Boyd pedalled slowly; he kept his distance without losing sight of the thief. The roads were busy, but they were heading south, away from the station, and the cycle lanes were moving freely. Then, without warning, the thief turned left and darted through the entrance to a park. Boyd moved to quickly follow. By the time he had come out the other side of the small park, she was gone; she must have seen him following her. Boyd cursed himself for not being more careful; he cycled around the surrounding streets but there wasn’t any sign of her, she had disappeared without a trace.
He turned a corner by some old viaducts when a pushchair suddenly rolled out from behind a wall and straight in front of his bike. Boyd had been looking the other way and was going way too fast to avoid it. He turned the bike, desperately trying to stop but went through the side of the pushchair, falling on top of it and crashing down onto the ground. Boyd did everything he could not to put his weight down onto to the pushchair, but it was no use, they smashed into the hard concrete together. He rolled over twice and lay on his back for a second, winded and trying to figure out what on earth had just happened. How did a pushchair just appear like that? He suddenly realised he may have hurt someone – oh please let it have been empty.
Boyd scrabbled up onto all fours and saw it, lying on the road, spilling out of a tatty blanket was an old doll with one eye missing and a twisted smile on its face. He heard a robotic laugh coming from the doll and recoiled in dismay.
A pair of shoes came to a stop in front of him. Boyd glanced at them. Shiny, black Doc Marten’s with white laces; He had seen a pair of those shoes already today. His brain quickly flicked through its memory banks and settled on a result: the stairs at the station. Boyd tilted his head up and there in front of him was the woman with the pushchair from Waterloo station; the one who had her handbag stolen. Next to her was the thief.
‘You owe me a pasty,’ the woman said.
Passing the Test
‘So, who are you?’ These had been the first words any of them had said to each other since Boyd had hauled himself up out of the road. At first, they had all stood in silence, weighing each other up. The teenage girl, whom he had assumed was a thief but had clearly been there to lure him away from the station, eyed him suspiciously. Boyd had waited for the other woman, the woman he had assumed was the victim of a bag-snatcher, to say something. This could all still be a trap, he had no idea who he was dealing with, but then, neither did they. He picked small chunks of grit out of his hands and gently sucked at the dots of blood they left behind.
‘You’re just a kid, so who are you?’ the woman asked again.
Boyd guessed she was around 19 or 20 years old. She was a few inches taller than him, with her hair in short curls. She was lean, athletic and wore black leggings and a black vest top. The younger teenager didn’t even look at Boyd; both young women seemed completely unfazed by how bizarre this situation had become.
‘You got my email?’ Boyd asked; it was time to test the water.
‘Maybe,’ the older woman replied, defensively.
Boyd paused, then shook his head and smiled. ‘You’re wasting my time.’ He started towards the bike he had abandoned on the floor.
‘If that’s how you want to play it, why even bother coming?’
He picked up the bike and turned back to the woman. ‘Y’know, people told me you guys were shady and fake, but I wanted to see for myself.’
‘And you think you’ve seen us, do you, bro?’
‘I think I’ve seen enough. You can’t help me.’ Boyd turned the bike around and climbed onto the saddle.
‘I know what happened to her,’ the woman said.
Boyd stopped. ‘You know what happened to who?’
‘You know and I’m not saying her name out here. If you really want to see us, follow me.’
Boyd looked over his shoulder. The teenager had gone, vanished into thin air, and the woman was walking towards a small café which was set into one of the archways in the viaduct. Boyd thought for a second, but it was just for show – he knew he would follow her, he had no other choice, no other leads to follow. It was time to see what FrakeNews could offer him.
As he entered the café, the woman was talking quietly with a bald Italian man who was standing behind the counter, wearing an apron. Boyd couldn’t hear what was said but the man fired him a wary look. She turned to Boyd.
‘This way.’
