Rogue (5 page)

‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’ Lucy snapped. ‘Not that you’d be able to find anyone as grotesquely swollen as you two steaming sacks of lard.’

‘Lucy, it’s all right,’ Laura said quickly.

‘No, it’s not all right,’ Lucy said, walking up to Block and jabbing a finger into his chest. ‘You two think you’re real big men, huh? Picking on a lone girl. You want to know what I think?’

‘Yeah,’ Block said with a nasty growl, ‘why don’t you tell me? Might be the last thing you get to say for a while. Hard to talk with your jaw held together by wire.’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Lucy said with a sudden nasty smile. ‘You know what they say about bullies like you?
All you really need is a hug.
’

Twisted into Lucy’s voice were what sounded like dozens of sinister whispering echoes, and as she finished speaking Block and Tackle’s faces went blank for just the briefest of moments. Then, without warning, Block turned to Tackle and they hugged each other.

‘Come on,’ Lucy said with a broad grin, ‘let’s leave these two to it.’

‘I thought you didn’t like doing that,’ Laura said, glancing over her shoulder and looking at the two boys locked in an affectionate embrace. Lucy had inherited ‘the voice’ and its ability to control the minds of others from her grandmother, Contessa Maria Sinistre, but she was usually reluctant to use it. In this case she’d clearly decided to make an exception.

‘I don’t normally,’ Lucy said with a grin, ‘but sometimes . . . well . . . let’s just say that it’s hard to resist. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off . . . in an hour or two.’

By the time they reached Ms Leon’s class they’d almost stopped laughing.

.

Chapter Three

The Shroud soared over the Harbour Bridge and past the famous white curving structure of the Sydney Opera House, banking towards the gleaming skyscrapers of the downtown area. There it dropped into a hover and slowly descended through what looked like a solid roof but was in fact an elaborate holographic projection. The Shroud touched down gently on the hidden landing pad and a few seconds later the hatch opened with a hiss, the loading ramp dropping to the tarmac with a mechanical whirr. Diabolus Darkdoom was waiting at the bottom of the ramp to greet Nero and Raven.

‘Diabolus,’ Nero said, shaking his friend’s hand.

‘Max, Natalya, welcome to Australia,’ Darkdoom said with only a small smile. ‘It is good to see you both again. I only wish we were meeting under happier circumstances.’

‘What’s wrong, Diabolus?’ Nero asked, genuinely worried by Darkdoom’s uncharacteristically dark mood.

‘It’s probably easiest if I show you,’ Darkdoom said, gesturing at the doors leading out of the concealed hangar. ‘The others are already here. Let’s get started, shall we?’

Raven exchanged a puzzled look with Nero as they followed Darkdoom across the hangar – it was unlike Diabolus to be so evasive. The three of them walked in silence down a couple of corridors until they arrived at a pair of frosted glass doors engraved with the G.L.O.V.E. emblem. The doors hissed apart as they approached and they walked through to find a large conference room containing a long oval table around which sat the other members of the G.L.O.V.E. ruling council. Along one wall of the room was a full-height window that gave a stunning view of the Sydney skyline. As Nero took his place at the table he could not help but notice that two of the seats were conspicuously empty. Raven quietly went and stood against the wall behind Nero, studying the faces of the other members of the council seated at the table. They all looked as if they were feeling the same mixture of curiosity and anxiety as Darkdoom went and stood at the head of the table, his back to the window.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, looking around the table, ‘thank you all for coming at such short notice. As you know, I am reluctant to force us all to gather in person like this, but there is a matter that requires our immediate attention. I am sure you have noticed that two of our number are not here today. There is, unfortunately, a very good reason for that. Over the past week both Jonas Steiner and Madame Mortis have been assassinated.’

Diabolus paused for a moment, noting the looks of astonishment on the faces of his fellow council members.

‘Towards the end of last week Steiner’s private jet crashed in the Bavarian Alps. A catastrophic failure in the plane’s navigation system and autopilot caused the plane to fly straight into the side of a mountain. However, it has become increasingly apparent that this was not just a case of equipment failure, but rather a deliberate act of sabotage.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Lin Feng, the head of G.L.O.V.E.’s Chinese operations, said angrily.

