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

by Rob Aspinall

  “What?”

  As Philippe rubbed his left cheek, I realised I’d just assaulted a highly trained assassin who’d a) saved my life, yes, but b) only after damn near killing me with a plastic bag. Who knows if he’d bump me off further down the road?

  “I suppose I can’t blame you,” I said, backtracking. “Becki is totally lush.”

  Philippe looked me up and down. “Hmm.”

  “Hmm what?”

  “Confused mental state. Must be the oxygen deprivation.”

  “What in shitballs are you blabbing about?” I said.

  “See … it’s affecting your speech patterns,” he said, examining my eyes with his. “Don’t worry, it’ll wear off.”

  Before I could grill Philippe on what the hell was going on, a battered old bus rattled into view. I stepped out, bag over shoulder and boots in hand, thumb out for a ride.

  Philippe quickly stashed his gloves, mask and holster behind a mountain boulder by the side of the road. The old school bus pulled over, spray-painted with flowers and peace signs, full of people singing the song “If You’re Happy and You Know It”. The doors hissed and unfolded. A dreadlocked Scandinavian man sat behind the wheel, toking on a joint.

  “You speak English?” Philippe asked.

  “Welcome, brother and sister,” the driver said. “Where are you headed?”

  “Where are you going?” Philippe asked, climbing on board with rocket-launcher case in hand.

  “How does Sweden sound, brother?”

  “Sweden sounds perfect,” said Philippe.

  The driver nodded approvingly and blew out a cloud of super-pungent puff.

  I followed Philippe down the aisle as the bus chugged off through the tunnel. It was packed with young Scandinavian hippies, beaming at us like they were on some kind of Jesus crack. We squeezed onto the back seat between uni-aged peeps wearing tie-dye tees with DIY slogans against guns, violence, governments and drone strikes.

  A-fucking-men to that.

  Of course, none of them had the foggiest idea there was a psycho-killer with a mini bazooka on board. The bus crawled at a snail’s pace out of the tunnel, all eyes pinned to the blazing forest and the Audi-shaped crater in the road.

  I really had to stop destroying things.

  A little further up the road, fire trucks and police cars wailed past us in the opposite direction. To lighten the mood, the driver resumed the big sing-song. Philippe and I were encouraged to join in by the people around us. We grudgingly clapped along as we rolled on out of Dodge, questions hanging heavy over me like those clouds above.

  Questions I couldn’t ask right then and there.

  Questions like:

  Who exactly was Philippe?

  How the hell was he alive?

  Why had he saved me?

  Why had he murdered his own?

  Could I really trust a professional killer?

  What was this JPAC organisation, anyway?

  And what did Project Maelstrom mean for the world?

  It was bad, I got that. But what kind of bad?

  I felt like I was at the start of a million-piece jigsaw, with all the pieces messed up and the big picture missing off the box. As I wrestled with the unknowns, with Auntie Claire’s death, with the thought of being truly alone, the clouds tore open and rain lashed down in monsoon torrents, battering the rickety roof of the bus and turning the world into globs of liquid colour.

  Still, I thought, I was free from the clutches of JPAC. Surely that had to be worth a few dancing cat emoticons. Suddenly I started to relax a little. Finally, I was off the hook. Which brought up another question: What did a dead girl do with the rest of her life? Pity there was no leaflet: Hey, I just faked my own death! What next?

  As the bus waded through the rain and my body began to dial down the adrenaline, I suddenly realised how tired and weak the events of the day had left me.

  My cheeks were burning but my body was cold.

  I felt dizzy.

  Short on breath.

  “You don’t look so good,” Philippe said to me. “Are you okay?”

  “Never better,” I said, slipping off the bus seat with a smile.

  A little scarred, a little unconscious, but alive.

  BOOK 2: INFINITE KILL

  Prologue

  The passengers on the U-Bahn were well and truly spooked. They herded together around the doors of the tram as it pulled sharply into the station. Some were still stunned at what I’d just done, staring at me like I was a two-headed alien. Others stared at the bodies on the floor behind me. As soon as the doors opened, they surged out like panicking cattle.

