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

by Rob Aspinall

  ”The first thing we need to do is drink some water,” I said. “I’m gonna die of thirst at this rate.”

  “Agreed, agreed,” Nathan said. “Common sense prevails.”

  I shot him the daggers over my shoulder as we found a set of fire exit stairs that took us several flights down to the ground floor. The place was deserted. I was surprised the homeless and the addicted hadn’t made it their base.

  “Why hasn’t this place been taken over?” I said. “It’s a squatter’s paradise.”

  “Probably the ghost stories,” Nathan said. “Superstition and all that.”

  We followed the corridor signs to the reception area, overgrown with greenery. Vines crawled up vending machines and over reception desks and waiting area chairs, while trees and bushes sprouted out of broken floor tiles in a vestibule area where a glass, circular ceiling had been smashed to bits, letting the sun and rain inside. It created a miniature forest, with insects chattering and small birds zipping in and out of the canopy.

  We stepped over roots and vines, sprawling like power cables across the floor. A set of automatic doors were stuck half a foot open, meaning we had to squeeze our way out. The hospital entrance had been built around by grey, breeze-block homes and low-rent apartment blocks. We jogged low alongside the building to the end of a narrow alley. I poked an eye around the corner, spotting an instant opportunity. A man in a black shirt and trousers pissed against a wall in broad daylight. His car was parked conveniently with the driver’s door open; a silver Ford saloon only a few years old.

  At last, some mother-trucking luck!

  “Stay here,” I said to Nathan.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said.

  I ignored his constant negging and darted across the street. The man was too busy pissing and whistling to see me slide into the driver’s seat. Or go to turn the ignition.

  Damn. No key. I climbed out of the car and took out my penknife. I crept up behind him as he whistled. Slow and silent, I put the knife to the man’s throat. He froze mid-whistle.

  “Give me your car key,” I said to him. “Slowly.”

  His stream of honking brown urine petered out. He reached inside the pocket of his black trousers and handed me his key.

  “Stay facing the wall,” I said. “I have a gun, too.”

  I was lying of course. And the pissing man knew it. As I back-stepped around to the driver’s side, he zipped up his fly and turned. He had a radio attached to his right breast and a police badge stitched into his shirt. It was Captain Diaz.

  Oh, this wasn’t good.

  I ducked into the car and rammed the key in the ignition, suddenly noticing the police radio on the centre of the dash. An unmarked car.

  Sloppy, Lorn, sloppy.

  Nevertheless, I fired up the engine, the plan being to spin the car round and pick Nathan up on the other side of the street. But as I went to pull the door shut, Diaz stuck a cold pistol barrel to my temple.

  I noticed the ankle of his trouser rolled up and a small holster around his fat, hairy ankle.

  “Turn the engine off,” he said.

  I turned off the engine.

  Come on Nathan, help me out here.

  “Now hand me the key,” Diaz said.

  I pulled the key from the ignition and handed it over.

  “Now out of the car. No tricks.”

  The barrel of the gun was out of my line of sight. Which meant trying to disarm the guy would be extremely tough. And risky.

  Diaz knew what he was doing. He was experienced and well trained.

  “Down on the floor,” he said, switching the gun to the back of my head, forcing me down.

  I lay with my face in the dirt, trying to think of the best way out of the latest jam, while Diaz radioed for backup.

  Come on Nathan, what are you waiting for? You can disarm this guy.

  Maybe it was the the eight-strong SWAT unit running up the street that was putting him off. They were no more than a hundred metres away. And no doubt the master tactician was thinking of number one, working out the best odds of survival. Thinking it might not be so bad if I was dead and he was free to do whatever he wanted.

  Diaz stood over me. I saw his shadow cast against the road. He held his weapon on me with both hands. Taking no chances.

  “Looks like you’re pretty much fucked,” Diaz said. “Where’s your friend, huh?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Doesn’t matter if you talk now or later,” Diaz said. “You’ll talk … Better for you if you talk now, though.”

