True to his word, Jack Bootle-Cadogan slipped straight through G-Mamma’s front door and up into the Spy-Lab at one minute to eight, carrying a suitcase.
G-Mamma snorted. ‘Good Gawdy-Lordy, are you planning a holiday? I don’t think you understand how our missions work, young dog… young man.’
Jack’s canine face crumpled self-consciously. ‘It’s just that I didn’t know where we were going or what I should wear, so I’ve brought a few options with me.’ He opened the case with a flourish. ‘There’s my helmet for if my dog head doesn’t disappear. It normally does when I relax, but I don’t imagine that breaking into a bank vault will be exactly peaceful. I brought normal boy clothes for if we’re meant to be just mingling in like ordinary teenagers, and I’ve got black tie in case we’re mingling like not-so-ordinary teenagers.’
‘Just a black tie?’ said Janey. ‘I don’t think that will go with your hoodie.’ He’d brought jeans and tee-shirts for his teenager outfit, to be topped with a soft, burnt orange hoodie that looked about ten sizes too small.
‘No, black tie the outfit. Formal dress. For dinner. With a dickie bow?’ he explained as Janey became increasingly confused. ‘You know, like James Bond would wear. I thought … you know … seeing as you’re spies …’
‘Oh! Right.’ Janey chewed her lip, wondering what to tell him. ‘The thing is, Jack, I don’t really think it matters what you wear if you’ve still in your dog get-up. It’s going to be quite hard to hide you if you’re clanking around in half a suit-of-armour.’
‘It’s only the top bit,’ said Jack in a small voice. Then he sighed, deeply disappointed, and Janey could hear the old sad Jack from Lowmount re-appearing.
‘G-Mamma, what if Jack Wowed?’
‘What if I what?’
G-Mamma circled Jack with a finger on her lime-green lips. ‘The Wower does bring out the best in everyone. Shows them their finest version. Are you up for it, Jack? You might discover your finest version is – I don’t know … maybe a Yorkshire Terrier?’
‘Oh. I’m not sure.’ Jack looked from Janey to G-Mamma and back again. ‘What happens to you if you get Wowed?’
G-Mamma rolled her eyes. ‘I’m always in my best version, Jack the Lad! I Wowed before you arrived.’ She was wearing builder’s overalls spattered with paint and make-up of every hue to match. ‘If we get caught, I’ll just say I’m the decorator. I’ll blend.’
It was highly unlikely that G-Mamma would blend anywhere but a paint factory, but by now Jack was looking so miserable that Janey decided it was time to help him out.
Besides, she was absolutely desperate to get inside that Wower!
‘I’ll go first, Jack,’ she told him. ‘You can see what it does to me and decide for yourself if you want to try it. You can always de-Wow if you don’t like the result.’
‘Back to this?’ Jack pointed to his furry face. ‘Yay.’
There was no answer to that, really, so Janey just gave him a small smile, trotted across the lab and opened the doors of what appeared to be the large American-style fridge. As she stepped in she breathed deeply. Heaven! The scent was just as she’d remembered: faintly medical with a hint of vanilla and chocolate, and a beautiful earthy warmth that reminded her of beaches and sandcastles.
‘Wow me,’ she told the machine, and it began instantly – the robotic hands massaging her head into a pony-tail that would be part-fashion and part-weapon; the gossamer threads of silver encasing her in a fluid but hard-as-nails lycra body-suit, and gold and multi-coloured laser beams that layered sparkles through her hair, wrapped her hands and feet in state-of-the-art gadgetry and, last of all, placed a new pair of Ultra-Gogs on the bridge of her nose.
‘Oh! That’s different!’ she exclaimed, as a dropper appeared from the wall of the Wower and inserted latex into her ear. Suddenly she could hear everything clearly: the conversation G-Mamma and Jack were having outside the door; even the low buzz from the radio next door where her parents were listening to a quiz, believing her to be safely in her bedroom.
‘So will I still recognise her?’ Jack was saying as she stepped out of the cabinet. His canine jaw dropped open. ‘Wow.’
If there wasn’t so much spy-power coursing through her, Janey was quite sure she would have giggled nervously at his reaction. But with the combination of spy-suit, spy-buys and spy senses, Janey felt incredibly grown-up and pretty much invincible. It was an amazing sensation, and suddenly she realised just how much she’d missed it.
