by Rob Aspinall
I touched down and detached the grappling gun from my belt, letting it hang on the end of the wire. I moved in through the fire exit door, into a gloomy corridor stripped to its bare essentials.
“The cat’s through the flap,” I said, unholstering my Glock .22 sidearm and heading up a set of riveted steel steps onto a gantry.
“Copy that,” Philippe said. “The postman’s through the gate. Beware of the guard dogs.”
The first guard dog came at me through a discreet grey door at the end of the gantry, barking at me to hit the floor. I shushed him with a non-lethal round to the shoulder, which put him down against the gantry railing. I moved in through the door, only to be faced by a long, breeze-block corridor with exposed metal pipework running left and right.
“Blueprint, this is Red Herring,” I said. “I could use a little help here.”
“This is Blueprint,” Giles said in my ear. “Where are you now?”
I read out the sign on the wall that said G BLOCK YELLOW..
“You need to head left,” Giles said. “No, right … No wait, I’ve got the iPad upside down … Definitely left. I think.”
“Left it is,” I said, jogging along the corridor, where I swiftly ran into a wall of armed security coming the other way.
I launched into the first guy with a flying kick to the chest, ducked as another threw a punch, letting him crack another guard hard in the chin. I rose and hit the puncher with an elbow to the jaw and as the fourth and last guard pulled his weapon, I twisted it from his hand and threw him to the floor in one move. I flat-palmed him in the nose for good measure and used his gun to crack another guy on the top of the head as he struggled to his feet.
“On second thoughts, right might have been easier,” Giles said.
“Now you tell me,” I said, detaching clip from gun and tossing them away.
I came to a code-locked white door with a pane of wire glass at head height. Giles was quarterbacking the mission from his new conspiracy dungeon back in London. He saw what I saw through a tiny camera sewn into a button on my black jacket.
“Now to get through the next door,” he said, “you’ll need a swipe card and a pre-approved retina.”
I looked further along the corridor; a guard emerging around the corner on his radio. “Hang on.” I said, whistling the guard and dropping to my knees, with my hands behind my head. “I give up.”
The guard hurried towards me with his weapon out. He unhooked a pair of black cuffs from his belt as he came towards me.
He shouted something at me in Uzbek, I think, telling me not to move. I waited for him to come around back, then grabbed him by the belt and slipped backwards between his legs on my knees, pulling my arms down at the exact same time. He hit the floor with a slap, leaving a faceprint on the hard, squeaky white lino.
I pulled him up by the shirt collar, my Glock in the small of his back. I pushed his head in front of the retina scan and ripped the clearance card from a hook on the waist of his trousers.
I kept the card and dropped the man with a gun-butt to the back of his neck, pulling the door open as it buzzed.
Okay, now we were talking. I stepped into something out of a sci-fi movie. Everything slick and sleek, with a glass wall on the inside that ran all the way around the complex.
I saw Philippe on the far side of the building, a few floors down, locked in a gun battle with a tonne of guards. They were just specks on the other side of a vast ocean of data banks stacked up over seven open storeys.
I went looking for an elevator., found one and jabbed on the button.
No juice.
“According to the drill manual, they kill power to the elevators during an attack,” Giles said. “You need a key to override the system.”
I found a door to the stairs instead. It wouldn’t budge. The swipe card didn’t work.
“Everything’s locked down,” I said. “Any other options?”
“Just a sec,” Giles said.
I leaned against the back wall, listening to the thrum from a nest of giant cooling fans on the ceiling of the complex. The glass was largely soundproof, but the pulsing beats of the fans still made it through.
I sang that song to myself while I waited.
A security guard rounded the corner and interrupted me. I smiled and gave him a friendly nod, arms folded, before putting him down with a dampened round to the leg. I shot the weapon from his hand and returned my own to my holster, letting the guard squirm and moan and bleed on the floor. Nothing fatal … I hoped.
“Here we are,” Giles said. “There’s a network of cooling vents. If you can find a panel around the other side of the building, you can drop down a few floors.”
I set off running, aiming for the opposite side of the complex. “You mean, squeeze my way into a claustrophobic network of tunnels from which there might be no escape?”
“Something like that,” Giles said.
I made it to the opposite side of the building and found a mesh panel in the wall, with a cool breeze whispering through.
“That’s the one,” Giles said. “Now you’ll probably need a screwdriver-“
I took a step back and kicked the panel in. I pulled it out of the vent and tossed it away.
“Or a sturdy boot,” Giles said, as I swallowed down a fear of tight spaces and climbed into the vent. I shuffled forwards on hands and knees, the arch of my back bumping against the roof of the aluminium vent.
Giles kept talking in my ear. “Now if I’m reading this correctly, you ought to come to a-”
Without warning, the floor of the vent fell from beneath me.
I slid feet-first at terrifying speed down a vertical drop. I managed to slow my fall by wedging the sides of my boots against either side of the vent.
I slowed into a squeaking slide until I came to a stop. To my left, I noticed a side vent branching out into a floor, I heard gunfire echoing loud through the aluminium.
“I think this is the exit I want,” I said, climbing inside it.
