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

by Rob Aspinall

  “I nearly gave you—? You’re the one with the axe, Texas Chainsaw.”

  “Oh, um, firewood,” he said, propping the axe against the stairs. “Who are you, anyway? What are you doing sneaking around my house?”

  “The door was open,” I said.

  “I could have killed you. Wait, the door was open?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He slapped a hand to his forehead. “I need to stop doing that. All these bloody precautions, to be undone by an unlocked door.”

  He was a lanky six-three. I guessed around nineteen, wearing a blue cable-knit Christmas jumper four months too early.

  “I get side-tracked sometimes,” he said. “Sorry, who are you again?”

  “I’m Lorna. Lorna Walker. You don’t know me, but—”

  “Are you feeling okay, Lorna? You look awfully green.”

  Oh, dog shit.

  31

  The Weatherman

  I came round on a brown leather sofa in the living room. I checked the cuckoo clock on the busy mantelpiece over the fire: 2.20 p.m.

  I lay snug under a thick knitted blanket in rainbow patchwork, head resting on a soft white pillow. I felt a weight. I looked down and saw the black cat sitting on my thighs, staring. Tail twitching.

  I shifted upright. The cat slipped further down my legs as I rose out of the blanket. It casually walked forward and re-parked its bum on my thighs.

  I reached out to stroke it, my left arm jerking back at the wrist. I was cuffed to a chunky old radiator behind the sofa.

  “Hey!” I shouted into the house. “Heeeeeyyy!”

  I rattled the cuffs against the radiator leg. The cat still didn’t move, aside from looking over its shoulder as if to say, Hey, boss, bitch woke up.

  I rattled some more. “Let me go! Let me go!”

  The cat looked increasingly concerned. Are you gonna sort this noisy ho-bag out or what?

  Heavy feet came down the stairs. The owner of the house put his head around the corner.

  “Oh, you’re awake.”

  “Well, duh.” I held up my hand in the cuff. “What the hell?”

  “Oh yeah. Just a sec …”

  His body followed his head into the room, holding my gun.

  “What are you doing with a firearm in your bag?” he asked, scraping a chair over and sitting next to the sofa, just far enough away so he was out of reach.

  “Chill out. The clip’s empty,” I said. “And who said you could go through my stuff?”

  “Doesn’t look like your stuff to me,” he said, pulling changing-room girl’s driving licence out of her purse.

  “Who are you really?” he asked. “Who do you work for?”

  “I don’t work for anyone. I’m doing my A levels.”

  He waved the licence in front of me. “I’d have expected more from MI5. Or whoever you’re with.”

  “I’m just a girl. On my own.”

  “Then what are you doing here? No one comes here. Especially not girls.”

  “They do when the whole world is out to get them.”

  “And they call me paranoid,” he said.

  “No, it’s true. The government, MI5, MI6, I don’t know, whoever. They’re trying to kill me.”

  “Why do they care about you?”

  “Because I’ve seen something. I know something. I’ve got something they want. I don’t know exactly. These people came out of nowhere and started attacking me. At first they wanted a list. Then they seemed happy just to bump me off.”

  My captor leaned forward on his chair, running a hand over his mouth.

  “You of all people should believe me,” I said, glancing over at the conspiracy collage on the wall. “You are The Weatherman, right?”

  His eyes doubled in size.

  “Bloody hell, you’re really telling the truth. I mean, the gun, the bruises.”

  He took out a key and removed the cuffs. “Sorry. Security precautions and what not.”

  “Like putting your postal address on your website?” I said. “Très secure.”

  “It’s still up there?”

  “How do you think I found you?”

  “Damn, I was supposed to remove it. But then someone messages you up to play Halo and …”

  I rubbed my wrist, skin flush red from the cuff.

  “Let’s start again. I’m Giles, The Weatherman. I’m not usually this draconian, but you could have been anyone.”

  “Like who exactly?”

  “A spook, a crank, a wannabe vampire. I get a lot of those. I keep telling them I’m not about the supernatural like other bloggers. I’m about the real stories.”

  He tucked the gun away in my bag on a nearby grandma chair.

  “So,” he said, “what brings you to Lavistock?”

  The more I talked, the bigger Giles’s eyes grew.

  “That leads me to you,” I said. “I came here … I don’t know, I guess I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Giles sat in silence, hands clasped together with index fingers pressed against his chin.

  “So this list,” he said, “the contact lenses …”

  “I haven’t got them on me. I hid them at home before I went for my hospital appointment. But I remember the list.”

  “All the numbers? In sequence?”

  “Supercomputer memory seems to be another of my new things.”

  “Then great,” Giles said, already up and walking. He stopped at the door. “Follow me.”

  He led me to a door under the stairs.

  “It might not make much sense, though,” I warned him. “Just a random bunch of dates and coordinates. Could be anything.”

  “It sounds like something to me,” he said, leading me down a winding set of stone steps into a cool, dark space where everything echoed.

  “Bear with me,” he said, disappearing into the darkness. I heard him throw a heavy, mechanical lever.

