CHAPTER SIX

They flew out from Heathrow Airport on the lunchtime flight.

For Bex international travel was always dead time, a pause between more interesting things, but it hadn’t occurred to her that neither Kieron nor Sam had ever flown before. The whole experience was new to them, from the check-in (which was quick and painless), through the security checks (annoying and embarrassing, especially when Kieron had to take his boots and belt off because some pieces of metal somewhere in the massive built-up soles and the buckle set off the security scanner) to the wait in the departures lounge (tedious). Watching them experiencing everything afresh almost made her re-evaluate the whole process of travel. Almost.

‘Why is there a smoked-salmon and seafood bar?’ Sam asked as he looked across the crowd of travellers who were sleeping or sitting and staring blankly into space.

‘What?’ Bex asked, looking up from the ebook reader she’d bought with her. She’d loaded it a while back with all those novels that people were supposed to read but never did. Right now she was fighting her way through James Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘Fighting’ was the operative term. Each difficult phrase she deciphered was like a piece of hard-won ground in an interminable war of made-up words and complicated sentences. She was half inclined to jack it in and move on to something simpler, like War and Peace.

‘Over there,’ Sam said. ‘Look. There’s a kind of fast-food counter right in the centre of the concourse. It’s like a burger bar, except that they’re serving smoked salmon, oysters and prawns.’

Kieron shrugged. ‘Maybe people like it.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t find that anywhere else. Why would people in an airport want to eat seafood?’

Bex searched her mind for reasons, but failed to come up with anything. She’d passed it a hundred times without noticing. ‘I’m guessing,’ she said, ‘that it dates back to the 1950s, when intercontinental travel started became something for ordinary people, not just the super-rich. Passengers wanted to have an experience that made them feel like they were special.’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said, ‘but seafood? How special is that?’ He frowned. ‘I hope I don’t end up sitting next to someone who’s been there. I’ll be smelling prawns for the whole flight.’

‘I could check it out on the ARCC glasses,’ Kieron said, reaching into his jacket.

Bex hit him on the arm with her ebook reader. Gently. ‘Do not do that. I don’t want us to attract any attention, and I don’t want you using the ARCC equipment unless it’s in furtherance of the mission. No playing around.’

He scowled, but he brought his hand out. ‘I was just trying to help,’ he muttered.

Once they boarded the aircraft, they had seven hours of tedium ahead of them. They had three seats together, with Sam by the window and Bex on the aisle.

‘Is that so you can quickly leap into action if anything bad happens?’ Kieron asked her as they strapped themselves in.

‘No,’ she said patiently, ‘it’s so I can get to the toilet without having to clamber over you two.’ Actually, it was so she had freedom of movement if there was trouble. The chances of any terrorist activity were slim, especially flying out of Heathrow where security was intense, but she wanted to be in a position where if anyone looked as if they were trying to take the battery out of their laptop and ignite it, or set fire to their chemically treated underpants, she could do something. Not that she wanted to – especially not in the case of chemically treated underpants. But at least she had a clear line of sight up and down the aisle. That made her feel more secure.

A rogue memory from years ago struck her, and she smiled. On one of her first trips to America Bex had been sitting diagonally across the aisle from a man who, she’d noticed at check-in, had a glass eye. Halfway through the flight she had got the distinct impression that she was being watched. Bex trusted her sixth sense. She wasn’t sure whether there really was such a thing as a sixth sense or whether it was just the other five senses picking up on something that was just beneath the level of conscious detection, but previous intuitive feelings had turned out to be true, so she was inclined to listen when unexplained alarm bells started ringing in her head. So she had casually put her book down, stretched and looked around as if she was searching for a stewardess. The man with the glass eye, sitting diagonally behind her across the aisle, was staring right at the back of her neck. He didn’t even try to look away. Bex stared back at him, frowning, to see if he’d get embarrassed, but he just kept staring. And then she realised: the man had fallen asleep, but his glass eye was still open and staring at her. As she turned back to her book, she’d reflected that it made sense. It wasn’t as if the light in the cabin was going to keep him awake.