‘Please,’ Darkdoom said quickly. ‘There will be time for questions shortly, but first there is something you should all see. Madame Mortis was attacked within her own headquarters, and our clean-up team was able to retrieve this footage from the building’s security system.’

He picked up a slim remote control from the table and pointed it at a large flat-screen display mounted on the wall at the far end of the room. The screen lit up with an image of an underground car park, and after a couple of seconds a black 4x4 raced into shot, coming to a screeching halt just beneath the camera. The assembled council members looked on in silence as the attack on the building unfolded. Raven watched as the assassin in white body armour neatly disposed of the bodyguards, feeling a mixture of anger and, she had to admit, slight grudging professional respect for the mysterious woman’s abilities.

‘As you will no doubt have noticed, Madame Mortis escaped that attack,’ Darkdoom said with a frown, ‘but it appears that she was merely being herded towards a much more gruesome fate.’ He hit another button on the remote control and the image on the screen switched to display footage from another camera, mounted in the back wall of an elevator carriage. Madame Mortis could be seen talking into her mobile phone as her bodyguard moved to position himself by the doors. She snapped the phone shut and then, just a few seconds later, the doors of the lift opened and her bodyguard raised his weapon, levelling it at a figure standing in the corridor beyond.

Nero felt a sudden horrible twinge of recognition as the person in the corridor raised one hand and pulled back the hood that had been concealing his face in shadow.

‘No . . .’ Nero whispered to himself as the image froze and the display zoomed in on the all too familiar face.

‘What happened next is what led us to question the nature of the crash that killed Steiner,’ Darkdoom said, looking around the table but avoiding eye contact with Nero. He hit the control again and the footage continued to play. The lift carriage lurched downwards and then Otto said something. A moment later the carriage took a plunge, the walls of the elevator shaft flying past, visible between the still open doors, as the digital counter on the wall raced downwards towards zero. The expression of terror on the faces of Madame Mortis and her guard as they clung uselessly to the rail that ran around the wall of the carriage was spine-chilling. Barely a second later the footage ended abruptly in blackness.

‘I’m sure that you all recognise the face of Madame Mortis’s attacker,’ Darkdoom said, suddenly looking very tired, ‘and I’m equally sure that you are all at least somewhat familiar with his abilities. Once we became aware of Mr Malpense’s involvement here we reviewed the limited data that we were able to retrieve from the flight recorder on board Steiner’s jet. The navigation systems had been remotely reprogrammed to ensure that the plane would crash. The technicians who reviewed the data assure me that there is only one way that this could possibly have happened –’

‘Otto would not have done this,’ Nero said quickly, feeling a mixture of anger and confusion. ‘I know him. He would not betray us like this.’

‘I truly wish that I could believe that, Max,’ Darkdoom said with a sigh, ‘but all the evidence suggests that he is directly responsible for the deaths of two members of the ruling council. He has been missing for months and it would appear that in that time he has, somehow, been turned against us.’

‘But why would he leave the footage of the attack on the security system?’ Raven asked. ‘It would have been a trivial task to remove all evidence of his presence – he must have known he was being recorded.’

‘For the very same reason that the woman who attacked the parking garage left one of the guards alive, I suspect,’ Darkdoom said with a frown. ‘Whoever is responsible for this wants to send us a message.’

‘Who would dare to risk a direct confrontation with us?’ Carlos Chavez, the head of G.L.O.V.E.’s South American operations, asked.

‘Sebastian Trent would,’ Nero said, feeling angrier by the moment. ‘We suspected that Otto had fallen into his hands, but I had hoped that we would be able to track him down before he made his next move.’

‘You knew that the boy had been captured by H.O.P.E. and you chose not to share this information with the rest of us?’ Lin Feng said angrily. ‘Are you insane? The boy is a weapon – a weapon that we cannot allow Trent to exploit.’

‘As I say, I had hoped that it would not come to this,’ Nero said quietly.

‘That does not excuse concealing this from the rest of the council,’ Chavez said, glaring at Nero. ‘What gives you the right to decide what we all should or should not know?’

