JIMMY COATES SURVIVAL

When Jimmy Coates goes rogue, only one thing can ensure his survival. Destruction.

JOE CRAIG

JIMMY COATES SURVIVAL

To Mary-Ann Ochota, bessway.

Thank you to Sarah Manson, Ann Tobias,

Nicola Solomon, Sophie Birshan,

Miriam Craig, Oli Rockberger and

everyone at HarperCollins, particularly

Stella Paskins, Geraldine Stroud,

Emma Bradshaw, Catherine Holmes

and Gillie Russell.

THE BIG BAMG

One minute it was a man-made wonder of the world: Neptune’s Shadow, the second largest oil rig in the world. Its lights glowed in the black fog of the North Sea, like an alien space ship. Towers craned out in all directions, metal arms trying to grab a piece of the night, while the pistons and pumps worked ceaselessly, dragging up the liquor from the belly of the world.

The next minute, it was a raging mountain of fire that lit up the whole of the night, a beacon visible as far away as Denmark. The noise of the blast shook birds from their nests in Northern Scotland. The source of billions of pounds for the British Government erupted with more rage than Mount Vesuvius.

In the morning it blew up again a million times, flashing across TV screens in digital reconstructions and vivid newspaper reports, each one exaggerating the size of the explosion a little more, and on the Internet, where people discussed why and how it had happened – and what the Prime Minister was going to do about it.

And it exploded over and over again in the mind of the one person who had survived actually being there

– Jimmy Coates.

01 SLIPSTREAM

First it was a light on the dashboard, then a clunk in the engine. Jimmy had been expecting this for the last three hours. I could ditch the plane in the water, he thought. At that moment he was somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and a part of his brain was already working out the best angle for the Falcon 20 to hit the waves. He could even feel the muscles in his shoulders warming, preparing for the longest swim of his life.

He gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead out of the cockpit. He knew ditching wasn’t an option. He had to reach Europe. Then came the answer.

The plane rocked slightly. A roar drowned out the sound of the Falcon’s engines. Jimmy peered upwards, squinting at the brightness of the sky. There it was – the shadow of a commercial jet looming above him.

“Time to catch a ride,” Jimmy whispered under his breath. He glanced one more time at the fuel gauges. They were deep in the red zone. He powered the Falcon higher, his fingers gliding over the plane’s controls. Blood covered his palms – black, coagulated blood that left sticky marks on every switch and button. But they were healing already. He could feel it. The pain was far away, buried by his senses. He stared at his hands, but saw past the shredded streaks of red and black skin to the dull grey layer underneath.

Next to the Airbus A490, Jimmy’s Falcon was like a fly around the back end of a hippopotamus. Jimmy was stunned at the enormousness of the plane. He guessed it must have been nearly a hundred metres long, with an even larger wingspan. Its deep rumble vibrated in Jimmy’s chest.

Sooner than he eXpected, Jimmy was flying just a few metres beneath it. Please work, Jimmy begged, searching inside himself. He knew it was the force inside him that had put this plan into action. Jimmy could never have dreamed up anything so outrageous without it.

He let the world fall into a blur, focusing all his energy on a point deep inside, somewhere between his stomach and the base of his spine. His inner power was coming. It had to be. It was destined to take over.

Then came the familiar buzz. His muscles flooded with energy. His neck fizzed and his brain throbbed. Jimmy was full of hatred and eXhilaration simultaneously. This would save him, but there was a tiny voice inside that knew this power would also eventually destroy him.

Jimmy jerked on the sidestick controller and the nose of his plane hurtled towards the airbus. Just as he thought he was going to burn to death in a mid-air collision, the Falcon was lifted back and upwards, wafted away on a cushion of air – the slipstream from the airbus engine.

At that moment, Jimmy cut the power to the Falcon’s engines. The dull whine disappeared and Jimmy was deafened by the thundering of the airbus and the roar of the air blasting past. Violent turbulence rocked him in his seat. He gripped the flightstick more tightly, desperate to control the shifting of the plane’s weight. He was surfing on air.

“Hey, look at this, Pritchie,” said the airbus pilot, sitting forward in his seat. A fragment of lettuce fell from his sandwich. His co-pilot had his cap down over his eyes and didn’t bother to move.

“What is it?” His voice was gruff.

“Message,” replied the pilot, taking another bite of his sandwich. “En-route controller. Something about a ghost on the radar.”

“Ghost?” Pritchie reluctantly heaved himself into an upright position and set his cap back on his head. “That’s, like, two blips where there should be one, no?”

“Well, it’s not some dude in a white sheet, is it?”

They both peered at the data link system. Then they checked their panel displays, both suddenly very alert.

“Found anything?” asked the pilot. Pritchie shook his head.

“Hey, what’s this?” he said. “Another message.”

Together they studied the communications system again. The pilot shrugged.

“Huh,” he started. “Funny. Must have been a glitch.”

“A glitch?”

“Well, we’ve found nothing and now they’re saying things are back to normal.”

“Guess that’s why they call them ghosts.”

They looked at each other for a second, each trying to work out if the other was going to make a big deal out of this or just get on with the flight. Eventually Pritchie broke into a smile.

“Let’s hope it wasn’t a flock of birds heading for an engine,” he said with a rough laugh, reclining in his seat and putting his cap back over his eyes.

“No worries,” the pilot snorted. “I don’t smell any roast chicken.”

Jimmy was riding the slipstream expertly. The slightest twitch of his muscles made tiny adjustments in the balance of the plane. Gradually he manoeuvred down and to the centre, where the airflow was strongest. If he was going to get away with this, he knew he needed to stay as close as possible to the airbus so the air-traffic control radar system would read the two planes as a single entity.

Now all he had to do was stay there until they reached Europe. Then he’d have to work out a way to land. He just hoped he wasn’t too late.

02 WILLIAM LEE

“Shall we get started then?” Miss Bennett announced brightly.

Eva Doren felt like a schoolgirl. But unlike most thirteen-year-olds, she wasn’t at school. She was at an operations room deep under the streets of Central London, in the bunkers of NJ7, the most technologically advanced and well-funded Secret Service organisation in the world.

She didn’t think there were many girls who came to work every day at a place like this: three breeze block walls, bare grey except for the multicoloured horizontal stripes of the electrical circuitry, and a fourth, newly installed glass partition which allowed extra light in from the corridor.

The doorway was an empty arch – there were hardly any doors at NJ7 Headquarters. The place was designed so that if it was ever evacuated it could be completely flooded by the Thames within two minutes, to protect all of the secrets it held.

“I thought we were waiting for someone?” said Eva.

“We are,” replied Miss Bennett. “But he’s late. So we’ll start without him.”

Eva pulled her ponytail tighter to stop her reddish-brown hair falling about her neck, and brought out a notepad and pencil from the top pocket of her shirt. She was sitting at a glass conference table big enough for twelve, but for now there were only three.

Miss Bennett was to her immediate right, sitting totally upright. Her hair was also pulled back in a tight ponytail, but it was longer than Eva’s and, Eva thought, glossier. At times Eva almost wondered whether Miss Bennett became more beautiful with every cruel act.

Miss Bennett sifted through a pile of folders, all of them plain brown apart from the NJ7 emblem on the front – a short, vertical green stripe. Then she produced a tiny digital recorder and placed it at the centre of the table. She pressed a button, cleared her throat and began, in a business-like tone:

“Present is NJ7 Field Agent Mitchell Glenthorne and Support Staff Eva Doren…”

She continued with some of the details of the meeting, while Eva watched Mitchell, sitting directly opposite her. His eyes were downcast, as they often were, but his shoulders seemed to grow broader, pumped with pride at hearing himself described as a ‘field agent’.

“Oh, and also present is myself, of course,” Miss Bennett added. “Miss Bennett, Director of NJ7.”

As she finished, a shadow fell across the table. Standing in the doorway was an incredibly tall man. Eva thought he was the tallest man she had ever seen, but he didn’t look strong or muscly. He was so thin Eva wondered whether someone had stretched him out when he was a teenager. He had to stoop to enter the room.

“Ah,” Miss Bennett said, leaning back and giving a dry smile. “It looks like our guest has decided to join us.”

The tall man didn’t respond, but took the seat directly opposite Miss Bennett. His features looked vaguely Indian, with a nose that was the same shape as the rest of him – long and thin. His hair was dark black and shaved on the sides of his head, which made him look even taller.

“Do we have to have a kid at every meeting?” the man asked, even before he had pushed his legs under the table. He stared at Eva. She felt her heart pounding, but didn’t flinch. She’d learned to hide her emotions. “I can understand the need for Mitchell to be here, but, erm…”

“Eva,” said Eva. She felt the urge to stand up, but resisted. It would only have made her feel even more tiny opposite this giant. Instead she dropped her eyes to her notepad and started scribbling.

“Eva plays a vital part in the running of NJ7,” Miss Bennett explained, “and in particular my office.”

“Isn’t it time we sent her home?” the man protested.

“From what I understand her parents think she’s dead.” Only now did Eva look up. Look homesick, she told herself. She was surprised at how easily the fake emotion came to her. Was it fake? Play the part. Be the loyal little girl. She could almost feel Mitchell’s examining gaze, but kept her own fixed on this new man’s face.

“How long are you going to maintain that… situation?” he asked.

“Indefinitely,” Miss Bennett snapped back. “Someone of your background must know how useful it is for the world to think you’re dead. By the way, what is your background?”

