Fugitive

by Chris Bradford

  Turning towards the wide sweeping staircase, Connor listened for signs of a battle upstairs but heard nothing. Deciding it was wise to clear the ground floor first, he crept down the main corridor towards Alpha team’s briefing room. Passing various classrooms, he noticed desks overturned, chairs kicked over and computers missing. In the dining hall, breakfast was still out on the tables. As he crept inside, Connor caught the lingering whiff of tear gas and spotted the spent cartridges of several flash-bang grenades – clear evidence that this wasn’t a straightforward robbery.

  The silence was unsettling and Connor felt an icy finger of fear creep up his spine. Where is everybody?

  Connor started coughing and his eyes began to sting. Despite the smoke escaping through an upper window, the dining hall was still hazy with gas. He retreated back into the corridor. Even more on edge now, he continued towards the briefing room. A window in the hallway was broken, glass scattered across the carpet. Careful not to step on any shards, Connor crept past. The briefing room was in the same state as the others: furniture in disarray and computers missing. Here the door seemed to have been barricaded shut. It may have held for a while, but scorch marks indicated an explosion and the door now hung off its hinges.

  By the look of things, the attack had been brutal and unexpected. But why wasn’t the alarm raised? How did the intruders overcome the security systems?

  Connor went over to the main desk and tried the phone. The line was dead. He retraced his steps and headed to Colonel Black’s office, passing more ransacked rooms and broken windows on the way. The office’s heavy oak door had been kicked in, the lock broken and the state-of-the-art LED display on the wall smashed. But, to Connor’s surprise, the intruders didn’t appear to have discovered the colonel’s personal computer. The heavy mahogany desk had been swept of its personal effects and its drawers rifled through. Yet Connor knew that an advanced multi-core computer was built into the desk’s frame and a slim glass monitor concealed in a hidden recess. Perhaps he could use the colonel’s computer to access the security systems and find out what had happened. Maybe even discover where everyone else was … dead or alive.

  Setting aside his baton, Connor sat in the colonel’s high-back red leather chair and pressed his thumb to the discreet fingerprint scanner on the inside of the armrest. A small digital display flashed: ACCESS DENIED. He knew it was pointless but Connor tried again anyway. As the display blinked stubbornly red again, Connor heard a crunch of glass in the corridor. Snatching up the XT torch, baton at the ready, he darted over to the open doorway.

  There was another tinkle of glass. The intruder was right outside the door! Connor leapt out to take him down first … only to discover the corridor empty. Too late, he realized that the crunch of glass had been a distraction. Behind, he heard movement and something struck him in the back. A searing pain blazed through his body and his muscles went into spasm. Connor felt as if he was being beaten with a dozen baseball bats at once. The convulsions overcoming him, he collapsed to the floor.

  Connor’s eyes blinked open. He couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds. A warm sizzling sensation – the same feeling as if he’d put his tongue on a 5V battery but amplified a hundredfold – slowly faded from his pulsing nerves. Every muscle in his body was now sore as hell and he felt utterly drained, as if he’d run a triple marathon. Then a surge of anger, fuelled by survival instinct, rose in him. He sat bolt upright and stared into the dark eyes of his attacker.

  ‘I’m really sorry!’ said Amir, holding up his hands. He brandished a Taser X2 Defender stun gun, its conductor wires still trailing from the muzzle to the two electrode darts embedded in Connor’s back.

  ‘You tasered me!’ cried Connor, glaring at his friend.

  Amir offered a sheepish grin. ‘I thought you were one of them.’

  ‘Didn’t you recognize me?’

  Amir shrugged defensively. ‘You’re supposed to be in Mexico.’

  Connor forced himself to calm down, the flood of adrenalin that the stun gun had released only now beginning to pass. He sighed heavily. With all the chaos going on and the phone line down, he realized that Amir wouldn’t have got his messages. Glad his best friend was alive and well, Connor embraced him.

  ‘Yeah, I missed you too,’ said Amir, detaching the barbs from his back and helping him up. Connor’s legs still felt rubbery and Amir had to support him over to the colonel’s chair.

