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

by Rob Aspinall

  Magda’s eyes told me he was. They drifted towards the doorway. Afraid. I turned and saw Philippe with a hammer.

  “I was just saying—” I said.

  “Murdering scumbag. I’m touched,” he said, taking a step towards Magda with the hammer. “Sure you want to watch this?”

  I shrugged. “After all I’ve been through lately? How bad can it be?”

  18

  Emergency Exit

  Kimbada Airport was less of an airport, more of a jungle clearing with a wonky strip of tarmac in the middle. The bullet-riddled sign and barbed-wire fencing said it all. This wasn’t a place to hang around and get comfortable. There was no terminal. No Duty Free. Just a wind sock and a strip of landing lights, only half of them lit. On the muddy track that led across the grass to the runway, I spotted a pair of taillights ahead of me. Small, streaky blobs slowly growing bigger as I caught up, windscreen wipers struggling to keep a cascade of rainwater at bay.

  The red blobs headed towards a white blob parked on the runway, kicking up a torrent of spray in my direction. The red blobs morphed into the van we’d come here in. The white blob turned into a medium-sized transporter plane, unmarked, its back end open and ready to receive. The van slowed and mounted the ramp into the back of the plane. I followed suit, rolling up into a brightly lit cargo bay where men in green flight suits busied themselves hooking both vehicles to the floor. One of the men stood next to the Hummer and grabbed a control pad for the cargo-bay door, hanging off a wire. He pushed a red button and the door began to whirr closed behind us. I climbed out of the Hummer and into the warm air. I ran a hand over my head and shook off some of the rainwater, the van and the Hummer drip-drying over the floor, puddles already evaporating in the heat.

  “Buckle up. Take-off in two mikes,” shouted one of the two-man crew.

  I shut the Hummer door and walked around the front. Clarence grabbed me by the throat and forced me against the muddied chrome grille.

  “What the fuck was that, leaving me halfway down the fucking hill?”

  I broke his hand from my throat and shoved him off. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  Inge rolled her eyes at the pair of us and opened the rear doors of the van to reveal Mobutu lying on the floor, foetus-like, tied at the wrists and ankles.

  “You abandoned the mission,” Clarence said, shoving me back.

  “I took advantage of the situation,” I said. “Now the world will think it was a rescue mission. Not an abduction.”

  “Mobutu was supposed to have gone into hiding,” Clarence said.

  “Am I not here?” Mobutu said from the floor of the van. “And what the fuck are you doing with my Hummer?”

  “Philippe’s right,” Nathan said, appearing out of a cabin door towards the front of the plane. He put his whippet-thin frame between me and Clarence. “The cover story still stands,” he said. “Besides, we have internal stakeholders to please. Quotas to fulfil. A civilian rescue will look good on the end-of-year reports.”

  Nathan held a hand out towards General Mobutu as an example. “Our remit is to stop dictators and warlords, after all.”

  I felt my hackles rise at the mere sight of Nathan. He was a snake of a man. Just like Mobutu. I’d have gladly strangled both of them. But this was a dream. A memory, leaking from the deepest recesses of my heart cells. Dr Tariq had said this might happen. And I could do nothing. Still, it was weird how these so-called memories came to me in order. One fragment followed the next when I slept. Then they’d stop and it’d be back to dreams of Auntie Claire and the faces of the dead. It’s as if my heart was trying to tell me something all over again. Like when it led me to find the contact lenses in the church. Dr Tariq had blogged about the heart having some kind of higher intelligence we didn’t yet understand. That it could see into the future somehow. Seemed a bit nuts when I first read it, but stranger things had already happened.

  We strapped ourselves in for take-off in a cramped passenger cabin between cargo bay and cockpit, the plane shaking from turbulence as we rode the storm, seeking out quieter skies. If all plane rides were as dicey as this, I think I’d be sticking to the roads and the rails. Mobutu was buckled and cuffed securely between me and Clarence, muttering about us coming into his country. Revenge. Consequences.

  “Well, look at that, General,” Nathan said, sitting facing us alongside Inge. He peered out of the window. “You’re not in your country anymore.”

  19

  The Hammer And The Nail

  OMG, it was a pukefest. Philippe had apparently broken the biro and opted for something more sturdy and durable. It did the trick. Magda’s screams were worse close-up. I forced myself to watch. It felt like some kind of weird, sick duty.

  Philippe told me to take off Magda’s boots and socks. She fought me, but I did it. At first, I thought he was making her more comfortable. Then it dawned on me as I stepped back out of the way. He started with the smallest toe on her left foot. He asked her how much JPAC knew. She refused to answer.

  Philippe took aim with the hammer.

  There was a bone-crunching thunk. A gurgling whimper. Magda cried, yet she didn’t spill.

  “Do they know we’re alive?” Philippe asked.

  “I was a Type A … before I became an Overseer,” Magda said. “Before the bureaucrats invented such terms. It means I’m trained to resist. Just like you. No matter what you do to me.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I try anyway,” Philippe said, lining the hammer up over the next toe in.

  “Tell him, Magda,” I said, trying to prevent the inevitable. “Please.”

