‘Yes,’ she hollered, as loud as she could, not daring to see how weird it would all look as she was projected all around the arena and possibly all over the world. ‘We’re here. We are SWAG.’
Now she could deduce from the camera angle exactly where the HOST exec were. Glad that the athletes were all slightly dazed from the ruby-powered manipulation, Janey instructed Jack under her breath. ‘Throw me as far as you can, and keep Gideon safe.’
‘Hope you know what you’re doing, Blonde,’ said Jack.
Simone Varley’s vile cackle rang out across the Kazakhstan landscape. ‘SWAG? What errant nonsense. You hold no threat for us, dear.’
‘Now,’ said Janey.
And Jack pushed upwards with his shoulders, launching her out cross the enormous field of confused but powerful competitors. Not even stopping to apologise, she jumped from one to another, landing on heads and shoulders and arms that reached out to grab her, occasionally on the ground in a space between athletes and then up again, across the top of the crowd, the cameras following her the whole way, showing her the distance she needed to navigate. Two hundred metres – and a sprint across the rooves of the horse trailers near the polo field. Yes, there was Senor Litardo, advancing on her with the same evil intent he’d shown at the party – not that he could help it with the lanyard controlling him. A hundred metres, just in time to race along the athletics track in a quicker time than the world’s best would ever manage. Fifty metres, then forty, then thirty, all the time with the cameras focussed on her face, for all the world to see as she sprang up the bleachers towards the executive boxes.
That was where they were, hidden in plain sight in a glass box above the stadium. Reaching the side of it, Janey ejected the special smash gas, balled her fist and obliterated the frozen pane with her Gauntlet.
They were all there – Simone, Oscar, Henry, all surprised but all looking remarkably unconcerned at what was going on. It looked for all the world as if they were simply having a board meeting, clustered around the end of a long maroon table with a simple console in front of them, operating the myriad cameras and sound recording devices from their fingertips while two larger TV cameras were trained on them, operated by HOST ambassadors.
Janey grinned. ‘Hi. We’ve got something of yours. Of HOST’s, I mean. Or should I say … GHOST.’
‘What is the girl blathering about?’ snorted Henry Wentworth, unaware that his voice was being broadcast to the world.
‘What are you?’ Simone Varley’s voice was venomous. ‘Some kind of traitor or a terrorist? Stopping the games for your own ends?’
‘Interesting choice of words,’ said Janey, running along the boardroom table. ‘Because talking of traitors, here’s someone you’ll remember.’
Knocking the cameraman out of the way so that he staggered to the edge of the box and fell out of it, she grabbed the camera that had been trained on their faces and pointed it out onto the grounds.
‘Jack and Stein, would you move apart?’ she cried, hoping the microphone would pick up her voice.
The two boys did as she asked, with the world’s cameras trained directly on them … and for the first time in forty odd years of the existence of HOST, their first member appeared.
‘Hi, guys,’ said Gideon Flynn pleasantly. ‘Long time, no see.’
Janey glanced into the monitors. Someone was still activating the camera inside the room. As the split screen showing Gideon in one half, in the other, Henry Wentworth’s vapid grin was rotating slowly, alighting upon a man’s suited knee, the sleeve of a white shirt lying across a gleaming table, and then onto the formerly handsome profile of Simone Varley.
Her glamourous demeanour had completely disappeared. It was as if she’d aged ten years in a single moment. Every carefully powdered wrinkle was amplified by the camera, and the horror in her eyes bore through the lens, naked and terrified.
‘Gideon,’ she whispered. ‘How … you’re still …’
As Janey hoped they wouldn’t notice that his silhouette was becoming increasingly indistinct, Gideon unleashed his quicksilver smile again. ‘Seventeen,’ he replied. ‘Like when I died.’
‘I don’t … we’re not …’
‘Oh, I think you are,’ said Gideon with a laugh, clearly enjoying himself, but as the word ‘are’ was released from his lips, it tailed away to nothing. The effects of the pom juice were evaporating, and so was Gideon.
