CHAPTER FIVE

‘I absolutely forbid it,’ Bex said in the same tone of voice that Kieron’s mum used when she told him he couldn’t go into Newcastle city centre at eleven o’clock at night to see his friends.

‘Look,’ Kieron said, trying to sound adult and reasonable, ‘we’re here, and Bradley is here, and you’re in India.’ He threw in a phrase he’d heard on TV, hoping it made him sound like he knew what he was doing. ‘We’ve got “boots on the ground”. Who else is going to help get Bradley away from these thugs?’ He decided to apply a little bit of pressure. ‘Who knows what they’re doing to him right now? We’re his last, best hope!’

‘Kieron, you’re just a kid. I can’t get you and Sam involved – not like that. I mean, at the moment you’re just sitting in a room somewhere, talking to me and helping me out, and believe me I appreciate the help. I wouldn’t have been able to get this far without it. The trouble is, trying to get Bradley back is risky. You’d be putting yourself out there, where Blood and Soil can find you.’ Bex sounded genuinely agonised, and Kieron felt a wave of guilt crash over him at the way he was trying to manipulate her.

Kieron opened his mouth to point out that Blood and Soil were already looking for him and Sam, based on the thug they’d seen back in the shopping mall, but he decided not to. That might just make things worse. Bex might stop all contact if he reminded her of that.

‘Let me sort it out from here,’ she said. ‘As soon as I can work out who in MI6 to trust, I’ll alert them and they can get Bradley out. Now, I’ve got things to do. Give me a few hours without any contact, OK?’

‘OK.’ Reluctantly he pressed the Disengage button on the side of the glasses.

‘So we’re going to do what?’ Sam asked, eyebrows raised.

Kieron tried not to meet Sam’s gaze. ‘We’re going to expand the image of the briefcase thieves and their pile of papers, and see if we can pick up any evidence that will help us work out what their plan is and where they might have gone,’ he said casually. ‘That way Bex can complete her mission and everyone lives happily ever after. Except the bad guys, obviously.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Sam growled. ‘The next bit. The bit about rescuing your girlfriend’s mate from right-wing extremists.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend!’ Kieron exclaimed, aghast. ‘I’ve never even met her!’

‘OK, your virtual big sister, or whatever you want to call her. We’re going to rescue her mate?’

‘Yes.’

‘From right-wing extremists?’

‘Again, yes.’

‘Even though she clearly just told you not to do that?’

‘Still, yes.’

Sam fell silent for a while, staring at Kieron. ‘You have spotted the flaw in your plan, haven’t you?’

Kieron shrugged. ‘We’re teenagers with no experience of rescue missions, and we can’t fight to save our lives?’

‘That’s the one.’

Kieron sighed. ‘Look, we’re the only people in the UK apart from the people who took him who know that Bex’s friend Bradley has been taken prisoner, right?’ He hesitated a moment. ‘Well, presumably he knows, but that’s kind of irrelevant at the moment. We’re the only people in the UK who know and can do anything about it.’

Sam nodded reluctantly. ‘Right.’

‘And if we tell the police about it, they’ll just pat us on the head and tell us to go away, right?’

‘Again – right.’

‘And we have possession – accidentally – of a powerful set of augmented-reality computing equipment that enables us to access information that’s normally only available to spies and secret agents, right?’

Sam winced, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t like where this is going, but right.’

‘So who else is better placed to find this Bradley bloke and get him out of where he’s being held?’

‘Your argument impresses me,’ Sam said. ‘Please subscribe me to your YouTube channel.’ He shook his head. ‘OK – two things you have to agree to before we go ahead.’

‘Go on then.’ Kieron felt a wave of affection for his friend. Sam was endlessly practical, and he would always have Kieron’s back. Always. Much as he hated to admit it. They’d been friends for as long as he could remember – their mothers had been in adjacent beds in the local hospital when they were pregnant, they’d got into emo music at exactly the same time and Sam hadn’t even minded when he found out that Kieron fancied his sister. They were, and always would be, best friends.

‘First, we find out where this Bradley bloke is, and then we have a sensible and mature discussion about whether he is, in fact, rescuable by two teenage greebs. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’ Kieron couldn’t help but smile at the way the tables had turned. A minute ago it had been him listing the elements of an argument and Sam reluctantly agreeing with them. Now it was the other way around.

‘Second, when we – or someone else – get this Bradley bloke out of wherever he is, he takes over that augmented-reality computer kit and we walk away.’