  Magda sneered at me. Philippe brought the hammer down. I turned away.

  It went on for what seemed like hours. Philippe hammered his way through seven toes across different feet. Finally, he changed tactic. He tied Magda up in a weird position on the floor. It looked mega-uncomfortable. Especially for a woman close to claiming her pension. No water. No rest. All those aches and pains of age must have been on fire. Yet she kept diverting the conversation. Maybe an old spy trick to take her mind off it.

  “All this time and you didn’t know,” Magda said, looking up at Philippe, who leaned against the wall next to me, arms folded like he was waiting for a bus.

  “Really, Philippe,” Magda said. “I would have expected more from someone with your reputation. I’m disappointed.”

  Philippe wasn’t playing ball. He consulted the fat digital watch on his wrist. It was early morning already.

  “What gave me away?” Magda asked, trying to squirm into a more comfortable position, without success.

  “A couple of things,” Philippe said, pushing off the wall with a foot. “Your eye-movement. When you told us about your late husband. Your days in the army barracks. The eyes move in one direction for the brain to access memories. The opposite to construct lies. Your eyes went right when they should have gone left … Then there was the drug. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate. Usually undetectable in a strong drink like Scotch. Unless you’ve used it so often, you’ve developed an acute sensitivity to its smell.”

  “I would have gone with something less predictable,” Magda said, “but it’s all I had in.”

  “All these years,” I said. “You were just waiting? Watching?”

  “Every Type A has an off-book residence,” she said. “It was no accident he stayed here. Or that he bought this place. Psychometric testing is quite effective for predicting behaviour. The committee knew you’d seek out a safe house, Philippe. Even what kind of place you’d choose. And Inge. She played her part beautifully. When it was time for me to retire from the field, I took the assignment gladly. I grew up in the country. It’s a wonderful quality of life.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If you appreciate life so much, why are you so loyal to people who specialise in death?”

  If Magda could have shaken her head, she would. “It’s just a small part of what we do. A necessary evil. You have no concept of what the world would be like without u
s. We preserve the balance.”

  “There’s nothing balanced about murdering innocent people,” I said. “Chopping off heads. Shooting people in the face.”

  Magda laughed incredulously. “It’s nothing new. Sacrifices have been made since the beginning of time. Predators kill prey. The strong kill the weak. It’s nature’s order.”

  Philippe bent down in front of Magda and repeated his question of the day. “How much do JPAC know?”

  She didn’t answer. He untied her and pulled her up onto her feet. Her bones cracked. Philippe had to manipulate her rod-stiff limbs into place as he sat her on the chair. He asked her the question again. No joy. He tied her wrists and ankles so she was sitting up in the chair. He brought out the hammer.

  “What do JPAC know?”

  “They know enough,” she said.

  Philippe lined up the hammer over a finger this time. Her pinkie. He pressed it out flat on the arm of the chair.

  20

  Woof Woof

  It was another couple of mind-slogging, gut-churning hours into the early morning before Magda cracked. The sky was phasing from dark to daylight, the birds tweeting outside and a rooster cock-a-doodling the morning in from the farmhouse yard. It wasn’t the hammer that broke her. Or the stress positions. It was physical and emotional fatigue. Philippe had broken her down, step by step, even blasting hardcore rave music into her ears via a pair of headphones plugged into his iPad.

  “How much do JPAC know?” he asked, after taking the headphones out of Magda’s ears, the faint, tinny sound of gabba beats joom-joom-jooming away in the background.

  “They know … they know …”

  “Yes?” Philippe asked.

  “They know everything.”

  “Be. More. Specific,” Philippe said, picking the hammer off the floor, the weight of the metal dragging along the floorboard ominously.

  I felt pretty tortured myself. Shit knows what it must have been like for Magda. She leaned back in her chair and cackled. Like she’d lost her mind.

  “You want specific?” she said. “How about this for specific? They’re watching you right now. They’ve been watching you since last night. Watching. Listening …”

  “I’ve kept them here as long as I can,” Magda continued, talking to some unseen entity.

  Her head rolled to one side out of exhaustion.

  “The place must be bugged,” I said. “Cameras. Microphones.”

  “No,” Philippe said. “I checked when we got here. I always check.”

  He slapped Magda awake. “How are they watching? What are you talking about?”

  Magda sneered back at Philippe, snot spurting out of a nostril. Blood caked hard against her crooked front teeth. Philippe twigged. He tugged the top button off of her blue cotton shirt and held it up to the dim morning light. He squatted down and smashed it between hammer and floor. The pieces revealed a tiny device.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A camera with a built-in microphone.”

  “So, what? JPAC are watching us right now?”

  Philippe hammered the device and smashed it to tiny pieces. “They were.”

  “Shit,” I said. “And now they know we’re alive.”

  “We plan for every eventuality,” Magda said. “Philippe, you should know that. You’re getting soft. Sloppy. The girl is corrupting your judgement.”

  I was astonished. “I’m corrupting—?”

  “How long have we got?” Philippe asked.

  “How the fucking hell should I know?” Magda said, letting out a heavy sigh and letting her eyelids fall.

  I went to check the window. Paranoid.

