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

by Rob Aspinall

  Green Vest staggered, with Danby moving in for a third hit. But he walked straight on to a clubbing right hander from the much bigger man.

  Agent Danby went soft in the legs and collapsed. I struggled to free myself, but Red Vest had me in a full nelson, my feet a foot off the floor. The pain was unbearable. All I could do was watch as Green Vest dragged Danbys limp body to the top of the staircase.

  “No!” I said, trying desperately to fight my way out of Red Vest’s hold. He squeezed tighter, with both hands.

  Green Vest bent over close to Danby’s left ear. “Can you fly, my friend?”

  He stood up and rolled an unconscious Danby over the edge of the hallway landing; no bannister or railings built-in to stop him from falling.

  Agent Danby’s body bounced side-to-side off concrete staircases. He hit the ground floor with a sickening splat; blood spraying like paint thrown at a canvas.

  Green Vest turned his attention to me. “How about you?” he asked. “Can you fly?”

  Yeah, I could fly.

  Fly into a fucking rage.

  And those two protein-guzzling clowns were in the way.

  19

  Red & Green

  As Red Vest’s fingers wrapped tighter around my throat, I was hit by a cellular memory. My first in a while, as clear as stunning HD.

  I flashed back into a white-walled dojo full of grey crash mats and ten-year-old kids dressed in black PJs, all the same height as me.

  A tiny old Chinese instructor with a long, wispy white beard stood in front of us, dressed in yellow PJs of his own. He had a burly six-footer walk up behind him and put him in a full nelson.

  “Larger opponents will often attempt to restrain you first. Perhaps with a grip from behind, or a choke,” the instructor said.

  The big dude locked his fingers around the old man’s wrinkly throat.

  I expected him to explain some super-complicated, technical escape move involving body weight and balance.

  Instead, he said, “Just do this.”

  As the big guy lifted him off the mat, the old man let out a cry and acted like he was running fast in mid-air. He heeled the guy in the ball each time until the he dropped to the mat.

  Kung Fu Master landed nimbly and looked down at the man at his feet. “Perhaps I should have warned Jeremy first.”

  The class burst into laughter as Jeremy clutched his battered vegetables, tomato-red in the face.

  I snapped back into the present as Red Vest hoisted me up in the air. I did as the old man said and kicked out furiously with my heels. I heard a cry of agony. The pressure released and I dropped to my feet.

  Ha! It worked! Super-pupil Lorna had done it again.

  I turned to see Red Vest staggering away, bandy-legged, whimpering like a small child.

  Green Vest was up next.

  I skipped out of his reach and beckoned him on. He charged at me. I moved at the last second. He hit the wall hard with a swinging elbow, a couple of concrete blocks breaking loose on to the floor.

  Green Vest came back at me, swinging. I ducked and hit him hard in the ribs, punched him in the face and stiff-palmed him in the sternum.

  It seemed to hurt me more than it did him. So I roundhouse kicked him in the jaw. He took the hit, caught hold of my leg and lifted me up in the air. He threw me across the floor and marched towards me. I pushed myself up on all fours and waited. I just needed him a little closer.

  A littler closer.

  Boom!

  As he bent over to scoop me up, I spun like a breakdancer on the floor and caught his legs between mine. I scissored my feet together and brought him down. No one was too big when you had the leverage.

  He hit the floor chin-first, with a growl of pain. I grabbed an ankle and put all my weight behind a twist. He cried in agony. I heard a puke-inducing crack, half his leg hanging off the wrong way.

  I let him up.

  He hopped on to one foot, tears streaming from his eyes. I doubled back and picked up the baseball bat, taking a run up. I hit a zinger on his chin, knocking him down the flight of stairs.

  I dropped the bat.

  Shit, Red Vest!

  I heard the guy wail in pain behind me. Not physical. Emotional. I guess there was some kind of bromance going on there.

