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

by Rob Aspinall

  “Gee, thanks,” I said. “Condescend here often?”

  Philippe ignored me and told me to practise the routine again.

  “And what’s part deux?” I asked, once we had it down.

  “A controlled explosion,” Philippe said, placing the small vial he’d taken from the Reichstag bomb on the cabin table. “There’ll be a contamination and exit protocol. That will be our window.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How do we get a bomb inside the Evil Empire?”

  “We walk it right through the door,” he said, holding up two new pairs of black boots by the shoe laces. One pair in my size. One pair in his.

  “Site security will be scanning for explosives,” he said, building two tiny devices on the table in front of me. Parts courtesy of Celine.

  One had the tube from the bomb strapped to it. Both were rigged to timers and sprayed with some weird blue foam that smelled like de-icer.

  “Shock absorbent spray. Conceals, cools and protects,” he said, like he was paid to sell it. “The explosive won’t scan in this stuff.”

  Philippe’s eyes lit up with boyish joy as he cut a hole in the heel of his right boot and the same in mine. My comfort zone was Netflix, nachos and a comfy duvet. His was IEDs, suicide missions and sweating in line at airports. He handed me a cheap digital watch.

  “Before they strip you and take your clothes away, push this button on the side, twice,” he said. “That will set the timer on your device.”

  The plan was still a little vague for my liking. To infiltrate a JPAC facility and see what happened? The fact that we’d ended up in Alaska, in the same place as Nasty Nathan, Teddy Tucker and the Spider’s Web was a bonus. But I guess you only win the lottery if you buy a ticket, right?

  Anyway, the real operation had just begun. Teasing the grand plan out of Daddy JPAC and blowing up Zone Five was just foreplay.

  Of course, Nathan and his boss had been savvy as usual. Telling us a lot and, at the same time, very little. We knew all about their global makeover. We just didn’t when or where, now they’d changed up the list.

  It was surprisingly easy to clobber a couple of plain-clothed JPAC employees and make our way back up the mountain. No one seemed to care about much, other than running to the nearest exit.

  “New facilities,” Philippe said, as we stood in the elevator, watching the numbers roll up towards Hive level.

  “It takes them a while to get the drills down. Especially contamination. People fear it more than fire.”

  Ah, so that’s what he meant by “good”.

  “What about us?” I asked. “Won’t we get contaminated?”

  “Only if we’re in the area when the explosive goes off. They’ll have control procedures in place … I hope.”

  Oh fab. I hope. That sounded convincing.

  As the elevator climbed to the top floor, Philippe’s nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

  “Cheesy garlic balls,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I can smell cheesy garlic balls.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said, fixing my hair up in a bun. “There’s only one cheesy pair of balls in here.”

  I’d taken the female employee’s thick-rimmed specs and pushed out the lenses. I thought I looked pretty geek chic. This would make one hell of an Instagram snap. But we had more pressing concerns. I buttoned the blouse up full-neck.

  “Hey,” I said. “What do we do next?”

  Philippe, dapper in a stolen spook suit and shades, seemed fascinated by the palms of his hands. “Huh?” he said.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked. “Knock out a couple of guards and steal their weapons? Maintain our cover? Slip in there unnoticed?”

  Philippe hunched his shoulders and giggled like a girl. It was creepy.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Hallucinogenic drugs,” he said, before cracking up like he was having his tummy tickled. “They’re starting to kick in,” he said. “I didn’t see this coming.”

  He giggled some more as the elevators pinged.

  Great, this was all I needed.

  The Hive was buzzing with activity, a red alarm light flashing and people either speed-walking to and fro with pieces of paper, or locked deep in conversation about the chaos we’d unleashed.

  Buzzcut, the DCL, was out on the floor, shouting at a guy coming down the stairs from the Command and Control pod.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bathroom, sir,” he said.

  “What in God’s name is going on down there?”

  “Down here?” he said, pointing at his own crotch.

  “No, downstairs, dummy. Zone Five.”

  “I’m not sure. Some kind of contamination. An outbreak.”

  “Well, get it under control. It’s interfering with my operation.”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “Don’t work on it. Get it done!”

  “I’m not in maintenance,” he said, a little confused, “but okay.”

  The operator scurried towards the elevator. Buzzcut strode back up to the Command and Control Centre. Here was our chance.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Mr Giggles by the arm.

  As the operator passed us by, I accidentally on purpose bumped into him and swiped his entry card, just like in training.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator said.

  “It’s fine,” I said, flashing a candy-coated smile.

  With Philippe about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane, I guessed the best plan of action was to start by getting into their systems.

  That was the whole point of this darned suicide mission, after all. We knew they’d switch up their game plan after the Reichstag. I had other things on my mind now we were here, like Nathan’s head on a stake, only there was the little matter of impending global genocide to deal with first.

  I tugged on the back of Philippe’s suit jacket to keep him upright. It was like hiding in plain sight. They were looking for people in jumpsuits escaping through the lower floors, not well-dressed peeps strolling around JPAC central.