  I watched the boots of those SWAT getting closer and closer.

  I thought about how stupid I’d been. All the little details I hadn’t noticed. Philippe had taught me better.

  31

  I.O.U

  Of all the sounds you don’t expect to hear in one of the fiercest places on Earth, it’s the tinkle of a bicycle bell. Yet that’s exactly what I heard. I looked up and saw a girl on an old fashioned bike. Patchy gold paint with a basket on the front, rolling in fast.

  “Look out!” she said, the tyres of her bike spinning by me with only a few inches to spare.

  “Watch it!” Diaz shouted.

  Too late. The girl wobbled into him on the bike, brakes creaking and the front tyre riding up over the toe of Diaz’s boot. I pushed up off my hands, on to my feet. Diaz shoved bike and girl away angrily, calling her all the names under the Mexican sun as she apologised profusely. I disarmed Diaz with ease and struck him across the face with the butt of his own gun; knocking him to the dirt.

  I paused in front of the girl on the bike. It was Angelina, paying me back for the solid I’d done her earlier in her parents’ store. She nodded and sprinted off with her bike, hopping onto the seat and pedalling out of harm’s way down a side street. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I snatched the key from Diaz and jumped into the silver saloon. I revved the engine and yanked the wheel to the left as the SWAT team opened fire, now only forty metres further down the street.

  I turned the car around and came to a stop directly in front of the alley next to the hospital; pushing the passenger door open for Nathan to dive in. I floored the accelerator pedal and escaped the onrushing SWAT.

  “Gee, thanks for the help,” I said to Nathan, before swerving around a patrol car coming the opposite way.

  “I had every faith in you,” Nathan said.

  I gave him the dirties. He hung on tight to the handle above the door. “That’s what you’re here for isn’t it? To protect me?”

  We took on fire as I slid the car right into the next street.

  We left the SWAT team for dead. But without a map or sat nav. And then there was the acrid black smoke blowing into the cabin through the blowers on the dash.

  “I think we might have a problem,” Nathan said, winding his window open.

  I choked on the smoke and struggled to see as I wound mine down too. There weren’t many cars in the slums and most of the locals seemed to be staying out of the way while the manhunt continued.

  The other minor snag was an improvised police blockade dead ahead at the top of the hill road; a huddle of black patrol cars with cops lining up ready to fire. I slammed on the brakes and pulled into an alley tighter than spandex as they unleashed hot leaden hell on the car.

  As the Ford saloon rattled off buildings either side, the engine caught fire. I brought the car to a slamming stop. The pair of us squeezed our way out of our doors, wedged half-open against walls.

  “Make sure you close your door,” Nathan shouted at me. I pushed it shut and joined him around the front of the car. We sprinted a short distance to the end of the alley and took cover around a wall made from sheet metal.

  A team of tactical police trooped up the alley and opened fire on the rear of the car. The saloon was already consumed with flames, but when one of the bullets punctured the fuel tank, the whole thing went up in a mushrooming fireball.

  I ducked back around the corner as a wall of heat surged thr
ough the alley.

  “With any luck they’ll think we’re trapped inside,” Nathan said. “At least until they put the fire out.”

  “Okay, I give up,” I said. “What’s your plan?”

  32

  Tooled Up

  Nathan’s plan was to find somewhere to hide out and wait until nightfall.

  “Yeah, ‘cause this place gets a lot less scary in the dark,” I said, as we stopped between buildings to have a rest. “Besides, time is ticking on that extraction window.” I checked my watch. “Only twelve hours left.”

  “I thought you were leaving the strategy to me,” Nathan said, sizing up a wooden door, light-blue paint peeling off in long strips.

  It was locked, but it gave.

  He forced the door open and beckoned me inside. He shut the door behind us and dinked on a dim light. It was a tiny tool shop with a window plastered from the inside in newspaper.

  “Oh, I think we just won the lottery,” Nathan said, checking out the room; cramped, musty and stickier than a toddler’s fingers.