  Industrial-grade strip lights blinked into life, revealing a basement hideaway slash panic room slash war room. There was a single bed and a huge, messy desk with a computer and bank of old CCTV screens covering the entire property. In the middle of the room sat a coin-slot pool table, while all four walls were plastered in a mishmash of magnetic whiteboards, cork boards, photos, printed images, maps, charts, tables, scribbled notes and a sprawling family tree of people and organisations.

  Giles stood proudly behind the pool table cum war table, covered with a tatty paper world map, rolled out and pinned down at the corners with large beach pebbles.

  He threw his arms out wide. “Welcome to The Weather Room.”

  “The what?”

  His face dropped. “The Weather Room … Don’t you get it?”

  I shook my head.

  “What the forecast looks like …”

  I still didn’t get it.

  “You do know why people call me The Weatherman?”

  “Nope,” I said, wondering what fresh madness I’d stumbled into.

  He picked up a pool cue resting in a corner and strode around with it like a military general. He wore The Weatherman tag like class president or milk monitor. Like it made him more than he was.

  “They say I can forecast the future,” he said, waving the cue around the room at all the stuff on the walls.

  Who were they? People who dressed like hobbits and superheroes? It hardly made him Nostradamus. In fact, all his prancing around was starting to get on my nips.

  “So what was it you were going to say?” I asked. “Before …”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, snapping out of his ego trip. “I’ve been working on this theory.” He slapped the cue against the website plan on the wall. “I’ve been thinking of reworking my entire website around it.”

  “And?”

  I know I was getting snappy.

  Snappy the Alligator, Auntie Claire was fond of calling me. But I got angry sometimes and I didn’t know how to stop. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t eaten. I got hangry sometimes too.

  G
iles ambled over to the family-tree maps, green and white stripy boxers sticking out of the low-slung grey skinnies falling off his arse.

  “This is the big one. The mother of all conspiracies,” he said, surveying the tree. “And your list could be the piece I’ve been missing.”

  He asked me for the dates and locations on the list, placing smaller beach pebbles on the map to represent each one. It looked like a confusing pebbly mess. Nothing more.

  Giles sighed and scratched his head. “Still can’t see a correlation.”

  “Correlation with what?” I asked.

  “I’ll start from the beginning,” he said.

  32

  Storm Warning

  Giles rolled down a huge white screen over one wall and turned off the lights. He teed up a presentation on a laptop called Who’s Really in Charge? An Emergency Weather Report.

  I leaned against the pool table to watch.

  “I’m due to present this at the next Conspiracy Conference in London,” said Giles. “Top-secret stuff. Even the location isn’t revealed until two days before. It’s still a work in progress, but …”

  He clicked the next slide. An image of a brain and another title: The Plastic Super Organism Currently Running the World.

  Giles clicked through a bunch of slides without pausing for breath. He talked about a secret organisation. The brains behind the global machine. It learned, adapted and constantly reorganised itself, operating much like a terrorist cell, with no obvious top-down power structure.

  Heads of state. Heads of companies. Heads of military. Even heads of activist groups. They were all involved.

  He talked about them using government and corporate resources as leverage, without the need for their own facilities and headquarters.

  Next, a grainy black and white photo of Hitler stiff-arming a gazillion Nazis.

  “It all started with him,” Giles said. “A new clandestine organisation created by the Allies to prevent the outbreak of another global war.”

  Next slide.

  “It no doubt began with a degree of good intention,” he continued. “Yet, like most organisations left unchecked, it was open to a slow, steady abuse of power and a gradual blurring of the lines.”

  I kept quiet. I wasn’t entirely sure what he was on about and didn’t want to sound thick.

  “The first real sign came with the assassination of JFK,” he said, bringing up an ancient colour snap of the poor guy with his brains blown out in the back of a convertible.

  He clicked fast and excitedly through a collection of images and news reports from the world’s recent history.

  “Then you’ve got Vietnam. The fake moon landings. The Cold War. The AIDS virus. Afghanistan. North Korea. The Bay of Pigs. Two wars in Iraq. And nine-eleven in between.”

  “But that was terrorists,” I said. “Al Qaeda.”

  “Was it?” Giles said, arching an eyebrow like a cheesy weirdo.

  I shrugged. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  He seemed disappointed. “I’ve got another ten slides yet.”

  “Sorry, carry on.”

  He clicked on to a collage of logos. Tonnes of big brands, oil giants, plus a few technology companies I’d never heard of.

  “So far, I’ve covered the headlines,” he said. “The usual conspiracy theories. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’re also talking corporate giants, advertising, the media and government agencies. This isn’t just a few Western nations vying for oil and rebuilding rights. It’s global. It’s endemic. It extends to engineering, technology, religion, oil, water, banking, financial meltdowns, consumer slavery, pandemics, Ebola outbreaks, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the internet …”

  Giles was talking so fast I thought his head was going to explode.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “The whole enchilada.”

  “An all-you-can-eat enchilada buffet,” he said. “I believe that this one organisation is responsible for everything of consequence that’s happened since the end of the Second World War. And if I’m right, the last seventy years have been one big experiment. They’ve been treating the world like a giant laboratory. Now they’re finally ready to go live.”

