But then something very peculiar occurred. Trouble made contact with her father’s chest and disappeared. And as Janey reached out for her father, she too shot straight through his body. Tripping over Trouble on the other side, she thudded to the ground on hands and knees and stopped, stunned.
‘Janey, don’t you get it?’
She turned around to see Alfie clambering out of her father’s back, followed by Mrs Halliday and G-Mamma, who struggled through like a squeezed marshmallow. The whole spectacle of people walking through her father was quite disgusting. ‘Of course,’ she said bitterly, trying to hide her embarrassment, ‘he’s a hologram too. A . . . a SPIRIT. He’s not really there. Just a movie of him.’
Mrs Halliday helped her to her feet. ‘I’m not sure if he’s a SPIRIT or a Retro-spectre – a sort of image made up of how someone looked in the past, although that’s such a new development that I doubt it. Still, you’ll find a lot of surprising things at this SPIcamp, Janey. That’s why it will be so good for you – for all of us. We’ll get to see what your father has been working on lately and receive the best training in the spying world. If he turns up in person, that will be an added bonus, won’t it?’
Janey nodded, feeling dangerously close to tears. She’d hoped so much he was going to be there, and when she saw Abe standing there she’d believed her dreams had come true. Now she had to pull herself together and act like the spylet he would wish her to be. ‘So, where do we go now?’
The hologram of her father turned around and gestured to a door at the back of the office. ‘Through the Wower, SPI-friends, and on to the Briefing Room. Welcome, once again, to SPIcamp!’
Seconds later, they stepped out of the Wower stalls in full spy gear. Janey was now Jane Blonde, platinum ponytailed, Girl-gauntlet and Ultra-gogs at the ready, and glittering in her silver Lycra SPIsuit. Her cat, meanwhile, had become one hundred per cent spy-pet, with hypnotic green eyes, shimmering go-faster stripes down each side and a golden tail which he waggled around like a great fat ostrich feather. They regrouped on the way to the door marked ‘Briefing Room’. Janey felt nervous, like she had on her first day at Winton School. This time, however, she knew each of the people standing with her was definitely friend not foe, and they all had her best interests at heart.
G-Mamma shifted the purple veil which descended from her gleaming lilac turban and whispered urgently to Janey. ‘Now don’t forget, Blondelicious – we’re not sure who knows that Boz-Sol-Abe is your father, so let’s keep that to ourselves. No more throwing yourself at his SPIRIT for huggy-wuggies.’
‘Right,’ said Janey, blushing. ‘I promise.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Alfie, up ahead of them.
He pushed open the door and they all trooped in, Janey clutching a quaffed and golden Trouble to her like a furry shield. The white domed room was half-full of people and completely devoid of anything else. Taking a quick glance around, Janey reckoned there were another four Spylets with their SPI:KEs: a tall girl in red, a bit younger than Janey, with bright auburn hair in feathery curls around her face, with a woman who looked like a taller version of her; a boy in a green padded SPIsuit like a racing driver’s and a sleek helmet the colour of a holly leaf, with microphone attached, acompanied by an anxious, thin-haired man who kept twiddling the dial on his SPI-Pod; and a set of black-haired twins in SPIsuits as liquid and black as ink – one boy, one girl – who stood with cross faces and crossed arms on either side of their SPI:KEs – their parents, Janey guessed. They were obviously having a job keeping the twins apart.
‘No other spy-pets,’ she commented to Alfie.
Alfie looked at Trouble and laughed. ‘How do they manage?’
She nudged him with her elbow. ‘You’re just jealous.’ She knew he’d love a dog but wasn’t allowed.
Janey, Alfie, G-Mamma and Mrs Halliday were just taking their place at the end of the line of Spylets and SPI:KEs when a chill wind whistled through the room. They all looked up to see the figure of Abe Rownigan floating above them, high up in the curve of the ceiling. A few of the strangers let out startled gasps. Abe smiled down at them and opened his arms as he had earlier, only this time Janey knew he wasn’t inviting her in for a family reunion. She swallowed hard and waited for the SPIRIT to speak.