‘What’s so funny?’ Kieron asked.

‘Just remembering something,’ she said.

Kieron and Sam had both bought their hand-held game consoles, so they spent most of the time playing – either individually or networked together. Kieron fell asleep a couple of hours after take-off, while still playing his game, and he gradually slid sideways until his head ended up on Bex’s shoulder. She debated pushing him away, but she didn’t want to wake him up. And besides, he looked so young and vulnerable, with his eyes closed and his hair hanging across his face.

How had she got herself into this situation with Kieron and Sam, she wondered as she stared down at him? This had not been part of the career plan that she and Bradley had worked out. Each individual step had made sense at the time, but the end result was that she was embarking on an undercover intelligence mission in the company of two teenagers. This was not standard operating procedure for agents.

They had proved themselves in action though. She had to admit that. They were brave, and they were resourceful. And they were her last, best hope of exposing the traitor within MI6’s SIS-TERR organisation.

Kieron woke up two hours later. His entire body language changed as he moved from the relaxation of sleep to the sudden realisation that he had his head on a girl’s shoulder, from totally unselfconscious to very tense and awkward in a few seconds. Bex quietly leaned back and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep as well. Kieron surreptitiously moved his head off her shoulder and straightened up. She left it a few minutes, then ostentatiously yawned and said, ‘How long was I asleep for?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

She found herself wondering if he had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend: either was fine. He and Sam weren’t together, obviously – they were just good friends – but he never talked about seeing anyone else. Girls made him nervous though: that was obvious by the way he wouldn’t look directly at Bex when he was talking to her if he could help it, and the way sometimes, if he wasn’t talking to her, he’d surreptitiously look over at her, checking her out.

She hoped he wasn’t developing a crush on her. That would be awkward.

There were movies on the in-flight entertainment system. Bex had thought Kieron and Sam might want to settle down and watch them, but actually they were bland things – comedies or dramas that had nothing in them that kids would find disturbing. Kieron had apparently downloaded a whole load of horror films onto his games tablet, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood to watch them. That was probably just as well – there was a family seated in the row behind them, and Bex didn’t want the young kids looking through the gaps between the seats and seeing the kind of horrible stuff that teenagers these days seemed to like watching. The in-flight entertainment system did, however, have a channel where you could watch the aircraft’s progress on a crude map, and Kieron seemed to become almost hypnotised for a while by the way the aeroplane icon slowly inched its way across the Atlantic, leaving a dotted line behind it.

‘Why’s the pilot taking such a long route?’ Sam asked, leaning over and glancing at the screen.

‘What do you mean?’ Bex asked.

Sam traced the path of the aircraft – a curve that led up from London, passed over the tip of Iceland, peaked over Greenland, then descended to hit the eastern coast of Canada. ‘He’s going miles out of his way,’ Sam pointed out. ‘He could have gone in a straight line. It would have been a lot quicker.’

Bex stared at him. ‘Do you do geography at school?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘Why?’

‘The Earth is a sphere, right? A ball. You’ve seen globes with all the continents marked on?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘But the map on that screen is flat, isn’t it?’

‘Yee-es.’ Sam had an expression on his face that suggested he was expecting some kind of trick or punchline.

‘Well, the curved surface of the Earth has to be distorted to make it look flat on the map. If you plotted the aircraft’s course on an actual globe, you’d find it was actually the shortest route between England and America. It’s not a completely straight line – that would take it right through the Earth’s crust – but it’s the closest thing you can get on the surface of a sphere. It’s called a Great Circle.’

‘Oh.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Who knew?’

‘Well,’ Bex said carefully, ‘pretty much everyone, I thought.’

They changed aircraft at Washington Dulles Airport, after a landing so gentle it was almost undetectable. It wasn’t Bex’s favourite airport, not by any means. Too impersonal, no decent shops and no decent restaurants. You’d think that the main international airport of the capital city of the most important nation in the world would try to be a little more impressive, but no.