  “You ever played Call of Duty? GTA?” he continued.

  “Who hasn’t?” I said.

  “Militainment. The steady militarisation of children’s entertainment, softening minds to organised military action and violence. They’re priming us for something. I’m sure of it.”

  Giles flipped through to a slide full of super-anvil thunderclouds that read: The Forecast: Storm Warning.

  He calmed himself and spoke with a hush, like this was the really important bit. “A global power play is coming. I feel it in my bones. And I’m almost never wrong.”

  Almost. Almost never wrong.

  This was the problem with weathermen. They’d tell you it was going to be sunny, then it would rain. They’d predict rain, then you’d get sun. Half the time you’d venture out wearing wellies and a coat when you could have gone for sandals and a T-shirt.

  No, I didn’t trust weathermen or their forecasts.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  Giles paused in the beam of the projector. “I don’t.”

  “Sounds like it’s just a theory,” I said.

  “Well, everything’s a theory until it happens,” he said.

  I already had my doubts about Giles. Now I was having more. He didn’t seem all there. He clicked through the rest of his presentation in silent defeat. I was pissing on his bonfire. The wrong crowd. The conspiracy mentoids would lick this shizzle off a shitstick, but I wondered if he was a bit loco.

  Then I saw something that made me jump. Literally like an uncontrollable spasm.

  “Stop!”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Go back to the slide before,” I said.

  Giles clicked back through to a grid of faces, each attached to a name. I walked in front of the beam, casting a shadow on the screen. I pointed at a photo of the sultan from the desert. “Remember the dreams I told you about? That’s the guy whose head I chopped off.”

  “Sultan Faisal Shamoun,” said Giles. “There was a video of it on YouTube. Rumour has it, he traded a third of his country’s oil to an unknown bidder, but there was no record of any payment.”

  Next I spotted Hamptons Guy. “And him. I shot him. He fell off a cliff.”

  “That’s Alan Watson, US congressman. Suspected of receiving payments for lobbying certain policy changes. His body washed up on the beach. They said he and his guards were shot and killed. An act of undeclared terror.”

  “Oh, and this guy too,” I said, pointing at the man Philippe and Inge had kidnapped in Paris. “They took him away in a helicopter.”

  “He’s alive and well, unfortunately,” said Giles. “Yevgeny Sokolov. Russian oligarch. Former mafia. Supposedly has half the Kremlin on the payroll.”

  “So Philippe won his bet,” I said. “Turns out he was a dangler.”

  “A what?” Giles asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “Didn’t realise Sokolov was mafia. Seemed like a really nice guy.”

  “I don’t think any of these guys could be described as nice,” Giles said. “This is how I know something big is happening. Pieces are being moved into place. Pawns knocked off their little squares.”

  Giles didn’t talk anything like his age. He was nineteen going on history teacher.

  “So, to cut a long, confusing story short,” I said, “it’s not the government trying to kill me?”

  “I very much doubt it,” Giles said, turning the lights back on. “MI5 would have bugged your house, your phone, your computer first. The people after you don’t wait and watch on the sidelines. They do what they want, when they want.”

  He fired up his computer and checked his email.

  “But there are laws,” I said. “You can’t just—”

  “You can if you don’t exist,” Giles said, falling
silent and staring at the screen. “Lorna, I think you should see this.”

  Giles angled his computer monitor towards me. It was a live BBC News stream with bird’s-eye footage of the aftermath of the chase on Barton Bridge, the Trafford Centre cordoned off by the police. And my library card mugshot superimposed in the top-right corner. Giles did some more rapid-fire searching. I was kinda famous. Trending for all the wrong reasons. The Guardian had a live update feed on their homepage:

  Girl steals ambulance from Manchester hospital.

  Rampage causes carnage on M60 motorway and local roads.

  Two doctors brutally stabbed at hospital.

  Security guard shot during ambulance escape.

  Four people killed in chase, one body pulled from water.

  Several in hospital with shock and injuries.

  Woman found strangled in changing rooms.

  Recent heart transplant to cure terminal condition.

  History of mental illness.

  Girl named as sixteen-year-old Lorna Walker.

  Walker was taking a cocktail of medication.

  Violent episode at home the night before.

  Pulled a gun on unsuspecting shoppers.

  Girl still at large, presumed armed and dangerous.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was furious, horrified and in deeper dung than a goldfish in a piranha tank. Up until now, I’d been clinging on to the idea that I could somehow return to Manchester. I’d been so close to a normal life. Yet there was no going back. I could see that now.

  As Giles put it, “My God, you’re enemy number one. This is real. Really, really, real.”

  The pair of us sat in silence for what seemed like an hour, Giles quietly surfing the news sites, giving me some mental space.

  After a while, I came to a conclusion. The facts weren’t going to change. So what good was crying about it going to do me? If my heart condition had taught me anything, it was to look forward, not back. Yeah, it was crazy. And it was a world I had no place being involved with. But I was involved, whether I liked it or not. What I needed now was a plan.

  33