CHAPTER EIGHT

From just outside the impressive security fence of the Goldfinch Institute, where she had parked the hire car, Bex watched and listened as Kieron dealt with Todd Zanderbergen’s subtle attempts to question him.

The car’s air con made it chilly enough that the hairs on her forearms were standing up, but whenever her hand touched the driver’s side window she could feel the thudding heat of the sun bearing down on the car’s metal skin. It was an odd juxtaposition. Still, at least the heat here was dry. Not like the humidity that she’d recently experienced in India and Pakistan.

Last week. She shook her head in disbelief. It had only been a week ago that she’d been in those two countries. And now she was in America. Sometimes she just wanted to sit back and wonder at this lifestyle of hers. One day she might be able to stop and settle down, but not yet.

As Todd instructed Judith to give Kieron the tour, Bex’s thoughts whirled as she watched her old friend Tara Gallagher scanning Kieron’s fingerprints and DNA on the Institute’s computer system.

She understood that the news that he was being checked out so thoroughly would freak Kieron out, but she needed to tell him. Todd Zanderbergen was a charismatic man, and he’d already offered Kieron the biggest bribe a teenage emo could wish for by offering to take the boy to the Lethal Insomnia recording studio. There was a distinct risk that Kieron might get star-struck and give something away. She needed to remind him that there was danger all around, but she didn’t want him panicking. It was a fine line to walk.

‘I think it’s safe to go on the tour,’ she said. ‘Give Zanderbergen the USB stick with the non-disclosure agreement. He’ll virus-check it before he uploads the file, but the virus on the computer is more sophisticated than he’s expecting. While he’s checking you out, the virus will be modifying his system just a little bit. And while you’re on the tour, I’m going to take the opportunity to head back into Albuquerque and do a little bit of investigating of my own. I hope that’s OK.’

‘You ready to go?’ she heard the PA – Judith – saying to Kieron.

‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘It beats hanging around.’ Bex realised that as well as answering Judith he was also talking to her. He was really getting the hang of working with the ARCC.

She made that little mental leap in her mind that allowed her to push to one side the things Kieron was seeing through the ARCC glasses and acknowledge what was happening in the real world around her. Everything was quiet, and her car was the only one on the tarmac area just outside the metal gates, but the security guard was standing outside his cabin, watching her. Maybe he was just bored.

With a slight pinch of her fingers she reduced the size of the virtual screen showing her what Kieron was seeing and pushed it to a corner of the lenses.

She put the car into drive and turned it in a tight circle, then accelerated away from the Institute.

‘I’m going to check out the local coroner,’ she said, not because she thought Kieron needed to know but because she didn’t want him to think that the link was down or that she was ignoring him. ‘Then I might see if there are any local newspaper archives I can check for obituaries, death notices and the like.’

Glancing automatically in her rear-view mirror, even though she was the only car on the narrow road, she saw that the metal plates that sealed the entrance to the Goldfinch Institute had slid into the ground. As she watched, a black car drove out. As it passed the security guard he made a strange little salute. Obviously someone important, she thought.

As Bex got to the interstate junction and headed towards Albuquerque, she looked in her rear-view mirror again. The black car had turned the same way. Not a surprise – the city was the biggest conurbation for some miles. Most of the Institute’s employees probably lived there.

She checked in with Kieron briefly, glancing up to the corner of her vision. He was walking down a corridor, Judith just ahead of him. Bex wasn’t sure whether he was concentrating on the PA’s backside as she moved or whether it was just coincidence that his gaze kept on slipping down there. Typical teenage boy.

She moved her attention back to the road. Traffic was light, but she kept her speed low. The last thing she wanted was to draw the attention of any traffic cops. A pickup truck and a yellow school bus were ahead of her on the road, travelling slightly faster than her in the same lane.

She checked the rear-view mirror again. The black car was maintaining the same speed as her. That was probably just as coincidental as the fact that it had turned right at the junction.

Without really thinking about it, Bex eased her speed up, indicated and moved out to the next lane. Now she was travelling slightly faster than the pickup and the school bus and she began to creep up on them. As she overtook the truck, Bex looked in the mirror again.

The black car had sped up and changed lane. It was still behind her, pacing her.

