Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  Outside the hotel, I could see why I’d picked the place. It was a stone’s throw from the big, fortress-like MI6 building on the water. I followed the dot on the phone to the middle of a square, where four benches faced outwards around a small fountain. Pigeons milled about, pecking at the ground. I leaned casually against a wall and watched Sarah from a discreet distance. She took a seat on one of the benches and bit into a sub, staring into space as she chewed, rubbing one side of her neck as if stressed. She broke into a smile and waved at a small girl in a plastic red coat, holding hands with her mum. Her gaze lingered on the child. She took another bite. I pushed off the wall and approached slowly, casually.

  Please, please don’t let us kill her. I know it’s just a dream, but I don’t want her to die. She seems like a nice, normal lady.

  She’s MI6, Lorn. They kill and torture foreign people, don’t they? Yes, just think of her looking into the big, innocent eyes of the girl in the red coat and blowing her away point-blank.

  Okay, that made me feel better. I stood over her. The sub was chicken and bacon. A meat eater. Even more reason. Boom, let’s do her for the chickens and pigs, Philippe.

  “Do you mind?” I asked, motioning to the space on the bench next to her.

  “Mom. Mom-mom-mom,” she said with a mouthful of bread. She cleared and swallowed. “Sorry, please …”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I did a double take. “Wait, haven’t we met before?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “The other day, you—”

  “Spilled water all over you. So clumsy of me.”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. She smiled and finished her lunch, screwing up the plastic wrapper.

  “My name’s Philippe,” I said.

  “Sarah.”

  “So, what a coincidence, huh?” I said, leaning back on the bench.

  “That’s an interesting accent. Where are you from?”

  “Seville, originally. But I lived in Paris for a long time and then Vienna. I guess that’s why I talk, how do you say … funny.”

  “Seville’s a beautiful city,” she said, crossing her legs towards me.

  “Ah, you’ve been?”

  She nodded. “So what brings you to London, Philippe?”

  “I’m a chef at the Mayfair. It’s why I move around a lot.”

  “The Mayfair? You must be good at what you do.”

  “I can hold my own,” I shrugged.

  “I had a nice hot gazpacho there once,” she said. “Maybe you prepared it for me.”

  “Hey, maybe,” I said.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you, Philippe,” she said, getting to her feet. “Back to work unfortunately.”

  “Ah, where do you work?”

  “Not far from here. Over the river.”

  “I’m going that way myself. I’ll walk with you.”

  Sarah threw her sandwich wrapper in a nearby bin. “Sure, why not?”

  We walked along making idle chitchat, Philippe turning on the charm, like he was a different person. I hope we didn’t have to go through another hotel shag sesh.

  We approached the front of the MI6 complex. I was expecting her to stop and say, Well, this is me. She kept walking, the conversation running dry.

  “So, Sarah, I was wondering … could I trouble you for your number? Maybe I can cook dinner for you sometime?”

  Sarah stopped, smiley, flirty, biting her lip. “Why don’t you give me yours?”

  I padded my pockets. “You know what? It’s a new number and I think I left my phone in the kitchens.”

  “C’est la vie,” Sarah said.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have a pen. We can do it the old-fashioned way.”

  As I reached into my jacket pocket for the needle, Sarah broke into a speed-walk.

  “Goodbye, Philippe,” she said over a shoulder, heading straight down a flight of tube-station stairs. I followed her at an even pace, not even trying to disguise the fact that I was on her tail. She glanced back anxiously, but kept moving through a crowd of commuters flooding the station.

  She swiped an Oyster card and headed straight through the barrier towards the tube. Meanwhile, I flashed a police badge to a man in uniform, who dutifully opened a side gate. I sidestepped the human traffic onto an escalator. Sarah was already halfway down. I bounded after her, but she scurried fast along one of the arching white-tile tunnels.

  It was sticky warm under the artificial lights, the claustrophobic air tinged with diesel. People hurried in and out of passageways like rats, playing dead behind the eyes. I scanned the tunnel for Sarah and caught the tail of her coat hanging a left.

  I found her waiting on the edge of a platform, feet tapping nervously. I stood further back, behind a crowd of people, one eye fixed on my target. The distant rumble and squeal of steel grew louder and louder until out popped a warm gust of turbulent air and a clattering flash of red, white and blue train. The doors slid open and everyone piled in. Sarah got on at the far end of the car and stood close to the door with her back to me. The train accelerated through the tunnel. One stop. Then another. The doors opened at the third stop along. A giant fat man in sweatpants lumbered on and stood smack-bang in front of me. I couldn’t see anything but the folds in the back of his neck. Was she still on? I shoved my way further into the car, pissing off the other passengers. Sarah was gone.

  I shoved back the other way, only to get sandwiched between the closing doors of the train. I fought my way onto the platform and headed for the nearest exit. There were four possible ways she could have gone. I checked the tracker app on the phone. The map was greyed out. GPS SIGNAL LOST. I picked a tunnel at random. Nope. The next one. Sorry, Philippe. The next. Bingo. At the end of the tunnel, I could see Sarah jumping on a train fresh into the platform. A rapid, high-pitched beep told me the doors were about to close. I sprinted towards them. Sarah saw me coming, eyes wide with terror. I was about to jump on when the doors shunted closed. Bam! A face full of carriage. I backed off as Sarah breathed an epic sigh of relief on the other side of the glass, the train rumbling off into the tunnel.

