Target (10 page)

with doors leading off it to other people’s rooms.
Other safehouses,
Jimmy wondered,
or just homes?
He brushed past the coats hanging by the door and tiptoed up the stairs. His instructions were to proceed directly to the top floor.

At the top of the stairs was another door. Jimmy tapped the entry code into another keypad and pushed it open. He found himself in a dingy one room flat. The whole place was grimy and smelled as if the windows hadn’t been opened in a decade.

The first thing Jimmy did was search the room. He didn’t know why and he didn’t know what he was looking for, but an overwhelming instinct wouldn’t let him do anything else until the whole room had been stripped and inspected, top to bottom. It didn’t take long. The room was small with only two beds and an empty chest of drawers. One corner of it had been converted into a kitchen. There was a little cash in one of the kitchen drawers and a small fridge containing a few basic items obviously left for Jimmy and his mother. Jimmy ate alone while he dismantled the fridge and put it back together piece by piece. He found nothing out of the ordinary.

There was a tiny bathroom too. Just a toilet, a sink and a shower – more like a cupboard, really. Jimmy’s head was spinning. He hadn’t slept and it was dawn already. He had to stay awake until he knew he was secure, then he could sit tight and wait for Stovorsky and his mother to come and meet him.

He stripped, laying his clothes over the radiator, and gently pulled the plaster off his neck, then the bandage from his leg. The flesh had knitted together, but there were still thick red lines where the skin hadn’t healed. And the whole area was tinged with the blue-grey that lived under the surface. Without that, Jimmy knew he would have lost his leg.

He stood in the shower, trying to refresh and refocus. It took a minute for the water to heat up, but as soon as it did, Jimmy wished he never had to leave it. Despite his programming doing its best to control his temperature, his fingers and toes had severely needed the circulation of warm blood.

That was it – his toes. Jimmy looked down at his feet. Water lapped around his ankles. Something was blocking the drain. He knelt down and carefully unscrewed the covering of the plug hole. A tile was loose. But it wasn’t just one tile, it was a block of them grouted together to give the shower a false bottom. Jimmy lifted it up to reveal a sealed plastic bag. In it was a laptop computer and a gun.

In a few minutes Jimmy had towelled off and found that the laptop had a fully charged battery, but no data on it at all. It had a built-in modem. Jimmy wondered whether the signal would be scrambled. If he used it, would it give away his location?

The gun was another Beretta 99G pistol – the type used by the French Secret Service when they had raided
the farmhouse. Jimmy slipped the laptop back into its hiding place under the shower. He kept the pistol.

He had never held one before, but it was eerie how naturally it seemed to fit in his hand. Jimmy turned it over, examining it. Should he be afraid of it? he wondered. Or should it make him feel powerful? The longer he studied it, the more it became just a lump of metal. The gun was certainly dangerous, but there was a different kind of danger everywhere else: it was wherever the Prime Minister had agents operating and it was inside Jimmy.

With a shudder of disgust, he dropped the gun on the mattress. He couldn’t bear to hold it any more. He rummaged in a kitchen drawer and found a spoon. With it, he began to dismantle the weapon, painstakingly tweaking at all the tiny screws until the whole thing began to come apart. Minutes later, he clattered its metal bones to the floor.
That’s safer,
he thought.
Only killers need guns.

Before Jimmy climbed into bed he suddenly stopped, staring at his hands. He couldn’t look away and fear crept over him like a storm cloud.
What if these are even more lethal than that gun?
he thought, laying his head on the pillow. At last he closed his eyes.

An ache returned to his leg. His fists were trembling.

“C
OME IN
.” M
ISS
Bennett’s voice penetrated the solid door with ease. Eva tentatively pushed it open and shuffled in, clasping a brown envelope marked Top Secret.

“The Ministry of Defence thought you would want to read this report immediately, Miss Bennett.”

Eva stepped carefully forewards under Miss Bennett’s expectant gaze. Miss Bennett took the brown envelope without a word of thanks, but examined Eva closely. “You know you’re not a prisoner here, Eva?” she asked in a steady tone. “You can go home at any time.”

Eva nodded, her face impassive. “As soon as I’m ready.”

“I understand.” Miss Bennett smiled at last. “You’ve been through a lot.” She paused, fingering the envelope. “You know, I was young when I started working for the Secret Services too. Not as young as you, but still very young.” Eva tried to push her lips into a smile. They twitched.

