by Greg James
‘Say no more, young Normal,’ he said. ‘Diversion is my middle name. Actually, it isn’t. MY MIDDLE NAME,’ he revealed, ‘IS IAIN.’
‘Hang on,’ said Billy. ‘I thought Iain was your first name.’
‘It is,’ said Mr Flash. ‘My middle name’s Iain too. I was named after my grandads, and they were …’
‘… both called Iain,’ finished Murph for him.
‘Yuss,’ confirmed Mr Iain Iain Flash. ‘But, just for today, my middle name is not Iain. It is, as I previously outlined, Diversion.’
Outside, the TV presenters were holding up a remote control unit. ‘When I press this button,’ the man was telling the crowd, ‘this dangerous machine will be destroyed, for the glory of President Knox.’ There was a cheer at the name.
‘Any time you’re ready, Mr Flash,’ whispered Murph tensely, ‘or we’ll be trying to fly out of here in a very flat Banshee.’
‘There’s not much legroom as it is,’ Billy pointed out.
‘Right,’ said Mr Flash determinedly. There was a slight whoosh as he activated his super-speed Capability once more, and within a split second he had reappeared right at the end of the line of reporters.
‘OVER ’ERE, YOU BLIMMIN’ BRAINWASHED BLIMPS!’ he yelled. The crowd turned to see where the noise was coming from. ‘NICHOLAS KNOX IS A SLIMY TOERAG!’ continued Mr Flash, warming to his theme. He began to leap up and down blowing raspberries, sticking his thumbs in his large ears and waggling his fingers.
‘Well, it’s not the most sophisticated diversion I’ve ever seen,’ said Murph matter-of-factly, ‘but it does seem to be working.’
‘Seize the abnormal!’ shouted one of the Cleaners, but as they began to run towards Mr Flash, he blurred and vanished, appearing behind them and shouting ‘Keep up, you bunch of bargain-bin beetroots!’ while sticking a hand beneath his armpit and making rude noises.
‘Let’s go!’ Murph told the other Zeroes. ‘Keep low, and get to the Banshee!’ One by one, they dashed out of the front doors of The School, ducking their heads and racing towards the car. Murph could hear Mr Flash still taunting the Cleaners as they went, now sounding like he was somewhere over to their left again.
‘HA! GOT YOUR NOSE!’ he was yelling as he flashed past one of the Cleaners, tweaking as he went. A large TV camera started spinning around and crashed to the floor as he kicked at it with a large black boot. The crowd was dissolving into panic, with reporters’ notebooks flying and Cleaners running to and fro seemingly at random as they tried to keep track of Mr Flash.
‘This is exactly the sort of chaos these abnormals like to cause,’ Julia Reynolds was saying. ‘This is what our wonderful President wants to stamp out. All hail Nicholas Knox!’
Nellie was the first to reach the Banshee. She opened the hatch at the back of the car and climbed inside. ‘Hurry up!’ she urged Murph over her shoulder. ‘We don’t want to be here when they drop that weight on us!’ Murph’s insides quailed at the thought of it, but before he could follow her through the hatch there was a shout from behind them. It was Ben Boxall.
‘Look! It’s those kids! They’re trying to—’
He was cut off mid-sentence as Mr Flash reached him and knocked him flying. But the damage had been done.
‘Stop them!’ yelled another Cleaner. ‘Ignore the shouting bald man and stop those children!’
‘YOU SMELL LIKE A DONKEY’S HOOF WHEN IT’S JUST STEPPED ON A PRAWN!’ bellowed Mr Flash, desperately trying to keep his diversion going.
‘He’s definitely been on his own for too long,’ sighed Hilda, popping her horses into existence to keep a knot of reporters at bay. They had been running to try and head her off but seemed horrified by her Capability, backing away from the tiny horses and looking scared. ‘Yeah, you better run!’ crowed Hilda as Artax and Epona pawed the ground and bared their teeth in fury.
Murph glanced over his shoulder to see a burly Cleaner grab Mary from behind. She lifted her umbrella over her head, hitting him in the face and managing to wriggle free.
‘Come on, let’s go!’ Murph yelled at her, diving through the hatch.