Eva relaxed a little. Miss Bennett was an expert at manipulating the conversation. It was a thrill to have someone so powerful on her side. The man had no answer. He just gave a reluctant smile, lips pressed together.

It was Mitchell who filled the silence.

“Without Eva,” he explained, “we would never have been able to kill Jimmy Coates in New York.”

Now Eva’s heart rate leapt again, but this time with elation. Mitchell was still watching her. She made sure that her face revealed nothing. You serve your country, she repeated in her head, telling herself lies to fool her body. Jimmy was a traitor. At the same time every sinew buzzed with joy that her friend had escaped New York in secret – and alive.

At last the man gave a small shrug and pulled out his files.

“This is William Lee,” Miss Bennett announced to Eva and Mitchell. “The new Director of Special Security. He replaces Paduk.”

The tall man offered his hand to them with an over-the-top grin, revealing a shiny regiment of teeth. Eva shook his hand, but Mitchell refused it. They had no choice about the grin.

“You’ve been appointed already?” Mitchell asked, confused. “Paduk’s body is still warm. Probably. Wherever it is.”

“It’s highly unlikely that his body is still warm,” Lee replied calmly, “now that he’s scattered in tiny pieces around ten square kilometres of the North Sea. Not to mention all of the bits of him that were probably consumed by fish…”

“Thanks for the graphic sketch,” Miss Bennett interrupted. “I think we get the picture.”

“Which picture is that exactly?” asked Lee sarcastically. “The one in which our largest oil rig explodes? The one where my predecessor bumbles into a rescue job and gets himself blown up? Or the one where our economy and energy infrastructure will struggle to recover?”

There was silence and they all avoided each other’s eyeline.

“That’s one of the things we need to discuss, isn’t it?” Miss Bennett muttered, gesturing at her files.

“Go ahead,” said Lee.

Miss Bennett pulled out several sheets of paper and spread them around the table. Eva leaned forward to have a look, but she’d seen them already. Some were photographs of the remains of the oil rig, but most were closely-typed pages – the report from the SAS. They all bore the same bold green stripe.

“According to my forensic team,” Miss Bennett began, “all the evidence suggests it was a botched sabotage job carried out by a single agent.”

“One agent?” Lee confirmed. “An agent who didn’t intend to blow himself up as well as the rig, yes?”

“It was a girl,” Mitchell cut in. Everybody turned to him.

“Mitchell was there,” Miss Bennett explained. “Part of the SAS team.”

“I see,” mumbled Lee. “And you saw the agent?” Mitchell nodded.

“She was masked and covered in oil, but from her size and capabilities, it was definitely Zafi.”

“Zafi is…” William Lee took a moment to consult one of the pages in his own files. “…the French child assassin, correct? Mitchell’s counterpart? Another genetically modified humanoid assassin?” He grunted a dry laugh.

“Humanoid?” Mitchell exclaimed in horror. “What do you—”

“Yes.” Miss Bennett cut him off sharply. “Zafi is the French child assassin.”

“Was,” Mitchell corrected. “She was blown up with the rig, remember?”

“Do we have her body?” Lee asked brightly.

“I said she was blown up. You know – kaboom!” Mitchell gestured an explosion with his hands. “As in ‘scattered in tiny pieces around ten square kilometres of the North Sea’. Do you want me to hunt down all those fish you were talking about and make them give excrement samples?”

“OK, fine. So the French blew up the oil rig, but now at least their operative is dead. The question is, how do we strike back?”

“The PM has my dossier on that,” said Miss Bennett.

“The PM has read your dossier. But I’m afraid he’s been unwell. Everything goes through me for the time being.”

“You?” Miss Bennett was taken aback, but quickly hid it. Lee perused his files, then carried on as if Miss Bennett weren’t even there.

“Mutam-ul-it,” he announced. The strange word seemed to linger on his tongue and in the air. “I have a strong suspicion we’ll be going with that option. Have everybody on standby.”

He got up to leave and Eva was shocked at his height all over again. It was almost as if he’d grown during the meeting.

While he gathered his papers a thought struck him.

“By the way, did you see the memo about my predecessor’s memorial service tomorrow?”

“I see every memo,” Miss Bennett hissed.

“It’s at the Mercantile Marine Memorial,” he continued. “The PM is expecting everybody to be there. Paduk was his friend.”

“Of course we’ll be there,” said Mitchell. “Paduk was our friend too.”

“And one more thing,” Lee added, ignoring Mitchell’s annoyance. “What about this Jimmy Coates? Anything to worry about there?”

“The file is closed.” Miss Bennett pulled a slim brown folder from the middle of her pile and threw it across the table. One page slid out. In the top right corner was a grainy image of Jimmy’s face, next to yet another green stripe. Large red letters were stamped across his forehead. They read ‘TERMINATED’. Under that was typed ‘New York, USA’.

“I know all of this,” Lee snarled, looking down his nose at the file. “But do we have a body yet?”

“Another tasty meal for the fish,” Mitchell cut in with a smirk.

“There are no fish in the East River,” Lee said, reading the details more closely. “Too much pollution.” There was a moment’s pause, then he tossed the file back on to the table and shot an expectant look at the others. “Well?”

“We had divers trawl the river,” Miss Bennett explained with a sigh.

“No bodies?” asked Lee.

“Too many bodies actually.”

“Children?” Lee was shocked.

“This is New York we’re talking about.” Miss Bennett shrugged. “We’re not the only organisation to use children as operatives. There’s the Mafia, the Triads, the Capita…”

The thought made Eva’s skin crawl. Could there really be that many people in the world prepared to kill children, and to use children as killers?

“In any case, Jimmy could breathe underwater,” Mitchell put in. “He could have drifted miles before finally dying.”

Miss Bennett agreed. “The search area is far too big for us to cover,” she said with another shrug. “And without jurisdiction…”

“But we’re sure he’s dead,” Lee asked, stooping to lean one hand on the table. He and Miss Bennett stared at each other. She slowly nodded.

“That many bullets in him? We’re sure.”

Lee absorbed the information, nodded, then marched out without another word. Miss Bennett waved Mitchell out of the room as well. He gave her an awkward salute before he left and dropped a nervous glance at Eva.

Before Eva could follow the others, Miss Bennett held up a hand. She leaned to the centre of the table and tapped the stop button on the digital recorder. Concentration furrowed her brow.

“Find out about that man,” she whispered, without looking up.

“William Lee?” Eva frowned. “Find out what?”

“Everything. Where he’s come from, who he is and what he wants.”

“What he wants? What do you mean?”

“Everybody wants something.” Miss Bennett slowly tapped her finger on the table and raised her eyes to Eva. “If you find out what it is, you find their weakness.”

03 A WING AND A PRAYER

Jimmy Coates had been chased, kicked, shot at and throttled. He’d been blown up, nearly drowned in oil and set on fire. But it was the lies that had done the damage.

He shivered violently. Several hours at 10,000 metres was taking its toll. Without the climate control systems of a commercial jet, it was almost as cold as the Arctic. The Falcon wasn’t designed for it and Jimmy certainly wasn’t dressed for it. His jeans were ragged and torn, and his hoodie was too thin to provide any real insulation.

Keeping control of the plane was even more difficult now. He had to shift the flightstick with the weight of his shoulders because he couldn’t rely on the delicate touch of his fingers any more – he couldn’t even feel his fingers. Not only that, but soon his chest was straining for every breath. It felt as if each rib was barbed wire.

Despite the pain, all Jimmy could think about were the lies that had brought him here. First, the head of the CIA had tricked him into blowing up a British oil rig. He knew the British were blaming the French and were ready to strike back. Any second a war could start between France and Britain. It’s partly my fault, Jimmy thought. His stomach lurched and it wasn’t because of the turbulence.

His whole life had become a network of lies and secrets. Secrets like the fact that he was even alive. The British Secret Service thought they’d killed Jimmy in New York, but he’d tricked them and survived.

Lies like the ones his so-called father had told for twelve years, before revealing that Jimmy wasn’t really his son. Then Ian Coates had taken over as Prime Minister and issued the order to have Jimmy hunted down and killed.

Lies suit him, thought Jimmy. He’s a professional at it now.

Even I’m a lie, he thought.

38 per cent human. He could remember with cruel clarity the exact moment when he’d first heard those words. The intense dread rushed back to him. He’d discovered he was genetically designed by the Secret Service to grow as a seemingly normal child, but to develop the skills of the perfect assassin by the time he turned eighteen. He was to remain unnoticed by the rest of the world, while his true nature was kept secret even from himself.

But instead of waiting for Jimmy to grow up, the Government had sent him on a mission early. They didn’t even care that I’m a child, but they wanted me to kill. He couldn’t help imagining the terror he would have experienced if he’d gone through with the mission, instead of rejecting it at the last moment. That’s when NJ7 had turned on him.

Ever since, Jimmy’s assassin skills had been growing and causing nothing but distress. Now they might cause a war, he thought with horror.

Jimmy had been searching desperately for ways to prevent it. The simplest way seemed to be for him to reveal that he had blown up the oil rig – not the French. But to turn up in Britain now, alive, would bring all the heat from the Secret Service back on to him. I can take that, he thought. If it stops a war it must be worth it.

But he knew it wasn’t that simple. His mother, his sister and his best friend were in London. British agents watched over them every second. As soon as Jimmy revealed that he was still alive, the people he loved would be under threat again. At best they would be taken into custody. At worst… Jimmy didn’t dare imagine what nightmares NJ7 would put them through to extract information.

