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

by Rob Aspinall

  A New Woman

  After doing some online shopping using Giles’s credit card – he assured me they delivered round here and waved away my promises to pay him back – we took a trip to the local chip shop.

  There was no such thing as CCTV here and the village was deserted.

  “You have to try the fish here,” Giles said.

  As a veggie and transplantee, I was supposed to be on the diet of a wild mountain goat, but darn if those chips didn’t smell good. And the fish were huge, fresh out of the sea and bubbling in crisp batter.

  I asked the nice, kind chippie woman for some mushy peas. I mean, peas were green and healthy, weren’t they? And ketchup. That had tomatoes in.

  We carried our bundles of paper to the harbour wall and sat with our feet dangling above the gentle, lapping waterline. The chips were hotter than Auntie Claire’s volcano toasties, but they tasted totally nom. Salty, vinegary perfection on the end of a blue plastic fork. And Giles wasn’t wrong about the fish. I hadn’t found a better use for my mouth since I kissed Becki.

  I wondered whether I could make a life there. Get a cat and a dog and a cottage and work in the chippie. All those hours I felt I’d wasted on the ward. I thought slow and quiet meant dull and boring. Suddenly it seemed like heaven. Yes, a cottage and a kitten and a puppy and a job in the chippie. Long walks on the beach and paddling in the sea. I could invite Becki up in secret. It would be romantic. We’d cause a stir among the locals. It was a beautiful pipe dream.

  “So you know my story. What’s yours?” I asked Giles, mouth full of hot mush.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why conspiracies? The Weather Room?”

  “It’s complicated,” Giles said, fizzing open a can of Coke.

  “What isn’t?” I said.

  “Let’s just say I had a few run-ins with the law,” he said. “My parents never married. Mum lives back in her old hometown in Trinidad. Dad’s a stockbroker. He packed me off to boarding school and then Oxford at fourteen.”

  “Fourteen? I was still learning my times tables at fourteen.”

  “I was a bit of a prodigy,” Giles said. “Dad left me a trust fund and went to start his own trading company in America. I got into activism at uni. Peaceful protest. Then riots. Corporate sabotage. They weren’t sure if I was a genius or crazy. They went with crazy. When I got sectioned, I played a lot of chess with a guy who told me all about these stories. He claimed to be a former British spy. He said he’d stumbled on the existence of a secret organisation. Next thing the man knew, he was being declared insane and thrown in an asylum. The stories all seemed to make sense. Even if he did like to rub his own faeces on the wall.”

  Giles took a slurp of his Coke. “There’s a seed of truth in everything.”

  “I get the conspiracies,” I said, “but why all the precautions? You haven’t done anything but create a blog.”

  “No one is safe, Lorna. That’s why I set up here, in my grandfather’s old house. It’s out of the way. Free from spying eyes.”

  “Some people are safe,” I said. “Most people.”

  “Really? Look around. Look at you. They’ve turned you into a fugitive overnight. You’re guilty of nothing but a little curiosity. You’re proof that there are dark forces out there, undermining the masses,” he said, staring out to sea.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought all this to your door.”

  “Are you kidding?” Giles replied. “Just when I was starting to doubt myself. Just when I was starting to think my parents – my therapist – were right that I should start taking my pills again. Just when I thought all this was for nothing … you come along. Like, like a sign from the universe.”

  He turned to me, salt and grease around his lips.

  “Finally, I know for sure that what I’m doing is real. It’s not just in my head.”

  He smiled and gobbled up the last of his chips. Funny, I thought. I spent most of my time wishing none of this was real.

  Halfway through the fish, I felt fit to burst. I donated the leftovers to Ninja the cat when we got back to the house. We lay there on the sofa together, me and Ninja, bellies like balloons, while Giles sat in the Weather Room, hosting “Sunday Secrets”, his live weekly web-chat.

  I thought the dreams had stopped, but that night another one found me, as if it had blown in on the sea winds whistling outside the spare-room window.