  “If this is the winning ticket, what’s the booby prize?” I asked, looking around a bench with a vice and a couple of manual metalwork machines.

  I rested the compact pistol stolen from Diaz on a metal top and took a chisel off a rack on the wall. It felt heavy and rough in my hands. “I guess these will do as weapons.”

  “No, look,” Nathan said, stood by a mess of boxes and bottles stacked against the back wall. “We’ve got methanol. Even better … motor oil.”

  “Even better than better,” I said, opening the lid on a brown and beige cool-box. “We’ve got proper water … coke … And this stuff,” I said, holding up a yellow and red packet of something.

  I cracked open a bottle of water and downed half the contents. I handed it over to Nathan, who quickly finished it off. I tore open the packet and stuck my nose inside. It was beef jerky. Looked like a Chihuahua had done some turds in a bag and they’d gone all hard. I sniffed and hesitated. I hadn’t eaten meat in over a month; back to my old veggie ways.

  I decided beggars couldn’t be choosers and dug my teeth into the end of a jerky strip.

  “Chewy, but flavourful,” I said, offering the packet to Nathan, who dug his hand in and took a small fistful.

  Anyone else find it annoying when people do that?

  He wandered around the room and stumbled on a tin of coffee. “Don’t suppose we’ve got a kettle?”

  I pointed to a makeshift stove the tool shop owner had set up on an aluminium tray. It consisted of a bunsen burner piped into a small, blue gas canister, with a dinky saucepan resting on a burnt patch of gauze over the bunsen burner tripod.

  Just like being back in fifth year chemistry, I thought, wishing I was back there right now; me and Becks asleep on the desk as Mr Pointon waffled on in his baggy brown cardigan.

  “Marvellous,” Nathan said with a smile, pouring a bottle of water into the pan and igniting the burner. “Marvellous, marvellous.”

  “We’ve got Twinkies, too,” I said.

  “Wonderful,” Nathan said, grabbing one out of the cooler.

  He boiled a pan of water and made us a pick-me-up brew. Black coffee with sugar, times two.

  I baulked at the taste, but drank it anyway.

  “This is all very lardy-dah,” I said, biting the end off a strip of jerky. “But what is your strategy, exactly?”

  Nathan held out a hand to appease me while he drank his coffee. After polishing off his brew and scoffing a Twinkie, he plonked his mug on the workbench and clapped his hands together.

  “Righty-ho,” he said, picking up a two-foot square white board leaned against a wall. He flattened it on the workbench, wiped away the nonsense scrawled on the board in black pen with a cloth and popped the cap off a pen.

  While savouring every mouthful of my creamy, spongy Twinkie, I stood at the end of the bench and watched Nathan draw out a large square. Inside it, he drew a series of three smaller squares, decreasing in size each time.

  In the centre square, Nathan drew an X. “Let’s suppose these squares represent two-mile markers,” he said. “And let’s assume for a moment we’re in the spot marked X.” He scribbled the letter P in all four corners of each square. “The police will most likely have set up blockades every couple of miles.” He drew squiggly lines between each of the lines. “And in the channels between each perimeter, they’ve got tac units and La Firma working in tandem to patrol and search. Added to any more small-time hoods looking to make a name for themselves.”

  “Meaning we’re trapped,” I said, “wherever we run.”

  “If we run,” Nathan said, leaning his weight on his elbows. “The one tactical advantage we’ve got, is we’re in the slums.”

  “Yeah, really advantageous so far,” I said.

  Nathan continued to talk in spite of me. “There are more than four million people living here. Takes them a lot longer to carry out a thorough search. And humans are inherently lazy. It’s the way our brains are wired. We miss things. We can’t help it.”

  “So what are you saying? They’ll get bored and give up?”

  “No, but they will cut corners. Expand the search prematurely Especially if they want to make it home for supper.”

  “You seem pretty sure,” I said.

  “Trust me, I’ve run operations across seven continents. People are the same wherever you go. Unless you’re on the ground directing them personally, people get sloppy, hungry, tired. And half of them are on their bloody phones when they’re supposed to be working. The same happened when JPAC red flagged you. I had to see to it personally in order to catch you.”