He shuddered and tried to focus all his energy on balancing the plane. But still his dilemma tore at him. It was simple: either he prevented a war, but left his family at the mercy of the Secret Service, or he could stay in hiding, protecting his family, but potentially destroying the fragile peace in Europe.

By now, Jimmy knew he was somewhere near the French-Spanish border, over the mountains. He had tuned the Falcon’s radio into the airbus’s communication system. On the seat next to him and across the floor of the cockpit, he had spread out all of the aeronautical charts he could find. Every signal to the airbus came with an automated verbal repetition – standard safety set-up on commercial flights. So Jimmy had picked up enough clues to work out the flight path. It was almost like Jimmy was listening to the plane’s thoughts.

And in his own head came the beginnings of an idea. France, he thought. Maybe that’s the answer… Could there be a way to keep his family safe and prevent war? Keep going, he told himself. The voice in his head was insistent, but his thoughts were muffled by the oxygen deprivation.

Jimmy was slowly suffocating. He realised he had to reduce his altitude, regardless of where he was. He flicked his eyes between the charts next to him and the nose of his plane, always watching and feeling for the constant adjustments in the airflow that was keeping him in the sky.

Time to dive, he told himself, and thrust the flightstick to the side.

It was like tumbling off the back of a rodeo bull. The huge body of the airbus ploughed onwards, while Jimmy watched the distance between them growing. Soon the commercial flight was a smudged shadow soaring far above him.

Jimmy was in freefall. With hands blue from the cold, he punched two buttons and flicked two switches. The Falcon’s engines sputtered into life.

I’ll make it to France, he thought, triumphant, as his head began to clear. I’ll warn them about a British attack and I’ll ask to see Uno Stovorsky. He remembered Uno Stovorsky from his last trip to France – the agent of the French Secret Service. The man had been gruff, but he had helped Jimmy and his family. Jimmy was sure he would help again.

Then the engines died.

Jimmy felt a violent explosion of panic in his chest. It was immediately dampened by a huge inner wave of strength. Jimmy tried the ignition switches again. Nothing happened. Again and again he tried restarting the Falcon’s engines, but they wouldn’t even splutter. He watched his hands moving calmly around the controls, while inside he was frantic.

No fuel. No engines. He heard the words repeating like a drumbeat in his head.

Jimmy’s genetic programming had already changed tactics. It felt like someone else was routing messages through his brain, but so quickly he couldn’t understand what was being said. Then the knowledge came to him fully formed, as if he had always known it.

He manoeuvred the flaps on the wing and the ailerons until the plane was gliding through the air, not plunging downwards. The design of the Falcon was on his side here – in case of engine failure it wasn’t meant to just fall out of the sky. But Jimmy knew it couldn’t stay up forever either. He looked around for a parachute and the ejector mechanism. Then he remembered: every passenger and member of the crew had taken their parachute with them when Jimmy had taken over the plane in mid-air. He’d made sure of it – he didn’t want to be throwing anybody to his death. Jimmy knew that decision might now condemn him. He was gliding in a tiny plane, several thousand metres up, without any power and without a parachute.

Suddenly the left side of the plane dipped. This is it, thought Jimmy. A vertical draft sucked the aircraft downwards. Jimmy felt his whole body reeling. He plunged through the clouds and saw the stark, white snowscape below. The plane was nose-diving towards the side of a mountain somewhere in the Pyrenees.

Every one of Jimmy’s muscles tensed. The scream of the air rushing past the plane seemed to pierce straight to the centre of his brain, doubling his terror. But he didn’t freeze. In fact he moved so fast he could hardly keep track of where he was.

He rolled out of his seat and climbed up, towards the back of the plane, digging his nails into the carpet. The friction forced some feeling back into his fingers. When he reached the cabin he grabbed hold of the passenger seatbelts and heaved his legs at the emergency exit. It flew open with such force that the door snapped off its hinges and hurtled into the sky. The wind blasted into Jimmy, knocking him back against the seats.

He crunched his stomach muscles to swing his entire body out of the door. He tensed his arms to rip the seatbelts from the seats. He slammed against the wing of the plane and slid along it, the back of his head knocking against the metal.

Jimmy’s body strained against the wind and the G-force while his hands worked to save his life. He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do and after a second he could hardly see because water was streaming from his eyes. He just had to trust that something inside him knew how to survive. He had to force his programming to take over from the terror.

He swung the two seatbelts over the lip of the wing, catching it with the buckles, then shifted into a crouching position, facing directly downwards, holding himself in place by gripping the straps at his sides. The wind in his face was so strong he thought the lining of his cheeks was going to tear.

Then he flexed his knees, rocking the wing. Over the roar of the wind in his ears, Jimmy heard a definite creak. The joint where the wing met the body of the plane was weakening. With the friction from the fall it wouldn’t take much more to snap the wing off completely. Jimmy rocked harder. He bounced on his haunches, listening to the creak growing louder. Then there was a massive splintering noise, like gunfire, then another. Jimmy kept rocking.

The ground charged towards him. He was close enough now to pick out the rocks and bare patches in the snow. He drove all his energy to his legs, frantically pushing against the end of the wing. Then, at last:

CRACK!

The wing lurched away from the rest of the plane. Jimmy was almost thrown off, but he squeezed hold of the straps and kept his footing. Then he threw his head and shoulders backwards, forcing his heels into the metal. The shift of his bodyweight pushed the wing underneath him. Now he was standing on a horizontal platform – and using the wind resistance of the wing to slow his fall.

All the time he felt the wing swaying violently beneath his feet. It wanted to flip on to its side again, but Jimmy wouldn’t let it. Now Jimmy was surfing again. But this time there was no slipstream to help him – just a vertical drop.

The side of the mountain loomed towards him. Then the rest of the plane crashed into the rocks. What little fuel was left in the tanks sent up a huge black and orange cloud. Jimmy felt the heat of it before he heard it. But he knew instantly that heat could save him.

The rush of hot air was like a cushion under Jimmy’s wing, but the updraft threw him off-balance. His feet slipped from under him and he pitched on to his front, smacking his chin against the front edge of the wing.

Then it was over. The wing slammed on to the snow with a cruel bounce. Jimmy clung to it as it raced down the slope. It was so steep Jimmy felt like he was still falling, but he could hear the fierce swoosh of solid snow and ice under him.

His surfboard had become a snowboard. Jimmy crunched his elbows straight, throwing his body upright again. He couldn’t see anything but a huge fountain of slush thrown up all around him. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, reading the undulations in the mountainside.

The wingtip cut through the ice, firing chips of it into Jimmy’s face and chest. But he didn’t care. He could feel himself gradually slowing down.

Then he hit a rock. The wing leapt into the air, catapulting Jimmy with it. He was thrown up with such force that he thought his bones would be ripped free from their joints. He heard his own voice crying out, distant and unfamiliar. The cold bit at his skin and all he could see was intense whiteness.

Then: THUD!

He hit something – and the total white turned to total black.

04 SEND THE ENFORCER

Eva watched the shadows shift across the turrets of the Tower of London to distract herself from the stifling air inside the car and the awkward silence. She and Mitchell had been parked there for at least half an hour, she guessed, with specific instructions not to get out. In that time, they had barely spoken. She was quite happy to keep it that way, but eventually Mitchell broke the silence.

“So your parents think you’re dead?” he blurted.

Nice conversation starter, thought Eva. She shrugged and turned to look out of the other window, across Trinity Square, to the sombre crowd around the Mercantile Marine Memorial. She couldn’t see anything that was going on, just a neat row of people’s backs about twenty metres away. She noted how unusual it was for so many people at a memorial service to be wearing bright colours. That was because a lot of them were military personnel in finest dress uniform. The civil servants and journalists were all in black though, making the overall effect like a mingling of peacocks and ravens.

“Don’t you mind that they think you’re dead?” Mitchell pressed. “They might, like, miss you or something.”

Eva sighed. “We didn’t get on that well, OK?” she explained. “My brothers know I’m fine. That’s all I care about.”

“You’re lucky you even know your parents,” Mitchell mumbled.

For a second, Eva felt a pang of sympathy. Mitchell never spoke about his own family. She felt the urge to explain that she knew all about what had happened to him: that his parents were killed in a car crash when he was a baby… that he’d escaped from his foster home… that his brother had beaten him… But she also knew what lay at the root of it all: Mitchell was the first child to have been genetically programmed to grow into the perfect Government assassin.

Eva shuddered and deliberately pushed away her sympathy. The boy next to her was the enemy. She had to remember that. Already he’d been sent several times to kill Jimmy Coates. The thought of it made her catch her breath. Jimmy’s sister was her best friend. It was for Jimmy and Georgie Coates that she risked her life every day, undercover at NJ7.

She reached forwards to the driver’s seat and turned the ignition one click so she could open her window.

“Hey,” Mitchell objected. “The windows are tinted for a reason, you know.”

Instinctively he tried to lean across her for the button. When he realised how close that brought them to each other, he froze. Eva glared.

“It’s just a couple of centimetres, OK?” she protested softly.

Mitchell pulled back.

“If anyone finds out the British Secret Service is employing two thirteen-year-olds Miss Bennett will go mental.”

“Who’s going to find out?” Eva asked. “Even if the press see us they can’t print anything about it, can they? Everything has to be approved by the Government press office.”

“I dunno. Miss Bennett said to stay out of sight. That’s all. Otherwise we’d be standing over there, wouldn’t we?” He nodded his head towards the throng of people. “And I should be out there. You know, paying respects, or whatever. I went on a mission with Paduk. I was partly trained by him.”