‘Wow indeed, Blonde girl,’ echoed G-Mamma. ‘The new improved Jane Blonde. Jane Blonder – that’s what we might have to call you.’
As she turned to the mirrored surface of the fridge door, Janey almost laughed aloud. It was the same as she used to be, but better, as G-Mamma had said. The Lycra outfit was not so much silver as a pearly white, which suited her better now that she was older. Light armoured padding ran down each of her limbs and across her ribs. Her hair, too, was paler than before, and instead of springing out sharply from the crown of her head, her ponytail lay in a silky rivulet across one shoulder and down her front. It might not be a dagger any longer, but it was long enough to be a lasso or something. The Ultra-Gogs, meanwhile, had all but disappeared since they were constructed from some material that weighed nothing, on super-light, almost invisible frames. From behind lenses which were almost impossible to see, her grey eyes flashed with excitement.
Jack’s doggy eyes were still staring at her, and now it was getting embarrassing, so she spun back around to him quickly.
‘Yes, Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s what the machine does. So that’s what it will do to you too, if you want. Not the spysuit and everything – that’s just for me – but whatever’s right for you. Just close the doors and say, “Wow me”, and it does the rest. Don’t worry; it’s straightforward.’
‘I’m not worried,’ said Jack. ‘That’s all very low-key compared with some of the transformations I’ve witnessed. Although still …’ He gave her a double thumbs-up as he backed into the cabinet. ‘Wow.’
The two spies waited until they heard Jack utter the magic words so that the Wower sprang into life. He was sweet, Janey realised, and she hoped above all else that the Wower would capture that and set him free from his Doghead alter-ego, at least for a while.
She was about to say this to G-Mamma when she noticed that her SPI:KE was close to tears. ‘G-Mamma, what?’
‘Oh, it’s youuuuuuu!’ bleated the woman, fishing for a paint-spattered cloth in the enormous bib pocket of her dungarees. ‘My blonde girl! Spylets really are forever. But you look so … so different, Janey Zaney Blonde and Brainy. My little spylet’s all grown up!’
And then she crushed Janey to that same bib pocket across her voluble bosom so that her Ultra-Gogs ground into her nose and her waterfall of a pony tail got caught in G-Mamma’s braces. ‘Owww,’ she said plaintively.
‘Sorry.’ G-Mamma pushed Janey away and blew her nose on the painting cloth. ‘Got carried away.’
‘You smudged your make-up,’ Janey pointed out.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ sniffed G-Mamma. ‘It goes with the overall look. Oh! Ha. The Overall Look! See what I did there?’
Some GM self-congratulation and possibly a rap about overalls were about to start up, so Janey held up a hand and pretended to be listening to the Wower. Actually, she didn’t need to pretend. She could hear quite clearly that, deep within the cabinet, Jack was actually singing.
‘Are you getting that?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got new plugs in my ears or something. I can hear loads more than usual!’
G-Mamma tried to shake her head and nod at the same time; it came out in a weird spasm, so the effect was like an earthquake in denim. ‘I can’t hear it, but I thought you could hear something, and no, I don’t know what you’re hearing, but oh! You must have been given BATS – Bionic Audio Transmission Selectors. You can tune in to the good stuff and tune out the bad. Oh, Blonde! You’ll be able to tune in to my rapping from your bedroom! Or even further away!’
Luckily, Janey was saved from having to respond by the appearance of Jack Bootle-Cadogan. Without the dog head.
‘Wow to you too,’ she said with a grin, as she took in his normal boy appearance.
She turned him around by the shoulders – which she could now reach – and showed Jack his reflection in the mirror. He was tall but not gigantic, with a kind, thoughtful face and a thatch of fair hair that she somehow hadn’t expected, since it was in stark contrast with the ebony fur of his canine head. He was dressed in pretty much an identical outfit to the ‘ordinary teenager’ one that he’d brought with him, apart from this one looked like it had been ironed. He touched his ears self-consciously and Janey noticed that his lobes were a tiny bit bigger than usual, but his limbs, while long enough to make him tall, were all in proportion so that he seemed very … connected, somehow, and not at all gangly and awkward like Alfie. More like Gideon Flynn, she thought suddenly, startled to find her cheeks growing hot.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ said Jack after a moment of looking himself up and down. Janey was only glad that he hadn’t been watching her at all in the last few minutes.