  No one blinked twice as we lingered by the stairs. That is until the Magic Mushroom King started gazing at the Hive ceiling in wonder. He reached out, as if touching imaginary stars.

  “Look,” he said. “So shiny.”

  I shushed him and steered us under the Command and Control pod and into a corridor that branched off from the main walkway into a row of private offices.

  “Ssssh!” Philippe said, mocking me with a finger to his lips, as if he was a teenager creeping in late at night.

  “How long does the drug last? I asked.

  “About twenty to thirty Earth minutes,” he said.

  “I never heard of a thirty-minute acid trip,” I said.

  “Time-specific truth drugs,” he said. “You can question someone and after they can carry on normally, without knowing they were even under.”

  “Why waste them on us?”

  “They probably wanted us to be fully conscious when they tortured and killed us,” Philippe said, before catching his own reflection in an office window. “Oh, I can see my brain,” he said, rubbing a hand through his hair.

  Good God, it was like being on a night out with Millie, only with guns and super-weapons. Thank fuck he didn’t have breasts.

  I dragged Philippe into an empty office where there was a desk with a computer cycling through a generic screensaver. I sat him in one of the visitor chairs and jumped on the machine.

  The username was saved, but the password was missing from the security lock screen. Of course it was.

  I looked around the desk for clues. A family photo at Disneyland. Wife and husband, with the two young kids. All beamingly happy.

  I tried Orlando. Nope.

  There were a couple of spidery drawings up on the wall. One from the boy.

  Adam. No. And only one attempt left.

  I couldn’t think of anything else.

  Ah, I du
nno. Password1?

  I was in!

  Password1? Really, JPAC?

  Luckily, the user’s files were super-organised. Of course, they don’t tend to give files names like Global Domination Plans, so I clicked through a bunch of odd-sounding folders:

  Hailstorm

  Landslide

  Project Aries

  And so on …

  File after file, I got kicked out.

  You do not have the security-level clearance to access this file.

  I thumped the desk in frustration, leaving a fist print that I quickly wiped away with the sleeve of my blouse.

  Meanwhile, my partner in crime was chewing on a fake office plant.

  “Philippe! Stop that!”

  “Nutrition,” he said, a mouthful of green plastic.

  I closed down the window on the computer, snatched the plant off Philippe and hauled him out of his chair.

  “Do you know what I like about you?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “We’ve got a special connection. Like, like, cosmic heart energy,” he said, staring into office space.

  Typical. I’d spent the last two weeks trying to squeeze a few droplets of conversation out of him. One little LSD shot and it was a fine drizzle of nonsense. I shoved him inside a tall, empty cupboard with a grey concertina door.

  “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  “Wow, Lorn, there’s a wormhole in here.”

  I slid the door shut and turned the handle to lock it from the outside. Let’s hope the owner of the office didn’t come back and hear a crazy Austrian talking to a magic turtle.

  31

  Command & Control

  I hit the stairs up to Command and Control. The guard from earlier was still on the door. I swiped the card with a nervy hand and it flashed green. He smiled at me this time. Not a clue. Amazing. I could breeze past armed guards into Club Don’t Exist with nothing more than a man’s key-card and another girl’s personnel badge. Yet it was almost impossible to get served in a Manchester pub.

  Command and Control was noisy with cross-chatter. Buzzcut paced around, ranting into a headset, his eyes glued to the big screens.

  “I don’t care what’s happening down there,” he said. “We’re past the point of no return, you get it? We have to release the energetic mass or we’ll fry the whole damn SW … Listen. You said you’ve got the toxin under control, right? Then unless it’s still airborne, there’s not a chance in hell I’m initiating full lockdown.”

  As I cut straight to the back of the room to a spare terminal, I heard the odd snippet like:

  “Pulse fire warming up to fifty.”

  “Target engaged.”

  “Pulse fire warming up to seventy.”

  “Initiating countdown to play action.”

  “Pulse fire at eighty per cent.”

  Once at the terminal, I didn’t need a password. My stolen access card gave me keyless entry and the monitor sprang to life. Took a bit of getting used to, mind you. The keyboard was a red hologram beamed onto the desk, the keys no more than markings of where to run your fingertips. Otherwise, you waved a finger at the screen and it responded. You could even pick the monitor up off its stand and carry it round like a tablet, comparing notes with other operators.

  The guy I’d stolen the badge off already had a world map up on screen, full of red pins labelled things like D65, F12 and C16, with mini timers counting down in hours and minutes. I had no idea what I was looking at, so I swiped it out of the way and went digging. Wasn’t hard to find all those files and more besides. And this time they opened. Now I just needed a memory stick or something.

  I opened a discreet drawer on rollers, hidden away directly under the desk top. It was full of paper, pens, a mug that said King of the World and … yes! A little cardboard box full of tiny black USB sticks. As soon as I plugged that baby into the side of the monitor, a message came up.

  FLASH DRIVE CONNECTED.

  I pulled up all the files as a list and highlighted the whole lot. I dragged them with one finger over to the flash-drive icon on the desktop. But the size and number of files was epic. This would take a minute I didn’t have. I faced a nervous wait.