It impressed Kieron and Sam, though, if only because they recognised the control tower from the Bruce Willis action film Die Hard 2. Which they referred to as ‘that old action movie’, making Bex feel really old.

The second leg, from Dulles to Albuquerque, was on a smaller jet with two seats on either side of a central aisle, rather than the 3-4-3 configuration on the aircraft that had bought them in to Dulles. Kieron and Sam both had window seats, and because this aeroplane flew lower for much of the journey, they spent most of the time with their faces pressed against the Plexiglas, staring at the terrain passing underneath.

Half an hour out from Albuquerque, Kieron invited Bex to look out of his window. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ he breathed.

Bex gazed out. They were passing over a broken landscape of vaguely reddish rocks – either the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness in Colorado or the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico, she thought, remembering the research she’d done on the journey before setting out. In the unlikely event that the aircraft might have to make an emergency landing, it was always useful to know where you might be. Not that it had ever happened to her, but there could always be a first time. The thing was to make sure that it wasn’t the last – at least not for the wrong reasons.

Below the aircraft, away to one side , she saw what looked like a massive discontinuity in the ground: a rough line where everything on one side was several hundred metres above everything on the other. Along the cliff-edge she could see an apparently endless line of huge wind turbines, spinning slowly. The low sun cast their shadows long across the landscape.

‘Impressive,’ she said, and she meant it.

‘This is the best trip I’ve ever been on,’ Kieron murmured. ‘Whatever happens, thank you for agreeing to bring us.’

Albuquerque airport shared its runways with the US Air Force’s Kirtland Air Force Base, so there were several sleek fighter jets on the tarmac when they landed. Predictably, Kieron and Sam spent their time comparing notes and trying to identify them. Boys, Bex thought with a surprising but not unwelcome twinge of affection. It didn’t matter that they were both emos with a massive disdain for governments and the military: show them some actual hardware and they’d be talking about maximum airspeed and armament. It was the same trading-card mentality that led to things like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Bradley would have been the same.

The airport buildings – well, the civilian ones anyway – were cool and spacious, influenced largely by the artwork and the dwellings of the local Navajo people. It didn’t look like England, and it didn’t smell like England, and the boys were entranced. They in turn attracted a lot of strange glances from the Americans retrieving their luggage at the same time. The hairstyles and the clothes that helped Sam and Kieron blend in in Newcastle town centre – at least, to an extent – made them stand out among the shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps that seemed to be de rigueur for the typical American teenager. Bex mentally cursed. She should have anticipated that. Drawing attention was something she tried to avoid whenever possible, but these two were about as subtle as a pair of pandas in a supermarket. She had to get them into something more suitable, and quickly.

‘Are we going to the hotel?’ Kieron asked as they walked out of the terminal towards the area where the rental cars were parked. The air was warm and smelled of dust and aircraft fuel. The sky was an incredibly clear blue. ‘Only Sam thought –’

‘We’re going to the mall,’ she said, cutting him off. ‘I need to get you into the kind of clothes that a teenage technical genius would wear. Something smart but casual. Sam too.’

‘Why me?’ Sam asked, affronted.

‘Just in case you’re seen together,’ Bex said, thinking quickly. ‘We don’t want anything that looks too odd, like an emo and a tech entrepreneur together.’

‘We’re not emos,’ Kieron grumbled. ‘We’re greebs.’

‘Whatever. You’re going undercover – remember?’

Albuquerque was a smallish city, and the airport was close to the centre. It took less than twenty minutes to drive along wide roads and past low, one- or two-storey buildings, in which Mexican restaurants and car dealerships seemed to alternate, to a mall that was actually just across the road from their hotel. Bex parked the hire car out in the open and started to lead the way towards the shops, but she realised after a few moments that neither Kieron nor Sam were following. She turned, to find them gazing in wonder into the distance. She followed their gaze, trying to work out what it was that had paralysed them.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked eventually, giving up.

‘Mountains,’ Kieron said. ‘Look.’

She looked. There were, indeed, mountains, rising up from the edge of town.

‘Yes, the Sandia Mountains,’ she said.

