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

by Rob Aspinall

  I opened the blade on my new I LOVE MEXICO penknife and told the defector to hold still while I cut the rope. It was tough going at first. The knife the stall owner sold me was flimsy and about as sharp as sponge.

  One I got into the rope fibres, I made easy progress, having to slow down near the end so I didn’t cut into his throat. Eventually, the rope snapped, I tucked the penknife away and removed the hood.

  When I saw what I saw, I almost threw up.

  Surely fucking not.

  22

  Drinking With The Dead

  The defector’s mouth was indeed covered by a strip of silver electrical tape. His eyes bloodshot. His head shaven and peppered grey. His face soaked in sweat. His skin tanned from the Mexican sun, but flushed red from the sheer heat of a black mask in super-scorch weather. And a heavy stubble from sharp cheekbone to wiry neck. From left temple to forehead, ran a three-inch scar. And protruding over the tape, a familiar beaky nose.

  His beady little eyes were fixed on mine. Was he thinking the same as me? That I’d like to take the penknife in my pocket and cut his head off very slowly while he was awake and alive? Or stab him and dump him in the market streets for La Firma to find?

  I tore off the tape. Hard. Fast. Angry. Taking some of his stubble with it.

  Nathan Moore, aka the antichrist, gasped for air; his lips cracked and crusted. He gagged and coughed. Looked at the bottle of water.

  “Please,” he said, croaking and reaching forward with tied hands.

  I moved the bottle out of the way, my eyes burning laser death beams into his.

  “What the f-“ I said. “I saw you die.”

  “You saw me bleed,” Nathan said. “But it’s fine, I forgive you,” he said. “Now, how about some water?” he asked, coughing. Probably for show, knowing him.

  God, he was like a cockroach. He just didn’t die.

  As Nathan reached for the bottle of water, I slid it further away. He slumped against the wall. “I’m sorry I killed your aunt … Clara, was it?”

  “Claire,” I said, blood boiling.

  “Genuinely I am,” he said. “If it hadn’t been me-”

  “If it hadn’t been you? Oh, that makes it all alright,” I said pushing the water towards him. He reached forward again. I snatched it away at the last. “You make me sick.”

  “A lot’s changed,” Nathan said, giving up on the water. “I’ve changed.”

  “What? Seen the error of your ways?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Pff. Come on,” I said.

  Nathan leaned his head back against the wall. “I mean it Lorna. I see your auntie … I see all the faces. I don’t know whether it was the wrench to the head, or …”

  “People don’t change overnight,” I said. “This is another one of your games.”

  Nathan shook his head. “Believe it or not … like it or not … we’re on the same side now.”

  “We’ll never be on the same side,” I said.

  “My JPAC days are over, believe me,” he said. “For one thing, I’ve been red flagged. Me and a few others.”

  “Like Teddy Tucker?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you about him,” he said. “All know is, I woke up on the floor in Alaska. Somehow, I found my way down to a truck out of the base and then on a transporter into Colorado. When I came out of the military hospital, I got a call telling me I was on a list of people being demoted.”

  “To what?” I asked. “Assistant Arsehole?”

  Nathan wheezed, as if he’d ran out of voice. I was too curious. I had to give him some water. I unscrewed the top and held it to his mouth while he gulped it down, water streaming over his chin and t-shirt, already damp with its own bib of sweat. I wiped the rim of the bottle with my hand and took a slug myself, feeling the cool water travel from throat to belly.

  “So you got demoted,” I said. “You’re still JPAC.”

  Nathan continued his story. “Demoted doesn’t mean picking up a smaller pay cheque,” he said. “I escaped the hospital and stole a car. I made a run for it all the way into Texas. They dispatched a Type A after me, but I made it across the border and lost the tail in Juarez, where I had a contact. From there, I entered the protection of the Rosales cartel.”

  “Friends of yours, then?”