‘That’s enough!’ Darkdoom snapped, silencing the other council members. ‘I supported Maximilian in this. There was no point in discussing Malpense’s disappearance with you all until we had more information – information that Raven was actively engaged in acquiring, and unless any of you have an operative who would have been better suited to that task I suggest you spare us your indignation.’

‘Have you made any progress?’ Lin Feng asked, looking at Raven.

‘Yes,’ Raven replied, ‘but Trent has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his whereabouts secret. At first I thought that it was simply because he knew that we would be attempting to reacquire Otto, but I think that it’s now clear that he was also planning these attacks. I
will
find him. You can count on that.’

‘Oh, I do not doubt your abilities, Raven,’ said Lin Feng, ‘but we cannot ignore the fact that this situation has become much more serious.’

‘We are quite aware of the danger that this represents,’ Darkdoom said. In the meantime we will all have to increase our own levels of personal security accordingly. By letting us know that we are all targets, Trent has at least given us the chance to better defend ourselves from any attack.’

‘I cannot speak for the other members of the council,’ Chavez said, still sounding angry, ‘but that is not enough for me. I want the Malpense boy declared a rogue operative.’

‘No,’ Darkdoom replied quickly. ‘We all know what that means, and I will not issue a termination order for Otto unless there is absolutely no other alternative. Whatever he has become, we still owe the boy a great deal. We should not forget the part that he played in preventing my predecessor from succeeding with his insane plans.’

‘We are all grateful that Number One was stopped,’ Lin Feng said, ‘but only you and Doctor Nero know exactly what happened. It would seem that rather too many essential facts have been kept hidden from us recently.’

Not for the first time Nero found himself wondering if he and Diabolus should have shared with their fellow council members the full details of what had taken place during the final confrontation with Number One. At the time it had seemed wise to simply tell them that their mysterious leader had been planning global genocide, leaving out the details of Number One’s corruption by the Overlord AI and Otto’s part in his plans. They should have realised that the people sitting around this table were never going to be satisfied with anything less than the complete truth. Indeed, it had been precisely that dissatisfaction that had driven Jason Drake to break away from G.L.O.V.E. and triggered the catastrophic series of events that had led to Otto’s capture during the Dreadnought incident.

‘Are you suggesting that we have lied to you?’ Darkdoom asked, a sudden edge to his voice.

‘No, but we have a right to protect ourselves in whatever way we see fit,’ Lin Feng replied calmly. ‘We cannot afford to take any chances.’

Darkdoom looked slowly around the table. He knew that there were some of them who still did not fully agree with his appointment as head of the ruling council, and while they might not be prepared to challenge him directly, they were keenly waiting for him to make a fatal mistake. Number One had controlled them through fear, and with that fear had come respect. Darkdoom knew that in the absence of that fear he needed to show strength to earn their loyalty. If they sensed weakness, they would rip him apart like a pack of wild dogs. Not for the first time he felt a grudging respect for the ease with which his predecessor had kept them all in line.

‘I need time to consider the options available to us,’ Darkdoom said. ‘Rest assured that I will not let Sebastian Trent destroy this organisation.’

‘Decide quickly, Diabolus,’ Chavez said with a frown. ‘Or we will decide for you.’

It was as close to a threat as any of the assembled leaders of global villainy would have dared.

Laura and Lucy hurried through the door into the lecture theatre.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ Laura said apologetically as they took their seats next to Shelby and Wing.

‘You and Miss Dexter can demonstrate just how sorry you are in detention this evening, Miss Brand,’ Ms Leon said, sounding irritated.

It was bad enough that they were getting punished, Laura thought to herself, but it was somehow worse being given detention by a cat. Ms Leon was without doubt the strangest of all their teachers. She had taken part in one of Professor Pike’s more unusual experiments, designed to give her the stealth and enhanced senses of a cat, but it had instead left her consciousness trapped inside a fluffy, white and unmistakably feline body. This had clearly done nothing to improve her already short temper. Miss Leon kneaded the red velvet cushion on the desk at the front of the room for a second before settling back into the sphinx-like pose that she always adopted when giving a lesson.