Not looking like a coincidence any more. Intriguing. Intriguing, and slightly worrying.

She could see the black car passing the pickup truck now. Glancing ahead, she also saw that she was approaching the yellow school bus. She touched the brake lightly, just to slow herself down a fraction, and changed lanes again so that she was directly behind the bus, with the pickup truck a little way behind.

Seconds later the black car swung smoothly into her lane. It now sat between her and the pickup truck.

It was following her. She was fairly certain of that.

The best way to establish that for sure would be to leave the interstate and see if the black car did the same. The trouble was, if she then rejoined Route 66 her follower would know she’d spotted them. Worse, she would have given away the fact that she was watching for followers and didn’t want to be followed. That in turn would cast suspicion on Kieron, because whoever was in that black car – or maybe their boss – would know that she’d dropped him off.

She had a problem. She couldn’t just let the car keep following her, because she didn’t want the driver to know she was going to the local coroner. That would raise just as many suspicions as if she let on that she knew it was following her. What to do?

A sign a little way ahead told her that a turn-off was coming up: a side road leading to somewhere called Los Lunas. Impulsively she indicated again and slid into the feeder lane for the exit.

Behind her, the black car did the same.

Steering one-handed, Bex called up the mapping function on the ARCC glasses. A secondary translucent window sprang to life, showing her the local area. A red dot identified her position. As she steered the car off the highway and onto the rougher local road she saw that there was a right-hand turn coming up ahead that eventually led to a Navajo reservation and, shortly after that, a left turn that wound back to Route 66. After that the road they were on kept on going all the way to Los Lunas, which seemed to be on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

She slowed down almost imperceptibly. As she’d intended, the black car started to creep up on her.

The right hand turn flashed past.

The road was badly pitted with potholes, and Bex’s car juddered as she drove. She kept both hands on the wheel, making sure that she avoided the worst of the holes.

Just as she’d hoped, the other driver realised that he was catching up with her just before the left-hand turn came up. Without indicating, Bex abruptly jerked the wheel, sending her car into a slide that left an expanding plume of dust behind her. The black car momentarily vanished in the cloud. She pressed her foot hard down on the accelerator and her car sprang ahead like a greyhound released from a trap. She completed the left turn and started speeding back to the interstate. Behind her in her mirror she saw the black car going past the turn, continuing towards Los Lunas. If she was lucky, the driver would think she’d made a mistake, come off the interstate too early, then made a panicked manoeuvre to get back on – a panicked manoeuvre which he’d seen too late to copy.

Before the black car could turn around, come back and make that turn, Bex accelerated as fast as she could. Within moments the junction with the interstate appeared ahead of her. Instead of resuming her journey towards Albuquerque, she went under the highway, then rejoined it but heading back the other way, towards the Goldfinch Institute. That way, if the black car did get back onto the main road, it would be going in a different direction to her, heading into town and looking desperately to catch up with her.

At the Los Lunas exit Bex came off again, crossed back under the interstate and rejoined it, now heading into Albuquerque, but hopefully a long distance behind the black car. If she kept her speed low she wouldn’t catch up with it, and its driver would have no idea where she was.

It was a hell of a routine to have gone through to get rid of what might have been an innocent driver who’d just ended up accidentally copying every manoeuvre she made, but Bex was pretty sure it had been necessary. As one of her trainers had said, years ago: ‘If something happens once, it’s an event. If it happens twice, it’s a coincidence. If it happens three times, it’s enemy action.’

Tara Gallagher had been on that course with her. Strange, the way things connected up.

As Bex drove she put the cruise control on and checked again on Kieron. He appeared to be in a firing gallery, shooting non-lethal beanbags from a gun with a broad, short barrel. They zoomed away from him in a shallow arc, hitting a target like a hanging punchbag, making it swing back and forth. He looked as if he was enjoying himself, based on the way Judith was watching him and grinning.

Okay – time for some research.

According to the ARCC glasses, it was the job of the Office of the Medical Examiner to investigate any death occurring in the State of New Mexico that was sudden, violent, untimely, unexpected or puzzling. The OMI worked out of a building on the campus of the University of New Mexico in the centre of Albuquerque. Following the directions on the map function, Bex left Interstate 40 at a massive junction comprising lots of roads curving off in different directions. Within a few minutes she was parking in the OMI car park, in the shadow of a modernist building constructed from white and orange stone.

