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

by Rob Aspinall

  Reluctantly, I did as he said. That’s when the door to the room opened. And in stepped a man in a medical coat two sizes too big. He also wore a big, annoying grin.

  “Morning, morning,” he said, takeaway coffee in hand. “Have I missed anything?”

  I recognised him instantly. How gullible was I? And at such a time. I hadn’t even asked what the hell it was Dr J was about to pump into my system. I tensed up on the bench.

  “Oh, don’t mind us, sweetheart,” Nathan said. “We’re just here to observe.”

  In a split second, I saw it all so clearly. Dr J’s upper eyelids were raised. He was perspiring faintly at the hairline. He swallowed deep as he prepared to push the drip into my vein. He was terrified.

  I scanned the faces of the three observers. The tag team looked bored. The woman’s lip was curled in contempt. None of them were taking notes. I spotted the gurney in the corner, with a large black zip-up bag on top. I read the label on the fluid bag … a tranquilliser? I noticed all this instinctively. And I remembered Nathan Moore as clear as day from my dreams.

  Since the home invasion the night before, I’d been an anxious mess. But in that moment, I felt a sudden, laser-beam focus, in the mind, in the body, burning through all the stress and fear and personal bullshit. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. And only one thing to do.

  24

  Consulting Room B

  As soon as the point of the needle touched my skin, I seized hold of Dr J’s wrist, stopping him from penetrating the vein.

  There was a long pause.

  I stared at the fake doctors.

  They stared at me.

  Nathan’s raptor smile slid off his face.

  Dr J’s sun-spotted skin drained out. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “They said it was you or my wife.”

  Ginger Bun was the first to move.

  As she lunged forward, I pushed Dr J into her. The black guy reacted next, but I beat him to the punch, swinging the IV pole and smashing his teeth in with the base.

  His tag-team buddy drew his gun, but I knocked the hot coffee clean out of Nathan’s hand and into the guy’s face. He staggered back screaming, emptying a clip into the grey lino, everyone dancing out of the way.

  Nathan was like a wiry little bird, no taller than me, but lightning quick, pinning my arm down on the bed and trying to force the needle in my vein. Ginger Bun grabbed at my ankles. I cracked my right knee upwards into her jaw. She groaned and spat blood. I wrestled with Nathan to stop him injecting me. If that needle went in, it was all over.

  I gripped him by the nose and yanked up and hard. He elbowed me in the mush and it stung like a mo-fo. I saw a gun sticking out of the side of his white coat and pulled it out. He twisted it out of my hand and planted a forearm against my throat.

  Ginger Bun came back for more. I sent her packing with a roundhouse to the side of the head and bit down hard on Nathan’s hairy forearm. He roared through gritted teeth and yanked it away.

  Dr J cowered in the corner against the gurney as the heavyset pair shrugged off their injuries and piled back into the fight. The black guy drew his gun from under his white coat, a long silencer barrel attached. Nathan intervened, pushing the weapon towards the ceiling as the guy took the shot. The bullet blew a harmless smoky hole in a ceiling tile.

  “Alive, you fucking imbecile,” he said, all of his good humour gone.

  At this point – all of ten seconds into the fight – a floppy-haired junior doctor came in through the door. “Excuse me, I’ve got this room booked—”

  He stopped mid-sentence when he caught sight of the struggle.

  “It’s okay. I’ll leave it!” he said, ducking back out of the room like a startled rabbit.

  The big white guy tried to rush me on the blind side, face patchy red with burns, but inner-Philippe had a move up his sleeve. I got Nathan in a headlock and pressed on a pressure point in his hand. The syringe popped free. I caught it and jammed it sideways in the guy’s right eyeball. He dropped, rolled, crawled and screamed his away across the floor, dragging the IV pole along with him.

  Okay, that was the worst thing I’d seen or done.

  Like, ever.

  Nathan backed me up against the far wall and dug me in the ribs with a pointy elbow, knocking the stuffing clean out of me. The black guy holstered his weapon, ready to join in.

  I slipped out from behind Nathan and danced past the pair of them.