  Hiding behind the space between the open door and the wall, I watched Sarah tip her entire underwear drawer into the empty suitcase on her bed. Dressed in grey suit trousers and a sleeveless black top that revealed freckles all the way up her pale, chunkiesh arms, she moved to the wardrobe, grabbed an armful of outfits and dumped them in. Then back to the wardrobe again, where she punched in a code on a small safe. The safe made a whirring sound.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” she said, under her breath.

  The safe clicked open. She grabbed a passport from inside and threw it on the bed. Next came a wad of foreign currency in a clear plastic pouch.

  I stood and watched silently. I guess you could only outrun a GPS tracker for so long.

  Sarah zipped and locked the case, stuffing passport and cash in an oversized brown leather handbag. She paused for a second, then doubled back to the safe, where she retrieved a grey cubic object the size of an engagement-ring box, only slimmer. I felt a surge of energy inside me. Like, I dunno, recognition or something.

  I stepped out into the room. Sarah jumped out of her skin, dropping the object on the white shag rug between wardrobe and bed.

  I held a gun down by my side for her to see.

  “How did you know?” I asked her.

  “Gazpacho soup is native to Seville, served cold,” she said. “Don’t suppose this is a friendly visit?”

  She smiled nervously, hopefully. I shook my head.

  “They dispatched you pretty quick,” she said. “I thought I’d have longer.”

  I motioned with the gun for her to step aside, stooping and picking up the grey, graphite object, light as a feather. I tucked it away in a trouser pocket and pulled the suitcase onto the floor.

  “Get on the bed,” I said.

  She let out a shaky breath, as if resigning herself to her fate.

  She’s only a PA, Philippe. What har
m can she do?

  I waved her onto the bed with my gun. She slipped off her shoes, unconsciously fixed her hair and climbed onto the bed, sitting upright against the pillows.

  “You know I’m undercover, right?” she said. “We’re on the same side.”

  I didn’t answer. Philippe didn’t talk unless he absolutely had to. Like it was pay-per-word.

  “Do you know why you’ve been sent to kill me?” she asked.

  I tucked the weapon back in the holster strapped around my shoulder. I took out the needle pen, removed the top and held the tip up to the light breaking in through the bay window. I stepped forward to the edge of the bed.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Sarah said.

  I followed her eyes down her body as far as her belly. Shit, there was a small bump. And it wasn’t bloating from the sub. She was pregnant. I looked up at her.

  “Not fit for service,” she said. “And we both know what that means.”

  I brought the needle in close to the vein. She struggled, knocking my hand away from her arm, but restraining her was easy.

  “Just make it quick,” she sighed, eventually giving up.

  She closed her eyes, tears squeezing their way out from under her lashes. I felt like crying too. These dreams were nightmares. My eyes dwelled on that bump again. Then back to her face.

  “Why didn’t you have it terminated?” I asked, suddenly finding my inner-chat. “You know the rules.”

  She laughed a little to herself, remembering. “I got as far as the waiting room. I couldn’t—”

  “And what did you think would happen?” I asked.

  “Get to a safe place. Keep the list as insurance. Leak it maybe. I don’t know. Have you seen the grand vision? Who wants their child growing up in a world like that, anyway?”

  “You shouldn’t have left that clinic,” I said. “Now it’s both of you.”

  “People like you only know how to destroy things,” she said. “How could you possibly understand?”

  I turned my attention to Sarah’s arm, bringing the needle back to the skin, ready to puncture the vein.

  You fucking bastard, Philippe. You heartless fucking bastard.

  15

  Q&A

  Early morning light filtered in through the angled blinds, the songs of chirruping birds through an open window.

  Aw, no fair! I wanted to know how it ended. Even the poison-pen bit where Philippe does what he does depressingly well.

  I reached for my phone. I had a tweet back on my question:

  No examples, but in theory, cell memory = muscle memory? Possible. Would like to hear more. @2ndCell

  He’d also tweeted me with his Skype address so we could set up a call. At last, I thought. Answers!

  Sitting in front of a large wooden bookcase crammed with books and papers, Dr Tariq seemed surprisingly young, with his floppy black hair, chubby cheeks and dinky stature, but I’d read his bio. He was older than he looked and had a string of letters after his name as long as my scar. So no matter how nuts his theories sounded, it was hard to argue when he told me my heart had a memory.

  “The cells in our bodies have a mind of their own,” he said in a strong Indian accent. “The nucleus of the cell is an intelligence in its own right. In fact, the cells in your body are constantly spying on your brain. Not only that, many times they’re sending signals to your subconscious mind that drive your behaviour.”

  I was no Stephen Hawking. And even though we were on Skype, I think he could tell he was losing me.

