The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  He reached her knee. She was laid out and strapped into some kind of white crate. Tubes and wires came off her chest and connected to a small life support unit, its LEDs blinking.

  Finn ran up her prone body and scrambled over the hissing, humming medical apparatus clustered over her head until he reached her ear.

  “GRANDMA!”

  Nothing. He yanked on some of the downy hair on her lobe, scaled her soft splendid face and tried to haul open her eyes. She was out cold. Drugged.

  Kaparis. The kidnappers had been Tyros, no question. But what did Kaparis want with Grandma? Finn knew the answer; it was in his heart. We love her. Blackmail … The thought of her being hostage to such a man made him sick.

  Finn could feel pressure growing in his ears. They popped. The jet was descending. He had to do something.

  Down the side of the white crate he could just make out something – a ziplock polythene bag.

  Finn headed for it, unclasping Grandma’s RHS visitor badge on the way. He used the pin to puncture the bag, then put both hands in the hole and forced it to split.

  Inside were the crazed contents of Grandma’s handbag – notes, nuts, make-up, coins, elastic bands, stamps, dog treats, a small china bell, a Cambridge University snow globe, a cheap string of pearls, an emergency sewing kit, a single cufflink and also everything they needed for their nano-day out – six nRation packsfn1, his nPhone backpack (battery dead) and, crucially, Hudson’s inhaler.

  Finn kicked open the cover on the inhaler’s mouthpiece.

  There was the concealed Bug, its pockmark thrusters showing through the cotton wool wadding.

  Finn pulled away the wadding and climbed on to the Bug. He snapped on the ignition switches and, with a sudden suck, the turbines turned over and the Bug lit up – rising to suspend itself, headlights alive.

  He eased it out of the mouthpiece and loaded up the nRations and the nPhone. Instinct told him to haul a pin from the sewing kit too, just in case.

  He climbed back aboard and was pulling on the harness when he felt a sudden jolt as the aircraft they were in touched down. There was a fierce braking and rumbling of wheels, loud enough to wake—

  “Aaaaaaaargh!”

  “Grandma!”

  The giant old woman woke in a panic, trying to lash out but constrained by the straps. The whole crate shook.

  Finn turned the lights up and shoved the controls forward. The Bug forced its way through the split in the polythene bag, then, thrusters hissing as automatic systems fought to keep it stable, it rose over Grandma’s struggling legs, each the size of a blue whale, and flew up towards her head.

  All Grandma saw was a glowing fiend approaching fast.

  “Aaaaaaaargh!”

  “GRANDMA! It’s ME!” Finn yelled.

  Grandma’s terrified, giant eyes fixed upon the Bug.

  “Infinity?” she demanded, words muffled by the mask.

  He flew nearer to her ear. “We’ve been kidnapped. By Kaparis. But I don’t know where he’s taking us.”

  Grandma let out a yodel of distress.

  “We’re all right. I’m all right. I don’t even know if he knows I’m here.”

  The engine noise wound down and they felt the aircraft stop completely.

  “We have to decide what to do,” said Finn. “We need a plan.”

  “Don’t do anything!” insisted Grandma.

  Metallic clunks were heard as doors were opened. Voices. East Asian.

  “Grandma, if they lift the lid on this thing I’ve got to go and get help.”

  Footsteps began to draw closer.

  Finn put the Bug into whisper mode and probed Grandma’s soft grey hair until he found a hairgrip just behind her ear. “Grandma, keep your eyes closed and play dead. I have to escape and find Al – he’ll rescue you!” he said quietly.

  Grandma groaned as if in a deep sleep – a moan of protest.

  Finn grabbed the nPhone pack off the back seat of the Bug.

  “I’m going to leave the nPhone on your hairgrip. It’s out of battery, but all you need to do is put it by any live wire to charge. Just by being on, it will send a signal so Al will know exactly where you are.”

  CLACK! CLACK! The clips holding shut the crate were sprung open.

  Finn twisted the Bug out of sight and Grandma snapped her eyes shut in terror.

  The lid of the crate lifted and a highway of light opened up down one side of it. Two pale, identical teen heads appeared.