  Hang on.

  Not paranoid.

  It was light now, despite the slate-grey skies overhead. A high-sided silver Transit van pulled up at the far end of the driveway to the farm. A man in jeans and a beige jacket got out of the driver’s seat and walked over to the near-side sliding door. He pulled the handle and rolled the door open, left to right. Another man in plain clothes jumped out of the van and the pair of them stood to one side.

  “We’ve got company,” I said over my shoulder. “They don’t look too fierce. I reckon you can take them.”

  Philippe joined me at the window. Out of the van stepped … ah, tits. They’d only gone and brought the dogs.

  The dogs hopped out onto the gravel driveway. The men climbed back in the van and slid the side door shut. The drones crunched forward as a pair, up the driveway towards the barn conversion.

  “Rough terrain robots. Weaponised prototypes,” Philippe said.

  “I know. I saw it in your memory. The Congo raid.”

  “Mobutu?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then you’ll know that they’re capable of—”

  Right that second, there was a whoosh and an almighty bang. The entire barn shook as part of the roof caved in overhead, a ball of dust and smoke engulfing the room. We ducked away from the window.

  “Keep your head down,” Philippe said.

  “Oh, you think?”

  “Just follow me.”

  The dogs weren’t big on subtlety. They followed up the rocket attack with machine-gun blasts that shredded the barn. We ran into the bathroom, where Philippe slid to his knees. He dug the fingers of both hands around the edge of the panel on the bath and tore it away. Another missile took another chunk of the building out. It was mighty close, rocking the entire bathroom. Tiles falling and breaking in the bath. Sink and toilet coming out off the wall.

  “Shit,” Philippe said.

  “What now?”

  “Magda found the guns.”

  I peered over his shoulder. There was an empty space where, presumably, a mini-arsenal used to be. There was one bullet remaining. As if it had been left as a joke. Ah-ha-ha, fuck you very much, Magda. The gunfire dropped off momentarily. Something told me the dogs were just warming up. Stretching their death muscles.

  “Okay, so what now?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking,” Philippe said.

  “Well, think faster!”

  Suddenly, gunfire shattered the bathroom window and laid waste to the rest of the blue-and-white tiles on the wall. Philippe dragged me down into a lying position, up against the bath.

  “Oh shit, we’re gonna die, aren’t we?”

  “Probably,” said Philippe.

  “You’re not supposed to say that.”

  “What would you rather me say?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me we’re going to make it. At least tell me we’ve got a chance.”

  “Okay, there’s a ten per cent chance we’ll survive.”

  “Ten?”

  “All right, seven.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Then stop asking,” he said.

  As the gunfire moved around the rear of the barn, we scrambled out of the bathroom, the back end of the building gone. Just gone. Like a huge monster had taken a giant bite. Philippe had said the only chance we had was to get down the stairs. As we ran along the hallway, there was an ear-splitting explosion that blew the pair of us backwards, the staircase gone in a swirl of fire, smoke clouding the air. I coughed it out as we got to our feet.

  To my left, Magda sat laughing and shaking her head in her chair, just about the only thing still standing in the interrogation room, now missing a roof and a couple of walls. Machine-gun bullets fizzed into the room, killing her instantly.

  “Okay,” I said, turning away from the ferocious heat. “This is just about the worst situation I’ve ever been in.”

  Nope. Nope it wasn’t.

  There was a creaking and a groaning underfoot. I looked at Philippe. He looked at me. The floor caved in.

  21

  Tip Of The Spear

  All I heard was a sudden snap, wood splintering and no time to brace. We plunged unguarded into an ashen black hole. A good ten feet of drop. I bounced bum-first on something metallic, but it had give. The floor I bounced onto was harder. Concrete. But
I was lucky. It was a tumble dryer that broke my fall. Philippe, not so fortunate. He ploughed straight through an empty clothes maiden and hit the floor hard. A miracle he didn’t impale an organ.

  We were in the laundry room. What was left of it – the door blown off and the wall that separated it from the living room caved in. I helped Philippe up and we lurched into the living area, just in time for the front door to fall inwards. It hit the floor with a whump. One of the dogs stood in the doorway, scanning the room with multiple blue laser sightings, its hooves clomping in over the flattened door, mechanical ticks and whirs as it strutted and turned, one side to another, smoking, glowing machine-gun barrels at the ready.

  We hid behind the sofa, somehow still in one piece, Philippe rolling the pain out of his right shoulder. The dog was close. Luckily, it wasn’t a real dog. It couldn’t smell us. But it could no doubt see better than us in the smouldering ruins of the building. Just a hollow, burnt-out shell with rubble all over the floor and a giant hole in the roof.

  “A sofa. I’m not sure this is the best place to hide,” I whispered. “We could make a run for the door.”

  “That’s what they want. The other drone will be outside waiting. It’s a flush and kill.”

  “Well, it’s better than a sit and die.”

  “Let me think for a second,” Philippe said.

  I was letting him think, bum hole twitching, mind racing, when something dropped off the stone fireplace and clanged on the floor.

  “How about those?” I whispered to Philippe, pointing at the shields and spears, now lying in a heap only a few feet away.