  He was mad as hell, charging at me like a Pampalona bull. I ran and slid on my side, sailed between his legs. I stopped right by the discarded clip and pistol.

  I jammed ammo into gun, rolled onto my back, aimed and clicked.

  Another jamming weapon. For frick’s sake, didn’t they teach them anything about firearm maintenance in Psycho Crime Club?

  Red Vest punched me in the stomach as I rose. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t fight. He swotted the gun from my hand picked me up by shoulder and thigh. He hoisted me over his head like he was pressing a barbell at the gym and carried me over to the top of the stairs, ready to toss me into the abyss like Danby.

  I hammered at his arms, but it was no use. He had all the leverage now. And all he had to do was throw me a couple of feet. Gravity and concrete would do the rest.

  “This is for Crusher,” he said.

  20

  Lorna Liar

  Whumph.

  I’m officially naming it the best sound ever.

  Well, it was kind of a whumph. It’s pretty hard to describe the noise a breeze block makes when it cracks over a bald man’s head. But that was pretty much it.

  Suddenly Red Vest’s arms gave way,.

  He slumped to his knees.

  I fell sideways on to the landing floor.

  I looked up and saw the defector stood behind Red Vest, hands dusted in concrete; the block in two at his feet. Red Vest slowly lurched forward and fell through the four-storey gap between stairs.

  By the time I got to my feet and peered over the edge, Red Vest’s body was slumped on top of Agent Danby’s.

  “Can you see in that thing?” I asked the defector, pointing at his hood.

  He pinched finger and thumb together. A little, he was saying.

  “Here,” I said. “While we’ve got chance, let’s remove it.”

  I took a closer look at the rope. The guy was around the same height as me, so it was easy to see. It was tied in a tight knot around the neck. I tried prising a finger inside, but some idiot had made it impossible to do.

  “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll get a knife.”

  I picked my way through the corridor, carpeted with bodies. Some dead. Some potentially alive, with legs that kicked and spasmed.

  This was usually the point where Philippe would have come out with some yawn-inducing fact about the things dead bodies got up to in the minutes and hours after their death.

  Was Philippe lying dead somewhere, twitching? I tried not to think about it. And I avoided eye contact with the faces of the fallen hoods. It didn’t make it any easier. But it sure didn’t make it any worse.

  It was you or them, Lorn, I had to remind myself.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said my inner devil. “Step over the poor people.”

  I found a bloodied knife on the floor and wiped it off on the board shorts of a young kid no more than sixteen.

  “Oh, even better,” inner-devil bitch said. “Way to respect the dead, Lorna.”

  As I returned to cut the tie from the defector’s hood, I heard a ringtone in my trouser pocket. Sweary gangsta rap programmed into the memory of the phone.

  An unknown number came up. It looked familiar.

  “Hold on a second,” I said to the defector, taking the call.

  “Gregg?” a woman asked,.

  Young. British. A little hysterical.

  Oh no.

  “Um, Gregg can’t come to the phone right now,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I leaned over the stairwell and looked at Danby’s body.

  “He’s having a lie down,” I said.

  “Lorna? Is that you?”

  Rumbled.

  “No,” I said. �
��This is … Fiona.”

  “Who?”

  “Um, we work together?”

  “I know it’s you Lorna,” Becki said. “Oh my god, I can’t believe … Now I know why he’s been ghosting me.”

  “Wait, Becki-“

  “God, I’ve spent the last two weeks wondering if it was something I did or said. All this time, he’s been with you.”

  “What?” I asked. “No-“

  “Fuck!” Becky said, breaking into shrieking tears. “He cheated on me. First he ghosted me and now he’s cheating on me with my best friend!”

  “I’m still your best friend?” I asked.

  “You’re a backstabbing bitch.”

  “I know how this looks,” I said. “There’s a reasonable explanation.”

  Becki wailed and bawled down the phone. I held up a gimme-a-minute finger to the defector and stepped over the bodies in the hall, seeking out some private time in the room we’d abandoned earlier.