‘Aren’t you different to normal?’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘That’s what the Wower usually does.’
Jack stared a little more, then shook his head. ‘No, exactly like I am normally, apart from when I’m chewing on bones and chasing sticks.’
‘Well, you must just be perfect all the time then,’ she said with a smile. Which had to be true, basically. ‘You must always be the best version of yourself.’
‘Perhaps.’ Jack shrugged and held up his nicely normal-sized hands. ‘Or maybe I don’t have a best version. Maybe there’s only this and the dog. How about that?’
‘I don’t think so …’ started Janey.
But the truth was, she didn’t know. The Wower seemed to work it out, somehow, but it was a machine, after all, and it must have been programmed somehow – by Gideon Flynn and his team, to some specifications that hadn’t been shared with the spies.
It was almost a relief to remember they had a mission to complete.
Janey led Jack across the newspaper on the bench and explained what they’d discovered. ‘I didn’t put it into the text in case someone’s tailing you.’
‘Tailing me! That’s funny.’
‘No, not because you’re a dog, but because you’re in this team – this SWAG set-up.’
Jack screwed up his nose. ‘Yes, I wonder what that’s all about? And where is our esteemed leader, the mysterious Gideon Flynn? I’d like to give him my bank account details, for a start.’
He was mysterious, she had to admit. They knew virtually nothing about Gideon Flynn. He’d paid for their spy-buys make-over, told them who to contact, named the team of which they were now a part without any explanation, sent them off on a dangerous mission, and completely failed to show up for anything other than the first meeting.
‘G-Mamma, that’s true. Where is—'
‘He’s meeting us there,’ said the SPI:KE, tilting one of the screens in their direction.
There was an email entitled: Dog-walking.
Janey winced, wondering what Jack would think of that, but he simply read it through with interest.
Give me a ring when you’re through, said the email, and I’ll meet you with treats. Can’t wait to pat the doggy. It was signed off by someone called Greta.
‘Greta Garbo, like that double agent’s name,’ said Jack with a nod. ‘One of my grandfather’s favourite actresses.’
‘Greta Garbo was also a spy herself,’ added G-Mamma.
Janey could hardly believe they were discussing spy names when Gideon had been so rude. ‘Pat the doggy? Meet you with treats? Who does he think he is?’
‘Don’t you think it’s clever?’ said Jack evenly. ‘Give me a ring reads as though it’s just giving him a call, but he actually means, you know, give me the ring! And then we’ll get our rewards. And if he’s going to pat me then it must mean that the ring really does help his condition. Or maybe he thinks his leprosy won’t affect me because I’m … you know.’
‘A dog,’ G-Mamma reminded him.
‘A god,’ said Janey sternly.
Jack obviously needed reminding how special he was. As this was something that she
used to require in order to believe in herself, she was well cut-out for the job.
Jack, however, didn’t seem to be bothered by it. ‘Well, it’s after nine,’ he said, rubbing his own hands together. ‘Are we going to do this thing? I’d really love some treats – I mean, money.’
He took careful note of the address, the picture of the house and the image of the Indian ring, and without even thinking about how long it had just taken him to get rid of it, he snuffled for a second and grew instantly into his dog-headed self. Then he grabbed each of their shoulders, bob-sleighed down - or rather through - the SPIral staircase, and blasted off towards London.
What nobody had considered was that the house would be full of people. And that it would be an enormous great house, one of several on a wide, tree-lined avenue. The houses were like small palaces – white and opulent, with grand staircases leading up to the massive doors in the middle, and symmetrical ranks of gleaming windows reaching up for three, four, even five storeys.
Janey peeked at the house next-door from their reconnaissance position beneath one of the horse chestnut trees. ‘Zoom,’ she said to her Ultra-Gogs, and instantly they focussed in on the doorway.
There were eight different doorbells lined up on a pewter plate to the left-hand side of the immense doorway. So that house had been divided into flats – eight different flats each with four to eight rooms per flat. The one that they were about to infiltrate was a single house with what appeared to be about fifty rooms – and a large basement harbouring a bank vault.