That condition made Kieron think for a minute. He didn’t want to walk away from all of this, from Bex and her mission in India, but he knew that he was only part of it due to an accidental combination of circumstances. He was probably the last person who ought to be helping a secret agent. He hated sports, and he didn’t know anything about politics. There were much better trained people out there – this Bradley being one of them. And if he tried to continue, if he still tried to be a part of this world that he’d inadvertently stumbled into, then he might actually put Bex’s life at risk. He couldn’t in all conscience do that.

‘Agreed,’ he said.

Sam nodded. ‘All right then – where do we start?’

‘The first thing we do is get that information off the image for Bex so she can do her job.’ Kieron considered. ‘OK, although these glasses have a really good resolution for the augmented-reality images they display, I think we’re better off downloading the image and putting it on a bigger screen.’ He pointed across to his desk, where his computer sat. It had been a Christmas present from his mother. It was expensive – even if it was second-hand – and he knew in his heart it was partly an unspoken apology for the fact she spent so much time away working and partly also a bribe so he accepted the fact that she would be working hard for the foreseeable future. He knew that she didn’t want things to be this way, but he also knew why things had to be this way – she was working hard to earn money to keep them going. He also loved the computer so he wasn’t going to complain. The keyboard lit up when it was switched on, the keys outlined in green, and there were LEDs inside the case that could be seen through a transparent panel. ‘You open it and get a picture editor up while I work out how to email this picture to myself.’

Actually, once he’d located the directory structure where the picture of the two briefcase thieves had been stored, emailing it was just a matter of selecting it, waving his hands until a menu appeared, then selecting the option to email it and typing his email address into the virtual keyboard that appeared in front of him.

‘Aren’t you afraid of the wrong people getting hold of your email address and finding out who you are?’ Sam asked as Kieron’s computer pinged to say that an email had arrived.

‘It’s a Gmail account,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘I’m emohead257@gmail.com. It’s already relatively anonymous, but if there’s any sign that people are looking at it I’ll just junk it and use another email address. I’m emohead258 and emohead259 as well. Covering the bases.’

Sam nodded approvingly. ‘That’s neat. And a little bit creepy as well. I didn’t realise your paranoia went so far that you have three email addresses. You’re worse than me.’ He opened Kieron’s email program and selected one of the messages that had just arrived. ‘Oh, you’ve got several things here from game companies, and – oh, interesting – you’ve got a message from Naomi!’

‘That’s private!’ Kieron said quickly. ‘Don’t open it!’

‘Is that Naomi who we see down in the city centre sometimes – the one with the green edges to her hair?’

‘She probably just wants to know where we are.’ He could feel his heart beating faster. When he saw that Sam had opened up the top message – the one with the graphics file that he’d just sent himself, he relaxed a little and continued: ‘I actually have eight email addresses. Only three of them are on Gmail.’ He tapped the side of the glasses. ‘If you ever doubted that Big Brother was watching you then these things should make you reconsider, mate.’

‘Just because Big Brother can watch you, it doesn’t mean he does.’ Sam turned from his typing and grinned at Kieron. ‘Besides, in your case it’s Big Sister, surely?’

‘Yeah, very funny.’ Kieron crossed the bedroom and stood over Sam’s shoulder. The picture editor he’d installed so he could make memes and stuff for the Internet had opened the graphic file. The picture was exactly the way he remembered the scene: the two blond thieves standing over a table with the stolen briefcase open, and a pile of A4 sheets beside it.

Sam frowned. ‘You know what? They look just like those people who march through Newcastle city centre every now and then demanding that all the migrants go back to where they came from.’

‘Ignoring the fact that most of the people who work in the corner stores and Indian restaurants come from families that have been here for longer than they have,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘OK – try zooming in on that pile of papers.’

Sam created a box around the papers and clicked the mouse. The screen instantly refreshed with a close-up of the papers. Several sheets had visible writing on them. The pixelation was hardly noticeable. ‘That’s a good-quality lens she’s got in her glasses,’ he observed.

‘That writing just looks like squiggles to me,’ Kieron said, leaning closer. ‘Zoom in further.’

Sam repeated his actions. The paper now filled the screen.

‘The reason that writing looks like squiggles,’ Sam said after a few seconds of intently staring at it, ‘is that it’s in a foreign language. It looks like Urdu.’

Kieron stared at him. ‘“It looks like Urdu,”’ he repeated. ‘Since when did you recognise Urdu?’

‘You know that girl in Mrs Adams’s class?’ Sam hunched his shoulders slightly. Kieron knew it was a sign of embarrassment. ‘Shahlyla? We kind of made out a couple of times. I saw a lot of Urdu books around her parents’ place.’

‘You and Shahlyla?’

