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

by Rob Aspinall

  Marko nodded. “Yes, Mrs Martel.”

  Philippe and Celine shook on it. Celine invited us over to her desk, where she fired up a laptop.

  “The usual method okay?” she asked, typing something in.

  “Of course,” Philippe said, leaning back in his chair. At ease in his world.

  “There, it’s done,” said Celine. “Would you like to check?”

  “Not that I don’t trust you,” said Philippe, scanning the computer screen as Celine angled it towards him.

  “Yes, that’s excellent,” said Philippe.

  “Oh, this is terribly exciting,” Celine said, handing the diamond to Tony, who’d magicked a metal briefcase from somewhere. “I do love a bargain.”

  Nineteen mill. Oh, yeah, a real yellow-sticker item.

  Tony wrapped the diamond in a black silk cloth and placed it in the case. The case went straight onto the plane.

  Celine checked her diamond-encrusted watch. “The girls can board now. If we hurry, I can still make my appointment in Albania.”

  I walked over to the Bentley. The girls sat patiently, chattering amongst themselves about what was happening – Christina moaning about feeling tired, Katya complaining of a headache.

  I opened the driver-side door and kneeled on the seat so I could talk to them all.

  “That lady over there is called Mrs Martel,” I said. “She’s going to take you home.”

  “What do you mean, home?” Irina asked.

  “Odessa,” I said. “Back to Odessa.”

  Christina seemed suspicious. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No … no joke. No catch. You’re going home now, to your families.”

  “But they’ll come for us again,” said Katya. “They’ll find us and then …”

  “Mrs Martel is going to fly you and your families out of Ukraine. Anywhere you want. They’ll make sure you get there safe. But you have to leave now. Come and get on the plane.”

  I stepped out of the car and pulled the driver’s seat forward. The girls followed me towards the jet, all of us in party dresses and bare feet, slapping across the smooth, chill floor of the hangar.

  Celine stood at the steps to the plane. She ran her eyes over the girls, tutting with sympathy. “You poor, poor things.”

  Tony had fetched some soft, caramel blankets from the plane. The girls turned and hugged me tight, Christina almost breaking a few ribs.

  “Thank you,” Irina said.

  “We won’t forget this,” said Katya.

  Christina sniffled back the tears. I felt myself going.

  “Go before I ruin my makeup,” I said.

  The girls took turns hugging Philippe. He looked awkward as hell. Stood like a statue, unsure what to do. Tony draped a blanket over the shoulders of each girl and led them in a line up the steps.

  “The country of their choice,” Philippe said. “And a generous relocation figure.”

  “We’ll take excellent care of them,” Celine said. “I’ll see to it personally.”

  Arms dealing, fencing and philanthropy. A curious mix. But Celine seemed genuinely moved by the plight of Irina, Katya and Christina. For her, you could tell it was more than just business. I had no doubt they’d get the “full gold package”, as Philippe had put it.

  As Celine’s pilot readied her jet for take-off, Tony pulled the Porsche around the back of the hangar.

  Nineteen million, though.

  Nineteen million!

  From one account to another, just like that. I couldn’t get my head around it. We climbed into the Bentley, Philippe taking the wheel, sniper rifle tucked away in the boot.

  “So where to next?” I asked, as we rumbled across the tarmac on the way out of the airfield, the jet taking off in the near distance. I watched it climb sharply into the sky, carrying the girls off to a new life. I almost wished I was joining them. I imagined the looks on their families’ faces when they got the knock on the door. Their daughters returned. It must have been nice to have a family to go back to.

  Philippe pulled his phone from a trouser pocket. He showed me the screen. We had our instructions from JPAC.

  Taipei. In forty-eight hours’ time. We were back, baby.

