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

by Rob Aspinall

  I did what I did best. I buried my head in the sand and hoped it would all go away.

  16

  How To Catch A Bullet

  I let go of Sarah’s arm and put the top back on the needle tip of the pen. She seemed confused. You and me both, sister.

  “Your old life is done,” I said, tucking the pen away in my jacket pocket. “Stick to your original plan. No friends or family.”

  I extended the handle on the case and tossed her the cute grey mackintosh from the back of the dresser chair.

  “What? Why? Why are you doing this?” she asked, unmoved.

  “Don’t question. Just go.”

  “O-okay,” she said, still taken aback by the sudden reprieve.

  Sarah slid off the bed and into her shoes. She worked her way into the coat, grabbed the case and walked, stopping short of the bedroom door.

  “You need to go too,” she said.

  “Why? What did you do?” I asked.

  Without answering, she disappeared through the doorway. As her case thumped down the stairs, I noticed a red light blinking inside the safe.

  I opened one of the bedroom windows overlooking the leafy suburban street. Sarah threw her case in the boot of a silver Audi A3 and backed out of the drive in a hurry. She took off down the road, tyres screeching. My attention switched to the watercolour-grey sky. A dot. A sound. A helicopter. Dark-blue vans pulling up either side of the house, a few numbers down.

  A heavily armed tactical unit streamed out and crouched in single file against walls and hedges as next-door neighbours were pulled out of their homes and moved a safe distance down the street. I drew the weapon from my shoulder holster.

  Don’t bother, Philippe. You’re done for. Put your hands up and pack your bags for max security.

  I ran into the back bedroom in time to see a second tactical unit filing around the house in their heavy-duty boots. They gathered around the back door, part of a choreographed raid from the front, the rear and above, helicopter blades beating thunderously over the roof of the house.

  Okay, this was officially some scary shit-poops.

  I bound down the stairs and vaulted over the banister into the hallway. I opened a utility cupboard under the staircase and loosened the head of a copper pipe. There was a loud hiss and a headache-inducing whiff of gas. I kicked open the door to the basement, flying down the rickety wooden steps. I hit the dirty concrete floor just as both police units crashed through the front and back of the house, sparking the gas. The whole house went up with the loudest bang I’d ever heard.

  I threw myself to the floor, hit by a wall of heat, like I’d just opened the world’s largest oven door.

  I heard the mo-fo of all whining sounds, followed by another walloping explosion. I got up off the dusty concrete floor and surveyed the damage. The staircase, smouldering. The door blown to splinters. Thick smoke filling up the basement. Acrid, eye-stinging stuff that got right into my lungs. I found a padlocked metal door, shot off the lock and yanked the stiff old thing halfway open, squeezing through the gap and climbing the few brick steps up into the back garden.

  It was carnage.

  Flames roared out of a gaping hole in the roof. Broken glass, tiles and bits of home strewn all over the place, with policemen blown halfway across the lawn, one stuck in a hedge and another staggering to his feet. He saw me walking across the grass and raised his rifle. I nonchalantly put a bullet in his chest. Down he went. I scaled the back wall easily and dropped to the other side in the immaculate rear lawn of a mansion house, where the police helicopter lay broken and smoking, the small tail rotor still spinning and the pilots crawling on elbows away from the wreckage.

  Standing frozen with an old-fashioned manual lawnmower was an old man in gardening clothes. I pointed the gun at him and politely informed him that I required the use of a car.

  The old man’s car turned out to be a beige Merc from the Stone Age. Mint condish with pea-green leather seats, parked on the drive behind high wooden gates. A fob for the gates had been left handily on the central console. While the engine warmed up, I took out the mystery object I’d stolen from Sarah and … Shit! No!

  The dream jumped ahead. Suddenly, I was Tokyo-drifting across a busy intersection in rush-hour traffic. I heaved the truck-sized steering wheel to the right and swerved around a double-decker bus. Two chasing black saloons did the same and stayed on my tail. They didn’t look like police.

  I squeezed every last drop of performance from the beige-mobile, but the non-antique cars were gaining fast.