‘We’ve never seen mountains before,’ Sam explained, still staring. ‘We’ve got things called mountains in England, but they’re really just hills. These are real mountains.’

Bex shrugged. ‘Seen one mountain, seen them all,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

The mall was buttressed at each end with a large department store. Bex took the boys inside the mall through the food court and then along rows of smaller shops towards the nearest, found the men’s department, then selected appropriate clothes for each of them – casual shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps, like the teens in the airport had been wearing, and slightly more formal lightweight jackets, cotton shirts and pressed jeans for any business dealings.

‘I’m not wearing this stuff,’ Sam protested.

‘Then you can go home,’ Bex said firmly. ‘I can exchange tickets and send you right back. You’ve done the journey out – you can find your own way back with no trouble, I’m sure.’

‘But –’ Sam held up the garish shorts – ‘no greeb would be seen dead in stuff like this!’

‘You’re not a greeb while you’re here,’ Bex pointed out in a low voice. ‘You’re undercover, remember? Pretending to be something else. Somebody else. And the main point about being undercover is that you don’t want to be found dead.’ She took a deep breath. ‘If you don’t like the clothes, you’re really not going to like the next bit.’

‘What next bit?’ Kieron asked suspiciously.

‘The bit where the two of you get your hair cut.’ Before their stunned expressions could turn into howls of protest, she said quickly, ‘I spotted a barber’s shop across the car park. You can keep it long, but we’ve got to find a way to make sure that it fits in with the clothes. Long but neat, in other words. And those piercings are going to have to come out.’

Fortunately they were too shocked to actually say a word.

They both just closed their eyes for a few moments, and nodded.

‘I think we both knew it was going to come to this,’ Kieron said, his expression pained.

Sam nodded. ‘Undercover opportunities for greebs are fairly limited. We talked about this before we left. If we’ve got to conform to go undercover, then so be it. Bring it on. Dress us up however you want.’

‘Didn’t Courtney and her friends used to do that to you when you were little?’ Kieron asked. ‘I’m sure she said there are photographs of you in a dress that they’d forced you to wear.’

Sam shrugged. ‘Don’t have to force me, these days,’ he said off-handedly. ‘Come on – let’s get this over with.’

The barber was an elderly black man who’d had his shop since before the mall was built. ‘They wanted me to sell this ol’ place,’ he told Bex as he cut a wincing Kieron’s hair, ‘but I told them no. So they changed their plans and built around me – left me here on the edge of the car park. Which is a good place to be. The ladies, they shop, an’ their husbands come in here for a trim or a shave an’ a chat. You guys ain’t from around here, are you? That accent – Australian, ain’t it?’

Afterwards she led the two shell-shocked teens back past the car to the mall again. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some ice cream. I saw a place in the food court selling flavours I didn’t even know existed.’

After Kieron had demolished his black-walnut-and-honey ice-cream sundae and Sam had finished his lavender and green tea with shortbread crumble – both covered with several different varieties of chocolate and caramel sauce – Bex shepherded them both back to the car. It had been sitting in direct sunlight for several hours, and Bex felt sweat breaking out all over her body the moment she slid into the driver’s seat. She quickly clicked the air conditioning on, and drove to the hotel.

She’d booked into a mid-range Marriott – one of several in the city. She had one room; the boys were in one down the corridor. ‘Unpack and rest for an hour or so,’ she told them. ‘Then we’ll get an early dinner and plan on what we’re going to do next.’

Dinner was steak and pasta in the hotel’s restaurant. The ice cream didn’t appear to have dented either Kieron or Sam’s appetites.

‘Do you think Lethal Insomnia are staying in this hotel?’ Sam asked, gazing around at what, to him, was probably a very upmarket place to eat. Bex had to admit that he looked good in his new clothes, and with his hair shortened and tidied. Kieron too. They ‘scrubbed up well’, as her mother would have put it.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t notice any TVs thrown out of top-floor windows or expensive cars floating in the swimming pool.’ At their blank looks she added, ‘It’s a rock ’n’ roll thing. From before you were born. Right – let’s get down to business.’ She glanced at Kieron. ‘We need to get you into the Goldfinch Institute. You’ve got something to show them – this idea for a non-lethal weapon that you and Sam have come up with – but that’s for once you’re in there. The first step is to actually get through the door.’