As she opened her door to get out, a black car drove slowly past. For a moment her heart jumped, but then she realised it was a different make than the one that had been following her.

‘Hi,’ she said to the receptionist, who had glanced up with a professional smile when she entered the building. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I’m, like, a research student, looking into clusters of similar deaths – seeing whether they might be related to things like faulty air conditioning, areas of vegetation that have toxic spores, that kind of thing. Is it possible to get access to some kind of database that would help me?’

‘You look a bit old to be a student, hon,’ the receptionist said, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

‘Post-graduate programme,’ Bex replied. She wasn’t even sure they had post-graduate programmes in the USA, but she’d heard the phrase and thought it was worth a try. ‘Student exchange,’ she added for good measure. ‘I’m from England.’

The receptionist hesitated for a heart-stoppingly long moment, then nodded. This was obviously the kind of query she had to answer several times a week, and she had a script memorised. ‘Sure, why not,’ she said. ‘A lot of our data is available to the public, and it’s searchable. Everything is held electronically. Basically, the reports that the medical examiner produces are: a report of findings, which is a summary of everything, plus a full autopsy report, a toxicology report, if applicable, and a report of external examination. We do charge, unless you’re a family member, and I’m guessing you’re not. It’s $1.50 per hour you spend on the computer, with a minimum of one hour. If you want to email documents to yourself, it’s $7. Paper copies are $1.40 per page. Is that OK? We take all major credit cards.’

‘Of course you do,’ Bex said. This was, she reminded herself, America.

Ten minutes later she was sitting at a computer in a small cubicle in a room on the first floor, with a bored clerk giving her a quick lesson on how to use their database system. Five minutes later he’d left, and she started to type.

OK, she thought, her task was to look into deaths of Goldfinch Institute personnel. She didn’t know their names, how they’d died or where. All she knew was where they’d worked before they’d died. Fortunately the system allowed her to search specifically on ‘Employer’.

Fifty-nine people employed by Todd Zanderbergen had died in the past five years. That was a noticeable proportion of his workforce. Intrigued, she split it up by year.

Five deaths, eight deaths, four deaths, seven deaths … and thirty-five deaths. For the first four of those five years, Todd Zanderbergen had lost an average of six employees a year. In the last year he’d lost thirty-five. Unless a coachload of employees on the way to a company picnic had crashed and burned, that was very odd.

Changing the parameters of the search, Bex checked the causes of death over the same period. Yes, there had been a few car crashes, although not an unexpected number and no disasters involving coaches, plus a climbing accident, a couple of strokes, some deaths due to cancer, two murders and a suicide. Well, this was America she thought cynically. The largest cause of death however was heart attacks. That was hardly a surprise, however. Heart disease was the single biggest cause of death in the USA, and also in the UK. Bex’s own mother had died ten years before of a sudden and unexpected coronary embolism. She’d been discovered by her father in their bedroom. She’d died while getting dressed: one sock on, one sock off, and a surprised expression on her face.

Unexpectedly thinking about her mother broke her concentration, and she leaned back in her chair for a moment, feeling a lump in her chest. She swallowed, pushing the memory away and trying to recapture the momentum she’d lost by checking in on Kieron. By now he was in a large, gleaming white laboratory, being shown a bizarre weapon that looked like a cross between a water pistol and a rocket launcher. A voice she didn’t recognise was saying: ‘… And then we transmit an electric charge along the stream of water, powerful enough to temporarily incapacitate anyone it hits.’

Nice, she thought. That’s next Christmas’s presents sorted.

OK. She turned back to the computer and cleared her mind. Let’s look at this from a different angle. What did those thirty-five people die of in the past year?

The answer was: heart disease. All of them. Every single one.

That wasn’t just odd; that was positively unusual. It looked as if this mission that she and Bradley had been given actually had a point to it. There was something suspicious going on.

