Kester and Lily crouched motionless behind the sofa in Frank Hawk’s room, their eyes locked on each other as they listened to someone enter, pick something off the floor, then cough.
A man’s cough.
Kester cursed the fact that he had not activated the spy camera. If he had, Lesh would have been able to tell them what the man was doing and where – exactly – he was. But, for now, he and Lily knew nothing.
Then they heard the sound of a zip opening or closing on a bag or a jacket, followed by a plastic popping noise.
Kester tried to work out what he was hearing. Was Hawk pulling a gun out of the bag? Did he keep the bullets in some kind of plastic pouch? He was thinking about the worst possible thing it could be, because he knew he had to be ready for whatever happened.
The next sound they heard gave them an answer to exactly what was going on. Two short bursts of a hissing sound. Kester smiled at Lily and tapped his armpit, to indicate the American was using an aerosol can. Lily smiled too. He wasn’t here to catch them in the act of spying: he’d come back to his room merely to spray on some deodorant and he didn’t know two children were crouched behind his fancy sofa.
Now if he would only just go!
Lily and Kester kept quiet as tiny particles of the spray that Frank Hawk had used on his armpits drifted over them both, illuminated by the light streaming in through the window. Lily tried not to breathe in, for fear of sneezing or coughing. Soon the door handle rattled as if it was being opened again and the door slammed.
Kester counted to ten before looking. It was always possible that the man had pretended to close the door and leave, but was, in fact, standing there with a gun aimed at the two of them, ready to blow their heads off.
Next Kester took his SpyPhone out of his pocket and – using the screen as a makeshift mirror – pointed it at the doorway.
Nobody there.
He looked round the corner of the sofa to confirm.
‘Clear,’ he whispered.
Lily frowned. ‘That was close.’
Kester walked over to the bathroom doorway and twisted the spy camera he’d placed there.
A voice came into both their ears at once. Lesh on the radio. ‘That’s activated now. All clear in the corridor. Target is in the lift, going down. Extract.’
Kester and Lily left swiftly, using not the lift but the cold stairwell again, then back into the corridors of the second floor. They saw no one as they walked. No staff. No guests. No Prime Ministers.
To room 312.
Opening the door of room, they saw the other three staring back at them.
‘We don’t have much time,’ Lesh said as soon as the door was shut. ‘I’m sorry. I have no idea where Hawk came from. He didn’t show up on the stairs or in the lifts. I can’t make sense of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Lesh,’ Kester said.
‘Maybe …’ Lesh hesitated. ‘Anyway, the cameras you’ve all fixed are working and I have both men’s rooms on my monitor.’
‘Did it go OK in Esenin’s room, Hatty?’ Kester asked.
‘Well, we were undisturbed,’ Hatty replied. ‘Thankfully. We planted the bug in the top of the door frame. Then we looked for papers and anything else we could find.’
‘And we found something,’ Adnan interrupted eagerly.
‘What?’ Lesh asked.
‘A file with three photographs inside,’ Hatty said. ‘Adnan made a copy of all the images on his SpyPhone. Look.’
Adnan held his phone out to the others. They saw three images. One of a tall, cone-shaped device half buried in ice. Another of some sort of large snowmobile. Finally, a map of some islands.
‘What are they?’ Kester asked.
‘The last is a naval chart,’ Hatty said. ‘Of here.’
‘Here?’
‘Look,’ Hatty pointed. ‘This is the channel where Tromsø is. The bridges on either side of this island are marked. It’s the view we all saw from the hill and from the plane. But this chart shows the depth of the water across the channel. It’s for ships to use to navigate through the islands, so they don’t run aground.’
‘What about the other pictures?’ Adnan asked.
‘That looks …’ Lesh said, gesturing for a closer look. ‘The conical thing, I mean. That looks like a warhead.’
‘A warhead?’ The other four spoke at the same time.
‘A nuclear warhead,’ Lesh explained. ‘The part of a nuclear missile that has the bomb in it. You know, the pointed bit on the end. But it’s not a modern one, it’s an old one. From the 1960s.’
‘How do you know that?’ Adnan asked.
‘I’ve read about them.’
‘About bombs from years ago?’ Adnan was surprised.
‘But what’s this got to do with anything now?’ Kester challenged. ‘Fifty years later.’
‘The question is: what has the warhead got to do with the map?’ Lesh said.
The room went quiet. Everyone racking their brains.
Kester broke the silence. ‘We can work it out later,’ he urged. ‘The thing now is to gather evidence while everyone’s up and about. We need to watch Hawk and Esenin. We need to see who they talk to. Try and hear what they talk about. Anything we can pick up tonight we can use to work out what these charts and the warhead mean. Come on.’
Kester was on his feet. ‘We’ll all go down to the bar area. Just hang out with the others. But try to take in as much as you can. OK?’
Lily, Hatty and Adnan all stood up and Lesh moved his wheelchair forward. They were ready.
And there was no time to lose.