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

by Rob Aspinall

  More reluctant than a cat at bath time, I brought the throttle back.

  “Let it drift under the bridge ahead,” Philippe said, back-stepping towards me.

  I turned the key off in the ignition. Our boat bobbed slowly underneath a low stone bridge. Philippe put his gun to my right temple and hooked his left forearm around my neck. He pulled me in tight in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, out of the corner of my mouth.

  “Remember the Reichstag?” he said quietly into the back of my head.

  “Duh, of course.”

  “Same routine. You’re a schoolgirl hostage. I’m the hostage taker. They’ll put us on separate boats, then push you down on the floor. When that happens, close your eyes, hold your breath and wait.”

  “What for?”

  “Trust me, you’ll know.”

  It was dark beneath the bridge. The police boats approached slowly from either side. Engines chugging. High-powered rifles pointing our way. Bright lights shunting into life. Both boats were much bigger than ours.

  “Release the hostage or we shoot,” the guy with the loudhailer said, voice bouncing off the underbelly of the bridge.

  Hostage. Ha! Either the Reichstag guards hadn’t told the police who’d disarmed them in the dome, or they thought I was suffering from … what did they call it? … Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. That. I guess in all the confusion of a terror threat, people’s wires got in a bit of a tangle.

  “You’ve got three seconds,” the cop said. “Three … two … one …”

  Philippe released his grip and stepped back, laying the gun down. The boat to our right rubbed up against ours and a SWAT member yanked me away from Philippe and onto their deck, where I was surrounded by an entire team of armed cops.

  One of the SWAT members hopped on to the old man’s boat and fired it up, steering it down river. Philippe was already held at multiple gunpoint on the other police boat.

  “Down! Down! Down!” yelled one of the SWAT team, pushing me to the deck.

  I heard another saying, “Hostage secured. Suspect in custody.”

  I closed my eyes and waited like Philippe said, scar grinding against the hard plastic floor. Boots stomping around the deck, perilously close to my head. A cold breeze picked up off the water and sneaked its way down my blouse.

  I shivered and held my breath.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  3

  Overboard

  As the police shouted to each other about heading back to SWAT HQ, I heard a giant pop and crackle. Rat-a-tat-tat like a firecracker on Chinese New Year. But not machine-gun fire. Something else. The smell of smoke. The coughing and shouting of men around me. I jumped to my feet and caught the tail end of some kind of flash bomb on the other boat. It seemed to have stunned every single SWAT team member, my captors included.

  I knew exactly what Philippe had done. Like the drone request in the desert that time. He’d snuck the stun bomb on board, out of sight between his hands and the back of his head. A Vasquez party piece.

  I couldn’t see much on the boat across from us because of the smoke engulfing the deck. It was a mess of arms and legs and rifle butts and shouting. A couple of shots cracked off against the underneath of the bridge and a SWAT teamer spilled out overboard. Another one followed soon after. Breathing in and out again, I saw my chance and spun around, pushing the nearest guy off the rear of the boat. Another came at me, fit enough to fight, but unable to focus behind the sight of his rifle. I threw him to the ground and disarmed him. Swung the rifle like a baseball bat and zonked another one out cold with the butt. I sensed a looming rifle barrel out of the corner of my eye. A driver stood at the wheel of the boat, with two more SWAT members to deal with. One held a gun on me while he blinked tears out of his red-raw eyes. The other tried to get a fix on Philippe across the water as the men thrown overboard swam for shore, struggling in their heavy body armour. No time or thought given to life jackets.

  The SWAT guy with the gun to my head told me to get on my knees. I dropped down, wondering whether he’d pull the trigger right here and now. After all, you heard stories on the news of cops shooting suspects all the time. I saw Philippe take down his last opponent over on the other boat. The spare SWAT member on my side took a potshot, but Philippe was too fast out of the way. He dropped low and stayed there, hidden by a flat cloud of smoke wisping off deck.

  “We need to get out of here,” shouted the driver.

  “Do it,” said the guy with the gun to my head.