  Connor collapsed into the soft leather seat. ‘What happened here? It’s like a war zone.’

  With a nervous glance towards the door, Amir pulled up another chair. He looked in a complete state: his thick black hair was matted, his eyes red and watery, his jeans torn and soaking wet, and his top smeared in grime. Amir wearily shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know. We were dealing with the fallout from the Mexico operation and –’

  ‘Yeah, I messed up badly, didn’t I?’ interrupted Connor, shifting in his seat, his gaze dropping to the floor.

  Amir looked at him. ‘It wasn’t just your mission. Several other assignments went haywire at the same time.’

  ‘What?’ said Connor, stiffening.

  ‘Never experienced anything like it. A bomb threat in Thailand, a shoot-out in America, a carjacking in South Africa. All our operations seemed to have been targeted at once.’

  Connor stared wide-eyed at Amir, unable to believe what he was hearing. ‘You mean Bravo, Charlie and Delta teams were hit too?’

  Amir nodded gravely. ‘Elsa’s in hospital, critical. Sean’s missing. We were waiting to hear back from David, but … while we were distracted managing those disasters … HQ was attacked.’

  ‘When exactly?’ asked Connor.

  Amir swallowed hard, looking on the point of tears. ‘Around breakfast this morning. Completely without warning –’ His voice faltered. ‘It just all happened so fast. We were totally unprepared. Crazy, if you think about it. We’re bodyguards! We’re trained to deal with exactly these sorts of situations!’

  Connor rested a hand on his friend’s trembling shoulder. ‘I know, I know, but we don’t expect to be targeted ourselves. Now tell me all you can about what happened here.’

  With his head cradled in his hands, Amir went on. ‘They seemed to come out of nowhere. They were literally inside the building before we even knew it. I was having my cornflakes, had just poured the milk, when flash-bang grenades went off in the dining hall. That was the first sign we were being attacked! Our instructors reacted fast, though. Tried to evacuate us. But –’ he glanced up at Connor – ‘the enemy seemed to know all our action drills in advance. They had the exits covered and the safe room locked down. Some teams managed to barricade themselves in. I made it with Ling and the others to Alpha team’s briefing room. But they blew the flippin’ door off!’ Amir snorted in stunned disbelief. ‘We were overrun. Steve and Jody put up a fight, allowing us to make it out into the fields. But … then we heard gunfire and screams.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw Steve, outside,’ said Connor.

  Amir looked up hopefully. Connor replied with a shake of his head. Amir gazed out of the window, his eyes glassy and brimming. ‘Steve sacrificed himself for us. And for what? We were all captured anyway. There were gunmen waiting at the boundary walls. We never had a chance.’

  Connor gave Amir a questioning look. ‘So how did you escape?’

  Amir responded with a hollow laugh. ‘As I was running away, half-blinded by tear gas, I fell into the old well. Almost broke my leg! It took me ages to climb back out. But that well saved my life. None of the attackers thought to look down there.’

  ‘So, where’s everyone else now?’

  ‘I think I’m the only one left, apart from you.’

  Connor felt as if all the air had been knocked from his lungs. ‘You mean they’re all dead? Ling, Marc, Rich–’

  ‘No! They were rounded up and loaded on to a cattle truck. They took all our computers too. Spent a good time stripping the entire place. Very odd.’

 
; ‘A cattle truck?’ questioned Connor. ‘I almost had a head-on crash with one as I arrived. There was a delivery van too.’

  ‘Yeah, that would be the computers and the gunmen,’ said Amir bitterly.

  Standing up, Connor shook the feeling back into his legs. ‘Well, at least we know our friends are still alive.’

  ‘Yeah, but for how long?’ Amir asked. ‘We don’t know where they’ve been taken … or why.’

  ‘Well, do you have any idea who attacked us?’

  Amir shook his head. ‘They were all wearing masks and balaclavas. Never saw a face.’