‘Spies and Spylets, welcome to SPIcamp. I hope you’ll forgive me for not being here in person but in, ahem, SPIRIT only. Perhaps you don’t recognize me in my current guise. You will have believed, most of you, that your invitation came from Solomon Brown. I am Solomon Brown. Solomon Brown, however, is an invention: the made-up brother of a real SPI who you believed was dead . . . but who has actually survived all this time. I am Boz ‘Brilliance’ Brown, also known as Solomon Brown, and latterly the businessman Abe Rownigan.’
There was a pause while the other eight people in the room stared at each other open-mouthed and then turned suspiciously to Janey and her crew, who were not looking at all surprised by this news.
‘How do we know this is not a trick?’ The man in the green suit folded his arms as he gazed up at the figure fluttering against the roof.
‘Good point. Let me give you some validations. Magenta and Titian Ambition, you’ve been responsible for covering European operations for six years, four months, and –’ he checked his watch – ‘thirteen days, since I bought out your excellent family ice-cream company.’
‘Best in the west,’ agreed the red-suited woman with a smile.
‘And please call me Tish,’ said the auburn-haired girl with a similar broad, gap-toothed grin.
‘Tish it is. Now, Eagle and Peregrine,’ said Abe, pointing to the parents of the twins, ‘Japanese kite-riders supreme, until Eagle was shot with an air rifle by a curious kid.’
‘What was the kid called?’ said the father, testing.
‘We should continue the introductions,’ said Abe, pointing to Alfie. ‘You may already have heard of the Hallidays, spy-names Halo and Al Halo. Halo . . . Maisie . . . is one of my most trusted colleagues. I hope you will learn from her as much as from your tutors. And finally, we have my . . . my personal and rather late selection for the world of spying, who is proving to be a formidable force.’ Janey felt a blaze of warmth, even from the holographic brown eyes. ‘Here, along with her inimitable SPI:KE G-Mamma, is Jane Blonde, Sensational Spylet.’
Janey stood, self-consciously staring at the SPIRIT to avoid the twins’ look of cool appraisal, the raised eyebrow of Leaf and the frank, open stare of Tish. Suddenly the SPIRIT winked at her, and she laughed aloud in surprise. The message was clear: her dad might not be able to be there in person, but he was looking out for her, wherever he was.
‘So, what are we doing here, sir?’ said Leaf after a moment or two.
‘Ah, first score to Leaf,’ said Abe with a grin. ‘Fairly important to establish why I’m dragging you away from your schooling to spend a week under a force field. Well, there are two reasons for asking you here. Three, perhaps, if I include the fact that some of you needed to know I’m still alive. Reason one: I’ve chosen you all for your incredible potential. I wanted the chance to test out your skills, and to give you all the chance to do some additional training, in a safe environment, before anything more threatening happens. Reason two: those of us who mean to carry on spying for the good of the world need to close ranks. I want you to get to know each other, be a team. I would trust each and every one of you with my life, and I want you all to know that you can do the same with each other.’
The reasons sounded credible, but somewhere between Janey’s stomach and her chest there was a knot of something strange – the odd feeling that she had come to think of as her spy instinct. Something was missing.
She looked up. ‘Um . . .’ she said quietly, ‘err . . . why?’
Silence cloaked them all instantly. Then Janey was very relieved to see that the wavering holographic image of her father was smiling. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Well done, Janey. Why indeed? I’ve only told you the surface reasons why I want you
to come here. What I haven’t yet divulged is the underlying motivation for needing a crack team of spies, united in their fervour to do good.’
Janey knew instantly. ‘It’s Copernicus, isn’t it?’
‘No! Not my fa– not him again!’ groaned Alfie.
With a sorrowful nod, Abe continued. ‘Yes, it is Copernicus. Some of you may know this already; others will not. Copernicus has become a power-crazed madman. He will stop at nothing. Already he’s turned the Sinerlesse Spy Group against us by persuading them that I was responsible for the death of their beloved family member Reg Baron. The spies who knew Copernicus as the Sun King have sought to reach us and kill us. He’s even cloned our own spies. We thought we had him safely caged – frozen, in fact. But somehow he escaped, presumably because of another loyal fool who had been promised something impossibly grand in the world takeover Copernicus is planning. He’s a very dangerous enemy, persuasive and influential, and he’s regrouping. If he becomes an enemy with an army, we need to be able to fight back. You people are my own army.’