‘Leave it.’

‘Are you still seeing her?’

‘I said leave it.’ Sam shrugged in an offhand manner. ‘Turns out she prefers rugby players to greebs. Could’ve told me that before we kissed rather than afterwards.’

‘And you have the cheek to ask me about Naomi. You dog.’ Kieron laughed. ‘OK – Urdu it is. We should be able to translate it. There’s tools on the Internet.’

‘Your augmented-reality kit could do it,’ Sam pointed out.

‘Yeah, but it’s quicker doing it here. Let me have a go.’ He pushed Sam out of the chair and took over, calling up an Internet browser, using it to find a site that could recognise and translate text in graphic images, then uploading the file to the site and setting it to work.

‘You’re really not worried about security?’ Sam asked from Kieron’s bed, to which he had retreated.

‘These sites deal with thousands of images a minute,’ Kieron pointed out.

‘But the NSA’s computers can analyse millions of images a second.’

‘Besides, I use an anonymising router and my email address can’t be traced back to me. Paranoid, remember?’

The computer pinged again, telling Kieron that the website had sent a translation directly to his email account. He opened the email and scanned its contents.

‘OK,’ he said dubiously, ‘that looks like a terrorist’s shopping list. The translation isn’t perfect – the words are jumbled up and the grammar is all over the place, but I can see “polonium”, “neutron”, “radiation”, “centrifuge” and “plutonium”, as well as what looks like a set of map co-ordinates.’ He hesitated, trying to work out the sense behind the scrambled text. ‘I think what it’s saying is that there’s a cache of …’ He trailed off, feeling a sense of unreality sweeping over him. ‘Oh boy. I think it’s saying that one particular nuclear weapon is stored at a particular location near the border between India and Pakistan. No, hang on, it’s saying that the nuclear weapon is being moved from a bunker near the border to a safer location deeper in Pakistan. It’s a shipping manifest!’

‘It’s a film script,’ Sam observed darkly, ‘that’s what it is.’

‘No.’ Kieron shook his head firmly. ‘This is real. It’s describing a bunker a few hundred miles south of Islamabad – wherever that is. I think we need to tell Bex about this.’

Kieron turned around to look at Sam, trying to gauge his reaction, but his friend was lying back on his bed with the augmented-reality glasses on. He waved his hands around, obviously accessing menus and the keyboard.

‘Hey!’ Kieron yelled. ‘Leave that alone!’

‘What – only you can use it?’ Sam snorted. ‘It’s not your personal property, you know.’

Kieron leaped across the space between the desk and the bed and snatched the glasses off Sam’s head. ‘That’s delicate technology – you can’t just use it to play first-person-shooter games.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Sam said, sitting up, He looked peeved. ‘Look, if you have to know, I was seeing if I could access the school’s server. Just think – if we can get hold of any exam papers before the exam happens we could sell them! Hell, we could just keep them to ourselves and pass all the exams with top marks!’

‘Which wouldn’t be suspicious at all,’ Kieron said, checking the glasses over for any damage. ‘Look, we’re already thigh-deep in government business. The last thing we want to do is raise any suspicions or draw attention to ourselves. Just – just leave this stuff alone, OK?’

Sam opened his mouth to say something that was probably going to be as cutting and sarcastic as he could manage, based on the expression on his face, but the distant slamming of a door interrupted him.

‘Your mum!’ he said, a panicked look crossing his face.

‘Kieron,’ a voice called, ‘are you in?’

‘I’m in my room!’ Kieron called back. He threw the glasses back to Sam. ‘Hide them!’ he hissed. He moved towards the door, desperate to intercept his mother before she could get to the bedroom, but Sam waved his hands madly.

‘Earpiece!’ he mouthed.

Kieron nodded. Whipping the earpiece from his ear, he threw it towards his friend.

Outside the bedroom, he closed the door behind him and moved out into the hall. He could hear movement in the kitchen. ‘How was work?’ he asked.

‘Another day, another set of bills paid.’ His mum pushed back her hair from her face distractedly, as if she was trying to push the world away. Dishes clattered, and then the door of the fridge opened and closed. ‘Look, I’ve got to go out. The boss wants me to be at a dinner to entertain a client. There’s a microwavable spag bol in the fridge. Can you manage?’

‘Yeah, we’ll be fine.’

