“Agent J!” said Sabre, feeling slightly dazed. “He’s under Blackwater’s control!”
“He’ll tell Blackwater about SWARM!” said Chopper.
“Call Sirena!” said Morph. “She’s closest to them!”
“She doesn’t have the weaponry needed to stop Blackwater,” said Chopper.
“No, but I have!” said Sabre. “Nero, remove Widow’s plug of webbing!”
With a swift punch from his pincer, Nero knocked out the web that Widow had spun to disguise the hole in the back of the speaker.
Meanwhile, Blackwater was still questioning Agent J. “Other agents?” he said, eyeing Agent J suspiciously. “What other agents? Who are you working for?”
Sabre buzzed across the counter. Staying low, so that Blackwater wouldn’t spot him, he zipped across the shop then dived down towards floor level, his needle-like mouthparts whirring forward. A memory-blocking pellet was loaded up. He swooped at a small patch of sock, visible between Agent J’s shoes and the hem of his trousers, and injected the pellet into Agent J’s heel.
“Amnesia sting delivered,” signalled Sabre.
Agent J flinched slightly. His eyes flickered.
“Logged,” replied Chopper. “He hasn’t worked with SWARM very long. That sting should remove his memory of us, and of SWARM HQ.”
“Poor Agent J,” said Morph, “he’ll need to meet us for the first time, all over again.”
“This is an emergency,” said Chopper. “It had to be done.”
Meanwhile, Blackwater was staring into Agent J’s eyes. “Are you listening to me?”
“Blackwater has been wiping the memories of his victims,” said Nero. “Now he’ll get what humans call a taste of his own medicine.”
Agent J’s memory of SWARM had gone, but he was still under Blackwater’s hypnotic influence. “Yes. I’m listening.”
“I asked who you’re working for,” said Blackwater.
Agent J seemed confused for a moment. Then he said “I work for MI5. I’m an MI5 agent.”
Blackwater’s face became a storm of fury and alarm. The robots were alarmed too.
“The sting’s effect hasn’t been strong enough!” said Sabre. “I’ll deliver another!”
“No,” said Chopper. “Those stings are designed to remove recent memories only. A second may cause permanent damage to Agent J’s brain. It’s too late, Blackwater knows that Agent J is part of the secret service. Agent J worked for MI5 for a long time before he was recruited by SWARM.”
Blackwater took hold of the lapels of Agent J’s jacket. “Say that again?” he whispered, through gritted teeth.
“I work for MI5,” said Agent J.
“Who sent you here?” demanded Blackwater. “Which section chief?”
“I … I don’t know,” frowned Agent J. “I … work for MI5…”
“I’ve been betrayed,” muttered Blackwater to himself. “That low-down worm is trying to double-cross me!”
“Who does he mean?” said Morph.
“This confirms he’s being helped from inside the secret service,” said Chopper. “What’s more, we now know he’s being helped from inside MI5 itself!”
Outside in the street, Sirena was still positioned on the wall above the shop’s window. “I’ll transmit a full report to SWARM HQ,” she said.
“Logged,” said Chopper, inside the speaker.
Blackwater was pacing around the shop. His hands tapped together nervously. “Think, think, think,” he said. “OK, they know about this place, but they don’t know about my place.”
He turned to face Agent J. “Confirm Firestorm Control, baseline alpha one.”
“Confirmed,” said the hypnotized Agent J.
“Go back to your HQ. Tell them you’ve investigated Trendi Soundz thoroughly. Tell them there’s nothing suspicious here. They got it wrong.”
“Nothing suspicious,” said Agent J. “Confirmed.”
“You’ll forget you ever met me,” said Blackwater. “As far as you’re concerned, this shop is run by … er, let’s see … by a tall, curly haired woman called … Daisy Brown.”
“Daisy Brown, confirmed,” said Agent J.
“She offered you a cup of tea. She was very helpful. MI5 have got it all wrong about this shop.”
“Very helpful,” said Agent J. “Got it all wrong. Confirmed.”
“Now go!”