‘I’ve got an idea about that too,’ Kieron said. He glanced around, much like Sam had done a few moments before, but with less awe and more nervousness. ‘Do you think we might be being – you know – bugged? Listened to?’

Bex shook her head. ‘Nobody knows we’re here. I’ve made sure of that. What’s your idea?’

‘I use the ARCC kit to hack into the Goldfinch Institute computers. They’ll have all kinds of firewalls protecting the internal, top-secret stuff, but their outward-facing admin server is likely to be only lightly protected. It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t let emails in and out, allow them to synchronise calendars and so on. So I’ll sneakily create an appointment in the calendar of the guy in charge …’

‘Todd Zanderbergen,’ Bex said.

‘Yeah, him. I then turn up at the main reception desk expecting to see him. His PA will be surprised, because she didn’t think he had any appointments, but there’s unquestionably one in there.’

‘Won’t they be able to check that it’s only just been added?’ Bex asked.

Kieron shook his head. ‘I can fake the timestamp so it looks like it was created a month ago. They’ll assume it didn’t show up until the last minute because of some kind of IT problem. So – I go in and talk to him. Then what do I do? Ask about these dead scientists and people who’d been working for him? That’s going to make him suspicious, isn’t it?’

‘OK – two things. Firstly, if you’re supposed to be trying to go into business with him you’re entitled to ask about anything that concerns you. It’s called “Due Diligence” – you thoroughly check a company out before you sign a contract. Say you’ve noticed that he’s been recruiting an unusually large number of staff recently. Ask him what happened – did lots of people resign? Did he fire people?’

‘We know why he’s recruiting,’ Sam pointed out. ‘Some of his staff have died.’

‘Yes,’ Bex explained patiently, ‘but when you’re interrogating someone, you never let on that you know stuff about them. You try to look innocent – see if they tell you what you already know or try to lie.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’ Kieron looked impressed and slightly daunted.

‘Don’t worry,’ Bex said reassuringly. ‘I’m your backup. I’ll be with you every step of the way.’

After dinner they went to Bex’s room. Kieron slipped the ARCC glasses on, ready to go to work.

‘Hang on,’ Bex said, holding up her hand. ‘Make sure you don’t use your own name when you make the appointment. Use the name Ryan Allen.’

‘That’s me, is it?’ Kieron asked. ‘I was wondering if I had an alter ego, like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne.’

‘More like Barry Allen,’ Sam muttered. At Bex’s questioning glance he added: ‘He’s the Flash’s alter ego. He’s a geek.’

‘Right,’ she said, understanding the reference but pretending she didn’t, just for effect.

Kieron frowned, the movement making the ARCC glasses ride up on his nose. ‘But what happens if they spot the appointment early? I mean, Todd Zanderbergen’s PA is probably going to go through his diary when she gets in in the morning. She’ll see it, and she might worry about the fact that she hadn’t prepared for it. Isn’t she likely to be suspicious?’

Bex shook her head. ‘If she’s any good – and I can’t imagine Zanderbergen employing anyone who isn’t – then she’ll prepare a briefing pack for her boss on anyone coming in for a meeting – who they are, what they want, where they come from, maybe even some suggestions as to what the benefits to the Goldfinch Institute might be of making a deal with them.’

‘So she’ll go on the Internet and check me out,’ Kieron said with an edge of worry in his voice. ‘And she’ll find out that there’s no information about me.’

‘Oh, but there is.’ Bex smiled. ‘Before we left, Bradley put together a complete dossier on Ryan Allen. I’m going to spend the next couple of hours seeding it around the Internet – not obviously, but scattered around in databases and stuff. There’ll be information out there on where Ryan Allen went to school, what his local paper wrote about him when he won a science prize, all kinds of little things. Nothing obvious – there’s quite a few people who don’t have a digital presence at all – but enough to satisfy their curiosity.’