“You train yourself,” Eva snapped. “You went for runs with him, that’s all.”

Mitchell didn’t answer. He knew she was right. She was always meticulous about detail and Mitchell wasn’t in the mood to challenge her. He also wasn’t keen to dwell on the sort of training that went on in his body: his muscles developing as he slept, his programming sending thousands of signals through his synapses every second to give him new skills that he’d never guessed could be his. The skills of an assassin.

They were both glad to be distracted by the Prime Minister’s voice floating through the window on a waft of cooler air.

“Paduk died in the service of his country, trying to defend one of our most precious assets from foreign sabotage…”

They had to listen hard. Every time a car drove past it drowned out the words.

“…response will be diplomacy… for a peaceful resolution… but if pressed we are ready…”

Eva didn’t want to hear it. Whatever the man said, she knew he would probably be lying. But it wasn’t the words that upset her. It was the voice – that calm, reassuring, authoritative voice. To her it wasn’t just the voice of the Prime Minister, it was the voice of her best friend’s dad, Ian Coates.

A few minutes later he was marching back in the direction of Mitchell and Eva, flanked on either side by Secret Service agents in plain black suits. The sun glinted off their dark glasses and picked out the green stripes on their lapels. They were big men, but Ian Coates wasn’t much smaller. Eva remembered that all the time she’d thought he was an ordinary businessman, he’d in fact been an NJ7 agent, along with Georgie’s mother, Helen. Since becoming Prime Minister, he’d clearly gone back to a strict regime of physical training. The shoulders of his suit were bulging.

Eva watched him striding towards them, his jaw jutting out in grim determination. But the closer he came, the more she noticed something was wrong. His swagger was slightly off-centre and his face was pale, with patches under his eyes that were almost yellow.

He forcefully raised a hand to wave to the press, before they were escorted away as a pack by more Secret Service staff. No time to pay private tributes to the fallen hero they’d all come to commemorate. Not that they seemed bothered, Eva noticed.

Eva and Mitchell’s car was one of a row of five. Their driver appeared out of nowhere and opened the rear door, motioning Mitchell to shift over to make room, ready for Miss Bennett. As he shuffled towards Eva, the backs of his arms stuck to the leather, making a soft squeak. The Prime Minister’s car was the one directly in front of theirs. He paused with one foot in and one foot out, and raised his head back in the direction of the memorial.

Eva followed the direction of his stare and saw Miss Bennett approaching across the grass. She moved gracefully and with a slight sway in her hips. Eva was amazed she could walk so effortlessly fast in high heels. One side of her mouth was curled upwards in a half-smile and as she came closer a flash of sunshine caught the subtle green stripe in the weave of her pencil skirt.

As she reached the Prime Minister’s car, they started talking – quickly and without waiting for each other to finish their sentences. Eva couldn’t quite make out their words, but it was obvious they didn’t agree about something. She opened her window a little further to catch their conversation.

Mitchell tried to object. “What are you…?”

“Shh!” Eva hissed. “Can’t you use some special skill to tell me what they’re saying?”

Mitchell snorted a sarcastic laugh, but before he could reply, a loud click cut him off. The back door on the other side of the Prime Minister’s car opened. Eva and Mitchell both sat to attention and leaned forward. Out of the car stepped William Lee.

His presence stopped Miss Bennett’s conversation dead. Ian Coates looked from Lee to Miss Bennett and back again. For a second, nobody said anything. Then the Prime Minister seemed to glance up at the sky before issuing an order that Eva could hear perfectly, though it meant nothing to her.

“Mutam-ul-it. Make it ours.”

Lee’s response cut through all the background noise.

“I’ll send the Enforcer.”

Eva turned to Mitchell and read in his expression that he was as mystified as she was. Within seconds, Miss Bennett was sliding in next to them.

“What’s Mutam-ul-it?” Eva asked, not caring now that Miss Bennett would know she’d been eavesdropping. “And who’s the enforcer – what did he mean?”

“He means we’ve got work to do,” Miss Bennett replied calmly. Then a darker expression came over her face. “He means we’re attacking the French.”

05 NASU MISO

Felix Muzbeke’s fingers trembled on the glass of the door. Usually he had no doubts about walking into a restaurant, but tonight he hesitated. His arm seemed frozen. He stared at his reflection: large brown eyes a little too far apart and a chaos of black frizz on his head. But in his mind he was seeing something else.

He was remembering another glass door just like this one, nearly five thousand kilometres away in Chinatown, New York. And he could see the scene that he’d replayed in his imagination so many times. Hiding in the darkness when that long black car pulled up. The two huge men in black suits who’d calmly stepped out, grabbed his parents and forced them to the ground. His mother looking up from the pavement, signalling to him to escape.

“It’s OK,” came a whisper from behind him, startling him out of his memories. “It’s not like Chinatown.” It was Georgie.

Although he was a couple of years younger, these days Felix felt almost as close to Georgie Coates as he always had to her brother, Jimmy. And behind Georgie stood her mother, Helen. Both offered the same reassuring smile, lips pressed together, concern in their eyes.

So Felix opened the door and entered one of the few remaining sushi restaurants in Soho, in Central London. There was a time when the place had been packed with them, when there would have been hundreds of people around to eat in them as well – tourists, locals, shop workers. But Felix and Georgie had never seen it in those days and tonight Brewer Street was deserted. The buildings twisted above them, Victorian and Georgian styles butting edges like brickwork pick ‘n’ mix.

Before Georgie and Helen followed Felix in, they both instinctively glanced up and down the street. They all knew they were watched every moment by NJ7, either on camera or by field agents. Checking over her shoulder was an old habit for Helen and had become a new one for Georgie. A habit it was safer not to break.

Just as Georgie stepped over the threshold of the restaurant, a man swept along the street so fast he was already past them. But Georgie heard the echo of his whisper:

“Nasu Miso.”

Nasu Miso? Georgie repeated the words in her head. Was it some kind of message, or just a foreigner saying “excuse me”? She watched the man’s silhouette marching away along the street. His body and head were both round – like a satsuma balanced on a melon.

Her mother hurried her into the restaurant.

It was only a small room, with a low bar and about thirty stools, all of them empty. A conveyor belt snaked its way through the place, carrying dozens of small dishes, each loaded with different morsels. Japanese waiters with crisp white coats and stern expressions hovered about, their arms behind their backs.

“Three green teas, please,” announced Felix nervously, perching on the nearest stool.

They all knew they weren’t there to have a meal. They just had to look like they were, for the sake of the NJ7 surveillance. Georgie knew they were all thinking about the same thing: whether the man they would be meeting could find Felix’s parents. He was from a French charity that specialised in tracking down people who had been made to disappear by the British Government. It all made Georgie feel sick, not hungry.

She’d hardly sat down when her mother announced, “OK, let’s go.”

“Wait,” Felix blurted. “Aren’t we…” He looked around at the waiters. They were all watching. Felix knew he couldn’t say anything, but his face was a picture of anxiety.

“He’s just late,” Felix whispered. “We should wait. This could be the only way to—”

Helen hushed him with a smile. She’d taken a single dish from the conveyor belt: chunks of aubergine in a gloopy-looking sauce, their purple skins glistening in the low lighting.

Georgie glanced at the menu and scanned the pictures. There it was. “Nasu Miso,” she mumbled under her breath.

“So let’s go,” Helen repeated softly. She slipped her fingers under the dish and pulled out the three cinema tickets that had been concealed there. “We don’t want to miss the trailers.”

As Helen, Georgie and Felix took their seats in the centre row of the cinema, the opening credits were already finishing. A black and white title card announced that the film was called The Lady From Shanghai, then the actors started talking in American accents.

“What sort of cinema is this?” Felix whispered. “How come they’re allowed to show American movies?”

“Old films are OK,” Helen whispered back. “This was made in the 1940s.”

Felix scrunched up his face, as if the images on the screen were giving off a bad smell.

“They expect people to sit through a movie that’s older than me, not coloured in and about some Chinese woman? No wonder the place is empty.” He slumped down and started fiddling with the tattered velvet seat cover.

In fact there were a few other people there – a solitary bald head in the front row that reflected the flickering light from the film and two girls a few years older than Georgie. Felix thought they were probably students and wondered whether they had boyfriends. He was so desperate to think about anything except the reason they were there that he forced himself to pay attention to the movie.

Then came a sharp whisper from the row behind.

“Don’t look round.”

It was a man with a French accent. Felix and Georgie froze in their seats, but Felix couldn’t help very slowly trying to glance over his shoulder.

“Enjoying the film?” snapped the man behind them. He leaned all the way forward, until Felix could smell the popcorn on his breath. Felix quickly turned back, before he’d caught a proper glimpse of the man. Helen didn’t turn round at all, even when she started speaking.

“I assume you got my message?” Helen began.

Felix felt his blood fizzing with excitement. Maybe the man already knew where his parents were. But his hopes died almost immediately.

“A lot of people have disappeared since this Government came to power,” the man said. “My organisation is overstretched already. Every day we get new messages begging for help to find family members, friends, teachers. Thousands of them. Anybody with any views this Government doesn’t approve of. Anybody who shows any kind of support for Christopher Viggo. They all disappear. What makes you think your case is so special?”

“If there’s nothing special about our case why did you agree to meet us? Why take the risk?” countered Helen.

“In your message you said you thought NJ7 might use your friends for some political purpose. That’s unusual. What did you mean? These people weren’t politicians. Were they public figures? Scientists perhaps?”

“No.”

“Then don’t waste my time.”