Bex considered emailing herself all the reports, but that would be a lot of data to go through – most of it irrelevant. None of the thirty-five deaths were listed as suspicious, which meant that the toxicology reports would be long, detailed and essentially useless to her. There was nothing to find.

Instead, on a hunch, she checked the place where each death had occurred.

They’d all occurred in the Goldfinch Institute itself. Every single employee who had died that year had actually died on company premises. None at home, none in a restaurant, or a gym, or a sports field. None while out jogging. Every single one of those people had died in that complex of blue glass buildings.

Surely that should have raised some suspicions? Someone should have investigated. But apparently nobody had.

She pulled all the data from the searches she’d made into one document and emailed that through to a secure and covert email address that she and Bradley used to share things when she was on missions and he was providing support. If she knew Bradley, he’d be monitoring it, but just in case she also sent a quick email to his regular account asking him to take a look and see if he could spot anything. It was mid-evening in England. Assuming he wasn’t out on a date with Sam’s sister, he might come up with something she’d missed.

Bex packed up, paid her bill at the reception desk and left. She had a feeling there was no more data there to find: if she wanted more, she’d have to look somewhere else.

When she checked the image from the ARCC kit, Kieron now appeared to be sitting in a small conference room watching some kind of company presentation. He’d got a milkshake from somewhere; she could see it in his hand. Every now and then it suddenly loomed up, obscuring most of the view from his glasses as he took a sip. Probably not wheatgrass, based on the fact that he seemed to be enjoying it, and it wasn’t luminous green.

The video Kieron was watching momentarily caught Bex’s attention. It showed what must have been some high-tech Goldfinch Institute piece of research: a man standing on a cliff-edge, probably somewhere out in the desert outside Albuquerque. He wore a flight suit and helmet, and he’d been strapped into a pair of wings shaped like a boomerang that extended out from his back, as wide as he was tall. Right in the middle of the wings she saw a jet engine with two protruding nozzles. As she watched, the man ran towards the edge of the cliff. He jumped, and the jet-engine came to life. Instead of falling, he flew!

‘Project ICARUS,’ a voice said on the soundtrack of the video. ‘A developmental system allowing military personnel the freedom of powered flight on the battlefield.’

As Bex watched, the video showed the pilot looping the loop and conducting various aerobatic manoeuvres.

‘And,’ the voice continued, ‘the ICARUS system is armed with eight small, high-velocity rockets, stored in the wings, for offensive and defensive use.’

The pilot adjusted his course so that he was flying parallel to the ground. Far ahead of him, Bex could see a large circular bullseye target, sitting surreally in the desert. Abruptly, several lines of fire leaped ahead of the pilot, linking his wings to the target. The bullseye exploded in flame as the pilot adjusted his course to avoid the blast, soaring triumphantly like some kind of superhero while the target blazed.

Impressive, she thought, as she pushed the images away into a corner of the glasses. The Goldfinch Institute seemed to have a lot of things going on in its research department. Kieron would be loving this.

Bex supposed that she ought to be heading back to collect him, but she could do with some food. Their hotel wasn’t far away, and she’d noticed a coffee franchise in the lobby where she could get a latte and a croissant. She could also pick up a power bank from her room: the ARCC equipment didn’t draw much power, but if she was going to have to sit outside the Goldfinch Institute waiting for Kieron to come out, then she might as well charge up her own glasses, just to make sure they didn’t suddenly flake out on her. The great thing was, they didn’t need a USB cable or anything – both sets of glasses and the earpiece charged electromagnetically when the power bank was near them. And, if she went to the hotel, she could check on Sam. Reaching her car, she quickly plotted a route through the centre of Albuquerque to the Marriott.

As she walked across the car park towards the hotel building she noticed several black cars parked there. Most of them were the wrong make, the wrong model or the wrong year to be the one that had been following her, but one car made her hesitate. It looked like the same car, but she wasn’t sure. She glanced at the licence plate, but that wasn’t much help: the car behind her had never come close enough for her to see its plates.

She shook her head in annoyance. There was no point getting paranoid. There had to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars meeting the same description. She couldn’t let herself get spooked by every single one.

She went in through a side door, but not the one she’d used the night before. She hated falling into routines. Routines were what got agents killed.