Inside, Nellie was already at the controls. Blinking lights had lit up across the dashboard, and Murph heard the jets begin to whine as Billy and Hilda followed him through the door, followed a split second later by Mary, all struggling to catch their breath. With horror, Murph heard the TV presenters shouting to each other outside.
‘Press the button! Crush it!’
‘There are children inside!’
‘It doesn’t matter! They’re abnormals! Crush them! Crush them!’
The crowd picked up the chant: ‘Crush … them. Crush … them.’
‘Nellie,’ said Murph desperately, ‘how long before we can take off?’
‘Any second …’ said Nellie tersely, her eyes on the dials in front of her. There was a blur in the cabin and Mr Flash appeared.
‘Good diversion, eh?’ he said, looking hot and sweaty but rather pleased with himself. ‘Did you hear what I said about the donkey? Why do you all look so nervous?’
‘Crush … them,’ chanted the crowd.
‘Oh … very well,’ snapped the TV host, slamming his finger down on the remote control.
At that exact second, the Banshee’s jets ignited. With a roar, the silver-blue car shot into the air just as the concrete block plummeted towards it. There was a huge clang and a shower of sparks as the edge of the block caught the open hatch at the back. The car jolted sickeningly, but managed to pull clear.
Within seconds they were safely away, roaring through thick cloud with The School far behind them.
‘That was what you might call unpleasantly close,’ said Billy, mopping his brow. ‘Nice work with the horses, Hilda.’
‘Thanks,’ Hilda replied. ‘Your umbrella came in handy too, Mary. Hang on …’ She leaned over the back of her seat. ‘Where is it?’
‘Where’s what?’ Mary replied.
‘Er … your umbrella?’
Mary looked down at her belt. ‘Oh,’ she said casually, ‘I don’t know. I must have dropped it. Never mind, I’ll get another one.’
There was the tiniest of pauses before Murph spoke. ‘OK,’ he told her, ‘we’ll pick you up a new one. Anyway – we rescued the Banshee. Let’s get back to base and see if Carl can fix that hatch.’
15
The Coppergate File
There was a shimmer in the air as Nellie expertly landed the Banshee in the courtyard of Perkins Dairy. Murph realised they must have passed through Carl’s Displacement Field. He relaxed. They were hidden from view.
As the ramp opened, the three leaders of the Rebellion came out of the ice-cream kitchen, beaming with pride. Carl emerged from the garages, holding a rag with which he’d been giving the Lean Mean Dairy Queen a quick polish.
‘Good the see the old girl again,’ said the old man fondly, giving the silvery-blue car an affectionate stroke on the bonnet.
‘Well done,’ said Murph’s mum, coming forward to give him a hug. ‘And it looks like you’ve brought someone with you?’ She peered over his shoulder.
Mr Flash appeared at the top of the Banshee’s ramp, still covered in mud, and with – Murph noticed for the first time – a twig stuck behind one of his ears. ‘I’M BACK!’ he announced as he descended grandly. ‘No autographs, thank you. Yes, yes, I know you’re all pleased to see me.’
‘Rest for now,’ Murph’s mum told him, rolling her eyes slightly at Mr Flash’s antics. ‘Then tomorrow, we’ll talk about our next steps. Lara’s got some interesting information on that computer you recovered from Ribbon.’
A little while later, in the Presidential Palace, Nicholas Knox was enjoying a short nap on his silken-sheeted bed when a small pinging noise awoke him. He padded over to a desk, tucking his feet into some black satin slippers as he went, and pressed a button on a computer terminal.
A screen fizzed to life, showing the green letters:
ENCRYPTED
TRA
NSMISSION –
PRESIDENTIAL EYES
ONLY – ACCEPT?
Knox pressed his thumb on to a small scanner unit.
There was a flash of light and the message changed to read:
ACCEPTED –
STAND BY …
The screen was filled with grey and white static, then a picture slowly formed. A sharp-nosed face framed by severe black hair appeared.
‘Come in, Knoxy. Knoxy, do you read me please? Overs,’ said Kopy Kat’s voice, distorting slightly over the airwaves.
‘President Knox receiving.’
‘Mission success!’ said Kopy Kat, pursing her red lips in triumph. ‘I have infiltrated the headquarters of the Rebellion. Nobody seems to suspect I am not who they think I am. All is wonderful and I am very, very clever I think.’
