CHAPTER TEN

Bex awoke, not knowing where she was. Keeping her eyes closed so she didn’t give away the fact she’d woken up, she tried to work out what her other senses were telling her. She was sitting on a hard surface – probably plastic, judging by the way her buttocks slipped on it when she wriggled slightly. Her hands rested on curved metal tubes about the width of her thumb. Well, ‘rested’ was an exaggeration. They were fastened to the tubes, and quite tightly as well, judging by the way her fingertips tingled. The tight bonds were cutting off the blood supply. Probably plastic cable-ties – it’s what most captors used these days: they were easy to obtain, quick to fasten, almost impossible to break if they were fastened tightly enough, and didn’t raise suspicion if they were found during a search in the same way that ropes, chains or padlocks might do.

She tried surreptitiously to move her feet. They didn’t budge an inch. Either the hard edge of the seat was cutting off the blood supply to her legs in the same way that the plastic ties were doing to her hands, rendering them numb, or her ankles had been bound just like her wrists. Or possibly both. She couldn’t rule that out.

Right – fastened to a metal and plastic chair by cable ties. That was bad: the only reliable method for getting out of those things without help depended on clenching your muscles when they were put on and tightened, so that when you later relaxed those muscles there was some flex in the ties, some looseness which you could then exploit by twisting around until the plastic wore down and snapped. Yes, you’d need to be a contortionist, but it was possible. The problem was, she’d been unconscious when the ties had been applied, which meant that her captors had been able to pull the ties very tight indeed. Not much hope there.

Eyes still closed, she put her feet flat on the floor and pressed them down, hoping that the chair would lift up. If it did then she might be able to push it over backwards and something might break. Something that wasn’t her skull or her neck, she hoped.

The chair didn’t move. Probably screwed to the floor. Her captors were really taking no chances.

The floor. Hard – probably wood. No carpet. File that away for later investigation. And she could feel it vibrating slightly beneath the soles of her feet. Maybe there was a generator running nearby.

Nothing her shoe could touch or reach was going to be of much help. If she was going to get out of this then she was going to have to expand her boundaries – look for something nearby she could influence.

She opened her eyes, but everything was still as black as pitch. For a moment she panicked, thinking she’d been somehow blinded, but as her breath came more quickly she realised that she could feel some of it bouncing back onto her lips and cheeks. It seemed like someone had put a hood on her – maybe to stop her seeing what was happening around her, or who was now holding her prisoner. Black cloth, and thick to boot. And now she came to think about it, she couldn’t hear anything either. Earphones? Probably, and surprisingly comfortable ones as well: form-fitting, foam, and, judging by the strangely ‘dead’ quality of the silence in her ears, with some kind of noise-cancelling technology built in. That didn’t sit comfortably with the hard plastic-and-metal chair though.

Sit comfortably. She forced herself to suppress a laugh: no point in alerting her captors to the fact that she’d actually woken up. She wasn’t sitting comfortably, and judging by the lack of sensation in her buttocks she hadn’t been sitting comfortably for quite a while.

How long? That was a good question. Obviously she couldn’t look at her watch, but judging by how hungry and thirsty she felt, and the vague feeling that she needed to go to the toilet, she’d been out of it for a good few hours. Maybe as much as ten or twelve.

A sudden flash of anger at her own helplessness made her clench her fingers on the metal tubing, and she noticed that she could feel the vibration through the arms of the chair as well as in the soles of her shoes. A motor, maybe? An engine? Was she in a vehicle? Not a boat, she was sure, despite the fact that she and Bradley had been cornered in one. An aircraft, perhaps? No sign of the dry mouth and the pressure in the ears she normally got on aircraft though. Maybe a car. No – more likely a van, given the materials of the chair she was sitting on and the fact that it was fastened to a wooden floor.

She sniffed. The hood didn’t help, probably blocking most of the smells that would otherwise hit her nostrils, but she thought she could detect the sweet tang of diesel fumes. Most likely a van then, and an old one.

The sudden memory of her and Bradley in a boat that was drifting to a halt, its fuel line severed by a bullet, brought back a whole raft of other memories. Katrin, Hekla and the other girl – Eva – running their bizarre and inexplicable demonstration. Kieron vectoring the Italian police helicopter towards the island. Escaping on the motor launch. The scary chase through the tombs. Gunfire. And then drifting until another motor launch came up alongside them, with the three Norwegian girls and several armed thugs pointing guns at them. And then what? Darkness.

She clenched her fists, angry that she couldn’t remember what had happened next, but as her muscles went hard she felt a stab of pain in the crook of her elbow, exactly where someone would inject her with, say, a sedative. Was that what had happened? Had she and Bradley been drugged to keep them quiet while they were being moved?