  I joined the back of the pack and made it out onto the platform, surfing a wave of panic towards the exit. The station was hot, brightly lit and tight, only adding to the claustrophobia. A flight of wide concrete steps led up to street level. I looked over my shoulder, only to see Inge back on her feet, clutching her bleeding nose and shaking off a fuzzy head, her body sandwiched between the closing, bleeping doors. She fought her way out onto the platform. I turned and blended in with the crowd, weighing up my options.

  Doubling back was a no-no. Jumping on another tram, impossible. I’d have to wait and Inge would be all over me, like fake tan on a footballer’s wife. Up the stairs and I might run into one of her JPAC besties. Inge might be radioing them right now. I had to do something different. The only other exit was into the tunnel swallowing up the shiny yellow U-Bahn tram. I broke out of the gaggle of passengers and veered left to where the platform sloped down into the mouth of the tunnel.

  In the shadows, I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, the rumble of the tram still vibrating through the wall. High-voltage wires hummed electric. Sweat stuck cool on the inside of my blouse and jumper from the fight. I leaned out off the wall, sneaking a peek at the platform.

  The station had emptied and Inge had stopped mid-jog. She spun around, a tall, lean figure in black, jabbering into a radio on her lapel. Her back to me. Blonde hair tied in a long pony. Suddenly, she whirled around in my direction. I shoved off along the inside of the track, thinking, hoping, she hadn’t seen me. But my feet weren’t the only pitter-patter echoing down the tunnel. She was on my tail, chewing up my lead with every step. The toe of my right shoe hit something hard and uneven on the floor. I tripped and fell, peeling the skin off my palms. I wasn’t fast enough to get away, and no sooner was I up, I was down again, collapsing under the weight of Inge’s rugby tackle. I wriggled away like crazy as she tried to grab me by the ankles. A swift school shoe to the side of her face gave me a spare second to scramble to my feet. Another tram clattered around the bend at speed. A yellow flash of steel ready to gobble the pair of us up. I snapped back against the wall. Inge did the same.

  As the tram whooshed by, blowing up my grey pleat skirt, I got the jump on her. I made a mad dash for it along the tunnel, breathing hard and heavy, wishing I’d been stricter with my own rehab and hoping my heart wouldn’t give way from all the fighting and the running. The bitch wasn’t giving up, of course. And I had a fresh pile of poop on my plate.

  In the glare of the disappearing tram lights, a silhouette of a man came running towards me. I slowed to a walk, the distance to certain death shrinking all the time as Inge and the shadow approached from either side. It was too dark to see a great deal, but, no doubt about it, the man was JPAC, his hand reaching to the side of his hip, bringing out the shape of a gun. Pointing it square at me.

  I waited for the flash and blast from the barrel. This was it. Nowhere left to run. Nothing left in the arms or legs. I’d backed myself into one corner too many. It would end here. In the dark. Anonymously. With me, a sweaty, panting mess, dressed in another girl’s school uniform. The shadow in front of me was all set to pull the trigger.

  1

  Aid International

  Another day, another memory that wasn’t my own.

  Africa. Somewhere off the beaten track.

  I sat in the passenger seat of a
van, soft suspension bumping me up and down as we rolled along red, dusty roads lumpier than the custard Auntie Claire used to make. I mopped the sweat off my brow with a white handkerchief and looked out of either window. Nothing to see but tall grass.

  “I think the air conditioning is fucked,” the man doing the driving said in a French accent. Like me, he was dressed in a white shirt and trousers. A red, cross-shaped logo on the left breast of the shirt. A stocky black guy with chunky long dreads and intense eyes that didn’t blink. With a thick, tattooed forearm, he worked the gear stick into third as we bump-a-lumped into a tiny village, the grass disappearing and the road widening, a smattering of broken-down buildings either side. Stores. Houses. A bar. A street-food place under a corrugated roof where chicken turned on a spit over an open flame. Not much else, other than stray dogs, live poultry and underfed children careering around. The children saw our van and began running in a pack behind, shouting and grinning, smiles wider than the potholes in the road.