This had to end now.
‘Simone Varley, Oscar Sullivan and Henry Wentworth,’ cried Janey. ‘You are the people responsible for the deaths of Gideon Flynn and Trent Varley. Gideon, as you can see, is back amongst us, and we – SWAG – have the means to bring back Trent Varley too. He led us straight to you, and we can prove that you murdered him, not Rosie Biggenham.’
‘Yes,’ called Jack cheerfully from down on the field, ‘we’re going to have you extradited.’
‘You can’t know this!’ cried Simone Varley. ‘It’s impossible!’
‘Ask if it’s as impossible as controlling the combined athletes of the world with ruby-powered infra-red rays,’ said Gideon, his voice hoarse, fainter by the second.
Janey repeated what Gideon had said. The camera moved jerkily away from the woman’s horror-struck expression, and finally Oscar Sullivan spoke.
‘What do you want, Flynn?’
He rallied for one last comment, the power of his intention and resourcefulness illuminating his body and face.
‘I want it to stop.’
‘It’s over, HOST. You’re over. Turn the rubies off,’ Janey ordered when nobody spoke within box of glass. Could they possibly ignore Gideon?
Then a familiar voice echoed across the arena. Janey whipped around – it was penetrating the outside air, but it actually came from within the room. ‘You heard her.’
Tilly. Tilly had been operating the other camera. For a second, Janey’s heart plummeted. Perhaps it had been a trick. Peppercorn had lured her up here. She’d been in it with Simone Varley from the beginning, and now they were going to end it together. It would make sense of why she was able to get the ring off her so easily. Of how the incriminating objects had ended up in G-Mamma’s lab. Of how Matilda Peppercorn had turned up, one step ahead of her, the whole of the way through this mission … Or maybe she’d done it unwillingly, controlled by her athlete band …
But then Tilly’s eye winked at her beside the camera lens. ‘Get on with it, then, Janey, or I might have to practice my kick-boxing in here. Or we could call Gideon and Trent up for a little reunion while we tie these smugly smuggertons up?’
‘You’re not being controlled by your wrist-band?’
‘Only partly. The part of me that’s human. As for the other bits …’ Tilly pretend-punched herself in the head. There was no doubting what would happen to the human element of her if Tilly thought something was trying to control her.
Tilly was on her side. So on her side. She had an ally – and possibly even a friend. Not a BFF, as the cat-girl had said herself, but certainly someone to share adventures with. Missions. More heists and toppling of world-class criminals like this …
‘Thanks, Matilda,’ said Janey happily.
‘No problem, Blonde. Actually it’s quite a lot of fun watching guilty people squirm. Shall we take a selfie with them? Oh, better not. We’re supposed to be at school.’
As her friend prattled on, Janey walked the length of the boardroom table almost as Tilly had done in the lab. Not a catwalk, this time. A spy walk. A Blonde walk. She halted in front of Simone Varley.
‘Stop it now,’ she said firmly.
‘I don’t answer to little girls,’ snapped Varley.
‘Good job I’m not a little girl then,’ said Janey bravely, although the woman’s brazen, commanding presence unnerved her a little.