Kieron nodded. ‘You’ve done this before,’ he observed.

‘It’s what I do. These days most of our jobs are as much about the digital information that’s out there as they are about disguises and adventures. More even.’

Bex watched while Kieron used the ARCC kit to infiltrate the Goldfinch Institute’s servers and place a spurious appointment in Todd Zanderbergen’s calendar. His hands moved gracefully and expertly through the air, moving data around and altering it. He really was a natural at this, she thought admiringly. If she was going to be using that same kit to provide information to him when he was in the meeting the next day, then she was going to have to get some practice in. Maybe a couple of hours while the boys were asleep. She’d trained herself to get by on only about five hours a night – she might as well use the rest of the time to prepare.

‘Right,’ Kieron said eventually. ‘That’s done. I’m in for 11 a.m. tomorrow.’

‘In that case, go back to your room and get some sleep. Rest, and I’ll see you for breakfast at about eight.’

‘Chances are I won’t sleep,’ Sam muttered. ‘Jet lag.’

‘Jet lag won’t really affect you, flying west across the Atlantic. It’ll hit you when we fly back though,’ Bex said. She rooted around in her handbag and bought out a container of pills. ‘Take one of these, both of you.’

‘What are they?’ Kieron asked suspiciously.

‘Melatonin. It’s a hormone the body produces naturally at night. It gets your body ready to go to sleep. We’re eight hours behind the UK here, so your brains think it’s now morning and you’ve stayed up through the night. Take the melatonin and you’ll be fooling your body into resetting its clock.’

‘OK.’ Kieron took the container tentatively. ‘If you’re sure.’

The two boys went to their room, and Bex set to work, using the ARCC kit to scatter little traces of Ryan Allen’s life around the Internet, just difficult enough to find that anyone looking would be persuaded that they were actual facts rather than constructed bits of fake data. It took her three hours, but it was useful. It had been a while since she had used the equipment – Bradley was the expert – but the mental muscle-memory was still there. By the time she’d finished she felt confident that she could support Kieron as well as he’d done for her in Mumbai and Pakistan.

Still wide awake, she decided to go for a drive. It was good practice to reconnoitre in advance if you were going on a mission. Discover the ways in and the ways out. Work out your options for in case anything went wrong. So she left her room, walked out to the hire car and drove away from central Albuquerque, along wide and gently curving roads towards the desert that surrounded the city. Night had fallen, and rather than turn the air conditioning on she rolled the windows down and let the breezes and sounds of the resting city come to her. The heat of the day had faded to a comfortable warmth now, but the scent of desert flowers was still marked, along with the smell of kerosene drifting across from the Air Force base. Through force of habit she checked her rear-view mirror every thirty seconds or so to see if there was ever a set of headlights that remained stubbornly behind her, but the cars she saw all turned off the road after a while, their drivers heading to their own homes, to restaurants, cinemas or bars. There was no reason for anyone to be following her, but it was like indicating before making a turn: something her brain automatically did without her having to tell it. A survival instinct.

The Goldfinch Institute was located some ten miles north of Albuquerque, on a route that she noticed with a smile eventually led to the town of Roswell. The boys would love that: Roswell was where the fabled Area 51 was supposed to be located: the military base which housed the hangars where a crashed alien spacecraft had allegedly been kept and evaluated by the American military since the 1950s. Rubbish of course, but it was a legend that just wouldn’t die.

The Institute itself was a mile down a spur road off the main highway. There were no signs for it: if you were heading for the Goldfinch Institute it was because you wanted to go there and already knew where it was. A subtle intelligence test, of sorts. Bex slowed down and parked on the dusty hard shoulder just before the turning, in the shadow of a massive advertising hoarding telling her all about the health benefits of some miracle juicer. She checked the car’s satnav. The spur road was marked, but according to the map it led nowhere: no houses, no towns, nothing. Her original intention had been to drive down and check out the main gates and the fences – drive around the Institute if possible and take some photographs – but she decided against it. There was a very good chance there would be CCTV cameras trained on the road, and number-plate recognition software that would note her car’s details for later analysis. Maybe even low-light, image-intensifying cameras that could get a good image of her face, even in the dark. It wasn’t worth taking the chance.