Knox rubbed his hands together in delight. ‘You certainly are,’ he said smoothly. ‘Where is the headquarters?
‘Is ice-cream factory type of dairy,’ replied Kopy Kat. ‘The ice cream is really excellent. Cake mixture and broken biscuit pieces is to die for! I had three bowls’ full this afternoon. If we ever decide to leave the villain business, we should market this stuff. It’s delicious!’
Knox pursed his lips in triumph. ‘Those idiots are totally unaware you are in their very midst,’ he told her smugly.
‘Very midst, what is this please?’
Knox was irritated. ‘You are in their very midst’ was a very villainous thing to say and he had hugely enjoyed it. ‘In their midst,’ he explained, ‘in the middle of them, you know?’
‘Ah, so midst is middle?’
‘Yes,’ snapped Knox, who didn’t want his moment of evil triumph to morph into a vocabulary lesson. ‘Midst … midst.’ (It’s one of those words that sounds weirder the more you say it. Give it a go now – say ‘midst’ twenty times out loud in quick succession. Knox was very keen to not have to say ‘midst’ any more.) ‘You have done excellently well, my pretty little Kat,’ he told her.
Kopy Kat made a small pleased noise that sounded a little like a miaow, even though she was not actually a cat.
‘Ensure nobody identifies you, though,’ he cautioned her. ‘Report to me whenever you can, and before long we shall smash this rebellion like … a ripe potato.’ He grimaced. It wasn’t one of his finest evil lines but the repetition of the word ‘midst’ had rattled him.
‘Over, out, and message understanded,’ confirmed Kopy Kat. ‘I shall be your – what is the expression … ?’ Knox rolled his eyes. ‘Your cuckoo in the grass, yes? A snake in the nest.’ The screen went blank as she disconnected.
Knox leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and smiling a smile as oily as a pair of greased worms. ‘The cuckoo in the grass,’ he murmured to himself smugly, before angrily correcting himself. ‘Nest!’
As soon as Kid Normal was defeated, he thought to himself, he would get Kopy Kat some intensive language training.
*
The next morning, the Rebellion held another council of war in the ice-cream kitchen. The three leaders sat along the head of the table.
Lara Lee was on the right. She had set up the black computer unit from Ribbon Robotics in front of them, with a thick cable connecting it to a monitor screen on the counter. The Super Zeroes were arranged around the middle of the long wooden table and Carl, Flora and Angel sat along the other end. Flora’s leg was still in plaster but she was able to get around quite well on crutches by now.
‘I won’t be kicking any bad guys in the face for another week or so,’ she had told Murph, ‘but I can’t bear being cooped up in bed any longer! Not when there’s a revolution to plan.’
Murph’s mum began the meeting. ‘Mr Flash is currently being debriefed,’ she told them. ‘The first rule still has to be: Trust nobody. Knox is clever, we know that. We also know he has Kopy Kat on his side. We won’t allow Flash to become a real part of the team until we can be one hundred per cent sure he hasn’t been mind-controlled – and that he is who he says he is. We don’t want a spy planted right in the middle of the Rebellion.’
‘Midst,’ said Mary to herself.
‘Yes, midst if you prefer,’ said Murph’s mum, looking at her quizzically. ‘Lara?’
Lara Lee pressed a button on the computer, and tapped at the keyboard. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told them, seeing their anxious expressions. ‘This screen is a closed system – it’s only connected to this terminal. There’s no way Knox could hack into it. You need to see what you recovered from Ribbon Robotics, because the information on this is utterly invaluable.’
A series of thumbnail images appeared on the screen as Lara went on. ‘We now know that Knox was indeed running Nektar’s spy drones, as you suspected. And in the weeks leading up to the attack, he was learning a great deal about The School.’
Murph got up and walked over to the screen to see the images more clearly. They all showed different scenes of life at school. Lessons, break time … One showed the chef, Bill Burton, in his kitchen. There was Mr Souperman in his office, and Mr Flash shouting at a class of third years outside the games pavilion.
‘Knox seems to have become fascinated with the world of Heroes,’ Lara went on, tapping more buttons. ‘We found some search history and a few journal entries he made. He also tried to hack into Government servers to discover if there was any official information to be had about the Heroes’ Alliance. But the most useful information is stored deep within this server.’