“There should be a panel beneath you,” Giles said.
Sure enough, there was. Through the mesh panel in the ceiling of the fourth floor, I could make out Philippe using a couple of guards as human shields, before returning fire, both ways.
I pulled my sidearm out of my holster and my backup pistol from my ankle strap. There was no easy way to do this, other than …
3
Data Cleanse
I smacked the butts of both guns hard on the flimsy mesh panel beneath me and dropped upside down through the hole in the ceiling. Wedging both thighs against the walls of the vent, I held a gun out left and right, firing in either direction. I hit both guards with shots to various body parts I thought might wound and preoccupy, rather than kill.
Philippe re-loaded and looked at his watch.
“I’m on time-ish,” I said, hanging upside down, kind of enjoying it.
It was a cool as shit move if I did think so myself.
Philippe waved a hand at me. “What’s all this?”
“This is called saving your arse.”
“A bit flashy, don’t you think?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with flashy?”
“You’ll find out in around five seconds,” he said unzipping a pocket on his rucksack.
As I hung there, wondering what the hell he was talking about, he counted the rest out. “Four … three … two …”
Suddenly, I felt my thighs cave in. I fell to the floor, landing in a heap and making an unladylike burgh sound on the way down.
I picked myself up and looked over the bodies strewn across the floor. “You promised not to try and kill as many people.”
“I know,” he said, taking a small, sticky bomb with a digital countdown from his rucksack. “I tried.”
Philippe threw the explosive hard at a glass door and the pair of us turned our backs to the device. The charge hit zero and blew the door outwards in a controlled explosion; a sideways shower of glass blasting into
the corridor.
Philippe glanced at his watch again. “We’re a fifty-seven seconds behind schedule,” he said. “Better make this quick.”
Clearly, that was a dig at me.
“It’s okay for you,” I said, as we crunched over broken glass into the humongous data hub. “You didn’t have to take the super happy fun slide.”
With wire floors and hard drive stacks stripped to their bones, it was obvious the plan here was to keep everything as chilled as possible. And I had the goose bumps to prove it, thanks to a whopping great draft created by those fans above. They were noisy as hell too, casting a strobing shadow over the entire hub.
“Remind me again,” I said. “Which bank are we looking for?”
“Bank 4.6.5. Row G. Stack 5,” Giles said.
It was a confusing mess of numbers and letters and flashing green lights. We moved between stacks, looking for the data bank in question.
“Here,” Philippe said, as we stopped in front of a touchscreen monitor.
He tapped his way through a series of options and found the bank we were looking for.
“How do you know how any of this stuff works?” I asked.
“Years of practice,” Philippe said, hitting a button on the screen. A few feet away from us, a panel opened up on a stack, around waist-height. “You get the flash drive,” he said. “I’ll set up Eddie.”
Eddie was the name we’d given to the electronic pulse weapon Philippe had used to get us both into the building. It was a metal object the shape and size of a small cake tin, with hundreds of tiny holes punched in the side.
For his next trick, Eddie would be wiping every last scrap of data from JPAC’s secret storage sites.
Most of the data was little use to us. But we knew from our JPAC whistleblower, codename Quarter Horse, that bank 4.6.5. Row G, stack 5, contained something very special. We just didn’t know what. And neither did he.
But where there was smoke …
With each stack carrying a backup flash-drive, it was a simple case of grab the stick and leave Eddie to do his stuff. In the meantime, we’d be out of the door with another juicy morsel of secret intel and another notch on our JPAC-punking bedpost.
I skipped over to the open panel, eager to get out of the world’s biggest fridge-freezer. “Um, we might have a problem here,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Philippe asked.
“No flash drive,” Giles said.
“You sure this is the right one?” I asked.
“Yes,” Giles said. “Are you sure your contact gave you the right number? Maybe you made a mistake writing it down-“
“I don’t make mistakes,” Philippe said.
“He’s right, he doesn’t,” I said. “It’s really annoying.”
Philippe hopped back on the touchscreen. “Someone got here before us. They removed the flash drive a few minutes ago.”
We spun around, checking up, down, left and right. I leaned over the gantry rail behind me and saw a man on the ground floor, leaving the place in a hurry. I took out my binoculars and got a better look. He was young, dark and athletic. Dressed like an IT nerd in thick-rim glasses and a short-sleeved white shirt, with a lanyard hung around his neck.
“Got a guy on the second floor,” I said. “Looks shifty.”
“Philippe ducked his head out from behind a stack and took my binoculars. “That’s our man.” He handed me back the binoculars. “Get ready to run,” he said, packing up Eddie and slinging the rucksack over his shoulders.
“Why?”
“Just do it,” Philippe said.
“Aren’t we gonna wipe the stacks?”
“No time,” Philippe said, as he pulled a zip wire from his belt.
I followed his lead instinctively, hooking the end of my own cord around the nearest gantry railing and climbing over the side. We abseiled in tandem and landed on the ground floor of the data hub. We left the cord winders hanging and ran through an exit door into a long corridor that led us all the way out through a deserted reception area.