  So no one would see what I was doing, I minimised the download window and turned my attention back to the map.

  One of the pins was blinking green somewhere on the west coast of the USA. The countdown on the pin had hit all the zeroes. I looked up at the big screens and there on CNN was a major breaking story.

  An earthquake in California. The San Andreas fault. Eight on the Richter scale. Untold casualties. The Golden Gate Bridge ripped, twisted and falling into the sea.

  The room cheered and whooped at the news. High-fives all round. I had to join in to maintain cover. The guy next to me had big sweaty circles under his arms.

  “Yeah!” he shouted, like he was a rock god and not a morally hollow douche in baggy beige chinos.

  “Okay, settle down,” Buzzcut said, trying to keep a lid on his own glowing pride. “Let’s wrap this last one up. Health and Safety are on my ass to get you all outta the building.”

  In the meantime, the download had finished. I unplugged the flash drive and tucked it away in my blouse pocket.

  I noticed a little green blinking target off the Indonesian coast. That meant it had to be a tidal wave. Or a tsunami. And only a few minutes until whatever it was got triggered by the Spider’s Web. In my mind’s IMAX, they were playing a 3D showing of dead, drowned Indonesians. Big-eyed, ribby kids without homes looking miserable. Dead animals. Homes and communities smashed to pieces. Tourists washed out to sea. Honeymooners and whole families wiped out.

  Much as I wanted to get out of there, I couldn’t. There had to be a way I could sabotage this bitch.

  I swiped in and out of files and applications as fast as I could. Most of it made no sense at all. I glanced at the sweaty div’s screen next to me. A bunch of power bars at around forty per cent.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  “Don’t you know?” he said in an Aussie accent. JPAC really was a global family.

  “I’m new,” I said, putting a hand over my personnel badge.

  “We’re all new,” he said. “What are you, like twelve?”

  “I’m an intern.”

  “Aw, gotcha,” he said, sipping on a big mug of steaming coffee and pointing at his monitor. “Right now, I’m just increasing power input, keeping the system in the sweet spot.”

  “Like giving it more juice?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess, but you have to be careful not to overload the system,” he said, nudging up one of the bars with a finger. “The SW generates huge amounts of microwave energy. She’s a temperamental mistress. It’s a pretty important job,” he continued, puffing out his chest. “Probably the most important in the room. Although you wouldn’t know it from my pay grade.”

  “True dat,” I nodded. “Hey, could you take a look at this? I think I might have done something wrong here—”

  As he leaned over to his left, I threw out a right elbow and knocked his mug into his chest. He pulled his shirt away from his body, soaked in hot coffee.

  “You stupid little—”

  “Shit, sorry.”

  While he was bent over, scrambling through his drawer for tissues, I quickly flipped each power bar on his screen up to a hundred per cent and minimised the window.

  I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?

  I glanced through the glass walls of the pod. The guy whose badge I’d stolen was back from the loo. The front door opened and security stepped in. The operator pointed at me. I spun around to hide my face. There, beyond the glass, down on the Hive floor, Philippe was dancing. Yes, dancing. Like an uncle at a disco. He must have picked the cupboard lock in the office. I looked over my shoulder. The security guy was marching over with the operator, another two guys already on the door in his place.

  “What in God’s swee
t asshole are you doing in my command centre?” Buzzcut boomed.

  The guard blanked him and kept coming my way.

  Get ready, Lorn.

  Before he could lay a hand on me, I stooped, elbowing him hard in the sternum and forearming him in the throat.

  One move. Bang.

  I relieved him of his semi-automatic rifle while he choked and took cover behind one of the terminals. More security had arrived on the scene, bellowing at everyone to get out. But Coffee Shirt was staying put, desperately trying to stop the power surge on his screen.

  He tried to alert Buzzcut. “Sir, we have a serious problem here!”

  Buzzcut was too busy doing some yelling of his own. “We’re in the middle of a pulse fire,” he barked, thick marine-neck veins swelling with rage.

  The guards insisted. “You’ll have to leave, sir. Come with us.”

  Buzzcut and Coffee Shirt were hauled out of the room, their protests falling on deaf ears. With mission control cleared, security screamed at me to put down my weapon.

  “Don’t you dare damage my C&C!” I heard Buzzcut shout on his way out of the door.

  “Put down your weapon and come out with your hands up!” security repeated.

  They soon lost patience. With an evacuation protocol going off, it was no surprise. One of the guys flashed off a round, shredding the terminal behind me and smashing a screen to pieces. I ducked out and returned fire, but they had better positions behind the doorway. And, crucially, a lot more guns.

  They pinned me back and sent me scrambling behind the next terminal. That’s when I had an idea.

  32

  Burn Baby Burn

  The glass of the Command and Control pod was thick. I hoped it wasn’t bulletproof.

  I sat back against the terminal and aimed at the bottom right corner of a glass panel. I unloaded a couple of rounds in a deafening rattle. The glass cracked and splintered into a million tiny fragments, but didn’t break.

  “I must be crazy,” I said to myself, pushing up off my feet and running full force at the glass.