  I heard a voice behind me in the van. European.

  “Nearly there,” she said. “Pull up here, Clarence.”

  It was the woman from my Paris motel dreams. My personal dream cherry popper. Inge. She sat side-on behind the driver, who I now knew as Clarence. Wearing the same linen uniform we all were. She followed a GPS route on her phone, brown sandalled feet resting on top of a large, red plastic box. A bit like a tool box with a handle on top. Behind Inge, there was a flat grey panel blocking the view out of the back, with a blue curtain drawn in front for no apparent reason. Clarence pulled over by the side of the road and I climbed out into the searing heat. No better or worse than inside the van. I spun around three-sixty, getting the lay of the land. Most of the surrounding area was dense jungle, where things swam and flew and crawled and stung and bit and slithered. But we’d parked up across the road from a large dirt clearing where a clutch of a hundred shanty homes shoved up against one another. Up to the right, thick jungle rose steeply up a hill. Only the one house sat towards the top. A big one on stilts with a wood terrace and a watchtower either side. Each manned by a guard in army duds, standing lazily, cigarette in hand and an automatic rifle strapped over one shoulder. The fencing around the house was topped with rolls of barbed wire. Not the kind of place you’d recommend on TripAdvisor.

  I mopped my forehead again and tucked my handkerchief in a trouser pocket. I took the red box from Inge as she climbed out of the van over the passenger seat. The side of the van bore the same red-cross logo we wore on our shirts, along with a name: Aid International. A clear rip-off of the actual Red Cross. Seriously, they could sue.

  I placed the box on the ground and opened up the top. The residents from the main road and the nearby housing estate were already approaching, the children having skidded to a stop by the van and formed a circle around us. Clarence spoke to them in an African language I didn’t understand, which presumably meant neither did Philippe. I opened the box. Inside, alongside latex gloves, cotton pads, syringes, medicines and the like, were bags of fizzy lollipops and Haribo. Now I got it. One injection. One candy-shaped reward. No wonder the kids were happy. The locals queued up as me and Inge administered the shots. Sleeve up. Rub with a sterile cotton swab. Needle in. Rub with a clean swab. Throw said swabs in a bag. As we rubbed and jabbed, Clarence did the talking and the organising.

  Of course, the super-glaringly-obvious question remained. What in Dickens were three stone-cold killers doing handing out medical shots? Clarence might have been a genuine aid worker, but, given the time-healed knife scar on the side of his neck, I doubted it. Had JPAC suddenly grown a conscience? Decided to do what it was originally set up for and actually protect people? I doubted that too. With the kids out of the way, happily sucking and chewing away on their sweets, we worked our way through the adults, stopping halfway through to take on a cool, tangy pineapple drink and a Jurassic-sized slice of watermelon. It helped to stave off the heat for all of a minute. I remember the temperatures from the desert dream being almost unbearable. This was a different kind of swelter. It was humid, with zero wind. And the flies! OMG, the flies. Was I made of actual shit? You couldn’t keep them from buzzing around, getting up in your grill. I spat a couple out of my mouth and snorted another one out of my right nostril.

  “Welcome to the Congo,” Clarence said, laughing at my attempts to bat them away.

  With the locals all sporting a fresh needle mark near the top of their left arm, we packed up the stuff and removed our gloves, taking another water break. Clarence chatted to some of the local men sporting English and Spanish football shirts. Arsenal. Barcelona. Man United and Real Madrid. It occurred to me that JPAC might be sticking the locals with some kind of killer virus. Yeah, wipe out a few million Congolese. For no other reason than that they could.

  “Here we go,” said Inge, putting a hand on my shoulder. “The welcome committee.”

  Two vehicles came towards us from further up the road. A pair of military jeeps with soldiers dressed like the guards in the watchtowers, complete with cherry-red berets. They looked about as welcoming as a bed full of scorpions.

  The locals drifted away quickly and quietly once the jeeps rumbled to a stop and killed their engines. The troops got out. Four in total. They stood in front of us, rifles strapped over shoulders, pistols tucked away in side holsters. One of the men, six-eight tall and three feet wide, had cut the sleeves off his shirt so everyone could see his gigantic guns. His front teeth were gold-plated and he wore wrap shades that I could see Philippe’s warped reflection in.