  Spike and Scar.

  Scar took out a powerful torch and Spike took out a smart phone, studying the screen intently. Nano-radar of some kind? The searchlight started at Grandma’s feet and crept up her body, towards her head.

  They’re looking for me, thought Finn.

  He watched the light creeping up Grandma towards him. He could hear his heart beat in his chest. He and the Bug were bound to light up any nano-radar. He was a sitting duck. He slapped open the chamber on the M249 machine gun in front of him. There was ammo in the block ready to run.

  As the searchlight hit him a bright spot showed up on the screen of Spike’s phone. She shrieked.

  Finn gritted his teeth and punched the controls forward, and accelerated towards a spot between Spike and Scar’s ghostly faces, taking them by surprise.

  The Bug shot out into the cramped cargo hold, engine SCREEEEEEEEECHING to reverse-thrust before it hit the fuselage, the seat harness nearly tearing through Finn’s shoulders.

  “Yaaa!” screamed Scar and dived for a cargo net, grabbing one and brandishing it.

  Finn shot back past them, over the large white chest he’d just escaped, slaloming through a landscape of personal luggage and crated cargo, darting around, looking for any kind of exit.

  Spike span with her phone until she captured the dot on her screen again. “Zhyaa!”

  “It’s on the tracker. Confirmed nano,” reported Li Jun.

  “Get it!” hissed Kaparis.

  Nano-radar had been fitted into every Tyro phone to track the nano-bot army. They hadn’t been able to search the body properly in the haste to escape London, but now, after hours of waiting, Kaparis congratulated himself. The boy would soon be in his hands.

  Scar flew through the cargo after the Bug, agile and vicious, a cat after a bird.

  Finn pulled the controls up hard and fast to loop above her, but she cast the cargo net.

  THWACK! It caught the edge of the Bug and sent it spinning.

  Finn clung to the controls as gyroscopes fought to stabilise the spin.

  Scar and Spike leapt as one to grab the spinning, glowing Bug, but as they did so a whole section of the fuselage suddenly shifted.

  All three were dazzled.

  Bright sunshine.

  The cargo bay was opening. Finn, back in control of the Bug, jammed the sticks forward and shot towards the light.

  With a hot wet wallop he hit the air of the tropics. Eyes adjusting in the rich sunlight, he flew out beneath the belly of the huge airliner they’d been trapped in, then corkscrewed around until he found himself rising above it.

  As he climbed higher, an airport spread out beneath him, its runways ending where they met the sea, while beyond, steep mountains framed skyscrapers that ran in a crest around a natural harbour.

  Finn’s mind jumped to the old kung fu films Al used to insist they watched.

  And at once he knew exactly where he was …

  ong Kong.

  The city clung to the hills about the harbour. Cargo ships and junk boats busied themselves on the waters. Old and new, land and sea.

  Finn looked back down at the airport runway. Spike and Scar were on the tarmac, searching for him, pointing the radar into the sky. The white crate was already being unloaded on to a forklift.

  Grandma …

  He had to get help.

  At the edge of the artificial island that was the airport, he saw a fast train approaching.

  Twenty minutes later Finn was riding the train’s roof as it ran back
into the city, like a desperado in the old Wild West, the Bug jammed into an air vent. Finn’s plan was to find a British official – there must be an embassy in Hong Kong – who could make contact with Uncle Al. Though what he would say, and how he would say it, he had no idea.

  After another ten minutes of buffeting, the train stopped at a station called Kowloon. Finn recognised the name from a Call of Duty map, and got off.

  He floated the Bug out of the station and flew to the top of a road sign where he tried to take in the scene. Dozens of images, sounds, sensations hit him. It was busy. The traffic was busy, the people were busy, the buildings were busy … even the air was busy, infused with aromas of Asian food, exhaust fumes and the sea. Then, penetrating the cacophony around him, Finn heard a tinny, high-pitched, stop-start buzzing.

  DZZTZT-ZZZTZTZT-ZTZTZ-TZZZ-ZZZSZ-TSTS-TZZZTZTZ …

  He looked up.