“There’s a lot that I want to teach you,” Miss Bennett went on. “Why don’t you start by taking breakfast to our guests?”

Eva nodded again and quickly left the room, pulling the door tight shut behind her. She didn’t even linger to try and hear what Miss Bennett might be doing. She didn’t need to. She knew Miss Bennett would be phoning the Prime Minister directly.

Eva had already read the report that was now in Miss Bennett’s hands. She could recite it almost word for word:
Navy Offshore Patrol Vessel intercepted and sank small craft off south-east coast. All crew and passengers apprehended. Those in custody include one woman. She appears to have Special Forces training and fits Helen Coates’s description.

Eva let the information wash around her head. They had Jimmy’s mother. But it was a different world for Eva now. One with hope – Jimmy was alive.

She walked sedately through the plush corridors – blood-red carpet under her feet, ancient French tapestries on the walls around her.
So this is what the inside of an embassy is like,
she thought. She continued down a grand flight of stairs, avoiding a cleaner who was furiously vacuuming. At the lobby, three floors below, Eva paused to pick up a tray of food from the security guard at reception.

“Miss Bennett asked me to take this down,” she said.

She crossed the lobby and another security guard
tapped the brim of his cap. He pressed the button that would call the lift for her. After a wait of a few seconds, the light above the doors pinged to indicate that the carriage had reached the lobby, but the doors didn’t open. The guard jangled his key chain and pulled a small golden key towards a panel by the lift doors. When he turned the key in the lock, the doors slid open.

It took almost a minute for Eva to reach the basement. When the lift doors opened again, Eva could have been in a completely different building. All the grandeur was gone. In front of her was a cavernous concrete hall that looked more like the basement of a multi-storey car park than the French Embassy. It was about the size of a football pitch and at one end a JCB excavator was blasting through the wall. Men in hard hats and black suits milled around, helping with the construction job.

Eva walked steadily across to the other end of the hall, towards a line of cells. As she approached the bars, she stopped first at a wall of bulletproof perspex. One security guard checked the pass clipped to her shirt, while another tapped a password into a computer, which opened a sliding door in the perspex to allow her through.

That was as close as she came to the prisoners though. The security guard took the tray from her and waited until she was on the other side of the perspex again. Before heading back to the lift she looked at the
figures huddled in the cell. Two of the prisoners had been there for three days: Christopher Viggo and Saffron Walden. Then there was a third who had been arrested the night before on charges of espionage and was due for interrogation that day: Uno Stovorsky.

Jimmy burst into life and sprang off the bed. He kicked at the gun parts, which rumbled across the floorboards. He scanned the room. What time was it? The lights on the microwave glowed at him: 17.34. Could that be right? Had he slept all day? Why hadn’t Stovorsky arrived and woken him? Where was his mother? They should both have arrived by now.

The fog of a nightmare still stifled his mind. He could never remember anything he had dreamed and this was no different. All that remained was that intense anxiety clutching at his muscles. On this evening, he couldn’t shake it off.

Something must have gone wrong. A few days ago the only people that needed rescuing were his best friend’s parents. Now Jimmy felt like the only one who
wasn’t
locked up somewhere.

Were Viggo and Saffron even still alive? And what about his mother? It took several minutes for Jimmy to clear his head. There was nothing to panic about. They were just late – that’s all. But in his gut, the worry spread into a bubbling turmoil. All he could do was wait.

Jimmy assembled some scraps of food into a sandwich and paced the room. He peered out between the curtains. Every noise alerted in him some kind of hope that his mother was coming up the stairs. But nobody came.

I’m on my own,
Jimmy heard in his head. He refused to believe it. But with every second that ticked by, he knew that he had to face the truth. He had no idea where his mother was. He had no idea where Stovorsky was. And they weren’t coming.

Jimmy slumped on to one of the beds, staring at the cobwebs in the corner.
She’ll be OK,
he assured himself.
She told me she would be.
He didn’t stop to examine whether he believed his mother’s promise. It would be far too frightening.

He jumped up and stormed round the room, kicking at the furniture. “Why did it have to go wrong?” he shouted aloud, surprising himself with the vehemence in his voice. He clenched his fists. There was a heat rising in his chest. His fist lunged towards the wall. But he stopped himself.
This is no good,
he thought.
Keep control.