Something tapped against her right foot. She kept still, not wanting to give anything away. Something hard, knocking against the sole of her boot. And again! Maybe an object on the floor, rolling back and forth as the van moved? Or maybe one of her captors, sitting beside her and shifting position, occasionally touching her by accident.

Or maybe it was Bradley, sitting secured by her side, inches away in space but a galaxy away in terms of being able to communicate. She moved her foot a millimetre to the right, and her boot contacted something solid.

Whatever it was, it knocked back, but this time there was a pattern to it, a whole sequence of thuds against the edge of the sole of her boot. Her instinct was to pull back, but there was something almost familiar about it, something she should be able to identify. Four rapid taps, then a gap, then two more rapid taps. A longer gap, then four rapid taps again, three slower taps, then a quick tap and two slow taps.

She felt herself relax, and beneath the hood she smiled. Morse Code, nearly two hundred years old now, and yet something that every agent knew off by heart. Four rapid taps – ‘H’. Three slower taps – ‘O’.

She checked off each letter as it was transmitted, painstakingly slowly, and managed to piece together the short but oh-so-sweet message:

HOW ARE YOU?

Bradley. Alive, and sitting right beside her. Almost certainly tied up, hooded and temporarily deafened with earphones, but still able to get through to her. Bless him. For a moment she wondered if it might not be Bradley at all, but one of her captors, trying to convince her that they were Bradley. Maybe they were going to try and interrogate her subtly, letting her talk to what she thought was her friend.

No, it was Bradley. Anyone else would have used textspeak to shorten the message – HW R U? – but Bradley hated textspeak. He always spelled every word out, and spelled them correctly as well. And used semicolons. He was the only person she knew who used semicolons in text messages. This was him.

After it became obvious that Bradley had finished, Bex used her own boot to transmit a message back to him:

FINE BUT ALL IS DARK AND QUIET. WE ARE IN A VAN I THINK.

His response came straight back, spelled out at length:

I AM BY WINDOW. BASED ON FLASHES OF HEAT AS SUN SHINES THROUGH ON MY HOOD WE ARE HEADING NORTH.

HOW LONG UNCONSCIOUS? she tapped back.

MAYBE EIGHT TO TEN HOURS. I NEED A TOILET BREAK.

She remembered a childhood refrain, sung during long car journeys, and couldn’t resist. STOP THE CAR I WANT A WEE-WEE! she messaged.

WHAT IS NORTH OF VENICE? he asked.

LOTS OF GERMANY, THEN DENMARK.

THAT WOULD MAKE SENSE, GIVEN WHERE THOSE GIRLS TOLD KIERON THEY CAME FROM.

Maybe the Asrael team was taking them back to their home base. It seemed likely, although Bex didn’t like to speculate on why, or what might happen to them when they got there. At least they didn’t want her and Bradley dead – not yet anyway. Part of her hoped that Kieron and Sam had managed to follow her rushed plan and rescue the ARCC glasses and the Asrael tablets from the dark waters of the lagoon, but another part of her almost hoped they hadn’t. Yes, she wanted to be rescued, but she really didn’t want the boys to be put in danger.

In the end, she supposed they had to decide for themselves what they’d do. They were nearly grown up and they had to take responsibility for their own actions.

Bradley’s foot suddenly jerked sideways, hitting her ankle hard. She cried out in sudden surprise and pain. What had happened to him?

Moments later she found out when her own hood was roughly pulled off, along with her earphones. The sudden glare made her blink.

Once her eyes had adapted, she looked around, trying to take in information as quickly as she could.

They were indeed in a van – an old one, with a driver’s seat and passenger seat up front, and four rows of crude chairs in the back. The kind of thing you’d see schools transporting kids around in in old black-and-white films. The sun was indeed low on the horizon on their right. They’d slept their drugged sleep all through the night.

Two of the armed thugs sat in front. Hekla and Katrin were in the first row of what Bex thought of as ‘the cheap seats’, with Eva behind them, and Bex and Bradley behind Eva. It was Eva who had pulled their hoods off. She sat there, smiling gently, holding the hoods now. Glancing quickly over her shoulder, Bex saw two more thugs in the last row. They were both asleep. Professionals: they knew that you should always sleep when you could, because you never knew when you might get the chance again. The same thing held true for eating.

The view through the windscreen was of one of Germany’s incredibly straight autobahns. Traffic on the road was fairly light. Looking to her left and right, Bex saw that the world outside looked grainy and grey – probably because the windows had been covered with a sticky plastic film that she guessed made them look like mirrors from the outside. So – no chance of a passing motorist having seen two hooded figures in the back and calling the police.