Agent J turned and walked out of the shop. He headed across the street, then headed off in the direction of Tottenham Court Road.
“He doesn’t even remember he drove here,” said Sirena.
“You stay with Agent J,” said Chopper. “Signal HQ to pick him up. We’ll remain here, to keep track of Blackwater.”
“Logged,” said Sirena. She fluttered into the air, and followed Agent J down the street.
Blackwater stood in the window, watching Agent J walk away. “Let’s hope that keeps them off my back for a while,” he mumbled. “It won’t work for long, though. Better hurry.”
While Blackwater’s back was turned, Sabre returned to the speaker. He darted back through the hole Hercules had made and Widow immediately resealed it.
“Blackwater now thinks MI5 are closing in on him,” said Nero. “His logical next move would be to speed up the Firestorm plan.”
“We still don’t know the full extent of that plan,” said Chopper, “or what exactly he means by the word ‘firestorm’.”
Blackwater collected a large holdall from behind the counter. He bustled around the shop, dropping various tools and electronic equipment into it. He paused when he came to the speaker in which the SWARM robots were hiding. He hesitated, not sure whether to take it with him or not. In the end, he scooped it up and squashed it into the bag alongside everything else. “Might as well find out why this thing malfunctioned,” he added.
He switched the sign on the door from “Open – Bargainz Inside” to “Closed – See Ya Laterz”. He locked the front door of the shop from the inside, then pulled down a security grille inside the window and padlocked it.
Next he picked up his holdall and hurried behind the counter, through to the shop’s small back room, which was piled high with stock and paperwork. Beyond that, past a heavily secured metal door, was a small car park. He dumped the holdall on the back seat of his large, rusty hatchback.
“Be careful,” he mumbled. “Always be careful.”
From his pocket, he pulled a device that resembled a calculator. He entered a short code into it. Inside the speaker, the robots’ network was suddenly swamped by a fuzz of static. To counteract the effect, each insect fired a tiny, fibre-optic line to the robot next to them, forming a circle around which data could be rerouted.
“That’s better,” said Morph. “I don’t like being out of touch. My sensors feel strange.”
“That device of his is powerful enough to block all kinds of signals,” said Nero. “Some of our sensor readings will experience interference, as well as our communications.”
“Why is our recent upgrade to deal with signal jammers limited to fibre-optic lines?” said Morph. “Couldn’t Professor Miller devise a way to overcome them entirely?”
“The only way to do that is to boost power output,” said Nero. “We are very small. To generate enough energy, we’d have to carry around power cells the size of beach balls. It’s simple physics. We have many advantages over humans but nobody’s perfect. Blackwater must be worried about the possibility of being tracked or monitored.”
“He’s extremely cautious,” said Morph.
“Hercules would make a joke about him being bugged,” said Sabre. The stag beetle beside him remained dark and silent, burnt out and lifeless.
“This means we’ll be out of range of HQ until he turns it off,” said Chopper. “However, we must all remain in place here. Preventing Blackwater from carrying out any further attacks must be our first priority.”
“I’ll continue to cut Hercules free,” said Nero.
The robots could fee
l that the car was now in motion, although Blackwater’s signal blocker stopped their sensors keeping track of exactly where they were, and where they were going.
“At least we know why he added the extra circuits into these speakers,” said Sabre.
“He sold them to unsuspecting, and otherwise unconnected, members of the public,” said Chopper. “The speakers would remain in his customers’ homes, operating normally, until he activated the hypnotic wave circuits built into them. Then, those customers would become his servants.”
“He must have relayed detailed verbal instructions to each victim through the speakers too,” said Sabre. “He’ll have told them where to collect all those gadgets, and how to operate them.”
“The victims wouldn’t even remember hearing the hypnotic signal,” said Chopper. “Blackwater will have ordered them to forget it. If any of the attacks were foiled, as we foiled the first one, then he would remain undetected, in the background.”
“It’s a clever way of committing crimes by remote control,” said Sabre. “Blackwater is clearly a genius at electronics.”