  “For example,” he continued, “think about standing up off your bed, let’s say one time out of five. And only one time out of five, you’re actually going to do it. The cells in your body already know exactly which of those times you’re going to stand up.”

  “I don’t get it. How come?”

  “Because if they didn’t, your body wouldn’t be able to send enough blood to your head to stop you blacking out,” he said. “Now, this is the really key part. Our memories are essentially stored in the body.”

  I leaned forward on the bed, as if being closer to the screen would make me smarter.

  “What this means,” he said, “is that when you experience an event in your life, however big or small, your body creates receptor sites for whatever emotion you experience. These emotions are basically chemicals cooked up in your brain and released into your body to let you know what you’re feeling, whether it’s fear, love, anger, joy, loneliness, whatever. Just like a drug habit, your receptor sites are addicted to emotions. And they’ll signal the brain to produce the chemical that represents the emotion in question. But the only way the brain can manufacture that chemical emotion is to experience the event. As the subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between an imagined or real event, the brain automatically creates a memory in order to manufacture the emotion and send it to the receptor site in the body.”

  Say what? It was a lot of science-talk to take in. I tried to clarify.

  “So, Dr Tariq, what you’re saying is, emotions are like drugs that the body gets addicted to. The body, like, says hey brain, send down more of that good shit. And the brain cooks up emotions in the form of memories. Then, voila! The chemical is released and the body gets its fix.”

  “Exactly, Lorna. Brilliant,” he said. “You just put it far better than I could.”

  Ha ha! I got it. Gold star for Lorna.

  “But what does all this have to do with heart transplants?” I asked.

  “Good question. It’s all a matter of identity.”

  Dr Tariq took a sip from a large black mug that said University of Copenhagen.

  “Remember I said your cells are spying on your brain?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And how they grow attached to certain memories and emotions?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, in doing so, each cell shares your own individual sense of identity. The music you like, the food you eat, the subjects you study … everything. For instance, did you read the example of the woman who developed a taste for chicken nuggets and motorbikes?”

  “Ha ha. Yes, I read that. Crazy.”

  “Well, in that case, the identity of the donor was stored in the cells of the heart that was transplanted into the patient. All of a sudden, those memories and emotions that form the identity of the chicken-nugget-loving biker are being transplanted into the body of the woman. The receptor sites in the heart cells are then sending messages up to their new brain to say let’s have more of those nuggets and motorbikes we’re so fond of. And so the subconscious mind instructs the woman to go and buy some nuggets and learn how to ride a motorbike. While she might not consciously recognise these new tastes as memories, that’s exactly what they are. Still with me?”

  “I think so, Dr Tariq, yeah.”

  “So to get to the point,” he said, “what you’re currently experiencing is the identity of your donor mixing in with yours. It’s quite a common occurrence. What’s not so common is the transference of the self-defence skills you described, which would require the building of muscle memory and a change in your actual physiology.”

  Dr Tariq broke off again to take another sip from his mug. He sat and thought for a moment, then lifted a finger towards the screen. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. In fact, theoretically, the body can signal spontaneous genetic changes instantly. Changes in strength, speed, even eyesight and so on. Just look at people with multiple personality disorders. Some change eye colour in seconds as their personality shifts. They can also switch instantly from disability and disease to perfect health and function.”

  “If a heightened sense of emotion is felt,” he continued, “especially if the amygdala senses a threat in the environment …”

  Dr Tariq trailed off, realising he was running away with himself.

  “As Arthur Conan Doyle said …”

  “Arthur who?” I asked.

  “He wrote Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Oh yeah,
go on …”

  “Conan Doyle said that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  “So you’re saying it’s the only possibility left?” I asked.

  “I can’t think how else a teenage girl could hospitalise four grown men so easily,” he said. “And your donor did die from a gunshot wound.”

  “So maybe he was some sort of badass? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Dr Tariq shrugged as if to say Yeah, maybe.

  “Then that means there’s a direct connection to my dreams,” I said.

  Dr Tariq paused and looked intently into his webcam.

  “I don’t think your dreams are dreams, Lorna,” he said. “I think they’re memories.”

  I thanked Dr Tariq for his help and asked whether I could email him with any questions. He said he’d love to keep in touch. In fact, he asked if he could track my experiences as part of a new book he was writing. Of course, I said. It’s not every day people wrote about you in a book.

  I came off the call with my head spinning. I needed some time to digest all the science stuff and get my head around the sheer craziness of it all. This wasn’t the kind of thing they taught at school. And it certainly wasn’t in Hey, I’ve had a heart transplant! What next?

  I opened my textbooks and tried to do some homework, but it was pointless. I stared right through the words on the page, thinking about the dreams and the recent behaviours. If Dr Tariq was right, then whose organ had they given me?

  I put my hand against my chest. Listen to your heart, that’s what people said. All I heard was bump-bump-bump. Then a disturbing thought hit me. If I had the heart of a killer and the heart had thoughts of its own, would it make me want to kill too? And if so, how long before it infected my entire mind?

  What should I do?

  What could I do?