He realised then that there was one thing he desperately needed. His friends. Jimmy pictured Felix and Georgie stuck at the farmhouse. Should he try to contact them using the laptop? It was risky, but if he knew his sister, she was bound to spend time at the Internet café in the village. She would never risk giving herself away by
checking her emails, but there were other ways of communicating.

Jimmy turned it over and over in his mind. As the time passed it became increasingly clear that Stovorsky and his mother weren’t coming. Jimmy was definitely on his own. But he didn’t need to be. If there was any chance that Georgie and Felix could help him, he should take it. It soothed him just thinking about them coming to join him. Yannick’s face would be all over security lists, but surely there was no reason for immigration to stop two kids, was there?

Jimmy felt a spark of excitement. But could he leave them a message that wouldn’t be intercepted? Jimmy tried to remember all the websites his sister might visit. Most of the Internet was restricted in the UK because of the Government’s censorship, so there weren’t that many.

He set about the task methodically, posting in every chatroom and weblog he could think of that his sister might stumble across. It wasn’t easy putting himself into the mind of a thirteen-year-old girl – some of the sites made him cringe. Eventually, he found himself in a rhythm, flitting from site to site, creating dozens of identities to register and post a message. He always registered with the same username: JawG, and the message he left was always the same:
Get 2 London. Feel icks too? Then leave the cook.

Jimmy was quite pleased with it. He thought it sounded enough like a girl that most people wouldn’t
mind that it seemed irrelevant to whatever topic was being discussed. As for it not making sense, well – girls never made sense anyway, did they?

After a while, Jimmy found his eyes tiring, and his imagination running out of ideas of which websites to visit. He shut down the laptop. If Georgie saw the message and understood it, she and Felix would turn up at the safehouse. It could take days though before that happened – if it happened at all. For the time being, Jimmy had to carry on as if they weren’t coming.

There was only one obvious place to start investigating – the French Embassy.

Jimmy went to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror above the sink. A crack in the glass ran down one side of his face. He took the thin bar of soap in his hands and squeezed off two small pieces, moulding them into long cup shapes. He placed them just over each eyebrow and pressed them on to his forehead. He repeated the process, this time pressing more soap on to his cheeks.

His hands were moving confidently, as if they had performed this routine a thousand times before. Slowly, Jimmy began to understand what his programming was helping him to do – create a disguise.

Next he made a roll out of toilet paper and stuffed it under his upper lip. More went between his teeth and his cheeks. He ran his hands under the tap for a few seconds, then rubbed them on the rusty pipe
underneath the sink. They came away covered in muck, which Jimmy smoothed over his face and neck, blending the pieces of soap into this new skin colour.

Finally, he needed to disguise his hair. He ripped off a corner of wood that was loose in the window sill and placed it in the sink. There was a box of matches in the kitchen drawer, and in a few seconds the wood was alight. A couple of minutes later it had burned away. Jimmy gathered the ashes and spread them through his hair with his fingers.

When he saw himself in the mirror again, he almost wanted to laugh. The shape and colouring of his face had completely changed. He looked more like an old man than a boy. But this old man was ready for his mission.

F
ELIX DRUMMED HIS
fingers on the old oak of the kitchen table. A book lay open in front of him, but he had hardly glanced at it in the last half an hour. It was all in French. Opposite him, Georgie was making a better job of pretending to read. Every now and again she would flick her eyes up at him as a reminder that they had to look like they were studying.

Yannick’s mother was pottering about the kitchen, mumbling to herself and scowling at Felix. At last, she left the room. Felix sprang up and pushed a chair against the door.

“I thought she’d never go!” he shouted.

“Shh!” Georgie jumped out of her seat too. “What if she tries to come back?”

“No chance. She’s gone for a nap. I slipped some cognac into her hot chocolate.” Felix’s grin was wider than ever, and Georgie couldn’t stop herself laughing.

“Great – so we’ve got about an hour before Yannick’s
back from the village. Let’s go.” She leapt up on to the table. “You first.”

Felix bounced on the balls of his feet and stretched a random selection of muscles. He took a three-step runup, then launched himself straight at Georgie. She was quick on her feet too. She swivelled and parried Felix away. He crashed to the floor, then he was up again, this time attacking with an attempted swivel kick. Georgie caught his foot and pushed him over. He fell on his front.

