CHAPTER FOUR

The Mumbai street was a riot of colour and scent. Wherever Bex looked, people were wearing brightly coloured shirts or saris. Behind them were open shopfronts stacked up with fruit and vegetables, tottering piles of books wrapped in plastic sheeting, and animals – kittens, puppies and parrots in tiny cages. The shops competed with each other to have the most attention-grabbing awnings, and above them were massive posters advertising beauty products, electronic devices and, strangely, local politicians with gleaming white smiles. Or perhaps they were toothpaste adverts; it was difficult to tell. But while her eyes were being dazzled by the confusion of sights, her nose was being assaulted by the smell of a hundred different spices – some of which were piled up in heaps in bowls in front of the shops, so vivid they almost glowed. The symphony of spice scents overlaid but didn’t quite disguise the smell of rotting vegetables and sewage that seemed to characterise that part of Mumbai. And – she frowned – she thought she could smell … yes, fresh laundry. Washing powder. How strange.

The street to which she’d followed the briefcase thieves was clogged with traffic: a combination of battered old cars, shiny new ones and three-wheeled motorised auto-rickshaws. They had an enclosed cabin to keep off the rain, but no doors, and there was only room for the driver up front. In the back the passengers sat on a padded bench.

She looked around, trying to seem like a tourist while the two blond-haired thieves paid their taxi driver, but genuinely fascinated by the whole look and feel of the city. She’d travelled widely in Asia during her gap year, but she’d missed out on India – replacing it with Indonesia and Thailand. This, from what she could see, was the real Mumbai – not the old Victorian part left behind by the English when they pulled out of India or the pretty bits that the visitors wanted to see, but the areas where the people who actually called the city home lived their day-to-day lives.

She could hear, above the cries of street vendors and the buzz of motorcycle and moped engines, a regular slapping sound. She couldn’t see what was causing it. Still distracted by the smell of washing powder, she crossed the pavement from where she had left her moped (well, the moped she had temporarily borrowed) towards a chest-high brick wall plastered with posters telling anyone who passed about local dance festivals, religious events and concerts. It was the kind of wall that, in England, would have given a view of a train track or a river below. That’s what Bex expected now, but what she saw was so unusual, so Indian, that she couldn’t help but smile.

It looked like a river probably did flow down there, at right angles to the street, but it was almost impossible to see it thanks to the hundreds of lines of washing that had been strung across it. They receded into the distance, looking like some bizarre spider’s web in which various scraps of coloured paper had been caught. Bex could just about make out, through the flapping clothes, sheets and pillowcases, that the slanting banks of the river had been covered with concrete. Where the water should have been was a mass of soapy bubbles, and the concrete thronged with women, all dressed in saris, who were busy dipping more clothes and bedding into the soapy water, pulling them out, twisting them into ropes and then hitting them against the concrete as hard as they could to expel the water. That explained the slapping noise she had heard. Once the women had got as much water as they could out of the clothes, they hung them up on the lines to let them dry in the heat, although given the humidity Bex suspected that there was almost as much water in the air as in the massive outdoor laundry she had found. Seeing the preponderance of sheets and pillowcases, Bex assumed that most of the hotels in Mumbai probably sent their dirty washing here to be cleaned. It certainly made her wonder if the sheet she had slept on the night before – the sheet she had assumed had been through a thorough wash since the last hotel guest had slept on it – had actually been dipped in a soapy river and hit against concrete to get it clean.

India. What a country.

She turned her head to glance towards the two blond thieves, but a small man with mahogany-coloured skin and jet-black hair stood in front of her. Most of his front teeth were missing.

‘You need a tourist guide?’ he asked in accented English. ‘I show you the best places. I show you the places that nobody else knows about. I get you in everywhere. Many friends in many museums and art galleries.’

She smiled, and held up her hand, palm outward. ‘No thank you,’ she said firmly. ‘I know where I am going.’