  “How could you?” Becki screamed. “I hate you forever.”

  “You’re just upset Becki-“

  “I’m not just anything, Lorna Liar. Where are you now? I’m gonna come round and rip your tits off.”

  “That’s probably not gonna happen,” I said.

  “Why? ‘Cause you think you’re some super-tough spy slut now?”

  “No, because you’re in Manchester and I’m in Mexico,” I said, pacing around the room, wondering how on earth I was gonna explain all of this.

  “Mexico? He took you to Mexico?” she said, bawling some more. “I tell him I wanna go there and then he takes you instead?”

  “Trust me,” I said. “We’re not having fun.”

  “Oh, having arguments now are we? Like a proper couple? How long has this been going on for?”

  “Just a couple of days,” I said. “But it’s not what you think-“

  “You couldn’t have me, so you’re trying to stop anyone else having me too, is that it?”

  “No, not at all,” I said. “BFF curious, remember? Anyway, I’m past all that … I think.”

  As Becki continued her rant, I heard a commotion in my other ear. Coming from outside. I trod carefully to the window, put my back to the wall and peered out onto the street below. There must have been ten or twelve guys with automatic weapons, all filing into the building.

  This time it was definitely La Firma. The real deal. Not just local punks looking to earn their gang stripes or make a quick peso.

  “Becki, listen, I’m gonna have to go.”

  “Oh, you got a cosy little beach date with Mr Lover, have you?”

  “Look, I’ll call you back-“

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “From now on, you’re a slag and I don’t wanna hear from you again. And you can tell Gregg he’s dead to me.”

  “And to everyone else,” I said, absently, darting across the room and into the hallway.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “If I make it out of here alive, I’ll explain everything.”

  I cut off the call with Becki shrieking expletives. I had hold of the knife, but there was no time to cut the tie around the defector’s hood.

  I could already hear the thunder of feet running into the building. I peered into the gap between stairwells. The angry mob ignored the two bodies on the floor and hit the first flight of stairs, Kalashnikovs at the ready.

  “Scratch the unveiling ceremony,” I said, pocketing the phone and grabbing the defector by the arm. “We’re all out of time.”

  All out of options too, other than climb the next flight of stairs. And the next three flights after that, until we hit the roof; the sun blinding.

  I dragged the defector from one edge of the roof to another, looking for another rooftop to jump to.

  Nothing but a four-storey flop to the pavement below.

  Except for the rear of the building, where a small courtyard was half-buried under rubbish, including a scabby-looking mattress, dumped on top of a mound of black bin liners full of God knows what.

  “How far up do you think four storeys is?” I asked the defector.

  He didn’t answer, of course. But he did peer over the edge.

  He could see enough, his head shaking furiously.

  “What choice do we have?” I asked, hearing yelling coming from the floors below. It sounded a lot like they’d found the rest of those bodies.

  “Okay,” I said. “You go first.” The defector shook his head again. “At the count of three,” I said.

  “One …” I grabbed him by the arm.

  “Two …” He appeared to brace himself.

  I pushed him off a blink before three so he couldn’t back out. He let out a muffled cry as he fell from the edge of the building and plummeted towards ground level.

  He hit the mattress hard and rolled off onto the littered concrete. As he lay motionless, I waited for the inevitable pool of blood to seep out from beneath his body.

  But no. He was up! Right as rain. Shaking off the impact.

  Okay, now my turn. I psyched myself up to make the jump, puffing air through my cheeks, the ground swimming below and the mattress shrinking by the second.

  I counted myself in. “One … Two …”

  “Hey!” a man yelled. A La Firma in a white tracksuit breaking out onto the roof, ready to turn me into a dead girl falling. Realising I still had the knife in my hand, I threw it by the blade, fast and true. It wedged between his eyes. A million-to-one shot.

  The man in the white tracksuit dropped instantly. But there were more behind him, spilling out of the doorway.