  The driver accelerated away from the bridge. The spare SWAT man pulled out a pair of handcuffs. He brought my left arm around my back, ready to snap a cuff on around the first wrist. Out of nowhere, Inge’s grey speedboat slammed into us side on, throwing both SWAT guys off balance. Inge jumped over onto the deck of our boat. She threw one guy over her shoulder and pushed the other’s gun away as it fired, the bullet hitting the driver in the back of the shoulder. He slumped forward onto the wheel, sending us into a dizzying spin. Inge lost her footing and fell over.

  The SWAT guy with the rifle didn’t know who to shoot first. He plumped for little old me, flat on my back from the spin. I kicked out one of his knees before he could shoot, booting the rifle out of his hands as I got back up. But his teammate got to me before I could deliver the knock-out blow. He grabbed me by the jumper and swung a fist. I ducked the first and the second. The other SWAT guy joined in. Suddenly I was blocking and ducking both.

  Inge punched one of the cops in the back. As he turned in pain, she punched him again in the gut, forearmed him in the chin and brought the tip of her elbow up under his nose. Rapid-fire stuff, his nose exploding a deep red. She booted him off deck. Fighting a headlock from the remaining SWAT guy, I reached behind me and yanked his ski mask down over his eyes, then jammed an elbow into his ribs a good couple of times. He was a big unit though. The biggest and hardest of the lot. He stumbled back out of elbow range and ripped off the ski mask, revealing a shock of platinum-blonde hair and a face that was all jaw. He unclipped the holster on his belt and whipped out a pistol. But he couldn’t get an aim due to the churning foam circles the boat was making over and over in the water.

  Inge snatched the gun from him and reversed it. I knocked it out of her grip into the water. She palmed me off in the nose, causing my eyes to water. The big blonde guy swung out at me, again going for the weaker one first. I blocked it and twisted his arm. He cried out in agony. Inge struck him in the gut. I punched him in the kidney. But the size of him; he wasn’t for going down. He shook me off and staggered away. Seems me and Inge both had the same idea. We stepped forward as a pair and martial-arts kicked him in the chest, once, twice and bang! Number three put him down, his head bouncing off the deck. Out cold.

  Before I could make another move, Inge drew a knife from her belt. We spun and we spun, me trying to stay away from that serrated blade. Then I saw Philippe coming our way, behind the wheel of the other police boat, picking up speed. I waited for the right moment, dodged past Inge’s swishing knife and made the jump, four feet over the water. I bumped and slid onto the other police boat. Philippe gave it full throttle and we sped away from the scene into the open river. I hauled myself up, jelly-legged from the spin. I looked at my tie, cut off an inch beneath the knot by Inge’s blade.

  The bitch wasn’t done yet, though. She’d taken the wheel of the other police boat and was on our tail.

  “Hey, what do we do about your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Hand me that rifle,” Philippe said, pointing to an abandoned weapon on deck. I scooped it up and tossed it over.

  Catching the rifle in his free hand, Philippe spun the wheel, turning the boat around one-eighty. He opened fire on Inge’s boat coming the other way. He riddled the side of the boat with bullets, also catching the engine at the back, but missing Inge. We turned again for another pass, but no need. Her engine smoked and caught fire, spreading across deck in a couple of seconds. The boat veered off to t
he left and smashed into a high stretch of riverbank wall. We cruised past. There was no sign of Inge.

  4

  Dry Land

  Philippe tossed the rifle in the water and steered the boat down river, but a couple of hundred metres on, it began to chug and splutter, slowing until it stalled. Blue smoke poured out of the engine and I realised water was flooding in through a bullet hole in the deck, swilling around our feet. The boat drifted over to where bright-orange kayaks bobbed in a line stretching out from the water’s edge. Each one had a young kid inside wearing a life jacket; an instructor sat in a kayak opposite, showing them how to hold the paddle. Unfortunately, we were too far from the river bank to hop off. On top of that, the boat was steadily sinking.