She tried to step past him, towards where the taxi was pulling away from the kerb, but the man caught her arm.

‘Nobody better than me in Mumbai!’ he said. ‘Best tourist guide ever.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. She pulled her arm away and kept moving, turning her head slightly so she could see out of the corner of her eye what he was doing. He started after her for a moment, an ugly snarl flashing across his face, then shrugged and moved on, looking for another victim.

Begging seemed to be a constant thing in Mumbai – or, at least, in this area. Women in saris and shawls moved along the road from car to car, extending their hands and beseeching the drivers for ‘bahkshish! ’ – which, she assumed, meant ‘money’. Some of them were holding babies, while others had burns on their arms or scars on their faces.

A voice in her earpiece surprised her. ‘They look like they’re begging for themselves, but they’re almost certainly part of a gang.’ It was Kieron. The sound of a familiar voice made her feel slightly less alone and vulnerable. It also reminded her of Bradley. The action of the past hour or so – the theft of the briefcase of atomic secrets, the following of the taxi and now the reconnaissance here – had pushed the thought to the back of her mind, but now she had a moment of relative peace it was right at the front again. She had to find Bradley, and get him away from the people who had kidnapped him, but how? She couldn’t tell her bosses back in SIS-TERR because the abductors appeared to have a link to them. And, to make it worse, she was stuck here in Mumbai on a mission with only a teenage stranger back in England to help her.

‘Where are you?’ she said in the end.

‘Still at my flat.’

She asked the question that bothered her the most. ‘Any sign of the guys who took Bradley? Did they actually come back to look for you?’

‘One of them did. We managed to evade him.’

She breathed a sigh of relief. At least that was something. Deciding what to do about that could wait until the present business was complete.

‘Looks like you’re in a market,’ Kieron said through her earpiece. ‘Is that where you followed your two suspects?’

‘They aren’t suspects,’ Bex pointed out. ‘They actually stole the briefcase. I saw them. But yes, I’ve followed them here.’

‘Let me just –’ Kieron said, then: ‘Oh, this thing’s like the best guidebook ever. I can call up details of the best-value cafes, local customs, things to avoid saying or doing – it even has a translator function!’

‘I don’t want a cafe,’ she pointed out. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

She heard a snort of astonishment through the earpiece. ‘Oh, that’s just wrong.’

‘What’s that?’ The two blond thieves had moved off the pavement now, and she walked along the row of shopfronts towards where they had been.

‘Apparently those women begging can actually rent babies to carry around with them so they get more sympathy and more money! What kind of mother would rent her baby out to be carried around the streets?’

In the background Bex thought she heard another voice – the mysterious Sam? – say: ‘My mum would.’ She winced, hoping it was a joke.

Up ahead, set back a little from the road, and raised above it by a handful of wide steps, Bex suddenly saw something incredible. It was so out of place, so garish, that she caught her breath. It had to be a place of religious worship, but it looked more like something out of a flu hallucination than any church she was used to. The columns and arches in front of the wide-open main door were, she supposed, a bit like the gothic architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, but they were painted in pastel colours – soft pink, calm light blue, gentle lavender and marine turquoise. They also had figures carved into them, but not the gargoyles or religious figures that a church in England would have. No, these looked like dancers in skimpy costumes, ready for a party.

The tops of the arches were scalloped instead of smooth, as if someone had gone around with a huge hole punch and taken semi-circular chunks out of the stonework every few inches, and most of the upper floors glittered and gleamed with gold paint. The windows on the upper floors were narrow, like those in a castle, and as she looked further up she could see that the entire edifice ended in a series of domes. They weren’t the regular, hemispherical domes you’d get in Western buildings though – they were taller, thinner at the base, more like the shape of some poisonous toadstools. They too were painted gold.

With some difficulty, Bex pulled her gaze back to ground level, and she realised that nothing she had just seen could compare with the sheer bizarreness of the fact that on either side of the temple sat a statue of an elephant.