“Although,” said Nero, snipping at the circuit board around Hercules, “he hasn’t been clever enough to outwit us.”
Blackwater’s car drove on through the streets of central London. By now, it was late afternoon. Darkness was creeping across the city.
5:42 p.m.
“Agent K is picking up Agent J and Sirena now,” said Alfred Berners. He tapped at a large screen in the SWARM laboratory. “Poor Agent J’s going to have a very confusing couple of hours!”
“We’ll have to worry about that later,” said Queen Bee. “Is Blackwater’s signal blocker still operating?”
“Yes, at full power,” said Alfred. “We’ve no way of knowing where the rest of the SWARM are until either it’s turned off, or one of the robots can get far enough away from it.”
“We can trust them to act correctly,” said Queen Bee. “In the meantime, is there any way we can track Blackwater’s movements from here?”
“I’m afraid not, Ms Maynard,” said Alfred. “We don’t know precisely what to look for. We don’t know if he’s walking, or in the Underground, or in a car. The robots couldn’t ID any vehicle or method of transport before they were cut off.”
Simon Turing appeared, hurrying across the lab to intercept Queen Bee. “Agent K reports that the home address listed for Henry Blackwater is a dud. He lived there until about six months ago, but he’s not there now, and his current address is unknown.”
“Have you been able to mine more background data on him?” said Queen Bee.
“I have,” said Simon. He called up information on the tablet he was carrying. “Henry Blackwater, forty-nine years old, born in England but spent most of his childhood in the Far East. His parents were both British electrical engineers, employed by a big international company. When Blackwater was twelve, terrorists tried to take over the area they were living in. Sixty people, including Blackwater’s family, were held hostage for five weeks. MI6 agents, along with security forces from other countries, stormed the terrorists’ compound. The raid was a total mess. The terrorists killed most of the hostages, including Blackwater’s parents and his two brothers.
“Henry was one of only three survivors. As you can imagine, as he grew up his attitude towards the terrorists who’d killed his family, and towards the secret services who’d bungled their rescue, wasn’t exactly positive. He was a ‘troubled’ young man, who got involved with various political extremist groups. Despite that, his talents for electronics, chemistry and engineering were astounding. He was judged to have a glittering career in technology ahead of him.
“However, instead of that, he applied – believe it or not – to join both MI5 and MI6, as well as the CIA in America and several more security services across Europe. All of them turned him down. He was reckoned to be unstable and potentially violent. The interview panel at MI5 believed that he was only making these applications so that he could ‘destroy the system from within’. Psychological assessment at the time said he was suspicious of others and hostile to authority. And also that he talked to himself a lot. For many years he scratched a living mending phones and computers. A few months ago, he seemed to vanish completely, then turned up running Trendi Soundz. Because of his background in revolutionary politics, MI5 have had him on their watch list for almost thirty years.”
“What a strange and unhappy life,” said Alfred Berners sadly. “But if MI5 are supposed to have him on their watch list, how come they don’t know his current address?”
“I think we can put that down to Blackwater’s MI5 contact,” said Queen Bee. “It appears we’ve found another official record that’s been deliberately deleted.”
“And until the SWARM robots can give us a fix on him, he’s out there on the loose somewhere,” said Simon Turing. “I wonder what’s made him start up this whole Firestorm business? Do you think it’s something he’s been planning for a long time?”
“Probably not,” said Queen Bee. “Even people like Blackwater don’t suddenly turn into big-time criminals at the drop of a hat. My guess is that his contact inside MI5 provided him with a few ideas about how he could cause chaos and gave him enough money to get started, and he’s taken it from there.”
“Why on earth would someone inside MI5 be helping him?” said Simon.
“That’s something we still have to discover,” said Queen Bee. “Blackwater is angry with the world and resentful over everything that’s happened to him. The data he stole from MI6 will get him all the revenge he could desire.”
“It’s frightening,” said Alfred in a low voice. “One person’s tragedy could end up destroying us all.”