When she reached her room she slid her key card into the lock. The green light came on, and she pushed the door open.

A woman stood in the centre of her room, and it wasn’t the maid.

It was a redhead, wearing black trousers, black boots and a black jacket over a white blouse.

The woman looked surprised, but when she realised that Bex wasn’t from housekeeping, her expression changed. The fake innocence dropped from her face, replaced by an icy detachment. She reached behind her back.

Assuming she was about to face a weapon, Bex sprang into instinctive attack mode. She flicked the key card at the woman, sending it spinning through the air. The woman tried to jerk her head away but the card caught her beneath her eye, drawing blood.

Bex had a split second to decide whether to run or fight. It didn’t even take her that long: fight.

A folding metal and canvas stand was by the door, ready for a guest to put their suitcase on it. Bex bent down, scooped the stand up and stepped forward, swinging it in an arc towards the woman’s head. The woman fell backwards onto Bex’s bed, but she used the bounce of the springs to propel herself back to her feet and towards Bex. Her fist swung up, hitting Bex beneath her jaw. Bex’s head snapped back with a click she felt all the way through her skull. For a moment everything went red. She dimly felt the glasses falling away from her face and the stand falling from her hand.

In desperation, Bex clenched her hands together and punched outwards. She still couldn’t see anything, but her fists met their target and Bex heard the woman hit the wall and slide down.

Her vision clearing, Bex looked around for a better weapon. Nothing: she’d packed her clothes neatly away in the wardrobe and her toiletries in the bathroom. Short of pulling the alarm clock / iPod dock from the bedside table and wrenching the power cable from the wall, she couldn’t see anything of use.

The redhead – little more than a blur at the moment – had fallen into the space between the bed and the wall, but she seemed to be levering herself up. Bex kicked out, knocking the bed sideways. With her support taken away the woman fell back again. Bex yanked the duvet off the bed and threw it over her, just to slow her down for a critical few seconds. Before she could get up, Bex ran for the bathroom. Not to lock herself in though – all American hotel bathrooms could be opened easily from the outside, if you knew how. It meant that if a guest passed out or, God forbid, died in the shower, then staff could get in. But that meant redheaded attackers could get in as well. No, Bex wasn’t going to shelter there. She was looking for a weapon.

She heard a scrabbling behind her, and muffled cursing. She slammed the bathroom door behind her and turned the lock. It wouldn’t stop her pursuer for long, but it would give Bex a few more precious seconds.

She scanned the toiletries she’d meticulously arranged on the fake marble surface, frantically looking for something she could use. Nail scissors? Too small. Toothbrush? Too blunt. Antiperspirant?

Antiperspirant!

As the door burst open, slamming back against the bath, Bex scooped the canister up. Her fingers fumbled with it, almost dropping it in the sink, but she turned around with it in her hand just as the redhead bought her hand up to point at Bex’s face.

Not a hand. A gun. A gun, pointed at Bex’s face.

Bex pressed the nozzle on top of the can.

A fine mist of aerosol droplets lightly scented with jasmine sprayed into her attacker’s eyes. She screamed, bringing her hands up to her face and dropping the gun. Bex bent to pick it up, and by the time she straightened up the woman was staggering back into the bedroom, wiping her arm across her eyes. She glared at Bex from bloodshot eyes, then turned and half ran, half fell out into the hallway. Bex’s heart was racing. As she tried to get her breathing under control, she heard the woman stumbling against the walls as she tried to run unsteadily away. Seconds later a bang! echoed through the building as the fire-escape door was thrust open.

‘What was that all about?’ Bex muttered to herself, gazing around at the room that had, just moments before, been immaculate.

‘Room party?’ a shocked voice asked. She turned around. Sam stood in the doorway. His face was white.

‘Don’t worry,’ Bex said. ‘If it had been, I would have invited you. Come in – I don’t want anyone else seeing in.’ As he entered the room, she gave him a quick, impulsive hug. ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean for you to see this. Are you OK?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. I don’t think she even saw me as she pushed past. I don’t know what you did to her, but her eyes looked terrible.’

‘Yeah,’ Bex said, ‘but on the plus side, they won’t be sweating for a while and they’re nicely fragranced.’ She took a breath. ‘Sit down. Let’s catch up.’