The statues were about three times her height – so probably life-sized. The skin of the creatures had been painted a greyish blue, but they were draped in sculpted blankets, painted red and gold, that fastened underneath their bellies with sculpted buckles. Their eyes didn’t look anything like the eyes of elephants she’d seen on television, and once on a trip to Africa. Normal elephants had small, orange eyes set in wrinkled and cracked flesh. The eyes on these statues were like exaggerated human eyes – white corneas surrounding bright blue irises and black pupils. They even had lashes – huge lashes, like something from Strictly Come Dancing or an early Disney movie – and a cheeky little gleam.

‘I do not believe it,’ Kieron’s voice said in a hushed tone.

‘It’s real,’ Bex said, although she wasn’t completely convinced.

‘Apparently this is a Jain temple. Hey, I didn’t know any of this, but the information’s coming up now. Jainism is an ancient religion, mainly in India but with offshoots around the world. Jains believe in non-violence and love towards all living beings, open-mindedness and non-attachment to possessions. They believe so much in non-violence that they are all vegetarians and they’ll even pick spiders up and take them out of their houses rather than kill them. Some Jains won’t eat potatoes and carrots and stuff, because they think that the vegetables feel pain when they’re pulled out of the ground.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Somehow, I don’t think Jain fundamentalism is a thing. I doubt there are any Jain terrorists.’

‘Then why have two probable terrorists just gone inside?’ Bex asked.

‘The computer says it has no idea.’

Two middle-aged Western tourists – a man and a woman – emerged from the open main doors as Bex arrived there and stopped. They were both carrying cameras. They stopped and bent down, and Bex realised they had left their shoes outside while they looked around. That was probably a mark of respect, but at least it told her that she could go inside and not look out of place. ‘I’m going to go in and see what’s going on,’ she said.

As she walked up the steps and got to the door she bent down and slipped her trainers off.

‘It’s well worth it,’ the man who had just emerged from the temple said to her as he straightened up. He spoke with an American accent.

‘It’s beautiful!’ the woman said. ‘So much care and attention devoted to it!’

Bex smiled briefly and moved on.

Just inside the doorway she saw a life-sized statue of a man sitting cross-legged on a pedestal. The statue had been painted to give him dark brown skin. His eyes were closed and his hands were folded in his lap. For a moment she’d thought the man was real and alive, until she saw the gleam of varnish and the cracks around the neck and forehead. Bex stopped for a moment, feeling a sudden urge to bow her head respectfully. As she did so, a woman in white robes who entered just behind her smiled and nodded. She, too, bowed her head to the statue, and Bex thought she heard the woman whispering, ‘Nishihi, nishihi, nishihi.’

The inside of the temple was large and airy, and surprisingly cool compared to outside. Monks in white or orange robes moved silently across the tiled floor. The walls and columns inside were as colourful as those outside, and when Bex glanced up she saw the interior of one of the domes, patterned with small multicoloured tiles that made it look like the inside of a kaleidoscope.

She moved around the inside of the temple, trying to look like a tourist but keeping watch for the two thieves. Whenever she passed one of the monks they bowed politely to her, and she bowed to them. Strangely – or perhaps not, given the nature of the place – several hens also strutted around as if they owned the place. In a city the size of Mumbai, with something like twelve million hungry inhabitants who considered cows sacred and pigs dirty, this was probably the only place they felt safe, Bex thought.

The inner space of the temple had a colonnade around its edge. Doors in the walls gave access to other rooms. Bex checked several of the rooms, looking as innocent and touristy as she could. The first few she tried seemed to be meditation spaces, with people kneeling or sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed. Or perhaps they were more statues; she couldn’t tell. Another door gave access to a large but secluded garden area, with paths of cracked paving slabs and dry-looking grass. Bushes and cherry trees lined it, and behind them a wall ran all the way around the edge. The next door led onto a narrow stairway that led upward. She listened for a moment, but she couldn’t hear anyone up there. She was beginning to believe that the thieves had gone straight through the temple, into the garden and away into the bustling city, secure in the knowledge that they had shaken off any pursuers, when she came to the next door. Assuming it was another meditation space or suchlike, she stepped into a small, square room and found the two thieves standing in front of a table on which the briefcase sat, open. The contents – several sheets of A4 paper – had been removed and were spread out on the table. The male thief was taking photographs of the papers with his mobile phone.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said automatically, ‘I thought this was part of the tour.’