  If I could just make it out of the door …

  Ginger Bun lurched up in front of me and spat out a couple of teeth. They had me now. Me, piggy in the middle; the three of them, slowly circling. Ginger Bun reached behind her head and drew out a seven-inch hair stick, silver and shaped like a knitting needle. She brandished it like a weapon, thick, mid-length hair falling messily around her shoulders.

  “Come on, Lorna, we only want to talk,” Nathan said. “We know you activated the list.”

  They inched forward, tightening the circle. I kept an eye on all three as I tried to recover my breath.

  “Apologies for my colleague last night – he’s new. Just come with us,” he said, the smile back on his face. “We’ll have a coffee and a chat.”

  It was like the start of the hundred metres. It only took one little flinch to set everyone off. And it was Ginger Bun who went first again. The second the bitch twitched, all three were on me. It was over in a flash.

  Nathan got to me first. I ducked under his arm, kicked out his standing leg and slammed him onto the floor, judo-throwing Ginger onto the bench from a kneeling position. I relieved her of the hair stick and, while I was down, head-butted the black guy in the danglies.

  I rose to my feet, karate-kicked a rebounding Ginger Bun out cold and stabbed the black guy through the main artery in his neck with the hair stick. Nathan tackled me to the ground and pulled out his gun, content to kill me after all. I knocked it away, but he spun onto his back and levered me into a chokehold on top of him. The guy with the drip in his eye murmured next to me on the floor. I ripped it clean out of the eyeball and inserted it into a big, ugly vein on Nathan’s choking arm. It was a straight race between the tranquillisers in the tube and his forearm on my windpipe.

  He was heroin-thin, so it wouldn’t take long.

  I squeezed my fingers on the tubing to speed up the flow, frantically blocking his other hand from removing the syringe.

  I saw stars and felt dizzy.

  Hold on, Lorn. Just a second or two more. Come on …

  Suddenly, someone turned off the lights.

  I gasped awake. Nathan’s arm had gone limp and I could breathe again. I wriggled free and wobbled to my feet.

  The drugs had kicked in just in time. Nathan lay drooling on his back. Needle Eye lay motionless, face down on the floor. Ginger Bun was still out cold against the gurney. The black guy was already dead in a sea of his own blood. And Dr J? He was clutching his arm in the corner, having what looked like a heart attack.

  The horror of it all was too much. It hit me that I’d killed at least two people. Shell-shocked, I threw up violently, hot yellow jets of puke burning my throat raw and splatting off the linoleum. The putrid smell of it made me puke again. I spat out the last of the carrot chunks, wiped the sick off my mouth with the paper sheet stretched over the examination bench and picked up a gun from the floor. I slipped out of the door quietly, only to hear a small army of feet echoing my way down not-too-distant corridors. I returned to the consulting room and pulled up the sliding sash window. I tucked the gun down the front of my knickers, hung a leg out over the window ledge and used a drainpipe to descend a floor to the courtyard.

  “What is she doing?” one of a huddle of smoking nurses said as she saw me dropping down out of the window.

  “You can’t do that,” said another.

  I headed towards an open door that would take me into A&E reception.

  “Hey, stop!” a gangly male porter yelled, tossing his cigarette butt and walking out in front of me. I pulle
d up my medical gown to reveal the butt of the gun. He surrendered his hands to the heavens and backed out of the way.

  I ran through the door and across reception, where a security guard stood picking his nose alongside a metal detector. It flashed and wailed as I sailed on through, the guard commanding me to stop. Too late, I was already moving barefoot through the main entrance. The ground was as the ground is – hard, rough and cold. I jogged across the yellow zone where the ambulances pull up, only to see a black Range Rover with tinted windows parked illegally, the front passenger side whirring down. A man stared at me and spoke into thin air, a finger to one ear. He and a guy in the back climbed out. Brutal ex-army types. Solid and war-weathered, with one-minute haircuts.

  I doubled back, but the security guard was waddling towards me, fat, unfit and receding.

  “You!” he said. “Come here.”

  I was caught in a shit sandwich between Paul Blart and Grab Team B.