‘We?’ She stepped back from the counter so she could look down the hall at him. She wore her one good work suit, but she’d lost weight and she looked lost inside it, like a girl dressing up as an adult. ‘You’ve got someone here? Is it a girl?’ A look of panic crossed her face. ‘Not that it matters. A girl, I mean. You’re a growing boy – you can have girls in your room if you want.’ Kieron didn’t think it was possible but his mother’s face took on an even more panicked look. ‘Or a boy. I’m not judging. If it’s a boy in your room that’s just as good. Maybe even better – at least a boy can’t get pregnant. Not that I think you’d –’

‘It’s Sam,’ he said.

A smile swept across her face. ‘Sam Rosenfelt? Oh, lovely. How is he?’

‘He’s good.’

‘Still in his “emo” phase?’

‘It’s not a phase, Mum,’ he said heavily, ‘it’s a lifestyle choice. He’s not an emo: he’s a greeb. And so am I, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

She stared at him intently, and from her expression it almost seemed as if she was actually seeing him for the first time in a while. ‘You’re so big now. How did you get to be so big? When did that happen?’

‘Gradually,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No, I swear last week you were –’ she waved her hand at waist height – ‘just up to here. And now you’re –’ she gestured vaguely towards his head.

‘Mum, it’s called “growing up”.’

‘Well, I don’t like it. Please stop.’ The wistful, almost sad expression on her face disappeared, replaced with a frown. ‘Your collar is frayed.’ She gave him a quick visual sweep, toes to top of head. ‘And I can see your socks. You need new trousers. We’ll go out at the weekend and get some.’ A pained look crossed her face. ‘No, scratch that – I’ll order some online, a size up from last time. Maybe two sizes.’

‘Skinny jeans,’ he warned. ‘And black. Not like last time.’

‘Skinny jeans make it look like I’m not feeding you properly.’ Her face seemed to age ten years in a moment. ‘Which I’m not. I’m sorry.’

Kieron stepped forward and hugged her. She hugged him back fiercely.

‘It is what it is,’ he said softly. ‘You’re working yourself into the ground to keep us going. I just wish …’

‘Wish what?’ she asked, her voice muffled by his hair.

‘That things were different, but they aren’t.’

She tightened her grip for a moment, then let go and stepped back. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. Her voice was practical, but a trace of moisture glittered around her eyes. ‘Be good, and if you can’t be good then be careful. Make sure you eat something – you and Sam – and don’t touch the bottle of wine in the fridge. That’s for me, for later.’

‘Bye. Have fun.’

‘Brush your teeth,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘And have a shower!’

Back in his bedroom, Sam was playing around with the augmented-reality goggles again. ‘Everything OK?’ he asked.

The sound of the flat’s front door slamming made Kieron’s curtains shiver momentarily.

‘Everything’s just wonderful,’ he said, then: ‘Right – your time is up. My go now.’

Sam slipped the glasses off with ill grace and left them lying on the bed as he rolled off. He threw the earpiece next to them. ‘All yours. Have at it. What are you going to do now?’

‘First,’ Kieron answered, ‘we need to tell Bex about the documents we translated, and then, while she’s deciding what to do about that, we try and track down her friend Bradley.’

‘Oh, we do, do we?’ Sam said, slumping into the chair next to the computer.

‘Don’t be like that. You can help.’ A thought tugged at Kieron’s mind as he slipped the glasses on and put the earpiece in his ear. ‘You haven’t been … talking to Bex, have you?’

Sam shrugged. ‘Would that be a bad thing to do? She’s not your girlfriend – we already established that. And you can’t own an MI6 agent.’

‘I think,’ Kieron said heavily, ‘that in order to avoid confusion Bex needs one person interfacing with her.’

‘Ah, we’re “interfacing” now, are we?’

‘Leave it out.’

Sam shrugged, turned around and started bringing Kieron’s computer out of sleep mode. ‘Actually,’ he said without turning his head, ‘I was looking for downloadable DLCs for games. Stuff that hasn’t been released yet. Didn’t find any.’

Putting the glasses on had activated a Start button that floated in front of Kieron’s eyes. He pressed it, and a window opened up, showing him what Bex was doing. For a sudden panicked moment he thought she was in the shower – water cascaded down in front of her – but he realised that he was looking through a window at rain at exactly the same time he realised that nobody wore glasses in the shower. Which made him feel a lot better.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Oh – you’re there. I’m back in my hotel room.’

‘The weather doesn’t look too good.’

Bex laughed. ‘Monsoon season, apparently. We can expect scattered torrential rain, but no let-up in the stifling humidity. It’s like living in a small kitchen where a kettle is perpetually boiling.’