‘This is private,’ the blond man said. He had a rough, raspy voice. He quickly held a mobile to his head, as if he was just about to make a call, or had just completed one.

‘Sorry,’ Bex said again, and backed away, trying her best to put a polite smile on her face. As she went she tried to take in as many details of the room as possible. A laptop sat on the floor, plugged into some kind of portable charging device and a Wi-Fi router.

‘Very clever,’ Kieron said in her earpiece. ‘Who in a Jain temple is going to complain about intruders? The monks are so polite they’d just smile at them and let them get on with whatever they’re doing. It’s the perfect cover.’

The blonde woman stared at Bex challengingly. Her hair had been pulled into a high ponytail which made her face look tight and dangerous. ‘Hey, I’ve seen her before,’ she said to her companion. ‘She was at the Gateway when we got the briefcase.’

‘Are you sure?’ The man scowled at Bex.

‘She was looking at us. Right at us.’

The man’s lips twisted into a snarl. ‘We’ve been identified. Get her! I’ll secure the case.’

The woman came towards Bex, her hand moving to the small of her back. Whether she was reaching for a knife, a gun or some other weapon, Bex didn’t intend hanging around long enough to find out. She turned and ran, all pretence of being a tourist thrown to the wind.

Bex’s bare feet slapped against the tiles as she sprinted across the open area of the temple for the main door. Monks looked over to see what was going on, their faces showing the shock they felt at the violation of their tranquil temple. Bex felt an almost irresistible desire to shout, ‘I’m sorry!’ as she ran, but managed to suppress it. Hens scattered before her in a flurry of feathers and clucking.

She could hear the thud of the woman’s shoes as she tried to catch up with Bex. It sounded like she wore boots. No respecter of the temple’s customs then.

Bex got to the door, but the wall by her head suddenly exploded in a cloud of sharp stone fragments. She hadn’t heard a shot: the woman must be using a silencer. If she went through the doorway now she’d be a perfect target, outlined in the light from outside for enough time that the woman could put a bullet in her back. Instead she jinked sideways, behind one of the pillars, and sprinted along the colonnade that ran around the outside of the temple space.

She passed another of the life-size statues just as a bullet smashed its forehead open. No point in going into the meditation rooms: she’d be trapped there, and she’d be endangering the lives of the Jains who were in there. She could see the door leading to the stairs across a corner of the open space, half hidden by a column. Should she head for there?

‘I’ve got the plans of the temple up,’ Kieron said urgently in her ear. ‘Don’t go upstairs. There’s only one stairway and the windows are too narrow to escape through. You’ll be trapped.’

‘Thanks,’ she muttered, and changed course.

The doorway leading to the garden appeared up ahead. She ran straight for it.

Bex pelted through the doorway and into the garden. A trio of Japanese tourists was heading towards her, along one of the paths. She ran through them, scattering them like the hens earlier. A cherry tree up ahead had branches that extended over the wall. She leaped for the lower branches, pulling herself up and into the foliage and the blossoms.

She heard the sound of boots on the paving slabs. That had to be the woman chasing her. Nobody else in the temple apart from her and her companion would be wearing footwear. The footsteps slowed to a halt. Bex imagined the woman looking around, holding the gun ready to fire. The leaves and the flowers were shielding her: if she tried to get up to the top branches and over the wall now the woman would hear her. Even if the woman couldn’t see her, she could still fire into the leaves and she’d almost certainly hit Bex. Instead, Bex stayed where she was, perched on one branch and holding on to another for stability. She tried to breathe slowly.