“Looks like you need to practise that one,” she giggled. Felix didn’t mind. Without looking up he hooked his foot round the leg of the table and wrenched it out from under Georgie. She gave a muted shriek and clattered to the floor. Felix was laughing his head off.

“Do you think this is what your mum meant when she told us to study while she was away?”

“We’re studying the delicate art of hand-to-hand combat,” Georgie giggled.

“Looks like you’re studying the insect life of the kitchen floor.” Felix hopped to his feet, set the table upright and took his position standing on it. “Your turn.”

They went on like this for nearly an hour, just as they had at every opportunity since Jimmy and his mother had left for England.

“How do you think we’d do against adults?” Felix panted, slumping into a chair by the stove.

“Let’s hope we never have to find out.” Georgie was exhausted too, but neither of them was laughing any
more. They knew that if they ever did need to defend themselves, it would be from a very serious threat. NJ7 was constantly on their minds.

Jimmy shuffled through the London streets with a deliberate stoop. He kept his face turned down to the pavement while his eyes darted about, taking in everything around him. His only clothes were the ones he had arrived in – jeans and an old sweater. But he covered them with an overcoat that had been hanging at the bottom of the stairs in the safehouse building.

The streets were dirtier than the last time Jimmy had been here, as if the city was disintegrating day by day. More shops were boarded up and people hurried along, reluctant to linger out of doors after dark. That suited Jimmy. It meant he was less likely to be noticed.

He stopped at the corner, across the road from the French Embassy, a grand Regency building. Outside the front door stood two security guards armed with machine guns. Above them was the empty pole where the French flag should have been flying. On the doorpost was nailed a judiciously small green stripe.

Jimmy stepped forward slowly, his heart pounding, reminding himself all the time that he was an old man. If they saw through the disguise, he might be killed on the spot. He stepped out of the shadows and crossed the road, knowing the guards would stop him, but careful
not to make eye contact. His disguise wouldn’t be so convincing up close.

“Sorry, sir,” one of the guards said abruptly, barring Jimmy’s way, “the Embassy is closed.”

Jimmy hesitated, pretending to shake a little. He tried to move towards the front door, but again the guard stopped him. “I said the Embassy is closed,” the man repeated, louder and slower than the first time. Jimmy increased his shaking and clutched his left breast with his right hand.

“Are you OK, sir?” asked the other guard. Jimmy didn’t respond. He pitched to one side and lost his balance, gasping for air. The guard caught him and lifted him back to his feet.

“Are you OK? Do you need a glass of water?” Jimmy nodded weakly. The guards took his weight and guided him through the doors of the Embassy – just as Jimmy had hoped they would. They stopped at the staircase and one of the guards eased Jimmy down gently. The other strode to the reception desk.

“Better call an ambulance, just in case,” he called out. Jimmy was sitting on the bottom step, still staring at the floor, as he had been the whole time. But now he gestured to the guard, clutching his chest.

“Water,” he panted, pointing at the jug on the reception desk. He was banking on the guard taking his voice to be the thinning tones of an old man. It worked. The guard nodded and turned to reception. For less than
thirty seconds nobody had their eyes on Jimmy. But thirty seconds was enough. Jimmy sprinted up the stairs. The guard turned round, holding a glass of water. The old man was gone.

Jimmy heard the alarm being raised downstairs, but he didn’t stop. He knew that security would immediately examine the CCTV footage of the lobby and see which way he went; cameras covered every inch of the building, inside and out. But Jimmy had to use whatever seconds he could to find out what had happened to Viggo and Saffron.

He bounded up the stairs, not even knowing what he was looking for. He could hear guards pounding after him. He reached the third floor and smashed his elbow into the fire alarm. A siren burst into life immediately and people stepped out of their offices, filling the previously empty corridors.

Jimmy smiled for a second – the confusion would slow down anybody who was trying to follow him. But before the thought was even through his head, he was shocked into panic. Every single person moving through the corridor towards him was a tall, broad man with close-cropped hair, wearing a black suit. Jimmy had stumbled into a nest of Green Stripes.

Jimmy’s programming lurched up a gear to compensate for his moment of terror. He was almost knocked off his feet by it. As if someone had grabbed him by the shoulder, it threw him into one of the rooms he had just seen people leaving. By a stroke of luck, the
room was now empty. He wondered whether anyone had seen him.