  And now there was a black, unmarked chopper tracking me in the sky, the door sliding open and a sniper leaning out over the edge with the kind of rifle that could take down King Kong.

  I was somewhere in central London now, familiar landmarks on the horizon. Big Ben. The Thames. The London Eye. Traffic was backing up nose to tail. I pulled a hard right down a narrow side alley, clipping the wall on the passenger side. The Merc was a tank and didn’t sweat it. The chopper disappeared out of sight overhead and only one of the chasing cars made it down the alley, the other getting blocked off by a honking bin lorry.

  It was close your eyes and grit your bum hole time. After flying down a maze of narrow, blind passageways, it was almost a relief to hit a dead end and get boxed in by the chasing car. A mean-looking spook in a blue bomber jacket stepped out of the passenger door and plugged the Merc with machine-gun fire, shattering the back window and piercing the front dash.

  I lay flat across the front seats and pushed open the passenger door. I leaned out à la Paris and double-tapped Bomber Jacket in the head. He bounced like rain off the front of his car, a small puff of blood mist hanging in the air where his life used to be.

  I hung out of the door for a second or two, listening to the chopper circling overhead, waiting for the driver to make his move. He did, reversing back down the alley.

  I sat up behind the wheel and found reverse. The engine cut and died. No option but to bail out on foot. The enemy car blocked off the escape route to the main road, forcing me to dive down a side street, searching for an exit.

  A hundred feet away, I spotted a narrow passageway leading to a busy pedestrian street. I made a dash for it. I was almost there when I came across an intersection, exposed. I heard a beating, buzzing insect above the rooftops. By the time I looked up it was too late. A flash and a pop later, I was knocked off balance. Flat on my back, face full of sky, a fierce pain burning a hole in my lower left gut. The sniper reloaded as hot blood seeped through my T-shirt. I fired back at the cockpit of the chopper. It pulled sharply away to the left, throwing the sniper’s aim off target. His bullet whistled high and wide, punching a hole through a nearby NO ENTRY sign. I scrambled to my feet, hand against gut, trying to stop the inevitable.

  Jesus, I felt everything. It was worse than my first period.

  As the helicopter circled and both chase cars appeared behind me at the start of the alley, I got lucky. There was a kid climbing off a scooter, delivering pizza. I shoved him away before he could take the key from the ignition and steered the bike one-handed across the pedestrian street, scaring shoppers out of the way.

  I cut straight through a pair of automatic doors into a small boutique shopping mall, weaving in and out of the human traffic, whizzing past designer stores to easy-listening music.

  I slid out the other side through the doors and out onto another pedestrian street. What I wasn’t expecting was a Chinese toddler with a SpongeBob balloon gawping at the pizza bike. I was about to turn his innocent little face into tiny-tot mash, but Philippe proved he wasn’t made of stone. (Maybe just concrete blocks.) I yanked hard on the right handlebar and slid smack into a bench.

  Oh man, that hurt.

  Pizza boxes spilled out onto the street, the boy blinking his baby browns at me in oblivious fascination, before being gobbled up in the arms of his shrieking mother.

  I pushed the bike off me and hobbled away, suddenly feeling cold. The helicopter whoppa-who
pped into view over the rooftops, distant police sirens rushing to join the party.

  I hobbled along, shaking off a bash on the leg but starting to go woozy, barging into an old stone building through a set of heavy oak doors. Inside, I found rows of old, stiff wooden seats, a thick maroon carpet and a long table under a white cloth at the front of the hall.

  Oh, and a huge plastic Jesus.

  Church.

  I headed over to the confession booth. Not a good sign. If you died in your dreams, you didn’t really die, right?

  I stepped inside and drew the purple velvet curtain across. The booth was an antique wooden box with a bum-numbing bench and a crucifix-mesh divide between sinner and priest. Philippe didn’t strike me as the religious type. A bit late now. If God really was throwing a 24/7 pool party in the sky, I don’t think professional assassins made the list. Not because of one quick confession while you bleed to death. I glanced to my right. The priest must have been on his break.