“The international situation is getting worse by the hour,” said Queen Bee. “Until the data is recovered, governments worldwide are ready to take drastic action to protect whatever secrets and secret agents might be at risk.”
“And meanwhile, the public are wondering who or what Firestorm is, and demanding answers they can’t be given,” said Simon.
“I think we can now be pretty sure what those messages Blackwater left mean,” said Queen Bee. “His motives and intentions are clear. His ‘Firestorm’ is nothing less than World War III.”
6:07 p.m.
“Is that you, Henry?”
“Yes, Auntie Madge,” called Blackwater irritably. Under his breath he added, “Who else would it be, you twit!”
The front door of Auntie Madge’s house was old, worn and grubby, with paint peeling at its corners. The rest of the house looked much the same. Blackwater, carrying his holdall, bumped the door shut and shuffled through the hall and into the kitchen.
“I’m putting the tea on in a minute,” called Auntie Madge from the living room.
“OK,” called Blackwater.
“It’s sausage and mash.”
“OK.”
He went out into the back garden. Tufts of weeds grew out of the cracks in the paving slabs. A saggy washing line had a selection of shirts and underpants pegged on it.
A large garage stood at the end of the yard, facing out onto a narrow alleyway that ran along the backs of the houses. Blackwater placed his hand onto a palm-print reader hidden inside an old wooden box fixed to the rear wall of the garage. There was a clanking sound from inside, as bolts were automatically drawn. Beside the box, a heavily reinforced metal door slid back. Blackwater glanced around to check that nobody was watching him, then entered the garage.
The metal entrance slid shut behind him with a clang. He touched a sensor, and the interior of the garage lit up brightly. It looked like a home-made version of SWARM’s lab, packed with technology, screens and equipment.
He heaved his holdall up onto a table. He unzipped it and lifted out the speaker in which the SWARM robots were hiding. Then he rummaged in his pocket and switched off his signal jammer.
“Network back online,” said Chopper. “Sensors at maximum.”
“Our systems have r
eturned to full function within this room,” said Nero, “but the garage itself must be shielded. We still can’t link to HQ.”
“Let’s take a detailed sensor sweep of this place,” said Chopper.
Blackwater snatched up a phone that was connected to a PC by a thick cable. His face was awash with anger. He tapped out a number from memory.
“Who’s he calling?” said Morph.
“The line is hardwired to that handset,” said Nero. “Without a physical connection to it, we can’t tap it directly, so we can’t hear who he’s speaking to. However, I may be able to remotely break into Blackwater’s phone system. I can try to back-trace the call, by using a wireless probe on that PC and tapping the public exchange.”
“Proceed,” said Chopper.
“Logged,” said Nero. “It will take approximately 64.7 seconds.”
“C’mon, c’mon,” muttered Blackwater impatiently. His call was finally answered. For the moment, all that the robots could detect from the other end of the line was a faint echo of what Blackwater could hear through his phone.
“You’ve double-crossed me!” yelled Blackwater. “I’ve just had one of your lot turn up at the shop! … Yes, MI5! … Of course, I’m not kidding! … I don’t care whether you authorized anything or not, an agent from MI5 was standing in my shop less than an hour ago… What? … No, I used my hypnotic control on him, it doesn’t allow subjects to lie!”
“Thirty-four seconds to an ID,” said Nero.
“Yes, of course I dealt with it! He’s gone away with his head full of rubbish,” continued Blackwater. “But it was an emergency measure! If your lot are already sniffing around the shop, then how long before— Oh! You think you’ve guessed where this person might have come from after all, do you? … What? … Top-secret section? Which top-secret section? … Oh, you don’t know what they’re called? Or the name of the woman who runs it? How convenient! In the meantime, I’m being tracked down by these people!”
“Nineteen seconds,” said Nero.
“That’s all very well for you to say! How do I know you’re not lying to me? How do I know you’re not setting me up? … Yes … Yes, I know you’ve given me equipment and information, but that proves nothing, does it? What? … You’ve got everything to lose too, if things go wrong?”
Code Name Firestorm Page 6