More footsteps. It sounded as if the woman with the gun was standing by the tree trunk now.

A cherry blossom beside Bex’s nose was giving out a strong scent. She felt a tickling in her nose. She wanted to sneeze. The feeling was building up and building up. It was almost unbearable now. Slowly, Bex bought her free hand up to her face and held her nose tight. Gradually the feeling subsided.

More footsteps, getting quieter as the woman moved away. The sound of the footsteps changed as the woman went back into the temple again.

Bex counted to twenty, just to make sure, then began to scramble up the branches to the top of the tree. She glanced over the wall, seeing a narrow alley with a rivulet of dirty water running down it. A mangy cat prowled, looking for food. Bex clambered onto the wall. Holding onto the brickwork at the top, she gradually let herself down, feet pressed against the wall, until only a drop of a couple of feet separated her from the muddy alley.

The brickwork beneath her fingers crumbled.

She fell the last few feet and landed on her back in the mud. The cat yowled and ran. Although her back hurt, she couldn’t afford to relax. She turned over and scrambled to her feet. Somewhere outside the front of the temple her trainers were sitting demurely – assuming they hadn’t been stolen by now. She couldn’t go back for them: it would be an obvious place for the thieves to wait and set a trap.

She began to squelch her way along the alleyway, away from the temple wall.

‘Anything I can do?’ Kieron asked uncertainly in her ear.

‘Find me a shop where I can get some trainers,’ she said tiredly. ‘Oh, and a replacement shirt. This one is soaked.’

An hour later she felt much better. She’d bought new trainers, changed her hairstyle and replaced her shirt with something very different in style. She’d dumped the muddy one in a bin on the street. As she walked away from the bin she heard a scuffling sound behind her. Turning her head, she saw three scruffy Indian children pulling the shirt out and fighting over it. They were pulling so hard it looked likely to tear.

Not her problem. At least she’d changed her appearance. If the briefcase thieves were still looking for her, they’d be looking for someone with different hair and a differently coloured shirt. She’d even managed to find some gel insoles in a pharmacy. Slid into the new trainers, they altered the way she walked. Not obviously, but she’d been trained to identify people by the way they walked, and she presumed the briefcase thieves had been given the same kind of training by whoever they were working for. If she had to run anywhere then she might have to take the insoles out and throw them away, but for the moment they were a part of her disguise.

It was a shame she still had to wear the sunglasses. They’d been made to look as anonymous as possible, but if she’d been able to she would have ditched them and replaced them with something with more bling, something that would have changed the look of her face. The trouble was, they were her link back to England, and help. If Kieron could actually be described as ‘help’.

Now she sat in a coffee shop, sipping a flat white that had, according to the barista, been made with cardamom added to the ground coffee. It tasted rather good.

Somewhere in her earpiece Kieron was telling her about cardamom. She’d turned the volume down, to give herself time to think. He was still enthusiastic about the technology, like a kid with a Christmas present. The trouble was, she didn’t know what to do next.

She suddenly realised that Kieron had gone quiet as if he was waiting for an answer. She touched the earpiece, turning up the volume again. ‘Sorry – did you say something?’

‘I said: would you rather I kept quiet for a while? You seem distracted.’

‘No. Well, yes.’ She sighed. ‘Look, you’ve got yourself into a dangerous situation, and I need to get you out of it.’

‘OK.’ He didn’t sound convinced. ‘Look, you’re in India and I’m in Newcastle. You can’t actually do anything to stop me helping you, can you?’

‘I can tell my superiors that you’ve got the agent-handling kit,’ she bluffed.

‘That would get me into trouble, and I don’t think you want to do that.’ His tone was reasonable, and he made a good point; she had to give him marks for that. ‘And besides, you suspect that one of your superiors is responsible for the thugs that took your friend Bradley. If you tell the wrong person then you’re exposing yourself, and putting me in danger.’ Another good point.