  23

  Chicken Noodles

  We lay belly-down on the roof of an empty office building, watching the busy street below and the five-star business hotel opposite. The text from JPAC had simply said Red Flag. 3rd Man. Then a date and coordinates for the hotel. JPAC were really being careful with their information, though Philippe said it was sometimes as much as you got. The ‘Third Man’ in this case was supposed to be Clarence. According to Philippe, he was playing back-up sniper if anything went wrong on the mission across the road. But seeing as Clarence was worm food by now, here we were instead, waiting for something to happen. Aside from the hum and honk of the city and the to and fro of jet engines above, it was all quiet on the Eastern front. The air was sauna-hot, the humidity making my face sweat. I tied my hair back into a ponytail and swept the area again with the binoculars.

  “The all-black outfits might not have been the best idea,” I said, talking about my vest and leggings.

  “What would you prefer?” asked Philippe. “Hotpants?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, mentioning nothing of the fact I’d almost worn a pair of frayed denim cut-offs.

  Philippe made a minor adjustment on his telescopic spotter lens. The rooftop was a disturbing forty floors up, two higher than the hotel, which sat four lanes of traffic across the road. One quick peep over the edge enough to give me vertigo.

  Seeing as Taipei was the capital and Taiwan a hi-tech country only a century or so old (according to the in-flight mag), pretty much everything was glass-fronted, which made it great for spying through windows. We’d been there for hours, lying low on the rooftop, watching, waiting, in the shadow of the green-tinted, bamboo-shaped superscraper, Taipei 101.

  Surveillance work really chafed your elbows. That’s all I’d learned so far. I checked my mission-issue watch. 4.23 p.m.

  “Can’t we go and get something to eat?” I asked, checking out the pictures on the noodle-store menu across the street with my binoculars.

  “Okay,” Philippe said, “but hurry up.”

  I flew down the stairs into the elevator and exited through a discreet side door we’d broken in through earlier, crossing over the road to the noodle store. For some reason, inner-Philippe wouldn’t feed me any Chinese lingo skills, so I pointed to what looked good and held up two fingers.

  “Not that,” Philippe said, his voice filtered and tinny in my wireless earpiece.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, if you like pig’s testicles.”

  Blurgh!

  “Chicken noodles to the right,” he said.

  I stopped the guy serving just in time and pointed to the next tub along through the glass counter. I came out of the store with two boxes of chicken noodles in a white plastic bag, hunger punching a hole in my stomach.

  “Got it,” I said. “Chow in five.”

  “Stop,” Philippe said. “Pretend to look in the bag.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  I peered inside the takeaway bag at those steaming hot noodle boxes, sucking in the aroma.

  “Now look to your left,” he said.

  I moved my eyes rather than my head. A three-car train. Black BMW saloons. They rolled right by me and parked up in front of the swish hotel lobby.

  “This is it,” Philippe said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me. This is the target.”

  A sumo-style man with wrap shades climbed out of the third BMW along and opened a rear door. A middle-aged Taiwanese man stepped out onto the kerb, buttoned his navy-blue suit jacket and straightened his crimson silk tie.

  “I can’t see their faces from here,” Philippe said. “See if you can get a picture. Make it subtle.”

  I hooked the bag around my
wrist and got my phone out. I knocked the flash off the camera and covertly snapped away, getting a good shot of the guy’s face.

  A trio of young, glammed-up Taiwanese women emptied out of the rear car, tugging down on their tiny, sparkly dresses. God, what was it with powerful men and their obsession with women a third of their age?

  More security in shades – I counted six – climbed out of the cars and arranged themselves around the big cheese, packing serious, semi-automatic heat inside their suit jackets.

  Sumo nodded. They all walked into the hotel lobby together, disappearing behind the plush glass doors opened and closed by uniformed hotel doormen. I jogged across the wide, busy street, rode the elevator (now working thanks to Philippe’s electrical skills) up to the top floor, taking the staircase to the rooftop.

  I handed Philippe his box of noodles.

  “Did you get it?” he asked.

  I gave him the phone. He transferred the images wirelessly onto a tablet and ran a face-recognition programme. It cycled through a thousand faces a second until it landed on a match.