  “Casual associates,” Nathan said. “I helped them scale up their operation in return for a political hit. Anyway, I put the word out through the right channels, hoping it would get picked up by MI6.”

  “So you could sell secrets?” I asked.

  “So I could protect my wife and daughters,” Nathan said. “I cut a three-way deal. The Rosales cartel would get a million dollars in return for my safe passage. I’d get immunity and relocation with my family. And MI6 would get everything I knew on JPAC.”

  “So you turned on your bosses?” I asked.

  “They turned on me first,” Nathan said.

  I pushed the bottle of water his way. He held it awkwardly to his lips and drank, before handing it back.

  “Of course, I was pretty surprised to see the two of you making the pickup,” Nathan continued.

  “Me and Philippe? Yeah, well your MI6 isn’t MI6. Not really.”

  “Oh?”

  “Clandestine unit” I said. “They intercepted your transmission.”

  “Huh,” Nathan said. “Well, it hardly matters now, does it?”

  I wiped the rim of the bottle again and took a few sips of water.

  “So … ” Nathan said, offering me his wrists.

  “Oh, no way,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said. “We could use another pair of free hands.”

  “There is no we,” I said, screwing the top on the bottle and getting to my feet. “Besides, who says I’m taking you with me?”

  “The MI6 agent is dead. Vasquez is gone. And the Rosales’s sold us out. Probably double-dealing with JPAC for triple the money. With or without me, they’re going to chase you across the city until you’re dead. And even saying you get out of this, you’re back to square one. I’m guessing you cut a deal of your own. The extraction for a pardon, am I right?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I stood up and walked over to a small, open window with bars on the outside. I checked the street for La Firma. We were clear. For now.

  “And why would you want to leave behind the last good source of intel you have?” Nathan continued, pushing himself up the wall onto his feet.

  I strode over to face him. “Because you’re an evil piece of shit.”

  “I’m also the evil piece of shit who knows the one place they’ll have taken Vasquez.”

  “For all we know, he’s already dead,” I said, pacing in a circle around the tiny room.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Nathan said. “He’s worth more to them alive. Just as I am to you.”

  I pulled at my own ponytail and let out a cry of frustration. As usual, I was caught between a rock and a cock-face. If I took Nathan with me and we did somehow hit our extraction, he’d get away with everything. But if I left him behind to die, I’d be escaping straight into a prison cell. And he might know where I could find Philippe.

  I couldn’t believe it was me protecting him.

  And I couldn’t believe I was even considering it.

  “Alright then,” I said to Nathan. “But you do what I say, when I say. No tricks.”

  He offered his hands again for me to cut the ties.

  “You don’t need your hands to run,” I said. “Speaking of which …”

  I peered through the window bars again. Still clear. “We’ve gotta go,” I said.

  “Where exactly?” Nathan asked. “Do you know where you’re running to? It’s a maze out there. We could be running in circles.”

  “Well we can’t just sit here forever,” I said.

  “And we can’t run from one building to the next without a finishing line.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We’re stuck in the lar
gest mega slum in the world. And the streets are staggered. Meaning you can double or triple the time and distance out of here.”

  “God, you’re worse than Philippe. Constantly working the negatives.”

  “I’m an analyst. We look at the big picture. Not the next blind corner.”

  “So what do you suggest, Mr Big Picture? What’s our best option?”

  “First off, have you still got that phone?” Nathan asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well take it out. Try and find out where the hell we are.”

  I removed the phone we stole from the gang member, with Danby’s SIM card still inside. “Shit, no bars. I can’t get online.”

  “It’s probably the walls in this place,” Nathan said. “We need to get out in the open. Try and get a signal.”

  “Quiet,” I said, putting a finger to my lips.

  I heard footsteps on the street outside. The metal door creaking open. Those same footsteps coming up the ladder.

  23

  Pirate Video

  My natural instinct was to jump on the person coming up the ladder before they could squawk. Nathan held out his palms towards me, urging calm. He picked the sombrero up and used it to conceal his bound wrists.