She trained her Gogs on the lower floors of the beautiful mansion until images of the basement pinged up onto her lenses. At first she couldn’t see the vault. The lowest level of the house seemed only to house odds and ends: a massive wine cellar, some small utility spaces containing washing machines and ironing boards, and – to her surprise – a darkened room that resembled the inside of the Octobus. On every wall was a bank of screens, all flashing grey and white. Two foreboding guards, each dressed from head to toe in dark khaki uniforms, were both concentrating hard on separate screens. Janey could see they were watching something going on inside the house, although she couldn’t work out the details.
Then she saw it.
‘Okay, I’ve found the vault,’ she said. ‘It’s in the very centre of the basement, right behind the room where the security guys are keeping tabs on what’s going on in the house.’
‘Well, that makes sense,’ said Jack, unperturbed.
‘Spies alive, what IS going on in that house?’ said G-Mamma. ‘Is it a party?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Janey, watching the lines of guests approaching yet another be-suited security guard at the top of the steps before being let through into the rooms beyond. Janey could just see a waiter handing out glasses of champagne as the visitors where ushered inside. She was reminded of another time when she found herself at a ball, having to dress hurriedly in her spy-suit and a shower curtain to gain admittance. That had been a few years ago. Now she doubted whether she’d get away with a home-made dress made of sparkly plastic – and anyway, this time they weren’t going to go into the party itself.
This time, they were only there to plunder the vault.
‘See? I knew I should have worn black tie,’ said Jack, gazing down at his neatly pressed jeans. ‘I’d have fitted in perfectly.’
‘The only thing you have to fit into is that bank vault with your enormous doggy noggin,’ snapped G-Mamma. ‘And then maybe after you’ve done that we’ll head to the kitchens and get some food.’
Ah. She was hungry. There was nothing worse than a hungry G-Mamma.
But Jack didn’t know this yet, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. Ever polite, though, he soon recovered and said amiably: ‘Good plan. I like food.’
‘We noticed,’ said G-Mamma, but then, she was hardly one to talk. ‘And I … quite like it too,’ she said after a moment. ‘And I might just be a little peckish which is why I’m a smidgeon on the irritable side. So let’s get this heist underway and then on to the important business.’
‘Very, very good plan,’ said Jack with a smile, so charming and sweet that even G-Mamma couldn’t stay mad at him.
Waiting for the right moment to enter, Janey observed quietly as a black car decorated with flags pulled up near the house, followed by another. In fact, when she looked up along the street, a whole cavalcade of limousines was appearing, each one disgorging important-looking guests in evening dress who were all being funnelled through the vast front door into the party beyond.
‘Who are all these people?’ She zoomed in on a flag; obediently, the Gogs popped up a description of the country it belonged to. ‘They’re from Ecuador,’ she informed the others. ‘The second one is … Cayman Islands … and the one behind it is Brazil. Why are they all from other countries?’
‘I might happen to know that,’ said Jack. ‘My father told me about it. This area is embassy land.’ He pointed to the houses on the other side of the street, all enormous, and several with security guards talking into the cuffs of their jackets. ‘This single street probably represents twenty different countries.’
‘And they’re all going to this party.’ Janey checked her Ultra-Gogs again. ‘What’s the time?’
Actually, she didn’t need to ask, because just at that moment a bell rang out across the city from a nearby church, chiming ten times.
‘Ten o’clock,’ they said together.
‘Something must be timed for ten so that the rooms all empty,’ said Janey, training her night-vision glasses on the security room in the basement once more. ‘Or everyone’s in one place. That way the coast will be clear to get into the vault.’
As if they’d heard her words, the security guards in the cellar suddenly glanced up and nodded to each other. If only she could work out what they were saying! Then it occurred to her: she had new BATS hearing. She cocked one ear towards the distant house and closed her eyes so that she could concentrate.
‘… one for each country,’ the smaller guard was saying. She could hear the sound of keys jangling on a fob, then the solid thunk of a single key sliding into a lock and turning. ‘You take that tray up to Wentworth, and I’ll bring the other one.’