She advanced along the table towards Varley, preparing to take her one-on-one if needed, but then the woman reached out a hand. She was going to poison her! But Janey checked, and there were no rings on her
fingers. What was she doing? Stretching out a wizened but beautifully manicured finger, Simone Varley pressed a button on the console before her, and Janey suddenly realised why she didn’t need a ruby ring of her own …
With a horrible, nauseating vibration pulsating throughout her entire body, Janey staggered to her knees. The whine in her ears was unbearable; she clapped her hands over them but even with the Gauntlet blocking it out on one side, the noise seemed to increase inside the cavities of her own head. The BUDS! Feeling sure she was about to vomit, Janey scratched at the latex ear pods out of her ears, but her arms felt weak, too feeble even for her to lift them up. She collapsed onto the board table, the whole surface vibrating and humming like the vile super-sized ruby, only worse, more intense, stripping out every atom of power in her body as if the oxygen was being sucked out of her through her skin. And then the pins and needles began, amplifying second by second until the pain seared through her as if they were actual pins and needles, and then knife-points and skewers, and then … agony such as she’d never experienced, not stopped in its tracks by her spysuit as a bullet would have been, but pulsing across and inside and through her body as if her veins had been set alight. As if, in fact, her nerve endings were being fried alive …
She hardly had the strength even to gasp, to register this information, but somewhere in the depths of her brain the thought crystallised and Janey knew what was happening. It was the reversed power of the manufactured rubies that Trent had warned them about. All over the stadium the athletes would be experiencing this same terrifying pain from the band on their wrists – but she wasn’t wearing a band, so why was this happening to her? And covering her entire body?
Her fluttering eyes focussed for a second on the surface beneath her, and she groaned. How could she have been so stupid?
‘Tilly,’ she managed to say, hoping her friend could rescue her, but Tilly herself was writhing on the floor, her head gripped between her fists.
It was the table. The very board table on which she’d so casually walked was the cause of it all – the most enormous, lozenge-shaped, super-sized ruby of all. ‘The table is a massive ruby,’ she gasped, unsure if anyone could hear her. Pain washed across her in a tide of misery, convulsions now rippling from her fingertips, across her outstretched body to her other fingertips, and from the cheek which lay on the evil, cold crimson surface to the tips of her Fleet-Feet. Even her gadgets were no good if she couldn’t operate them, and there was no power in her limbs to slam her feet or press a Gauntlet finger.
Then suddenly she saw him – not down in the stadium where she’d left him, but right behind Simone Varley. He seemed as solid and alive as the HOST execs, which could only mean one thing.
If Gideon Flynn looked completely alive to her, then it must be because she was almost in the same state. Jane Blonde was close to death.
And Gideon knew it too. ‘Come on, Janey,’ he said. ‘Fight it. Don’t become like me.’
But what could she do? She had no strength left in her, no gadgets that might work …
Apart from one or two.
It was a slim hope but the only one she had. The only one they all had. If this continued, Janey would die, the competitors would all be damaged and HOST would have control of all they desired.
She just had to cross her fingers and believe that they could all still be shocked. Because it wasn’t just her arm this time. This time, she was in her spysuit.
With the last strands of energy that she had in her body, Janey leaned her chin down towards her chest and whispered one word:
‘Invisibubble.’
She watched as her body vanished, and then turned her eyes towards the remaining HOST leaders. Just a head. Just a head staring at the three evildoers with eyes framed by Ultra-Gogs. Varley screamed and clutched Oscar’s hand, and they all moved together involuntarily as Janey shook the glasses from her face so that they lay on the ruby table top before her. She had no idea if this would work, but she had to try.
‘Gogs,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘target the console.’
The lenses flickered before her, zooming in on the machinery in front of the trio.
‘Reverse,’ said Janey. ‘Reverse the ruby power. Light it up.’
The Ultra-Gogs took her instruction and tried to make it work; this wasn’t a function it was set up for, but it did, at least, activate its laser-powered lights. With a blinding shock like lightning, a searing beam with a spectrum of red from pink to deepest, darkest blood colour sliced towards the console, shot through. The console hissed and smoked and then burst into flames.
Immediately Janey’s pain eased. In seconds she was able to prise herself off the table surface and clamber towards the end, removing the Invisibubble shield and allowing the agony to dissolve. Simone and Oscar were shouting at each other, batting helplessly at the flaming console to prevent the flames reaching a particular button … the one corralling the athletes, no doubt …
But then, Henry Wentworth reached across them. It was the first time Janey had seen him without a fatuous smile on his face.
‘No. I’m done with it too,’ he said. ‘You two are … impossible.’ Shoving Simone’s hand out of the way, he pressed the button even though flames were licking at it.