  “But didn’t we just crash a cop car? They know which area we’re in.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Nathan said. “The first conclusion they’ll jump to, is that we’ve fled the surrounding blocks. As far as they’re concerned, we’re on a direct route out of the slums. Heading West, towards Los Reyes.”

  “And they’d be right,” I said.

  “But if we hang back long enough,” Nathan said, straightening up and pointing to the space around the inside square, “they’ll withdraw their search units.”

  I leaned over the bench and ran a finger between squares. “And that lets us move easier between each perimeter.”

  “Excellent Lorna,” Nathan said, patting me on the back. “You learn fast.”

  Was it weird that praise from Nathan felt good?

  Yep, it was weird.

  Plain wrong, even.

  Disgusted with myself, I moved the conversation on. “So that’s why the wait until nightfall?”

  “One of the reasons,” Nathan said.

  “Doesn’t change the fact we’ve got to make it past all those police perimeters. I mean, all we’ve got is a tiny handgun and some tools. And even with a car, we’ll get about twenty feet before they blow it to hell.”

  “That’s why we remove two of the perimeters,” Nathan said, picking up the cloth and rubbing out a couple of the inside squares.

  “Yeah? And do you suggest we do that?”

  33

  Cocktail Hour

  Night fell slowly but surely outside the tool shop.

  Inside, I opened and poured the owner’s beer stash into a sink. The entire six pack. Each one, a litre bottle.

  I stuck a finger in the neck of each bottle and carried them over to the workbench, the smell of beer mixing in with methanol and motor oil.

  The bottles clinked together as I laid them on the bench in front of Nathan, who wore a battered leather apron tied around his waist. He took one of the bottles and placed a clear plastic funnel inside. He told me to hold the bottle steady as he poured in a measure of methanol from a grey, four-litre container.

  He put the methanol down and picked up a can of motor oil. In went a generous dash of thick oil, creating golden swirls in the clear liquid, filled two thirds of the way up the beer bottle. Next came liquid detergent. Lilly Meadow Fresh. N
athan tipped a small amount of blue detergent in through the funnel.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “Makes the smoke thicker. And a little bit chokier,” Nathan said. “Didn’t Philippe teach you this stuff?”

  “What, leave the child with the harmful chemicals? Pff.”

  “Philippe doesn’t like sharing his toys,” Nathan said.

  “I know, right? So annoying.”

  “Hand me one of those rags, will you?” Nathan asked, wiping the sweat from his brow with his t-shirt.

  We’d found a white desktop fan too, for all the good it did. It was like being blown on by an asthmatic field mouse.

  I handed over a greasy rag; one of many we’d found lying around the tool shop. Nathan removed the funnel from the neck of the bottle and tore the rag in two. He slipped on a pair of heavy-duty metalwork gloves and dunked the rag inside the methanol container, before forcing it into the head of the bottle, so that only the end stuck out over the top.

  He pushed the bottle my way, the stink of the thing stripping the insides of my mind.

  Nathan smiled smugly. “And that, boys and girls, is how you make a Molotov cocktail.”

  I pushed an empty bottle his way in return, accidentally laughing at his remark.

  #LornaHowCouldYou

  With six freshly-made cocktails resting on the workbench, we sat against a wall with the fan blowing in front of us. I took my pumps off and loosened my sticky toes in the artificial breeze, drinking another bottle of water.

  “So how do people end up working for an organisation like JPAC?” I asked Nathan. “I always wondered. And Philippe wouldn’t tell me.”

  Nathan yawned and stretched out the tension of the day. “I was recruited from a private security contractor.” He rested his head against the wall and stared into space, as if reliving a memory. “There I was, sitting in a bar in, shit, where was I? Yes, of course, Johannesburg … I was having a drink in the hotel bar, when the most beautiful blonde walks in. Little black dress. Bombshell looks. The most perfect pair of-“