Janey opened her eyes quickly, but it was too late to see what the guards were taking upstairs. Already, she could spot their outlines heading up the cellar steps, ghostly shapes marked out by the heat sensors in her Gogs. All her equipment really had been upgraded.
G-Mamma gave her a nudge. ‘Action stations, Blonde?’
‘Yes. We’ve got about ten minutes, I reckon, although I doubt we’ll need that long. Jack, you’d better stand right behind this tree so nobody sees you change.’
‘Right you are,’ said Jack.
It was a good job they’d already experienced what Jack looked like in his dog-god form, or they’d have completely given away their location by screaming. It was still quite unnerving to watch Jack change from the easy-going teenager he’d transformed into when they arrived at their target destination to an intimidating, canine-headed bruiser – but it did at least mean that, this time, they wouldn’t have to face any other intimidating bruisers like the many security guards in the vicinity.
‘Oh! Here,’ said Janey, whipping off her Ultra-Gogs and planting them on Jack’s long furry snout. ‘That’s the room you’re looking for.’
‘Great,’ replied Jack in his slightly deeper voice with was just a shade growlier, after squinting at the mini screens for a moment. ‘Would you mind taking the glasses off now? With my canine vision they make me a bit dizzy.’
‘Of course. I’d rather have them myself anyway.’ Janey parked her glasses back in place. ‘Ready?’
Jack nodded. Now that they’d done this a couple of times, he no longer needed to clap his massive hands onto their shoulders. This time they simply stood side-by-side in front of Jack and waited for him to wrap his arms around them, and then the miraculous sliding began: straight through a limousine where the snoozing driver didn’t even stir; along the wall to the side passage where they passed through a padlocked iron gate as if it were air, then through brick walls, washing machines, racks of wine with not so much as a drop spilled, and suddenly into the security room. The faintest tingle of electricity simmered in Janey’s chest as they oozed through the computers, until a heartbeat later, they found themselves in the vault at the very centre of the basement.
Jack let go of them, wrenching his feet out of the floor into which they’d accidentally become embedded. Then he closed his eyes for a moment and, with a sigh of relief, changed back into Boy Jack.
‘I must be relaxing more to be able to that. Oh, look at this! Well, that’s not what I expected,’ he whispered. ‘Our vault’s full of old portraits and dusty artefacts. This is sharp!’
‘You have a vault?’ said Janey with a laugh.
Jack gave his little embarrassed shrug. ‘Yeah, well, we’re kind of posh. But it’s not like this. More of a museum, really.’
They looked around them. It was, as Jack had stated, very sharp. There was nothing visible to the eye to begin with; it was as if they were standing inside a black cube of marble. Then, as they adjusted to the light, the walls became marked with fine grey lines and a grid of hundreds of rectangles appeared on each surface, including the floor and the ceiling.
Janey peered closely at one of the rectangles.
‘They’re boxes,’ she said. ‘Each one is a separate box with something in it. I can see money in this one – piles of cash, in fact – and some … well, trainers, I think …’
‘Time’s a-ticking, boys and girls,’ said G-Mamma. ‘It’s nearly ten past ten. Which one has the goodies in it?’
Fishing in the bib on the front of her decorator’s overalls, G-Mamma pulled out the blurred photograph of the sitar player wearing the ruby ring.
Janey swallowed hard. ‘G-Mamma, there are hundreds of boxes in here. Even with the Ultra-Gogs, I won’t be able to locate one tiny ring in just a few minutes.’
‘How about you take two walls and I take the other two?’ said Jack, scrunching his eyes up until his ears turned black and furry and his alter-ego appeared. ‘I’ll just go in and have a rummage.’ And with that he stepped through the surface of the wall and disappeared inside the marble.
‘That might have triggered an alarm,’ cried G-Mamma. ‘They’ll be on us in seconds!’
From the security room next door they could hear a distinct intermittent bleep that hadn’t been there before, and although the guards weren’t there at that moment, there was no doubt they’d be back very soon.
‘Hurry,’ said Janey. ‘You take the ceiling and floor. You’ve got Ultra-Gogs?’