And suddenly a high-pitched whine sliced through the air. Every athlete around them froze momentarily, and Jack dropped to the ground as he clutched his hands to his ears, howling, begging for the pain to end … and then it stopped, just as abruptly as it had begun.
As police sirens wailed across the dustbowl, the competitor army before them stood down, athletes staring at each other in surprise as they discovered they seemed to have been lined up in military formation for some routine they’d never practiced.
‘We’ve done it,’ she said breathlessly, staring through the monitors as a Georgian competitor inspect his ripped shirt with bewilderment, and the synchronised swimming team checked each other for bruises. ‘It’s over, Gideon.’
But when she looked behind Wentworth, Gideon Flynn was no more. Where he had stood there was just the faintest eddy of red-gold dust, exactly like the earth beneath her feet.
Chapter 26 - The School of ICE
‘Perhaps,’ said Matilda Peppercorn, in as comforting a fashion as she could manage, ‘Gideon’s absence is like a ghost disappearing from this mortal plane when he’s completed his good deed, like Trent did. Or that other famous dude. Scrooge.’
Jack threw a peanut at her. ‘Scrooge wasn’t a ghost. Marley was a ghost.’
‘Who’s Marley?’
‘The ghost! In Scrooge! Have you even read A Christmas Carol?’ howled Jack in frustration.
‘Of course not,’ Tilly retorted. ‘I did see the Muppety film version, though.’
‘Okay, well, was Scrooge a ghost or a man?’
‘I think he was a frog, wasn’t he?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Woeful. I give up.’
‘Actually,’ said Janey, ‘I’m rather glad. I keep hearing the word “ghost” and it makes me …’
She didn’t even finish the sentence, as she couldn’t find the most appropriate word. It made her all sorts of things, really. Sad, mostly, because that was what both Gideon and Trent had been – actual ghosts - and now Gideon was gone. Then her mind would wander over GHOST the organisation that lost Gideon in some hideous accident before becoming plain old HOST, and then Gideon was gone from them too. And plain old HOST was a complete misnomer, as was ‘Helping Others Save Time’. Helping Ourselves Shoot Trent, more like, and generally helping themselves to anything they wanted. And Gideon was gone.
Jack and Tilly were staring at her, their eyebrows furrowed in such a similar way that they would have hated it if she’d pointed it out to them.
They were lined up along the fountain in the grounds of Jack’s castle, waiting for G-Mamma to call them in for her surprise.
It was just one of the several extraordinary circumstances that had evolved around the surprisingly sudden collapse o
f the World Community Games. To the outside world, it appeared that the police had discovered the role of H, O and S in the recent death of T in the HOST organisation and had pulled the plug on their management of the Games. Simone Varley was being charged with murder as she’d administered poison to her husband which rendered him incapable of avoiding a trip to an MRI which was mysteriously jammed – by a minion controlled by a ruby ring, Janey guessed – and where the metallic remnants of a past accident ripped out of him, shooting him, as it were, from the inside out. Wentworth and Sullivan were both named as accessories, and Miss Rosie Biggenham was cleared of all charges as she’d clearly been framed with evidence hidden in grocery boxes. Jack had read all this out to them with considerable glee, taking special care to explain all the legal terms that might otherwise be lost on them, especially to Matilda.
So that was what the world at large believed. Like Janey, many people had expressed regret that the World Community Games weren’t actually going to happen, as it was a pretty stellar idea (and some new consortium had stepped in to take over for the next year).
What few people had seen, though, was the other set of … well, non-people, clearing up after the event.
Stein had swigged down the last of his pom juice just as soon as he could, sent an email to his friend Moose requesting “immediate supplies via Ambro Flight, gadzooks and forsooth!”, and then helped Jack to process Trent who was still roaming the arena, rattling his head.
‘Can’t believe my own wife would have me killed,’ he repeated. ‘My own wife!’
Jack smiled benignly. ‘You’ll have some great stories to share with my rellies, and they’ll have some for you!’
S*W*A*G*G 1, Spook Page 25