She was just about to turn around and head back to town, get a few hours’ sleep, when she saw a light down the spur road. On instinct, Bex turned her own headlights off. For a while the light seemed to just bounce around, illuminating the dusty tarmac and the scrubby cactus-like bushes that lined the route on either side, before it resolved into the twin beams of a car’s headlights. The sparse starlight, and the splash back from the beams, soon revealed the bare lines of a sports car manoeuvring along the road towards her.

At the junction with the main road, the car slowed down before turning. Bex sat quietly, not moving. Maybe it was a late worker, heading home, or maybe it was the Institute’s security guards on patrol. Either way, she didn’t want them to know she was there.

The car accelerated into a turn, heading back the way Bex had come, towards Albuquerque. When its lights caught the advertising hoarding and reflected momentarily back, illuminating the driver, Bex felt the breath catch in her throat as she recognised Tara Gallagher, her old friend from MI6 training. She was older, and she’d dyed her hair red, but Bex would have known her anywhere. They’d spent too long together in muddy ditches and in dimly lit bars for that.

The car rounded the corner and sped away. Tara’s head didn’t turn. She hadn’t seen Bex.

It took fifteen seconds before Bex felt she could breathe again. What were the odds that she and Tara would end up at the same remote road junction in a foreign country at the same time of night? Was that an omen, or was it a warning? Bex wasn’t sure, but as she drove back to town – slowly, so she didn’t run the risk of overtaking Tara and giving her old work colleague (and, she admitted to herself, one-time friend) a possible view of her face – she turned the unlikely encounter over and over in her mind. One way or the other, she decided, it was a bad sign.

Tara’s car had either got to town way ahead of her or had turned off, perhaps down a side road leading to some exclusive development of ranch-style houses, and Bex got back to the hotel without incident. She checked the car park carefully before parking, and used her key card to enter the hotel through a side entrance rather than the main lobby just in case someone was watching. She got to her room, undressed and brushed her teeth and was asleep within moments. She didn’t dream.

The next morning she met the boys in the restaurant for breakfast. It took a few moments for her to recognise them: automatically she’d been looking for them in their emo – sorry, greeb – guises, but they were neat and tidy, in the clothes she’d bought for them the day before. They’d even washed their hair and shaved the few hairs they had – ‘bum fluff’, her mum would have called it – from their chins. She felt strangely proud.

Breakfast was the standard American buffet arrangement, and they’d stacked their plates up with bacon, mushrooms, scrambled egg, sausages, hash browns and refried beans. Kieron had even balanced several slices of cheese on top of his pile, while Sam had poured maple syrup over his.

‘It’s OK,’ she said reassuringly, ‘you’re allowed to go back as many times as you want. You don’t have to carry the absolute maximum away on your first visit to the buffet bar.’

They stared at her, wide-eyed.

‘Really?’ Sam asked.

‘Really,’ she said.

While the boys ate everything on their plates and then went back for more, Bex contented herself with a coffee and toast. After they’d all finished their breakfast, she looked at Kieron.

‘Ready for this?’ she asked.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Bex slid the ARCC glasses across the table towards him – not the special VR ones that he was used to wearing, and which she had used the night before to seed his new identity across the Internet, but the ones she generally wore on missions. The undercover ones. The ones that looked like ordinary glasses, but which had concealed cameras and microphones in the frame that would transmit everything Kieron saw and heard to her, wherever she chose to base herself.

‘Put these on,’ she said. ‘They’ll make you look even more like a tech-savvy teenager than you already do.’

As he placed the glasses on his nose, she passed him the tiny earpiece that would slip inside his ear canal and relay everything she said to him, undetectably. She smiled. ‘Come on – let’s go. We’ve got an undercover operation to complete.’