  No time for dilly-dallying. I hurled myself over the edge and fell at breakneck speed towards that postage stamp of a mattress.

  21

  Black Market

  If the fall wasn’t enough to rob me of my breath, the impact of the springy mattress punched it right out of me. I bounced off across the floor and rolled over three times before I came to a stop. With no time to lick any wounds, I took the defector by the arm and ran us out of there, fuelled by pure adrenalin.

  A spray of late bullets from the rooftop knocked the stuffing out of the mattress and chased us across the courtyard into a series of tight, winding side-streets between buildings.

  We bumped in and out of corners; the sound and fury of Kalashnikovs not far behind. After a few more blind alleys, we came out in the middle of a packed, sweltering market; a snaking, buzzing line of blue and yellow tarpaulins sheltering all the counterfeit merch a girl could want.

  We shuffled through the criss-crossing crowds, on the receiving end of some funny looks from the locals, as if I’d brought my pet gimp out for a walk.

  A red scooter pipped and zipped by before I had chance to clothesline the rider off it and commandeer it for an escape. We also passed by a white saloon car that time had forgot, parked up with a man half-dozing, half-smoking in the driver seat. I looked both ways and saw it was pointless to even consider stealing it in the post-siesta rush.

  Instead, I settled for pushing through the marketplace on foot, the smell of smoking street meats and the sound of metal music from a CD stall swamping my senses.

  And the heat. Whoa! Worse here than anywhere. The confined space and pressing flesh ramping it up another ten degrees, with bugs landing and dancing on my sticky skin every few seconds.

  I looked over my shoulder, swatting away the flies buzzing in and out of my face. I saw the first of the chasing pack, rifle held in the air with one hand, shouting at the market-goers to move.

  As usual my attention was caught by shiny objects. Fake leather and jewellery pulling me in like a tractor beam. I directed the defector over to a stall under a yellow tarpaulin. The owner sold all kinds of stuff. Hats, watches, handbags, umbrellas … I splashed out on a sombrero, pushing the rim low over the defector’s head to cover the hood. I also picked out an orange sun umbrella. I instantly put it up, concealing our heads, backs and shoulders from sight.

  To round off my retail therapy
sesh, I bought a two-litre bottle of water to stave off the gagging thirst that had crept up on me since the fighting, along with a penknife. I also picked up a replica version of that orange clutch bag I’d seen in the Fifth Avenue department store. I asked the heavyset, moustachioed store owner how much in Spanish.

  Under the cover of umbrella and the guise of casual market shoppers, we went completely unnoticed by the gang members, as they passed by us to our right. The store vendor told me an amount in pesos that must have added up to all of four pounds. I told him I’d think about it as I glanced to the left.

  All clear.

  I pulled the defector along, telling him to keep his head and hands down until my command. We followed the path of the gang for another twenty feet, until the market threw up a side-street to the right. I took a chance La Firma had carried on straight past and steered us through an even tighter part of the market; most of it undercover.

  We passed all kinds of makeshift stalls, peddling everything from video games and football shirts, to tarantulas and snakes. It seemed never-ending and how long before an unseen La Firma came out of the crowd and we got stabbed and shot?

  No, we had to get off the streets.

  We broke into yet another labyrinth of alleys, closed courtyards and ramshackle buildings. I noticed a dented metal door left ajar inside a narrow passageway low on light and space. I crept towards it and opened it out slowly. Behind the door, I found a wooden ladder leading up eight feet into a plywood hole cut wonkily in the floor above. I climbed the creaking rungs slowly and peeped into the space. It was a secret room full of PC hard drives, lined by shelves and boxes of black market DVDs. I noticed packs of blank CDs left out in front of each hard drive. And B-movie posters in Spanish plastered over the walls.

  It would have to do.

  I fetched the defector from the passageway and pushed him up the ladder. With the pair of us safely inside the room, I sat the defector down against a spare stretch of wall, cracked open the water bottle and took an awesome, ice cold swig.