  The whole lot looked like they were fed on a diet of raw meat and bullets. Gold Teeth stepped to the front. “General Mobutu asks what you are doing here,” he said, speaking English in a thick African accent. “Why you inject people here?”

  “We’re from Aid International,” Inge said.

  Gold Teeth and his men looked her up and down. Sweat made rings around her arms and her hair was scraped back tight. No makeup and a flush-red face, but she still managed to look attractive.

  “We’re here to give out immunisation shots,” Clarence said.

  The big man looked down his nose at Clarence. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the woman,” he said, staring at Inge.

  Gold Teeth bumped past her, looking inside the medical kit and around the back of the van. I felt my right hand clench into a fist. Clarence looked anxiously at me.

  “STI vaccines,” Inge said, drawing Gold Teeth away from the van and back to his men.

  “STI?” the big man asked, as confused as the rest of the soldiers.

  I pretended to scratch my crotch, screwing up my face.

  “Ah,” the group of men chorused, nodding at each other.

  “You mean scratchy-scratch,” one of the soldiers said.

  “Exactly,” Inge said, smiling. “Bangy-bang without the scratchy-scratch.”

  Gold Teeth laughed and turned to one of his men. He gave him a quiet order in his native tongue. The soldier returned to the jeep and spoke into a radio. The jeeps bore what I knew instinctively was the Democratic Republic of Congo flag. Yet they also featured faint white numbers and letters in Russian. The soldier came off the radio and jogged back into line. He spoke quietly into the ear of Gold Teeth, bending to his left to hear.

  Gold Teeth nodded and stood up straight. “General Mobutu invites you to his residence,” he said, pointing to the house on the hill.

  “Thank the general for his very kind invitation,” I said, “but we have another two villages—”

  “The invitation is compulsory,” said Gold Teeth.

  All four soldiers snapped their rifles off their shoulders and pointed them squarely at the three of us.

  “Tell the general we’d be delighted,” said Inge.

  2

  Agnes Holgersson

  The doctor pushed me in a wheelchair down one squeaky-clean white corridor after another, the top of my scar peeping out above a long, fluffy white dressing gown. I wore a medical br
acelet around my left wrist. Agnes Holgersson. Fourteen. Cardiology. Recovering. And under the dressing gown, a long-sleeve pink button top, light blue jeans and black trainer pumps. I had a vague recollection of being forced into each item of clothing by the doctor while I slipped in and out of consciousness. Other vague memories included him knocking out another doctor, heaving him into a laundry bin in his Donald Duck boxers and throwing a sheet over the top.

  As the doctor wheeled me into an elevator, I felt ropier than an adventure playground, my head lolling forward over my white hospital-issue slippers, but I had enough juice in me to play my part in the op. We rode the elevator down a floor and followed the green, Swedish signs to the hospital pharmacy. The doctor wore a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses with the lenses pushed out, along with a stethoscope round his neck, a light-pink shirt and a black tie. The pharmacy sat at the end of the corridor through automatic glass doors. The doctor wheeled me up to a long counter in front of six rows of high shelving, packed with pills and potions. A hypochondriac’s wet dream. Everything shiny and white. So this is what it felt to go private.

  The doctor took a few pieces of blue prescription paper out of his white coat pocket and flattened them out on the counter. He cleared his throat, not because he needed to. A pharmacist popped out of the back to serve us. A lofty man with floppy, silver-blonde hair and a crumpled face. I understood every word of Swedish he spoke.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Hello,” the doctor said, pushing the pieces of paper across the counter. “I need some immunosuppressants for my patient here.”

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “Agnes Holgersson,” I said, not having to pretend very hard to look seriously ill.

  The pharmacist – Sven Ahlberg, according to his name tag – typed my name into a computer. “Agnes, here we go.” He grabbed the prescription papers and studied the scrawl. “Sorry, but I’ll need sign-off from the unit manager.”