The view through the side windows was of a flat, boring landscape where trees marked divisions between fields. The occasional farmhouse or barn that flashed past probably hadn’t changed much in fifty years.

Looking back to the windscreen again, Bex saw that they were fast coming up to a road sign. As it passed by she thought it said Hamburg, or possibly Hanover. She desperately tried to remember her German geography. They were probably on the A7 – like Bradley had said, heading north through Germany towards Denmark.

‘Sorry to wake you up so abruptly,’ Eva said, smiling sweetly, ‘but I was getting seriously bored and I wanted someone to talk to.’

Bex glanced sideways, at Bradley. He gazed back at her. He seemed uninjured.

‘What shall we talk about?’ Bex asked. Her voice was croaky, and she coughed to clear it. ‘Needlepoint? Netball tournaments? Or con artists who create the illusion that for a small fortune they can kill anyone in the world, anywhere, any time, for a price, while in fact they can only kill some specific people they know about in advance – a service they are only too happy to demonstrate?’

‘Are you absolutely sure of your conclusions?’ Eva said, right eyebrow rising slightly in a surprise she was trying hard to mask. ‘Perhaps we are the next generation of assassins. Techno-assassins.’

‘I doubt it. Too much doesn’t add up. I don’t know how you arranged to have your drones in the right place at the right time, but I really don’t see you having millions of them all in the air at the same time, ready to rain fire and destruction down on anyone at a moment’s notice.’

‘We did hit your apartment though,’ Eva pointed out. ‘And your car.’

‘Yes,’ Bex said smiling calmly, ‘we wanted to ask you about that. It’s obvious you used the same type of drone, but that was before your demonstration on the island. Why take a contract before you’d even got all your potential customers together and demonstrated your capabilities? And who on earth would risk employing you before you’d even proved what you could do?’ She tried to make the question sound casual, as if the question about who had hired Asrael to kill them was just something tacked on the end, but that was what she really wanted to know. Often, getting someone to answer a question meant hiding it behind another question, one you were less interested in.

‘We were approached,’ Eva said, smiling back, ‘by someone who had heard about us. We were preparing our demonstration, and frankly we were amazed – and slightly worried – that they knew as much about us as they did, but they assured us they just wanted to get ahead of the game – pay us for a job. They said it would be a private, covert test of our system before we exposed it to our customer base. We gave them a significant discount, but it worked, didn’t it? Your apartment and your car were destroyed, and you had no idea how.’

‘But you didn’t get us,’ Bex pointed out. ‘None of us.’

Eva tilted her head to one side curiously. ‘You said, “none of us”. Interesting. My English is rough, but surely, as there are two of you, you should have said, “neither of us”?’ She closed her eyes briefly and nodded. ‘There are more of you. Thank you for that information. We need to look into that. It seems we have left some loose ends behind. We need to clear them up.’

Bex tried not to react, but inwardly she cursed herself. Still woozy from the drugged sleep, she’d inadvertently given away the fact that Kieron and Sam were part of the team.

‘So what happens to us?’ she asked. ‘Where do we go from here? You obviously need us for something, otherwise you’d have shot us and dumped us in the lagoon.’

Eva stared at Bex for a long moment. ‘Someone wants you dead. Admittedly, we failed in that, back in England, but we might be able to persuade whoever your enemy is to pay us a little bit more to kill you now, properly. If not, well –’ she shrugged – ‘you’re almost certainly working for MI6, which means you have secret information in your heads that other people will want. The Russians will offer us a decent sum for you. So will the Chinese. Who knows – MI6 might beat their offers if we hand you back to them.’ A long pause, then: ‘Or maybe they’ll pay us to kill you, just to stop you falling into the hands of their enemies.’

Bex wanted to glance sideways at Bradley, but she stopped herself. They both knew there was at least one person in MI6 who would pay to have them dead – presumably the same person who hired Asrael to kill them in the first place, although Asrael had no way of knowing that. Instead she said, ‘You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?’

‘It’s a business,’ Eva responded, ‘and, as with every successful business, we have to leverage our assets.’

Bradley suddenly spoke, surprising Eva. ‘I presume the auction process has ended. Do you mind telling us who won?’

Now Eva laughed: a genuine, full-throated laugh. ‘Ah,’ she said through the last few chuckles, ‘so this is the point where the evil team of assassins reveal the full enormity of their plans?’

‘That would be nice,’ Bradley said seriously. ‘I mean, who are we going to tell?’