Felix heard the man heave himself to his feet. He wanted to reach back and grab him, or shout out – anything to get the man to stay and help them. Then, to his shock, Helen Coates spun round and stated loudly: “I used to work for them.”

The man slowly walked back to them. The bald man at the front of the cinema turned round and gave a loud “Shh!”.

“For this boy’s parents you mean?” asked the French man, crouching again behind Helen’s seat.

“No – for NJ7.” There was a pause, filled only by the voices from the film. “Many years ago. I was NJ7, but I left when…” She stopped, suddenly wary of her surroundings.

“It’s OK,” the man reassured her. “This building still has walls lined with lead. It makes it difficult for them to listen in or to watch without having an agent inside.”

“Well, that’s all.” Helen added no more details.

“I see.” The man pondered for a moment and shovelled in a fistful of popcorn. “It makes sense now. Your method of communication, you demanding this meeting…”

While the man considered everything, Felix couldn’t help peering round. He didn’t want to miss a single word. Now for the first time he got a proper look at their contact’s face: podgy and sullen, with a neat, blond moustache.

Suddenly the moustache twitched. “Neil and Olivia Muzbeke could be more significant than I first thought,” the man announced.

Felix shuddered slightly at the mention of his parents’ names. They are significant, he insisted in his head. “You’re going to help us?” he exclaimed, with a surge of energy. He could barely keep his voice to a whisper.

The French man ignored him and spoke directly into Helen’s ear.

“You said in your message they were taken in New York, so they could be at any one of dozens of British detention centres all over the world. But from what you’ve told me I don’t think they’ll be dead. Yet.”

Felix felt a lump lurching up in his throat. He fought back tears.

“If I need to contact you again?” asked Helen.

“You’ll never see me again,” replied the French man. “But somebody will contact you.”

He left them with instructions to stay until the end of the film and go straight home afterwards. Felix sat in the darkness thinking of nothing but his parents and how wonderful it must be to be French.

06 WHITEOUT

Jimmy opened his eyes. He was surrounded by a whiteness so intense that at first it hurt the backs of his eyes. He tried to look down at his body, but moving his head was awkward, as if it was being held in place by a surgical clamp. Every bit of his skin was prickling from the cold. It grew more acute the more awake he became, until it was the pain of a thousand stabs.

The pounding of his heart and the flow of blood through his ears were the only sounds. Beyond that was unwavering silence. His slightest movement caused a low creak that was like a hurricane in comparison. What is that? he asked himself. Then he realised it was the noise of densely packed snow shifting.

Only now did Jimmy remember the details of his crash and that he must be suspended in a snowdrift in the Pyrenees. Every sensation became less disturbing because he could explain it. But then he was attacked by another memory – the reason he was here in the first place. Britain is going to attack France. How long have I been unconscious? I have to warn the French. For all he knew he could be too late.

Jimmy tried to raise his right hand to wipe his face, but the weight of snow packed in around him held it down. He jerked it free, sending a stab of agony through his ribcage.

He struggled to think clearly. He didn’t even know which way was up. He spat out a globule of saliva. His mouth was so dry it took some effort. The spit dribbled up his cheek, then froze just below his eye.

Great, he thought. I’m upside-down.

At last he loosened enough of the snow around him and tumbled backwards, just managing to avoid landing on his head. It was only a short fall, but the impact doubled every pain in his body. He gripped the right side of his ribcage and let out a cry of agony that rang off the cliff faces and echoed back to him.

The world was still almost completely white. Plumes of mist swirled around him, only parting for fleeting seconds to reveal glimpses of the mountain peaks. Massive rock formations, hundreds of times the size of Jimmy, poked their heads out of the whiteness to peer down at him, then disappeared again as if they’d seen enough.

Apart from these flashes of clarity, Jimmy’s visibility was less than a couple of metres. His body had developed the ability to see in the dark far better than any normal person and he had used it to escape some nasty situations in the past. But this wasn’t darkness – it was the opposite. His night-vision wasn’t going to help him here.

He glanced back and just made out the hole where he’d been stuck. Buried about half a metre into a wall of snow and ice was a cavity roughly the shape of Jimmy’s inverted body, with extra holes where he’d wriggled free.

He struggled to his feet, still clutching his ribs. Without realising he was doing it, his palms were prodding around the bones. When he came to the origin of the worst pain he winced and let out another cry. Two cracked, he heard himself thinking. He knew his programming was evaluating his condition and keeping him alive. Without it he would certainly have frozen to death hours ago.

He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and tried to calm down. He took several deep breaths, but every gulp of air chilled his gullet. Now he was out of the shelter of his snow hole, the wind brought the temperature plunging down. And Jimmy felt it threatening him. His shivering was brutal and uncontrollable. Then he looked down at his hands and knew that two cracked ribs were going to be the least of his problems. The ends of his fingers had turned yellow and white.

Immediately Jimmy found himself marching away from his snow hole. Every step sent a severe stab of agony from his feet. He assumed they were turning the same colour as his fingers, but he didn’t have any choice but to keep going. He deliberately planted every pace more firmly, almost revelling in the torture, challenging his programming to lessen the anguish. It was the only way he could make himself carry on walking.

Soon he developed a rhythm, then at last his programming swelled inside him. It felt as if he was growing an extra protective layer against the cold – almost like a fleece just underneath his skin. But still the wind bit into him, attacking every pore.

The further he walked, the more the snow around him revealed blackened corners of debris, like spots on a Dalmatian. A few paces on he saw the wreckage. It was a mess of ashen detritus and twisted metal, hardly recognisable as a plane. It might have been invisible in the snow except for fragments of metal shimmering under the thin layer of frost and blackened, burnt-out corners flapping in the wind.

Jimmy rushed forwards as fast as his body would allow. He crouched among the wreckage, desperate for some shelter, and dug around the ash and snow looking for anything that could help him. He tucked his hoodie into his trousers and scooped up armful after armful of ash from inside the body of the plane, stuffing it down his top for added insulation. Some he forced down his trouser legs too, until he felt like he was wearing a fat suit.

His hands were virtually useless now. He had no sensation in them except throbbing agony and couldn’t flex his fingers. Nevertheless he forced them into the snow and shovelled.

The only recognisable piece of debris he pulled from the wreckage was a half burned, blackened, in-flight washbag. The cloth cover had protected its contents surprisingly well. Jimmy pulled out an eye-mask, a mini-toothbrush, a tiny tube of toothpaste and a shoehorn.

With a rush in his veins, he snapped the shoehorn in two and used the elastic from the eye-mask to strap the pieces to the soles of his shoes. The upside-down curved shape would dig into the ice and give him vital extra grip.

Then he snatched up the travel-size tube of toothpaste, squeezed it in his fist and forced the contents down his throat.

Take all the energy you can get, he told himself. You’ve got some walking to do.

The waves attacked the shoreline with such ferocity, it was as if the water was angry that it couldn’t reach any further. For all its might, it couldn’t change the fact that just a few metres away was the edge of the largest desert on Earth. This was the battle line where thousands of miles of water met thousands of miles of sand – the West Coast of Africa.

On a mound overlooking the beach stood a single figure, lean and supple. She seemed to bend with the wind, not letting it bother her, and held a Zeiss-Ikon rangefinder steady at her eyes. Behind her trailed a stream of hair as black as her skin. Against the sand, her limbs stood out like charcoal twigs on snow.

Suddenly her whole body stiffened at what she saw in her scopes.

Through the thunder of the waves approached a ship so powerful and furious it looked like a salivating beast on its way to fight the whole of Africa single-handed. A Type 48 destroyer; 7500 tonnes of warship. She recognised the curious straight edges of the bridge section and the slim, arrow-like construction of the bow. From the centre rose a huge mast, which was more like an Egyptian monument. Radar balloons stuck out on either side and when the sun hit them they glinted like scowling eyes.

The destroyer was charging through the swell of the ocean towards the shore. She estimated the rate at over 30 knots. And at the sharp point in the front of the ship flew a bright Union Jack flag.

The British are coming, the girl thought, fear creeping into her joints.

She looked to her left, down the coastline, and adjusted the triangulation of the rangefinder. From here she had the perfect view of the only buildings for several kilometres. A couple of heavily marked tracks scarred the sands to the south and led to parallel lines of high fences. Within that was a complex of low buildings, connected to a dozen vast warehouses that backed on to the water. And there were two concrete towers supporting crude look-out stations, both topped by sun-bleached flags of red, white and blue – the French Tricolore.

Despite the distance, the girl could also make out human figures around the outer fence. Were they running? Yes. That’s when she knew for sure.

Mutam-ul-it was preparing for an attack.

So should we, she thought, steeling herself. Time to raise the alarm.

07 FEAR, PAIN AND A RED BEARD

Jimmy had been on the move for hours. The terrain was rugged and the air was thin. He could hear his brain assessing the surroundings. He had to be over 3000 metres up, he guessed. Above the snowline. That put him somewhere on one of the highest peaks, in the centre of the mountain range. But however difficult it was, he had to keep moving if he was going to stay alive. And there was the constant fear at the back of his mind, driving him on – the British attack on France. He had to stop it.

By now the agony that shot through his body with every step had mutated in his mind into some kind of reassurance. It told him he was still alive. That he was still moving. His legs felt so heavy that his feet dragged along the ground as he walked.