He knelt down and pressed his hand flat on the carpet, right by the door. This way he could feel when the reverberation of footsteps subsided. He glanced over his shoulder at the empty office. He could see immediately that he’d find no information here. There was obviously some kind of security procedure for evacuation. Everything was locked away.

Jimmy’s eyes lingered on the window. He was suddenly aware of a strategy running through his head –
abandon the mission,
it reasoned,
escape while you can.
Jimmy knew it was the right decision. But the window wasn’t the answer. As soon as he was spotted on the outside of the building he would be an easy target.
Reach the roof,
he told himself.
Escape from there.

Jimmy opened the door a crack. The corridor was empty. Had they found him on the CCTV yet? He slipped out then immediately had to jump across into the doorway opposite. There was someone leaving an office further down the hall. Jimmy couldn’t believe it – it was Miss Bennett.

The sound of her voice stifled his breathing. It was the voice that had assigned him his original mission, and the voice that in a previous existence had belonged to his form teacher. He had to focus to pull himself together. Gently, he tried the handle of the door where he was hiding. It was locked.

Miss Bennett and whoever she was talking to were between him and the staircase, walking towards him. Then he heard the voice of the other person – Mitchell.

“But I’m ready to try again, Miss Bennett,” he was saying.

They were only metres away now and approaching Jimmy. Jamming a foot against either side of the doorframe, he climbed off the ground. Wedged in that position, near the top of the doorway, he yanked a button off his coat. With a flick of his wrist he sent it flying up the corridor towards Miss Bennett and Mitchell. They didn’t see it soaring over their heads, but they heard it ricochet off the wall behind them.

“What was that?” snapped Miss Bennett. They both swivelled round for an instant. In that moment, Jimmy swung himself out of the doorway and reached up. The wall was covered in a giant tapestry which hung off what looked like a curtain rail. That’s what Jimmy grabbed hold of now.

As Miss Bennett and Mitchell turned again to continue walking, Jimmy pulled himself up and slipped behind the tapestry. The only evidence that he was there was a slight swaying of the ancient wall hanging.

“Hadn’t we better evacuate with the others?” Mitchell asked. He was standing right next to where Jimmy hung. Only a thin layer of fabric separated them. Jimmy held his breath. In his belly stirred a genuine fear. He tried to hold on to the thought that he’d beaten Mitchell in a fight
before, but it was no good. He knew that had been at a time before Mitchell’s killer instinct had been roused. Jimmy no longer had that advantage.

“Oh, please,” Miss Bennett sighed. “Is the building on fire?” Jimmy made out a slight mumbling from Mitchell, but nothing more before Miss Bennett continued. “Jimmy Coates has arrived in England – just as we expected. I want you here so that you can kill him. Again.”

They carried on walking and Jimmy made his way steadily down the corridor, hand to hand along the wooden rail. He knew he was behind Miss Bennett and Mitchell now, but the staircase was still a couple of metres away. Then he reached the end of the tapestry.

There was no choice. He had to jump out and make a run for it.

He gathered his thoughts once more, urging his programming to give him a burst of silent speed. With any luck he would be halfway up the stairs before Mitchell or Miss Bennett turned round. The fire alarm still rang out, piercing his brain as if expressing the tension in Jimmy’s heart. Then he went for it.

His fingers let go of the railing and he dropped to the carpet. As soon as his foot touched the floor he was bounding off it again in a sprint. Security guards were already dashing up from the floor below, leading with their machine guns.

At the stairs Jimmy stopped dead. He had been so focused on Miss Bennett and Mitchell that he hadn’t
sensed the person walking with them, a few paces behind. Now Jimmy was face to face with that third person. It was Eva.

It seemed like all the world had slipped into slow motion. Any second machine-gun fire would tear into Jimmy’s back. Eva and Jimmy stared at each other. What was it that Jimmy saw in her eyes? There was a cunning there, in this moment of crisis, that he had never seen in her before. Was she a friend or an enemy?

Then she moved, but she didn’t run away. Instead, she threw herself into Jimmy’s stunned arms, turning so that she was facing the same way as him. She grabbed Jimmy’s arm and placed it round her neck. At last, Jimmy realised what she was doing. He tensed his hand, ready for a fatal chop, and pressed the tips of his fingers against Eva’s temple. He spun her round to face his foe, her body shielding him from the security guards.

Eva screamed. Jimmy’s voice emerged calm, but ferocious: “Come any closer and her brains redecorate the wall.”