  I stood in Giles’s back garden under a full moon. The two guys I’d killed at the hospital were there with me. One crawled endlessly in circles, screaming about his eye. The other tried in vain to stop blood spraying from his neck.

  “What did you do?” he warbled at me. I shrunk away into the woods, where I came up against a pair of heads on wooden branches sticking out of the ground. It was the two guys from the ambulance chase. Faces swollen like giant boils.

  “What did you do?” they whimpered in chorus.

  “I couldn’t – I had to –” I said.

  “You killed us,” said one.

  “We had families,” said the other.

  “Mums, dads, brothers and sisters.”

  “Wives, girlfriends, children.”

  “So much to live for.”

  “You killed us horribly.”

  “Horribly.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, fighting back the tears.

  “Too late for sorry,” another head sneered. It was RRB. Maggots crawled out through her lips as she talked.

  “If you hadn’t stolen the list, none of this would have happened,” she said.

  The air stunk like an infected wound.

  “I drowned before I died,” she said. “Have you ever drowned, Lorna?”

  “Have you ever been choked to death?” gurgled Ginger Bun, a bra tangled around her throat.

  “Been stabbed in the eye?” the guy I stabbed in the eye cried, his head now on a stick too. And his eyeball hanging by a gristly thread.

  “Been stabbed in the neck?” said the guy I’d stabbed in the neck.

  I tried to explain myself, but all the heads were arranged in a row, babbling over me.

  “What was I supposed to do?” I asked.

  The answers flew back like machine-gun bullets.

  “You were supposed to die.”

  “Your bad flap was a sign you’re not wanted.”

  “But you continue to be a burden.”

  “You continue to ruin other people’s lives.”

  “You bring suffering wherever you go.”

  “Why don’t you just die?”

  I covered my ears, trying to block out the voices.

  They chanted as a crowd. “Die! Die! Die!”

  I ran through the heads, deep into the wood, only gnarly tree trunks for company, bare feet schlurping in the cold, sticky mud.

  In the far distance, I could hear the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire. Something was burning. I heard footsteps zigging right to left. Heavy breathing getting closer. If you go down to the woods today, bring spare underwear, because you’re gonna shit yourself.

  The creature in the woods came straight at me out of the darkness. I didn’t even realise I was holding a gun. I let off a deafening round that lit up the night in a paparazzi flash.

  In that flash, I saw a child’s terrified brown saucer eyes.

  Back to black. I heard a whisper. “Am I dying?”

  I lurched up straight as a rod in bed, covers already off, the bathroom a short, mad dash away. I got there just in time to spray the inside of the toilet bowl. The faces from the dream lingered with me as if they were still there, watching me kneel on the lino, shivering and sweaty. The girl in the woods. Was I making her up, or was she a memory too?

  There was no way to know. At least it was morning and I didn’t have to go back to sleep. I cleaned up the toilet and took a drink from the tap. After a quick shower, I heard a buzzer go downstairs.

  Giles bundled his way through the front door, arms full of Amazon goodies.

&nbs
p; First out of the box was the fake tan.

  While I’d never opted for the FT before, my friend Holly had once told me you had to prepare your skin or risk being patch-tastic. I was lucky in that I was freakishly un-hairy. All I had to do was exfoliate and moisturise. With my skin prepped and a spot of Vaseline dabbed around my brows and hairline, I snapped on a pair of latex gloves and went to town, covering every nook and cranny. I almost popped a shoulder doing my back, but with the help of a tanning spatula and a bit of strategic mirroring, I got the job done.

  Giles was banned from the top of the house while I walked around on my heels drying off; the cat lay on the guest bed, wondering who this new, tropical brown lady was, standing mostly naked in the middle of the spare room.

  The stuff was good quality, though. Covered most of my bruising and even helped make my scar a little less Bride of Frankenstein. I did a full trial run, applying the new makeup I’d ordered and slipping into a dress.

  “Order something you’d never normally wear,” Giles had suggested.