  Connor frowned. ‘Can you access the CCTV footage from the colonel’s computer? That might give us a clue.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Amir, settling himself into the colonel’s chair. He pressed his thumb to the fingerprint scanner. The display blinked red: ACCESS DENIED. ‘Administrator override 43XGT97,’ he said and the display turned green, a laser keyboard lit up on the desktop and the slim glass monitor rose from its recess.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why you didn’t get any warnings?’ said Connor, pacing the room. ‘What about the perimeter alarms? Security cameras? Pressure detectors? The school is a virtual fortress. The attackers shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near HQ.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself too,’ replied Amir, his fingers flying across the laser keyboard as he called up the surveillance network. He studied the screen for a moment, then frowned deeply. ‘Nothing was triggered. Not the perimeter alarms. Not the pressure detectors. Not the window sensors. They’ve all been deactivated. The CCTV cameras too. Footage for the past twenty-four hours has been entirely erased!’ He typed some more, pulling up different screens that meant nothing to Connor. ‘Our communications were disrupted too. All incoming and outgoing messages blocked!’

  Connor stared at Amir. ‘How’s that even possible? I thought you told me it was a closed system.’

  ‘It is,’ Amir replied, his eyes locked on the streams of code. ‘To have overcome our security firewall and remotely accessed the system, these weren’t some fly-by-night hackers. They had to be high-level professionals –’

  ‘Or someone on the inside deactivated the alarms,’ suggested Connor.

  Amir’s mouth dropped open. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s a possibility we have to consider.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. To be able to locate this secret facility and cripple our security systems must require insider knowledge, though.’

  Amir leant back in the colonel’s chair. ‘Or else unlimited resources, like a government intelligence agency. The fact that multiple missions were disrupted at the same time, in different locations around the world, points to an extremely powerful organization.’

  Connor thought over his assignments before Mexico. ‘The Russian mafia perhaps? Possibly the Russian government? Or maybe both!’

  ‘Well, they were definitely foreign,’ agreed Amir. ‘But they weren’t Russian. When I was in the well, I overheard a couple of the gunmen talking. It sounded like Japanese or Chinese. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but there was one word I did recognize –’ Amir hesitated, a pained expression clouding his face – ‘repeated a number of times, a name actually.’

  Connor stopped pacing and turned to his friend. ‘Whose name?’

  ‘Your name.’

  Connor felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. ‘Are you saying I was the target?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ replied Amir. ‘I mean, your operation was the first to be attacked. But, judging by the way they stripped HQ, I’m guessing they were after something else too.’

  Connor thought back to Mexico. The assault had been well-planned and executed with the same brutal efficiency, the attackers timing their drive-by to the exact second. As the van had passed, Connor remembered the driver had glanced at him, not Eduardo. And, when the gunman had raised his Glock 17, the pistol had been pointing at his face. It dawned on Connor that the attackers hadn’t been trying to kidnap Eduardo at all – they’d been trying to kill him! Connor’s legs lost their strength once more and he slumped down in the spare chair. Was he really the reason for the attack in Mexico and on HQ? The thought sent a chill through him. He stared aghast at Amir. ‘What do they want with me? What were they looking for?’

  Amir shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. As I said, I didn’t understand a word. But I’m hoping Colonel Black might know.’

  Connor sat up straight. ‘He wasn’t captured?’

  ‘No,’ said Amir with a shake of his head. ‘He was off-site at the time.’

  A wave of relief rippled through him. The colonel wasn’t only the head and founder of Buddyguard; he was the closest Connor now had to a father. ‘Where is he then?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know exactly,’ replied Amir. ‘The colonel got a call from Bugsy last week and left as a matter of urgency.’

  ‘So Bugsy’s OK too!’

  Amir nodded. ‘He’s been away on some pre-mission appraisal – a high-level assignment, judging by the secrecy surrounding it. Bugsy wouldn’t even tell me where he was going and I’m his logistics deputy!’

  Knowing that both the colonel and their surveillance tutor hadn’t been captured in the assault, Connor started to feel more hopeful about their situation. ‘Have you tried to contact them?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Amir. ‘But I’ve had no response … although I think I now know why.’ He pointed at the computer monitor where a line of code flashed red. ‘That is a back door to our entire system, planted without our knowledge. The enemy have had access to our entire security network, communications and all mission databases. They’ve basically been in control!’