‘I will tell you, but mainly because I want to see your faces as you realise what’s going to happen, and how you’ve completely failed to stop it.’ She gazed delightedly from Bradley to Bex and back. ‘A far-right group in England, backed by a billionaire businessman, has secured our services for a fantastic sum of money. They want us to kill your entire royal family, in order for a fascist regime to be established. The police raid on the island has dented our credibility a bit, so we’re going to have to actually do this one, just to prove we can. So – that’s what you failed to stop. Enjoy your knowledge.’

Eva looked as if she was going to say something else, but one of the girls in the front seats turned around and shook her head warningly. Eva glowered, but turned away and stared out of the window.

ANY IDEAS? Bex tapped out in Morse Code against Bradley’s foot.

LOADS, he tapped back, BUT THEY ALL INVOLVE NOT BEING HERE. YOU?

NOTHING.

AT LEAST THEY HAVEN’T PUT THE HOODS BACK ON US.

DON’T TEMPT FATE.

The van drove on for another hour or so. Bex’s mind churned with ideas, but none of them were any use. Maybe, when she and Bradley were untied at the end of their journey, they’d be able to do something, but it was pointless planning for it. Neither of them had any idea what situation they’d be in then.

Abruptly the van left the wide road, taking an intersection that seemed to lead them through a wilderness of flat countryside covered in scrubby bushes and the occasional dilapidated concrete building. If this was leading to a secret base, Bex thought, then it would have to be very impressive to make up for its surroundings.

There was no secret base. Instead they turned off onto a dirt track and drove for maybe twenty minutes before emerging from a clump of scraggy trees onto a flat expanse of cracked concrete that seemed to stretch towards the horizon.

OLD AIRFIELD, Bradley tapped.

YES, Bex tapped back, BUT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

The van stopped beside a helicopter that appeared to be waiting for them, but it was unlike any helicopter Bex had ever seen. Its body was long and thin, with a cockpit at the front – more like a small commercial airliner – with two massive tubular engine cowls running along its upper surface, but the really bizarre thing was that it was raised high off the ground on four thin, skeletal legs. A National Express coach could have driven comfortably underneath it and out the other side. Its long rotor blades curved downwards from their hub, hanging lower than its underside. If it hadn’t been for the crane-fly-like legs they would have scraped the ground. Its upper surface was painted a sickly green, and its underside was, strangely, a dull orange. The paintwork seemed old and faded.

MIL MI-10, NATO CODE NAME ‘HARKE’, Bradley tapped. CARGO HELICOPTER. 1960’S TECHNOLOGY. I USED TO HAVE A DINKY TOY VERSION. I LOVED THAT THING.

‘It’s a bit old, isn’t it?’ Bex said, raising her voice. ‘I mean, are you sure it’s safe?’

‘It does the job,’ Eva said without turning around. ‘That’s another principle of successful businesses – only spend money where you need to, and to make yourselves look impressive to your customers. You two are not customers.’

Several crew members who had been waiting jumped to their feet and gestured to the driver to approach. Bex noticed with a sudden jolt that a flat metal pallet lay on the ground immediately beneath the helicopter’s belly. Chains led upwards from its corners to chunky brackets on the helicopter itself.

‘You have to be kidding,’ she said, aghast.

‘We’re Norwegian,’ Eva called back. ‘We have no sense of humour.’

Their driver cautiously manoeuvred the van onto the pallet. He turned the engine off, and the crewmembers moved in to secure the wheels with more chains.

‘Er, forgive me,’ Bradley said hesitantly, ‘but are we going to de-bus? Get on board? Get comfortable?’

Eva shook her head. ‘No, we’re staying here.’

Glancing outside again, Bex saw that the crew had vanished. From somewhere above them a coughing roar broke out, like an asthmatic and elderly lion. A cloud of black smoke drifted across the concrete. The tips of the blades, which now surrounded them on all sides, began to rotate, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.

‘Is there an at-seat trolley service?’ Bradley asked. His voice was higher pitched now, with what Bex recognised as an edge of real panic. ‘Or maybe, you know, just a toilet break?’

‘Suck it up,’ Eva said.

The chains holding the pallet clanked as they pulled taut. Moments later the pallet jerked upwards and began to sway.

‘Travel sickness pills?’ Bradley asked weakly.

The ground dropped away below them as the Harke lurched into the air. The rotation of the blades – a flickering blur above them, silhouetting the helicopter’s body – had straightened them out now. Stomach lurching, Bex gazed out of the window at the rapidly receding concrete. She couldn’t see the pallet the van was attached to; as far as her jangling nerves could tell, they were hanging in space, swinging from side to side.