He waited a moment for the news to sink in. Alfie muttered inaudibly and popped a piece of gum in his mouth, a sure sign that he was nervous. Copernicus was not only an evil overlord, he was also Alfie’s father, as the Spylet had almost let slip. As such, he knew that any suspicion of betrayal must first fall on him. His mum put an arm around him, and Janey gave him a small, lacklustre smile. G-Mamma, meanwhile, was blossoming like a sunflower. She loved nothing better than a good fight.
‘So, my friends,’ said Abe quietly, ‘can I ask that of you? Are you ready for that?’
‘Ready? Oh YEAH!’ yelled G-Mamma, punching the air. ‘Bring on those baddies and let’s whup ’em good!
‘We’ll thrash ’em.
We’ll mash ’em.
We’ll round them up and bash ’em.
We’ll stick them in
Our rubbish bin
And absolutely trash ’em.’
Those who didn’t already know G-Mamma stared round-eyed at her jubilant outburst, and Janey managed to lay a hand on her SPI:KE’s arm just before she started to whirl around doing a victory dance. ‘Later,’ she said quickly out of the corner of her mouth.
‘Oh, sorree!’ G-Mamma folded her arms sulkily and glared at Tish, who was covering her mouth with her scarlet Girl-gauntlet in an attempt to hide her laughter.
Abe laughed too. ‘Janey’s right, G-Mamma. We don’t have the right to celebrate yet. At the present time we don’t even know what we’re up against. I know only this: Copernicus is a clever, devious enemy, with as much technical and scientific knowledge at his fingertips as I have. He’s already discovered the secret of reincarnation and a key to evading death, and he can make infinite copies of his spies and his prisoners. Wherever he is, there is no end to his ambitions. So,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, ‘here’s what SPIcamp will consist of. Each day you’ll be doing physical training in the spy-sports hall, and catching up with our current technologies. You will also be set tasks by me. And these tasks must be carried out alone. Try to be creative – don’t rely on the same gadgets and strategies all the time. I have to be sure that each of you is ready, and that I can trust you completely.’
Alfie cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘Sir, do you mind me asking who our tutors are going to be?’
Abe smiled. ‘Not at all. I told you in the invitation to the camp that I’d hand-picked both students and tutors. It might have been more honest to say that I self-picked the tutors. They are all me – all my SPIRITs. You’ll find briefing packs with your timetables and maps of the grounds in the Spylab through that door behind Ivan.’ They all turned to see a space where previously there had been a solid wall. ‘Go through now, and everything will become clear as the week goes by. Oh, and this is very important – a good team plays together and eats together, so I’ve set up a restaurant on the site, where the best food will be available for breakfast, lunch and dinner—’
‘Hallelujah!’ yelled G-Mamma.
Abe laughed. ‘. . . PROVIDED you are all together. The divided team goes hungry.’
‘You mean, kind of like Survivor?’ said Tish with a grin, and those who had seen the reality TV show (which was everybody but Janey) laughed.
But the room fell silent as Abe’s SPIRIT suddenly looked very serious. ‘We are certainly in this for survival. But there is no competition among ourselves. Under this force field, there are no individual winners or losers. You are a team – one team. You stick together, or fall apart.’
There was a long pause while this sank in and the ‘team’ looked at each other sideways, wondering who might be the one to break the unit that Abe was trying to create. Janey knew that trust needed to be earned – by now she had enough experience of people who appeared to be allies but turned out to be quite the opposite. As she glanced around she saw that a few pairs of eyes were fixed stonily on Alfie.
This week was not going to be the holiday camp they had imagined.
satispies and spyroscopes
It was still only mid-morning, just a couple of hours after they’d arrived, but with the lights off and the blackout blinds in operation, Janey couldn’t even see her hand in front of her face. The feeling was very disorientating. She’d been sent into a blackout room to be introduced to a new gadget, shoving her way through the airlock at the door, and she didn’t really feel that she ought to make use of her old SPI-buys. But the darkness was closing in oppressively, pushing at her temples, squeezing the breath out of her . . .