‘Well, I’ve been asleep all day,’ Sam said, throwing himself into the small armchair over by the window. ‘What’s your story?’

Quickly she brought him up to date with the trip she and Kieron had made to the Goldfinch Institute, her journey back and the events in the hotel room. ‘I’m guessing that someone at the Institute gave orders to follow the car and see where I went. Either the driver or someone else was instructed to search our hotel rooms for anything incriminating.’

‘Our hotel rooms?’ Sam squealed.

Bex nodded. ‘Both rooms were booked at the same time, and we all arrived together. Normally I try not to leave a trail when I stay in hotels, but we’re undercover – at least Kieron is. We had to leave a trail. People need to think that we’re real.’

‘You mean this could have happened to me?’ He gazed around in shock at the damage.

She shook her head. ‘No – she would have knocked on your door and said she was there to make the bed up or something. If you’d answered, she’d have apologised and gone away. If you didn’t answer, she would have picked the lock and searched the room without leaving any trace.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Either my room was first, or yours has already been searched. Actually she would probably have started with yours – Kieron’s fronting up this operation.’ A thought struck her. Kieron! She scooped the ARCC glasses up from the floor where they’d fallen and put them on. The earpiece was still in her ear canal, but her brain had been filtering out the noises from it.

Through the ARCC link she could see a conference table and, to her relief, Kieron’s hands. Todd Zanderbergen was on the other side of the table. He was holding the rubberised electrode net, turning it over and examining it with interest. Tara Gallagher sat off to one side.

Bex would have liked to tell Kieron about the fight, and being followed, and pull him out while they considered their options, but Todd was talking.

‘This is really great,’ Zanderbergen said approvingly. ‘Small, flexible and really well designed.’ He scrunched it up. ‘I guess your idea is that this is projected from some kind of launcher, like those beanbags you saw earlier, unfurls in flight and wraps itself around the target’s head. Intriguing.’ He fixed Kieron with his pleasant and yet razor-sharp gaze. ‘So, how do you guarantee that the net will unfurl properly and fit around their head rather than, oh, say, smacking them in the face? It seems a rather clumsy manoeuvre.’

‘Well, that’s a good question …’ Kieron said. Bex could hear a slight tension in his voice. He sounded as if he’d been talking for a while and was running out of things to say.

‘Sorry – I’m back,’ Bex said. ‘Tell him it’s defined by distance.’

‘Distance,’ Kieron said with a notably relieved tone in his voice. ‘It’s defined by distance.’

‘The launcher will have a laser rangefinder,’ Bex went on. ‘The net of electrodes will –’

‘The launcher will have a laser rangefinder,’ Kieron interrupted. ‘The net of electrodes will be held together by an electrostatic charge.’ Before Bex could speak, he kept going. ‘At the right moment after it’s fired, the launcher will communicate with the net using near-field wireless technology, like Bluetooth. The charge will flip, the net will be pushed apart and it’ll wrap around the target’s head.’

Todd nodded. ‘Very clever. You’ve thought all this through. Can you demonstrate it?’

‘That’s why you need him,’ Bex said.

‘That’s why I need you,’ Kieron translated. ‘I have the principle of the thing worked out from beginning to end, and I can demonstrate the way the reflected brainwaves will calm the real brainwaves. Putting it into practice – making a technology demonstrator – requires funding and support.’

‘I need to get you out of there,’ Bex said, then quickly added, ‘Don’t say this to him. But we need to extract you.’

‘OK – let’s talk turkey,’ Todd said, leaning forward slightly. ‘My legal people have read through your non-disclosure agreement, and we can live with it. Let’s discuss terms.’

‘Actually,’ Kieron said ‘let’s not. I’m jet-lagged, and that means I’m not at my best for making deals. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to take advantage of an exhausted kid. Can we meet tomorrow?’

‘I’ll clear my schedule,’ Todd said. ‘What about your car? Do you have to call it?’

‘Interesting,’ Bex mused. ‘He knows I drove away. What else does he know?’

‘I’ll do it in a moment,’ Kieron said.

‘We need to go,’ Bex said to Sam. ‘Now.’