  Connor gasped. ‘For how long?’

  ‘Who knows? They’ve hidden their tracks well.’ Amir’s fingers raced over the laser keyboard, his brow a knot of concentration. ‘Multi-rootkits … time-based evasion … internal data obfuscation … stego-malware! The combination of evasion techniques is truly exceptional. I’d be impressed, if only it weren’t directed at us –’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Amir, but is there any way we can track the colonel down?’

  ‘Give me a minute, then I’ll access his private agenda. Don’t want our friends snooping on us any more.’

  Lines of code reeled across the screen. To Connor it was gibberish, but to his friend the hieroglyphic-like fusion of letters, numbers and symbols were as accessible as a picture book.

  After several minutes of furious typing, Amir hit enter. ‘There, that should kill it,’ he said, leaning back in the chair with a satisfied smile.

  The screen flashed white, then went blank.

  ‘Is it supposed to do that?’ asked Connor.

  Amir’s smile faded. ‘No.’

  He tried to reboot the computer. Nothing happened. Amir slapped his palm to his forehead. ‘How could I be so stupid? Of course the malware had a self-destruct command. It’s crashed the entire system. Permanently.’

  As Amir tried in vain to get the computer back online, Connor pulled out his mobile. ‘What about my phone? Can we use this to contact the colonel? Or is it compromised too?’

  ‘Most likely,’ said Amir with a grimace. He waved for Connor to hand it over, then, with a flurry of input commands, accessed the phone’s operating system. ‘Well, there doesn’t appear to be anything obviously suspect. After the Cell-Finity bug issue during Operation Hidden Shield, we upgraded the security on all mobile devices. They’re near impossible to hack, though you can still be tracked via your signal –’

  All of a sudden the phone vibrated with a message. Amir did a double-take, then passed it back to Connor. ‘It’s an encrypted text from the colonel.’

  With Amir peering over his shoulder, Connor pressed the fingerprint authorization to decrypt the message:

  End mission immediately. HQ compromised.

  DON’T involve authorities. DON’T communicate.


  Lives at stake.

  Meet at 31.224484, 121.487966.

  1030hrs local time 16/5.

  ‘He knows about the attack at least,’ said Amir flatly.

  ‘Let’s check the coordinates –’

  ‘No!’ cried Amir. But Connor’s thumb had already instinctively hit the hyperlink.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Connor with a feeble smile. ‘I thought you said there was nothing suspect.’

  ‘It’s not your phone that’s the problem,’ said Amir. ‘It’s the wireless router it’s automatically connected to. That’s still potentially compromised.’

  ‘Well, it’s too late to worry about that now,’ said Connor sheepishly as a global map appeared on the phone’s screen, then zoomed in on a sprawling city. He exchanged an astonished look with Amir at the destination. ‘Shanghai, China. They’re on the other side of the world!’

  Amir checked his watch. ‘That gives us barely twenty-four hours to reach the rendezvous point.’

  Connor rose from his seat. ‘We’d best pack our gear then.’

  ‘First I need your phone,’ said Amir. After noting down the colonel’s coordinates on a scrap of paper, he took out the SIM card and snapped it in half. Then he dropped the phone on the floor and stamped on it repeatedly, until it was little more than a pile of broken circuitry.

  Connor forced a laugh. ‘I was due an upgrade anyway! But how’s the colonel supposed to contact us now?’

  ‘He can’t. But neither can the enemy track us,’ Amir explained. ‘We have to go dark. New phones. New kit. New everything.’

  As they headed out of the office and down the corridor towards the logistics supply room, Connor gazed round at the destruction. It was sad to see their training headquarters in such a sorry state. This had been his home for almost two years. Here he’d learnt the life-saving skills of a bodyguard, made lifelong friends, met Charley. So many good memories were attached to the place. And now it was a wreck, a broken shield that no longer protected anyone.