last 20 seconds and found what they were looking for. The clip from the intro theme played in reverse, beginning with an explosion that drew inward and ended up as the clock on the Houses of Parliament. The mechanical voice spoke over the scene.
‘If you have any information or a story that you think could be FrakeNews, go back to where it all started and find the time.’
Fitz hit pause and stopped for a moment.
‘What do you think?’ Boyd asked.
‘Give me a sec,’ he replied, waving his hand in the air as he was trying to think. He played the message again and scribbled on a pad next to his keyboard. Boyd looked down at it and saw that Fitz had written ‘back to start’ and ‘find the time.’ ‘Okay, so they are probably not going to make this too difficult. Let’s face it, they want people to send them information.’
‘Right,’ Boyd replied. ‘And I think it’s probably going to be an email or something secure, right? Because that way, they can pick and choose what stories they want to follow up.’
‘Exactly. They can filter it.’
‘Makes sense.’ Boyd looked at the pad again. ‘So let’s go back to the start of the video and see what we can find, maybe?’
Fitz set the video back to the beginning. They watched the opening theme but neither of them saw anything that stood out. He went back to the start and they watched it a second time.
‘Okay,’ Fitz said over a long exhale. ‘So, this is the beginning and there’s a clock.’
‘Which fits in with, “find the time”.’
‘Right, but even when I pause it, there’s nothing visible here. I don’t know, maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree.’
Something clicked in Boyd’s eyes; they opened wide and he raised an index finger. ‘Hang on, go to the FrakeNews channel page and open the first video they ever posted,’ he said, excitedly.
‘The what?’
‘Their first video. It’s not a report like all the others, it’s about what they stand for and why we all have a duty to question facts we’re told and stuff. It’s got a different name. I can’t remember now. Bring it up.’
Fitz closed the video and scrolled down through the long list of FrakeNews reports, over a year’s worth, before getting to the first-ever post on the channel. There it was: the video was called ‘FrakeNews – everything they don’t want you to know’. Fitz opened it and the usual titles began to roll.
‘Stop it there!’ Boyd said and Fitz hit the button on his mouse. ‘Can you zoom in on the clock face?’ Boyd asked.
‘Yep, hang on.’ Fitz took a screen grab of the image and then moved it over onto his MacBook and opened an app called Clean Screen. He carefully clicked all over the image as he expanded it, bringing sections of it into focus without worrying about the other areas.
‘Can you see it?’ Boyd asked.
‘Yeah, I can see it’s there, but I need to clean it up. Hang on.’ After a minute of careful manipulation, there it was on the screen in front of them: on the second hand of the clock was an email address. Fitz already had one of his many Gmail accounts open and had copied the address into the addressee field. ‘Now we get back to our first problem.’ He turned to Boyd. ‘What makes you think they are going to listen to a couple of teenagers with a wild story about hired gunmen on motorbikes tearing up Bloomfield?’
‘It isn’t a problem,’ Boyd said, waving for Fitz to pass him the keyboard so he could type the email.
‘Oh, it isn’t? I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Fitz. They’re the only ones investigating these power surges; they’re the only ones talking about a woman who has vanished into thin air. And now my dad gets snatched or something whilst he’s looking for her? They’re not just going to listen to us, they’re going to help us.’
The Waiting Game
Fitz’s dad got in late. Fitz went downstairs to say goodnight to him and his mum, and when he came back up, he arranged a sleeping bag and pillow on the floor for Boyd.
Much to Boyd’s frustration, they still hadn’t had a reply from anyone at FrakeNews. He had felt like they were making progress but now it was all in someone else’s hands and he didn’t deal well with that arrangement. He felt for sure that FrakeNews would leap at the chance to meet him and hear his story, then he would convince them that they should work together to find out where Miranda Capshaw had disappeared to. Fitz had set up an alert on his phone for the email account he had used to message them, but all was silent.
It was one o’clock on Sunday morning and Boyd was finding it impossible to sleep. He was sitting on the floor in the dim light given off from the various electronics in Fitz’s room. Fitz was fast asleep, letting out the occasional snort as he rolled over. Boyd was doing the only thing he could think of to keep moving this forward: he tried to piece together everything that had happened since Friday night.
It felt like he was in the centre of a drama, and the only one without a script – like he was surrounded by secrets, all kept by the only people he had ever really trusted and now he was alone, without a clue as to why. He’d always had a sense of being detached from the people around him. What had Fitz called it? The ‘iceman’ act. But it wasn’t an act and Boyd didn’t seem to know how to fix it without feeling like a fraud. He was who he was because of the way he’d been brought up. He had never had a close bond with his dad, not in the same way other kids did. Whenever they were on holiday or out somewhere and they saw other families and the way they interacted with each other, Boyd and Martin always instinctively looked away. Boyd used to convince himself that the thing they were missing was his mother, but deep down, he knew it was more than that.
His mother had died giving birth to him, so he had never known her. His father didn’t like talking about her and she didn’t have any family, so for a long time it had felt like there was a huge piece of his life missing. His dad hadn’t been able to look after him at first, so he had lived in some kind of children’s home until he was five. He didn’t really have any clear memories of that time, just tiny fragments, like blurred photographs, nothing he could really grab hold of and call his own.
Boyd had found that the best way to deal with being different was to just accept it, get on with things and not care about anyone else. He had never felt hard done-by; he had never felt jealous of other kids or like he had missed out. In fact, he had always felt lucky for the life he had, until now. Now he was angry and, without Fitz, he would have felt utterly lost and alone. But he knew that his dad had always done his best for him and now it was Boyd’s turn to step up and do something for his dad. He had to believe that whatever he was involved in, he wouldn’t keep anything from Boyd unless
he absolutely had to.
Fitz stirred and rolled over. ‘What’s up?’ he asked Boyd.
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘Is it the rubbish pillows?’
Boyd chuckled. ‘No, it’s not the pillows. I’ve just got too much stuff going on in my head, that’s all.’ He stood up and went to Fitz’s workbench.
Fitz climbed out of bed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. ‘I do all my best work when I can’t sleep,’ he said, picking up one of the radio-controlled cars.
Boyd inspected one of the loose wheels from the bench. ‘Oh, weird,’ he said shuffling it in his hand to hold it by the hub. ‘What’s that on the tyres?’
‘Just a little something I’ve been working on.’ Fitz picked up a pencil, leant forward and brushed it along the surface of the tyre. Boyd could see 100s of fine hairs moving and fluctuating under the pressure of the pencil.
‘You know how a spider…’
The phone vibrated on the bed where Fitz had left it. Boyd snapped his head around, his eyes flared open. Fitz threw down the pencil and dropped into the chair in front of the computer. He tapped the keys, his hawk-like eyes focused on the screen as he accessed the email account. Then the side of his mouth raised in a smile. He looked at Boyd.
‘Monday morning, Waterloo Station. We’re on, mate.’
A Hornet’s Sting
You only ever had a meeting in Lord Ravensbrook’s private office in Lockmead House if there was something very right or something very wrong. Unfortunately for those currently gathered, waiting patiently for His Lordship to arrive, something was very wrong indeed. This was his inner sanctum; this was where Ravensbrook could truly be himself, drop the act he put on for the public and indulge his true passions and desires without any concern for judgement. In this room, the decisions that shaped everything His Lordship had worked towards for almost 20 years had been made and witnessed by only his most trusted team of lieutenants.
Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1 Page 10