  Incoming. His least favourite insect: stooped in profile, lazy in flight and responsible for the annual death of half a million people from malaria. A mosquito.

  It swung down towards him, body swollen to the size of a Labrador, its wingspan the same as Finn’s height, arrow-thin proboscis pointing at the open side of the Bug, ready to run straight through him … DZZT! DZZZT!

  Finn snatched up the pin he’d taken from Grandma’s bag and, using it as a sword, he parried the incoming stinger with a healthy smack, before thrusting forward to nick the mosquito’s swollen abdomen. BOOOSPLOOSSHHH! Its guts – full with blood harvested that morning – burst spectacularly.

  Not since Finn had totalled the pinata at Max Campbell’s ninth birthday party had he seen such a multi-coloured explosion. Yuk, he thought, drenched in blood and guts.

  But there was no time to recover, straight away …

  DZZTZT-ZZZTZTZT-ZTZTZ-TZZZ-ZZZSZ-TSTS-TZZZTZTZ …

  A dozen or so more mosquitoes appeared, from all directions, alerted by the smell. Finn aimed and fired the Minimi machine gun – DRRRRTT! – and a pair ahead of him exploded in a haze of haemoglobin. The scent would throw the others briefly off his own, but he had to get clean or he’d never get rid of them. He fired the turbines and took off.

  There was a fancy skyscraper hotel opposite: The Ritz Carlton. Bingo.

  Finn headed for the automatic doors, and following a businessman, he slipped into the sudden, air-conditioned cool and entered a large atrium.

  Sanctuary.

  He headed for the reception desk a few feet above the businessman, mind a blur, one half thinking: I’ll follow the man to his room, find water, wash the blood off, then fly out and find the Embassy, while the other half thought: How? How? How? Ho—

  And that was when he saw it. At the reception desk, one leaflet among a hundred others: The Pennsylvania Youth Orchestra Proudly Presents …

  DAY THREE 16:03 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  For Commander King, for Bo Zhang, for the team of technicians and experts of every kind, these hours were the worst of times. The waiting and the not knowing were far worse than fighting and losing a battle, far more sapping of the human spirit.

  Al, who had long since burnt through his reserves of patience, was having the worst of it. Every newsless moment was torture. He watched the surveillance footage they had of the attack on Grandma over and over – the clouds of coloured smoke obscuring most of the screen. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed.

  The boy stays safe. The one thing he’d promised himself – the one thing he’d promised his mother. The boy stays safe.

  Al would never forgive himself. What was he doing here, miles out of place, hours out of time? But what was the alternative? This was Kaparis, Kaparis all over, and if it was Kaparis then by now Finn and Grandma could be at any point on the globe undergoing who knew what …

  Whatever this was, it must be something to do with the G&T being in Shanghai.

  He also knew that this would not end until he could get to Kaparis. That meant watching and waiting. That meant holding his nerve.

  He swallowed his fear, scratched the sphalerite stone that hung at his chest with his thumbnail. Secretly it glowed.

  Kelly was angry, restless. Delta electric with upset. Stubbs withdrawn. But there was nothing to be done but deal with the task in hand, while security agencies scoured the globe for any sign of Finn and Grandma.

  A network of nano-radar sites had been set up in the heart of the Forbidden City and Kelly and Delta had flown countless sorties in the X2 Skimmers, making high-speed sweeps, zone by zone, spiralling towards the centre of the tech metropolis. But so far they hadn’t located any sign of a nano-bot.

  Bo Zhang’s technicians had pored over weeks of CCTV footage and established that nine other unknown teenagers had visited the Forbidden City over the previous eight weeks, they had all visited Sector 9, and it had to be borne in mind that many more than six nano-bots could have been released. But again, there was no direct evidence they were Tyros and as yet no sign of any nano-bots.

  Commander King was detached and rational. “Time. The more time that passes, the closer we get.”

  Bo Zhang nodded in agreement. “We will find them, it’s all just a matter of—”

  “Scale,” Al interrupted. He jabbed a finger out across Shanghai and did the maths.

  “Somewhere out there, on a sphere with a surface area of more than half a billion square kilometres, is a boy only 9mm tall. Right now he may as well be lost in the infinity of space.”