They went into a storage room filled with large, industrial cans of olive oil and boxes of provisions. There was a small desk covered in paper and folders; the woman pushed a chair towards Boyd, he sat down. She perched on the edge of the desk, just like the Prov always did when he was giving out detentions. It meant she positioned herself above him, it gave her an edge, a sense of authority.
‘So, your mother is wrapped up in this, how?’ the woman asked him.
Boyd frowned. ‘It’s my dad, and he’s missing.’
‘Right. And you said your aunt is helping you?’
Boyd took a deep breath. ‘Look, you know I didn’t say that and if you’d have wanted me to prove I am the person who wrote to you, you should have given me a codeword or something. As it is, your pasty and magazine are sitting on the floor by a bench in Waterloo station because I thought someone was being robbed and I tried to help. But seeing as there was a homeless guy next to me, I wouldn’t have my heart set on getting the pasty back in one piece.’
The woman was quiet for a moment. She looked Boyd up and down, taking everything in. Despite having spent a couple of nights at Fitz’s house, he was totally exhausted, and utterly desperate; it must have shown.
‘Okay,’ she said with a straight face. ‘We tagged you the moment you arrived and wanted to see what kind of person you are, so we staged the theft. We call it the “White Knight” test, and you passed. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m Skye.’ She held out her hand.
‘Boyd.’ He took it and they shook.
‘Let’s get you a brew, and we can talk.’
‘We’ve got a hit!’
Elliot Jagger put down his forkful of pancakes and responded to the urgent bleep coming from one of the computers in the Hive. He had set it up the night before, using what he considered his two most innovative creations. First, he had used a programme to drift through the cracks in MI5’s computer network and pinch CCTV footage; he called it Pick Pocket. If Elliot wanted to take a little look at something a government or corporation had on their system, as long as it had been saved to the victim’s network or shared with someone, Pick Pocket allowed him to digitally enter unnoticed and take a copy without leaving a footprint. As it downloaded the recent CCTV footage from all major cities and transport hubs in the UK, his facial-recognition software, Face Trace, began to search through it for Boyd’s likeness; and now, huddled in front of the monitor, they were looking straight at him.
‘When and where,’ Hornet demanded. She was bent over the desk like a vampire about to sink her teeth into her prey.
Elliot hit some keys. ‘Waterloo Station, the platform 10 camera at 7.58 am this morning.’ They all checked the time; it was almost nine; they were an hour behind him.
‘Now it knows his face, it will find him again, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not the one who should be worried. How long to find him?’
‘It should be almost instantaneous,’ Elliot said, adding a little dash of caution to his statement because, right now, Face Trace had not found any other hits.
‘And yet, here we are,’ Hornet hissed.
‘Maybe your computer is stupid,’ Bull said, as if it was a valid point that needed to be made.
Elliot turned his chair slightly to face the no-neck Russian. ‘Ah, of course, you’re right!’ he responded sarcastically. ‘I shouldn’t have run it on the computer I modelled on your brain.’
‘How about I smash it over your head, and we see if it works then, huh?’
Hornet had heard enough. ‘Children,’
she said sharply. ‘I’ve done enough babysitting over the last few years.’ She looked at the frozen image of Boyd’s face on the screen. He was walking down the platform, towards the station. ‘The software clearly isn’t the issue. It’s only found his face once, which can only mean one thing: he’s hiding. Run this on from the point he exits the platform and you’ll find that he puts his hood up. So, all we need to do is follow the movement of the hooded boy via the cameras. It’s not the perfect solution, Mr Jagger, but it’s hardly rocket science. Sometimes, even the most effective predators must adapt. Get on with it.’
Elliot hit play and they watched Boyd approach the ticket barrier and pull his hood up over his face. He flashed a look at Hornet, her mouth turned up in one corner as she licked her thin lips like a hungry lizard about to snatch an unsuspecting fly.
She looked at the screen as the hunched figure of a teenage boy was swallowed up by the huge rush-hour crowd at Waterloo Station. He might be an hour ahead of them, but he was alone, he was rattled and he would be desperate. ‘Good,’ she thought.