  I took a pack of gum from a trouser pocket and thumbed out a couple of pieces. I sat there chewing for a few seconds.

  What, Philippe? Is this your plan? Sit here and chew some gum? Great plan.

  With minty-fresh breath, I pulled out the mystery object I’d stolen from Sarah and stuck the lump of sticky green gum on top. I then bent over double and pushed the object gum-first against the bench until it held firm.

  I sat back upright. With the adrenaline of the chase wearing off, the gunshot wound stung like hell. I peeled my T-shirt off the wound to assess the damage. Blood gurgled out of a thumb-sized hole. I zipped up my jacket, slid the curtain open and tried to walk, the whole world spinning around me like I was on the waltzers. As an ageing priest hurried out of a back room to help me, I collapsed on the soft, shallow steps of the altar. From there on in, it was like being back in the recovery ward on the anaesthetic. I was faintly aware of police officers talking to the priest. Of a man in plain clothes subtly taking a photo of my face with his phone. Of the man being removed. Paramedics running in. Plastic Jesus II looking sad.

  Then I blacked out.

  Philippe was dead.

  17

  Uncertainty Principles

  I woke up to laughter. Rip-roaring, tear-streaming, leg-kicking laughter. A classroom full of faces all rubbernecking in my direction as Mr Herd called my name in a soft, mocking way.

  “Lor-na. Oh Lor-na. Time to wake up, Lorna.”

  The class burst into fits and giggles all over again. I picked my head up off the desk and wiped the drool from my chin. Oh, awesome; someone was recording it on their phone. I could see the headline. Dumb sick girl drools all over desk … AGAIN!

  Mr Herd was a hairy pea on legs with a ginger-grey beard. He stared over his glasses at me from the front of the class. It was a warm, stuffy classroom with double physics on the menu. I mean, what did he expect?

  “Sorry, sir,” I said. “I was listening. I was just, um, resting my face.”

  “Ah, good, then you can explain the equation here. Even better ,you can finish it for us.”

  Sniggers rippled through the room. Mr Herd held out the marker pen and invited me up. It was an impossible task for a rookie A-level student and he knew it.

  “So, Lorna,” said Mr Herd, “now that your brain’s had a nice little rest, maybe you can tell us what we’re looking at.”

  I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, as if I was actually mulling it over. Like I had a clue. The equation, squiggled in fat green marker, resembled something off a pyramid wall.

  I felt the classroom walls closing in, my cheeks burning.

  Come on, brain. Think sciency thoughts.

  Okay, say something. Say anything.

  “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?” I asked.

  Mr Herd rocked back in his scruffy brown brogues.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Explain it to the class, please.”

  The words tumbled out of me like I was possessed by Wikipedia.

  “Well, it’s like, as soon as you measure, say, the position of a quantum particle, you affect its momentum. And vice versa. Meaning we can only measure the probability of where things will be and how they’ll behave. Not with any degree of certainty. So, the universe is kind of … fuzzy.”

  Where the hell did that come from?

  “Co-rrect,” Mr Herd said, his eyebrow arching towards the board. I took a shot and wrote the number two where there was a gap in the equation.

  Mr Herd said nothing. By golly, I was right!

  He wiped away Heisenberg’s equation, grabbed a fat blue pen and squeaked out another brain scrambler as long as a short walk.

  “Okay, let’s see you complete this one,” he said.

  Oh, come on. Give me a sodding break.

  Why was he picking on me? It’s not like I was the first student to fall asleep during a quantum particle waffle-a-thon.

  I stood back and got a good look at the equation. You know that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves gets the knowledge downloaded direct into his brain and suddenly he knows kung fu? Well, it was the same thing. I knew maths and science kung fu. And I knew it better than Mr Herd.

  “There should be a y here,” I said, scribbling it down to complete the equation. “Except you’ve made a bit of a boo-boo, sir.”

  “A what?” Mr Herd replied.

  “A mistake, sir. There’s a mistake in the middle here.”