He travelled in a dead straight line, but the going was getting steeper. At least the fog had cleared a little so he could see his route further ahead. In the crash he’d slid a long way down the slope and he was paying for that now, always having to march against the gradient. Every few minutes he came to what looked like an impassable rock face, but his body seemed to relish the challenge. Despite the onset of frostbite and the cracked ribs, Jimmy free-climbed as if he’d been born a mountaineer. The hooks of shoehorn he’d fixed to his soles served as makeshift crampons.

With his eyes squinting against the elements and his body straining to keep his basic systems going, Jimmy fought on. But the real torment was in his mind. The whiteness that surrounded him seemed to reach into his brain to plant fear and worry, but most of all anger.

As he heaved himself up the cliff face, he thought back to the very first night that NJ7 had come for him. From that moment, almost everybody he trusted had betrayed him. He had believed Miss Bennett to be his form teacher and he’d even gone to her for protection. She had turned out to be the one woman who most wanted Jimmy dead. He felt a bitter laugh scratch at his throat.

But it had happened again and again. Eva’s parents had pretended to protect him, then betrayed him to NJ7. Colonel Keays had fooled Jimmy with the promise of CIA refuge. Jimmy’s stomach turned over when he thought of his own gullibility. How had he trusted any of these people? He had even convinced himself to use his assassin skills to work for Keays.

Never again, Jimmy thought. He told himself that if he made it across the Pyrenees to see Uno Stovorsky – or any other agent of the French Secret Service – he would beware every word that was said.

Trust your instinct, he urged himself. But in his heart he knew that even his instinct was untrustworthy. Sometimes it was the human part of him acting out of fear, or loyalty, or emotion. Sometimes it was the assassin in him, spurring him on towards self-defence, survival and violence. Perhaps even murder.

How could he know which instincts to trust and which to resist?

Around him, the light was fading. When darkness fell Jimmy knew the temperature would plummet even further. But there was no time to dig shelter for the night and rest. He had to keep going. There was a battle coming.

The largest destroyer in the British Navy dropped anchor 16 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara. The waves pounded against the iron, but to the commanders and crew of HMS Enforcer the conditions were irrelevant. Two hundred and fifty men and women in pristine white or navy uniforms moved through the vessel with such precision and efficiency they were like parts of a single machine.

In no time the Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles were primed. The targets were locked into the guidance system. Everything was perfect. Nobody needed to say a word.

Except one.

The front section of the central mast contained the command centre – a triangular room with a low ceiling and a door at each corner. This was the brain of the ship. The longest wall, the base of the triangle, was a huge window that looked out over the front of the vessel. All along it, at hip level, was the control desk. From here, the senior officers and their staff made all their decisions and issued their orders.

But one man was completely out of place. He was wearing a suit and a life-jacket and was at least 50 centimetres shorter than everybody else. Compared to their naval steel, he was made of pie pastry.

“Remember,” he said, his voice quivering, “we can’t—”

He was cut off by a glance from Lieutenant-Commander Luke Love. Love’s expression was harder than the iron of the ship’s hull. The sunlight coming through the glass picked out the proud gold braid on the upper part of his sleeve – two stripes with a single loop.

“A single misplaced explosion…” the other man whispered, so intimidated by Lt Cdr Love’s glare that he could hardly speak. “It’s such a delicate environment, that’s all. And we don’t really know what safety systems Mutam-ul-it has in place. You know, for the…”

“Don’t worry, Dr Giesel,” Love replied calmly. “We know enough.” His voice was strangely cheerful, but deep and serious at the same time. Like an experienced headmaster. “Your report told us which specific buildings to hit and which to avoid,” he explained. “The place will remain fully operational and almost all in one piece, ready for your team to take over.”

The muscles round the officer’s mouth creased into a grim smile. Then he lay his hand on the number pad of the control desk in front of him and punched in an eight-digit code.

“Right,” he declared under his breath. “Time to nationalise this hellhole.”

Even the walls of the town of Tlon showed the troubled history of the state of Western Sahara. Almost a century of graffiti was layered on top of itself. The oldest protested against the rule of the Spanish, from the time when they had colonised the country. It was no longer visible under the blurred mess, but since then there had been plenty of other people to complain about: the Moroccans (Western Sahara’s neighbours to the north), the Americans (first for them being there, then for them leaving), a dozen different football teams (from the time when the politics were so complicated even the locals didn’t know who to protest about) and, most recently, the French.

Every building bore the marks of unrest and instability. Cracks ran through the stone walls and holes in the roofs had been covered with ragged, sun-bleached tarpaulin to keep the heat out. These days the cracks and holes couldn’t be fixed, even though they let the rats in, because they were conduits for the cables of the rudimentary electricity and telephone systems. They were also used for signalling.

A series of flashes reflected the sunlight from the low roof of a house. Nobody would have noticed the dark figure hidden under the tarpaulin. Five hundred metres away the signal was acknowledged with another flash, then repeated at a new angle. It was acknowledged again, a little further away this time, towards the centre of town.

The rooftops of Tlon glittered with rapid flashes. There were sounds too, on top of the normal bustle in the labyrinth of narrow streets. Across the town, telephones rang once, stopped, then rang again before being picked up. But no words were spoken – there were only sequences of taps and breaths.

In the small central market there was a sudden eruption of squawking. A boy ducked under one of the stalls, disturbing a small chicken coop on his way through. He sprinted across the street, hidden in the cloud of dust he kicked up. He slipped past a market stall selling bootleg DVDs and burst into the building opposite – three storeys, almost completely masked by a huge Coca-Cola billboard.

Inside was a bare room, dark except for the horizontal stripes of light cutting through the shutters, making the floorboards look like a zebra-skin rug. There was another door at the back, partially concealed by a stained red curtain.

In front of it stood a young guard with a machine gun across his chest and a silver rod where his left leg should have been. In the darkness that was almost all that was visible, until he recognised the boy and smiled, revealing three rounded, pearly teeth.

The boy didn’t smile back.

“Mutam-ul-it,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath.

The guard’s smile vanished. He nodded and knocked on the door behind him. It flew open immediately. In the doorway stood a broad man, silhouetted against the harsh light of the bare bulb inside his room.

A European observer might have noticed this man’s wild red beard, deep-set blue eyes and the explosion of orange hair on his head. But to everybody in this town he could be identified simply as ‘the white man’. Certainly nobody paid any attention to the thin black tie worn loosely around his neck, or to his slender-lapelled suit – black, dusty and worn at the elbows. Who here would even notice that on one lapel was a short, green stripe?

When this man spoke it was in grammatically perfect Hassaniya Arabic, but with a strong northern English accent.

“I told you this would happen,” he announced, waving the boy away. He turned to his guard. “Go get the trucks. Now.”

08 BIRDS IN FLIGHT

At last Jimmy could feel the temperature creeping up a couple of degrees. The sun was rising – not that he could see it with the fog still so thick. He’d made it through the night. But the white world around him seemed to close in. Then it started spinning.

If I stop I’ll die, he told himself. But the voice was faint, as if something inside him was still shouting, but he had lost the ability to hear it. Keep walking, it continued, so feebly it was quieter than a thought. Then came echoes of the phrases he had repeated to himself over and over thousands of times since he started his trek: Find Uno Stovorsky. Warn France. But they were confused and lost beneath the wind.

Then even that noise stopped. Jimmy no longer knew where he was or where he was going. For a second it even felt like his thoughts were completely detached from his body. All the pain floated from his limbs…

No, he heard. Find Stovorsky… France… But the words didn’t mean anything any more.

A light pierced his eyes. Something silver and glimmering. It seemed to pull Jimmy towards it. He was overwhelmed by the sensation that this was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. The surrounding whiteness flickered from grey to blue to black. Is it night again? Jimmy wondered.

It was his last thought before his head hit the snow.

“Birds in flight, sir,” came a voice through Lt Cdr Love’s intercom. “The launch was clean.”

Dr Giesel ran his hands nervously up and down the front of his life-jacket, then straightened his tie.

“They’re definitely on target?” he whispered. “Because if they’re even slightly off—”

“This is the British Navy,” Love cut in. “We don’t do ‘slightly off’.” He kept his gaze straight ahead at the clutch of buildings on the horizon. The Tomahawk missiles twinkled above them. There was a glint of pride in his eye. But when he caught sight of the other man’s concern his expression softened. “The missiles are guided by GPS,” he explained, “and the targets can’t move. They’re buildings. Not people.”

Dr Giesel was satisfied for a second, until fear crept into his face again.

“What’s up?” Love asked. “Worried about killing a few Frenchmen?”

Dr Giesel’s mouth fell open in horror. How could this man be so flippant? Didn’t he realise he was effectively starting a war?

“Don’t worry,” chuckled Love. “Much as I would have loved to blow up some Frenchmen, we’ve got a live satellite feed that shows us they started evacuating as soon as they spotted us on the horizon. Our missiles will take about ninety seconds to reach them. That’s more than enough time for whoever’s left in there to clear out. Then the place is ours.” He winked and turned back to wait for the explosions. “It’s almost too easy, isn’t it?”

The intercom crackled into life again. “The last French truck has left the site, sir. The place is deserted.”

Love turned to Dr Giesel and gestured as if to say, ‘I told you.’

“Send the satellite feed up to my monitor,” he ordered, into the intercom.

A second later, one of the screens on Love’s control desk switched from a graphical display to a pin-sharp satellite image of the coast 16 kilometres ahead. The sand was a beautiful reddish-orange, but it was blemished by groups of square white buildings and criss-crossed by tracks. Then there were six much larger rectangular buildings lined up next to the water. They would have been overwhelming on the ground, but here they were reduced to knots of pixels. And racing away towards the edges of the screen were dozens of small black squares.