  A man poked his head into the room. Fat, fifties, with armpit rings soaked into a green polo shirt. He held a burrito to his face, half of it falling out of his mouth as he spoke.

  “Hey, what is this?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “Ah, there you are,” Nathan said. “Did you forget our meeting?”

  “What meeting?” the man asked, stepping into the room.

  “Me and my daughter. We want to take some DVDs over the border. Stuff you can’t get over there. Didn’t your associate tell you?”

  “I don’t have an associate,” the pock-skinned man said, taking another bite of his cheesy burrito, which smelled fit. Unlike him.

  “Then we must have been talking to one of your competitors,” Nathan said, moving towards the exit to the room. What was his name …”

  “Ricardo?” the man asked.

  Nathan nodded and smiled. “Ricardo. That’s the one. Forgive us. It was my daughter who was talking to him. Her Spanish isn’t so good as mine. We’ll be on our way.”

  The man stepped across Nathan. “You don’t wanna do business with Ricardo,” he said. “You want a DVD? I have all the DVDs you want. A bigger selection than Ricardo. Better quality. Lower price.”

  The man brushed between me and Nathan and rested his half-eaten burrito on the side.

  What if I just put a quick sleeper hold on him right now? I could steal the rest of that burrito.

  “Take a look through,” the man said, licking his greasy fingers and pointing to a large box. “One hundred pesos for five. Two hundred for ten.”

  “Go on,” Nathan said to me, that old familiar grin returning to his face, “take a look.”

  I flipped through a large box of DVDs, making it look convincing. I pulled out a random selection of cases, with crudely printed covers and discs inside with the movie title scribbled in black Sharpie. I thought I’d better go for the ten for two-hundred peso deal. Keep the owner of the room extra sweet.

  “Here,” I said stacking the DVDs in a pile and handing over the money; my spending cash starting to run low. And to think, Philippe had said there wouldn’t be chance for my usual souvenir shop.

  The DVD man slid my chosen titles into a used blue carrier bag and handed it over. “Here you go young miss. Don’t bother with Ricardo next time. Come straight to my stall. Third one down on the left.”

  “We’ll tell our friends about you,” Nathan said, as he dropped the sombrero down the hole and climbed onto the ladder, me blocking the man’s view so he couldn’t see him struggling in his ties.

  “Tell them to visit Pablo’s World Famous Movies,” he said to me, as I mounted the ladder.

  I did my best innocent smile, descending the ladder, umbrella under one arm.

  I met Nathan outside the metal door and angled the sombrero on his head. I popped the umbrella and we walked out into the market. We moved with caution through the crowds. Nathan asked an elderly market trader where he could get a decent phone signal.

  “Up on the roof,” he said, pointing to a spiral of weathered iron steps. They wound their way up on to a flat rooftop above a boarded-up bar with a faded tequila bottle painted on the side.

  “Thank you,” I said, as we moved on.

  At the foot of the steps lay a young boy dressed in ragged clothes. He looked as if he was homeless, ribs pushing their way out of his skin and dirty all over. I saw he desperation in his eyes.

  Nathan told me to hand the kid the bag of DVDs.

  “Here, can you sell these?” he asked him.

  “Si,” he said.

  “Take them. They’re yours.”

  His face lit up, rooting through the bag. “Gracias señor!”

  He jumped up to his flip-flop feet and skipped over to the markets.

  Nathan caught me gawping at him as he put a foot on the spiral staircase. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, following him up the rickety, wobbly steps.

  Just shocked as hell, that’s all.

  As we reached the rooftop, I handed Nathan the umbrella and checked for a signal. I had one bar. I opened up the browser. It took forever and stalled.

  “Not enough internet,” I said.

  “Is there anyone you can call?” Nathan asked, looking out over the rooftops, across an endless sea of lopsided, shambolic housing built by people doing the best with whatever they had.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t know the number.”