  Distracted, I was also a hair-width away from being mown down by an ambulance pulling up fast in the yellow zone. The paramedics jumped out and opened the doors, ready to unload their human cargo.

  I spotted the keys in the ignition. Well, what else was I going to do? Get the bus?

  25

  Driving Lessons

  I jumped in the ambulance, whomped the door shut and popped the central locking.

  Grab Team B were approaching the driver’s door, Paul Blart from the passenger side, while paramedics yelled something about the patient in the back. I turned the ignition and revved the engine, my first ever time behind any kind of wheel.

  One of the grab team took a potshot at me with his gun. I ducked at just the right time, the bullet cutting through both windows before landing in Paul Blart’s left shoulder.

  I pulled the stolen weapon out of my knickers and attempted to fire back. I clicked empty. Oh, fab, I’d picked up the wrong gun. I stashed it in the driver’s side compartment and glanced in the rear view. The paramedics ran for cover, leaving the patient in the back. I found first gear in a panic, heaved off the stiff handbrake and floored the accelerator. The ambulance jumped and stalled. One of the grab team reached up through the smashed window of the driver’s door and pulled my head sideways by the hair, trying to impale my face on a stuck-up shard of glass.

  The ambulance rocked as his colleague jumped in through the back doors. I turned the key and the engine coughed like a pensioner smoking fifty a day.

  Come on, you absolute piece of shit. Start now!

  With my right eyeball perilously close to the jagged point of the glass, I reached over my shoulder for my seatbelt, wrapped it round my attacker’s neck and clicked it into the anchor point.

  I let it go and it snapped back tight, pinning the guy by the throat against the ambulance door. He had no choice but to release my hair and desperately grapple with the belt.

  I sat back up in my seat and turned the ignition again. Vroom! Finally. I planted my foot and this time did a better job of letting out the clutch. The ambulance screeched out of the yellow zone, the engine screaming in first. I got it into second, then thrashed it into third, following the exit signs and making visitor cars swerve out of the way. It was a stretch to reach the pedals and the steering wheel felt huge, like driving an oil tanker. And just to add shit to the pile, the other grab-team guy had fought his way to the front of the ambulance. He put a gun to my head and ordered me to stop.

  Who was I to argue?

  I slammed on the brake pedal and hung on tight. The emergency stop threw him head first into the windscreen, cracking the glass and painting the dash red. He fell back into the passenger seat and lolled forward, face like a squashed grape.

  Meanwhile, as my weight shifted forward, the guy caught in the belt gargled.

  I unclipped the belt and he spun away on the floor. I buckled back up again, thinking he was gone, but, tearing out of the entrance to the carpark, I had to brake hard and swerve around an oncoming truck. It gave Mr Persistent just enough time to catch up and hurl himself into the back. I turned my attention from the rear view to the road, where there was a fresh problem.

  The Range Rover pulled up alongside me, driven by a brutal woman who’d presumably passed her test around twenty years ago in whatever grim-faced part of the world she came from. She rammed the Range Rover into the side of the ambo, shunting me up onto the pavement and sending the guy in the rear flying sideways. I pulled back onto the road in time to avoid a teenage mum pushing a pram, sending the guy flying again, into a box full of medical supplies.

  The ambulance and Range Rover bumped up against one other, doing fifty in a thirty zone, straight across a busy junction, leaving a mess of beeping, crashing traffic in our wake.

  The Range Rover had to slam on and pull in behind me as an articulated truck, horn blasting, came within an inch of wiping it out.

  We came up on some congestion ahead, boxed in by local shops and red-brick terrace houses either side. It’s then that I realised I had an advantage. I fumbled around the dials and switches on the dash with one hand, weaving in and out of slow-moving traffic with the other.

  The driving was getting easier, brain and muscles remembering years of road time they’d never had. I found the right button. The siren wailed into ear-splitting life and the traffic ahead parted like the Red Sea.