‘Oh, forget hanging on,’ she muttered to Trouble, who was squirming around her Fleet-feet, rattling the bell on his collar to make his presence felt. Presumably he could see better than she could, but even he didn’t seem keen to move. With her left hand, she squeezed the ring finger on her Girl-gauntlet, releasing a laser of light, and directed it at Trouble’s tail. In his Wowed state, his tail lit up like a beacon when the laser danced off the golden fur, and light bounced out in a one-metre circle around the spy duo.
Janey gulped. She appeared to be suspended in mid-air. She couldn’t see where the bottom of the room was, but she could hear that though the atmosphere around her was still, the air around the room’s perimeter was rushing and gushing like a whirlwind. It reminded her of the gusty tornadoes that had been sparked off whenever Copernicus (disguised as Abe Rownigan) set the SPI-clone off to make a copy of something – or someone. ‘I hope I’m not being cloned,’ she said out loud, rather more bravely than she felt.
At once there was a laugh, and the room filled with light as a hundred tiny bulbs peppered the roof like stars. ‘No, but it’s the same principle,’ said the Abe-SPIRIT who was now hovering directly across the room from her, unaffected by the roaring wind. She still had to fight the temptation to run across and give him a hug – though what she would actually run on she had no idea.
‘Like with the SPI-clone,’ her father was explaining, ‘the use of the vortex is all important. You might know that the centre of a cyclone or tornado is very still. In this case, we’ve created a fixed vortex and suspended you in the middle of it. That’s why you had to push through at the door. It’s a Spyroscope – useful for getting you out of harm’s way. When you’re in the middle of the vortex it’s very difficult to reach you, with bullets, hands or blades.’
Janey nodded. ‘But I can’t carry a room like this around in my SPIsuit, can I?’
‘Ah,’ said Abe. ‘No, you can’t. But hold on to Trouble for a moment . . .’
She did, grasping his collar with its collection of bells and tags and holding her breath as the roar of the wind started to die down. ‘I’m sinking!’ she cried. It wasn’t unpleasant, but she was definitely dropping, heading for the floor of the vast, tank-like room.
‘You just switched it off,’ explained her father’s SPIRIT.
‘But . . . how?’ Janey patted her way up and down her SPIsuit. She had on her Girl-gauntlet and a SuSPInder belt. Her ASPIC (which appeared to be a skateboard but was
actually an Aeronautical SPI Conveyor) was strapped to her thigh, and there was even a small chunk of SPInamite tucked into a pocket on her sleeve – definitely for advanced Spylets only. There was nothing new there. Nor was there anything to be found in her high platinum ponytail or her narrow, letter-box-shaped Ultra-gogs. ‘I don’t understand.’
Her father crossed his arms and gazed at her expectantly. ‘OK, I have to work it out,’ she said after a moment. ‘Is it something I activated when I walked into the room? No, that wouldn’t be it, because it needs to be something portable. So what else . . . hang on a minute.’
She looked down at her Spycat, who was busily licking at his paws and dragging them through his quiff, his cat-bell dinging madly whenever he waggled his head. ‘Since when does Trouble have a bell?’
A broad smile spread over her father’s face. ‘Exactly. What he has now is a Spyroscope that looks to all intents and purposes like a small glass bell, such as you might see on any domestic cat. You just need to enclose it in the palm of your hand to activate it, and again to deactivate. Of course, this time we activated it for you, but you turned it off yourself by grabbing it.’
‘Clever.’ Janey could see how the Spyroscope might be very useful in certain situations.
‘Janey,’ said her father, a new tone entering his voice, ‘I’ve gathered you all together and am starting to introduce new gadgets like the Spyroscope because sinister things are happening . . .’
Now he had all of Janey’s attention. ‘Like what?’
The SPIRIT scratched his head. ‘It’s not all easy to explain. There’s nothing actually wrong in some instances, but my instincts are telling me that something’s amiss. You’ll understand that, Janey. But some of the evidence is very tangible. You know we kept all the spies we’ve thwarted in our recent missions frozen in our secret hideout?’
Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice Page 3