  “Chien Hung Su,” he said. “Taiwan Minister of Defence. Must be a regular visit. Classic ambush play. He’ll be staying in the penthouse suite overlooking the main street.”

  I took a look through my binoculars. Sure enough, the entourage appeared at the penthouse window. One of the bodyguards stepped out onto the balcony, slid the door shut behind him and lit a cigarette.

  Su moved into a huge, luxurious bedroom with the girls, slapping them on their tight little behinds. One jumped on the bed, while another removed the old man’s jacket and tie, the third girl popping open a bottle of champagne. Sumo pulled the long, thick drapes shut across the windows.

  I lowered my binoculars. “Dammit. What happens now? What do we do?”

  “Eat your noodles and watch the skies,” Philippe said, resting his telescopic sight on the concrete roof. “We’ll be here for a while.”

  I tucked into my noodles, a million times better than the fast-food junk we got at home. The only problem was the chopsticks. The noodles slipped between them almost every time I got close to taking a bite. Philippe worked his sticks with consummate ease, shovelling rapid fire into his mouth.

  “How did you get so good at that?” I asked, frustrated.

  “Three months in a Chinese prison,” he said.

  In the end I shoved my nose in the box and ate like a pig from a trough, the only way to get noodles into mouth.

  “Classy,” Philippe said.

  I shrugged, mouthful of food. “Sixteen years in Manchester.”

  24

  Don't Look Down

  Night fell over the rooftops. Taipei lit up like a billion Christmas trees – giant advertising billboards and traditional Chinese writing in flashing neons. The traffic stayed busy. The streets filled up with people exploring the city. Lovers. Families. Kids hanging out. For a moment, I was a tad jel. Or envious, as Philippe would say.

  “They’ll wait until it’s dark,” Philippe had said about JPAC’s impending arrival.

  “How do you know?”

  “The night will provide cover and the guards will be less alert,” he said. “It’s what I’d do.”

  Around 11 p.m., I was tinkling away in one of the office toilets when Philippe spoke into my ear. “Get up here.”

  Typical, I thought.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” I said.

  “Well get to the end of it.”

  “Okay, okay. Keep your underpants on.”

  I returned to my place on the rooftop, hearing a gentle thrum in the air.

  “There, see?” Philippe said, pointing to the night sky.

  I adjusted the focus on my binoculars and saw a black helicopter hovering high above the hotel, in some kind of stealth mode.

  He was right. They had come from the air. I set my binoculars to night vision. Two lines dropped out of the open helicopter door, a figure sliding down each one fast and easy, touching down on the hotel roof. They detached from the lines and, as the chopper lifted off and away, they ran low and tight as a pair.

  Despite the night vision and the sexless outfits, I could tell one was a man, average height and build. The other was a woman. Tall and athletic.

  “Show time,” I said, borrowing off Christina.

  Philippe was already digging something out of his rucksack. As Team JPAC made their way to the opposite side of the roof, he knelt down and fired a thick black wire out of a grapple gun. It split in four, like at the Reichstag, and stuck firm on the other side. He pulled the wire tight over the lip of the roof, then pressed a button and the gun drilled its way into the concrete roof. He twanged the wire. Super-taut.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “Watch what I do.”

  I really, really didn’t do heights. Not in the first place. And definitely not since dangling off Barton Bridge with Range Rover Bitch.

  “I dunno,” I said. “It’s a long way down.”

  “Do you want to hit JPAC where it hurts or not? Because there are no easy missions.”

  The thought of Auntie Claire in that barn spurred me over to the edge of the building. “Fuck it. Okay then.”

  Philippe sat with his feet hanging casually over the side.

  “The momentum will take you down,” he said, hooking a strap over the wire. It had a loop on either side that he slipped his hands through. He pushed off and straightened his body. The strap caught tight and he flew silently down the wire, unseen by the ants at street level. He was over in a jiffy. My turn. I wrapped my hands tight in a strap of my own and sat myself on the edge of the rooftop.

  “Don’t think. Just go,” Phillipe said over the radio.