  He was right. Knee-high black boots and tight white dresses weren’t me. But if the Trafford Centre had taught me anything, it was to sex it up a little. I put the long black wig on and gave myself the ten times over in the bedroom mirror from every conceivable angle. I was going underground. Why did I still care so much about the shape and size of my bum? I guess it was hardwired in. Advertising. Photoshopping. Gossip-columning. A girl could fight off a hit squad full of trained killers. But she couldn’t outrun her own body horrors.

  I barely recognised the girl in the mirror. Fab. I added what I thought was a moody, sexy pout. It felt ridiculous. I wasn’t one of those duck facers. I was a giddy smiler. Just for posterity, I took a few selfies on the new phone Giles had given me. I say new – it was an iPhone a few updates old. Positively ancient and on a top-up SIM too.

  It would have to do.

  I tried out a new walk, up and down, the cat’s eyes trailing me like a tennis umpire. Once I was happy with the new walk, I had to choose a nationality. A language. An accent. I applied some bright-red lippy and batted my smoky eyes at the imaginary people in the mirror, extending a demure hand like I imagined classy minglers did at mansion parties.

  “Hello, my name is Katerina.”

  “Guten tag. Mein name ist Katrina.”

  “Hola, mi nombre es Katerina.”

  “Ciao, il mio nome è Katerina.”

  I tried it out on Ninja. He decided it was more fun licking his own bum ring. I clomped downstairs and into the kitchen, putting one hand on the frame of the door and the other on a flirty hip.

  The Italian accent came out perfect. “Ciao, il mio nome è Katerina.”

  Giles fell backwards out of his chair, spilling tea over the front of his jeans.

  “Lorna?” he asked, springing back to his feet.

  “Si,” I said. “Who else?” I practised my walk over to the kitchen worktop, tearing a paper towel off a roller and handing it over.

  Giles cursed and dabbed at the tea stains. “Wow,” he said, “you look …”

  Glamorous? Sexy? Sophisticated?

  “Grown up,” he said.

  “Gee,” I said. “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “It was a compliment,” Giles said, binning the soggy kitchen roll.

  “You’ve not had many girlfriends, have you?”

  “Not real ones, no.”

  I snatched the wig off my head and plonked myself down at the kitchen table. We went through the plan one more time. Giles was off to London to attend his conference. I was bound for Norway on a fishing boat the next night.

  Once I got there, Giles had an internet friend who specialised in fake passports and visas. I’d get my new ID and move across Europe, into Russia, where it would be easier to disappear. From there, I could take a flight to Venezuela, which Giles insisted was the perfect spot for people on the wrong side of the law.

  Thanks to his global network of conspiracy geeks, Giles seemed to have connections in just about every country. But it was a daunting thought, travelling alone across continents. The furthest I’d been abroad was here, in bonny Scotland. So Russia? Venezuela? If it kept me alive and they had the internet, I guess I could live with it. Couldn’t get by without meds, after all. And there’s no way I was going back to a UK hospital. I’d lost track of how long ago my last pill had been. I wrote out a long list of what I took and Giles emailed it on to his Norwegian friend, Fingar, which made me snort with laughter every time he said it.

  Fingar. Ha!

  34

  Hurricane Lorna

  I was due to travel at night, when it was easier to slip in and out of port, but I got ready way ahead of the trip. I thought that if I got into character, it might take the edge off the nerves. It almost worked. I paced up and down the hallway, practising my walk and talk, my bag already packed at the bottom of the stairs.

  Giles stood topping up the windscreen washer of his mud-silver four-by-four. I stepped out onto the porch and sucked in the fresh sea air. It was a warm day. Bright and calm. Seagulls went about their squawky, flappy business above the harbour and I could just about make out the sounds of the sea crashing against the rocks a little further down the coast road, where the currents got lively.

  In the distant horizon out to sea, I noticed a speck in the sky. It was getting bigger, fast, heading our way. Giles joined me on the porch, watching the clouds. In a couple of seconds, the speck was on us, thundering overhead in a blur of gunmetal grey.

  It was a fighter plane. Screaming low, rattling bones and windows.