We sprinted across the car park towards the front gate, jumping over the bodies of more security guards, to where Philippe had left the van. He opened the back doors and hopped in. He climbed on the spare dirt bike we’d brought along for our little Uzbek break. He revved the engine and jumped it out onto the tarmac
I got on the back as the ground beneath us rocked, like an earthquake tremor.
“That can’t be good,” I said, grabbing Philippe’s waist.
He lifted both feet and steered us out of there just in time.
The entire complex exploded with an almighty bang behind us. And I could still feel the heat of the blast on my back as we stopped at a safe distance.
We watched the complex burn. Smoke spiralling into the air; one of those huge fans rolling to a cindering stop and flattening the van.
“You didn’t think it was important to tell me there was a bomb?” I asked.
“Didn’t want you to overreact,” Philippe said.
“How can you overreact to a bomb? Blind panic is the universally accepted response.”
Up, over our heads, a helicopter flashed by, carrying the bomber on the end of a rope ladder. He threw us a mocking salute as the chopper whirled overhead.
“Can’t believe we got out-missioned,” I said.
“Can’t believe we didn’t see it coming,” said Philippe.
We zoomed off up the ravine, so steep I thought I was going to fall off the end of the bike.
We flew into the air, over the ridge and landed with a hefty bump.
Riding back the way I’d come in, Philippe hit the brakes as we reached the first of the perimeter patrols.
The guy was still zonked.
“He slept through all that?” I said.
Philippe lined the bike up alongside the open window of the four-by-four and reached inside. He pushed a hand against the guy’s head. He flopped over. Dead.
On second glance, his neck was clearly broken.
Philippe turned to me and burned disappointment-shaped holes in my eyes. “Asleep?” he asked.
“Death is a kind of sleep,” I said.
“What do I always say?” Philippe asked.
“Be certain before you’re sure,” we both said, as Philippe revved the engine and scooted us out of there, another JPAC facility ticked off the list. Even if it wasn’t us doing the ticking.
4
Happy Birthday
SOMEWHERE OVER KAZAKHSTAN
The first leg of our ride home wasn’t exactly luxurious; the back of a small, Cessna drug runner plane, as opposed to a private jet. We had to stick to a budget, Philippe said. Eek as much mileage out of the Arina Blue payment as we could.
Philippe brought a large, grey holdall from beneath his seat and dug around inside it. “I almost forgot,” he said, pulling out a small gift, badly wrapped in black bin bag and silver electrical tape.
Philippe handed it over to me across the cabin. I leaned over and took it off him. I’d purposely kept it quiet about my seventeenth. I felt old enough as it was. And it felt weird celebrating it without Becki and Auntie Claire.
“How did you know?” I asked Philippe.
“I remembered from reading your Red Flag Protocol file, he said perkily. “I know technically it was yesterday, but-“
“It’s only Friday. Still my birthday weekend,” I said, shaking the gift. “What is it?’
“Open it up and see.”
I tore at the bag apart, fastened tight together by too much tape. It was a hard blue box with a digital watch inside.
Worst. Gift. Ever.
“I love it!” I said, slipping the old one from my wrist. “You can never have too many mission watches.”
“Exactly,” Philippe said, as I fastened on the new one.
Philippe waited, as if there was more to it. “Go on then.”
“Go on, what?”
“Push the button,” he said, pointing to the righthand side of the wa
tch.
I pushed a small, red button and held it for a couple of seconds. A tiny, metal spike shot out of a small hole in the watch face.
“Whatever you do, don’t touch it,” Philippe said. “It’s phenol-tipped. Pierce the skin of an attacker. Preferably the vein.”
“Celine helped me pick it out,” he said. “You sure you like it?”
I smiled through my teeth. “You know what they say … poison’s a girl’s best friend.”
“It’s a one-shot deal, though,” Philippe said, shoving his holdall back under the seat. “So only use it when you absolutely have to.”
“Any cake to go with the gift?” I asked, pushing the red button to retract the spike.
Philippe dug inside his rucksack. “I’ve got a protein bar,” he said. “Chocolate vanilla.”
“I’ll take it,” I said, grabbing the warm, squashed bar and tearing off the end of the wrapper. “So are you gonna sing me happy birthday, or what?”
As Philippe fixed me with one of his bitch, please stares, my iPad on the seat next to me bleeped into life. A video call from Giles.
I know technically you were supposed to have your devices on airplane mode, but Black Market Air weren’t exactly picky when it came to stuff like that.
“Hey,” I said to Giles, moving over to the seat next to Philippe and propping the iPad up on my lap.
“Hey,” Giles said, sat next to Zak, his new BFF and the latest addition to our fledgling remote tech team.
“Whassssuuuuuup,” Zak said, in his lay-about way; leaning back in his chair in a white punk t-shirt; his hair a long, mousy mess and his face thin, with a smattering of late teenage stubble.
Philippe shook his head at the sight of them, raspberry ice pops in hands, with the tongues to match.
“So the mission went well, yeah?” Zak asked, in a home counties accent.
“No, it did not go well,” said Philippe.
“Hey Lorna, I got you a present,” Giles said.
“You knew too? What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a secret. I’ll show you when you get back.”