For a few seconds everybody on the bridge stood in silence, while French jeeps and trucks fled the compound. It was like watching germs squirming under a microscope. Some of them twisted and turned as if they didn’t know where to go. This was no orderly retreat, thought Dr Giesel.

In contrast, the atmosphere on the Enforcer was totally calm.

“Only a few people in the world have ever seen these images,” said Love softly. “You won’t find this place on Google, that’s for sure. And only a handful know what really goes on here.” He looked round at Dr Giesel. “Soon you’ll be the one in charge.”

Suddenly the screen went white. Dr Giesel’s eyes jumped from the monitor on the control desk to the horizon. Two towers of black smoke erupted into the sky. After a split-second they were lit up with orange flames. Then came the sound – two deep booms that shook the floor. Dr Giesel placed a hand on the control desk to steady himself, but noticed that he was the only person affected.

“Better prepare your team,” Love announced, so casually it was as if he had asked what was for dinner. “Mutam-ul-it will be under your control in no time.”

Dr Giesel was terrified to see what damage had been done, but at the same time he couldn’t look away. The smoke finally cleared enough for the ground to be visible again on the satellite feed. In the exact spots where there had been two white squares there were now two black patches, each surrounded by a ring of fire in the footprint of the destroyed buildings. The precision was incredible. But then the doctor noticed something at the edge of the screen.

“What’s that?” He nervously leaned forwards and laid a finger on the monitor. The black dots that had been rushing away from the compound were now rushing in every possible direction. Some had stopped completely, but after a few seconds they turned around and went back the way they came.

Lt Cdr Love peered at the screen. “What’s going on?” he barked into the intercom. “Don’t the French know how to evacuate? What are they doing heading back in?”

There was a pause, then a crackle. “It doesn’t appear to be the French, sir.”

“What?”

“It’s another force.”

“Another force?” There was confusion from everybody on the bridge.

“That’s right,” confirmed the voice on the intercom. “They appear to be taking over the French vehicles and…”

“I can see what they appear to be doing!” raged Love. “Why are they doing it? And how are we going to stop them?” He spun round to each of his officers in turn. Every one wore a blank stare.

“Well?” he bellowed. “Who the hell are these people?”

* * *

One second Mutam-ul-it was there; the next it had vanished in a plume of black smoke. Hot ash rained down around the girl, then hailstones formed out of the sand that had been melted together by the explosion.

The girl buried her face in the sand and covered the back of her head. But she didn’t have time to hesitate. She had waited as long as she could remember for this and she knew that the dozens of people waiting around her were going through exactly the same rush of disbelief, joy and dread. Some were much older than her, a few were even younger, but they were all looking to her for leadership.

For a moment she felt a surge of pride. Her father would never have believed that any woman could be in charge, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl – even his own daughter. Impossible. But no one in her parents’ generation had trained as hard or studied strategy as widely as she had.

Then her pride was overwhelmed by sadness. So few of her parents’ generation had survived. She forced away that thought. It was time to move. It was time to prove why the others were glad to be led by her.

She raised her head and checked that the fighters immediately around her were watching. Then she lifted her arm and signalled, indicating which teams were to head for which vehicles, exactly as she’d been trained. Time to run.

The signal was passed down the line and they acted on her command. As a single unit, they rose from behind the mound and charged towards the chaos. They were a silent force among the panic. Everywhere were French shouts, engines roaring and the din of the fires raging at Mutam-ul-it. But the unit ran in silence.

And none was faster than her. Her black hair flew behind her like a rebel flag. Before she had time to be afraid, she tumbled deliberately into the path of an open-top French jeep.

It swerved to avoid her, but came so close she reached up and caught the bumper. Sand mixed with exhaust fumes seemed to get inside her skin. She strained her arms to keep hold of the jeep. Though she was slim, her biceps bulged. It was as if every fibre of her body was muscle and passion. Just like training, she told herself, trying to ignore the darts of terror in her heart. She clawed her way up the back of the vehicle until she could reach the tread next to the rear wheels.

Inside were two huge soldiers in desert camouflage. But she took them by surprise. She punched the base of her palm into the nose of the passenger. Blood exploded all over the cab. Now she had a firm footing on the running board and she grabbed the blood-spattered man by the shoulders. He was unconscious, which made him all the more useful as a battering ram.

She forced the soldier’s head into the face of the driver. He scrabbled for a sidearm, but the girl stabbed her elbow into his shoulder with perfect aim. She struck the sternoclavicular ligament with such power she heard the bone beneath it shatter. The man cried out in pain and the gun dropped from his hand, while the jeep veered across the sand, out of control.

She was desperate to grab the wheel, but first she had to reach for the door handle and push the soldiers out of the jeep one by one. She couldn’t believe the adrenaline inside her. Her hands were shaking.

At last she took control of the jeep. She could feel tears itching to come out, but she swallowed the fright and steered the vehicle round to point straight back at Mutam-ul-it.

Through the thick smog she could make out everything she needed to know. Her teams had sent a shockwave through the French retreat. Their soldiers were reduced to escaping on foot. Some lay down, defeated; others tried to sprint away, flailing and staggering over the sands. Their jeeps were now hers. And every one of them was hurtling back towards Mutam-ul-it.

With a smile, she slammed her foot down on the accelerator.

HMS Enforcer was suddenly frantic. Crew scurried in and out of the command centre, handing print-outs to each other, poring over charts and conducting muttered conversations. Dr Giesel couldn’t keep track of what was going on. His breath was suddenly short and he had to sit down.

“We think it’s the local rebel force, sir,” came the voice through the intercom, much less assured that it had been only minutes before.

“You think?” Lieutenant-Commander Love’s face had turned red with fury. He strode up and down in front of the window. “Who trained them?” he bellowed. “How can they do this?”

He removed his cap to reveal a head of brown hair shaved aggressively short. He furiously massaged his scalp, then ordered, “Arm two more missiles.”

Dr Giesel sprang up from his seat at the back of the command centre and rushed towards the Lieutenant-Commander.

“Sir,” he panted, “we can’t do that.” Love spun round and glared with the look of the devil. Despite that, Dr Giesel insisted, “We don’t have another safe target.”

“We can’t have these people going in and occupying the place,” Love replied, his voice resounding about the command centre. Giesel’s response was less decisive, but immediate.

“We don’t know which other buildings—”

“So we’ll hit the same places again.”

“But the heat from the explosions…” The two men faced off against each other, but Dr Giesel knew his subject. He wasn’t going to be shouted down. “It’s already risky. Another blast could—”

“What is this – a negotiation?”

Love slammed his cap back on his head and rushed back to his control desk. He jammed his thumb into the keypad with such anger it threatened to split the plastic cover.

“No!” Giesel shouted. Love ignored him. Giesel took a deep breath and threw himself at the control desk. Love swatted him away without even looking up and pressed the final digit.

Giesel heaved himself to his feet and stared out of the control centre window, aghast. A second later, two missiles soared into the air.

“Right,” announced Lt Cdr Love, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “Get your team on board the chopper. We’re sending you in.”

“We can’t.”

“What?” Love scowled as if he was trying to shoot lasers out of his eyes straight into Dr Giesel’s forehead.

“I tried to warn you,” Giesel said quietly. “Sir.” He deliberately emphasised the word. “My report recommended that Mutam-ul-it would remain stable if you hit those two specific targets.”

“We did hit those targets!” roared Love. “And we’ll hit them again!”

“But my calculations were based on a single strike. The heat from two explosions will throw everything off.”

Love froze. Giesel waited for his message to sink in, but it didn’t look like the man was listening any more.

“Do you understand now?” Giesel asked, as gently as he could. “After those missiles hit, the whole place could be unstable. There’s no way we can go in.”

Lt Cdr Love turned away and rested his hands on the control desk. His head hung between his shoulders, hiding his face. Then he coughed and scratched at his collar.

“Signal Command,” he whispered to nobody in particular. “Tell them we have a problem.”

09 FRENCH WELCOME

Opening his eyes felt like lifting up a building. Every part of Jimmy’s body was either totally numb or in excruciating pain.

Pain means I’m alive, he told himself again, but it wasn’t reassuring. Then he felt a sudden heat in his chest. Within seconds it washed through his body, melting to a soft warmth. It was like diving into a pool of warm honey. It didn’t soothe his pain completely, but it made it bearable.

Slowly Jimmy became aware of his surroundings. The first thing he saw was soft beige light all around him and a huge ceiling fan whipping round above his head. His nostrils tingled with a bitter smell. It made him think of school on the first day of term. Then he remembered the same smell when he’d lightened his hair as a disguise. Bleach. Jimmy thought. I’m in a hospital.

There was something soft behind his head which he assumed was a pillow, but when he tried to feel around to check whether he was in bed, he found that he had no sensation in his hands.

Then he heard the squeak of soft shoes on lino and a shadow fell across his face. Jimmy felt the kick of a strong force inside his gut. His programming wasn’t only working to dull the pain. It was on full alert. Have they examined me? Jimmy wondered. What have they found? Maybe whoever had examined him had simply followed the usual procedure for victims of extreme cold and not noticed any unusual results yet.

“Uno Stovorsky?” came a high-pitched male voice.

“Yes,” Jimmy tried to cry out, but his throat felt like it had been slashed from the inside. He didn’t care. Somehow whoever was looking after him had found out that he needed to see Uno Stovorsky.

“Hello, Uno,” the man said in a thick French accent. “You are English?”