This was not going to be a pleasant journey.

KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN AND FIXED ON THE HORIZON, she tapped. IT’LL HELP WITH THE TRAVEL SICKNESS.

Bradley didn’t reply. When she looked sideways at him, his face was pale and sweaty.

Off to the right, Bex saw what looked like glittering blue water, with the orange-and-purple sky of a beautiful sunset beyond. They seemed to be flying along a coastline.

GERMANY STILL?

It took a few moments before Bradley tapped back: STILL HEADIN NORTH, I THNK. PROBLY DENMARK.

She noted the dropped letters and felt a twinge of worry. He must be feeling pretty bad.

After a while there was more water than land in sight, and then just water. The further north they flew, the colder it got. Even the blue of the sea took on a harder, sharper edge, and when finally land appeared again, she saw patches of snow among the green of vegetation; patches that grew larger and larger until everything through the windows on both sides was either snow or rock, punctuated by the snaking dark lines of roads.

Her breath turned to steam in front of her face and her fingertips tingled.

NEXT TIME, she tapped, THERMAL UNDERWEAR AND GLOVES.

NEXT TIME? Bradley tapped back. When she glanced sideways at him he was staring straight ahead, blankly.

The swaying of the van was beginning to get monotonous, lulling her to sleep. When the pitch of the Harke’s engines changed she snapped out of a doze, unsure how much time had passed.

It was difficult to tell whether they were flying over spits of land separated by water or water interrupted by random stretches of land. On the few occasions Bex thought she saw the gleam of a light go past, she couldn’t tell whether it was a building or a boat.

The helicopter got lower and lower, and then suddenly she saw a building rising up towards them: all wood and white stone, gleaming in the last rays of the sun. No straight lines: just curves everywhere, like a stranded sea creature; an artificial starfish perched on the edge of a steep hillside, almost a cliff, at the bottom of which waves crashed against rocks in explosions of white spume. Then the legs of the helicopter touched ground, and seconds later the pallet bumped roughly a couple of times before grating to a halt. The helicopter settled around them, and the rotor blades began to slow down to a point where they could be seen individually again rather than as a blur.

DOSNT MATTER IF K AND S FIND ARCC KIT, Bradley tapped. He was noticeably slower than earlier, and less precise. TOO FAR WAY. NOTING HEY CN DO.

THEN WE RESCUE OURSELVES, Bex replied.

IF U SEE CHNCE, TAKE IT. LEAVE ME BHIND.

NO WAY.

Outside, the helicopter crew had disembarked from their high cabin and seemed to be unfastening the van.

‘Put the snow chains on,’ Katrin ordered from up in front – the first thing Bex had heard her say for hours.

The air inside the van had turned bitingly cold.

WHERE DO YOU THINK WE ARE? she asked, trying to keep Bradley engaged with what was happening. Stop him from sinking into catatonic depression. He was still too close to the concussion he’d suffered only weeks ago: he didn’t have the physical or mental reserves to cope with the trouble they were in. That was a problem, because Bex might have to depend on him if they were both to escape.

NORWAY. WEST. BTWEEN STAVANGER AND BERGEN.

The van began to move, snow chains biting into the frozen ground. The driver accelerated slowly, picking his way across the flat surface that lay between the helicopter and building ahead of them. It was the size of a manor house and glowed with warmth and light, like a beacon in the night. Skirls and flurries of snow surrounded them as they drove, stirred up by the bitter wind that managed to insert its fingers in through cracks and gaps in the body of the van.

Something moved, off to one side. For a moment Bex thought it was another helicopter, but it seemed too small: an object like two barrels fastened together, with a rotor blade spinning around the narrower waist where the two sections joined. It had just lifted off from a strip of concrete where, Bex realised with a growing disquiet, a row of a few hundred similar objects sat beneath tarpaulins.

‘I suppose it saves treating guards for frostbite and chilblains,’ she said to Eva, nodding her head towards the object as it rose smoothly into the air.

‘Well, we have them, so we may as well use them.’

‘How are they powered?’ Bex asked curiously.

Eva shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Small nuclear batteries maybe? Not my area.’ She turned around and clicked her fingers at one of the thugs sitting behind Bex and Bradley. They’d been so silent and motionless that Bex had forgotten they were there. ‘You two – take these two into the lodge. There’s a storeroom in the basement, near the stairs – put them in there.’ She glanced at Bradley, then at Bex. ‘And find a portable toilet from somewhere and put it in with them. If you can’t find one, a bucket will do.’

‘Welcome to Norway,’ Bradley said weakly. ‘We hope you enjoy your stay at the lodge.’