Elliot brought up a new feed from a camera inside the station and scanned the sea of people, looking for their target. Hornet tapped the screen with the sharp point of the ‘T’ on her ring, highlighting a hooded figure moving slowly through the crowd.
‘And we’re back in the game.’
Frake HQ
Skye got up and walked to the side wall. She stood in front of a shelf containing jars of pickles and tubs of flour, put her hands on either side of the shelves and pushed; the shelf and the wall popped outwards on a hinge to reveal a dark corridor. She turned, squared up to Boyd and held up a finger.
‘Know this,’ she jutted her chin towards him in defiance. ‘I’m about to show you a level of trust that most don’t get anywhere near because I can see that you’re alone, scared and I think we can help each other. But just as I trust you, you trust me when I tell you to tread carefully, and if you betray me, even for your own noble reasons, I will end you. Do you get me?’
Boyd was transfixed. Skye’s brown eyes were filled with conviction and left him in no doubt where he stood. He nodded. ‘Sure.’
She stood aside and ushered him through the doorway. He stepped into a short, narrow corridor that was lit by one light fixed to a socket on the red brick wall. Thick dust clogged in his throat when he breathed in; he pulled his hoodie up and around his mouth. Skye closed the secret door behind them and walked to a small door at the end of the corridor. She tapped in a code on a keypad and Boyd heard a loud ‘THUNK’ as the bolts retracted. Boyd followed her into a new space, eager to get out of the confinement of the hallway.
It was a vast open space made entirely of brick, down to the curved, arched ceilings; they were inside the railway viaducts. The place was massive, with sections divided up by wooden walls. Two old Land Rovers and a selection of mopeds and bicycles sat to their left, and metal racks on the wall displayed helmets, motorbike leathers, jackets, skateboards – basically every transport option you could want to get across London in a hurry.
Beyond the vehicles stood nine long metal dining tables with benches attached, and to the left of these a wooden partition built against the back wall housed a large kitchen. Inside, a few people were busying themselves with kettles and pans, getting breakfast started. They moved through the dining tables and towards a wooden partition that stretched the whole width of the building. Skye stood aside and motioned with her hand for Boyd to go through. ‘Welcome to FrakeNews.’
Boyd stepped through the doorway into pretty much the coolest place he had ever seen. He suddenly thought how it was probably a good thing that Fitz wasn’t here because they’d never be able to get him to leave. In front of him were metal racks filled with servers that formed a walkway. Once beyond it, he saw around 20 metal desks that looked like they had been put together with whatever someone could find dumped by the side of a railway line. The chairs were all different: some were office chairs with chunks of foam missing from the back or the seat, others were old dining room chairs that someone had clearly thrown away because they had seen better days. No one here had made any effort to give them a new coat of paint, or repair them, they just used them.
There was a set of stairs in the middle of the room and another set in the far corner; the upper levels looked like those portacabins you get on building sites. Skye headed towards the stairs in the far corner and Boyd followed. His eyes were searching the desks and the monitor screens as he walked through, desperate to see something that might give him a clue as to what Skye and her boss knew about Miranda, but he saw nothing. It was still early and there wasn’t a huge amount of activity in the office right now, if you could even really call it an office.
Skye led them upstairs and into a small room with an old, tatty sofa, a dining chair and a coffee table. She sat in the dining chair and pointed him over to the sofa. There was a door to his left and the young ‘thief’ from the train station came through it, carrying a tray. She put it down on the coffee table.
‘Thanks, Teela,’ Skye said. The tray carried two cups of tea and a packet of Penguin biscuits on it.
‘Thank god’, Boyd thought; he was starving. ‘May I?’ he said, pointing to the Penguins.
‘Go for it.’
He tore open the packet, took one, opened the wrapper and hoovered up the bar in an instant. He washed it down with a sip of the hot tea. ‘So, how does your boss get away with having a kid like that working for FrakeNews?’