‘I could tell the police.’ That one was a gamble, but she couldn’t think of anything better in a hurry.

‘They’d think you’d made it up. A secret agent operating abroad but being fed information by a teenager in Newcastle? There’s no way they’d send anybody round to the flat to impound the kit from me.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Besides, I’m the one with the information goggles, not you. You don’t even know where I live.’

‘Fair enough,’ she said, and took a sip of her coffee. ‘What are my chances of persuading you to just pop the glasses and the earpiece in an envelope and post them somewhere?’

‘Zero. I’m having far too much fun, and you need my help. Now – treat me like I’m Bradley. What do we do?’

She sighed. ‘OK: we have three problems, if we ignore the fact that highly expensive and top-secret technology has got into the hands of a couple of teenagers.’

‘Don’t push it,’ he said, but he sounded amused.

‘The first problem is that Bradley’s been taken prisoner or hostage by these “Blood and Soil” right-wing fanatics in Newcastle. They might be hurting him, torturing him for information.’ The thought made her queasy.

‘But you think one of your bosses is linked to Blood and Soil. I checked that number plate using the glasses. It’s linked to a firm that’s actually a front for MI6.’

‘We’ve been over that.’

‘Yes, but you’re missing the point. The traitor inside MI6 would know everything that Bradley knows, wouldn’t they?’

Bex would’ve hit her own forehead, but it would have attracted too much attention in the coffee bar. ‘You’re right. So – why did they take him?’ Before Kieron could reply she came up with the answer herself. ‘They needed to disrupt our mission so that the thieves here could steal the briefcase from Fahim.’

‘That’s right.’ Kieron sounded pleased with himself. ‘They weren’t expecting me to pick up the kit and help you chase the thieves.’

She felt better now. Bradley might not have been safe, but at least he wasn’t being tortured. Probably.

‘That means,’ she went on, making the connections in her mind as fast as she spoke, ‘that the briefcase thieves and the thugs who took Bradley are all part of the same plot or organisation.’

‘I think we knew that from the way they looked,’ Kieron said. ‘All blond and clean-cut.’

‘So if I can somehow find them here in Mumbai, I can find out what they’re doing and perhaps, perhaps, get them to tell me who the traitor is back in MI6. Then we can get the traitor to tell me where Bradley is being held.’

‘Good idea.’ Kieron sounded smug, as if he’d just received an A on his homework.

Bex felt her mood deflating. ‘The problem is they’ll have cleared out of the Jain temple, and probably eradicated any clues as to where they might have relocated. I don’t know where they might be now.’

‘I can help with that,’ Kieron said, sounding even smugger.

‘How?’

‘Firstly, remember the person on the hotel roof – the one with the telescopic rifle who created the distraction that enabled the thieves to take the briefcase? They might have left some clue on the roof that would identify them.’

Bex thought about that for a moment. ‘Unlikely,’ she mused, ‘but possible. It’s a long shot though. Do you have anything else?’

‘I do. Remember those sheets of paper on the table in the temple?’

Bex cast her mind back. The briefcase had been open, and the papers had been on the table. The male thief was photographing them with his mobile phone. ‘Yes, I do, but they’ll have been taken away by now.’

‘Yes, but I found out how to record stuff through the camera in your glasses. I photographed him photographing the papers.’

‘So we can identify him?’ Bex was dubious.

‘No.’ Kieron’s levels of smugness were becoming irritating now. ‘So I could take the bit of the image where the papers were, enlarge it and read what’s on the sheets. I could only see the top few, and they were in some foreign language, but I bet I can get your computer thing to translate them. Hopefully it’ll tell us what the thieves are trying to do, and that’ll help us locate them.’

‘Kieron,’ Bex said, ‘I take it all back. You’re a genius.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And there’s one more thing.’

She felt a small bud of unease begin to flower in her mind. ‘What?’

‘Sam and I are going to go and get your friend Bradley back from Blood and Soil.’