  “Can you swim?” Philippe asked.

  “I do a mean doggy paddle.”

  “That’ll do,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the boat. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going in there. Uh-uh. I don’t do freezing-cold water.”

  “One way or another, you’re going in.”

  I heard patrol-car sirens in the distance. A convoy of them not too far away.

  “We haven’t got long,” Philippe said, hurling his rucksack to the safety of the shore. He slipped into the water. Not even a gasp. Jesus, how could he just get in there like it was no big deal? He swam the few feet to dry land and hauled himself out. I looked along the river from where we’d just come, the police cars flashing over a distant bridge. I turned my attention to the freezing-cold river … the freezing-cold water flooding the boat.

  I went for it.

  No, not freezing my nipples off in the Spree. Of course not.

  I lowered myself down off the front of the police boat, where the kayak line ended. I stepped on the first, skipped onto the second and then the next six after that. Treading light and fast off the back of each kayak, the kids laughing and the instructor doing his nut. I hopped off onto the river bank and got a round of applause from the kids. I took a bow, then spun off and joined a soaking-wet Philippe, running across a stretch of grass towards a large glass office building set back off the river.

  “In here,” Philippe said, putting a size ten through an anonymous side door. We broke into a concrete stairwell, which took us into an underground carpark. Clean. Shiny. Full of new executive saloons. Philippe led us along the walls, dripping a trail of river water behind us. He said we had to stick to the walls to stay out of the range of the CCTV.

  I knew what he was looking for. A beaten-up old car with no satnav, air con or basic comforts of any kind, like suspension or windows that didn’t let the wind in. All the cars down here were pretty much new, bar one. A white Fiat Punto. Philippe told me to keep an eye out while he did his break-in trick. Within a few seconds, we were in and, seconds after that, the engine coughed into life. Philippe tossed me two smartphones from his rucksack.

  “Hold these,” he said. “One’s mine. The other I got off Clarence. See if there’s anything on there we can use.”

  We spun out of the space in a squeal of tyres and up a couple of ramps. I found a fob left in a tray on the dash and dibbed us out through a metal shutter. Now we were out of the heart of Berlin, the roads were clear of police, but Philippe stayed within the speed limits just to be safe. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and put the heater on full volcano.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Philippe said. “Inge.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “She’s not,” he said again.

  “Okay, it was a joke. God, so touchy.”

  I pretended to tap into his phone. “Ooh, maybe there are some raunchy texts between the two of you.”

  “Give me that,” he said, swiping it off me.

  I laughed until my cheeks hurt, all the tension and anxiety coming out. As we hit the motorway network beyond the city limits, I began to relax, undoing the slashed school tie from around my neck and arranging my hair the best I could in the vanity mirror. I took a look at Clarence’s smartphone. No dice. It was asking me for a PIN.

  “Hey, this is code-locked,” I said.

  “No problem. I can unlock it when we get to Austria. It’s easily done.”

  “Remind me, what’s in Austria again?”

  Philippe just smiled.

  I didn’t like it when he smiled.

  5

  Daddy's Girl

  The Grüne Hügel Privatklinik was more like a five-star retreat than a medical centre. Halfway up a hill, overlooking a crystal-clear lake and small Austrian village, the place was a converted white stone mansion with cream marble floors and a giant tropical fish tank in reception.

  I half expected to be thrown out for being too poor and scruffy, a common feeling I got whenever I went into anywhere remotely fancy. Philippe obviously thought the Punto was too classy, so we’d switched cars outside Berlin and stolen another old banger with red doors that didn’t match the rest of the mint-green Polo.

  We looked like something a dog had spewed up, but we were validated with smiles from the pristine staff in their crisp white uniforms.

  “What if they report us?” I asked as we entered through one of the spotless automatic doors.

  “They’re very discreet,” Philippe assured me. “It’s why I come here.”

  “Welcome back, Mr Vazquez,” the pretty young receptionist said with a smile, her teeth whiter than snow. “Just a check-up or will you be staying with us?”