  DAY THREE 18:06 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  “First of all, Mrs Allenby, my apologies for keeping you waiting …”

  An apology. He was opening with an apology. How English.

  He had planned an awesome first meeting. Violet Allenby was to be led in as he listened to Bach’s D Minor Toccata and Fugue and the chamber rose out of the coral sea and spiralled to its highest point in the sugarloaf. He would then say, “Good day, Mrs Allenby.” Instead, as the chamber rose in darkness, he was forced, upon his honour, to apologise.

  He’d spent the intervening hours mobilising the Hong Kong Triadsfn1 and organising the search for Infinity Drake, air-dropping into Hong Kong as many nano-trackers as could be spared. A vast effort, a vast expense. And so far: nothing. The boy had clearly gone to ground.

  “My duties have delayed me. Also, I understand my operatives were negligent and omitted to restock the life support unit. Fresh opiates should have been added. I understand you may have been awake for part of the journey. Distressing. I wanted you to wake as if in paradise.”

  “I was as comfortable as could be expected, under the circumstances,” snipped Grandma, determined this ridiculous man should not have the pleasure of being right about anything.

  “They will be punished.”

  “Not on my account. I was quite happy. As a girl, I memorised ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’:

  “Love divine, all love’s excelling

  Joy of Heaven to Earth come down …”

  … warbled Grandma rather beautifully.

  Good grief, thought Kaparis.

  “I hope from now on you will be more comfortable. A room has been prepared. As long as your son and his employers see sense, you should not be detained here for long.”

  “How do you know I haven’t already raised the alarm?” said Grandma.

  “Nobody will hear you cry for help out here,” Kaparis assured her.

  “Nevertheless,” said Grandma, “I must inform you, it is my duty as an Englishwoman to attempt to escape.”

  Kaparis sniggered, sounding like a slowly deflating balloon. “That, I look forward to.”

  Mindful, as always, that every last soul was worth saving, Grandma took in the wretch on the raised dais. The hissing lung. The distorted head encased in optics. The screen array and the mysterious thirst for global dominance. It all added up to unhappiness (it so often did). She must try and be positive. She trotted across to the windows, adjusted the blinds and switched on a lamp to create a warmer atmosphere. />
  Heywood, the butler, froze in terror. Ditto her two female Tyro escorts. As Grandma rearranged a sculptural masterpiece, Li Jun physically shook at her bank of screens.

  “Stop that!” Kaparis gasped. “This chamber has been designed with great care and at great expense by the finest – Do not touch! That’s a Matisse!”

  “Well, it’s all wrong in here. You know, Doctor Kaparis, whatever misfortune befell you, a disability does not have to be a disaster—”

  “MADAM! I am exactly the same in character now as I was the day I was born, never altered by expediency, circumstance, injury or experience – not even when members of your family tried to destroy me. I have endured and I remain and I—”

  “Our local riding centre does marvellous work with the Cerebral Palsy Pony Club. Come along and you might surprise yourself. The ponies don’t have the palsy, of course, the riders do. The point is to embrace life. I mean, look at Tanni Grey-Thompson and all the Paralympians—”

  “Heywood!”

  “If madam would—”

  “Ah, it’s Heywood is it – fresh flowers on top here.” She patted the iron lung. “An arrangement around a tropical theme, I think. Do you have a florist? I don’t see much in the way of native flora, do you?” she said, peering out at the moonlit rockface.

  “Kindly refrain from addressing my staff!” snapped Kaparis.

  “Would you like to be alone?” asked Grandma.

  “… Yes.”

  Kaparis tried to say it in a way that it implied it was all his idea, yet succeeded only in sounding chastened.

  “Shall we go then?” she said to the two terrified Tyros and began to sing again.

  “He who would valiant be, ’gainst all disaster

  Let him in constancy, follow the Master …”

  Grandma was taken to her room beneath the waves. It was beautiful, done out very much in her style, with a big brass bed and a selection of cakes. There was even a supply of wool, knitting needles and patterns.

  “He should be running a hotel, not trying to take over the world,” she remarked to one of her ‘girls’.