Skye raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, strictly speaking, Teela doesn’t work for FrakeNews, and as for my boss,’ she paused, ‘I think you need to forget anything you think you might know about us.’
‘But you are going to help me, right? You wanted to know about what happened to me, about my dad.’ Boyd suddenly had an awful feeling that he was wasting precious time.
‘Boyd, relax. Let me explain.’
Relaxing was the last thing on his mind. He fought the urge to tip the table over and scream that he needed her to stop stalling and give him some answers. He took a breath and grabbed another Penguin. If he wanted to make any kind of progress, he had to trust Skye.
‘Okay, I’m listening.’
‘This is all me, everything you see around you and everything you watch on YouTube.’ Boyd looked at her quizzically. ‘The underground news organisation that the government and big business wants to silence – you’re looking at it.’ Skye held her hands out. She wasn’t being arrogant; she was almost apologetic, as if Boyd would be disappointed in the news. ‘I started putting it all together two years ago. I took in kids from the streets, people who had nothing and no one they could rely on and I put a roof over their head. If you go up those other stairs, there are rooms and beds; we all live here.’
‘All?’
‘There’s about 20 of us; all young women with nowhere else to go. We all have skills that drive our cause forward. Teela can climb up a drainpipe, get through an open window and be gone before you even know it.’
‘Well, I nearly caught her,’ Boyd smirked.
‘Yeah, because she let you. Kelsey is our mechanic, Delilah is our bodyguard. But our secret weapon is, every one of them is at home on the London streets, and we all know how to be someone that everyone else ignores. Who remembers the person sat in the doorway asking for spare change, huh?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Right, and we use that to fight against those people who stepped over us on pavements and had us thrown out of shop doorways night after night.’
‘But how do you have…’ He waved his hands around, gesturing at the building they were sat in. ‘… all of this. How can you?’
‘Daddy was rich. I never knew him, he didn’t accept me when I was born and my mother died, so I ended up in care, then on the streets. When my father died, turns out, he left me a few quid. They found me when I was admitted to hospital with an appendicitis.’ Skye stopped and for a moment, it looked like she was fighting back tears. ‘I never wanted his mo
ney, I wanted a dad - but I can certainly take what he gave me and use it for something good.’
She paused again. Then, she slapped her hands down on her knees, ending the topic of conversation. ‘So, that’s my history. Now it’s your turn. It’s about time you told me how you’re linked to Miranda Capshaw.’
Boyd told Skye everything, from the attack on Aurora’s van, the phone call between Aurora and his dad, right up to arranging their meeting at Waterloo. When he was finished, she asked him some questions about his dad.
Boyd told her that Martin worked for a logistics company called Hurricane. He didn’t know what it was exactly that his dad did or even where the office was; he said Martin went away quite a bit for business.
‘I think you need to get your head around the fact that your dad’s wrapped up in this somehow,’ Skye said, trying to tread gently. She had already picked up on Boyd’s tendency to react to a tricky situation by letting his emotions get away from him. He had done a reasonable job of gritting his teeth and holding it in so far, but Skye knew that talking about his dad’s involvement might just provoke him. ‘And if you’re right, and Miranda Capshaw is at the centre of this, then I reckon we can help each other.’
‘You’ll help me find her?’
Skye tilted her head to one side. ‘Well, it’s not like on TV, where the good guys just follow a trail and it leads somewhere. There’s a load of threads we could pull at here, some will get us nowhere and some of them will mean trouble. It’s about knowing which one is going to get us closer to the truth. In our vlog about Miranda, we mentioned the power surges that had been happening, right? The thing is, we didn’t put everything we know in those videos. I’ve got a team member who is in contact with three scientists inside three different governments and the reality behind these surges will blow your mind. Honestly, we could release this stuff and people would go ballistic; it would cause someone somewhere a proper headache.’
‘So why don’t you? Force them to answer you, make them tell the truth!’
Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1 Page 13