Jimmy’s heart crumpled. Why would anyone think he was Uno Stovorsky? He strained his neck to get a better look at the doctor. He was a short, middle-aged man with scars on his cheeks and a tidy goatee beard. A line of biros stood to attention in the top pocket of his immaculate white coat.

“I’m not Uno,” Jimmy said. His voice came out deeper than he was expecting and with a rough tone. He repeated himself, but this time relaxed his lips and tongue, letting his programming take control. His words came out in perfect French. “Je ne suis pas Uno Stovorsky.”

The doctor apologised, obviously shocked that his patient spoke the language like a native. He continued in French. “It’s the name you were muttering when they brought you in. You said it over and over. You have no identification on you, so we assumed it was your own name. Tell me—”

“When who brought me?” Jimmy didn’t have time to make a fuss about introductions and he certainly didn’t want to explain what he was doing in the Pyrenees in the first place.

“You set off the alarm when you touched the border fence.” The doctor’s face turned sour at Jimmy’s interruption. “That is only about five kilometres from here. We don’t get many who have survived a journey over the mountains. And children travelling alone…” He tailed off as if he expected Jimmy to give an explanation.

It didn’t happen. The man shrugged. “The patrol picked you up immediately. ”

In the past, the French-Spanish border had been left virtually unmanned, with travellers free to cross one way or the other as they pleased. But that wasn’t the case any more. Despite the relatively civil relations between the two countries, there were still security concerns. Now the border was clearly marked out by fences, patrols and checkpoints.

Jimmy remembered the silver glimmer he’d seen before he collapsed. It gave him a thrill of achievement. He’d made it to the border.

“Uno Stovorsky is an agent of the DGSE,” Jimmy explained. “Your Secret Service. Can you contact him for me? It’s urgent.”

Very slowly he flexed his elbows to force his upper body off the bed.

“You can’t get up,” the doctor protested. He tried to push Jimmy down, kindly but firmly. “It might not seem like it because you’re on powerful painkillers, but you’re very ill.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jimmy insisted. “I take vitamin tablets.”

He shook his chest to get the doctor off him, which sent a harsh stabbing pain through his ribs. Jimmy winced, but kept moving. In a second he was sitting upright. The ward housed five other beds, but they were all empty.

“You don’t understand,” said the doctor. “Even if you can get up, you can’t leave.”

Jimmy stared the doctor down, trying to read what he really meant. Then the details of his surroundings flashed up in his brain – details he didn’t even realise he’d noticed.

“Bars on the windows,” Jimmy muttered. “Doors of double thickness with reinforced glass. What sort of hospital is this?”

The doctor didn’t say anything, but glanced over his shoulder towards the thick double doors. Meanwhile, Jimmy rolled his shoulders, without knowing why. Then he realised. His programming was testing his mobility.

He had to know which movements were impossible and which were just painful.

He raised his hands to look at what damage the cold had done and for the first time saw that they were completely wrapped in bandages. He looked down. So were his feet. The balls of bandaging looked like four large portions of candyfloss, one stuck on the end of each limb. Now Jimmy also noticed the tube inserted into his arm, attached to a saline drip next to his bed.

“I don’t need this,” Jimmy announced, surprised at his own confidence. It increased as his programming fuelled his strength. Jimmy was feeling the effects of several weeks’ recovery condensed into a few minutes. It was thrilling. He hooked one bandaged hand under the tube and yanked it out of his skin. “Thanks for your help, doctor. I’m leaving.”

“Stay where you are,” the doctor ordered. “This isn’t a hospital. It’s the medical wing of a border control detention centre.”

“Detention centre?” said Jimmy, testing how far he could flex his knees.

“It’s where we keep people who try to cross the border illegally until they can be identified and—”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“We are helping you. That’s why I can’t let you—”

Before he could finish, Jimmy swivelled in the bed and stuck a leg out. He hooked his bandaged foot round the bottom of the metal stand his drip was hanging on and flicked it upwards. The base of it smacked the doctor in the knee. The man stumbled forwards.

Jimmy grabbed the pole between his forearms and stamped down on the wheel lock on one leg of his bed. Then he kicked against the wall to send himself rolling across the lino on the bed.

The doctor scrabbled for a whistle that was round his neck and gave it a huge blast. The echo had barely died when the double doors burst open. Two armed security guards charged towards Jimmy, one reaching for the baton on his belt, the other going for his gun. Jimmy kept rolling, using the metal pole as a paddle.

He crouched low on the bed and waited until the very last second. His programming was thrusting power into every corner of his being, as if it was grateful to be let off the leash at last. At the same time it gripped Jimmy’s mind, controlling his actions.

Just as the guards descended on him, Jimmy steered himself round in a sharp twist. He twirled the pole over his arm and smacked it into one guard’s face. The momentum spun the bed all the way round so Jimmy was facing the wrong way. Jimmy brought the pole under control and jabbed it backwards, under his arm. The foot of the stand connected with the other guard’s chest, then Jimmy snapped it upwards into his face.

When both guards hit the floor they stayed down.

But two more were hurtling towards the ward. Jimmy stayed calm. He rubbed his feet together to loosen the bandaging, then twisted his right hand into it and pulled. Within seconds it had unravelled, exposing his blackened and twisted left foot. Jimmy stared, relieved that the power of his programming combined with the painkillers meant he could hardly feel it.

The new guards were through the ward doors. Using his wrists and forearms, Jimmy wrapped the length of loose bandage round the metal pole. Then he kicked the pole directly upwards. The foot of it caught on a strut of the ceiling fan above Jimmy’s head.

Jimmy twisted his arms into the other end of the bandage and swung into the air, leaning back to control his direction. He slammed his knees into the guards’ faces and they toppled like skittles.

By now the first two guards were rolling over, trying to get up, but they were too late. Jimmy was through the doors. He hurtled down the corridor, half running and half sliding, with one foot still cocooned in bandage.

A quick glance at the emergency evacuation notice told him the layout of the building. As he ran, he tore at his bandages with his teeth, desperate to free his hands. He turned a corner, heading for the nearest fire exit.

Another guard sat in front of the exit reading a newspaper. When Jimmy tore into view, the guard leapt to his feet and held up a hand to signal “Halt!”.

Does that ever work? Jimmy wondered. He picked up speed, while the guard scrabbled for his walkie-talkie, then his gun. By then Jimmy was on him. He crashed his shoulder into the man’s midriff and the pair of them tumbled to the floor. Jimmy dived for the exit in a flurry of newspaper pages. He clattered through and an alarm erupted throughout the building.

Jimmy felt the ice-cold air hit his skin. It brought back the terror of his mountain trek. He looked around to find himself in a fenced courtyard, with a watch tower looming overhead. The guard’s newspaper was fluttering all over the courtyard.

“Stop immediately,” came a stilted voice, speaking in English, but with a French accent. “Otherwise you will be shot.”

Jimmy buzzed with the strangest feeling of delight. His programming hummed through him, relishing the battle. His brain whirred with a thousand calculations – the angle of the shot, the velocity of the bullet, the distance between Jimmy and the fence…

To his shock, a smile twitched in the corners of his mouth. He felt his muscles bracing for the sprint and was actually enjoying it. But then his eyes fixed on a single sheet of newspaper and the delight froze in his heart. Jimmy suddenly knew that there was no point trying to outrun the French shooter. He stopped dead still and raised his hands.

The newspaper’s front page swooped along the concrete. It was dominated by one image: the skeleton of a burnt-out building, with a huge grey battleship looming on the horizon. The ship was flying the Union Jack.

Suddenly four guards pounced on Jimmy, pushed him to the ground and cuffed him. He didn’t resist. He knew it was too late for that now.

10 LIES WORK

Mitchell jumped out of the shower and grabbed his towel. The red light above the sink had just come on. It reflected around the black tiles and gave the steam an eerie, hellish glow.

He rushed through to his bedroom, randomly drying bits of his body as he went. Drips ran down his nose and bounced off his brawny chin before hitting the carpet. He leaned over his laptop, careful not to drip on it, and found what he knew would be waiting for him. The red light only came on when there was an email from Miss Bennett.

He clicked it open and pulled his desk chair closer with his foot. Before his shower, he’d been absorbed in one of the SAS combat simulators. It was intended as part of the training for recruits, but to Mitchell it was just the best console game he’d ever played. The handset was discarded on the floor next to a packet of crisps and the image of a mangled enemy corpse was still paused on his TV.

His room was quite small, but it had everything he needed. In fact it had everything he had ever wanted: TV, HD-DVD player, and imported luxuries like a Bose sounddock. Even the shower responded to voice commands.

But he knew there was a price for living in such luxury. Looking around the room, with its smart black and red design, there was one obvious reminder of his situation: the lack of windows. The British Secret Service had taken over his life so much that these days he lived underground, in one of the few residential apartments at the NJ7 network.

Miss Bennett’s email had no message in it, but a video popped up instead. Mitchell settled back to watch.

The image was jerky, as if it had been filmed on a hand-held device, like a mobile phone, and at first it was too dark to see anything. Mitchell turned up the contrast on his screen.

The video appeared to have been filmed in a snooker hall. There was the noise of balls being hit and in the corner Mitchell made out a sliver of green baize. But everything was obscured by the shoulders of people around the camera. The place was packed. Then Mitchell finally realised what the focus of the filming was.

At the front of the crowd was a tall figure addressing the others. His manner was relaxed, but powerful. Mitchell turned up the volume. He could just make out snippets of the man’s speech above the cracking of the snooker balls and the murmurs of the crowd.

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