  Philippe draped an arm on the desk. “Just a check-up.”

  “And will your daughter be in need of attention?” the receptionist asked, her eyes betraying her smile as she looked me up and down.

  “Oh, she’s not—”

  “Yes,” I said, doing my posh telephone voice. “That should be splendid.”

  I hooked my arm around Philippe’s, pouring it on. “Can I have a sweetie, Daddy?”

  Philippe snatched a couple of fruit lollipops from a huge crystal dish on the reception counter. He stuffed them aggressively in my hand. One strawberry. One blackcurrant. Yum. Yum. Yum.

  The receptionist tapped away at her computer and told us to wait in Consulting Room 1B. “To the right of the elevators, second room on your left down the hall.”

  “Daddy?” Philippe asked me, as we made our way past a small fitness room with glass walls, where two overweight, silver-haired men plodded away on adjoining treadmills.

  “Well, you are in your forties,” I said.

  “I’m thirty-nine.”

  “Either way, you don’t want them to think you’re a paedo kidnapper,” I said, sucking on my strawberry lolly.

  “If you’ve got the money, they really don’t care,” Philippe said, pushing the consulting-room door open.

  Dr Gradel, placed a cold stethoscope on my back and leaned in close. So close I blushed.

  “Breathe in,” she said, listening carefully.

  Perfect teeth. Gym-bunny calves. Dark, glossy hair like Becki’s. And, I guessed, a bit of Turkish in her genes. She was a real sophisticated beaut, maturing nicely into her dirty thirties.

  “Okay, good,” she said, scribbling on a stainless-steel clipboard. Even their clipboards were high-end.

  I sat on the examination bench next to Philippe, both of us in a smock, fresh from a hot shower and a full physical.

  “Well, the good news is you’re both doing well. Mr Vazquez, you’re in excellent condition, considering. Your heart is strong, if not entirely reliable.”

  Not entirely reliable. I wondered what she meant by that. She seemed miffed about something.

  “Been drinking a lot lately?” she asked.

  “Just the odd Scotch,” Philippe said. “You know me.”

  “I thought I did,” Dr Gradel said, under her breath.

  Ooooh. Bitchy. Was there something between them? Had they shagged? I sensed a frisson of tension.

  “Chloe …”

  Yep, I was Chloe Vazquez now.

  “You’re also doing well, considering your organ isn’t your ow
n. Incredible case study. Father donates his own heart to child and receives a new organ cloned from his own DNA.”

  I knew Philippe had spun her a story while I was changing into my medical gown. Did she believe him? I guess they were paid enough here to believe anything.

  “I imagine much of your accelerated progress is down to the medication your father has been on all these years,” said Dr Gradel. “Some of the enhanced benefits may have passed on through proteins in the cells.”

  “Enhanced?” I asked. “Like steds?”

  Philippe and Dr Gradel looked at each other, equally confused.

  “Steroids,” I said.

  “They’re non-steroidal,” Dr Gradel said. “Though they do result in enhanced physical and mental performance, including increased immune strength and bone density.”

  So that’s why Dr J thought his machines had gone screwy. And it made sense. JPAC didn’t want their best assassins getting sick or injured. Not when there was a global village to intimidate and control.

  Phillipe stood and stretched. “It increases stamina in all departments,” he said.

  “Not all departments,” Dr Gradel said, ditching her clipboard and pen on a characterless grey cabinet.

  They’d definitely shagged.

  “You never told me you had a daughter,” she said to Philippe, peeling her latex gloves off at the wrist and dropping them in a cylindrical, stainless-steel bin.

  Come on, cell memories, throw me a dream bone. I want to know what she looks like naked.

  Good grief, what was I becoming? It was like Philippe’s inner schoolboy was at the controls of my brain and body, sniggering, wolf-whistling and tossing off all over the inside of my mind.

  Ugh. Gross. Were all men like this, even when all grown up? The thought depressed and disgusted me a little.

  Philippe gave the doctor some flam about not finding out about me until a year ago.