  “Do you get a lot of jet fighters round here?” I asked.

  “No,” Giles said, stepping backwards, trying to see the sky over the back of the house. “No, we don’t.”

  His mouth screwed up in a something’s not right kind of look.

  The sound of the fighter trailed off. I joined Giles down the side of the house, where we could see the jet shrinking into the distance. It boomed up higher in the air, nose pointing to space, then looped around and came in for another pass. It almost split the tree line it was flying so low. I couldn’t help ducking as it shot on out to sea. Any lower and it would have taken my wig along for the ride.

  “I’m not sure this is a good thing,” Giles said, eyes glued to the plane, already tiny in the distance.

  “Where’s Ninja?” he asked.

  “Um, I’m not sure. Why?”

  “We need to go before they get here.”

  “Facial recognition,” Giles explained, as we piled the last of the files, the hard drives, the pictures, papers and charts in the boot.

  “My guess is, they tracked you on CCTV as far as the bus terminal. Now they’re sweeping with planes.”

  We climbed in the front of the four-by-four.

  “But how did they know it’s me? How can a pilot see at that speed? In this disguise?”

  “You said you visited my website,” Giles said. “They could have got hold of your search history. Connected the dots. The fighter could have taken pictures on the first and second pass. Beamed them back to an HQ where they’ve got geometric mapping software.”

  Giles thumped a fist on the steering wheel. “Of course, I should have run a simulation on all possible scenarios.”

  “You can’t think of everything,” I said.

  “We have to. We’re playing their game now,” he said. “They’ll have whole teams and platforms dedicated to it. Running possibility algorithms. Plotting out your most likely options until they tighten the noose.”

  I could feel the rhetorical noose choking me as he said it. Giles fired up the clanking diesel engine, steering it along the winding driveway.

  “Look!” I said. “Ninja!”

  Here he came, trotting and meowing along the front wall, carefully stepping over and around the wire fence, even though it couldn’t have been charged any more. Giles scooped him up, opened the gate and climbed back in the driver’s seat. Ninja meowed and meowed and meowed.
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  “Yes,” said Giles, holding him nose to nose. “We’re leaving early.”

  Ninja meowed again.

  “I know, I know. I liked the house too …”

  Meow. Meow.

  “Yes … don’t worry, I haven’t left any evidence,” Giles said to him.

  Meow.

  “Of course I remembered your fish snacks.”

  Just when I thought the guy was sane.

  He handed me the cat and we pulled out onto the main road, driving as far as the seafront. Without explaining, Giles jogged round to one of the rainbow of houses that ran along the harbour.

  Minutes later, I was standing on a small, dangerously rusty fishing trawler with a clattering engine that kicked out a dirty blue pong. Giles stood on the worn wooden jetty a few feet away.

  Apparently, the fisherman and his wife, the nice lady in the chippie, owed Giles a favour. He’d shown them how to use the internet to download porn and order sex toys. Gross as, but who was I to complain?

  “Text Fingar when you get into port,” Giles said.

  “What will happen to you? Where will you go?” I asked.

  “Friends in low places,” is all he said.

  “Thank you, Giles, for everything.”

  Giles nodded. He didn’t seem one for sentiment and there wasn’t much time before another of those grab teams arrived. He climbed back in the four-by-four and took off with a toot of his horn.

  “Wha’ever it is yae done, no one aroond here’ll give yae up,” Gregor, the fisherman said, an accent thicker porridge. He pulled on a bright-yellow mac and unfastened the boat from its moorings.

  “What’ve the government and seagulls got in common?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking it was a serious question.

  “They can both shove their bills up their arse,” he said, belly laughing at his own joke.

  The fisherman and his wife. Porn and sex toys. His beard and her downtown jungle, locked in some weird Velcro sex tangle. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. As we pulled away out of the harbour, I sat down on a wonky wooden bench running along the back of the trawler. I watched the village slowly disappear. The tiny white cottages. Giles’s abandoned home. Lives affected. Plans destroyed. Hurricane Lorna had blown on through. Where would I hit next?