  The neon-lit street below me spun as I did exactly the opposite to what he’d told me, looking straight down between my boots.

  “The show will be over in two minutes,” Philippe said. “Move it.”

  Well, I guess I hadn’t been through hell with Helga for nothing. I lowered myself over the edge and straightened out the way Philippe had done.

  And without warning, I was off, the speed taking me by surprise. I whirred across the nightmare drop and slammed to a stop on the other side, just about hanging on. Philippe grabbed me by the arms and pulled me up onto the hotel roof.

  “Remember the training drills,” he whispered.

  I followed him jelly-legged and adrenaline-fuelled in tight formation across the roof, light-footed and low, with my weapon – a Glock pistol and silencer – trained on the space in front.

  We stopped halfway across the rooftop behind a fat aluminium ventilation pipe. The JPAC agents stuck an explosive charge to the door and stood back. The guy blew it open. The tiniest of explosions. We waited for them to slip inside and then moved, quiet as library mice.

  The internal stairwell was bare-bones concrete, spiralling anti-clockwise all the way down the building. As we descended slowly, I caught a glimpse of the two black figures, like ghosts, slipping silently through a door. We sped up and caught it before it could swing shut.

  A sneaky peek around the corner found the two ghosts advancing along a wide corridor. Ten shades of brown and beige. Modern chic with carpets so thick they needed mowing. Hidden Taiwanese voices were laughing and talking and getting closer. A couple of guys. The JPAC agents flattened against either wall as the guards rounded the corner. Before they realised what was happening, they’d both caught a quiet bullet.

  And before their bodies could drop, JPAC had made up the distance across the foot-shushing carpet, catching and lowering them without sound to the floor. The man and the woman nodded at each other and moved around the corner. We moved, too, fast against the wall. We saw what JPAC saw. Another pair of guards outside the penthouse door, eyes and spare thumbs glued to HTC phones. Faint music played from behind the penthouse door they stood either side of, machine guns hanging low inside their jackets.

  JPAC crept forward, closer and closer. I wanted to say something; tell the guards to look out, to
cough or clear my throat. Anything to give them a fighting chance. Wasn’t that what we were here for? To stop JPAC? Seemed easier with the help of some heavily armed guards paid to protect their boss. And seemed a bit pointless, never mind a bit heartless, to let JPAC kill their way through to the target. But talking during a raid was banned; especially a shadow incursion. All I could do was go with the murderous flow.

  Life was ram-jammed with compromises and sacrifices. The more I saw of the world, the more it dawned on me that things were just never black and white. We lived in a state of perpetual grey. You could be shorn of your principles in a heartbeat.

  It was depressing.

  Focus, Lorna! I told myself. Stick to the mission and ignore everything else. You knew this wouldn’t be pretty.

  The taller of the two, the woman, whistled softly like a bird. As the guards looked up, JPAC double-tapped both in the head, silencer barrels soaking up most of the sound.

  The guards slid and slumped into their respective chairs, each leaving a vertical streak of bright-red blood on the wall above their heads. JPAC moved to the super-sized white penthouse door with a gold number 1 on the front. The music coming from inside the penthouse suite was bad enough. The singing worse. Like a cat being stabbed.

  JPAC crouched either side of the door, the man knocking heavily three times. The moment the door clicked open, JPAC busted their way in, knocking over the guard inside the door.

  Philippe gave me a thumbs up and held his hand out straight ahead.

  Go time.

  We ran through the door to the penthouse, into a world of seven-star luxury. A small hallway branched left into a living area, where Su was stripped to his underpants, socks and shoes, murdering “Like a Virgin” through a mic hooked up to a karaoke track on a giant home-cinema screen. He was surrounded by his female escorts, all in their underwear, their backs to us, oblivious. And JPAC, too, who were creeping up on Su as slowly and silently as we were on them.

  Then a guard went and ruined it all. I saw him toss a cigarette stub on the balcony. JPAC hadn’t noticed him. I grabbed Philippe and pulled him away behind a small bar in the corner of the room.