  The class erupted with laughter. Mr Herd looked at me like I was insane.

  “Don’t be ridic—”

  In that moment, he knew I was right.

  “Besides,” I said, “there’s an alternative way.” I wiped the equation off the board and replaced it with a simpler one.

  “There,” I said, snapping the lid back on the pen, feeling a little high on the fumes.

  You could have heard a mouse eat a marshmallow, it was so quiet. Mr Herd examined the board again, his eyes running back and forth over the equation, fingers tugging at the end of his beard. He fixed me with a stare.

  “Who are you?”

  “Lorna, sir. Lorna Walker. You had me last year.”

  The class laughed again. Quick to jump on any innuendo.

  “Had me for GCSE science, I meant.”

  Mr Herd wagged an accusing finger at me, but said nothing. As if he couldn’t find the words. Then he simply walked straight out of the room.

  “Ha ha. Nice work Theory of Everything,” one of the lads shouted to a smattering of cheers and laughter.

  “You just punk’d his ass,” said another, trying to sound street.

  I returned to my seat and the class broke into loud chatter. I closed my textbook and checked my phone – a string of tweets and FB posts on what had just happened.

  Herd just lost it in Fiziqs.

  Old Turd goin apeshit.

  Scartits just fkd Turd up!

  And, oh, another video of me to cringe myself to sleep to.

  Science 101 with Good Will Munting. Watch this …

  I played the shaky footage of me accidentally ripping Mr Herd a new one. Did I really sound that shrill? Thank God my hair and makeup looked okay. And I’d had the sense to wear my good jeans and that pretty pink top.

  18

  Ooh La La

  Watching the video, there was no other reason for my sudden super-geek spike other than Philippe and his worldly know-how.

  But there would be an even bigger development. After re-watching the two vids of me in class, it suddenly dawned on me. I was actually looking half human. Shiny, manageable hair. Clear, glowing skin. A flat, toned belly. And best of all … I rolled up my jeans and angled my leg to get a good look. Yup, them cankles be gone.

  The hospital team had been lowering my dose, but not by all that much. Ha! Suck on that, Dr J, you little scaremonger. Old puffy pizza face was looking pretty damn tidy if she did think so herself. Becki sat next to me in French, laughing over my shoulder at the vids.

  “First fighting, now science,” she said, squeezi
ng my arm. “You’re full of surprises, Lorn.”

  It was a sunny afternoon, shafts of light breaking through the windows and amplifying the coral green in Becki’s large, upturned eyes. She toyed absently with a strand of that glossy dark hair that slipped off her slender brown shoulders, the top of a sticky pink bra peeking out at the side of her strapless white top, dazzling against her smooth brown skin. I caught the scent of her summer perfume in the air, before bitch-slapping myself in the mind.

  WTF, Lorna!

  Madame Fournier arrived and told us the drill for the afternoon’s oral assessment. Half of us were up today, the other half in tomorrow morning’s lesson. Alphabetical order, she said. My spoken French was much like my written. Le shit. Yet since I was a Walker, I knew I was safe for the afternoon. I was a wonderful compartmentaliser and could easily remain in a state of blissful ignorance until the next day.

  “Let’s see, we’ll do it a little differently this time,” said Madame Fournier. “We’ll go in reverse order, starting with you, Yvonne.”

  Crapsticks. Amir Zaman would be second, then Michelle Yates, then me.

  Amir was pretty useless like me, but super-swot Michelle? She was a straight A in every way and I’d have to follow her.

  I tried to think of other things as we sat there listening to Amir murdering every word. Don’t think of screwing up the test. Don’t think of Becki’s exposed legs crossing and uncrossing under the desk. And certainly don’t think of the tip of her elbow resting gently against yours.

  I thought about the mystery object instead. Sitting there under that bench in the church confession box. If … if the dreams were memories, did that mean the object was real? The dreams came chronologically, after all. Maybe my new heart was trying to tell me something, woofing and pawing at me like Lassie until I got the message and finished what it started. Did it think I was Philippe?

  Michelle Yates was up.