‘Contact lenses. Better with my make-up.’ Her mentor blinked her painted eyelids a couple of times to activate the lenses, then dropped effortlessly to all fours like a ragdoll, scanning the boxes with occasional squeals. ‘Oo, Monroe memorabilia! Hey, your uncle had a watch just like that when he was a kid. Oh, nice!’
Tuning her out, Janey concentrated on her own element of the mission. She peered into box after box but found nothing that looked like jewellery, especially a ring. Frustration rising, she rushed along the wall, unable to see anything that fitted the picture they’d been given.
To her surprise, however, in the corner of the room it appeared that many of the boxes had been knocked together to create a wardrobe-sized space. In it was the sitar, all glowing wood with a great onion bulb at its base and a fretboard that was almost as long as Janey was tall.
‘The instrument’s in here,’ she said to G-Mamma. ‘Maybe the ring’s inside it.’
G-Mamma leapt to her feet. ‘Only one way to find out.
She lifted Janey’s hand, complete with her spy Gauntlet, and squirted the index finger in the sitar’s direction. Smoky white gas poured out of the glove, settling over the black surface in a mist.
‘Punch it,’ said G-Mamma, so Janey balled her fist and slammed it into the box.
It shattered like crystal.
‘Liquid nitrogen,’ explained the SPI:KE. ‘Liquid while in the Gauntlet, gas once it’s outside it, rapid freezing of whatever it lands on – so don’t split your glove, Blonde!’
‘I’ll try not to,’ said Janey, pulling out the Sitar and scouring it for signs of the ring. She shook it to see if it rattled; it simply vibrated gently in the vault, sending soothing guitar sounds around the room.
Unfortunately, they weren’t the only sounds it created. Suddenly the beeping from next door elongated into one long blast of a horn before increasingly hideously into the siren scream of a fire-engine. Above and around them, the footsteps of several meaty security guards rained down on them.
‘We’re too late!’ hissed Janey. ‘The ring isn’t in the sitar, and we don’t have time to keep looking.’
It was a terrible realisation. Her first mission in months, maybe even years, and she’d failed.
‘We have to go!’ She smacked on the wall where Jack had disappeared. ‘Jack, we have to—'
At that exact moment, he emerged from the wall, brandishing a small velvet box.
‘I’ve got something! It was the only jewellery box in the whole place – all the rest of it was either porcelain objects like little statuettes and stuff, or necklaces laid out on pads. I haven’t looked in it yet, but—'
‘No time, Jack. The guards are coming.’
It was worse than that, actually. The guards were all around them. They’d imagined that the only entrance was the one through the back of the security room, but what if it wasn’t? Shouts and the stamping heels of hard-soled boots were ringing out from behind each of the walls. She checked with her Gogs, and sure enough, the outlines of a dozen or more burly men radiated onto her mini screens. They were surrounded.
‘The only way is up,’ she said briskly, turning G-Mamma around so they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, ready for Jack to transport them.
G-Mamma grabbed the sitar grimly.
‘I can’t do up.’ Jack sounded pretty bleak. ‘Only on stairs.’
But luckily, Janey had thought of that already. ‘Okay. You do through, and I’ll do the up part.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Jack started to say. A crack of light from the nearby utility room was beginning to appear as the door opened from the outside.
‘Just be ready!’
As Jack’s mighty hands curled around their upper arms, Janey leaned backwards against him, drew her knees up to her chest and – hoping desperately that her spy-buys all still worked in pretty much the same way as they used to – she slammed her feet down as hard as she could against the marble floor.
As more light spilled out across the gloom of the vault, Jane Blonde’s Fleet-Feet burst into action with a bang like cannon-fire. She shot into the air with her SPI:KE at her side and her new ally behind her, and the three of them touched the ceiling, melted it, then vaporised the roof, insulation and floor above so that it closed seamlessly in their wake. In moments they were all tottering unsteadily in the downstairs bathroom of the enormous meringue of a house.
Jack was staring at her, eyes wide. ‘That was … outstanding!’ he said with a wolfish grin.
‘Great teamwork,’ replied Janey, as pleased as he was at what they’d accomplished together. ‘Now let’s see if we got what we needed.’
They all gazed at the neat leather box on Jack’s palm, and Janey held her breath as she opened it, awaiting the lustrous glint of ruby …
But the box was empty.
Their mission had bombed.