She tapped again and an icon appeared, with the words CLASSIFIED – PROJECT COPPERGATE written underneath.
‘We have discovered from Knox’s journal that he was the one who originally created Nektar’s mind-control technology,’ Lara Lee went on. ‘He called it “Project Coppergate”, and as we know, he used helmets to transmit the mind-control waves.’
Mary’s mum took up the narrative. ‘It seems that all the time he was working with Magpie, Knox was also running his own, separate operation honing his mind-control tech. He has obviously discovered a way to transmit the control waves over the phone and TV networks. Coupled with people’s natural suspicion, they ensure that Knox gets what he wants.’
There was a moment’s silence while this sank in.
Murph broke in. ‘So – what’s our plan?’
Lara Lee spoke again. ‘If we can get into these files –’ she pointed to the Project Coppergate icon – ‘there’s a chance I can write some software to disrupt Knox’s mind-control waves.’
‘What,’ said Murph, ‘so we just … email it to him or something? Pretend it’s a letter from his bank saying he’s due a refund of a million pounds?’
‘Not quite that simple, I’m afraid,’ smiled Lara. ‘Carl?’
‘Been working on a little something for a few years now,’ said Carl, ‘and I wondered whether it might come in useful one of these days.’ He reached below the table and produced a small black box with a single button on top.
‘What’s that, then?’ asked Murph.
‘This,’ said Carl, ‘is a bomb.’
There was a sudden scraping as five chairs were sharply pushed back from the table.
‘Simmer down, simmer down,’ chuckled Carl. ‘Not that sort of bomb.’ There was another scraping as five chairs were moved forward. ‘This is a Cy-bomb,’ Carl continued. ‘It transmits a limited-range wave that can implant a virus in any computer system.’
‘So it could stop Knox’s technology?’ asked Hilda. ‘He wouldn’t be able to control everyone?’
‘Yup,’ confirmed Carl. ‘But there are a couple of tiny issues.’
‘When you say “limited-range” … ?’ asked Murph.
‘Ah, yes,’ Carl replied. ‘That’s the first issue. The Cy-bomb only has a range of about thirty metres.’
‘So we’d have to set it off right in the heart of Knox’s headquarters?’ asked Murph.
‘Absolutely,’ Flora replied. ‘Well, you wouldn’t want it to be too easy, now, would you?’ She grinned around at them.
‘To write the virus,’ Lara Lee answered, ‘I need access to this folder containing Knox’s original Project Coppergate files. It’s the only way I can find out how his mind-control tech works, and design the program that can disrupt it.’
‘So, what?’ Murph asked. ‘We need, like, a password or something?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, great! So, we have to try and guess Nicholas Knox’s password?’
‘Not exactly,’ replied Lara. ‘This computer terminal came from Ribbon Robotics. Any password with administrator privileges would open this folder. But it would need to be someone very, very high up at the company. Like the man who took it over, for instance.’
‘You have got to be joking!’ burst out Hilda. ‘You want us to try and find out Nektar’s password?’
‘Precisely.’
‘But … but … he’s been missing since the escape from Shivering Sands!’ squealed Hilda. ‘We don’t have any idea where he is!’
‘That,’ said Flora, leaning forward and smiling, ‘is where you’re wrong.’
‘Why is it us two who have to go to see Nektar?’ asked Hilda as she and Nellie fol lowed Flora across the courtyard.
‘Nellie’s the pilot,’ replied Flora over her shoulder, ‘and Nektar’s terrified of your horses. If you can’t talk the password out of him, maybe you can use them to scare it out of him.’
‘Murph couldn’t come anyway, I suppose,’ reasoned Hilda. ‘Nektar’s got this weird fixation that he’s his son, for some reason.’
‘Murph needs to start preparing the mission to plant the Cy-bomb, anyway,’ Flora replied. ‘Billy can help him with that. We need to be ready to strike as soon as possible. Every day wasted is a day when Knox’s grip on power grows stronger.’
She led them through a green-painted wooden door, with the word RECORDS stencilled on it in black lettering. Inside, a woman in a black military uniform sat behind a table littered with papers and cardboard folders.