As Bex spoke, Kieron realised that he could see her reflection dimly in the window; a ghostly figure overlaid on the waterfall outside. He gazed at her for a moment, interested in this person he’d got to know so well in so little time but never actually seen. He couldn’t tell her height – he was effectively looking at her from the level of her own eyes – but she seemed young, like someone who’d left sixth form and gone to college. She had long, brown hair, and she looked … normal. Like someone you might see behind a till at a supermarket, or behind the counter at a chemist’s.

‘How’s everything going at your end?’ she said, breaking the spell. ‘Made any progress?’ She turned her head, and Kieron got a view of her hotel room. It was small, but nicely and rather ornately furnished. Compared to his bedroom it was incredibly neat: an open suitcase sat on a table near the door, but no clothes or other possessions were scattered around. Bex seemed to live in a world where she might have to snatch up her case and move at a moment’s notice, so she made sure that everything she needed was in there.

‘I’ve got a document to show you,’ he said. ‘How do I get it onto your glasses?’

‘You can’t,’ she replied. ‘Apart from the camera, which is hidden in a hinge, these glasses are just glasses. It’s a safety precaution in case anyone behind me spots the pictures being projected on the lenses, or gets suspicious and picks them up off the table if I’ve stupidly left them lying around, or even snatches them off my head. You’re the one who can access all the information, not me.’

‘What about the earpiece?’ he asked, intrigued. ‘Won’t people spot that?’

‘I’ve got long hair. The earpiece is hidden behind my ear and it’s covered. If anybody does see it and ask about it, I just tell them that my hearing got damaged standing next to the amplifier stack at too many rock concerts when I was younger.’

‘Really? They had rock music when you were younger? I thought it was, like, jazz, or classical, or stuff like that.’

She laughed: an attractive rippling sound. ‘Yeah, right. Every generation thinks it invented rock music. What kind of stuff do you guys listen to?’

Kieron shrugged, even though she couldn’t see him. ‘Fatal Insomnia, Bearclaw, things like that. Screamo mostly, with quite a lot of goth added in. What about you?’

‘I used to be addicted to Sisters of Mercy. They counted as goth as well, although probably an earlier version of goth than yours. Oh, and Dead Can Dance, although they were more post-rock than goth. I guess you guys are on post-post-rock now. Or even post-post-post-rock.’

‘Look,’ he said awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry about earlier. I just want to help.’

‘I know. And thanks.’ He heard her take a breath, and her voice became more practical. ‘So, what’s this thing you want to show me?’

‘We enlarged the photo of the documents that were on the table in that temple. We could only translate the top sheet, but it looks as if it mentioned a nuclear device that’s being stored at some military base in Pakistan. It’s being moved sometime soon. What we saw was some kind of shipping order.’

‘A shipping order?’ Bex’s tone was thoughtful. ‘Interesting. Pakistan is one of the seven nations we know have nuclear weapons, and they’re paranoid about their neighbours in India. Anything bad that happens in Pakistan is blamed by the government on Indian interference. It’s the same in India as well – they blame the Pakistanis for a lot of their problems.’ She sighed. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean that tensions are ratcheting up in the area.’

‘Are you going to report this back to your bosses? I mean, even if one of them is a traitor, they still gave you a job to do.’

‘Yes, but I haven’t done the job properly yet. I know what was being handed over, but I don’t know who it was being handed over to, or why, or what these Blood and Soil idiots were doing there – if it was them, and not just a coincidence. Look – thanks for the work you’ve done. Leave it with me and get some sleep.’

‘OK. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Kieron. And tell Sam goodnight as well.’

He switched off the ARCC equipment. For a moment he just stared at his wall, letting the reality of his room flood back in to replace the distant magic of India.

‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Now we find Bradley, and surprise Bex with the news tomorrow.’

Sam stared at him, eyebrows raised. ‘And how exactly are we going to do that?’

‘Don’t know. Any ideas?’

Sam thought for a moment. ‘You’ve got the licence plate of the van they took this bloke away in, haven’t you?’

Kieron displayed the purple Sharpie text on his arm.

‘You should get that made into a tattoo,’ Sam said. ‘You know, so you can remember all this after it’s over.’

‘Focus.’

‘Yeah. OK, there are CCTV cameras on most junction traffic lights these days – have you noticed?’

‘Speed cameras?’ Kieron asked.

‘No, they sense approaching traffic and change the traffic-light priorities if there’s nobody approaching the junction from the left or right, but they also look for people who drive through red lights. That means they have licence-plate recognition.’

‘Ah!’ Kieron nodded. ‘So we use the ARCC kit to search the DVLA records for all licence plates on blue vans that drove away from the shopping mall at about the right time. Simple!’

‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘Simple. The complicated bit is, what do we do after that?’