  Nathan looked around us once more. “Sod it. Dial seven-six-two, two-seven-six.”

  “Okay,” I said, unsure what all this was about, but dialling anyway.

  “Now hold it to my ear,” Nathan said.

  I held the phone to his ear.

  “Ops leader whiskey bravo four requesting a direct line on a cell,” Nathan said. “UK-based.”

  Nathan whispered: “Postcode?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “It’s 10 Burton Street.”

  “10 Burton Street,” Nathan said. “We don’t have the name … Any number is fine.” Nathan handed the phone over. “I can’t promise who you’ll get through to.”

  I held the phone between us, so we could both hear.

  “Yeah?” a young male said, yawning.

  “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Me,” the guy said.

  “Who’s me?”

  “Who’s you?”

  “Stop being a dick,” I said.

  “Then stop calling me,” he said.

  “No, wait. Don’t hang up.”

  “Or what?” the guy said.

  “Free sex,” I said. Don’t ask me why, it just came out.

  There was a pause. “I’m listening,” the guy said.

  “Wait, is this Zak?”

  “The one and only.”

  #shouldaknown

  “Zak, it’s Lorna.”

  “Hey babe. I was waiting for your call.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Put Giles on.”

  “Hey G-Force!” Zak shouted.

  G-Force?

  I heard Giles in the background. “Whaddup Z-Man?”

  “Your favourite hottie’s on the phone.”

  I blushed. God, was there anything that didn’t embarrass me?

  Giles came on to the phone. “Hi Lorna. Ignore Zak. I didn’t say you were a- Not that I’m saying you’re not … I’m not saying you are either, but, y’know.”

  “Yeah, kinda got bigger issues right now,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “That’s what I need to know. Is there any way you guys can locate a GPS on a mobile?”

  “Hang on, I’ll put you on speaker … Zak, can we run a trace on this call?”

  Zak put on a silly Yoda voice in the background. “Trace call, can I.”


  “I guess that’s a yes,” Giles said. “Give us a minute.”

  The minute ticked by agonisingly slowly. Me and Nathan crouched low on a brick roof hot enough to cook eggs on.

  “Yeah, you’re in Mexico City,” Zak said.

  “Yeah, I know that. We’re in the slums.”

  “What are you doing there?” Zak asked.

  “Sightseeing,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “So snippy,” Zak said.

  “Tell that little shit I’m going to rip his little head off if he doesn’t get on with it,”

  “Who said that?” Zak asked, suddenly worried. “It’s not your assassin friend, is it?”

  “Worse,” I said. “He’s six-five and he knows where you live.”

  “Well in that case, let me zoom in here,” Zak said. “Yeah, it looks like you’re somewhere in the middle.”

  “Then we’re going to need transport,” Nathan said.

  “Can you tell us the way to Los Reyes airfield?” I asked.

  “Just a moment,” said Giles. “Around ten miles. Heading West.”

  Ten frigging miles!

  “Thanks guys,” I said. “You’d better vacate for a couple of days. Take anything valuable. We had to patch through via JPAC.”

  Giles was narked. “Lorna! What were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry. We were desperate. Philippe got snatched. And now we’re being hunted down by a gazillion drug gang members.”

  “If Philippe got snatched, then who’s we?” asked Giles.

  “Seriously, you don’t wanna know,” I said.

  “That’s just great,” said Zak. “Go where? Do what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Go to Lego Land … Whatever it is you do when you’re not tossing yourself off. Just make sure you’re not there when JPAC turn up on the doorstep.”

  “Understood,” Giles said. “But stay in touch. I’ll keep hold of Zak’s phone.”

  “Hey, what the-“ Zak said.

  “If we don’t make it … I just wanted to say. I don’t know…”

  “Spare us the tears, love,” Nathan said. “Time’s wasting.”

  “It’s okay, get going,” said Giles. “And good luck.”

  I came off the call and slipped the phone back in my pocket. I gave Nathan a mean stare. We looked across the rooftops.