  Glancing in the rear view, the grab teamer was rising with his weapon. I spotted an empty stretch on the opposite side and yanked the wheel to the right, sending the guy slamming into the side of the ambulance all over again. Trouble is, Range Rover Bitch (let’s call her RRB) had pulled into the space I’d just been driving in, blocking me off and leaving me speeding towards oncoming traffic.

  We careered along, faster and faster, one eye on each other. She had to slam on to avoid piling into the back of the slower-moving cars, but I was stuck on a collision course with a honking bus. I planted my foot on the brake pedal like I was trying to stomp a kitten to death and pulled up hard on the handbrake.

  We slid sideways. Everything juddered and I had to fight just to stay upright in my seat. The ambo leaned over dangerously to the left, ready to flip over and get mashed by the bus.

  This was it.

  Goodbye world …

  No. Ha!

  The tread on the tyres caught and held on the asphalt. We fishtailed out of the turn and into a narrow residential street with cars parked bumper to bumper either side. One guy opened his door without looking and I snapped it clean off as the Range Rover reappeared in the driver’s side mirror.

  Whoomph! I bounced up and down in my seat, hurting the bony bit in my bum on the way down.

  Ah, speed bumps. Always a pleasure.

  I kept my foot on the accelerator, destroying the suspension one bunny hop at a time. I didn’t know where I was headed. Only that I couldn’t stop. There was a T-junction ahead leading back onto a main road. I slowed down enough to wang the ambulance to the left and into the flow of traffic, sending a tiny white Fiat into a spin.

  “Shit. Sorry!” I shouted out of the window.

  The guy in the back dragged himself up to the front using the seat headrests. I punched him square in the balls. He grunted, threw a punch. I ducked and got him in the balls again.

  “For fuck’s sake!” he screamed in a Scottish accent.

  Worst. Grab assignment. Ever.

  I elbowed him in the nose, trying to keep my eyes on the road. He got me in a Spock grip on the shoulder that sent a bolt of incredible pain into my neck.

  “Pull over,” he said, digging in harder. The pain was unbearable. I had no choice.

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  I did the brake thing again. Strapped in by the seatbelt, I was fine and dandy, but the grab teamer cannonballed straight through the already cracked windscreen, the ambulance jolting a couple of times as he got caught under the wheels.

  With no time to anticipate my sudden brake, the Range Rover slammed into the back of the ambulance, rocking me forward. I looked
over my shoulder as I crunched through the gears. Its front grille had caught on the back of the ambulance in a twist and tangle of steel.

  There was no shaking that ho-bag off now. I found the appropriate gear and the pair of us accelerated together, knocking my head back against the rest, aggravating the mild whiplash in my neck. There was a groan from the gurney in the back of the ambulance. The patient was in trouble. His heart was connected to a monitor and I could make out the rhythmic beeping under the noisy engines and the whoop-whoop of the siren.

  His heart was doing the samba. He’d have to keep dancing.

  We flew straight on across a large roundabout without breaking pace. A trio of police cars converged on our tail from all different angles.

  We hurtled down the slip road to the M60 motorway that circles the city, wind beating in through the smashed-out windows, causing my eyes to water. My hair was a mess, clinging to my face like a needy boyfriend. I pushed it out of the way in time to filter into traffic. The eight-wheeled metal beast cut straight across into the fast lane.

  One hundred. One-ten. One-twenty.

  It was crazy. At least we had a clear run, the cars in front diving into the slower lanes to make way for the wailing, flashing sirens. I had to figure a way out of this. Couldn’t drive forever without ending up in a tumbling motorway wreck. Worse still, the old timer was close to flatlining. And if he croaked, it was all on me.

  As if to make my day just that little bit more hellish, the guy lying in the passenger seat was coming to his senses. Crap, I’d forgotten all about him.

  Jesus, they were like wasps or cockroaches. They didn’t know how to die. And speaking of horrible flying things that come at you from the sky, an unmarked black helicopter swooped into view, keeping pace with us above the other side of the motorway. It was different to the one I’d seen in my dream. Sleeker and more like it belonged to the military. But it came with a sniper just like the other one. He slid the door open and leaned out behind a powerful, sighted rifle.